"I am not a witch" is added to the political lexicon

Did people react like this during the Great Depression? Did they vote for dimwits like Christine O'Donnell? Sadly, they nearly did, there being no real "good old days" in the real world. As a matter of fact, people acted about as crazy as they are now, albeit with better results. True, the New Deal didn't go far enough--thanks to the business sector--but at least they voted for FDR.

Americans are a pretty nutty bunch, and O'Donnell just reminds us of this fact. Being "nutty" is alright at parties, but not likely to get good results as a congressional representative, especially a Senator. Yet, nutty is what we tend to elect. O'Donnell is another kind of nutty altogether, however, not that she's hateful.

Fine, lots of young women screw around with the Occult during their teen years, sit on a Satanic altar on their first date...they don't? Really? Whoopsie! Hey, when I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Remember 1999? Me either! What were you having for lunch on June 21st of that year? Me either! Remember the impeachment hearings of Bill Clinton? Remember unlimited credit disguising the fact that Americans were making shit wages, even then? What a time! But it had to end, like all false Edens.

O'Donnell said this on her 1999 Bill Maher appearance (apparently, she blew the entire production staff, starting with Maher): "One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that," she says. "We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar." As nutty as it sounds, I know of a woman from college who did this! "A little blood"?! OK, we don't want to start throwing the blood libel around here. Would this be tolerated from a Democratic candidate or anyone on the Left? Of course not.

Let's be clear: this isn't "normal" behavior, even to someone like myself who doesn't even believe in the Christian cosmology and certainly doesn't believe in the Devil, Belial, Cheeseburglar, and all shim's other supposed guises. Interestingly, we've gone from denying that we're actually the Devil (Nixon, during the Watergate hearings in 1973) in our politics to denying that we're a holder (witch) of the franchise license (O'Donnell), like a local businessperson who owns a Howard Johnson's (who?). OK, fine, you're not a Republican, just nuts...

So, here were are, 37 years later from the Watergate hearings, and somehow, some way, the GOP is still around. We've gone from "I am not a crook," to the obvious detached insanity of "I am not a witch." If that's not a warning sign with the bodies of dead canaries littered all around it, I don't know what is. What a fuckin' bimbo in our political stasis and limbo. We probably deserve her winning the election. Now dance, bitch...er, witch.

Gimp of the perverse: The loves of Jack Burkman, Part I

The Beltway--Where does one even begin with someone like this? At least he's complicated, and if you think not, read on. I've established contact with several former (what would the word even be? lovers? victims?) women who have endured the unfortunate attentions of lobbyist and GOP media pundit, Jack Burkman, Jr. The deeper you dig into the lives and behaviors of people like this, the more you begin to realize how damaged they are and that behind all of the bluster is a very sad individual who needs help. Where do the problems begin? Where else but in the home, during child-rearing.

Not that it's some kind of immutable law, but the "Jr." part of his name itself suggests a patriarchal family culture, and indeed, my suspicions were confirmed by one woman who dated Burkman nine years ago when he was just becoming known as a media figure, thanks-in-part to people like Bill Maher (thanks for nothing, Bill) for putting him on their programs for the sake of "fairness" and "balance." Had they really meant it, they wouldn't have bothered in the first place. It should be noted that Maher himself is well known for his own womanizing and has illustrated some arch-conservative tendencies over the years that don't speak well for him. Burkman represents all kinds of institutions and individuals as a lobbyist as well as in his role as a conservative (I use the term very loosely here since he's assisting selfish interests in gorging at the public trough) pundit. If only this was all he did.

Burkman's past support and shilling for the Rev. James Dobson's "Focus on the Family/The Family Research Council" is consistent with a patriarchal demeanor. But there are some indications that he's bored with it all and yearns for a modern woman with intellect, wit, and some kind of a sense of self somewhere in the mix, and he wasn't alone in this with the other privileged former clients of the DC Madam's prostitution ring, Pamela Martin & Associates which catered to men wanting "intelligent and educated" escorts. Some of the women he's dated are impressive, smart, witty (not merely attractive), and he warms to this to some extent. You could say that the dirty politicians and lobbyists are intellectually-sexually starved and find their fiefdoms in hell boring and confining, like anyone with a meaningless career or job.

