THE WRATH OF ABE LINCOLNHey folks. I haven't written since the war began. I spent the first week protesting and the weeks since banging my head against a wall hoping if I do it hard enough my country will come back. I mean can you fucking believe that shit on the USS Abraham Lincoln? Bush, renowned draft dodger and AWOL weekend warrior, dresses up like a soldier and lands in a fucking jet so he'll seem like "one of them" on TV. It was just like that celebrity stunt show where Vanilla Ice jumped a motorcycle, except this one is being paid for by our tax dollars. They said Bush had to go in a military jet because the carrier was too far at sea for a helicopter. But the next day they admitted that actually the helicopter would've worked better, and that they had had to slow down the ship and change its course to get a camera angle where you only saw water in the background, not the nearby San Diego coastline. The carrier had already been emptied of fighter jets but the White House requested they keep one of them there so it could be in the background during the speech. I know all presidents are phoneys but has there ever been one more phoney? The only thing that could've made the whole thing worthwhile would be if that famous Washington DC statue of Abraham Lincoln had come to life Dai Majin style, risen out of the water and started banging Bush over the head with his chair.
Anyway I apologize if this column seems even more rambling than usual. I've been working on it for a while but there are so many outrages every day that I had to keep updating and adding and deleting. But here it is.
POST-JOURNALISM
I mean what can you even say at this point? Or worse, what can you not say? As soon as you start complaining, you realize there is no convenient place to stop.
I can't help but feel like we left the door unlocked and some fuck came in and stole our democracy while we were out getting beer. It's not just that the guy got into office by getting his brother and his dad's friends on the Supreme Court to stop the votes from being counted. It's also everything the fucker has done since then. He is constantly showing a profound disrespect for democracy. I was just reading about him hanging out with John Howard and saying, "He was steady under fire. He stood his ground when he needed to stand his ground because he understands the difference between right and wrong."
In other words, Howard stood his ground against the overwhelming opinion, er I mean focus group, of his people. It is the same across the board: the "new Europe" countries that Bush and friends have praised are countries where the government supported the war despite overwhelming public opinion against it. Meanwhile Bush and his asslicking toadie bitches (er, republicans) actually want to PUNISH France and Germany for not supporting the war, which would have meant overruling the overwhelming sentiment of their citizens.
It's not only regime change that begins at home, it's democracy too. But I guess they're not really even talking about democracy in Iraq anymore. They're starting to realize that maybe their Iraqi National Congress informants were wrong, and the entire rest of the world was right, that giving Iraqis the government they want means giving them an Islamic government. All the sudden it's, "whoops, did we say, no, we didn't say DEMOCRACY did we? No, we just said freedom, I believe. Not like in France but like in, you know, everybody loves freedom and how awesome it is and everything. I have to go hide in the oil ministry now, see ya."
I think the scariest thing about it all is the way the news channels just decided to give up journalism and become propaganda ministries. How do they even do it? I understand that it's in the network's best interest to kiss ass - some of them are owned by corporations that manufacture weapons, all of them want Colin Powell's son to give them favorable deals when the FCC deregulates media ownership even more (vote on June 2nd). But that's not enough to explain it. It's still technically a free press. These people are still technically human beings, presumably with beating hearts, so I don't understand how they let themselves go on TV and do this. How do you work in a profession that seems to no longer exist?
I didn't really think I could become more angry at what's going on in my country but it happened a week or two back when I first read that American troops had shot and killed unarmed Iraqi protesters. It only came from one source, the AFP (American Foreign Press?) but it looked legit.
I watched CNN, MSNBC, even as much FOX as I could stomach. No mention, not even on the scroll. I talked to other people about it, nobody had heard about it. If this had really happened it would be pretty huge. We supposedly went there to liberate these people, now they're asking us to leave and we're killing them for it. The sad thing is I've seen how riot police treat american citizens at protests, so I can easily imagine that 20 year old kids trapped in a foreign land, surrounded by a culture they don't understand telling them angrily to get the fuck out of their land... it's easy to imagine those kids would shoot into the crowd. Sorry, "support the troops", go USA etc. but it's not as surprising as it is disgusting.
Still, it's a pretty horrible turning point in this war, a Kent State type incident. Even if you really believed the Iraqis loved the Americans being there you might start to think, wait a minute, is it going to stay that way after this?
Well by now it's night and I've known about this since the morning and I'm thinking you assholes, how come I know about this and you're the fucking journalists? They showed a clip from Ari Fleischer's briefing that day where they asked him about the Anti-American protests. If the Iraqis are so happy that we liberated the shit out of them and their homeland, then why are they now protesting our presence there? Fleischer, using his trademark "I dare you to punch me in the balls like I deserve" smarm, said something to the effect that "today will be remembered as the day Iraqis took to the street to protest and were not shot for it."
Except, of course, they had been shot for it, and if Vern in Seattle, Washington knew that then you better fucking believe White House press secretary Ari Fleishcer knew too. But he still had the balls to say that. At this point even I'm thinking you know, these guys wouldn't be THAT obvious. And it was only that one source, and nobody else has verified it. It must've been made up. I went to bed feeling better about the world.
But of course the next day I found more stories with more details. Some said the protests were started by an American flag being raised on an Iraqi government building. Whatever happened, Centcom admitted that American soldiers had shot Iraqi citizens. In their version, "schoolboys with AK-47s" had fired on the troops, which was why it was okay and not a big deal to FIRE MACHINE GUNS INTO A CROWD OF UNARMED PROTESTERS.
I turned on CNN, and it wasn't the top story but eventually they did have a report from Mosul. The weird thing was, they didn't explain what happened. They just said there was confusion and some kind of "gunfire." If you didn't already know what happened you would have no idea what they were talking about, but if you did then you could piece together that the report was supposed to be about the shooting incident.
Well I'm sure since then there has probaly been some time where the corporate news have actually explained the incident, I just haven't seen it. But these things keep happening and they are hugely important events but you wouldn't know it from the way they are covered - or more often not covered. There was the one where Iraqi police officers trying to stop bank robbers fired shots in the air, so American soldiers machine gunned a crowd of people including the police officers. Then there was the one where Iraqi youths surrounded their school demanding that the American soldiers stop using it as a base so they could go to school. Of course, the soldiers fired on them - if I remember correctly they killed 13 people and injured 53. The next day, while thousands protested those shootings, American soldiers drove by in a jeep and again fired into the crowd, killing more people. Also there was the day when a huge explosion killed a bunch of civilians - witnesses said the soldiers had been blowing up cars with weapons in them, and this one got out of control. The official Pentagon line, though, was that an "unknown Iraqi" had fired flares into an ammo dump and made them all go off at one time, like in Naked Gun. The Iraqis were so disgusted with the Americans that when they tried to help with the injured, Iraqis threw rocks at them.
