Reading is Fundamentalist TGIF, and we get to read another heart-warming, wacky, yet self-righteous slice o' life from America's Worst Mom (registered trademark of TBOGG International). While we don't want to spoil Cap'n Bogg's telling of the tale, we can inform you that this week's adventure features young Tobogan making dead rat faces as Mummy reads to him and his older sister Liquidity. But the boy keeps spoiling Mummy's fun by enjoying the book (kids should be listening to 19th century classics for moral improvement, not for fun). Oddly enough, some man claiming to be Meghan's husband is there too (we suspect it's really Uncle Daddy, who comes by in the evenings sometimes). The two younger girls, Myrtle and Concubina, were previously read The Story of Babar so Mummy could teach them that the French are an evil race who hate elephants. But Meghan stopped reading when they got to the dirty part where Babar goes to a whore house and politely thanks the madam. From fairy tales, young Concubina has learned that all women are either witches or princesses. Meghan says that her daughter may be right about this, and adds that Concubina "exudes more respect for me when I am wearing a dress." Be that as it may, the girl knows that Mummy is always a witch, no matter what she is wearing. The whole experience is a lesson to Meghan why Americans restrict the sizes of their families: it's so they won't have to waste their lives reading stupid books to stupid kids. The Cox Kids  Back row (l-r): Edsel, Jether, Hugobert. Front: Twyla Lou, Cornucopia, Saliva. 8:28:59 AM  |
This Week's World O'Crap Bookclub Selection The Pandagon post about the Left Behind Series suggested our next bookclub selection. No, it's not the latest in that series (Left Behind 21: The Number of the Beast's Best Friend), but the first volume in a NEW series by the non-writer half of the Left Behind duo:  Babylon Risingby Greg Dinallo (Author), Tim Lahaye (Author)
Wow! This Michael Murphy sounds like quite a guy! Let's hear more about him, from the BABYLON RISING site:
The website also contains a long excerpt from the book --which, contrary to standard Wo'C procedure, I am recommending that you read, if you ever find a copy in the dumpster or something. You have to love dialogue and descriptions like these:
And if THAT didn't make you want to read it, here are a couple of Amazon Customer reviews:
Okay, so most of the reviewers (even the Left Behind fans) didn't like it, citing the book's unrealistically perfect hero, implausible plot, didaticism, and generally poor writing, but that's why we recommend it (if you can get a copy for free). After all, per the webpage, this book has got:
Murphy cuts down some tent peg thingees with a pocket knife, and thus defeats a lion (all while complying with ASPCA standards).
If it's the one about the graven image with a head of gold, a chest of silver, a stomach of brass, legs of iron, and feet of clay, Daniel already revealed it. It's in the Bible and everything!
Yes, Murphy's feisty but properly-submissive Christian wife dies. But fortunately, he quickly finds a spunky new women to wow with his Biblical insights. ( I learned that from the Amazon customer reviews.)
And they're SECULARISTS! And you know what they're like!
As the webpage informs us, the NY Daily News calls our protagonist, "Cool, brainy, sexy and valiant... a Boy Scout turned Indiana Jones." So, sounds like a must read. If you love kitsch as much as I do. Again, don't take my word for it, believe this postcard that I am supposed to send to you from the book's webpage:
Oh, the only prizes you could win are copies of the book, so I think you'd do better to just check the dumpsters. 7:41:33 AM |
Verrry Interesting, But Stupid II There's always fodder for this popular feature! (And by "popular," I mean that I like it.) Lets see what's new for today! 1. Well, in a press release about an upcoming "Elevate Conference" for "the 20-30 something generation," here's what Jerry Falwell had to say about the scheduled speaker:
Eww, Liberty Univerity is cloning Sean Hannities! That's very interesting, but really scary! 2. And speaking of Liberty University and cloning, what's our young friend Judson "Cloned Pandas of Mass Destruction" up to? Well, working at Walmart, apparently. He complains about having to get up earlier than he wants, drive a car he can "barely afford gas for" to a job where he has to stand for hours on concrete floors, stock shelves, run a cash register, and do "a hundred other mind numbing tasks." And then he returns home to a house he can't really afford. Hey, welcome to the real world, Free Market boy! But Judson's real gripe isn't with the economy, or with a system which doesn't do enough to look out for workers. No, it's with President Bush's plan to increase funding to the NEA, which will make rich people have to pay more taxes. Judson says:
Um, Judson, out of a $2.4 TRILLION budget (which doesn't include keeping the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq next year, which is expected to add about $50 BILLION to the debit side of the ledger), Bush proposes increasing the NEA budget by $18 million. We have a deficit which is expected to reach $521 BILLION this year. We are currently borrowing $1.5 BILLION a day to run the government. In order to reduce the deficit, we need to cut back on spending (or eliminate Bush's tax cuts). So, maybe doing away with that $18 million NEA increase makes sense. But in the scheme of things, it would only cut those rich guys' taxes by, oh, let's say $20 each (since I don't know the real figures). Do you really think they're going to say, "Hey, I saved $20 in taxes this year because Bush canceled that plan to increase funding to the NEA! To celebrate, let's get together with all the other Walmart stockholders and vote to give Judson Cox a raise!" Anyway, an interesting idea. But naive. And, you know, stupid. 3. And speaking of stupid, Ann Coulter, who got lots of attention lack week for calling John Kerry a gigolo, does it a bunch more times this week. She's like a kid who learned a new dirty word, and says it over and over, in an effort to get attention. But then she gets back to her favorite trope: the Democrats (liberals) are all America-hating traitors.
