Marxist slur of the month*

The Republicans spout such freeform nonsense these days, that's it a shame to single out anyone of them for praise. But this week's belly laugh came courtesy of Republican Party chairman Jim Greer who last week accused the president of seeking to use his speech to the nation's school children as an opportunity to brainwash them with “socialist ideology”. Having read the text and found that all Obama did was tell them to stay in school and wash their hands, Greer graciously conceded, "In its current form, it’s fine. But it remains to be seen if it’s the speech he’s going to give.” Best be safe than sorry. Obama might momentarily break cover and start reciting Das Capital in a scary Exorcist voice which, run backwards, tells the little chilluns to kill grandma.

*In a fruitless effort to limit use of the terms Marxist, Communist, Socialist, and Nazi by politicians who haven't the foggiest what they mean.

It could all be so much simpler

"British terrorists planned to blow up at least seven transatlantic flights from London, murdering more than 1,500 people in a plot on a scale to rival the September 11 attacks, a jury found today... three men now face life sentences after being found guilty of conspiring to explode liquid bombs on airliners flying from Britain to North America." — The Guardian

There. What's so difficult about that? Terrorists are found guilty in a court of law on the basis of evidence, and sentenced to life in prison.* It sounds so breathtakingly simple compared to the snarl-up Bush has landed on Obama's desk. The US government, by contrast, can't prosecute because the only terrorists they've been able to lay their hands on are in permanent legal limbo. They can't present evidence because the evidence is tainted by torture. And nor can they sentence them to life in prison because the Republicans are busy spreading the belief that no prison is strong enough to hold them — that the terrorists will burn through any wall using their evil death rays, like the X-Men.

* Extra bonus: the eavesdropping that caught them was legal. Greenwald:

So here -- with this British Terrorist conviction -- we have the perfect template for how Terrorism can be effectively combated within the rule of law. Authorities learned of the plot through legal investigations involving warrants and FISA court supervision. The Terrorist suspects were not disappeared to a secret prison, nor held without charges, nor did they have confessions tortured out of them, and were not given some sham military commission; instead, they were charged with a crime, given a trial in a real court with due process, convicted by a citizen jury and then sentenced to long prison terms. It was all effectuated in accordance with legal means and basic precepts of justice.

Cinderella by Kurt Vonnegut

Silvers.org posts an account of a lecture given by Kurt Vonnegut on the need people have for drama in their lives.

“People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let's look at a few examples. Let's look at a very common story arc. The story of Cinderella. People love that story! This story arc has been written a thousand times in a thousand tales. And because of it, people think their lives are supposed to be like this."

Real life, he said, goes more like this:

"But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

What might have been

Debris from the World Trade Center is stored in an 80,000-square-foot hangar at Kennedy International Airport. The humidity is regulated so the steel does not rust. The FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who extracted page after page of actionable intelligence from Abu Zubaydah using nothing more than a plateful of Oreos (and whom the 9/11 commission deemed "one of the more impressive intelligence agents -- from any agency -- that we encountered in our work"), recently broke his silence:-

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out. Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

Quote of the day

"I complete me. I'm just lucky that after I completed myself, I met someone who could tolerate me" —Sandra Bullock

Nothing beats the wit of Rafael Nadal

I just saw Rafael Nadal play his fellow Spaniard Nicolas Almagro in the third round of the US open. There was one rally in particular that reminded me who I love tennis. I won't try and blind you with science, but basically Nadal hit it over the net. You thought to yourself: there is no way Almagro is getting to that. But somehow got it back over the net. He hit it back in such a way as to make you think: Nadal's toast. Then, incredibly, Nadal got his racket to the ball, and hit it back in such a way as to make you think: game over. But Almagro got to it and..... you get the picture. (I told you this wasn't going to be Phd level commentary). I know of no other sport that provokes such regular spirals of delight. Football is a long agonising struggle punctuated by ecstatic release. Basketball come close, with its end-to-end switcheroos, but the team nature of the sport can't deliver the personal battle to wits that tennis delivers— the giddy brinkmanship, the vertiginous delight, the air of high-octane flabberghast. Only great farce comes close — Noel Coward, or a Preston Sturges comedy, or Spielberg. Tennis makes me laugh the same way an Indiana Jones chase sequence makes me laugh.

Judd Apatow, king of pain

No 6 in Time magazine's list of tips for filmmakers is "Out Apatow Apatow. Raunchy comedy The Hangover was a surprise hit: cost 35 million, grossed 270 million." I'm always amazed by critics and journalists who characterise Apatow's movies as "raunchy" or "grossout". The New York Times calls him "the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies." Really? That's what you remember? What distinguishes Apatow is the painful honesty of the writing — the line in Knocked Up when Leslie Mann says“You think because you don’t yell that you’re not mean. This is mean.” The chest-waxing and the gyneocologist jokes, you can get anywhere. I guess it doesn't sound as good: Judd Apatow, king of pain.