I (speakingcorpse) will have more to say later about the novelist Gary Indiana's eloquent review of President Clinton's autobiography, but I thought I'd alert you to it and present you with a passage. It seems that Indiana (who refers to Midge Decter's biography of the clinically psychotic torture-advocate Donald Rumsfeld as an example of "coprophagia") is a new avatar of the AmCop spirit:


"I will leave it to others to parse whether it is preferable, given the systemic and implacable evils of maintaining an empire that is inherently vampiric and suicidal, to have its declining years managed by Rapture-hungry mental dwarves, cretinous judges flapping about in Iolanthe-inspired Inquisition costumes of their own design, and megalomaniacs of indeterminable species such as Richard Perle; or by a plain-talking arriviste who can't resist a Big Mac and a strawberry milk shake, and once in a while needs a blowjob from somebody he isn't married to. I happen to think it does make a difference what kind of arse sits in the Oval Office and whether he governs with a sense of his own transience and imperfection or uses fear and intimidation to whip the population into line with whatever brand of pious bullshit makes him feel like Superman. For people who truly believe the Bush coup d'état has 'restored honor to the Presidency,' or however that tired tune goes, I recommend Bill Clinton's book as a good strong dose of the reality principle. Honorable people don't waste any time proclaiming how honorable they are, and sometimes honor consists in admitting you fucked up."

This is speakingcorpse once more.

I have some good news. The Southern Baptists, one of the nation's largest evangelical churches, whose membership consists almost entirely of old-fashioned Bible-belt Bush supporters, has rejected the Bush campaign's recent efforts to get hold of church membership lists so as to appeal directly to Christian Republicans. The campaign has 22 "coalition coordinators," people who work for Bush, and who are paid to go back to their personal churches and get out the vote. According to a campaign memo, the coordinators are supposed to:

*Send your church directory to your state Bush-Cheney '04 headquarters or give to a BC04 field representative.
*Identify another conservative church in your community who we can organize for Bush.
*Recruit 5 people in your church to help with the voter registration project.
*Talk to your pastor about holding a citizenship Sunday and voter registration drive.

Many liberal congregations have criticized the Bush campaign because if churches participate in this stuff, they may eventually have to have their tax-exempt status revoked. The campaign people insist that this won't happen, that participation will not turn churches from religious into political organizations. But the law is not clear. Anyway, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, says in this article that the Bush people have crossed a line: "It's one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the Kerry campaign. It's another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support." Well this isn't really telling Bush to go to Hell, but it is a rebuke. Hopefully, this will take a few votes out of Bush's so-called "base."


The man of sorrows, the atonement accomplished, his life ebbing...
Why was he forsaken?

Hello again. speakingcorpse here, still at the controls, sitting at the desk of Blicero, where I am accompanied by two cats, whose inherent wordless dignity rebukes me for degrading myself by ingesting items of "news information" supplied by the machinery within this God-forsaken computer.

Having spent the last few minutes reading what brain-damaged bloodthirsty corpse-lovers have to say about Michael Moore, I feel deeply and irreversibly degraded. I am becoming, I fear, poisoned by what I read; merely responding to these "news articles" involves me in the death-process that has irreversibly overtaken the "journalists" that have produced them. Even as I write these words, I feel myself becoming, like CBS Early Show hostess "Hannah Storm," a piece of human shit. (It's remarkable the way the hostess's obviously made-up name itself announces that the entity to which it refers is not worthy of a real human name.)