In all of these incidents the Pentagon had a cover story, usually involving shots fired from unknown sources. We're talking crowds of thousands where no Iraqis seem to have heard shots, and the gunmen were never caught or identified, but god bless America and the troops would never do anything wrong. In the rare cases where I saw the incidents mentioned on tv news, they used the Pentagon cover story and did not mention that witness accounts contradicted it. And even in the more accurate newspaper articles, the headlines are always passive. Not "Americans shoot Iraqi civilians" or "US troops gun down protesters" but "bullets fly in Mosul" or "violence continues." Better not make it clear what happened in the headline. What if somebody reads it?
AND THEY HAVE KIDS LOCKED UP WITHOUT CHARGES!
And by the way, did you hear that the Pentagon was forced to admit that they have CHILDREN locked up in Camp X-Ray? In case you forgot, that's the camp in Guantanamo Bay where they are still keeping POWs from the invasion of Afghanistan. They don't call them POWs though, they call them "enemy combatants" so they don't have to follow the Geneva conventions. They admit that they use sleep deprivation and other cruelty for interogations, but they claim that they go just under the line of what would be considered torture, so it's okay. There have been numerous suicides there and they have actually claimed that these are people who were already depressed when they were captured and that it doesn't have anything to do with being locked up under cruel conditions with no charges or hope of release.
Now an Australian paper reported that there were children there, and our military admitted it. Only they call them "juvenile combatants" between the ages of 11 and 16. They would not say how many there are or their specific ages but they said it was okay because SOME of them have killed before.
I mean is your blood beginning to boil yet? Is this the America you believe in? But what's worse, that we do this or that we don't fucking care that we do this? I don't know, I think maybe people would care if they knew about it but I haven't seen a single mention of this on TV. I've watched hours of call in shows about "Do you think the Dixie Chicks have a right to say that?" But maybe "Is it okay to lock up children if they are Ay-rabs?" would be worth a debate too.
BUT BACK TO POSTJOURNALISM
Bill Maher said that it's like they decided if they all threw out the rules of journalism at the same time it wouldn't count. And that's exactly what happened. If these people were journalists they would report the facts and not take sides. Not only did they try to fight the war alongside the military, they unquestionably adopted the obvious propaganda language of the military. If they work in news they probaly follow current events, and therefore they know that this war was supposed to be about stopping the theoretical weapons of mass destruction from falling in the hands of terrorists. The whole obliter... er I mean liberating the Iraqis business came completely out of left field. So when they call it "Operation Iraqi Freedom" this is an obvious piece of propaganda and not something that the real news chooses to make into a fancy logo and leave on the screen 24 hours a day. If it was called "Operation Vote For Bush in 2004" I wonder if they would've put that on the screen all day? Or "Operation Try the Burger King 99 Cent Value Meal."
And if it was real news they wouldn't call it "coalition forces." What coalition? If the Americans and scattered token Brits called themselves "The Superfriends" or "The Awesome Team" I guarantee you that Fox News would go along with it. But the real news would call them US led forces at best.
All the Michael Jackson specials in the world could never top the insanity of cable news war coverage. The only people who win in a war are the wives of retired generals, because they get to stay home in peace and quiet and not have to hear about that shit anymore while their husband runs off to walk around on a giant map and trigger little animated explosions. They're so excited to use their lingo and share their knowledge with other people who get a hardon thinking about war.
I think my least favorite of the anchors during combat was that Lester Holte dude on MSNBC who always had a half smile on his face even if he was talking about a kid getting his head blown off. One day I saw live coverage of some Iraqi official speaking at the UN about this being an illegal war - something most of the world agrees with. They cut back to Lester who smirked and said, "Obviously a moot point." On the real news, the anchors don't get to rebut.
I should know better but one day I watched a little Fox and I saw an anchor in the studio reporting on the peace movement, and how they are unorganized and violent and how their main concern now is the western influence on Iraq and for example if there is a KFC in Baghdad then Iraqis will get fat. The female anchor laughed at this and then the male shook his head in disgust. At no point was there a reference to a specific person or group that said this or believed this, or any vague indication of where this idea was channeled from, it was just this guy's interpretation of what the half of this country and majority of this world that opposes invading Iraq supposedly believes. Now I honestly believe if this fucker pulled a Billy Madison and had to take a junior high journalism class, he would have no chance of passing. He doesn't even know what journalism is. You can't interview yourself as a representative of the people who disagree with yourself. Or can you? I guess this is the New Journalism or something. Postjournalism. Is our whole country high?
I ask that everyone start using the term "POSTJOURNALISM" to describe what they do on TV now. I would also like to suggest that people mail high school journalism text books, maybe with important parts highlighted, to specific postjournalists. It would also be good to organize high school journalism teachers or even the young editors of high school newspapers to go to the headquarters of these cable news channels and offer free tutoring.
That sounds like a joke but I honestly think it's necessary. Every week they fall down another notch below what you already thought was the lowest possible notch. Like when Rumsfeld started mentioning Syria alot and right on cue they started doing shows about, "Who's next? Syria?" Not outraged, but casual like, "Do you think Nicholson will get the Oscar, or Day-Lewis?" Four days earlier I bet you could've watched every cable news channel for 24 hours and never heard the word "Syria." Suddenly Colin Powell says "we're not going to invade Syria" and the main topic of discussion becomes the danger of Syria to our national security.
If Rumsfeld and Powell never talked about Syria, Americans would not care about Syria. They could go 20 years and never be affected by Syria or ever find out who their leader is or where they are on a map. But because they went the other route and talked about Syria they actually have nutballs believing that we MUST invade Syria. I honestly think we could invade Disneyland and Fox News viewers would be convinced we stopped a grave threat to our freedom.
There's an experiment I think the networks should try. They should make up a fake country and report just for one afternoon that Rumsfeld and Powell say they are not going to invade. I guarantee you the next day people would be calling for fictional blood.
And by the way, did you notice how it's still not about oil? Yeah the first combat death was securing an oil field, yeah the main accomplisment was securing the oil fields, yeah they're mad at Syria for pumping oil. But that's only because it's not about oil.
Okay whatever dude, it's not about oil. But still, you managed to secure the Ministry of Oil and leave every other government building to be trashed or burned. Well now it is going to be all about oil because that's the only part of the government they got left.
