Death of a President

Hey, did you hear about the movie that’s just been made called Rape of a Senator? Yeah, can you believe the nerve, the appalling bad taste? They got this Hillary look-alike to play a U.S. Senator who gets assaulted right on the steps of the Rayburn building by this big guy with a bad haircut. The whole ugly thing is shown in graphic detail.

The director (no doubt a right-wingnut) denied that he had any anti-liberal agenda or sensationalistic designs. He said “it's a serious film which I hope will open up the debate on where current domestic policies are taking us."

Yeah, right. In a pig’s eye. This is an outrage! Why—uh, what? It’s not Rape of a Senator? It’s Death of a President? George W. Bush gets whacked on film?

Oh. Well, that’s different. I didn’t realize we were talking about real art. In that case, no problema.

Dynamite Israeli video

Get down, baby! “You look like a hippopotamus / You have the brains of a bird…”

Not your father’s music video, exactly. The lyrics are in Hebrew, with English subtitles. The music is driving, Israeli rock. The video, intense scenes from the recent Israeli military push into southern Lebanon—rockets, tanks, bombs, all sorts of fun stuff. The object of their affection: Hezbollah chief thug, Hassan Nasrallah.

The chorus:

Yalla ya Nasrallah, we will screw you inshallah
We will send you back to Allah with all the Hezbollah
Yalla ya Nasrallah, go away ya garbage
It’s already been sentenced from above—that this is your end
You are pathetic, you are small
And resemble an orangutan
You have lice on your beard
And soon you’ll be out of here
You are a dead cockroach, your are a skunk.

At least, it makes us want to get up and dance. But it also makes us lament: If only they had succeeded…

To view, go here if you have a YouTube account. Or go here if you don’t.

NYT reporter in counseling for PTSD

Sometimes the elite mainstream mediocracy do something right. Like today’s Washington Post editorial pinning the blame for the Valerie Plame leak right where it belonged from the beginning: On hubbie Joseph Wilson. Like The New York Times recent two-part take-out on the tragedy of child porn by Kurt Eichenwald, called “Dark Corners.”

Unfortunately, it was at high personal cost for the reporter, as this interview excerpt reveals, after the interviewer asks Eichenwald his personal view of the pedophiles themselves:

You know, on some level, for some of them – and this might surprise people, because I do seem to have [LAUGHS] – when you hear me, I sound like have hatred – many of them, I feel sorry for them. Nobody would choose to isolate themselves in this way. And there are those who recognize that their desires are, in fact, damaging to children, and so they make sure they stay away from kids. And I actually have respect for those people. For those who rationalize it, for those who sit there and say, you know, children benefit from sexual relations with adults, for those who say that they're fighting for children's rights to have sex with adults, I have nothing but contempt for them. You know, I have seen more kids sobbing in front of me, I have had more instances of witnessing an image that haunts me for months. This is the first time in my life that I've needed to go into counseling sponsored by, you know, The Times, where I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I had to stop doing this for three months. You know, my wife periodically will say, you know, are you sure you can keep handling this? I'm not sure. But there is nothing more important in this country, in terms of transforming the social fabric of our nation, than the Internet. And reporters are duty-bound to let readers understand how it is transforming us, both for good and for bad. And if we ignore the bad, then we, I believe, are abdicating any right we have to say that we are journalists.

So, what was all that about victimless crime?

Read the rest of the interview here.