At this point, the best I can say for Michael Moore--and I mean it as the highest praise--is that he is not yet human shit, not yet soiled beyond recognition by the people he has to deal with on a day to day basis as he plugs his masterpiece, "Fahrenheit 9/11." Make no mistake: the film, because it can be received as a human product even as it circulates through the media cesspool, is an historic masterpiece. It is a masterpiece because it is not shit. It does not lie; it does not celebrate mechanical corpse-production; it does not laugh in the face of the dying; it does not hypnotize its viewers with images of necrophilia, thereby inducing a guilt that can only be expiated by their own blind submission to a barely audible high-pitched hum that emerges from behind their televisions. Therefore it is a masterpiece. This is the basic point of Paul Krugman's New York Times column today. The movie shows us footage we haven't seen. It insists that Bush does not even deserve death, as he is undead excrement. It shows us human beings suffering, and contrasts this suffering with the passionless life of human shit. It therefore rises effortlessly above the media realm it surveys, exposing it is a landscape decorated with corpses and shit-sculptures.

See also this excellent column by Matt Taibbi. Taibbi denounces Christopher Hitchens, whom I would happily bludgeon to death, and he points out that it is absurd to get into any sort of detail-worrying discussion of the pluses and minuses of Moore's film when the "real" "journalists" deserve to be "be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona."

Finally, and most importantly, please visit the CBS Early Show webpage, where, in the upper left corner, you can click on the video link entitled "Michael Moore Tees Off." The video shows an interview of Moore in which he humiliates--if it is possible to humiliate somthing inhuman--the semblance of a female countenance that has been labeled "Hannah Storm," which apparently functions as the hostess of that program.

This is speakingcorpse posting again.

My first reaction to Nicholas Kristof's latest offering (it is an offering in precisely the way the shit of an infant or domesticated animal is an offering--the only thing it can give to its caretaker, and thus necessarily, when produced, a gift)--my first reaction was weary disgust and scorn. I thought, here is this Kristof, another so-called liberal, masturbating in public, worrying about whether Michael Moore is acting decorously and admirably, even as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Limbaugh, Murdoch, O'Reilly, Mellon-Scaife, Scalia, et al., have already inserted a missile deep into Kristof's asshole (and they've put missiles in the asses of the rest of us, too) and lit the fuse. I thought to myself that Kristof will still be having this public conversation with himself about the higher standards "liberals" need to hold themselves to when the fuses burn up and the missiles explode. One second he'll be mumbling to himself about decency, and the next, a fireball will come pouring out of his mouth, exploding his head, spraying fragments of his skull across the surface of the newly incinerated earth. What, I thought, is Kristof doing but waiting to be killed? Is he suicidal?

But a day of reflection (Kristof presented us with his excretion yesterday) changed my persepctive. Kristof is not (or not just) suicidal. He is also obviously thirsty for the blood of his fellow citizens. Perhaps this is obvious, but I'll say it anyway: Michael Moore, whatever his flaws, is not lying when he presents Bush as reluctant to go after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with the full force of our military. The section of the movie that describes the Bush-Saud ties may not add up to a clear conclusion, and this may be frustrating; but Bush's reluctance to go after Al Qaeda is obvious, and it is so dangerous and stupid that it is impossible to account for it without impugning Bush's motives; and Bush's motives have to be somehow related to his family's ties to the house of Saud. Kristof's suggestion--repeated constantly by numerous liberal shit-eaters--that Moore objected in the film to the invasion of Afghanistan is a vicious slanderous lie. Anyone who watched the movie saw that Moore thought we did not go after Osama hard enough. Moore never says we invaded because of the Unocal pipeline; he suggests that the pipeline distracted Bush from the real business at hand.

Way too many smart people have been saying that Moore is the left's answer to Limbaugh. This is either a suicidal lie, a murderous lie, or both. Whatever Moore's inadequacies (including self-aggrandizement), they do not approach the systematic lying of the right's lying media "brownshirts" (to use Al Gore's word). Kristof says that Moore, and other "lefties," are now like Limbaugh because they call Bush a liar. Nothing Bush says is true (Kristof essentially acknowledges this), and yet to call him a liar is, according to Kristof, like calling Clinton a serial murderer. This is actually what the columnist for the New York Times newspaper says.