Let's set all the death and destruction aside and just look at the mess at the museum of antiquities. If that isn't a symbol of everything that's wrong with us I don't know what is. That was a museum that had the first known written word in it! We're talking things that are 7,000-10,000 years old. The museum had begged the Pentagon for weeks to secure it so it wouldn't be looted like museums were in Afghanistan and in the first Gulf War. But then when the shit went down the kids in the Marines couldn't do anything because they didn't have orders. We secured the oil fields, we didn't secure 10,000 years of civilization. Oh well what can you do man, war is hell right? Our bad. Whoops.
So the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddha statues because they were assholes. We did it because we couldn't be bothered. It takes all kinds.
EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT AND WE ARE GREAT
I went to a baseball game the other day and I saw a group of college teens wearing red white and blue novelty top hats and jester hats. And I thought do you always wear that, or just during invasions? The same people who get out their flag pins and hats and sequined vests to wear not on an ordinary day, only on a day when our country is killing people in another country. That's the day they choose to show their pride.
I don't think it's just that our country is divided politically, I think it is also a difference in personality or philosophy or something. It's not so much that these people are republicans who agree with George Bush as that they want to believe that everything is all right and that we are great and that the whole world not only can suck our dick, but that it's lining up begging to. This isn't World War III, it's World's Biggest Gang Bang III. It's alot easier to believe that than to face the ugly truth of forged documents, changing stories, a crowd of 2 million chanting "Death to America", Iraqi kids throwing rocks at American soldiers every day when they patrol, husbands coming home not knowing they've been freedom fried by the depleted uranium they were asked to use on other human beings.
TAKE FOR EXAMPLE THE DIXIE CHICKS.
It's easy to believe that there is a backlash against the Dixie Chicks because one of them once admitted that she was ashamed of George Bush. The story was that the singer made a casual comment against Bush onstage in London, the fans got pissed and the country radio stations had to stop playing their music. The reality though is that thanks to media ownership deregulation passed by Clinton, radio stations are rarely independent or locally owned and are all controlled by a small group of companies. The most notorious is of course Clear Channel, the one that banned all songs with airplane references or anti-war sentiments after 9-11, the one that organized pro-war rallies across the country by calling them "Support the Troops" rallies, and the one that had their stations stop playing the Dixie Chicks.
I can't speak for fans of modern country music, because I understand them about as much as I understand a frog on a pogo stick, but I'm assuming they don't go out and re-buy their favorite albums every week. So my guess would be that the drop in record sales for the Dixie Chicks was not from their fans, who by definition already have their album, but by the people who didn't buy their album because they didn't think about it because they didn't hear it on the radio because it wasn't being played on the radio because Clear Channel owns the radio. One corporate behemoth making a stupid decision is not the same as an uprising. That's like if when Coca-Cola introduced New Coke the media painted it as a popular movement against the outdated flavor of Coke. Anyway, so now there's this illusion of a Dixie Chicks backlash, and it's a good gimmick so whatever idiots the country stations have as counterparts to the "morning zoo crew" get people riled up and next thing you know some innocent, confused kid in a henry porter t-shirt is on tv stepping on Dixie Chicks cds and going into the pre-teen chat room calling them "dixie sluts" because his mom said they were against war which in the bible it says thou is a whore if you shalt not kill. It's a fraud man, it's not real. I give country music the benefit of the doubt. I bet most people in country music are not really that stupid.
(But if I'm wrong, and this whole anti-Dixie Chicks business really does represent the consensus of country music, then let me finally join in with the vast majority of Americans who say FUCK COUNTRY MUSIC. Look, I don't listen to your garbagey music, I don't understand why anyone would, but I don't participate in the bashing of it or of southern culture. I rarely if ever use words like redneck, hillbilly, backwoods, inbred, wifebeater, mouthbreather, cornpoon, trailer trash, white trash, Trent Lottesque, Deliverance, etc. I don't believe in that classist stereotyping shit. But if you're seriously going to back these fuckin yahoo hacks who come out with their flagwaving novelty songs everytime a war hits, funneling american emotions into their wallets with the exact same thoughtfulness and subtlety that the fictional characters of pro-wrestling do, and then you're gonna turn around and crucify your most acclaimed and popular artists for briefly mentioning concern for human life, well then fuck you. Really, seriously, FUCK YOU and your pansy-ass phoney patriotism bullshit. I mean, you seriously LIKE that song where the guy is talking about how he "remembers 9-11" so he has no choice but to stick a boot up the ass of every arab country he can figure out the name of? I forget the asshole's name but I do remember that THAT GUY IS A FUCKIN MORON. It is not physically possible to be more of an ass than that fucking guy.
When he gets his shit-smelling red white and blue boots back on his feet I'm gonna call up the Make a Wish Foundation and have them fly him to Kuwait to meet that kid Ali. Ali sadly is only the most famous of thousands of innocent victims of this war. If you haven't heard of him, he's the kid who lost his parents, his siblings, his arms and alot of his skin when an american "smart bomb" blew up his house. Then he had to sit in an impoverished Iraqi hospital for a week or two before the international media made enough of a storm that the american media would cover the story and the Pentagon would finally decide as a PR move to liberate this one kid to a real hospital in Kuwait. It will be interesting to see Mr. Boot Up Your Ass Because I Remember 9-11 talk to Ali. He'll have to explain why Saudi Arabians who killed themselves in New York two years ago means that the American army had to go to Iraq and "stick a boot in his ass" by blowing off his arms and killing his entire family. GO USA!
It's not like your music is real country music in the sense of Johnny Cash and friends anyway. You have about as much to do with country western as R. Kelly has to do with Motown.)
UPDATE: The Dixie Chicks now played a sold out show in the South to thunderous applause. Apparently they even set aside time for the audience to boo, and just got cheering. So it looks like my instinct was right.
WHY THE GOVERNMENT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT CRAP THEY PLAY ON THE RADIO
And this brings me to the real problem we have here which is media consolidation. This one is going out to the teens and college youths out there because this is how I'm going to recruit you. Have you ever noticed how popular music sucks? Yes you have.
Well what if I was to tell you that Britney Spears, N'Sync, the Macarena, and whatever else the kids at school who you hate listen to, what if I was to tell you that they are the government's fault? I never realized this until I saw the Bay Area hip hop radio dj Davey D speak recently. He is a guy who was fired for having an anti-war activist on his show during the attack on Afghanistan. He talked about how everywhere he went people would talk to him about their concerns about war and the loss of civil rights in our country but every time he turned on the radio all they would talk about is the feud between Nas and Jay-Z. On September 11th 2001 he was watching the World Trade Center fall on TV when an acquaintance called him from Manhattan. Hey Davey D, will you play my record on your radio show? Davey D said what are you doing calling me about a record when the towers just fell down? The guy says towers, what are you talking about? Turns out he had been listening to Hot 97 all morning and they hadn't mentioned what was going on.
