or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
June 06, 2007
Freakier Than Holsinger
As you may have already seen, Dr. James Holsinger, Bush's nominee for Surgeon General, is very concerned about gay men and their "anal eroticism." Indeed, like most extremely manly men, he spends a lot of time thinking about this. I'm guessing that, at least when he was younger, he thought about it four or five times a day.
So everyone's getting a good laugh about this. But Bush & co. work out their peculiar psycho-sexual obsessions in ways far more serious than this.
Take Eliot Cohen, for instance. Cohen wrote the Air Force's study of the effects of air power during the Gulf War. Later he was a founding member of Project for a New American Century. And now he works for Condoleezza Rice in one of the State Department's most prominent positions.
And this is what Eliot Cohen wrote about bombing other countries in 1994:
Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.
Ha ha ha! Yes, killing thousands of people with high explosives is sort of like sex out of wedlock! What a witty, apt comparison!
These people are the world's most genuine perverts.
Posted at June 6, 2007 10:29 PM | TrackBackPeople like him are one of the big reasons why real antisemitism (not 'antisemitism' defined as opposition to Israel) isn't going to die out anytime soon.
Posted by: anon at June 7, 2007 12:14 AMThanks, anon. This site has suffered for far too long from a lack of creepy comments.
Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at June 7, 2007 12:17 AMI strongly suspect that Holeslinger will go down in the anals of history.
Posted by: rob payne at June 7, 2007 12:30 AMannie, this is why we must privatize Social Security.
Yes, the opinions of one Jewish neocon are liable to foment raging anti-Semitism. I still haven't forgiven the Italians for Caligula.
Posted by: StO at June 7, 2007 02:24 AMPremature incineration, it's an E.D. problem.
Posted by: Mike Meyer at June 7, 2007 09:17 AMThese people are the world's most genuine perverts.
Such as that defender of family values (whose name escapes me) who observed that, as with all boys who grow up on farms, his first sexual experiences had involved livestock.
Posted by: Gag Halfrunt at June 7, 2007 11:37 AMGoddam.
I mean, really goddam. That air power line is unreal. These people are seriously crazy.
Posted by: Batocchio at June 7, 2007 03:26 PMThe bus pulls out and WE'RE on the ride. (everyone's a bozo on this bus)
Posted by: Mike Meyer at June 7, 2007 06:56 PMMaybe the urge to surge is the result of OTHER unfulfilled urges.
This is why you can take a leaf from the Greeks: Spartans and Athenians alike. I mean, hell, they were all as well known for their anal adventures as their military ones, and maybe that was what really kept them from even killing as many of each other (and those Persians too) off as they could have had.
Posted by: En Ming Hee at June 7, 2007 07:01 PMCohen is not "seriously crazy." He was warning about the very real appeal of airpower as a tool of coercion, addressing clueless policy elites who want to wield a big stick without putting boots on the ground, thinking to avoid messy consequences. What's wrong with his analogy?
Posted by: Ralph Hitchens at June 12, 2007 04:52 PM
