Monday, November 14, 2005

It was something like that, only a helluva lot more pus. My abscess I don't write much about myself, but even I get tired of writing about George W. Bush and the Repugnicans. So I'll write about something different and something more pleasant: My trip to the dentist today for my raging dental abscess. I'll start at the beginning: Friday I woke up with a swollen left jaw and neck. I was significantly disfigured, so it's a good thing that I don't much give a shit what I look like. Your typical gay man would have been hysterical. I was not. Immediately I went into denial, or, as I'd rather put it, I was optimistic: It will heal itself, I thought. As quickly as my face ballooned up, it will deflate. It did not deflate, and come Saturday I was worried because my neck was becoming increasingly swollen. I could open my mouth less than an inch, so eating was challenging. My greatest fear was that if I did nothing at all, my airway (trachea) might become obstructed by the creeping swelling in my neck in the middle of the night, and maybe I'd be able to dial 9-1-1 in time.  On Friday I had called my dentist, with whom I'd signed up but have never seen. I got her outgoing message and I left a message. It was Veterans Day, and although she (or her staffer, whoever recorded the outgoing message) did not say on the outgoing message that they were closed on Friday for Veterans Day, I assumed that to be the case. I figured that I could probably make it through the weekend and see a dentist today, but, as I stated, on Saturday I was worried about possible airway obstruction (which is, by the way, a possible life-threatening complication of a dental abscess if untreated). So I went to the emergency room under my medical insurance. I wasn't expecting them to do anything to the tooth, but I thought it wise to at least start on an antibiotic. The doctor gave me a prescription for penicillin (without my having to ask for an antibiotic) and for Vicodin. I did not ask for Vicodin -- mainly I wanted an antibiotic and I wanted to be checked to see if I might suffocate in my sleep -- but I accepted the prescription and had it filled. (My co-pay for the penicillin and Vicodin was a total of $10, which I had on me. They are going to bill me $50 for the ER visit and I don't know whether they're going to bill me for the X-ray that they took of my head and neck, the X-ray that I didn't ask for, but the X-ray that the doctor said indicated that my airway was not compromised. I have medical insurance and I am paying at least $60 for that visit and the treatment. I'm pretty sure that things are much better in Canada.) Let me say for the record that Vicodin barely works. Back in my nursing days in the 1990s, when I'd give my patients Vicodin they'd be complaining of pain again within an hour or two. Vicodin is what they (doctors) give you when they want you to just shut up and go away and leave them the hell alone about your pain, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Trust me. I know this from my nursing days. When the pharmacist described Vicodin to me as a "strong" painkiller, I wondered if she really thought that it is a strong painkiller or if she is part of The Vicodin Conspiracy. (Another tip from a former health-care insider: When they have no fucking idea what's wrong with you, they call it a "virus." They say that it's a "virus" because they know that patients usually come to a doctor wanting two things: A diagnosis and a prescription. So there are lots of people out there with mystery "viruses" who have been given Vicodin.) Anyway, since my four-hour visit to the ER Saturday night, I have been taking my penicillin religiously, and the 20 tablets of Vicodin, because Vicodin only slightly better than a placebo, ran out this morning. I got through yesterday OK, but today I was dead-set on seeing a dentist. My assigned dentist, whom I've never seen -- I put her down as my dentist because she's within three blocks of my apartment -- apparently never fucking answers her office phone, and neither does a receptionist or other staffer. You can call any number of times and you'll never get a real, live person. And I left her two messages, as instructed, and she never fucking bothered to call me back. Even after I told her that my problem was a dental abscess, which, if untreated, can kill you. (I didn't tell her the "which, if untreated, can kill you" part. That is common dental knowledge. I just told her the raging dental abscess part.) This woman is supposed to be my primary provider, but for all the fuck that she knows, I'm lying dead in my apartment and in a few days my neighbors will notice an unpleasant odor coming from my apartment and will notify the police. I fired her today. Not to her face -- or even over the phone, because, as I just established, it's imfuckingpossible to get the woman or even an underling of hers on the phone. I just switched dentists. And I'm sure that she doesn't care. (Remember, she doesn't care that my body is decomposing in my apartment because she wouldn't give me the dental care that I needed.) My new dentist is everything that my old one whom I never saw isn't. For starters, when you call his office, someone fucking answers the fucking phone. He saw me the very day I called -- at 3 o'clock today. All that I really, really wanted from him today was for him to drain my fucking abscess, which by today was about the size and shape of a ping-pong ball and as hard as a golf ball (no exaggeration) -- remember that this thing started on Friday, and so by today it was in full force. I was chock full o' pus.  