This isn't just a matter of bland corporate radio trying to tenderize our souls and remove all thought or potential unplanned controversy. It's a matter of some ponytailed morons in an office building in the midwest somewhere deciding what this guy should listen to in Manhattan. This really goes on, in fact Clear Channel has an office in Seattle and I've talked to people who have worked there, their job being to compile lists of the songs that will be played for various "formats." These days those moron on air personalities you hear are not actually deciding what will be played, it is dictated from on high and pre-programmed.
So I already knew this for a fact but I was still amused when Davey D said he proved that to his friends by having them look up the playlists on web sites for urban stations around the world, when they discovered that every single one was playing the exact same group of songs. Since we were in Seattle Davey D pointed out that the brief "Seattle Sound" explosion which I am vaguely aware of which apparently happened in the early 90s, well that couldn't have happened today because there is no localism. There is one college station that could have played Nirvana and friends but they don't have the same reach as the "alternative rock" station that really helped bring them to a wider audience, which now follows a playlist from on high.
So now I'm telling you kids, and this is a fact, the way you get on MTV and the radio is you're on a major record label who pays an independent promoter to bring your CD to the decision makers tied to a brick of cocaine. Because these people love cocaine, YOU have to listen to Christina Aguilera.
AND THAT'S ONLY THE BEGINNING. I mean, everyone agrees that the media is owned by too few companies. You'd have to be completely blind and deaf not to see that things have gotten ugly. But Colin Powell's son Michael - who got to head the FCC completely on his own merits, same way Bush became president - actually thinks that the rules we have now are too harsh. On June 2nd, with very little public debate and virtually no mention on the TV news, he will hold the vote for a new set of rules that would allow the same corporations to own more radio stations, own a newspaper and news channel in the same city, etc. Because really what America is all about is less viewpoints.
Please people, write the shit out of your senators and congress people. They're our last hope to stop this insanity if the FCC fuckers vote yes. First we gotta stop it from getting worse, then we'll figure out how to make it better.
--VERN
VERN'S AMAZINGLY LATE SUMMER PREVIEW
Well friends I'm back after a few months of travelling around the world learning every martial art known to man, or maybe just not being inspired enough to write. One of the two. I would like to thank the people who wrote me nice e-mails to make sure I was okay or encourage me to Write again. Also I would like to thank the people who sent me advice about paying my mortgage, penis enlargement, the hot new mother and daughter pictures, my details and especially the wicked screensaver.
As usual, it is hard to write about politics these days because holy jesus, where do you even start? I have noticed that there were a whole lot of us who were right, and a couple people on tv who were wrong, and yet I haven't seen anybody saying I told you so. Thanks alot assholes, for taking the fun out of "I told you so." It sucks to be right when being right means that all those troops you supported so god damn much are left rotting in the desert with no mission, no welcome, no desire to be there, and no hope for coming home any time soon, unless they run over a bomb and lose a couple limbs. Every once in a while you see one of them on tv looking sad, and you have to imagine a little thought balloon over their head that says, "4 more years!?" Oh well, it's a volunteer army, I guess you can't really complain that you got shipped off to your doom by the same assholes who turned around the very next day and cut your benefits and your pay. I wonder how many of those congress bitches were still wearing their american flag pins when they signed that into law? No biggie, when we're done arguing about gay marriage and the ten commandments maybe we'll look into bringing them home. IF there's time. I doubt it but maybe. Keep your pants on, troops. Go USA.
But hey, you already know how I feel about that so for now, FUCK THAT SHIT. This is a web sight about the god damn Films of Cinema, is it not? So what exactly is the deal here, Vern? The last summer movie I reviewed was THE MATRIX RELOADED and I believe that was before summer technically started. So today what I want to do for you my friends is go back and review all the big summer movies I didn't bother to review before. So put on your shorts and get ready for a nostalgic journey WAY back to the beginning of summer. (by the way, just because every fucking day was DO THE RIGHT THING this summer doesn't mean there's global warming. that's all a big coincidence.) I want you to close your eyes, well not actually close your eyes because you should be reading this, but anyway I want you to open your eyes and remember a time when all anybody was talking about was a hulk, and not just any regular hulk but an incredible hulk. I guess maybe technically speaking he is not called an incredible hulk he is just HULK, however the incredibleness of this particular hulk goes without saying.
Apparently in the outside world this movie is considered a failure, but everybody I ever met loved it. This to me is what you always hope for from a big summer event movie and usually don't get. One made by a great director who is willing and somehow able to take millions of dollars from a studio and use it to make kind of an art movie. Except with a big green guy who goes on a rampage. This is a movie where The Incredible Hulk flies across deserts, throws tanks, tears a mutant dog in half, chews up a missile, rides a jet into the upper atmosphere AND takes a moment to contemplate lichen in the desert. And that last part is why it's so great.
Of course, Ang Lee makes you wait for the big tank tossing rampage, but that's not a bad thing. God forbid a movie take time to develop its plot and explore the emotions of its giant green muscleman characters before the tanks start flying. This is a completely unique comic book movie in many ways. For one thing, it has much more faith in the human drama of its story, and expects its audience to watch long scenes about normal colored, non–flying humans having conversations with each other. Wearing ordinary clothes. For another thing, it goes much further than most in its depiction of super-powered mayhem. We have never seen a super hero in a movie who could do as much damage as Mr. Hulk. Although I guess he cannot fly around the earth so fast that it starts to spin backwards and goes back in time. But that shit is for pussies.
I should point out though that the Hulk is not really a super hero. He does not fight crime or any crap like that. This is more of a universal monster movie, the tragic story of a scientist cursed by an experiment gone awry who tries to control (but ultimately is liberated by) his monstrous side.
I've heard some people complain that the Hulk was "obviously CGI". What did you want, a puppet? The Rock painted green? Yes, he is an animated character, like King Kong. He might not look as real as the guy sitting next to you in the theater loudly comparing the movie to spider-man, but he is a better person. It's a real good animated performance, thanks in part to Mr. Ang Lee who apparently wore the motion capture suit for alot of the scenes.
The actor I was looking forward to seeing was Eric Bana, who will win an outlaw award for CHOPPER if I ever get around to announcing the awards for that year. (try to act surprised, though.) He does a decent job in a more normal role, but the standout here is Nick Nolte, who is basically playing that great mugshot of his. His performance as Bruce Banner's father is completely insane, not hammy in a Joel Schumacher Batman villain kind of way, but more in a Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau kind of way. He looks like he hasn't taken a shower in days and he mumbles and snorts most of his lines. In the best scene in the movie he turns an important talk with his son into an impromptu play for the military and makes a big crazy (but completely accurate) speech about military aggression. On the first viewing it seemed completely out of the blue, but the second time I saw it I realized how much of the movie was leading up to this moment. There is a theme about the heartlessness of the military machine, and I don't think it's a mistake that jets follow the Hulk into San Francisco and shoot missiles at him right on top of the Golden Gate Bridge. I mean, they just don't give a fuck who gets in the way, they want to shoot a big green guy. It's only because Hulk is a nice Hulk that nobody gets hurt.
