****

How could I have neglected this golden nugget:

"Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Monday at the Capitol for disorderly conduct, shortly after saying she would run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosie over the California Democrat's refusal to try to impeach President Bush...

"'The Democrats will not hold this administration accountable, so we have to hold the Democrats accountable,' Sheehan said outside of Conyers' office after the meeting. "And I for one am going to step up to the plate and run against Nancy Pelosi.'" http://www.townhall.com/news/us/2007/07/23/sheehan_arrested_in_impeachment_protest

On the one hand: promises promises, but on the other, it is getting impossible to sound the depths of left wing lunacy.

****

Here's a gem (thanks to http://corner.nationalreview.com/) that bespeaks well that truth is way more fantastical than fiction:

"Hillary Clinton announced that she is not a big-government liberal but a 'modern progressive' that 'believes strongly in individual rights and freedoms.'” http://clubforgrowth.org/

I'm getting sea sick.

****

Having finished Moby Dick it didn’t take long for Al Gore to come to mind."

If I were on the Good Ship Democrat, I would be Starbuck’s late offspring pining to excess at our mad captain’s grotesque mad obsession. But being of a different genetic disposition, I have proved no Starbuck and have quite quit the Good Ship Democrat by slipping away in broad daylight on a smaller but more able skiff and have headed for Key West, or some such. Unfortunately, Ahab’s genes seem to have carried forth to our own generation in the person of Gore (but somehow the perspicacity was lost, once again proving that genetic disposition looses as much good as it looses bad), whose madness will if followed stave not just the Good Ship Democrat, but too will ram the Good Ship Earth into the dark ages.

Note: cigarette smokers are not immune from the takings as there will be a new one-dollar tax on a pack of cigarettes. Yes, I know, everyone knows that smokers are evil and taking money away from them is always justified in a Mad Mad World.

Is this a Mad Mad World or what?

****

Quoting from SUSAN GOLDSMITH of The Oregonian (linked above):

“Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?”

****

I need a hike.

Gullible Brick: Hello you wonderful people you--give yourself a hug. I would but I’m here and you’re there.

Direction: Audience walks in hugging themselves. They cackle with excitement as men and women wearing blue jeans, Birkenstocks, and t-shirts sporting slogans: save a whale abort a fetus; dames for resurrecting Saddam; Joe Wilson can I have your baby; Hillary is my virtual partner.

Gullible Brick: It always gives me a rise when I see America marching madly for homologous diversity. [he turns aside and whispers ‘what is homologous.’] Well, I can see that by the looks of everyone here it’s an early hour; you haven’t even had time to put your make-up on!

Cat Call from audience: It’s 3pm Gullible!

Cheers

Gullible Brick: America needs more dedication like yours.

Wild applause

Gullible Brick: Alright alright!! We’re lively tonight, but I know why, its because tonight we have two esteemed components of the fight on terror with us tonight: Senate Majority Leader Reed and Speaker, Woman…

Wild applause and screeching

Gullible Brick: Yes, that’s right, the leader of the free world, fighting conservatives everywhere, leading even to their flight from Frisco, our esteemed lady of the twilight, Speaker Pelosie.

More wild applause

Gullible Brick: Please applaud our inestimable guests.

Wild shrill applause

Direction: Reed and Pelosie walk on stage from left to right while holding hands and bowing to the audience and pointing to their hearts and then pointing to the crowd. The Crowd holds up lit lighters. The overheads dim. The speakers blast Blue Bird Blues. After a minute or so of the venerable blues classic the music fades to black.

Gullible Brick extends his arms and hands and Pelosie and Reed do likewise. They raise their heads skyward and pant “ One, two, three, four, Bush’s war is no more; One, two, three, four we love our savior Gore [the crowd is chanting along as they can read…the overhead monitor] One, two, three, four give Hillary a more.

Then the three lower their clinched hands and then in a swift moment they raise them up and break their grips and shout: “Social justice--raw raw raw.”

Gullible Brick: Well this fine objective reporter just wants to thank you for coming here to Abortion Hall and telling us all how you are saving America.

Pelosie: Well Brick it’s because of objective reporters like you that we can end the terror of Halliburton.

Applause

Gullible Brick: Yes, I know. Ever since we reported cannibalism and gators eating people during Katrina we have been the acme of reporting. But enough of my good work what about yours. What led you to undermine the military surge a mere couple weeks after its implementation.

Reed: Well Gullible, as you know the country is beside itself for defeat, and if not now when? So me and Pelosie.

Gullible Brick: Conspired..

