In the montage, Pluto is urinating on a portrait of Mickey Mouse, while the real, bedraggled Mickey is shooting up heroin with a hypodermic needle.

His nephews are masturbating while they observe Goofy enjoying intercourse with Minnie Mouse on a combination bed and cash register. The beams shining out from the Magic Castle are actually dollar signs.

Dumbo the elephant is simultaneously flying and defecating on a furious Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey and Louie stare at Daisy Duck's anus as she watches the Seven Dwarfs groping Snow White.

The Prince is peeking at Cinderella's vulva while trying a glass slipper on her foot.   more »

'Everyone's a hero, everyone's a star," sings Jon Bon Jovi on his 2005 album, "Have a Nice Day." It's an insipid song, but a fitting anthem for what has become a thoroughly insipid age.

Once upon a time, you had to do something truly exceptional to qualify as a full-fledged hero: single-handedly hold off a battalion of enemy soldiers to allow your platoon to escape, or rescue 100 children from a Nazi concentration camp.

But today, just showing up at your Army recruiting station makes you an instant hero -- and getting yourself hurt or killed doubles your heroism, even if you were sound asleep when your supply convoy went over an IED.

The empty rhetoric of heroism is everywhere these days. You know what I mean. Pat Tillman -- the former NFL star -- is "an American hero," apparently because he volunteered for duty along with several hundred thousand other people, then had the misfortune to be 'accidentally' shot by his own side.   more »

The US & UK desperately hold on to illusions

about the situation in Iraq,

because the unvarnished truth is extremely disturbing.

Iraq's politics, as opposed to Iraq's grim daily ground-floor reality, increasingly resembles a game of illusions which those involved conspire to maintain or prolong. It is an Alice in Wonderland world - except there are no white rabbits disappearing down holes, let alone being pulled from hats.

In Washington, or at least in the White House, the official illusion, stoutly maintained, is that things are moving (if not surging) forward, that a process of achieving stability and benchmarks is in place, and that a military progress report - nothing more dramatic or cathartic - will be delivered to Congress next month.

A similar hall-of-mirrors stance has been adopted by Britain's Gordon Brown government, not so different after all from its Blairite predecessors.   more »

On August 7th, by hitting the ball out of the park for the 756th time, Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron's 33-year-old career home-run total, regarded as the greatest record in professional baseball history.

Yet even as San Francisco Giants fans hailed their hero, many other baseball fans across America were dismissing Bonds as a cheat, and his new record a travesty.

Among fans there is an OJ-style racial divide, with whites more willing to believe the circumstantial evidence against Bonds than his fellow African-Americans.

Many of them point out that the achievements of baseball's past [white] heroes (though not Mr Aaron, who is black) were artificially enhanced by segregation.

As Chris Rock put it after Bonds passed the home-run total of the legendary “Babe”, “Babe Ruth didn't play with no brothers. What is more of an advantage, a pill or racism?”   more »

What fun that Hillary Clinton called

Barack Obama's foreign policy notions naive

She should be rewarded for restraining herself this long. He is naive, as were his sophomoric statements during the YouTube debate, to which Clinton's response was directed.

It's the most defining distinction between the two candidates - where Clinton is nuanced, Obama is naive. As the former secretary of state, Madeline Albright, noted, Clinton's answer in the debate was very "sophisticated" and showed her "understanding of how the diplomatic tool needs to be used".

Not only in foreign policy, but everything about Clinton is nuanced. She's learned the hard way. She came to Washington in 1993 a wide-eyed idealist, although with far more experience than Obama has now, and she got smacked around by Congress.   more »