J-Lo Sentences You to...The Cell!

I was listening to the Fat Guys At The Movies podcast ("Episode 238, King Kong vs. Dirk Diggler"), featuring our friend Ike (of the Pop Culture guru duo Mike & Ike), and the conversation turned to Tarsem Singh's Immortals -- which, if you've turned on a TV or sat through the trailers in a movie theater lately, you've probably been unable to avoid knowing exists, and which opens today.

Now, we have a rule against doing BLTBM-style reviews of films while they're still in first run release -- an easy guideline to follow, since most of the movies we write about don't linger (or malinger) long at the multiplex.  Still, we're occasionally tempted to break Ape Law, and this picture looks particularly juicy: willowy young men pirouetting madly in pleated miniskirts, bronze-clad warriors attempting and failing to organize a phalanx in zero-gravity, and Mickey Rourke sporting a rhinestone-studded hockey mask and muttering "Releez da titans," like a bleary-eyed Redwings fan hunched over a bar after ordering five too many boilermakers.

Anyway, Ike reminded the audience that one of Tarsem's earlier, funny films was The Cell, which, coincidentally, is featured in the Psycho Therapist chapter of our currently-under-construction sequel to Better Living Through Bad Movies.  So please enjoy this preview of coming attractions.  The review is by s.z.  The cantilevered butt cheeks are courtesy of Jennifer Lopez.

The Cell (2000)
Directed by Tarsem Singh
Written by Mark Protosevich

Tagline: "This summer... enter the mind of a killer."

And as an added bonus, enter the mind of a Jennifer Lopez!  As you might imagine, it’s full of expensive, bizarre clothes, MTV videos, and a violent man in trouble with the law. Plus, lots of derriere jokes!

The Dreamscape/In Dreams/What Dreams May Come part our movie begins with Jennifer of Arabia riding her horse across the sands while wearing a wedding gown she apparently borrowed from Harvey Birdman, Attorney-at-Law.  See, Jennifer is a child psychologist thingy who, through the marvels of unexplained science, can enter the mind of her patient, a catatonic kid who hates water.  Her therapy sessions consist of her donning a red rubber cat suit (ribbed for our pleasure), getting hooked up to a Playskool My First Matrix machine, then invading the boy’s subconscious to urge him to Just Say No to schizophrenia.

Jennifer, a highly trained mental health professional, says earnestly, "He’s living in a world that’s not healthy," and wants to reverse the polarity on the mind-melding device, which, as we know from Ghostbusters, is highly dangerous.  Her scientist colleagues shoot down the idea, so Jen goes home and smokes pot in her underwear, while generously shoving her butt at the camera.  The scientific community's argument is now invalid.

Meanwhile, in the Silence of the Lambs/Seven/Swingers portion of our movie, FBI agent Vince Vaughn, looking like he’s suffering from a serious case of cotton-mouth and dope lag, is trying to locate an appropriately bizarre serial killer to spice up the movie.  Vince just got his big break in the case: a dog hair, which DMV records indicate belongs to Vincent D’Onofrio.  But just seconds before Vince breaks down the door, D’Onofrio takes a bath, which causes him to have a seizure, rendering him totally catatonic. 

Even worse, Bad Vince grabbed a new victim while Good Vince was waiting in line at the DMV, and since the girl is trapped in Bad Vince’s automated aquarium, she will drown within a few hours. To add suspense to the movie, why don’t you hold your breath until the girl is located? (Full disclosure: We tried this and passed out several times, but feel that our ability to appreciate the director’s singular vision was only enhanced by the hypoxia and serial concussions.)

Vince takes Bad Vince to a specialist in bath-tub related disorders, who says that he is suffering from a rare form of schizophrenia triggered by a trauma involving Mr. Bubble....exactly like the kid in the first part of the movie.  What are the odds! The doc explains that drugs can’t help and the catatonia is permanent, so it looks like the girl is doomed.

Vince asks Jennifer if she can get the girl’s location from the mind of the killer.  She wrinkles her brow, looks puzzled, and in her best Melanie Griffith voice states, "For severe schizophrenics there's no difference between fantasy and reality."  Yup, Jen is one of the nation’s most gifted psychologists — and probably attended the same institute of higher education as Dr. Christmas Jones, the 22-year-old world-renowned nuclear physicist/underwear model in The World is Not Enough.

And that brings up a very important question: what would Jennifer’s Bond Girl name be? We lean toward "Professor Bébé Gottbach, Ph.D." -- but feel free to come up with your own.

Anyway, Jennifer enters Bad Vince’s head, sees a boy, and follows him to a barn.  He pushes her away from a horse just as panes of glass fall from the ceiling, sectioning the animal into a science project ("the living horse’) or into steak for the Black Angus restaurant chain.  This symbolizes the damage done to D’Onofrio’s young psyche by the theme song from Mr. Ed.

Suddenly, she encounters a king wearing a purple cape that extends for miles.  Jennifer is horrified, because the cape makes his butt look really big, and her contract contains an ironclad No Compete clause.  She signals to her colleagues that she wants out of Bad Vince’s twisted mind now!

Good Vince asks her to go back, since she didn’t come up with any useful information except that Bad Vince -- in the tradition of movie serial killers like Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill -- murdered King Friday and is wearing his skin.

