Monthly Archives: June 2004

Bill Mullins writes about my line in this item that William F. Buckley thinks the Iraq war was a colossal mistake…

I think you are putting words in Buckley's mouth. The quote from the NYT: "'With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago,' Mr. Buckley said. 'If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.'"

I think the most damaging spin you could put on that is that the administration had or used bad evidence going into the war, or that the war had gone worse than he would have guessed a year ago; not that the war itself was a colossal mistake.

Marshall was using Buckley's statement to buttress his own argument that the war was a mistake. It's not at all clear that Buckley would agree (but it's also not clear that he would disagree).

Mr. Mullins is right. I don't want to spin Buckley's words in any direction. He merely said what he said, and the words "colossal mistake" was an unwarranted extension of them on my part. Thanks for the catch.

I see that this morning, the Nicholas Kristof column has had a spelling makeover and now says the movie is called Fahrenheit 9/11. By the way, I'm seeing said film this evening and will report any thoughts I have on it later tonight or tomorrow morn.

Joshua Micah Marshall takes note of the fact that even William F. Buckley (no wild-eyed Liberal, he) thinks the war in Iraq was a colossal mistake, and lays out a simple case against it.

Over in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof admonishes people who call George W. Bush a liar. I buy some but not all of his argument. Okay, it destroys polite discourse to call Bush that…but the alternate explanation that Kristof supplies is that Bush unknowingly took this nation to war based on false pretenses. Is that really a nicer thing to say about someone? I don't see how calling someone a liar "polarizes the political cesspool," to use Mr. Kristof's terminology, but saying that the person allowed himself to be duped into a war that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars is keeping things civil. If I were in that position, I think I'd almost prefer that they call me a liar. Secondly, a lot of the reason we have nutcase conspiracy theories in this country — about the Clintons or Bush or any of our leaders — is that the leading reporters of news (like, say, The New York Times) aren't doing a good enough job of asking hard questions and testing the validity of accusations and rumors.

One trivial point of interest in the above: Kristof's review says that the name of Michael Moore's movie is Farenheit 9/11. Mr. Moore seems to think it's Fahrenheit 9/11, and the rest of the New York Times is siding with Moore. Even their weather reports spell the word "Fahrenheit." Remember when the Times was famous for not making that kind of mistake?

Earlier, I mentioned that if you need to sign up for things online but don't want your regular e-mailbox clogged with the resultant Spam, it's easy to get a special e-mail address at Yahoo or Hotmail or even e-Garfield just for that.

Several of you have sent me descriptions of methods that might even be easier. One is BugMeNot, which is a database of communal usernames and passwords for free websites that require registration. If you want to access the New York Times site, for example, and don't wish to sign up, you go to the BugMeNot site and you can look up a username that someone else got for this purpose.

Another is Mailinator, which is a clever idea. It's an open-to-all temp mail service. Let's say you need to sign up for the Prune Growers Monthly site and don't want to open a Hotmail account just for that. You make up a name and affix the Mailinator domain to it. Let's say you pick "Stupidface." You sign up on the site as Stupidface@mailinator.com, then you can go to the Mailinator site, log in as Stupidface (without a password) and the response e-mail will be there for you to see. Mailinator keeps it online for a few hours, then deletes it but in the meantime you've set up an account for Prune Growers Monthly without giving them your real e-mail address. Neat.

Thanks to Kip Grey, Stuart Kaufman and others who sent one or both of the above tips.

I'm told that Steve Rossi, former partner of Marty Allen, is now doing a show at the Lady Luck Casino downtown. Over the years, I saw dozens of comedians portray bad lounge singers. The first was my pal Bill Kirchenbauer as the obsequious Tony Rolletti on Fernwood Tonight. Then came Bill Murray's character and Andy Kaufman's character and dozens of others…and I used to say I'd seen countless spoofs but had never seen a lounge-style singer terrible enough to justify the take-offs. (I didn't phrase that well but you know what I mean.)

A few times, I came close. There was a gent who used to play at various clubs Burbank and whose act consisted wholly of what some call "Ego Songs." These are songs where you're never more than half a sentence from a personal pronoun…"I've Got To Be Me," "I've Got the Music In Me," "For Once In My Life," "My Way," "This is My Life," etc. There ought to be a law that says you can't sing more than one of these in your act unless someone has heard of you.

Then there was a lady singer at the old Playboy Club in Century City. Her whole act was Ego Songs and for her closing number, she performed the single most egregious act of on-stage self-adoration I've ever witnessed. She sang the Peter Allen song, "Quiet, Please…There's a Lady On Stage," which Allen wrote about his mother-in-law, Judy Garland. But this highly-unknown vocalist had altered the lyrics so it was about her — she was the Lady on Stage in her interpretation — and she kept singing the line "Stand for the ovation," over and over, demanding the audience stand up and applaud her. Some did, but only because they were getting up anyway to leave.

That lady was more sad than laughable, so I still said I'd never seen a truly ghastly singer in the lounge tradition. Then I saw Steve Rossi at the old Bob Stupak's Vegas World hotel. He was so slick, so full of himself, that I couldn't believe it. It was like a self-parody of a self-parody of a self-parody…entertaining in a very bizarre way. If Rossi's still at the Lady Luck next time I'm in Vegas, I'm going to go, just to see if he's managed to ratchet the self-parody up to an even higher level. If he could hire some former bevertainers to sing back-up and add in a juggler, he'd just about have the ultimate Vegas act.