A very recent date of Burkman's conveyed this to me:

He also acted genuinely surprised to find out that I wasn't a whore, and that I did not want his money. It makes me feel sorry for the man, but he dug his own grave with that one. He started talking to me about marriage (on the second date!) and told me repeatedly, "Honey you should get married. I can't believe you're not married, a girl like you.I can't believe a guy hasn't married you yet." So weird. Then he asked me if I wanted children. It scared me.

He told me honestly that I wasn't a whore, and that so many girls he met were whores (well if they're prostitutes ...) and I said something about having a nihilistic view on life and he jumped as if surprised to learn I knew the meaning, or as he said, "the correct meaning of that word," and that it had been so long since he had been with a girl who knew the word, at least the correct meaning.

But it depends on who's he "dating" at the time, and old habits die hard. The cynicism seems to rear its ugly head first. Does this sound like someone who's torn? But he was impressed with this woman's intellect and warmed to it. This speaks well for him in a general sense and raises the question of whether he feels trapped in the life he's been drawn into as a conservative media pundit and an advocate for things that he probably doesn't believe in, maybe just marginally and out of convenience rather than actual conviction. As the lady stated, "he dug his own grave with that one." The bars may be gold, but a cage is still a cage, and he has the intellect to appreciate this.

Yes, Burkman has a dark side as well, as strange as this is going to read to people aware of his general demeanor since for many that's the only side they ever see. One recent (this year) "paramour" put it like this:

I don't think in his mind, he thinks that there is anything wrong with what he does. His morals are screwed up. He treats women like whores but he promotes family values, he even did work for the FRC. After I called him a wolf, he looked a little mad and disappointed and said, "You looked me up." That is when he got really defensive and told me he did proposition those girls, but so what, anyone would have, but that he never payed [sic] for prostitutes [sic] in his life, that he would never pay for sex. [a patent lie on his part] I didn't say anything after that because he obviously did not see the connection between the two.

Burkman apparently also walks with a limp, like some perverse character out of Gothic literature, rather than a middle-class man with an Ivy League education. However, Burkman's not a physically unattractive man by any means and suffers from a foreshortened leg and soul, which is why you would associate him with someone as nefarious as the ectomorph Rev. James Dobson and the lamentable Bush-Cheney campaign of unfortunate years past. The list of his righist hack credentials is substantial as even a brief visit to his website will illustrate, and he was even intimately involved in the attempt to impeach former President Bill Clinton for the very behavior he and his peers on the right engage in regularly.

In 2000:

I first met Jack in the bar at the Capital Grille (a popular lobbying/political hang out). I didn't notice the limp then, but when I picked him up for our dinner date I saw that it appeared like he was dragging one foot behind. I asked if he had recently hurt himself and he said he was born with one foot shorter than the other (why he doesn't wear a corrective shoe is beyond me). So he has a very distinct gait.

This is just my amateur armchair analysis, but I'm guessing he has a lot of anger and desire to prove himself (last kid picked for sports, teased about it, etc.). I can't prove any of that but he has this angry drive about him flavored with a lot of sarcasm & cynicism. [this indicates unhappiness with the state of things] I also made a comment about how women look to see how their boyfriends treat their mother as an indication of how they'll be treated and he absolutely howled at that, telling me "[H]oney, you're barking up the wrong tree then."Not a fan of Mom.

But his father must have called him 25 times one night when I was over. He let it go to the answering machine every time. His father was watching political talk shows and calling Jack every few minutes with a comment or opinion.Very close to his father.

I'm not a member of the psychiatric community either, but some things are simply obvious here, and I should add that Burkman's not a very good liar when he's occasionally exposed to genuine scrutiny, spouting half-truths when he's cornered as most scoundrels tend to do. But that's how liars and criminals behave, and he's represented more-than-a-few in the last decade. I believe these women and what they have had to say. Incredible resources and effort are constantly being marshaled to protect these men from scrutiny, something one would associate with the apparatchiki of the Soviet system.

Indeed, it's good to have friends in the corporate-owned mainstream media to cover for you and your misbehavior, and political appointees in the federal bureaucracy to pressure law enforcement to stand down. By admitting in his public denials of being in the DC Madam's phone records and admitting that he spoke to mainstream media-outlets who then took him at his word, he has basically lied on multiple occasions. The first lie is certain: He was in the DC Madam's phone records, and it's even money that mainstream journalists really did talk to him and were told to stand down either by their editors or the owners of those publications and/or wire services. Why? To keep the game going, to keep money coming from the public trough to dirty corporations and government contractors, and even towards rightist religious institutions. To preserve the unaccountable power of criminals.