For Dr. Jennifer’s encore appearance in Bad Vince’s mind, the director, remembering his acclaimed "Losing My Religion" video, has D’Onofrio dress like a demon (you know, Clown White greasepaint, two pigtails dangling from his forehead, and a pair of brass rings pinching his nipples, which I bet his wife is going to be irritated about when she goes to wash her hair and notices the shower curtain is sagging).  Then Bad Vince licks Jen, which suddenly convinces her that his world is reality, just like the foreshadowing said would happen!  The scientists are powerless to help her because turning off the equipment now would cause them to lose their Quake game.  But Vince remembers the third rubber cat suit, and prepares to barge into D’Onofrio’s subconscious too.  The scientists advise him that the way to snap Jennifer back is to "Hit her with something personal," like Mr. Blackwell’s Worst Dressed list.

Vince sees a rainbow of fruit colors, eats some Skittles, and then encounters Jennifer, now wearing a skimpy black lace outfit, orthodontic headgear, and Queen Amidala’s hair.  She smiles cruelly as D’Onofrio pokes a hole in Vince’s tummy and pulls out his intestines, using a Ronco device made just for that purpose ("And boy, does it catch intestines!"). Vince remembers the scientists’ recommendation and confronts Jen with something painful from her past. "You were in Anaconda!" he yells, and the shame frees her—unfortunately, to make Gigli.

"You'd tell me if I looked stupid, right?"

Vince spots the logos on the machinery holding Bad Vince’s mind together and deduces where the girl is being held.  So, with Jennifer rescued and the case solved, his work here is done. However, Jen knows there are more cool outfits for her to wear, so she locks the doors to the lab, reverses the polarity on the machine, and joins minds with Bad Vince again.

This time she finds herself dressed as a nun playing Santa Claus in an Obsession ad. She beatifically tells the boy that she came back to help him like she promised.  Then D’Onofrio appears, now made-up like Dirk Benedict in Sssssss.  Jennifer changes into a black leather cat suit and black lipstick and wails on Bad Vince while shouting the diva’s traditional battle cry: "My world, my rules!" And her chief rule is: nobody upstages me and lives!  

She stabs D’Onofrio repeatedly, but he merely smiles, demonstrating that even in her own mind Jennifer is an amazingly feeb.  So she changes back into the nun outfit and drowns the boy, which is shocking unless you went to Catholic school.

It’s several days later. Vince, more lethargic and hungover than ever, is at D’Onofrio's house, looking for loose change.  Jennifer shows up, looking for closure.  Vince tells Jennifer he remembers only pieces of his experience with her, and says something about a "drug-fueled mind-bender," which, coincidentally, is how Jennifer would later describe the experience of being trapped in an elevator with Paula Abdul.  They half-heartedly say thanks and good-bye.  Jen goes back to the Vogue shoot in her young patient’s mind, while Vince returns to FBI Headquarters to file his report and smoke a bowl of Super Lemon Haze with  Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.  Finis.

This is All I Have to Say About That

Dear Penn State rioters:

If you can put "child rape" and "winning college football games" on the Scales of Justice, and football wins, then you're exactly the kind of person who ought to spend your professional life weighing a witch and a duck.

 "It's a fair cop."

So consider changing your major now.  There are many exciting opportunities for sociopaths in the burgeoning field of Wiccan/Mallard Metrics!

And don't feel bad for Joe Paterno.  After 15 years of Looking the Other Way, he's got the neck flexibility of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and that's got to come in handy when parallel parking.

Fabian Society Radicals Pooped in My Snuff Box!

Washington Post Opinion columnist and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is uniquely qualified to comment on the similarities between the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, and the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s.  As most pediatric psychologists will tell you, the first five years of a child's life are the most formative, and Gerson was born in 1964, making him three years old in the Summer of Love, and five at the time of Woodstock and the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, getting in just under the formative wire.  As a result, when he looks back upon his most vivid and influential recollections, he finds that they are inextricably linked with a disastrous upending of social and cultural norms, a brazen challenge to political orthodoxy, and near constant bed-wetting.

But before we plunge into his Mix 'n' Match exercise, we should probably ask ourselves who this confused-looking fellow in the photo above really is?  According to Wikipedia, "He served as President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006" -- when all of the Bush Administration's most important policy fuck-ups were conceived and executed.

In the Feburary 7, 2005 issue of Time, "Gerson was named as one of 'The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America'" (he came in 9th, but there were accusations of illegal performance enhancement by his fellow snake-handlers, who claimed Gerson dosed himself before particularly important or ecstatic religious services with large intramuscular injections of rattlesnake anti-venom).  As for the highlights of his speechwriting career:

Gerson proposed the use of a "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" metaphor during a September 5, 2002 meeting of the White House Iraq Group, in an effort to sell the American public on the nuclear dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

Gerson coined "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and "the armies of compassion." His noteworthy phrases for Bush are said to include "Axis of Evil", a phrase adapted from "axis of hatred", itself suggested by fellow speechwriter David Frum but deemed too mild.

According to Matthew Scully, who worked with him for five years, Gerson is a "self-publicizing" glory hog guilty of "foolish vanity", "sheer pettiness" and "credit hounding". In Scully's account, Gerson did not come up with the language that made him famous. "Few lines of note were written by Mike ... and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses -- not even 'axis of evil'."

