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Peter Beinart Nude Model Dear LI As you probably know, the most exciting story of the upcoming 2008 presidential campaign is the extraordinary synergy between science and muscular liberalism that has actually cloned a candidate from one of Joseph Lieberman’s cells crossed with one of Harry Truman’s. The candidate, Harry Truberman, will, I think, be challenging voters with his exciting new policies any day now, as soon as our assistants teach him English. But with the upside comes the downside. Yes, the Truberman campaign did hire me to create an exciting blog for a truly spectacular candidate (also, they are programming some math and geography into his, at present, prone and unconscious bio-structure). This was great news, until the minions of reaction got ahold of it, as in this ABC story, ‘ Truberman stumbles on the Net’. The money shot graf, as it were, is this one: “The drama began when it became known that the Truberman campaign had hired Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Re

- Do you know how to twist? Well it goes like this… The buffoon and the ass keep turning up together, as though the deck of achetypes that lies, face down, under my electric prestidigitator’s fingers were a crooked pack. According to Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradion, Apuleius, the author of the Golden Ass (that book of transmutations through which the transcendentally ludicrous is finally given shape and form by Psyche’s quest for Cupid) was, by the fourth century A.D., credited with the translation of the corpus of Hermes Trismegistus. These were the books that were supposedly written before Moses was a pup, and they were wildly popular in the Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici hired Ficino to translate the Greek Corpus Hermeticum in 1462, as the manuscript containing it had turned up by way of a traveling monk, Leonardo da Pistoia - instructing him to interrupt the Plato translation project, as the Corpus Hermeticum was urgent. Cosimo wanted to read the thing befor

Back in the day, fascists were loud and proud. They formed parties that called themselves fascist. They enthused about Mussolini, and Hitler. They enthused about their own leaders, who they usually called “leader” – in Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Latvian, upper class English or what have you. They had a trade mark, of sorts, on a brand – fascism. Now, of course, fascism has become an open source kind of thing. Sure, there is a party that calls itself fascist in Italy, but that is the little toe of fascism nowadays. Fascism has become an honorific bestowed by others. You have Islamofascism (or the new variety, Sunni fascism, coined by that facisto-brander extraordinaire, Chris Hitchens), you have Christian fascism, you have Bush as a fascist and Osama as a fascist and my Uncle Dick as a fascist and Donald Duck as one too. Oddly, as the brand has exploded, it has also become a secret vice, like eating clay is in certain counties in the Southern U.S.A. Nobody wants to be a loud and prou

Congratulations to Mistah Scruggs, who is to the squirrels of this era what Davy Crockett was to the bears of his, on the announcement of his upcoming marriage . I am a little worried about the impact of this marriage on the Scruggs+Limitedinc+Gulf and Western high end adult entertainment business. I hope the bride to be understands that we are only in the business of creating quality cinema for muscular liberals (with your favorite stars, like Peter Beinart, Nude Model) because, well, because WE CARE.

This blog does try to take our far flung correspondent T.’s advice about leaving dead horses unpummeled – but sometimes, Christopher Hitchens provides such an irresistible target that we can’t, we just can’t. Forgive me, Mr. T! Anyway, this is just to note that the pluminess, pomposity and egotism with which the man’s mind is furnished is busy producing a form of prose that sounds exactly like the parody of the English celeb journalist i n this video by IT’s friend, Jeremy Mcclintock This comes from his latest article in Slate, entitled, Don’t Blame me, blame the evil Islamofascists against which I struggle like a veritable Hercules: “The only way of preventing this triumph of the democratic heresy, wrote Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was to make life so unbearable for the heretical Shiites that they would respond in kind. The ensuing conflict would ruin all the plans of the Crusader-Zionist alliance. I can still remember the chill that went through me when I read this document and realized th