No, my new dentist, who I am pretty sure is younger than I am and I'm 37, said, he couldn't drain my abscess, because he couldn't properly numb the area and draining the abscess would hurt like hell (I paraphrase). Jesus Fucking Christ. If he had wanted to plunge an ice pick into my face to drain that fucking abscess, or perhaps drawn a circle around the perimeter of the abscess on my jaw and thrown a dart -- hard -- into the center of that circle at close range, that would have been perfectly fine with me. I just wanted that fucking abscess, which was causing me considerable pain and discomfort, drained. But he refused, and probably still would have refused even if I'd offered him a blowjob (after my mouth healed, of course). I asked my new dentist who refused to drain my abscess if I could get something for pain (if I could at least get something for pain was what I implied, but I didn't say that). Yes, he said, but toward the end of the visit he handed me a prescription for ibufuckingprofen. He handed a former RN who had asked him for something for pain a prescription for ibufuckingprofen. They give you ibuprofen, which you can buy over the counter at any fucking drug store or grocery store, when they care even less about you than the Vicodin-prescribers do. (I have been taking naproxen, a cousin to ibuprofen, around the clock like candy for days now, so the prescription for ibuprofen is worthless to me and remains tucked inside the pages of the book that I brought for the wait in the waiting room.) My new dentist was able, however, to take an X-ray of every fucking remaining tooth in my mouth today (OK, an X-ray technician did it, to be technical). I don't know what you call the machine, but it's an X-ray machine that travels around your head and gives an image of every tooth in your mouth in one neat row. It's neat but also kind of eerie. It produces an X-ray that looks something like this (this X-ray is not mine): The panoramic dental X-ray (like the one above) looks like a cross between a jack-o'-lantern and a human skull. That's some cool Halloween-looking shit. This technology has probably been around for many, many years, and probably every single person who reads this will have had such an X-ray taken. Which just goes to show how infrequently my ass ever sees a dentist's chair. My new dentist wanted to come up with a "treatment plan," he said, and the panoramic X-ray of the train wreck that is my mouth apparently was the blueprint for that "treatment plan." I don't remember half of what he rattled off as he dictated his lengthy dental to-do list for me to his assistant, but apparently I'm going to be getting a bridge or two or three, and my mouth probably will pay for a trip to Europe or the like. (In defense of my teeth, my front teeth are in pretty good shape, but my back teeth are another story entirely...) I'd just as soon that my new dentist raze all of my teeth and give me fucking dentures already -- soaking your teeth overnight seems so much easier than brushing and flossing and enduring abscesses that the dentist won't pierce open and the like -- but my new dentist has other plans for my mouth. Anyway, so I walked out of my new dentist's office today with a nifty new "treatment plan," but I walked out of there in more pain than I was in when I had gone in there -- seriously -- because when they took the single X-rays of my abscessed tooth, the sharp plastic X-ray shield thing that they shove into your mouth and command you to chomp down upon dug into the tender, swollen tissue under my tongue and I tasted the blood. I walked out of my new dentist's office today with the fucking abscess still quite intact -- and with a worthless prescription for ibufuckingprofen. Because I'm on the 10-day course of penicillin prescribed for me by the ER doctor on Saturday, the abscess should miraculously disappear, or at least seriously shrink, by Thursday, at which time the bad tooth, a molar, can be extracted, my new dentist told me during my visit today. I was incredulous that my body could somehow absorb that much gunk by Thursday, but I couldn't force the man to do anything about my abscess, so I left, with the intelligence-insulting prescription tucked in my book along with my appointment card for Thursday. I recounted my dental experience to my brother on the telephone this