What is wrong with him? As I said, I first thought Kristof was merely guilty of liberal guilt, of suicidal nattering. If nothing Bush says is true, but he believes his own demented utterances, is he a liar, or merely deluded and incompetent? Kristof apparently thinks that dwelling on this absurd question is of paramount importance. But the fact that he thinks so, I've realized, can't be accounted for by referring only to Kristof's guilt complex, his wish to die. His remarks are so insanely irrelevant, so psychotically self-involved, so arrogant in their refusal to recognize the real political situation, the real dangers posed by people other than Michael Moore, that I have to conclude that Kristof actually hates not only himself, but all liberals, and indeed, the entire citizenry of the United States of America. He is actively and murderously trying to destroy not only himself but everyone around him.

This is speakingcorpse here, posting by myself for the first time, from the computer of Blicero:


Bad news for Red Sox fans (Yankees crush Sox) was offset earlier this evening by a display of generous, magnanimous, and strong-hearted humanity by tens of thousands of admirable New Yorkers in attendance at Yankee Stadium. Those at the game were treated very badly: having paid to see the baseball game, they learned during the seventh-inning stretch that they had been unwittingly forced to share the stadium with the dying asshole-birth, Dick "Dick" Cheney. He had been sitting with George Steinbrenner, in his private box, for part of the game, and between George "Half-Dead Droning Deflated Plastic Robot" Pataki and Rudoph "Thin-lipped Pointy-Nosed Corpse-Exploiter" Giuliani for the rest of the game. After "God Bless America" had been played during the seventh-inning stretch, the song and America itself were soiled by the idiots at Yankee Stadium who had already made the mistake of letting Giuliani, Pataki, and Cheney into the ballpark. The stadium staff apparently thought that the sentiment expressed in "God Bless America" should be associated with the deadly image of Cheney, who was shown, at the end of the song, on the stadium screen. The crowd could easily have rioted in respose, or left en masse, or tried to commit collective suicide with hot-dogs. But instead, the assaulted fans kept their presence of mind and simply booed. It was, as I said, a display of the best of the human spirit. Read about it here.

speakingcorpse writes:

Max Sawicky had a contest for "most vicious comment" in a blog featured on the blogroll of Glenn Reynolds, or Instapundit (by far the most-read right-wing blog, and probably the most-read blog in the whole blogosphere--he's a big law prof. in Utah). The idea was to counter Reynolds' constant scanning for "vicious" and dangerous comments that have appeared either in the comment threads of, or on blogs that are linked to, famous liberal blogs. Max's response was to ask readers to find the most vicious fascist remarks in Instapundit's comment threads, or in blogs like Little Green Footballs, which are on Instapundit's blogroll. Needless to say, Max ended up posting some horrifying stuff. Then he had a second contest, asking readers to find the "most vicious" stuff on blogs that are on the Maxspeak blogroll. This is kind of a celebration of angry writing, meant to contrast with right-wing fascist viciousness by being funny and interesting. So one of our Amcop readers (John Boy)nominated my thing on Russert's dad and the idea of praying for the Kent State murderers. And it's been chosen to be an official contest entry! It's on MaxSpeak now!

Blicero adds: The award-winning speakingcorpse post is "Do not ask for whom the flag waves. It waves for you" from 6/4/04.

Says Le Chien:

The only chance the left has at making gains in 04 is in Illinoise where the proletariat faction of the media has falsely disseminated perverted information about senatorial candidate Ryan.

Beware, Illinoise: it wasn't Jack Ryan who was perverted; it was the information about him.

Yes, says Dowd.

And plus, they're making videos with Hitler in it. If anyone asks you: you don't need to know anything about MoveOn.org, anything about Zack Exley, anything about Howard Dean or Al Gore. All you (and your friends and family) need to know is: The out-of-control Republicans are saying "Go fuck yourself" to Senators and making videos featuring Hitler.

Bush campaign = videos with Hitler.

Why does the Bush campaign need to put Hitler in its campaign videos? I guess they must like Hitler, or something.