The Rake Magazine

He'd be assassinated today, too.

I wasn't sure whether I should laugh or cry yesterday when I heard that Michele Bachmann had "scolded" the God Hates Fags protesters at the funeral of the Minnesota soldier who had been killed in Iraq. As Bachmann explained, it's not that God doesn't hate fags, it's just that he doesn't hate them enough to desecrate a soldier's funeral.

No, really. She just wants it put to a vote of the people of Minnesota as to whether or not God hates fags. Michele, do you really think the people of any state should get to vote on what God does or doesn't hate? That's what we have a legislature for, right? So, if you can just get your Senate colleagues to vote on what God hates or doesn't hate, that will just have to do. Leave the people out of it, because, frankly, if we've learned anything about what people will vote for these days, it's that they'll vote for damn near anything that fills their little minds with hateful crap.

Michele, you should consider the possibility that appendicitis is only the first warning that an overload of vile prejudice can cause pain...maybe pain sent from, yes, God. Sent to punish you. Yeah, I know the mind of God, too. That's it. You are in deep shit now.

I was sort of wondering as you were about to go under the knife, as the pain in your side gave way to the anasthesia, if a thought flashed through your mind: "God, please don't let my surgeon be gay."

The only thing that saved Michele from being the real highlight of my day, however, was the thought of George W. Bush spreading flower petals at the memorial to Mohandas Gandhi in India. You can't make up stuff like that.

It gives me a huge pain to even mention those two men in the same sentence. God, please give me a tiny portion of the Mahatma's capacity to forgive.

Never mind. Someday, Bush, when someone explains to you who Gandhi was (other than some guy in a Ben Kingsley movie) you'll be ashamed.

Actually, you probably won't.

"Ok, Cheney, just you and me. Shotguns at 10 paces."

I just couldn't let this go, but it popped onto my computer a few minutes ago when I used Yahoo for the first time in months. The headline that jumped at me was this: Bush Confident Bin Laden Will Be Captured.

Big talk from a guy who has spent four and one half years "hunting" Osama, which, in case you are keeping score, is now one year more than we spent on Adolf Hitler. And three years more than we spent deposing Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with attacking the United States, and couldn't have done so even if he wanted to...because he had no weapons.

The only more preposterous crap we've been hearing lately is from all the flacks telling us that there is no civil war in Iraq. Here's a clue, Sean Hannity: when there is a country that has two factions and those factions are trying their best to kill each other, that's the definition of a civil war.

I guess you could say it's not a civil war only if you don't admit that Iraq is really one country, and that countries don't really matter much at all in the Muslim world anyway. What does seem to matter is whether you are Sunni or Shiite. And if you define your boundaries that way, we don't have a civil war, we have a world war in the making, with the world's oil supply right in the middle.

And when that all goes to hell, Hugo Chavez will be holding a lot of cards in the big game. When are we planning to topple his statue in Caracas?

How can you not love ice dancing?

I'm back after a week of visiting a tropical isle where my only form of mental exertion was figuring out how to bash tennis balls back in the general direction of their origin without having to stop sipping on my rum drinks. I couldn't quite get it right so I retreated to the veranda to spend my time on trashy novels without having to worry about yellow projectiles upsetting my mojito schedule.

So, I missed the two big stories of the week: the Cheney shooting and the Olympic snowboarder who tried a trick as she was headed for the gold medal and fell on her ass. Which is more "dog bites man" I wondered, when I got back yesterday: Cheney not giving a shit about who gets hurt, or a snowboarder being a show off? Didn't give it too much thought as I concentrated on getting back to a place with a television and renewing my quadrenninal love affair with ice dancing.

But, in the cold light of a Minnesota Monday, I thought of some more similarities between the two non-stories. Other than the disdain they truly deserve, it's that the press seems to elevated them both, particularly the Cheney story, to the level of say, a Presidential blow job.

It doesn't take much to distract the press from the boring work of actually doing some work. Bush going on the stump behind his cynical "addicted to foreign oil" crap? Who cares what's behind that? That would require doing some background stories on what Bush's energy policy has been to date. Oh, yeah, I forgot that's secret.

I could come up with some more, but I have to only 50 pages left to find out if Dirk Pitt gets the girl and the treasure. (Sorry, fell asleep on the plane.)

But you get the point: any fortuitous incident that can be covered with a minimum of reportorial expertise and a minimum expectation of the attention span of the audience is just what our press is after today.

What's next? Somebody's house burning?

Film at 10.

If you haven't stumbled upon this site yet, you should check out MNstories.com. Every day a new short video with some connection to all of us. Yesterday was a cat, today is The Red Tail, a short from a longer film about Northwest Airlines. One line from the MNstories excerpt struck me: "If we can't save the jobs, what's the point of saving Northwest Airlines."

Check out mnstories. A three minute break in your day can't hurt.

"If we don't wiretap, the Quakers will win"

I'm getting more perplexed by the Democrats every day. Although Senator Leahy made logical mince meat out of Alberto (Torquemada) Gonzales yesterday, of course, nothing will come of the inquisition into Bush's warrantless wiretapping of Americans as long as the Republicans are in power.

Logically, it seems Congress would want to maintain its status as an equal branch of government by clearly declaring that they make the laws and the president has to follow them. The Foreign Intelligence Security Act is pretty clear (and damn lenient) about getting warrants to listen to American conversations. It clearly says that its process is the only legal process for doing so. One can only logically infer from Bush's breaking this law that he has something to hide--such as exactly who is being listened to.

Yet, Bush and his apologists pretty much have said, "We're above the law." And, oh by the way, "Congress, you can go to hell."

I heard Diane Feinstein (another spineless Democrat) on the radio this morning. She said the matter will probably end up in the Supreme Court. Well, here's some news for you, Diane. As of last week Bush owns the court too, because you and your 44 colleagues were too damn chicken to stop Alito's confirmation, even after he said in the hearings that the President was pretty much a dictator, and that was ok with him.

Diane, the correct way to have this out is to have the House impeach Bush for breaking the law. That leads to a trial in the Senate, as I'm sure you must remember from the critical Clinton oral sex auto de fe.

Congress better get its act together on this, or it will find itself even more irrelevant than it already is. And you know if that happens, lobbyists won't even bother with you any more. They'll just go straight to the top and you'll have to pay for your own golf trips.