The first time I saw it I thought of Nick Nolte as a super villain, but the second time around I really thought of it as the tragic story of the father's relationship to his son. He makes this one mistake of experimenting on himself and every other bad decision he makes in the movie stems from that. Except maybe sending the mutant dogs after Hulk's girlfriend. That was a little bit out of line, in my opinion.
Anyway, after he transforms from the mugshot into some kind of weird walking electrical field (that's gotta be the most abstract fight scene in any comic book movie) there is a shot of him saying good night to baby hulk. The first time I thought it was just a flashback, but the second time I realized it could represent the electrical field actually saying goodbye to his son as he disappears into the atmosphere. And I can't think of any other comic book movie (unless maybe ghost world counts) that has such ambiguous and poetic images.
CHARLIES ANGELS in FULL THROTTLE
Now you might start noticing a pattern here, but I believe this is another movie that everyone criticized but that is clearly a masterpiece of its genre. If you liked CHARLIE'S ANGELS this is a more powerful strain of the same virus. This is the perfect so-called "dumb popcorn movie." There are movies like ARMAGEDDON that are just plain dumb, and you wonder why they didn't take any of the oscar winning and/or acclaimed writers in the cast and have them write a script that wasn't completely moronic and asinine. If Armageddon had made more sense or assumed its audience knew how to read complete sentences, it would not have hurt the movie. Maybe its audience didn't need it to be smarter, but they wouldn't have cared if it was. It would have made it better.With a picture like CHARLIES ANGELS PRESENTS FULL THROTTLE however, adding more layers to the characters or more realism to the caper plot would not only not improve the movie, it would completely ruin it. It has to be that way because that's why it's funny. This is a movie about sexy, smart badass super secret agents with more talents and outfits than Barbie. It's about girls doing kung fu and changing outfits and making double entendres. It is designed so that every moment is completely silly and ludicrous. The tone of the action is cartoonish to the extreme. There is a scene right in the beginning where the girls steal a truck and crash it, plummeting off a bridge, but the truck happens to have a helicopter in the back so they jump out of the truck and into the helicopter which they manage to fly away in.
THE MATRIX takes the Hong Kong style of fantasy action and makes a plausible explanation for how it is possible. CHARLIE'S ANGELS however takes the more pure hong kong approach of assuming that anyone who is not willing to accept the cinematic defiance of all physical laws is an asshole and deserves to be tortured. So if you have an attachment to quasi-realism in your action then you will be deservingly beaten over the head with beautiful scenes like the one where the villain turns around midair and unloads two pistols. While driving a motorcycle. In a motocross race. Without causing much of a scene.
All of the characters are back except for Bill Murray's Bosley, who is replaced by the great Bernie Mac. This is the one major flaw of both movies. These are two great comedic actors, and they are amusing as Bosleys, but do not live up to their potential. I think this is because both are best when they are allowed to do extended riffs, but here they just get to do little bits. The movie belongs to the ladies.
Crispin Glover also returns as the skinny man, and what was a funny throwaway joke the first time (his hair fetish) now gets a whole backstory featuring Carrie Fisher.
The audience I saw this movie with on opening day was openly in love with it. They cheered for the re-introduction of each character, including Mr. Glover. They cheered for many action scenes, especially the one where the ladies tear through a roof and grab splinters of the roof in mid-air and then use those like skateboards to slide down a rail. I actually heard two people leaving the theater saying, only half joking, "I think that was the best movie I've ever seen."
If I hadn't heard otherwise I would think it would be impossible to leave this movie without a smile on your face, unless you got stabbed in an unrelated incident or something. Maybe that's why it got all those bad reviews. Geez they need to do something about that.
28 DAYS LATER
Mr. Boyle's low budget zombie movie was the "surprise hit" of the summer according to various shitty entertainment magazines that I keep forgetting not to read. I thought it was pretty decent but it does not add anything significant to the zombie genre. Most of this material was already covered more thoughtfully and with better visuals in Mr. Romero's classic series of films. Kids, if you have not seen them, stop doing your fucking homework and go rent NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DAWN OF THE DEAD and DAY OF THE DEAD, in that order. These are three great pictures that each make a statement about the time they were made in. Believe me your life will be improved by watching these movies.
28 DAYS LATER, at least on my one viewing, doesn't seem to say much about our times. But it does repeat several ideas from Romero: a disparate group of survivors looking for a safe haven, a fun looting spree, a semi-domesticated zombie chained by the neck who later gets set loose as a weapon, a military base where the soldiers turn out to be a bunch of goons, a scene where they stop to get gas and one character wanders off and gets attacked by zombie kids and has to kill them. Yes, the zombies are faster than in Romero's pictures, but we've also seen that in the great Return of the Living Dead.
I liked 28 DAYS LATER better near the end where it started to add more non-Living-Dead-retread twists. The idea of the soldiers using the continuation of the species as an excuse for rape. And of course the guy poking out eyes with his bare hands and then embracing his lover without even wiping off. Charming. I also enjoyed the loving relationship between the father and daughter.
I'm not saying it's bad. It's well made and I thought it was worth seeing. I'm just saying that shooting it on digital video instead of making it look really good doesn't constitute reinventing zombie horror.
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN in CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL
The big surprise for me this summer was this movie based on the great Disneyland ride. I mean it's a fuckin pirate movie produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Based on a ride. Sure, Johnny Depp has a good track record but he also has a couple thankless roles in his past like the hunky gypsy guitarist in Chocolat, which is how I pictured this one.The script is by the same fellas who wrote THE MASK OF ZORRO and it's a similar type of old fashioned action adventure swashbuckling type deal, except with the clever added bonus of living skeletons and a monkey. The plot involves pirates cursed by Aztec gold they stole so that they turn to skeletons in the moonlight and cannot enjoy any of their plundering and/or pillaging. So instead of being about pirates searching for treasure, it's about them trying to bring it all back to end the curse. Usually in a pirate movie you get the scene where they find all the treasure and scoop it up. Here it's the opposite where they joyfully dump all the treasure back out.