What a waste of a man. What a waste of an education. What a waste of this, the final democratic experiment in the history of the human race, a species assuredly headed for oblivion thanks to people like Jack Burkman, Jr. and the people pulling his strings. How can someone like this live with themselves? Therein is part of the reason behind the sexual addiction. Sad. Pathetic. True.

The End?

Religulous (2008)

You know, Bill Maher is a smarmy, egomaniacal asshole, a complete jerk. I wasn't going to bother watching this movie when my brother called me about wanting to see it. We almost never see movies together, maybe every five-years-or-so. What did I have to lose?

So I went, and my brother showed-up about five-minutes-in claiming it took a flying saucer to get him there--something like that. Then he started shouting at the screen unintelligibly, throwing popcorn everywhere like a Hunter S. Thompson sidekick. Anyway, I would have been missing-out had I not taken him up on seeing this very provocative movie.

I can't say that I expected much: Maher's HBO shows like "Politically Incorrect" and "Real Time," are reasonably popular but also tend to showcase Maher's egocentricity and brand of reactionary assholism. The comedian frankly reminds me of his personal friend Dennis Miller whose long-lost career as a comedian caused him to go begging around at Fox News for a job at...being who he really was all-along, an arch-conservative, reactionary asshole. Maher strikes me as different, but with tendencies towards the same direction as his pal Miller. It's isn't that I don't agree with him much of the time; it's how he tends to come-off, which is as a cocksure materialist Hollywood asshole.

And yet, here in his film "Religulous," he's correct again and a much more restrained kind of asshole.

The film is a kind of documentary with more than a few nods to Michael Moore's style, interspersing the interviews with rapid-fire retorts from Maher and company in the form of excerpts from cruddy Hollywood biblical epics (think Cecil B. Demille), dorky religious "educational" films, and from news archives. It's a very effective style, especially when Maher goes as far as to have text-comments responses and observations on the screen when he's sparring with various religious idiots of various persuasions. This makes for a very funny approach that gets a lot of well-earned laughs for their wit and concision. At times, Maher competes with Lenny Bruce in how astute and unique his observations are, but like Lenny, he has similar limitations.

But how can you beat those Christian creationist-themed museums and amusement parks? One can imagine hipsters running-roughshod over each other to get into the places to experience them in an "elevated" state of consciousness...

One might call the film's approach to its subject unfair, but this is also entertainment, let's face it. It's hard to say how much input the oddly-attired director Larry Charles (Borat) had in all of this, though it appears that most of the time all he and Maher had to do was to concoct a few meetings and scenarios, write a few questions, and let their camcorders record what happened after that. This is a simple and economical way of film-making in many respects since the comedian has a decades of improvisational experience. Several reviews have stated that Maher picked straw-man opponents who were easy targets for a man who's done stand-up comedy and media appearances for 30 years, yet you don't tend to get this impression watching the film. That's a red herring argument. He approached believers, the main criterion. It's about faith, stupid.

Yes, sometimes one could say that Maher's "rude" and even "pointed" in his interrogations (sorry, couldn't pass on that one), that he's "unfair" and "biased" in his sense of "superiority," but they're simply missing-the-point. It's doubtful that very many religious thinkers and fundamentalists were going to talk to him at all, so he took a more "populist" approach and went out to talk to the rank-and-file, really the most important part of religion as a problematic part of human life and culture.

One specific interview with a UK Pakistani rapper Aki Nawaz (aka Propa-Gandhi) who extols religious intolerance and war makes a good argument for the renewal of Paki-bashing, though his his subject does a much better job at undermining his arguments than Maher does. Nawaz is clearly an idiot and a hypocrite, but you have to show these people for what they are. Some have written that Maher won't let the bizarre rapper get a word in edgewise, but when you see the lyrics to his raps on a split-screen, it's forgivable. It's one of the few times he does it in the entire film.

This is what's so impressive about the movie itself: Maher is generally known for being much more hyperbolic and confrontational than this, and he tends to let his subjects skewer themselves, often just posing a few reasonable questions and listening to the absurdities flowing from them. Granted, when he hits, he hits hard, but he's not being unfair here. The man has certainly grown and I'm impressed.