Small wonder the Washington Post snapped up Gerson to fill the Chair in Advanced Plagiarism Studies after Ben Domenech resigned his position to spend more time with other peoples' writing.

So let's enjoy his fresh take on the lèse-majesté of our latter day hippies:

As radicalism creeps in, credibility retreats from OWS

At what point does a protest movement become an excuse for camping? 

And at what point does camping become an excuse for a protest movement?  When I was in Boy Scouts, that moment came when Mr. Fischer, the fill-in Scoutmaster dropped a lantern, setting one of our World War II-era Baker tents on fire, and burning up two rain ponchos and most of our toilet paper.

 At what point is utopianism discredited by the seedy, dangerous, derelict fun fair it creates?

At what point is a pure Aryan society discredited by the race-mixing, mongrelizing action of the Play-Doh Fun Factory?

The emergence of Occupy Wall Street raised Democratic hopes for the emergence of a leftist equivalent to the Tea Party movement. The comparison is now laughable.

Exactly.  Where are the stirring orations and the Charlie Daniels Band medleys?  Where are the posters of Obama as Witchdoctor Hitler?  Where are the holstered Glocks and the slung AR-15s?  And most important, where are the patriots in their silken knee britches and tricorner hats, riding their Hoverounds through town to warn the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, by ringing those bells, and makin' sure to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed?  Huh?  I ask you.

Set aside, for a moment, the reports of sexual assault in Zuccotti Park and the penchant for public urination.

"I say, Old Bean, I don't know about you, but I've been seized by a mad fancy for an al fresco whiz."

Tea Party activists may hate politicians, but they venerate American political institutions. Veneration does not always involve understanding. But the Tea Party’s goal is democratic influence. 

Let's take a moment to applaud their efforts to gain influence over institutions they don't understand.  And to note the odd coincidence that "veneration" and "urination" rhyme.

On its tie-dyed surface, the OWS movement seems little more than a confused collection of grievances.

Why, when one of these greasy-haired, leather-clad, cycle-straddling delinquents was asked what he and his cohort were rebelling against, he responded inanely, "Whaddya got?"

But there is some ideological coherence within OWS. Its collectivist people’s councils seem to have two main inspirations: socialism (often Marxist socialism) and anarchism.  [...]  That is the opposite of participatory democracy — the use of power to intimidate a fellow citizen on a public street. It is the method of British soccer thugs.

In Oakland, protesters have been playing at the Paris Commune — constructing barricades, setting fires, throwing concrete blocks and explosives, declaring a general strike to stop the “flow of capital” at the port.

Not to mention deflecting tear gas canisters with their heads, which is more the method of British soccer players.

Here, OWS seems to be taking its cues from both “Rules for Radicals” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

While Michael seems to be taking his cues from the first scenes of Battleship Potemkin, and the last scene of Easy Rider.

Defenders of OWS dismiss this as the work of a few bad apples. But the transgressors would call themselves the vanguard.

Detractors of our corporate media would call Gerson a fawning, bum-sucking courtier to a Mammon-worshiping oligarchy.  But Michael would say, "I'm sorry, I can't talk with Charles' and David's Koch in my mouth.  But I will take bets on which one of them you think will win the sword fight."

Since the 1960s, some on the political left have sought liberal reform through the democratic process and nonviolent protest.

Prior to that, though, it was all tumbrels and guillotines.  As every schoolboy knows, President Benjamin Harrison signed the Sherman Anti-Trust in the blood of J.P. Morgan, using the tycoon's still spurting neck stump as an inkwell.

Others have sought to hasten the crisis and collapse of fundamentally illegitimate social and economic systems. Both groups can be found within OWS, but the latter is ascendant.

Still others, like Michael, have bravely defended a fundamentally illegitimate social and economic system, even going so far as to record YouTube videos assuring the bullied plutocrats that "It Gets Better."

City governments have also begun to look hapless for their accommodation of squalor, robberies, sexual attacks, drug use, vagrancy and vigilantism.

Although I hear Mega City-One is having a good deal of success with its new "Street Judge" program.

And what must Democratic leaders — who rushed to identify with a protean political force — now be thinking? OWS is not a seminar on income inequality — not the Center for American Progress on a camping trip. It is a leftist movement with a militant wing.

In other words, it's the worst nightmare of both Michael Gerson and Congressional Democrats: liberals who are actually pissed off enough to fight back.

Will Americans, looking for jobs, turn in hope to the vandalization of small businesses and the promise of a general strike? Will citizens, disappointed by a dysfunctional government, be impressed by the endless arguments of anarchist collectives? Will people, disgusted by partisanship and rhetorical rock-throwing, be attracted to actual rock throwing?

Will Brenda tell her fiance Jack that she actually married Stavros, the Greek shipping magnate while she was suffering from amnesia?  Will Joe and Betty be able to dig their way out of the collapsed mine shaft in time, or will Aunt Susan be forced to give birth in an old ore cart?  Will a lazy columnist padding out his 800 words resort to the kind of breathless, cliffhanger questions associated with the climax of a radio soap opera and the sting of a Hammond organ?

Tune in tomorrow.

This seems to be the desperate political calculation of the Democratic Party. Good luck with that. 

Thanks, Michael.  And best of luck with Herman Cain as your front runner (you were right -- that merger with the Tea Party by the Republican leadership in 2008 was a smart investment.  Will the OWS movement still be paying these kinds of dividends three years from now?  Good luck with that, indeed).

