Limited, Inc.

Iraq, I rack 'em up and I roll, I'm back and I'm a hi-tech GI Joe. I pray for peace, prepare for war and I never will forget ~ there's no price too high for freedom so be careful where you tread. – Clint Black. LI is sickly fascinated by the sixth Bush budget. Six years in a row of what some muckety muck’s might call pathological lyin’ by our Rebel in Chief ©, not bein’ as well trained as he is in the big picture. Although there is no price too high for freedom, we have not been putting that exactly square in the budget for the past three years. Our bold Rebel in Chief ©. learned, in the secret years of his training as one of America’s great guerilla warrior (after the big one himself, Sylvester Stallone) to clothe boldness with discretion – hence the song of the supplemental that has tripped shyly through congress, year after year. Our Rebel in Chief ©. has grown so enamored of fictitious numbers that he could market his budget as a his own personal memoir. Part

Some days, you read the papers and you think, surely this dirty regime is about to fall. Item: Vice President Cheney directed his assistant, Scooter Libby, to leak what seems to be classified information. Item: The CIA officer who coordinated intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the Bush vanity project says that the administration cherry picked the intelligence to make its case. Item: Bush’s news conference comment that he not only did not know Abramoff, but thought for a long time that he was a brand name of cleaner, like Easy-off, is contradicted by Abramoff’s own memory of good times with George. Item: old news, but again, the Crawford ranch White House was quite aware that NOLA was drowning as it was drowning. Panicked, Bush went to the West Coast and played a little back stage guitar. Item: even Republicans agree that this year’s White House Budget has as much chance of being realized as the Aristocrats has of being named the 700 Club Movie of the Year. But the machine keeps g

As the Muhammed-as-Snuffy-Smith controversy continues, it is interesting to watch the politics become a veritable machine to produce idiocy. I suspect that there is some mystical law that governs these things. But, one wonders, what is this law? Is it something in the nature of opposition itself, some diabolical dialectical germ that is slipped into that moment in the discourse which ends up producing those magnificent retards, the left and the right, the point and the counterpoint, the defenders of civil liberties (with exceptions) and the defenders of the oppressed (no matter what they do)? If this is so, it would subvert my idea of progress, the good society, the goals of art, the use and purpose of philosophy, the true, the beautiful and the just. It would make my life a mockery and the minimum life style I’ve chosen the door prize of the lowest order of sap. It would make my words no more rational than the foaming of a poisoned rat. … Well, at least it would be all about me. Ther

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff from Die Zeit penned an op ed in the WAPO about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Muhammed. His account of how this began doesn’t, actually, make much sense: “It's worth remembering that the controversy started out as a well-meaning attempt to write a children's book about the life of the prophet Muhammad. The book was designed to promote religious tolerance. But the author encountered the consequences of religious hatred when he looked for an illustrator. He could not find one. Denmark's artists seemed to fear for their lives. In turning down the job they mentioned the fate of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist for harshly criticizing fundamentalism. When this episode percolated to the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the paper's cultural editor commissioned the caricatures. He wanted to see whether cartoonists would self-censor their work for fear of violence from Muslim radicals.” How, pray tell, do you write a bo

Yes – LI was hasty, yesterday, roundly condemning this administration. Today, we have to eat our words, because the Bush administration released a budget that is obviously a highly literate satire, on the order of Dead Souls or A Modest Proposal. Just as we were attacking Bush for boldness, he comes up with this truly postmodern classic, which can be enjoyed by the whole family. There is, for instance, the halving of the deficit, which is achieved by pretending hundreds of billions of dollars just aren’t being spent. This in itself is a terrific satiric swipe at Enron’s accounting methods, which, by being adopted wholesale by the government, are exposed in all their ridiculousness. Then there is the 6 percent increase for the military and the 3 percent decrease for education. Let’s see, the six percent raise is, what – 10 million per terrorist? 30? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter anyway, as we all know that the war on terrorism is a wink wink job. The real battle is to get as much

This is a waste of time, another useless political fantasia. But what the hell. We look like we are going to plunge into a prolonged contest in all venues between the Dems defending our civil liberties (meaning that they want to pass laws to take them away before the president does it unilaterally) and the Republicans defending our national security (can you look into the video camera, Osama? What’s the message for America again?) Forgive me, I need some release. The President’s newest and funniest defense of the NSA wiretappings is this: if we had had those wiretappings before 9/11, everything would have been different. Now why doesn’t a Dem, one Dem, one little Dem, ask: how would things have been different? Would Bush have pressed the FBI? Directed the secretary of transportation to contact the airports? Done the type of things that, say, you do when you are warned that a terrorist attack is imminent? Gee. It turns out that we were warned – or at least Bush was – that the chance was