So it's a good story but nobody fucking cares, because right in the middle of it is Johnny Depp in a classic (won't get the oscar it deserves) comedic performance as Captain Jack Sparrow, a character he describes as "a cross between Keith Richards and Pepe Lepew". As soon as he makes his entrance, casually sashaying off of a sinking boat onto a dock, you know you are gonna love this movie. It's great to see such a weirdo as the lead in a big budget adventure movie, even if they hedge their bets and include that elf Orlando Bloom as a more traditional, bland hunky character who grows in his Errol Flynn goatee over the movie to show how cool pirates are. The best pirates though are the less debonair ones. Most of the bad guys (including Geoffrey Rush) look like a little more grotesque version of the rubber cartoon characters from the ride. This may be the most rotten teeth seen in any one movie.
My only real complaint is the music. Apparently Bruckheimer decided the music "wasn't piratey enough" so he hired Hans Zimmer to replace a bunch of the music. But instead of making it piratey I think he just took a couple tracks off the cd for THE ROCK and cut them into the action scenes. Oh well, I'll live.
This is Johnny Depp's movie for sure but I would also like to thank director Gore Verbinski. After this and the surprisingly good remake of THE RING I think it's safe to say he knows what he's doing. Maybe they should just keep hiring him for things that just seem like they could never work. Like a sequel to this movie.
LEGENDS OF THE EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN or whatever
I guess everybody else saw it coming, but this was the one real dud I saw this summer. I put my trust in Steve Norrington because Steve Norrington made BLADE. And no matter what Steve Norrington does, no matter how low he sinks, he will always have that. He fucking made BLADE. He is the director of BLADE.
But yeah, he's also the director of DEATH MACHINE, and now director of this. It's all about a bunch of literary characters (Alan Quatermain, Tom Sawyer, Dorian Grey, Mina from Dracula, Jekkyl and Hyde, etc.) who are hired as secret agents for the British to fight some asshole in a mask called The Phantom. And in case you can't figure out that means the Phantom of the Opera, Sean Connery says, "How operatic."
That's the first problem with this movie, is that it treats its audience like a bunch of fuckin retards. For example that old ham Connery plays the legendary adventurer Alan Quatermain, who is in many books and movies about cities of gold and what not. But in case you have problems pronouncing Quatermain, they actually added an 'r' into the name so it's "Quartermain." So don't worry about it retards, even you will be able to pronounce his name.
According to my nerd sources, the comic strip this is based on is very smart and literary and over pretty much everyone's head, and real british. The producers thought they needed to add an american character in the mix so americans had someone to relate to. So they made Tom Sawyer into an american secret agent. Well, that's fine, but when you see the movie (but hopefully it won't come to that) you'll see that NOBODY would want to relate to Tom Sawyer as he is portrayed in this movie. I don't care if you are as american as an apple pie with cheese stuffed into the crust, you're gonna like either the invisible man best or Captain Nemo, if anybody. No fucking way anybody, anwhere, saw this movie and came out and said, "I really like that Tom Sawyer, I'm glad they included him in there for an american perspective that I can relate to."
But complaining about that is just petty, because you could fix any five or six of the problems in this movie and you'd still have nothing. It really doesn't work on any level other than occasionally having a good visual. (And yet the best shots in this movie don't approach the visual appeal of the average shot in Norrington's lower budgeted BLADE or THE LAST MINUTE.) It's an ensemble piece with no really cool characters in it. Like X-MEN if every character was Cyclops.
But the main problem is that this is one of those movies where the story seems to be the last thing they tried to figure out, a couple months after filming. Shit, what is this movie even about? They are secret agents trying to stop the phantom, but then it turns out he is actually a guy in disguise as the phantom, and they are not actually secret agents, and then they fight in the snow, and then Alan QuaRtermain dies, and then he comes back to life because of an african chant or something. It's one of those movies like MONKEY BONE where it seems like ten different groups of studio executives requested 100 different changes to the script and by the time they all came together nobody could remember why they asked for the changes in the first place. It reminds you of movies like THE SHADOW or even WILD WILD WEST that some day you will encounter in the video store or on cable and say, "oh jesus, I forgot about that one."
Oh well. I better get to work forgetting.
BAD BOYS II
Are you fuckin kidding me, I didn't watch that shit.
FREDDY VS. JASON
Finally, the summer ends on a high note with the big one that everyone has been waiting for. I couldn't be happier with Mr. Yu's take on this ridiculous Billy the Kid vs. Dracula style crossover.
The setup is good, so let me explain it. The movie starts out in a fit of surreal inspiration with a demonic looking sharp-toothed Freddy Krueger narrating the movie. He explains how he has been banished to hell, powerless because everybody forgot about him (and also because he himself forgot that he died in FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE). Jason is still rotting 2 inches beneath the dirt where Freddy found him at the end of JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY, so Freddy goes into the big guy's dream, pretends to be his mother and convinces him to go to Elm Street to kill some teens. So Jason rises from the dead and I guess walks from New Jersey to Ohio where he finds some teens partying in the infamous house at 1429 Elm Street, and brutally slaughters a kid in bed. The police see the mess and think it's Freddy, which spreads fear around the town of Springwood, giving Freddy more power.
Trouble is, Jason is already loose. I guess Freddy's not all that familiar with what Jason does, but what he does is, if something moves, he kills it. Often with some sort of tool. If somebody runs away, he just walks and catches up with them. If he happens to be in space, he might turn into a cyborg, who knows. Jason is a bad motherfucker. So he's killing these people before Freddy can get to them, and they get real pissed at each other and then there is a big fight.
Of course there is also a whole plot about the teens caught in the middle of this and how they play the two maniacs against each other, but the writers don't make the mistake of assuming we give a flying fuck. At first the living characters are pretty much a joke. The audience understands the mythology of Freddy and Jason and the victims don't, so there is humor at their expense. Like lamb to the slaughter.(except funny.) There are also some funny gimmicks like a scene where the girl from Destiny's Child who is not Beyonce is forced to pull off Jason's mask and give him mouth to mouth. No joke. This is a great film.
Yu and company know that the audience really only cares about Freddy and Jason, and their characters are in top form. Freddy is a good balance between the later talkative killer of the sequels and the quieter, scarier guy from the original classic. He says "bitch" too much but he doesn't do too many puns or oneliners and the dreams he creates are dark and boiler-room centric. He doesn't figure out the kids' hobbies and kill them in ironic ways. He's real dark and nasty, and even has one line that will make you go, "ooooooh, man." It's amazing that after all these years Freddy could actually say something shocking.
