The usual atmospherics are pumped up -- sudden panic and fear, an elusive and ubiquitous enemy that assumes many guises and shapes, cherry-picked information to provide a patina of verisimilitude to the danger, followed by a march of authority figures to rescue us.

For the embattled Bush, filled with "self-confidence," the "motives" he doesn't wish critics to examine turn out to be far more utopian than the military success of the surge, as he explained to his conservative interlocutors.

"There is such a thing as the universality of freedom. I strongly believe that Muslims desire to be free just like Methodists desire to be free."

Beneath the seething chaotic violence, beyond the tribal and religious strife, past the civil war, the Iraqis, according to the president, under their robes are no different from American Methodists.

There's nothing more to understand. If only we can prevail, they can be just like us. The rest is marketing   more »

Shouldn't one's overall happiness -- physical, marital or otherwise -- be directly equated with exceptional amounts of sexual training and education and awareness?

Isn't such positively libidinous education not a recipe for health and well-being?

Girls should know how to handle their own genitalia. Experimental sex should be encouraged from an early age.

Arm your virgin daughters and inept sons with slick and giddy reverence for the joys of the flesh, for its potential to transform and ease tension and make you realize all is not so wrong and sinful and hateful with the world.

Would we not be utterly transformed? Would we not finally be free of the sneering, churlish mentality that somehow thinks virgins are dumb, immaculate prizes to be won? Let's just say it: There is no sacredness in the virgin.   more »

Another Gay-bashing, Klan-loving, Pulpit-Slurping, Republican has disgraced himself.

No, make that two.

Let's start with the Christian Coalition's favorite son, Louisiana senator David Vitter.

There's not enough Boudreaux Buttpaste in the world that can wipe-clean a career like Vitter's-- now better known as The Guy Who Frequents Prostitutes and Asks To Wear a Diaper.

Apparently the whores of New Orleans call him "Vitter the Shitter." And don't even ask about his love child -- who, one can only hope, is kept well-stocked with Pampers.

I hate the way a hypocrite like this can drag the good name of kinky sex through the mud.   more »

In their quest for evermore cash for their political war chests, Clinton and Obama are doing a pretty good job of wearing each other down - or of, at a minimum, replacing raw public enthusiasm for their campaigns with the more mundane emotion of genial familiarity.

This may increase the possibility of them being passed on the outside by Edwards, Richardson, or, conceivably, a late-entry Al Gore.

I guess it's even possible someone else could launch their own surge, though at this point I doubt it.

All the attention's been on the staggering amounts of cash the Obama and Clinton machines have generated; but a couple below-par performances in the early contests by either of these candidates could render the year-long pre-primary cash-padding process largely an irrelevance.   more »

Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in so-called free societies when I reported from totalitarian societies.

During the 1970s I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me.

"In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies.

"Unlike you in the West, We've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines. Unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."   more »

The assumed superiority of the Western way of life filters down to the citizens of empire by reinforcing and justifying their prejudices, fears and insecurities.

With ‘morality’ and ‘civilisation’ on our side, all manner of crimes can be condoned and a ‘consensus’ invoked which reinforces the daily diet of lies and disinformation. And when such a ‘consensus’ doesn’t exist, simply ignore it.

Thus the slaughter of innocents by remote control and thus devoid of a human component can never be called an act of terror but a single individual who sacrifices his or her life for a cause, is defined as a terrorist.

‘Terror’ is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. When ‘we’ slaughter hundreds, thousands of people, it is described as ‘collateral damage’, or a ‘regrettable incident’.   more »