“George Bush’s second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804. The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.” – Mike Carlton, Sydney Morning Herald.
DOWDIFICATION WATCH: She’s up to her old tricks again. Greg Djerejian is on the case.
MADDEN WAS THE FIRST PICK: ABC’s first choice to appear in that now-infamous skit, in which Terrell Owens was hit on by Nicolette Sheridan in a towel, was John Madden, aging – and white – announcer. If Madden had indeed been in the skot, I bet it wouldn’t have provoked such outrage. Why? Because we wouldn’t have seen a sexual encounter between a powerful black man and a sexy white woman. Almost thirty years after Loving vs Virginia, inter-racial sex is still taboo in many parts of this country.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “You quote the speech at Mecca as part of a case for optimism about Islamic terrorism, and ask why it has not received more coverage. It has not received coverage because it is completely irrelevant to the issue of “Islamic terrorism”, if by that one means anything to do with 9/11, the Bali bombing, Zarqawi in Iraq, or anything else that might threaten the interests of western democracies. This Imam, in this pulpit, is a mouthpiece for the Saudi Royal family. They are trying to suppress the growing unrest in Saudi Arabia, some of which has taken the form of violence and terrorism. The Saudi regime is appallingly repressive and undemocratic, and is widely cited around the world as proof of Bush’s hypocrisy in claiming to be in favor of “freedom” and against “tyranny”. The fact is, the terrorists in Saudi Arabia are trying to dethrone a group of tyrants, i.e. the Saudi Royal family, that the U.S. has spent decades trying to keep in their thrones. Now the tyrants’ mouthpiece, i.e. the Grand Imam, says that *this* terrorism is bad, because it threatens the Saudi tyranny. That will not stop the Imam and his associates from spreading anti-western and anti-democratic messages all around Islam, and even encouraging further anti-western terrorism. To read his speech as some indication of a cooling-off in radical Islam’s infatuation with terrorism would be naive in the extreme.” More feedback on the Letters Page.
The Dish 