He's Lucky Nobody Punched Him in the Face

This didn't make me laugh because it took over 3000 American lives to reach the middle of America, but Bush ought to be getting a good feel for what "his people" think of him and his incompetent, corrupt regime. Never mind the rest of us. Of a Bush "surprise" visit to a diner in Illinois this week, we have the following:

In Peoria this week, many patrons found their pancakes more interesting. Except for the click of news cameras and the clang of a dish from the kitchen, the quiet was deafening.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” Bush said to a group of women, who were sitting in a booth with their young kids. “How’s the service?” As Bush signed a few autographs and shook hands, a man sitting at the counter lit a cigarette and asked for more coffee. Another woman, eyeing Bush and his entourage, sighed heavily and went back to her paper. She was reading the obituaries. “Sorry to interrupt your breakfast,” a White House aide told her. “No problem,” she huffed, in a not-so-friendly way. “Life goes on, I guess.”

What if the cameras and secret service hadn't been around? Do you think anything has penetrated that thick skull yet? Maybe impeachment isn't so far away after all, if even in Peoria--Peoria!--it's all anyone can do to simply feign politeness.

Toast, toastie, toasted.

Please, Somebody, Save Me from Myself!

I've always had a touch of madness, but none so worrisome as my fetish for certain things French, and the main one among them (gasp!) is the Citroen DS automobile model made in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Last summer in Berlin I came face-to-face with a few, and to say that my heart nearly burst for the beauty and absolute unattainability of these gorgeous beasts is an understatement. I did indeed grow faint at one point and had to sit on a kerb simply drinking in the incredible lines of the sheet metal arcing like a haughty Gaelic sneer from bumper to bumper.

Then I saw one on my home streets last week. And now I find that there are some real Citroen nuts not so far away in California, and a whole subculture of Citroen freaks.

What am I to do? Please, please, please help me!

Measuring Madness by the Calendar

This picture was taken by Olaf on Saturday, January 23, 2003, in San Francisco, at the protest against war in Iraq before the invasion. That was now over four years ago.

And how long has it taken the naysayers, Dems and Repubs alike, to even begin to come around to see that we were right? How many dollars wasted? How many lives destroyed? Yet still they hesitate lest their political ambitions be thwarted.

The people must lead, or they will be cast into the cauldron by those who have the arrogance to take their lead from them through ignorance, fear, and suppression of reason.

Immortal Olaf? Well, Probably Not.

Oh, if only this were a fact of the landscape. Think how quickly the regime would shape up if confronted with thousands of these images in every city in the nation. One cannot help but wonder, what is the power of Olaf?

I hope someone sees the self-referential irony in this graffito-neato. Ain't I postmodern?

This Is How the Finger Actually Works

This individual happens to be protesting the ongoing ban on imports from Cuba, chiefly those lovely Cohiba cigars. Note that he holds icons representing the embargo in the frame with his squinty-eyed visage: the cigar burns slowly and deliciously and the ring is held pinched between his fingers asserting the origin and authenticity of the smoke. His right hand forms a proper "finger" in which the knuckles should frame the finger much like the carriage frames the barrel of a cannon. I'm really quite taken with the compositional balance of this photograph. It forms two triangles, yet puts the essential elements all along a single horizontal. The wristwatch pulls the eye across the action of the picture and the perfect head-on angle to a less-than-perfect face gives it a certain almost Gaellic disdain, despite that the model has not a drop of French blood running through him.

Oh, and if the customs people are thinking about pursuing this guy, the cigar was purchased and consumed legally in another country. And every puff was like a big "fuck you" to the Bush-Cheney cabal...or at least it felt that way. Please compare the weak method used by El Presidente (below) compared to the muscular mode of giving the finger employed by our cigar lover.

Ah, the small pleasures are what makes life worth living.

The Man with his Finger on the Button

Hey, American people! Fuck you! Ah'm goin' into Iran.

Veep Cheney may be still controlling the language and the policy of this deranged regime, but Junior still controls the magic finger, and that finger (No. That finger.) is only one secret service agent away from nuking his enemies, among whom a lot of us are now counted by virtue of our failure to worship his divinity. But Cheney's madness is articulate enough to continue to fool the 30 percent out there who still think Georgie is a terrific president. Here's an example:

Obviously, there was flawed intelligence prior to the war ... but we should not let the fact of past problems in that area lead us to ignore the threat we face today and in the future.

This sounds like a good argument, right? Of course, it's completely false reasoning, because NO ONE is suggesting we ignore the threats we face. I believe the rhetoricians call this the "straw man" fallacy. Note also that he's still blaming the intelligence--"there was flawed intelligence"--without acknowledging the filtering role he and his minions played in assuring that no contrary evidence to their predetermined plans to invade Iraq got traction in the White House. And let's not forget the unrelenting incompetence of their performance of the invasion, whether supported or not by intelligenge: no plan for occupation, no plan for establishment of civil authority, and no desire to think about anything except Chimpie in a crotch-enhanced flight suit in his ultimate dress-up fetish moment.

We've now reached the point where polls reveal that 58 percent of Americans just wish that the Bush regime was over. Well, wishing doesn't make it so. The criminality this cabal has committed is sufficient material to impeach, remove from office, indict, try, convict, and imprison them for the rest of their natural lives, after which time they will be handed over to Satan to be roasted and boiled alive throughout all eternity, but that is beyond the court's jurisdiction. I'll settle for impeachment and removal from power. Let the historians take care of the rest, or the court at the Hague.