Garry Wills, polishing the roob, pleads to and for Obama in latest NYRB:
I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.America's dickheads and assholes would call Obama weak and unpatriotic, call him guilty of sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, of betraying the service dead, of appeasing the enemy, if Obama decreed tomorrow that every Muslim on the planet must die and started lobbing nukes on Tehran and Damascus and that mosque in Potomac.
I love the NYRB, have been a subscriber for thirty years, it's arguably the preeminent journal of America's Left intelligentisia (or of the New York and Ivy League Left intelligentsia), but Wills pathetic plea is embarrassing: Wills assumes that either Obama can't leave Afghanistan because of pressure from the Right or won't because of concern for his reelection when it's simply a matter that Obama doesn't want to: he believes in the mission.
- Let's get the Dolchstosslegend going!
- UPDATE! American priorities.
- The Communist Manifesto in Cartoon (which I post as much as a flashback - cartoon-wise - for farts my age as any reason else). (h/t)
- Defective Comics.
- Lacan and E-Mail.
- Comedy's Charcoal Age.
- Simplicity.
- American Democracy.
- I do hope Greenwald has bodyguards and never drinks from a glass he walks away from in company.
- Yup.
- Google pigoons and Atwood before reading today's Rich.
- The Palin Effect.
- Grifter.
- Conservative curve ball.
- Your Fucking Washington Post.
- Moron and fatfuck Shales, reviewing the new Prisoners remake: Strikingly photographed in starkest black and white, the '67 "Prisoner" was a curious and rather tantalizing melange of counterculture imagery, traditional paranoid fantasy and even a bit of Cold War spy thriller, with the spy stuff mostly expunged from what AMC calls its "reinterpretation" of the story.
- It's a couple of days late, but Trisketdekaphobia.
- More Elric in Nigeria. Since he's there, he might be interested in this.
- UPDATE! Even more Elric in Nigeria.
- The ad Typepad is running on its dashboard:
- Think: if blegs were a professional soccer shirt, that statement would be true, and think how weird soccer shirts look when teams are forced to play minus the logo.
- Berbatov is.... The Continental.
- Viers v Veirs: the story.
- Political activism in Kensington!
- ICC side-effects.
- Joe's Record Paradise! in Post because Joe smokes pot. Joe's Record Paradise was the best headshop in MOCO when MOCO had headshops. Or so I'm told.
- UPDATE! Sex in Fredneck.
- The worse uniform ever contest declares a winner.
- Union's new home shirt.
- Clowns wear all-black when their colors are red and white:
- An pox forever on Little Danny Helmetball, though wearing colors at home is a surprise and a plus:
- Barking Dog's Writer's Journal.
- More on the ascendancy of memoirs over fiction. You know, it's true on TV too.
- UPDATE! The review of but what interests me in UM's review of a book by Jonah Raskin is in the author photo, behind Raskin's left jowl, is M31 by Steven Wright.
- An American minimalist.
- Excellent bleggal-gazing: Sojourns in Meatspace.
- Here we are, stuck by this river.
- Beards per minute. UPDATE! More!
- Into you like a train.
- UPDATE! !wOOt! Plus Planet just called and said they're playing Lisner Auditorium on February 14, so Landru, Ilse, Hamster, Bromark, Elric, you want tickets, let me know, I might be able to take care of all my Giftmas shopping at once!
- Cartographic Study of Musical Incest.
- Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
- Touch me, I'm going to scream.
- Spiral Cliff.
- It's not alright.
- UPDATE! It's not up to you.
- Today's Listening Assignment.
- What's important.
A LETTER
Anthony Hecht
I have been wondering
What you are thinking about, and by now suppose
It is certainly not me.
But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering
Blood knows what it knows.
It talks to itself all night, like a sliding, moonlit sea.
Of course, it is talking of you.
At dawn, when the ocean has netted its catch of lights,
The sun plants one lithe foot
On that spill of mirrors, but the blood goes worming through
Its warm Arabian nights
Naming your pounding name again in the dark heartroot.
Who shall, of course, be nameless.
Anyway, I should want you to know I have done my best,
As I'm sure you have, too.
Others are bound to us, the gentle and blameless
Whose names are not confessed
In the ceaseless palaver. My dearest, the clear and bottomless
blue
Of those depths is all but blinding.
You may remember that once you bought my boys
Two little woolly birds.
Yesterday the older one asked for you upon finding
Your thrush among his toys.
And tides welled about me, and I could find no words.
There is not much else to tell.
One tries one's best to continue as before,
Doing some little good.
But I would have you know that all is not well
With a man dead set to ignore
The endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood.
Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, in hopes of changing my mood:








