Who will Britney marry next? Answers on a postcard!
Come On and Do the Spider Walk Near a Spider Hole American troops in the ancient Iraqi city of Hatra are working to create "The Exorcist Experience," which seeks to draw tourists to the site where some of the classic 1973 horror film were shot. You remember, the part in the beginning where Max von Sydow encounters Pazuzu for the first time. "This place will be a real moneypot," one U.S. soldier says. Except for one small detail: the site is cursed. Hey, but so's our involvement in Iraq, so c'est la vie.
Looks Like There's Still Some Demons to Be Exorcised Remember the Mukhabarat, Saddam's feared and hated secret police apparatus? Well, they're all gone of course, and now we introduce you to the people who will be rooting out Iraqi insurgents from now on . . . the Mukhabarat. Proving once again that there's nothing truer in Iraq than "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," the CIA is funding a new secret police force composed of the remnants of the old secret police force. "If successfully set up, the group would work in tandem with American forces but would have its own structure and relative independence," a former U.S. intelligence officer says. "It could be expected to be fairly ruthless in dealing with the remnants of Saddam." And, you know, with people.
Consider Arms Is Worse Than Hitler, and Other Banal Cliches I feel like a sucker for writing about this, because it's such a non-issue, but I'd feel remiss if I didn't tackle the controversy surrounding an ad made for a MoveOn.org-sponsored contest that linked some statements made by George Bush with statements made by everybody's least favorite person, Adolf "Sunny" Hitler. Much of the phoney, manufactured outrage over this ad seems to be based on the fallacy that it's unusual for people to drag in Nazi iconography to smear a contemporary politician. In fact, this sort of thing has been going on since the 1930s, and will go on long after the last Nazi is dead. Take this article, for example, which details GOP pollster Grover Norquist's recent comparison of the estate tax to the Holocaust (in fact, as many sources suggest, the Holocaust was a good deal worse than having to pay your fair share of income tax). Although normally I would complain that Ed Gillespie isn't jumping two feet up Grover's ass like he is with MoveOn, I won't, because Grover does this shit ALL THE TIME. He's also compared the estate tax to apartheid-era South Africa and Communist East Germany. The fact is, people, that politicians are going to get compared to Nazis because many people are stupid and lazy and want to get your attention by shocking you. Although we will never stop this, we can at least try to divert attention to more fruitful parallels: Satan, for example. When Rush Limbaugh ACTUALLY SUGGESTED in 2002 that Tom Daschle might be the Devil, no one really seemed to care (except for Tom Daschle and, presumably, the Devil). Since secular American society regards Hitler as a much worse figure than the Devil, why don't we compare our enemies to the Prince of Lies; we'll get our juvenile point across, and Matt Drudge won't wet his panties whining to his listeners about our "political hate speech" (for an illustration of this, please see my entry in the MoveOn contest, which inoffensively depicted Beelzebub sodomizing George Bush while the two of them ripped Iraqi babies from their mothers' wombs).
More Kafkaesque than Orwellian? You Make the Call! How come we live in a time when the only authors whose names can be reliably applied to our public life are the two spy-haunted Europeans who created nightmarish dystopian scenarios of paranoia and total oppression? Just for once, I'd like to live in a time or place that could accurately be described as "Wildean" or "Tolkientine" or something. Anyway, more of the same: the administration has taken an unprecedented step in asking the Supreme Court to keep secret an entire case relating to the detention of people after September 11, etc. You'd like to think the Supreme Court will respond with an unprecedented "Fuck You," but if you believe that's possible you're living in a world that's altogether too Salingeronian.
Pray for Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman? But She's the Red Harlot of Babylon Spoken of by John of Patmos! Thought we'd drop in on our old friends at the Presidential Prayer Team, and glory be, it looks like they have themselves a redesign. Featuring a bizarre tribute to Herbert Hoover (who the fuck is trying to rehabilitate Herbert Hoover?) and a new, ecumenical flava (dig that Thomas Merton quote, ripped totally out of context from a man with a lifelong loathing of the U.S. government!), we're glad to see the Prayer Team is doing better than ever. "Thank God that President Bush and Mrs. Bush have enjoyed continued health and strength throughout the year," the site advises. Oh, I'm praying all right, but I guess you could say we're not on the same team.
-Consider Arms
12:30:54 PM 
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