Herman Cain Fell Into Margaret Sanger's Honey Trap!

Mark Crutcher, according to his bio at LifeDynamics.com, "may be best known for his bold undercover operations that have exposed shocking and even illegal activities inside the abortion industry."  You probably recall this story from the last time we featured his work, but in brief, Mark infiltrated a Planned Parenthood clinic by disguising himself as 513th Trimester fetus, then acted obnoxious in an effort to get someone to abort him.  When he eventually found himself in the dumpster out back, he knew he had 'em nailed to the wall, which is why today Planned Parenthood is as extinct as ACORN.

Baby Snooks' bio continues:  "The success of Mark's covert surveillance efforts led one New York newspaper to label Life Dynamics 'the CIA of the pro-life movement.'"  Not wishing to jeopardize national security, the newspaper in question prefers to remain nameless, but I'm sure it's one of the more prestigious broadsheets, like Oswego County Today, or Chocolate Singles.

Herman Cain, meet Samuel Yette

In January of this year, an African-American man living out the remainder of his life in a Maryland nursing home finally succumbed to Alzheimer's disease. Unfortunately, because he was not a sports hero or a member of America's brain-dead entertainment industry, the nation barely noted either his life or his passing.

And this relative obscurity should make it even easier for Mark to exploit the dead -- it's like he's discovered a vast, untapped oil field beneath an ancient Indian burial ground.

His name was Samuel Frederick Yette. Born into the segregated South in 1929, Mr. Yette earned a bachelor's degree from Tennessee State University and a master's from Indiana University. Then, following his U.S. Air Force service in the Korean War, he became an award-winning journalist who worked for several newspapers and magazines. In 1964, he was appointed executive secretary of the Peace Corp after which he became special assistant for civil rights to the director of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. He later became a civil-rights commentator for both BET and PBS, and he finished his working life as a lecturer and a professor at Howard University.

Among Yette's many other achievements, in 1968, he had become the first African-American reporter hired by Newsweek magazine where he soon rose to the position of Washington bureau correspondent.

So far this has been an unusual column for Mark, one which veers far from his comfort zone by careening dangerously close, if not actually sideswiping, genuine facts (most of which appear to have been gathered from the many obituaries which noted Mr. Yette's barely noted passing, including this one from the Washington Post.)  But now we've reached the part where Mark has erected his oil derrick, and is ready to sink his drill-bit down through the corpse, hoping to strike rhetoric.

But three years later, he wrote a book that exposed high-level plans within the United States to use birth control and abortion as instruments of black genocide.

 Well, according to that same WaPo story:

The book asserted that the federal government showed a pattern of repression against African Americans that, left unaddressed, could lead to genocide.

"Blacks are given a choice in this country," Mr. Yette wrote. "To accept their miserable lot or die.'"

He cited his experiences with the Johnson administration and the Office of Economic Opportunity and claimed that even government programs aimed at helping the most vulnerable citizens were vehicles to repress them further.

"The raised hand of Uncle Sam," Mr. Yette wrote in his book, was "swatting poor Negroes while rewarding rich whites with the spoils of black misery. As this truth became known, hope turned to hatred, dedication became disgust, hands raised for help became clenched fists, and eyes searching for acceptance turned inward."

I read about a dozen different obits of Mr. Yette, and none of them mentioned his crusade against contraception, or quoted the passage from his book which described birth control as a Black Birkenau.  But as we know from an-cho-vies such as Mark, or Judie (The Distaff Pontiff) Brown,  an empty uterus is murder, the moral equivalent of an Auschwitz crematorium, which is why we say of a pregnant woman that she's got "a bun in the oven."

Also, the book (which Mark doesn't bother to name, but is titled "The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America") was published two years before Roe v. Wade, so it doesn't seem likely -- even from the perspective of Occam's Disposable Razor -- that much of it concerned a plot by Nixon to ram  safe and legal abortion through the Supreme Court as a means of gradually eliminating the audience for Richard Roundtree films.

Mark again:

It is important to understand that, by this point in history, population control – especially black population control – had become a virtual religion for America's power structure.  [...]

That knowledge was the driving force behind the assault on Samuel Yette. The Cartel – of which Richard Nixon was a card-carrying member – was sending a message to civil-rights activists, politicians, journalists, writers, college professors or anyone else who might have influence within the black community. They were being warned that, when it came to population control, they only had two options: They could either get on the plantation or they could keep their mouths shut.

Now comes Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. 

He can either put a sou'wester on his bollard, or H.R. Haldeman will destroy him.

In the last few weeks, Cain began pointing out that the Cartel is still alive and well in the form of organizations like Planned Parenthood. He also reminded the public that this particular organization was founded as an instrument of eugenics while being politically and financially backed by ultra-wealthy racists and eugenicists. He then correctly pointed out that Planned Parenthood, as well as other eugenics organizations, have disproportionately placed their facilities in minority communities with results that have been both disastrous and predictable.

Well, he did say some crazy shit on Face the Nation, none of which was "correct."  As Steven Gray said at Swampland:

1.    Sixty-three percent of abortion clinics are in neighborhoods where more than half the residents are white; about 9% of abortion clinics are in predominately black neighborhoods

2.   White women account for 36% of abortions, compared to 30% of black women and 25% of Latinas.

Back to Mark:

Finally, he called for Planned Parenthood to be stripped of its one-million-dollars-a-day in taxpayer funding. 

