Bush Beats the Devil

George Bush is not Satan.

That was the final word on the subject from Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals, the day after Hugo Chavez claimed otherwise. Haggard was very clear about it: "NAE theologians and scholars have conducted a thorough exegetical study of the biblical texts concerning the person, disposition, and earthy manifestations of Satan (Beelzebub, Lucifer, Prince of Darkness). They have incontrovertibly concluded that, contrary to the assertion of Hugo Chavez, President Bush is not the Devil."

I totally agree. I have done my own extensive research using alternate tools, and have determined that, without question, President George W. Bush is not Beelzebub. Without going too far afield, I would like to add that he is also not Alfred E Neuman, a chimpanzee, or the latest reincarnation of the 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus.

For one thing, if he were Beelzebub, he would not have said this: “I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like a comma because there is -- my point is, there's a strong will for democracy.” Beelzebub would have had far better sense than to speak like that to Wolf Blitzer on national TV. However much you may dislike Beelzebub, you have to admit he is one shrewd personification of Evil. A chimp would have just flung his feces at Wolf. I don’t know exactly what Paleologus or Alfred would have said, but I’m sure they would have committed offenses on entirely different levels.

As usual, no one in the world really knows what George Bush meant to say. Did he mean that historians are such bad people that they would reduce to a comma the sacrifices of all the US soldiers who have fought in Iraq, including the now nearly 3000 who have died? Did he mean that he’s with these imaginary bad historians on that point? Or did he just mean to remind us that he doesn’t like to read, so if he were handed a history of the Iraq War in say, twenty years, he’d only read to the first comma?

Or maybe he has a deeper meaning in mind. What’s a comma anyway? It’s a hesitation and an interruption. Maybe he is using the word comma accurately as a metaphor for the way he has used the Iraq War and the so-called war on terror to interrupt America’s history of freedom, for the sake of creating and buttressing a sham democracy on the other side of the planet.

Maybe the comma is meant to indicate what he and Congress have together made of us.

The United States as we have known it is now hanging by a thread, with the passage last week of S. 3930. Congress was told by the Supreme Court to fix our policies on detaining and trying terror suspects, to bring them into line with the US Constitution. Congress has basically spit back in the face of the Supreme Court and said to hell with habeas corpus, to hell with the 5th Amendment, to hell with the 14th Amendment. Beelzebub can have all of them; we’ll take Bush and fear.

The thread I mean is the Supreme Court again. If the Supreme Court lets S. 3930 stand, there will be no branch of government left to preserve the constitution. Without a functioning constitution respected by any fraction of our government the United States will have essentially been comma-ed out of existence.

George Bush calls the Geneva Convention vague. I have to wonder if he has ever encountered any of his own pronouncements in print. Does he not even read himself? Not only does he not have the political acumen of Satan, he lacks the vanity, and in his case that’s not a good thing.

Satan would have a lot to teach Bush. He could show him how to google himself, teach him to take pride in his language, and how to reach new levels of competence, so he can screw us all even better than he’s doing now.

Going Gaga for Google

The word of the day: commandeer.

Some sentences using the word of the day: The dictator commandeers the airwaves. The pirate commandeers the gold shipment. During the national emergency, the authorities commandeered private buses to aid in evacuation. Admiral James T. Kirk commandeers a self-cloaking Klingon Warship and flies it to the Seventies. The Bush administration’s Department of Justice commandeers Google.

The word of the day tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong with Department of Justice’s subpoena of Google records pertaining to pornographic searches. It isn’t about privacy; it’s about piracy. Where’s the emergency that justifies the commandeering of a company’s one service? Where’s the legislation that permits it? Since when did the United States become a dictatorship whose administration can commandeer any business at will?

Where does government commandeering come from? Exactly where I have told you it comes from, in this very column, before. It comes from fear and cowardice. I said as much in a column for October 17, 2002, at which time I said I thought I was onto a grand unifying principle of the workings of the universe, possibly involving vinyl. I didn’t say so at the time, but I had in mind vinyl automobile seating, rather than recording media. But I will not rule out recording media as a factor in the grand unifying principle.

Let me recall the principle. The principle is that reacting from fear, rather than reason, just gets you more stuff to be afraid of. So, generally, whenever the public is afraid of some so-called threat, even a threat that is non-emergent, that’s been around since the beginning of time, and didn’t just land on our doorsteps today, the public can be induced to look the other way when the government orders everybody but its own employees to do something about it, resulting in illegality.