Jason meanwhile is played by a new guy, Ken Kirzinger, who is slightly taller and narrower than Kane Hodder. I think he's better. He's got the rotted, mutated head with a string of hair growing off. And he slaughters people left and right. This movie is a lot gorier than I expected. There are alot of beheadings and impalings and cuttings in half, which feel different from the old days because sometimes they use computers, but who cares. Everybody enjoys a good beheading whether it's high tech or low tech (and here you get both).
Part of the joy of this movie and the anticipation of this movie is the discussions about who to root for. I have always liked Freddy better because his movies are more imaginative and visually ambitious. Still, I was rooting for Jason. Freddy is a child killer (molester?) who got burned alive and is getting his revenge by, well, continuing to be a child killer. Stubborn old fuck. Jason, on the other hand, is some retarded dead guy trying to make summer camps safer for swimming. So obviously he is the good guy. I think the writers of this movie agree with me on that because they portray Jason as the more sympathetic of the two and even have a part where you feel like Freddy is being too mean to him.
The highlight is of course the big fight at the end. I always wondered, what exactly is Freddy vs. Jason anyway? Is it a competition to see who kills the most people? (answer: sort of.) How are they gonna fight anyway, is Jason gonna fall asleep? (answer: sort of.) They are both able to do some damage both in the dream world and in the real world.
Yu is the perfect director for this movie even if every movie he's made in america including this one is slumming. I don't know if he even did it on purpose, but he is the guy who injected new blood into the '80s slasher franchises by taking a more absurdist approach to them with BRIDE OF CHUCKY and now this. This approach was also taken with the great JASON X. These are all movies that take iconic horror characters from the '80s, remove them from the templates of their previous sequels, and put them in much more ludicrous situations. We've seen Jason kill kids in the woods many times before, but now we get to see him loose on a space station, or on Elm Street, bogarting Freddy's souls.
Yu also has a great visual sense and makes this movie look distinct from either of the franchises that inspired it. There are assloads of classic images, many of them that play off of the combining of the mythologies (Freddy leaping out of Crystal Lake and landing with a weird demon face is my favorite).
I love this movie the end
well friends thank you for letting me catch up there, i hope to see you all soon
your friend
Vern
VERN FOUND COWERING IN SPIDER HOLE
(or, A TEARFUL VERN EMERGES FROM THE PERSPEX BOX)
Okay, so I'm sure you're used to my little hiatuses by now, but I gotta say I'm sorry for this one. What, was I fucking hibernating? Actually it was a variety of mishaps and whatnot which kept me offline which in turn stopped me from writing reviews and even got my hotmail account shut down for a while. So if I missed anyone's e-mails I apologize.
So what all has happened since last time? I didn't see MYSTIC RIVER until the other day so I didn't review that yet. I did bash the Texas Chain Saw remake's head in over on the Ain't It Cool News. I think Cuba Gooding junior came out with a new retard movie, or was it gay jokes this time? I never saw it. ELF was kinda cute, Tupac came out with a new one - when is that guy gonna start directing? - BAD SANTA was pretty funny, and I liked the cartoon about the singing triplets. Seagal did a new one with Ching-Siu Tung, next up is Ringo Lam.
I liked the new matrixes, I loved KILL BILL, but one thing we can all agree on is that new lord of the rings sequel is pretty much the greatest ever. At least, best movie involving giant eagles and elephants, with ghosts and elves and shit. Mr. Jackson and company have really gotten their footing on this one, they know exactly what they're doing and we're real attached to the characters now. Lots of drama, lots of macho crying, lots of giant elephants tipping over. I never seen anything like it. I hope my man in new zealand Andrew is reading this. Way to go Z-Land.
Can't wait for part 4.
And now we got these anti-piracy sermons playing before movies. Some stuntman tells us that he literally gave his left nut for the car chase in some shitty police thriller and if a 14 year old kid downloads it even once, he will have to slaughter his children for meat if he's going to survive. I never watched a shitty download movie in my life, I still love to hear people boo down this propaganda. If I wanted to be preached to, I woulda waited at the bus stop where that guy yells at me through a megaphone about the king of kings and the lord of the lords.
A tip to movie studios: if you don't want kids watching your movies for free, stop your employees from bootlegging them. Duh.
Even worse, the Regal chain has this thing now called "The Twenty." While you wait for the movie, instead of talking to your friend or reading a book or sitting there with your own thoughts or some stupid shit like that, you get to watch this excellent twenty minute long collection of commercials. I mean I assume they're excellent because they have their own name. The Twenty! It's cool! Don't miss The Twenty. I love The Twenty. Hey, did you see the Twenty this week? I heard that product was excellent. Who told me that? I think it was my friends at The Twenty. If it was bad, it wouldn't be on The Twenty now, would it?
Okay, I must admit. There are no Regal theaters in the downtown area and if there were, I would sooner light my asshairs on fire than go support this shit. But I saw the CEO of Regal on some CNN business news thing, talking about The Twenty. Not defending it, as you would have to do in any reasonable forum. But talking it up. They acted like it was this great innovation that we should all admire, like he just invented electricity or something. At the end of this long report the anchor said something like, "Some moviegoers complain that they don't want to be bombarded with advertisements," and that was all they had for that side of the story.
(Are there any moviegoers that DO want to be bombarded with advertisements?)
There was an episode of the cartoon Futurama where the advertisers of the future actually put advertisements into people's dreams, so the guy dreams he goes to class wearing only his underwear, and then it turns out to be an ad for a specific brand of underwear. The reason why that joke is funny is because it's fucking true. I don't think there's a soul who would disagree with me. If they really had the technology to do that, they would fucking do it. If they could make shit come out of your ass with an ad for Pepsi on it, they would do it. If you could give birth to a baby with a Nike logo in its eyes and an AOL 9.0 CD attached to its ass, I guaranfuckingtee that's exactly what you'd find yourself doing.
By the way, did you know that Blockbuster has copyrighted the white circle? I walked past one of their stores and they have window decals that represent snow. Some of them are just white circles, but they include the Blockbuster copyright information.
Anyway speaking of the cable news - you remember how crazy the tv made me last time we met. Now it's gone through the looking glass, over the rainbow, under the bridge, over the hump and backwards down the toilet, into the dangerous reverse twilight zone. Lately I find myself turning on Fox news late at night and the next morning when I remember what I saw, it's hard to figure out if it was a dream or not. I'm pretty sure I saw this one show where these fat middle aged counterparts of AMERICAN PSYCHO's Patrick Bateman sit around and talk about stock tips. You got the American flag waving on the upper left, the TERROR!!!!!! alert staring you down on the lower left, the scroll waving at you across the bottom part, the stock quotes on the lower right, in the lower middle, above the scroll but below the Patrick Batemans, you got a huge disclaimer scrolling by telling you that these people are pretty much talking out of their asses and if you trust what they're saying you're going to lose all your money and it will not be Rupert Murdoch's fault so quit sending him those fuckin letters. And then one of the guys on there is talking about how you should invest all your money in Halliburton, because the daily mortar attacks and suicide bombings are bound to slow down and Cheney's boys will clean up and there's no reason to feel guilty about making money off of corruption, death and misery so cash in boys!