 (You heard correctly ... $1,000,000 a day.)

Mark Crutcher and Dr. Evil:  Separated at Abortion?

The fascinating thing is that, within hours, anonymous people start dropping out of the trees to claim that Herman Cain sexually harassed them. As we have seen in the past, this is a very convenient charge because it is one that is virtually impossible to refute. The reality is that, in the minds of many, the accusation itself is evidence of guilt. Once the charge is made, the target has to prove a negative and, for all practical purposes, that cannot be done.

True, proving a negative is extremely difficult, which is why Mark prefers to falsify a positive, by whipping up his own facts, made from scratch out of common items you'd find around the house.  He's like the Martha Stewart of pathological liars, except if he was sentenced to a stretch in a women's prison, he'd be everybody's bitch.

On the bright side, a non-anonymous person dropped in today with a fresh, ripe accusation against Cain, finally giving his supporters a visible target.  (Michelle Malkin is already struggling into her catsuit, and by nightfall she'll be clinging to a branch outside the woman's bedroom window, trying to spot a thong in her laundry hamper.)

This is especially problematic for Republicans since the standard for using it against them is different than it is for Democrats. For whatever reason, it appears that our society has reached a point where it simply accepts that Democratic politicians will have significantly lower moral standards than Republican politicians.

Which is why today Anthony Weiner is the freshman Senator from New York, and David Vitter works the deep fryer at the Kenny Rogers Roasters on Gause Boulevard West in Slidell, Louisiana.

The perfect example of this, of course, is Bill Clinton. I mean, here is a man that even the most ardent Democrats would not leave alone in a room with their 15-year-old daughter, but would happily elect president of the United States.

I never heard anyone -- even at the height of the Arkansas Project -- claim Clinton suffered from ephebophilia.  Still, I don't want to accuse Mark of flinging libelous statements in a wild orgy of unreasoning hatred, because no matter how much he disapproves of Bill Clinton as a person and a politician, if the former President impregnated the girl, Mark would force her to carry the baby to term.

Back to the Cain situation, let me make it clear that I have no personal knowledge of whether the claims against him are legitimate or not. On one hand, there are men who sexually harass women, and on the other hand, there are women who fabricate such charges out of thin air.

Sometimes the accused winds up with a lifetime appointment to the United States Supreme Court, sometimes he merely ends up with a huge influx of donations to his Presidential campaign.  So ultimately, justice is done.

So while I have no way of drawing conclusions regarding the merit of these accusations, it is their timing that is suspicious. From the beginning, it seemed too coincidental to actually be coincidental that Cain's attack on the Population-Control / Family-Planning Cartel was immediately followed by sexual harassment charges against Cain. 

But then, with slapstick comedy it is all in the timing.

I may be baying at the moon here, but the whole episode gives off a very Nixonian odor. Perhaps Herman Cain is being warned to either take one of the Cartel's options or suffer the fate of Samuel Yette.

A long, satisfying career as a professor at Howard University?  That seems more like a punishment for the students, doesn't it?

Whether that is the case or not, the reality is that if Herman Cain were "pro-choice" on abortion and the leading candidate in the Republican race for the White House...

 ...we'd have to conclude that we'd fallen through a wormhole and were actually living on Gor, the Counter-Earth.

 ...there would be no sexual harassment accusations hanging over his head and it wouldn't matter how true or untrue they may be.

If you doubt that, again I refer to Bill Clinton.

Who had no accusations of sexual harassment, rape, drug smuggling, real estate fraud, and serial murder lodged against him, but was ultimately impeached for stealing office supplies from the White House supply closet.

When far more serious and far more numerous accusations were made against him, including some that would have been felonies if prosecuted, the leaders of America's eugenics and population-control groups tied themselves in knots trying to defend him ... Former Time magazine reporter Nina Burleigh wrote an article heaping praise on Clinton in which she volunteered that, "I'd be happy to give him a b--- j-- [street term for oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal." 

Mark put on his pimp hat and calf-length cheetah fur coat and went undercover on the mean streets to decode the very latest in filthy euphemisms popular amongst our urban youth and guttersnipe news weeklies.

The message in all this was unmistakable and unambiguous. The population-control lobby has come to just accept that, by definition, pro-choice men are going to be of lower moral character than other men and should not be held to the same standards. And sure 'nuff, they never are. 

If you had any real respect for women, Mr. Feminist, you wouldn't drive her to Planned Parenthood, you'd chain her to the bed until her water broke.

I want to offer one last observation for Mr. Cain and all those others who might one day find themselves being ground under the Cartel's hobnailed boot. Samuel Yette left this world as a decent and courageous man, and that is a feeling sellouts like Jesse Jackson will never experience. In the final analysis, Shakespeare defined the lives of these two men centuries before either of them was born: "Cowards die a thousand deaths. The valiant taste of death but once." 

And moral vultures who feast on the corpses of men they never knew, and whose opinions they misrepresent for partisan gain, get to taste of death at three square meals a day.

Fill It To The Rim...With Brimley!