I illustrated the problem with a practice I learned about in my cab-driving days. When the police in Seattle want to break up a domestic violence situation, they often commandeer cabs and order the drivers to kidnap one of the parties. They don’t call it kidnapping, they call it telling the driver to take them where they (the police) say to take them, but you know it’s kidnapping when the party in question says, “I don’t want to go where the police say I should go, I want to go to the Seven-Eleven, and if you don’t take me there I’m jumping out of this cab while it’s moving and getting a lawyer and suing you from here to Jankistan.”

So far as I know this practice is still going on. No legislature ever authorized it. No cab driver has ever been deputized to do the police’s business and take people places against their will. The police never offer to even pay for the commandeering of the cab drivers’ services, the kidnap-ees are supposed to pay to be kidnapped! The practice isn’t enforced with court orders; it’s enforced with physical intimidation. Or, as in my case, with actual police violence, following a “failure of communication.”

Which is what we have in this instance, with Google. The government demands they turn over their records of searches. Now, farmers farm dirt. Bus companies bus people and luggage. Mercenaries deal in hurt and death, anything but mercy. Search engines store and move information. And here it comes to pass that the Department of Justice demands that they turn such information over, at their own cost and at their own liability, without one stitch of legislation authorizing the commandeering of any company for such purposes. Communism!

Presented with demands from a government that has all the biggest guns and the world’s biggest army in history, it wouldn’t be surprising if Google caved and preferred to risk litigation from the ACLU rather than from the United States. Why not? Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL all wimped out.

But Google didn’t. Way to go, Google!

Read About Sex Here

If you're like me (and pray to your favorite power source you aren't) you like to sit all day. And when you sit all day staring at a computer, like I do, you get tired of it just sitting there staring back at you with the same cute kitty picture in the background, or whatever. So you push buttons and try to make the screen do stuff.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that one of the things I make my computer do is fetch news stories for me. This is how I, a man who hates to leave his chair even to collect free food, came to know a while back that a rooster in a town in New Zealand was suspected of carrying a bomb. I did not go to New Zealand. I simply read about it in a newspaper story, which I found on-line. I think I had googled "New Zealand terrorist chickens" during an extreme boredom fit. Or some such thing. ("To google" = "to use the Google internet search engine.")

This morning I did something similar. I tried to google "Downing St. Memo." I expected that a story of the magnitude of the Downing St. Memo story had been written up thousands of times, as would be revealed when I searched Google News from among their more than 4000 news sources. But only 27 stories popped up.

Let's put that into perspective. It has been less than a day since Russell Crowe threw a phone at some guy, and the story of his arrest has already appeared in over 300 news outlets.

So, I thought, maybe I'm asking for the wrong thing. The Downing St. Memo isn't really a memo at all, I thought. It's actually the official British Government minutes of a secret July 2002 British Government meeting called to discuss secret talks between a British representative and the Bush Administration in April of that year, concerning Bush war plans for Iraq, proving that he lied for months to the American people about his intentions, I thought. So I should drop the word "memo" and add the word "minutes", and google the phrase "Downing St. Minutes."

For just a few seconds it looked as though I was making progress! Instead of only 27 stories I found a whopping whole 49! A stunning improvement! Then I looked at what stories I really got and found that all of the new stories I had picked up were sports stories and one from something called "Boston's Weekly Dig" which had an article on 74 Things to Do This Summer. Number one: "Get drunk at Fenway Park." The word "downing" appeared in a passage that discussed the possibility of downing gallons of cocktails in the company of hairy gay men, the event described as "running with the bears." "Minutes" referred to minutes on a ferry boat ride, presumably also spent getting drunk.

OK, eventually Anitra "born to google" Freeman showed me that I needed to spell out "Street," finally getting me just under 500 hits. But, this is for a story that's had over a month to spread.

Googling "Michael Jackson trial" netted 13,300 hits! Even a story as recent as the coming out of Deep Throat got me over 5000 hits, and that's after googling "Mark Felt Deep Throat," rather than just "Deep Throat."

What does it take to get the world's press to take a story seriously? Evidently only six things matter: Sex, booze, sex, celebrities, drugs, and sex. Michael Jackson's trial has at least five of them. The Russell Crowe story has two of them (if he wasn't drunk that would be news), while writing about the Deep Throat story confers license to write "Deep Throat" over and over again, so there's your sex, sex, sex.

Question: Why does everybody know about Abu Graib and almost nobody knows about the Downing St. Memo? Answer: No one was naked at the Downing St. meeting.