evening and then, because I wasn't feeling so great, I told him good-bye, hung up the phone and prepared to lie down shortly. On the way from the bedroom to the bathroom, I felt a creamy, foul-tasting substance filling my mouth on the lower left side. Yes! I thought. Yes! My new dentist had refused to do for me the only thing that I'd wanted him to do -- lance that fucking abscess -- and within just an hour or two of the end of my visit, the abscess drained on its own. I'm not quite sure if the copious amount of dark pus came from the space between the gum and the bad tooth or perhaps if it even came from where that fucking sharp-ass plastic X-ray shield thing that they sadistically make you bite down on sliced into the tender, inflamed tissue beneath my tongue. At first I thought that if the pus was draining from beneath my tongue, where they had sliced me with the X-ray shield thing, perhaps that wasn't such a great thing. But as I spat the horribly foul-smelling brownish blood-tingued pus into the sink and pressed out, from the bottom and the side of my left jaw, as much of the thick, rotten stuff as I could, I felt quick relief, and it didn't matter to me exactly from where in my mouth all of that pus had exited. (I don't have a flashlight, and so I'm still not sure. I'm really hoping that it came from the bad tooth, however.) My God, words can't describe how nasty that shit -- the pus, which was about the color of the headline of this blog piece (yes, that was quite intentional) -- was. If you were to manufacture it in great amounts and dump it from airplanes upon our enemy troops -- and threaten to do it again if they didn't surrender immediately -- they would surrender immediately in absolute disgust. It looked and it smelled like Death, which, in a way, I suppose it was. Yuck. (Y'all are just lucky that I don't have a digital camera is all's I have to say.) Anyway, so I'm feeling much better now because my dental abscess has finally, one way or another, drained. I've done a lot of reading on dental abscesses on the Internet, and they recommend than an abscess be drained as soon as possible to facilitate quicker healing. So now I'm wondering about my new dentist. Did he really believe that waiting for my body to absorb all of that pus was the best course of action? Or did he just not want to be thoroughly grossed out by what surely would have been a pus-fest? He didn't even bother to feel the left jaw area of my face -- if he had, he would have felt the hard, ping-pong ball-sized pocket of pus in my jaw, and he would have known, I think, that there was no way in hell my body was going to absorb all of that shit before my scheduled extraction on Thursday. On Thursday I will let my new dentist know -- gently, of course -- that my body did not absorb that gallon of pus on its own, but that under so much fucking pressure, the abscess burst open on its own. Or that maybe even that fucking sharp-as-hell plastic X-ray guard thing that the X-ray tech shoved into my mouth and told me to bite down upon did what he would not: Punctured a hole under my tongue through which the pus could escape. And then, after my new dentist extracts the bad molar (it can't be saved, trust me), he will be able to cross off the first item of his very long dental to-do list that he so selflessly compiled for me today. Update (Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005): After having spontaneously drained and after five days on penicillin, the abscess seems to be gone or nearly gone. I have just a little swelling remaining and minimal, mostly incidental pain. The biggest problem I have is that I still can't open my jaw very far -- this is a condition called trismus (rhymes with "Christmas"). It makes eating difficult and makes toothbrushing thoroughly and performing fellatio impossible (although I have attempted only the toothbrushing thing since the abscess). Apparently, abscess-induced trismus eventually goes away, but it can take a long time... I returned to my new dentist today because he wanted to extract the molar that caused the abscess, but because of the trismus he was unable to extract the tooth (I had suspected that this might be the case) and he is referring me to an oral surgeon who, he said, still can extract teeth when the patient has trismus. (I shudder to think what the oral surgeon's methods are, but I'm guessing -- hoping -- that I'll be put out...) Anyway, my new dentist is kind of cute (not in a GQ way, but cute nonetheless) and this fact has made me recall that episode of "The Brady Bunch" in which Marcia is hot for her dentist and keeps coming up with excuses to make appointments with him. Unfortunately, given the state of my mouth, I won't have to make up excuses for several return visits... 10:30:38 PM    Comments []

