John Kerry didn't seem to be in the greatest mood. Wonder why.

Posted by: Attila at 01:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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. . . really hates this shit. I think that to him the public part of his job is the most burdensome. He's like a mirror-image of the average VP: he is an actual advisor and helper to the President, but he dispises the ceremonial aspect of his job.

He's not just the classic VP who sits around and waits for the President to die.

Posted by: Attila at 01:46 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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. . . that the boy has learned to speak in public. He kept that smirk on a short leash, and almost never stumbled over his words.

And he dug it when people yelled "no" while he made assertions about Social Security; he couldn't hide that. He likes conflict. He enjoys this process because he's pretty sure he's going to win the fight.

For an illiterate business major, he has big brass balls; they've got to clank when he walks.

And if you have any sympathy for his goals, it's hard not to like him.

Okay. I'm going to forgive the O'Shaughnessy incident. Let's never speak of it again.

Posted by: Attila at 01:41 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I mean, this is what you get when you vote a business major in as President of the United States. Mangled references from famous poems.

I'm all better now, really.

Where the fuck, by the way, were his speechwriters? Did none of them major in English?

Where were the fact-checkers? Drunk again?

Anyone in the West Wing have a bookcase in their office?

I'll be fine, though, really.

Posted by: Attila at 01:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Ode

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man, with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

—Arthur O'Shaughnessy
(who was not Franklin Roosevelt at any time)

I guess it's too late to take my vote back, huh?

Posted by: Attila at 01:16 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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. . . has filed another report.

No word yet on whether he's actually read Blog! yet.

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. . . of Condi over at Cassandra's place.

Don't miss this one. Our future CIC so rarely loses her temper that it's nice to see her in a "take no shit" mood.

No one has ever laid a glove on that woman. Not at the 9/11 Commission hearings, not during the confirmation hearings. Not ever.

Posted by: Attila at 02:21 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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. . . has the best side-by-side comparison of the "captured American" with the Cody action figure doll that was used to create it.

Quinton has the best roundup.

Apparently, the whole affair is already on Snopes, but the UK's Guardian is still cluelessly running the story about our guy held hostage by the jihadis.

The weird thing is that the MSM went with this. Don't they have people who can look at a picture and gauge its general authenticity? This is reminiscent of the RatherGate memo affair, in that there are a lot of details that are wrong, but beyond that the whole look is wrong: if nothing else, the head and the body are out of proportion to each other, and the face looks distorted, not quite human. (Just as there were dozens of problems with the RatherGate memos, but they were simply bogus as first glance: typed documents from the 1970s look different than MS Word documents from the 1990s/2000s, and these papers were clearly computer-generated. I would have found that whole affair forgiveable if the memos had been created using Courier, or some other typewriter-simulation font. But they were not.)

The only available conclusion: the MSM is, as a group, less intelligent than my old hiking boots.

My only question: did those who created this image make a tiny little banner to go behind Cody, or was that photoshopped in later?

Fortunately, in this case if the Islamofascists take his head off, it can be popped right back into place. I love happy endings.

UPDATE: Scrappleface tells the heroic story of how the doll hostage was rescued.

Posted by: Attila at 10:22 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Within a few days. Pretty good, for a small-time blog.

And my traffic is up again, which probably means that I need to keep you guys entertained.

"Honey, would you feed the blog?" (Nope. It don't work like that.)

Posted by: Attila at 09:24 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Govindini Murty has an interesting post up about the paucity of good roles for women in the current incarnation of Hollywood. For those who don't know, Murty and her husband, Jason Apuzzo, are the movers and shakers behind the Liberty Film Festival, last October's celebration of conservative and libertarian cinema. The event was an enormous success, and Murty/Apuzzo have now started a blog that will discuss film and "the industry" from a conservative point of view.

This issue of roles for female actors is one that Murty discussed at the flim festival itself, and I remember having mixed emotions about her central thesis: that there is something intrinsically degrading about a woman taking her clothes off, or having to utter four-letter words—probably due to the fact that I take my clothes off and utter four-letter words every day. Of course, Murty is a real conservative, and I'm a libertarian warblogger. (And in the wake of Bush's electoral victory and the elections in Iraq, we will see debate heat up between the two wings of the GOP that we represent; this is as it should be. No problem, as long as we are all respectful.)

The larger point, of course, is dead-on: good roles for women are becoming rare, particularly for an actress who doesn't care to engage in gratuitous sexual scenes. And the "interesting" roles are very often only so because they run completely perpendicular to the traditional values of this country: certainly there's a huge market out there for stories about women that are life-affirming, and that reflect the variety of human experience.

Would I call the current situation "misogynistic"? Probably not. But there's a huge market segment that's being underserved: it's possible to make stories about strong women that do not have to be ghetto-ized into "chick flick" status. To take an extreme example, Alien and Aliens were very successful in showing a strong woman character without fundamentally denying Ripley's femininity: in Aliens, her entire motivation for needing to destroy the mother-alien reflects her role as a surrogate mother to the child Newt and a desire to protect the families in the colony. She fights fiercely precisely because she is a woman.

No one wants to take women back to the June Cleaver model, but there is a wide world out there between the stereotypical notions we have of traditional women's passivity and the types of images we are getting now (outside of some very creative movies for children that we should be thankful for). There are stories to be told that a lot of people would like to see: some of them even live on the coasts!

Time to explore, boys and girls: there's money to be made.

Posted by: Attila at 09:10 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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. . . . explains how the Iraqi elections prove he's always been right about everything. (Note to self: must speak to his siblings regarding this assertion.)

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. . . what Michael Moore was going to tackle next, there is the tantalizing possibility that it's the Blogosphere. I don't have the impression that he knows the lay of the land, or that he has any idea what he's up against.

So it would be really fun to watch, if indeed that were his plan. Sadly, I have my doubts.

Posted by: Attila at 12:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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. . . and Why We Write.

Mike at Cold Fury sums up the case for the war in Iraq. He doesn't baby the opposition, though: if you're one of my lefty readers, you'll have to be in the mood for something bracing if you go there.

Hat tip: Andrea Harris, who is always bracing.

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Don Danz tells the story of Sgt. Rafael Peralta of the USMC, who was mortally wounded in the fight over Fallujah, yet managed in one last heroic act to save four other nearby Marines.

In compiling photos of Sgt. Peralta from his personal life, Don underscores the significance of this fine young man's actions. He was a credit to the Corps.

If you are a Catholic—or belong to another sect that remembers the dead in a special way—say a prayer for him.

If you aren't, do it anyway. And tell me how it feels.

Posted by: Attila at 08:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A graven image is a graven image, man. Pull yourself together.

And stop eating that bacon, or at least substitute turkey bacon, which might even be healthier.

Posted by: Attila at 01:15 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Of course, the very best one is over at Treacher's place. I even saw that same pic in its original habitat, but somehow wasn't able to copy it onto my hard drive; very annoying. (I guess I could steal it from Treacher, but that would be wraaaawng.)

The point is, we deserve lovely images about this pivotal moment in middle-eastern history. One we helped bring about. Cherish them.

Posted by: Attila at 01:00 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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