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mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 - 10:52 am: | |
These are David Byrne's bitter comments on Spitzer:
"New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was referred to as client number nine in the prostitution sting this week. Assignations run around $4,500 for the top gals in this house, so I ask myself: why haven’t we been provided the names of clients one through eight? It goes without saying that all are wealthy men, and there are probably a few other politicians among them. The prostitution ring — the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. — was under federal wiretap, so they MUST know the identities of the others. There are probably a lot more than nine clients too, eh, so why have their identities not been released? Though they vigorously deny it, it sure smells like a Republican setup. Alberto Gonzales was Attorney General at the time this investigation was begun — he who fired a whole slew of high level federal judges because they wouldn’t kiss Bush’s ass. It’s just the sort of thing he would do, with the quiet urging of Carl Rove or Dick Cheney. The dirty trickster Roger Stone — whose work goes back to Nixon days — has been after Spitzer for some years. He was behind a threatening phone call to Bernard Spitzer, Eliot’s father, regarding campaign contributions to his son’s election campaign for attorney general in 1994. Here is part of the voice message he left: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.” Stone was being paid by a group of Republicans to bring down Spitzer, and now he may have succeeded. (He was also involved in orchestrating protests against the Florida vote recount, the debacle that allowed George Bush to become president.)"
Now it seems to me that Byrne is overlooking something, namely that the Republican was, is, right, correct, however nasty he may seem in himself he is factually accurate in his predictions about Spitzer. Spitzer was a hypocrite, and spent what looks like tens of thousands of dollars on prostitutes.
We are in a game of good and evil. But should it be taken at face value? Is it all about good and evil? Right and wrong? Or something else?
Do bona fide Angels exist and should they take over the planet? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 - 11:47 am: | |
Another thing that I find off colour in Byrne's words here is his use of "gals". Using "gals" is like using "folk" to talk about people. Folk are harmless individuals, getting on with their lives, just interested in sensible things. Nature's inheritors. Same with "gals". The use of the word "gal" is a term of neutral endearment, similarly: gals are just folk getting on with their lives. Doing nothing *really* wrong, even if they are occasionally a bit troublesome. A gal isn't a woman; isn't actually a human being in the objective sense that a human being is capable of doing or being as aberrational as the behaviour of human beings in actual human history. Makes one wonder if Mr Byrne is a regular user of "gals". |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 - 2:58 pm: | |
Everyone thinks they are Mr Good Guy.
Everyone is in the same self-delusional state.
Like someone on a mobile phone in a full silent train carriage: he - she - thinks everyone else is lapping up their every word, whereas in fact we are all clutching our stomachs and filled with nausea.
Did I say everyone? Say some people. Only. Only some people. Some people make sense; some people don't make sense. It doesn't matter which way you hold up the facts no sense is made by them. You turn sommersaults mentally trying to imagine what the hell they are thinking but it is impossible. No, it makes absolutely no bloody sense whatsoever. Statement A does not correspond to Fact B whichever way you look at it. So what is to be done? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 - 3:43 pm: | |
Is this Hell, that to be unaware of the living presence of anything is to be unaware of death?
A kind of hollowed out square. The square was once open to the sky - it still is - but four walls have obliterated the horizon. What are they, four buildings? Have they four doors?
Lateral awareness, lateral extent, the granular lost in the colour of planar for that is just a symmetry count them one two three four.
That is all there is. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 - 4:17 pm: | |
I have just noticed the Independent uses the exact same heading as I do today to look back at who was who in the Iraq debacle. Basically, for me the last 5 or so years have been the most unsatisfactory politically that I have ever experienced. A neverending litany of stupidity; I really don't see anything to solve it either. Brown is better than Blair but just as yellow is lighter than Black. It is just a matter of degree; it is still a government by stupidity.
Really though, I don't think that there is anyone who can crack that particular code. Stupidity is what we have had and stupidity is what we will get; it will just be matters of degree. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 20, 2008 - 10:54 am: | |
If you look at Bush's speech about an American victory in Iraq yesterday, it becomes clear that his idea is that if you have an enemy that enemy has to be attacked before he attacks you; you have to take the war to him. Iraq may have had the largest secular middle class in the Middle East and it may have had nothing to do with al Qaida, Osama Bin Laden or weapons of mass destruction, but it was a place he could attack for a cluster of reasons that - well - couldn't be clarified enough ever to see that they could make sense - or not. It was (if you like) informationally foggy enough while being conveniently geographically located. Very very odd. An attackable 'enemy' is the first requirement regardless of whether or not such an enemy exists. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 20, 2008 - 11:14 am: | |
A neat justification for any war at all! Once someone's been attacked, they become your enemy - and because they're an enemy, you were right (and in fact very perceptive) to attack them in the first place. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 20, 2008 - 11:16 am: | |
>"Attackable enemy ..."
One obscene irony of the Iraq invasion is that many more states are increasingly eager to get their own nuclear deterrent, as a safeguard against future western military action. Bush still seems to believe in "exporting" democracy as a free market function: in fact, he's simply making us all investors in global instability. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 20, 2008 - 12:31 pm: | |
Among the many ironies of the currently relatively peaceful state of Iraq is that it is dependent on the 'Awakening', so called: the Sunnis have thrown in their lot with the Americans because otherwise they would have to side with al Qaida, who are not interested in them: but on the contrary bent on their destruction. So the Americans find themselves financing people logically identical with the inmates of Guantanamo Bay, the Insurgents, but here actually employing them rather than torturing them and so even patting them on the back in the process: feting them as heroes, 'concerned citizens'. |
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