More on torture and Q: How do you know when Bush is lying? A: When his lips are moving My three-day Veterans Day weekend began with a dental abscess that manifested itself when I woke up Friday morning with a swollen left jaw. Because I can't see my dentist until tomorrow at the earliest, yesterday I had to make a trip to an emergency room, where I got penicillin and Vicodin to hold me over (I mainly wanted an antibiotic so that I don't die, and I didn't ask for Vicodin, but I figured what the hell, I'd take it anyway). Anyway, so that's why no blogging this past weekend -- the abscess has been sapping my energy even more than the knowledge that I live in George W. Bush's Amurica has been sapping my energy, so for the most part I've been doing only what I absolutely have to. But here is some more stuff on the topic of torture, perhaps inspired by my knowledge that I have to have the bad molar extracted soon (actually, my last trip to a dentist, in which he drilled out all of the roots of one of my other molars, was quite painless, so I won't libel dentists): This 'toon on torture is by Mikhaela Reid: Maybe Cheney should have been a dentist. Dentist Dick. Dick the dentist. It works. Here is Tom Tomorrow's take on the torture thing (among some other things): Why does it have to be one or the other? I think that they're stupid and that they're liars. Finally, here's a column from today by New York Times columnist Frank Rich titled "'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories": If it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the world, "We do not torture." Even as he spoke, the administration's flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper. The vice president, not satisfied that the CIA had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret CIA prisons two years ago, was uncovering new "black sites" in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a spending bill amendment, written by [former prisoner of war Republican Sen.] John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners. So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, "We do not torture" -- a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib -- you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore. The fallout from the Scooter Libby indictment reveals that the administration's credibility, having passed the tipping point with Katrina, is flat-lining. For two weeks, the White House's talking-point monkeys in the press and Congress had been dismissing Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation as much ado about nothing except politics and as an exoneration of everyone except Mr. Libby. Now the American people have rendered their verdict: they're not buying it. Last week two major polls came up with the identical finding, that roughly 8 in 10 Americans regard the leak case as a serious matter. One of the polls (The Wall Street Journal/NBC News) also found that 57 percent of Americans believe that Mr. Bush deliberately misled the country into war in Iraq [emphasis mine] and that only 33 percent now find him "honest and straightforward," down from 50 percent in January. The Bush loyalists' push to discredit the Libby indictment failed because Americans don't see it as a stand-alone scandal but as the petri dish for a wider culture of lying that becomes more visible every day. The last-ditch argument rolled out by Mr. Bush on Veterans Day in his latest stay-the-course speech -- that Democrats, too, endorsed dead-wrong WMD intelligence -- is more of the same. Sure, many Democrats (and others) did believe that Saddam had an arsenal before the war, but only the White House hyped selective evidence for nuclear weapons, the most ominous of all of Iraq's supposed WMDs, to whip up public fears of an imminent doomsday. There was also an entire other set of lies in the administration's pre-war propaganda blitzkrieg that had nothing to do with WMDs, African uranium or the Wilsons. To get the country to redirect its finite resources to wage war against Saddam Hussein rather than keep its focus on the war against radical Islamic terrorists, the White House had to cook up not only the fiction that Iraq was about to attack us, but also the fiction that Iraq had already attacked us, on 9/11. Thanks to the Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who last weekend released a previously classified intelligence document, we now have conclusive evidence that the administration's disinformation campaign implying a link connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda and 9/11 was even more duplicitous and manipulative than its relentless flogging of nuclear Armageddon. Senator Levin's smoking gun is a widely circulated Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 that was probably seen by the National Security Council. It warned that a captured Qaeda terrorist in American custody was in all likelihood "intentionally misleading" interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had trained Qaeda members to use illicit weapons. The report also made the point that an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration was absurd on its