There is "indisputably nothing cooler" than wartime military service??? I'd say that such service is a lot of things (brave, heroic, life-altering, deadly, etc.), but "cool" wouldn't be one of them. While Ann is looking quite gaunt, haggard, and plague-ridden lately (and that's nothing to what her heart and brain must look like), I'd image that there is SOMETHING she's fit to do in Iraq. Maybe cleaning latrines or looking for land mines. Why doesn't the "woman" sign up, and gain some coolness? 4. Brent Bozell's latest TownHall column is about stupid liberals who hate Fox News, which is, as everybody knows, "fairer and closer to the American center than any of the liberal outlets." So how DARE Geneva Overholser, "a whining liberal windbag if there ever was one" object to the National Press Foundation giving an award to Britt "Craggy Face" Hume? Anyway, Brent's ideas are stupid, but rarely interesting, but if you take this sentence fragment out of context, he almost seems like he's making sense:
5. And let's finish up with old young conservative Jan Ireland, whose latest piece is about how liberals hate the Pledge of Allegiance because it points out that America is a republic, not a democracy, and the libs want to get rid of the electoral college so Al Gore would have won in 2000 (even though HIS majority win was through ballot fraud). But if we ever to go to a direct democracy, it sets us up for "Invasion USA" (both the '50s classic and the Chuck Norris version).
It would be the perfect crime! 300,000,000 Middle Eastern Terrorists secretly slip over (or under) the Canadian and Mexican borders on election day, and vote for Islamic fundamentalist law (Proposition 12). And only our electors prevent that from happening! Yes, verrry interesting. Reallly stupid. 5:24:39 AM |
Follow the Money From Instapundit: Yup, if there really WAS a crime committed and Glenn didn't take it seriously before, it was all Joseph Wilson's fault for being a Democrat. And if Glenn never believed me when I said that Scooter was the felon, that's Valerie Plame's fault for being too covert for Scooter to know about -- but if he did know about her, then it proves she wasn't covert at all, and therefore the affair is as bogus as Wilson made it seem. And the whole thing never could have happened, because the leakers would have to be really vindictive and/or really stupid, and people like that just don't exist. Anyway, in light of this new report that the FBI has evidence that Scooter Libby and John Hannah are the Senior Administration Officials who provided Valerie Plame's name to Novak (and also in light of the White House push to blame the CIA for brainwashing a naive and trusting President into believing that Saddam was a grave threat to US security, and therefore inveigling us in a bogus war), let me share with you a few paragraphs from a November 2003 The New Republic piece by Franklin Foer & Spencer Ackerman (emphisis mine):
With this background, the leak is perfectly understandable. Cheney sets up his office as a kind of rival National Security Council. When he doesn't get the info he likes from the intelligence community, he gathers his own intelligence from Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles, and has his untrained staff analyze it. And hey, it means that Saddam and his al Qaeda buddies have atomic weapons! He tries to get the CIA to confirm this, but the Nonproliferation Center won't. Cheney asks them to investigate the Italian report that somebody who knows somebody in Iraq said that Saddam tried to buy yellowcake in Niger. The Nonproliferation Center says they already checked on that rumor, and it's bogus. Cheney says, "Check it again." So, Alan Foley asks Joseph Wilson to fly to Niger and ask his contacts in industry if this report could be true. He does, says it's not, the CIA reports this back to Cheney's office, and the CIA thinks that's the end of that. But Cheney and his boys Scooter and Hannah continue to hate the CIA (and its Nonproliferation Center) with the hatred that burns like a white hot sun -- those damned analysts with their PhD.s and their years of training and stuff, and how they think THEY'RE so smart. Then somehow, through nobody's fault, those "seven words" about Saddam seeking African uranium magically appear in the State of the Union address, and are publicly disputed by Joseph Wilson. He's calling the VP's office liars! For Scooter and Hannah, this was like a slap in the face! So, Hannah tells Novak (and a bunch of other reporters) that Wilson only went to Niger because his wifey, Valerie Plame, got him the gig, and so you shouldn't believe anything that Wilson, the CIA, or anybody not in the White House says, 'cause they're all jerks! And liars! It makes sense that Hannah and Scooter would have known that Plame was a CIA officer -- they probably met her on one of their visits to the Nonproliferation Center. And somebody (maybe even Alan Foley) told them that her husband was Joseph Wilson; it would have been assumed that Senior Administration Officials could be trusted with information like that. As to whether Hannah and Scooter would have known that Plame was under cover, if they met her in their official capacity, they would have. They may even have known that she had experience gathering weapons-related information in the field, and therefore should have known that her cover was not just for fun. While they probably didn't stop and think why it would be bad (as in, causing harm to national security) to blow her cover, "realizing the ramifications of disclosing a covert agent's identity to a non-authorized source" isn't a an element of the crime. Consider, for instance, the case of Sharon Scranage, a gullible, young CIA secretary who told a boyfriend (who turned out to a foreign intelligence officer) the names of some CIA station people. She went to jail for 3-5 years. Do we expect more of our government secretaries than we do of our Senior Administration Officials? Sure we do, but SHOULD we? But perhaps Scooter and Hannah can try the stupidity defense at trial. Well, actually, I'll bet you five bucks that this never goes to trial; I predict that Hannah will shoulder most of the blame, and will be allowed to resign, and pay a small fine. Scooter will get a reprimand in his permanent record. Anyway, as Glenn says, stay tuned -- I'm sure Glenn will offer more legal considerations about the case in the coming days. 2:02:03 AM |
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