But then, there's the faults in the film (though they're few): Maher does a strange thing and trots in Jewish Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta sect who's against the existence of the state of Israel (an "anti-Zionist") on theological-grounds. This is where Maher strays badly, as there's an inverse to the rabbi in the far-right Israeli and international Jewish community's--and strongly religious--reasoning of a sole Jewish stake in Palestine. This is just one example of the comedian's arch-conservatism inside and outside of the film. Indeed, Maher shows us how truly bizarre and wrong Judaism and most other major faiths are, but he makes an exception with the rabbi, exposing his own very slanted bias about the Palestinian question. This isn't to say that he's "wrong"--his very strong opinions for a Jewish state are valid after the Holocaust. They ring true, as Western history has amply illustrated. As a matter of fact, the core of his own reasoning here is more-than-valid, and Jews have good cause to aspire to statehood for logical security reasons. But he's making a very odd exception here that's troubling, and like most Jewish statists, he goes too far, just as Yisroel Dovid Weiss and his inverted opponents. When Maher walks-out on him, it's unsurprising, and I don't support his views here at all.

Yet, with 1 billion Muslims in the world, and 14 million Jews, his opinion is not unwarranted. What he misses, however, is that Israel is still being used a client state to control, destabilize, and divide the Middle East for geopolitical aims. Once it was the Romans, now it's the Americans and the rest of the West, hungry for cheap oil. In some ways, he misses his own point underscored at the end of the film. Whether his omissions are intentional or just a matter of running time, or just too many roads to go down, is the question. One could go on-and-on about the Palestinian question, and Maher probably saw a real quagmire in his section on Judaism and so just stuck to more superificial-aspects of how wacky the Orthodox version of the faith really is (trust me, it is). For the record, this writer believes that Israel has the right to exist, as does a Palestinian state and that it should be brokered diplomatically rather than through violence by all parties.

Even with its problems, Maher and Charles have made a very accessible argument for why religious belief is a "plague" (stated not by Maher, but by a Vatican astronomer) infecting humanity.

One of his finest-points is about Islam: like Christianity, it's undeniably a conquest faith that nowadays has very little tolerance for the beliefs of others on almost any level, and that's coming directly from the Koran. Judaism is essentially the same these days in its statist incarnation, but a quick look at the Torah (the "Old Testament" to Christians) offers-up numerous examples of conquest and even genocide by the tribes of Israel.

What's so interesting and enjoyable about Religulous are the gaggle of morons he interviews and just how obviously hypocritical (and possibly nuts) many of them are. His interview with Senator Mark Pryor, a faux-Democrat from Arkansas, must be seen to be believed. At one point, Pryor admits, "There's no I.Q. test to be a senator." No shit? There should be, even trumping election results if they don't pass. While we're at it, how about a mandatory psychological examination for office-holders as well? The audience I watched the film with all laughed very heartily over Pryor's statement, their chortles coming from the news of our current economic crisis and the last eight years of misgovernance. Hey, people still went to the movies when the Great Depression was on, so why can't we?

Perhaps the biggest hole in the film is the exclusion of other major religions, though they're tapped by the film by-implication. Surely, though, we could have seen how ridiculous many Eastern religions are, especially Hiduism with its castes and absurd rules and laws dictating behavior. There are so many other examples as to be dizzying, and that's part of the answer. Maher goes after the "worst offenders," the major world religions. He might have included Buddhism, though it really does struggle to match the absurd credulities required to be a follower of Islam and Christianity.

Maher's most successful accomplishment is in illustrating that religion has enslaved humanity to the few for millenia, and he deserves a great deal of credit for stating it where he states it. The majority of us know about the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the crusades and Islamic holy wars that spread the faiths across the globe, and violently more often than not. We all know this. Truisms don't need repeating. That's one of the main messages of the film itself--the toxic-effect religion has had on humanity is well-known from the historical record, and talking with biblical scholars isn't going to shed much more light either as they tend to agree generally with Maher on the oddness of literalism and fundamentalism in religion rather than a symbolical or allegorical reading of the "sacred texts." No film--even one five-hours-long--could adequately address all of this. Good job, and we "non-believers" have a lot of work to do.