face: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements." But just like any other evidence that disputed the administration's fictional story lines, this intelligence was promptly disregarded. So much so that eight months later -- in October 2002, as the White House was officially rolling out its new war and Congress was on the eve of authorizing it -- Mr. Bush gave a major address in Cincinnati intermingling the usual mushroom clouds with information from that discredited, "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant. "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," he said. It was the most important, if hardly the only, example of repeated semantic sleights of hand that the administration used to conflate 9/11 with Iraq. Dick Cheney was fond of brandishing a nonexistent April 2001 "meeting" between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague long after Czech and American intelligence analysts had dismissed it. The power of these lies was considerable. In a CBS News/New York Times poll released on Sept. 25, 2001, 60 percent of Americans thought Osama bin Laden had been the culprit in the attacks of two weeks earlier, either alone or in league with unnamed "others" or with the Taliban; only 6 percent thought bin Laden had collaborated with Saddam; and only 2 percent thought Saddam had been the sole instigator. By the time we invaded Iraq in 2003, however, CBS News found that 53 percent believed Saddam had been "personally involved" in 9/11; other polls showed that a similar percentage of Americans had even convinced themselves that the hijackers were Iraqis. There is still much more to learn about our government's duplicity in the run-up to the war, just as there is much more to learn about what has gone on since, whether with torture or billions of Iraq reconstruction dollars. That is why the White House and its allies, having failed to discredit the Fitzgerald investigation, are now so desperate to slow or block every other inquiry. Exhibit A is the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, is proving a major farceur with his efforts to sidestep any serious investigation of White House pre-war subterfuge. Last Sunday, the same day that newspapers reported Carl Levin's revelation about the "intentionally misleading" Qaeda informant, Senator Roberts could be found on "Face the Nation" saying he had found no evidence of "political manipulation or pressure" in the use of pre-war intelligence. His brazenness is not anomalous. After more than two years of looking into the forged documents used by the White House to help support its bogus claims of Saddam's Niger uranium, the FBI ended its investigation without resolving the identity of the forgers. Last week, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported that an investigation into the November 2003 death of an Abu Ghraib detainee, labeled a homicide by the U.S. government, has been, in the words of a lawyer familiar with the case, "lying kind of fallow." The Wall Street Journal similarly reported that 17 months after Condoleezza Rice promised a full investigation into Ahmad Chalabi's alleged leaking of American intelligence to Iran, FBI investigators had yet to interview Mr. Chalabi -- who was being welcomed in Washington last week as an honored guest by none other than Ms. Rice. The Times, meanwhile, discovered that Mr. Libby had set up a legal defense fund to be underwritten by donors who don't have to be publicly disclosed but who may well have a vested interest in the direction of his defense. It's all too eerily reminiscent of the secret fund set up by Richard Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, to pay the legal fees of Watergate defendants. There's so much to stonewall at the White House that last week Scott McClellan was reduced to beating up on the octogenarian Helen Thomas. "You don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen," he said, "and I'm going to tell them the facts." Coming from the press secretary who vowed that neither Mr. Libby nor Karl Rove had any involvement in the CIA leak, this scene was almost as funny as his boss's "We do not torture" charade. Not that it matters now. The facts the American people are listening to at this point come not from an administration that they no longer find credible, but from the far more reality-based theater of war. The Qaeda suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman on 11/9, like the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London before them, speak louder than anything else of the price we are paying for the lies that diverted us from the war against the suicide bombers of 9/11 to the war in Iraq. Yup. Besides ludicrously implying that the Democrats are just as responsible for the bogus war on Iraq as his regime is, "President" Bush on Veterans Day trotted out another of his regime's old and tired propagandistic lies: That to criticize his unelected, corrupt and criminal regime's launching and/or subsequent bungling of the Vietraq War is to "send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."