Lately, LI has contracted the bad habit of picking up and dropping threads. Like Roger Rabbit blithely hopping down the path of Needles, this kind of thing can lead to no good end. Although it might not seem like it to the reader, LI likes to think of this blog as our own, our.. our Fors Clavigera , our Cantos, our Maximus poems, our Collected Looney Tunes, vol. 2, 1941-1948. We are in hot pursuit of a central but always somehow eluded pattern here, fellas. Our threads – the Giants, Asinine philosophy, the Infinite Earth, Anima Mundi, and especially, via Michelet, the Witch’s path of negation (or is it a train of powder, already lit? the path you can’t go back down, honey) – actually and obscurely point to each other, with the political posts crudely breaking in upon the flow, a Robert Wilson-like chorus of pyromaniacs and junkies equipped with a barbaric yawp lined with newspaper. Ah, and you thought you were simply reading the heebee jeebees of a logomaniac, eh? Well, lets set ou

LI shouldn’t post on Rev. Ted Haggard, the ideal no sex man . LI should have some shame. On the other hand, the American knock-em-up spares no man, never has, puts six bullets in its six shooter and uses em all, breaks broncos and banks and babes, busted prairie ground for suckers, moves with a sublime unsense of its own ridiculousness to ever greener pastures through ever more trivial valleys of the shadow of death, recycles himself for the second, third, and 1+n acts, and is that meaty breadwinner, Rabbit and Proteus, Elmer Gantry and Coyote, met in one. This is from the Denver Post: Haggard, 50, resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and was fired from the church he built from nothing into a 14,000-member congregation after a former male prostitute in Denver alleged a three-year cash-for-sex relationship. Haggard admitted to "sexual immorality" and a long battle against feelings contrary to his beliefs. He admitted buying methamphetamine but sai

This lead graf to the story reporting on Proconsul Bremer’s upcoming testimony before a House committee contains some good material: “The last time L. Paul Bremer testified before Congress, he was lauded as an American hero. Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) congratulated Bremer, who was leading the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, for a "tremendous success." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) commended his "energy and focus." Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) praised his "brilliant analysis."” Interesting what you can find going through the old quotes. This is from a Washington Post editorial (probably a Fred Hiatt editorial) from August 17, 2003, about Iraq: The reality is more mixed. Certainly the U.S. effort is greater than some critics suggest, and the results are less gloomy than you might imagine from the inevitable daily attention to the latest problem. Some of the worst scenarios, widely foretold before the war, have not played out; there have been few

In Jean Claude Beaune’s Philosophy of technique: matter, instrument, automat, he has an interesting passage on a conference talk given by Gaston Bachelard in 1939. The talk was called Universe and reality, and was sprinkled with odd remarks. For instance, Bachelard said” L’univers est l’infini de mon inattention… L’univers est mon repos, l’univers est ma paresse. Ce n’est jamais ma pensee.” “Bachelard posed as someone so naïve as to press on the limits of frivolity: “I have never reflected on the idea of the universe” (before the occasion furnished by the Lyon society of philosophy) and related cosmological preoccupations solely to the trivial inquietudes of a graduate student. He defined himself as a tetrological specimen – without any doubt, a unique one – “of a philosopher who has lost his world.” As Beaune says, we are a long way here from the Pascalian trembling before the infinite. Again, Bachelard says that “the idea of the universe presents itself as the antithesis of the obje

I’ve only been in one real barfight. That was back in New Orleans days, and it wasn’t as fun as the fight in Hedwig and the Angry Inch . Unfortunately, it was faster, windows broke, my buddy made like a rabbit for the hills, which left me rather alone, and the cops came. The fight in HAI was started by the cry, ‘faggot’, which is the only similarity to that far off Plum Street brawl – apparently the bar I was in had strict rules on the display of male affection. Who knew? Well, this week some blogs I go to and bloggers I like have been piling onto each other. It started with a thread at the Weblog, and ended, as usual, in tears, bannings, and complaints about personal threats. To me, the fun here is puzzling. It is sorta like a mosh pit without any music. Now, myself, when I am gray and crooked, I intend to bore grandnieces and nephews with the story of how old LI leaped into that mosh pit at the Nirvana concert (and, I should interject here before my friend D. leaps in here to make a