Wingnut pundit Warner Todd Huston (who was last seen in Antarctica, trying to slip an alien parasite into Kurt Russell and hectoring him to eat his oatmeal) is in a dither about a billboard rented by atheists in Costa Mesa, which inaccurately quotes Thomas Jefferson on the subject of Christianity.  As it happens, I grew up one town over from Costa Mesa, and my mother lived there for several years, so I can't say this news comes as a complete shock.  The place had a Fedco, several auto body shops, a third run movie theater, and a couple of unusually efficient pot dealers, but it was never known as a hotbed of either Colonial history aficionados, or theologians.

Atheists lie and do so on a billboard!

I'm going to assume Warner has never been to Costa Mesa, or even Southern California, otherwise he'd be less easily shocked by this kind of thing.  Or perhaps he actually believes that those Pai Gow card gaming casinos in the City of Commerce attract an exclusive clientele of suave, James Bondian playboys and off-duty fashion models, instead of heavy-smoking Korean nail technicians and off-duty cops from Lakewood.

Anyway, the local Handi Wipe that passes for a newspaper in Orange County published a story debunking the billboard, but this failed to arrest Warner's tailspin of rage and depression, because the lie that some of the Founders were Deists rather than orthodox Christians is still out there!  Hunkered down on the tundra, waiting, watching, like a Siberian husky possessed by a shapeshifting extra-terrestrial, and it just makes him so mad!

Talk about making a mistake everyone can see! Atheists in California have done a disservice to their own crusade to spread atheism by launching a new billboard campaign that ascribes a false quote to Thomas Jefferson. That's right, they've essentially become liars for atheism.

The failure to vet one's source is an outrage!  Unless you're running for the Republican presidential nomination -- then it's just Tuesday.

"I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature," the billboard "quotes" the president as having said. "It is founded on fables and mythology," this quote concludes. [...]

As the Jefferson library notes, it's a bit hard to believe that Jefferson saw no "redeeming features" in Christianity since he spent months cutting and pasting and rearranging the Christian Bible to his own liking! If there was nothing worth the effort in there he had a funny way of showing it.

The link goes to an Angelfire page that hosts the Jefferson Bible and introduces it thusly:

Thomas Jefferson believed that the ethical system of Jesus was the finest the world has ever seen. In compiling what has come to be called "The Jefferson Bible," he sought to separate those ethical teachings from the religious dogma and other supernatural elements that are intermixed in the account provided by the four Gospels. He presented these teachings, along with the essential events of the life of Jesus, in one continuous narrative.  [emphasis added]

Jefferson liked the social philosophy espoused by Christ (all that peace, love, and charity stuff), he just didn't like the religious elements.  So it seems clear that Warner is right, and Jefferson wasn't a Deist after all, since he blue-penciled the parts about Jesus being a deity.

This Jefferson-the-Deist business is has been a lie told by atheists for at least a generation. In fact, it is a calumny visited on most of our founders. It is also not true.

And a false calumny is the worst kind.  It's probably my least favorite thing ever, except for maybe a circular tautology.

Never in his life did Jefferson call himself a Deist. He called himself a Unitarian (what we might call a Unitarian Universalist today). He did not call himself a Deist. Why should we call him something he never called himself?

"Like the good socialist he is, Obama wants to pick the winners and losers in the world of business..."
  ---Warner Todd Huston, October 1, 2011

Additionally, while many modern atheists and half-informed hobbyists in things historical imagine that all or even many of the founders were "Deists," the truth is that almost none of them were — at least not by their own admission. Washington wasn't. Hamilton wasn't. John Adams sure wasn't. Neither was Madison or Monroe.

Okay, then -- the Founders were orthodox Christians who just liked to whittle, and preferred using a Bible to the more conventional stick.

It is absolutely true that a large portion of our most famous founders had a great amount of disdain for organized religion and/or the priesthood. After all, students of history that they were, the founders knew that religious orders and churches were involved in some of the worst massacres in human history. Not only that but such monstrous actions were within recent memory of the founder's era. It's only natural that they were suspicious of organized religion.

But we simply cannot pretend that this country was not founded by thousands of extremely devoted Christians.

Warner sets the scene so vividly I can almost see it.  "Well done, Mr. Jefferson!  Well done, Mr. Adams, Mr. Madison, Dr. Franklin -- we've founded a new nation which reflects our devout Christianity!  Now what say we go across the road and worship at that monstrous institution that was lately involved in mass homicides?  I needs must confess my sins to a suspicious and morally repugnant clergyman."

Even if a few of our most well known founders were somehow secret Deists, not many of their peers and co-founders nor their supporters back in their home states were anything but sincere believers.

So none of the Founders were Deists, except for the ones who were, but at least they were cowards about it.

After all, religion was one of the first things that our founders strived to protect! Remember that whole "freedom of religion" thing?

I do.  Of course, one can be a vegetarian and still support the USDA inspection of meat-packing plants.

Perhaps two leading founders at one time claimed themselves Deism for themselves, but that is all I've ever run across.

Okay, so two -- two tops!  Two leading ones, anyway...there might have been a few obscure Deist Founders who snuck into Independence Hall, but all they did was photo bomb that John Trumbull portrait of the signing of the Declaration, then leave.

When he was a young man Ben Franklin once wrote that he was a Deist.

Franklin?  Never heard of him.

But he was hardly a "regular" Deist —

He was a "foot long" Deist, at least to hear the French ladies tell it.