Pelosie: Just like a man, always completing

Gullible Brick: your sentences.

Applause

Reed [getting teary eyed] Nancy, you know that just isn’t true.

Cat call from audience: men are pigs

Applause

Reed: So the first thing I did was the disgrace…

Gullible Brick: full attack on General Petraeus. Homey you told em.

Pelosie: [frowning] Brick, you are such a.

Applause

Gullible Brick: Astonishing guy. Yea, I know. But back to you Harry. So.

Reed [lost in space] Yes, I told him, um, that he was, um, he was a

Gullible: Man, that was awesome!

Wild applause

Gullible Brick: So tell us what is your inspiration?

Pelosie: Yes, no pay raises for those awful people that save Iraqi lives by fighting peace loving Jihadis: http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/reid-pulls-the-dod-bill-2007-07-19.html

Gullible Brick: You two. You two [opens his arms wide steps toward them] are just so so special. Just special!!! Lets give ourselves a hug [he hugs himself, Pelosie and Reed look at each other a little confused, shrug and hug themselves]. And so now what can we do.

Reed: Well I don’t know what [snivels and gets teary]

Pelosie: vote. We have a vote coming. Go out and vote. Everyone! Everyone!

Now you may have gathered by way of reference that this trait of mine owes something to a family gene that worms its way forward to my tongue, that it bypasses otherwise perfectly functioning judicious brain cells, but by a conduit I know not what.

Now I am in no way forswearing the fun of snark, parody, ridicule or simultaneous use of all three or their familial relations where events demand, or merely warrant the fun of their articulation, but I am suggesting, nay asserting, that there are times where I would rather have not said what I’ve said, and this I blame on genetic defect.

That being said, I confess a wish to rid myself of said defect, and though acknowledging its genetic origin, and therefore impossibility of absolute good riddance, I do but claim my free-will as a balm against its unmitigated ill effect. That is I struggle to keep said tongue in its place until said judicious brain can team out the worthy ridicule from the unworthy, and while conceding this is not a perfect scheme, let alone science, it does seem to me it is a worthy vocation to which the shorn and torn tongue I own is the shape it is due to my biting my own.

Now you might ask, “what has this to do with Ishmael and Ahab and the happy crew of the Pequod?”

Madness of course. As the most debilitating aspect of madness is its surrender to itself, and this is the constant condition of Ahab. This is the constant definition of the ego unmollified by relationship: The ego unmollified by responsibility and obligation to something beyond itself.

But lets listen to a smattering of what Ahab has to say on the subject:

“ ‘Lad, lad [speaking to a young deck hand named Pip] I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt [of Moby Dick], my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below here….

‘They tell me [Pip speaking], sir, that Stubb [2^nd mate] did once desert poor little Pip [another Pip who drowned]… ‘But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.’

‘If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.’

‘Oh, good master, master, master!’

‘Weep so, and I will murder thee! Have a care, for Ahab is mad….”

As you see Ahab prefers, has surrendered, willfully even, to his own madness. He is consumed with, consumed by, his own ego.

Now of course Moby Dick is about a good deal more than all consuming ego, but from just this theme we can see the likeness to it in our secular society as envisioned, promoted, and expressed by “left progressive thought.”

The madness inhered by perfecting, of ridding, the world of destructive forces, Moby Dick, the whale, the recondite force whose meetings with sundry ships “contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which the White Whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eye’s, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see.”

And there we have Utopian insanity: My ego made whole by ridding the world of that which offends it (epiphany for Joe Biden--can you say Jihadi). And here too we have Nietzche’s madness that has infected our own society and seeks nothing less than absolute will be granted Government so that it can slay the indifferent immoral whale of existence.

Which is any of us who do not agree with the practicableness, let alone desirableness, of what can only be termed tyranny. And note there is the profoundest difference between protecting one's own person from extinction (see Allies vs. Axis) and from asserting one's own existence as all.

It is well to take "arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them."

By the by, yes I did see the religious allusion of which I am sure Mr. Hitchens approves, but then that is a discussion for another time.

When does winning http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/weekinreview/08burns.html inspire insipid languorous whining? http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/washington/08reid.html. When you're a sucker for failure, um, lover of surrender, er, just a fool for defeat:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/washington/06cong.html

Where do nitwits go to evacuate unpleasantly for global mummery?  Ha, our friends spotted them and talk about them here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288580,00.html Where the footprints are heavy and the expatiating befuddled cranium is filled with gassy hot air: For a recap of the vapid shenanigans go here: http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/ Oh, and I'm thankful they witnessed it so I didn't have to.