So at this point I'm pretty sure I'm having a nightmare but it wasn't until they went to the commercial break that I found out the name of this program was THE CO$T OF FREEDOM. And yes, they really had the dollar sign for the S. When they came back they discussed the topic, "Crazy terrorists or mad cows: which is the biggest danger to your money?"
It's like a horrific fake TV show Paul Verhoeven would make up for a new ROBOCOP movie, but look it up - it's real.
And last week I was watching FOX NEWS WATCH where a panel sits around and talks journalism issues, which is pretty much like Nickelodeon doing a show about retirement. They try to mix it up a little with the token not-quite-right-wingers though, and I was pretty surprised what one of them almost got away with saying on Fox.
The topic being discussed was "Worst Collective Act By Journalists," and one woman made the obvious choice: their coverage of the run up to the Iraq war. First she said, "Well, Fox News viewers won't be too happy to hear this," which I thought was amazing - acknowledging on Fox itself that the network and its audience are partisan and pro-war. Then she started to describe how the journalists swallowed this notion that there was no choice but war and acted as a mouthpiece for the administration and--
Suddenly, it went quiet. We interrupt this legitimate point for a special report. NASA is flying a little thing around Mars. There is a parachute and what not. It's in space, with science and everything. Hooray for space! Whitey on the moon!
I swear it really happened. I gotta start taping this shit so people will believe me.
There was a couple minutes there where the cable news started to catch on to a few things and would air one or two mildly critical things about Bush every two weeks while we were all asleep. But then as soon as the Kurds, er, I mean, we, caught Hussein - they turned into babies again.
Okay, so Hussein was found in this hole, right? All he had was a pistol, some money, and a stash of candy bars. No computer, no cell phone, no pigeon or tin can with a string. He didn't even have any playboys. So now we can all agree, right, that he couldn't have had anything to do with the daily suicide bombings, mortar attacks, missiles fired at planes, helicopters shot down, etc.? Because he was in a hole?
You'd think so, but that would mean we all had common sense enough to have, like, common sense. Instead, there were numerous experts on TV still referring to attacks carried out by "Saddam loyalists." And the postjournalists who were interviewing them didn't question that notion at all.
Then instead of talking about all the horrible things Hussein has done in his life, they kept talking about him being a "coward" for hiding in a hole instead of, say, setting off some of those invisilbe weapons of mass destruction and going out in a blaze of glory. Even Bush said, "I find it interesting that he ended up in a hole." In other words, Bush would've had more respect for Hussein if he'd shot up the american soldiers that the Kurds gave him to, er I mean that found him.
CNN kept running a title that said that Saddam had married his second cousin.
One republican I saw interviewed by Wolf Blitzer joked that Hussein looked like "something out of the movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills," but then went on to say that we should not expect the violence to stop, because Hussein probably didn't have anything to do with the attacks, which were caused by Iraqis fighting against the occupation.
Blitzer responded (and I am not shitting you): "You make a good point. He does look homeless, and in a sense, you could say he IS homeless, couldn't you?" Completely ignoring the substance of what the man said to refer back to his jokey reference to a bad '80s movie about a homeless dude getting it on with bette midler or some gal like that. (not worth confirming in imdb.)
THIS JUST IN. As I was working hard on this column, the Paul O'Neill thing broke. If you didn't hear about it, the former treasury secretary under Bush (forced to resign because he was against the tax cuts) was interviewed for a new book and by 60 Minutes with some pretty funny revelations about Bush and friends.
The one that's getting the most attention is the one about how at the very first national security council meeting, ten days into the administration, weeks after claims that Clinton was too interventionist and that Bush would be against nation building, Bush apparently announced that he wanted to invade Iraq and asked how it could be done. "Go find me a way to do this." O'Neill said he was shocked that no one said, "What? Why would we do that?" but instead just figured out how it could be done. (And then, coincidentally, September 11th happened. What the fuck? Do they ever worry that maybe they wished too hard?)
Now look, we all pretty much assumed Bush was planning to invade Iraq from the beginning. But we were called conspiracy theorists for believing it. After all, they were doing it BECAUSE of September 11th, right? Because Rumsfeld saw the world "through the prism of September 11th." Because the world has changed. Everything is different now. We will never forget.
Well, that's what they all said two days ago. Now they have had their memory wiped like the puny humans in DARK CITY and they say what are you talking about? We all knew this, and they were open about it, regime change was the official policy since Clinton. And all those times that they said it was because of September 11th and the war started on September 11th and all that stuff, that was actually just a metaphor for we all knew they were planning it all along out in the open and not in secret and p.s. they're not fucking liars.
O'Neill said that during his time there, he never saw any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The official White House response is that O'Neill wasn't privy to all of the evidence.
He was a permanent member of the National Security Council! So that means that, by the White House's own admission, the National Security Council was never shown any evidence of these weapons that they were so sure Iraq had! So how did they know?
There were some other good ones from Mr. O'Neill too, which came out in the form of thousands of documents that he gave Pulitzer prize winning writer Ron Suskind for the book. (One "senior white house official" (read: Karl Rove) poo-poohed O'Neill's comments by saying, "We never listened to the crazy things O'Neill said before, why would we now?" I guess they never listened to his thousands of crazy documents and transcripts either.)
#1. In a meeting where O'Neill worried about the defecits, Dick Cheney said, "Reagan proved that defecits don't matter."
Not to republicans, anyway. They just max out all the cards, then go work for corporations for 8 years, then come back and start over. Cheney would never admit this in public, but he apparently does at the meetings.
#2 (even better). In a meeting discussing plans for the second tax cut, Bush was initially hesitant. He asked, "Didn't we already give a tax cut to the rich? Why can't we do one for the middle?"
Of course, the real shock there is that Bush actually had a moment of guilt there, where he wanted to do the right thing. But does it bother all these right wingers, who have explained up and down a tree that tax cuts for the rich are actually not for the rich, that Bush himself described them as "for the rich" from the very beginning?
Shit, there's a million other things for us to catch up on, but I'll cut this off right now. I hope everyone is having a good 2004 so far and if you have time, maybe you could read one or two new reviews that I plan to write. After that I've got bigger plans but let's start with the baby steps, huh?
welcome back vern
(that's what you should say, in my opinion)
thanks everybody
--Vern