* Again the Bush regime's old and tired tactic of trying to morph very valid criticism of the Bush regime into an attack on our troops, an attack that was never made or even intended. I'll tell you how you support our troops: You don't send them to bogus wars for the war profiteering of Dick Cheney's Halliburton and of other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, and when you face valid political criticism, you don't -- on Veterans Day, for fuck's sake -- try to use the troops to shield yourself from that criticism, like that climactic scene in the 1983 movie "The Dead Zone" (the original one) in which the slimy politician (played by Martin Sheen) grabs an infant and holds it up in front of him to try to prevent an assassin (played by Christopher Walken, the movie's hero, actually) from shooting him. Bush holds the troops -- at least 2,065 of whom have died in Vietraq since he sent them there in March 2003 -- up in front of him just like that baby in the movie to try to save his own political ass because, just like the sleazy politician in the movie, he's a fucking coward. He always has been: He supported but wouldn't go to the Vietnam War himself, but went AWOL from even the Texas Air National Guard, which his daddy got him into. Now, as "president," he thinks nothing of using our troops' name to shield himself from the consquences of his own criminal and incompetent actions.  Of course, Bush already is as politically dead as was that politician in "The Dead Zone" after he held that baby up to try to stop the assassin's bullet. In a nationwide Newsweek poll taken within the past week, 50 percent of the respondents said that Bush is not honest and ethical and only 42 percent said that he is. In a nationwide Associated Press/Ipsos poll taken this month, 57 percent said that Bush is not honest and 51 percent said that he is not ethical (42 percent said that he is honest and 47 percent said that he is ethical). So Bush & Co. can keep on lyin' -- because no one's listenin'. And Bush & Co. are politically impotent because no one likes 'em: Bush's approval ratings in nationwide polls taken this month remain consistently below 40 percent. And there probably would be popular support for Bush's impeachment in 2007 because in the aforementioned Newsweek poll, when asked, "Do you think Bush can be an effective president during his last three years in office or that he won't be able to get much done for the rest of his second term?", only 36 percent said that he can be effective during his last three years in office, while a whopping 56 percent said that he won't be able to get much done. The majority of Americans -- correctly -- already have written George W. Bush off as a loss. *The full quote is: "The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them." Of course, the Bush regime did start a bogus war in Iraq in March 2003, which is common fucking knowledge, so the assertion that the Bush regime started a bogus war in Iraq in March 2003 is not "false" or "baseless." Nor is it an "attack." It is a statement of truth, something that is alien to the members of the Bush regime. And the Iraq had nothing to do with "the global war on terror" until the Bush regime illegally, immorally, unprovokedly and imperialistically invaded Iraq in March 2003, turning it into a hotbed of terrorism. And Middle Easternerns aren't nearly as interested in "destroying our [Americans'] way of life" as they are interested in preventing our Americans' way of life, including (and probably especially) our addiction to their oil, from destroying them. And "national interest"? Please. Our national interests include things like having adequate levees in case of hurricanes, adequately educating our citizens (we're a nation of fucking idiots), and ensuring that all of our citizens have adequate health care, regardless of their ability to pay. Wiping out Social Security, throwing us into a record federal budget deficit, making us even more hated around the globe (and thus much less safe) by invading and occupying a Muslim nation that did absofuckinglutely nothing to us, outing CIA operatives whose job is to prevent actual WMDs from ever harming Americans, selling out our environment to the highest bidder -- all things that the Bush regime did or attempted to do -- aren't exactly in our national fucking interest. The Vietraq War is in Halliburton's best interests -- it is not in our national interest. The plutocrats assert that lie over and over again: That their personal financial interests are our nation's interests. For Bush to assert that his cronies' war profiteering is our national interest is yet another of an endless series of bold-faced lies that emanate from his filthy fucking lying mouth. Update (Monday, Nov. 14, 2005): Here is Ted Rall on torture (I just discovered this 'toon of his today): 12:14:53 AM    Comments []