When he was young Franklin thought perhaps every universe had its own god but that perhaps they did not involve themselves too much in their own little realms. Not very orthodox Deism, that.

It's amazing the Deist Pope didn't have him excommunicated.  They're very strict about their doctrine.

The other was Governor K. Morris, the man responsible for helping write the Constitution of the United States. According to a book on Morris written by Richard Brookheiser, Morris claimed Deism for himself.

So it's a untrue calumny that the Founders were Deists and not devout Christians, except for two of the most famous ones, and Jefferson, who loved the New Testament once you cut out all the Christianity.

 Certainly it may be true that our founders harbored Deist ideas and it may be true that they feared a political backlash in a nation filled with Christians for saying so out loud, but if they didn't call themselves Deists, how can we? 

"Lincoln would not have approved of a president Barack Obama. Not because Obama is a black man, but because he is a socialist...But, regardless that he was arguing the case against slavery, the nugget of truth in his words can properly be applied to Obama's socialist agenda.
 ---Warner Todd Huston, April 29, 2009

"They imagine that this law was the first version of Obamacare and that this is somehow precedent for Obama's modern, socialist power grab...The fact is, the sailor's relief act is not in any way like Obamacare nor does it serve to justify Obama's socialist healthcare powergrab."
 ---Warner Todd Huston, July 6, 2011

In all the years of reading on the founders I've done I've never seen any other founders calling themselves Deists.  If someone out there has proof otherwise I'd love to hear it. 

Meanwhile, you can't hand Obama a deli sandwich with arugula and spicy brown mustard without him saying, "Thanks.  And keep the change -- I'm a socialist."

But let's not take the revisionism by decades of historians with an agenda as "fact."

Also, while I personally have no doubt that Warner is, in fact, human, we should probably still make him take a blood test.

Lee Likes His Left Hard

You may remember Lee DeCovnick, and if you do, that information will probably be included on your rap sheet under "Distinguishing Marks or Scars."  For those who don't, however, Lee is a retired bean counter ("Lee DeCovnick was a Senior Financial Analyst for a Fortune 500 company in the era of Lotus 1-2-3-, 5¼ floppy disks, and monochrome monitors") who -- when last seen -- was engaged in a contest or epigrammatic one-upmanship with some imaginary Jews, and thrashing them soundly.

Well, he's back, and in keeping with this eerie time of year, with its ghosts, goblins, and discounted candy corn, he's returned to do battle with another mythical creature -- the Hardcore Alinskyite.

The Hard-Left OWS Plan

The hard progressive left in America has been unleashed into the streets by the community organizer in the White House.

The last time this happened, we accidentally unleashed them into the breezeway, and then the hard progressive left stepped on Bobby's pool noodle, and we had to fight our way through the crowd every time we needed to get to that faucet by the garage to turn on the sprinklers, so you can see why we were so relieved to hear that this time they got an organizer to run the unleashing.

The current crop of street pawns, the banal cattle of Occupy Wall Street movement, are fed, herded, and coldly led by the professional agitators from ACORN, SEIU, and the Communist Party of America.

Again, you can probably spot the difficulty.  When two out of the three agitators responsible for feeding your pawns are either moribund or non-existent, you're going to get a back-up in the dining room; and half the time they wind up taking it out on the hostess.

Still, you've got to admit, we've had a nice crop of pawns this year, and the rooks look about ready to drop.

These hardcore Alinskyites are well-funded and well-organized.

Glad to hear somebody's hiring.

Through a series of set-piece street actions and media events coordinated with the White House, the street cattle's drumbeat attacks on capitalism, property rights, and traditional religious and working class values have successfully dominated the news cycles.

Speaking of action set pieces, Lee just spoiled the plot of the new Fast and the Furious sequel, Fast Six, which climaxes with an illegal, high octane race between street cows and chess pieces.  (Scuttlebutt from test audiences, though, is that there are still pacing problems, because several of the ruminants stop mid-race to take a drum solo.)

From the Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October, Fred Thompson's character informs us, "Son, a Russian doesn't take a dump without a plan."  So too with these Alinksy inspired disciples who obviously have their own version of an American "Red October."

When not waving signs proclaiming themselves to be a percentage of the American population roughly equivalent to the amount of purity in a bar of Ivory Soap, the protestors in Zuccotti Park are busy building a submarine with a magnetohydrodynamic drive out of love beads and bongos.  No wonder there's no room for port-a-potties.

Normally the last year of a lame-duck presidency is replete with overseas photo-ops and serious speeches on 'what it all means."  However, America is now burdened with B.H. Obama, a hard-left socialist president who will maintain and expand his control over the executive branch of the United States government, by any means necessary.

President Obama is ignoring our constitutional system of checks and balances and attempting to usurp the powers of the executive branch?  Isn't that grounds for impeachment?  Or at the very least, shouldn't we insist that he punch out by 5:30 so we're not getting charged time-and-a-half?

So what are the two primary short-term goals of the Alinskyites?

1.  Pick up the cat's thyroid medicine at the vet.
2.  Rent a Rug Doctor.

Long-term goals of the Alinskyites include:

1.  Get back to the gym.
2.  Call that guy about cleaning the gutters.
3.  Check recipe cards for vegan dessert options for Shelly's baby shower.
4.  Finish watching Season Four of Who's the Boss? and return the discs to Netflix.
5.  Figure out how to move completed, 9,138 ton nuclear submarine from Zuccotti Park to the Hudson River without scratching the paint.