The link I posted earlier for Bill Clinton's BBC interview has since changed. This one works at the moment but I don't know for how long. If you want to see the section that some folks are describing as an "outburst" or as Clinton losing his temper, it starts around 16 and a half minutes in. (The whole show is around 48 minutes.) As you'll see, it doesn't quite live up to the hype.

Here's an article about last April's WonderCon in San Francisco. As one might expect, it gushes about my pal Sergio. But at least I get mentioned.

I mentioned this a few weeks ago but, hell, it's my weblog. I'll mention it again if I want to. I've been enjoying my regular stops at the website of The Cocktail Doll, a genuine lady who serves beverages to gamblers at a Vegas hotel. (And I even know which hotel, but you won't get that info outta me.) She has a section called Daily Rounds which is her journal of adventures in serving drinks and getting tipped, usually poorly. I love weblogs that give you a look at a slice of life that you might not otherwise glimpse, and "Dollie" does a fine job of describing what it's like in her world. Drop by and see for yourself.

There are some criticisms you can make of public officials that don't click with me. That is, I shrug and think that someone is trying to spin something minor into a solid attack. One of these is the notion that someone is crazed and out of control and "losing it." If a politician goes up in a tower with a rifle and starts picking off innocent bystanders…or if he ran naked into the streets screaming, okay. I'd accept that the guy was maybe a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

But I don't buy that Al Gore raising his voice or Howard Dean giving out with a big "whoop" or even George W. Bush stammering is indicative of mental fission. The other day, Bill Clinton gave an interview on British television which his detractors spun as an "emotional outburst" and a sign that the stress was getting to him…or something of the sort. I watched it (as you can do here) and I thought it was a perfectly acceptable tone and that Clinton was firmly in control. His foes were just trying to make something out of nothing.

And I guess I also feel that way about all these speculations that Dick Cheney's recent use of the dreaded "f-word" suggests that he's having some sort of breakdown. I think the Vice-President made a tactical error that will come back to haunt him. Hostile crowds will chant his quote back at him, plus it'll be that much harder for him to argue that he's restored "dignity and honor" to the White House. But I don't think you can really infer that the man is falling apart. He just got mad and that's how it came out. Do we think our elected officials never get mad? Or don't say such things that go unreported?

I think Dick Cheney has a lot to answer for. I'm waiting for the Vice-Presidential Debate when the Democratic nominee — who looks more and more like Edwards — starts itemizing how much government money has found its way over the years to the Cheney bank account. But the suggestion that Cheney is becoming unstable is lost on me. This election is getting nasty enough without that kind of nonsense.

Here's an article from the Conservative National Review that lists some outrageous things on which your government is spending your money.

Will Ferrell has signed on to play Franz Liebkind in the movie version of the musical version of the movie of The Producers. That seems wrong to me but maybe it'll work. (Hey, you know who I think would have been great in the role? Kevin Kline! Think about it.)

My pal Danny Fingeroth has written a clever new book about the psychology of superhero-dom called Superman on the Couch and I sure enjoyed my copy. You can get yours by clicking here and you can hear a good interview (it's about eight minutes) with Danny over here on this National Public Radio page. Danny says some interesting things about the nature of heroism (super or otherwise) and about what it means to those of us who live vicariously through the super-guys, and provides a new way to look at some old conventions of the genre. Oh, yeah — and there's a foreword by Stan Lee, too. That makes it all official.

Comicbookmarks.com is a handy new website that will link you to all the important Internet places that have to do with comic books. Including this one.

Here are two interesting articles in the L.A. Times by one of my favorite political analysts — which is not to say I agree with everything he writes — Ronald Brownstein. In this one, he discusses the political risks for George W. Bush in the handover of just whatever it is we just handed over to Iraq. And in this one, he discusses Bill Clinton's legacy and suggests that its finer points are the kinds of things that Conservatives either don't notice or don't care about.

You'll need to register to read articles over at the Times. If you don't want to give them your real e-mail address, get an extra one at some site like Hotmail or Yahoo and use that for such sign-ups. Or even easier, let a lasagna-loving cat deliver your mail by signing up for a free account at e-Garfield.

Also: A couple of folks sent me links to news reports wherein Bush's 9/11 conduct is defended by the principal of the school where he was appearing when the planes hit. Here's one and here's another…and I don't think she makes a very good case for the man. Is the argument here really that it was more important for the President of the United States to not panic 40 children than it was for him to find out more about an attack on this country that was currently taking place and to determine if he maybe, like, could or should do something? Or that there was no way he could have gotten out of the room swiftly without panicking them? Or that maybe the children might wind up being panicked anyway over what was going on? Or that he didn't wonder if maybe he was about to be the target of an attack and shouldn't be near those kids? Or that…well, you get the idea.

I still find it mind-boggling. When the rest of us heard that airplanes were being flown into skyscrapers in New York, we rushed to turn on the news and learn all we could. The man most responsible for national defense sat in a classroom (where he probably shouldn't have been in the first place) and took his own sweet time finding out what was going on. I keep thinking I must be missing something; that there was some logical explanation for his lack of prompt action. Someone, please, point me to it.

The funniest man on the planet is about to open his website. And he's made a special video to announce this.