Desensitization.  OWS is funded through Soros and dozens of his interlocking 501(c)(3)s, the Tides Foundation, the CPUSA, AFL-CIO, SEIU, UAW, Islamic radicals, and, of course, Obama's BFF, ACORN.

You forgot SPECTRE, THRUSH, and C.H.U.M.P.

This abomination of Aliskyistes...

For fans of collective nouns (a "murmuration of starlings," a "rhumba of rattlesnakes") an "abomination of Aliskyistes[sic]" was officially added to the language with the release of the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, along with a "queef of wingnuts" and a "sansabelt of retirees."

...is determined that American should become acclimated daily to the classic Marxist street rhetoric of financial inequality, anti-capitalism, and "lets all hate rich Jews, oh I meant Wall Street bankers."

After beating the Jews to a verbal pulp in his last outing, Lee and the Israelites have now become best friends.  It's just like The Quiet Man, except rather than killing a man in the boxing ring like Sean Thornton (John Wayne) did, Lee just talked one into a coma.

Big lies and the drum beat repetition of the big lies into a national consensus: where in 20th-century history have we seen this happen?  Oh yes, but back then it was referred as "Lebensraum."  And we all know how well that that turned out.

In July 1942, SS troops exterminated the Jewish inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto.  In October 2011,  unemployed people camping in a park held up some hand-made posters that hurt bond traders' feelings.  The parallels are almost too eerie.

Misdirection.  The Obama administration reeks of donor payoffs and political scandals.  Solyndra, Fast and Furious, LightSquared, SunPower, the list goes on and on.

And I'm sure if you go down the list far enough, you might actually get to a scandal.

So what do you do, as a trained and indoctrinated Aliskyite, to deflect attention from these slip-ups?  You move the media spotlight onto those nasty Wall Street capitalists.

But the joke's on the media, because the Wall Street capitalists don't register on film or cast a reflection.

Use up the daily press cycles interviewing time-warped hippies.

Well, That's a good point, because I have some questions for the time-warped hippies that the mainstream media is too afraid to ask:

1. How did the S.D.S. wrest control of Project Tic Toc from General Heywood Kirk?
2. What was the deal with the brown acid?
3. Can you get me Lee Merriwether's autograph?

"Tony -- look!  There are still hippies in the 21st century!  And they've perfected a silent propulsion system for their submarines!

The country is not looking at the causes or solutions; it is, in fact, hidden from our sight, by a few cattle herded from behind by the cold Marxist street agitators.  No doubt, Leon Trotsky must be smiling in hell's burning fire, admiring the handiwork of his 21st-century offspring.

Since the Marxist street agitators are cold, and Leon Trotsky is hot, I'm going to eat the cattle's porridge, because it's probably just right.

America can now look forward to months more of these set pieces of Marxist agitprop, with the lapdog mainstream media dutifully and daily regurgitating OWS vomitus into our homes and onto our computers.

But at least the lapdog media tend to eat their own vomitus, although just to be on the safe side I always pull out the Swiffer whenever I see Wolf Blitzer outside the CNN building, eating grass.

The Alinskyites will prevent Obama losing his control over the executive branch of the United States government, by any means necessary.  This is the key unwritten mission statement behind all of the anti- capitalist, class warfare nonsense OWSers are spewing in the streets.  The OWS cattle are out there as disposable pawns in a new un-American and anti-constitutional national political process of brinksmanship, raw power politics, ideology, and class and racial warfare.

I wish the cattle would use cloth pawns.  I realize disposable pawns are cheaper and more convenient, but they're really piling up in our landfills.

Historically, communists have used violent "false flag operations" against their own useful idiots, to both gain sympathy and to allow tyrants to unilaterally invoke gun control in the name of national security.  Nazis did the same thing.  Marxist dogma also calls for coordinated multi-city street violence and rioting, as occurred in the communist revolution in Venezuela.

Remember, this isn't about an unregulated financial sector crashing the economy through fraud and greed.  It's about Communist cows and Nazi chess pieces fighting over gang turf, then teaming up to perform a snazzy Jerome Robbins dance number.

The GOP had damn well better wake up fast to this new (to America) process, or they will have lost the initiative before the first roll of the die.

Oh, we're playing D&D now?  I can't keep up with all these metaphors.  Quick, somebody stall Lee while I find the suede pouch with my 12-sided dice, then I'll show this beeyotch how to roll Initiative.

Cry Happy Birthday, and Let Slip the Dogs of War (and Other Funk Fusion Bands)

I had a bit of a NyQuil buzz going last night, but I was too congested to sleep, so as things weren't making sense anyway, I figured I'd head over to American Thinker and see what --

Wait a moment...Paul Drake has just walked into the court room and handed me a note...This looks important...

Well!  It turns out that today is the birthday of early Wo'C adopter Chris Vosburg (or as he's known to his friends, "Engineer Vosburg"), our meatspace drinking buddy, a witty and informative commenter, and World O' Crap's leading expert on Dutch rock bands and Perry Mason.  In honor of this august occasion, I'm going to stop pretending there's any danger that I'll ever actually post another Ann Coulter picture, and instead offer this cheesecake photo of Della Street in a negligee:

"I'd like to see Counsel in my chambers..."

Happy birthday, Chris!