Things what make my eyes cross in pain:

"That's what it sounded like to me," said Sen. Evan Bayh (D., Ind.), when asked Monday if the Medicare "buy-in" proposal was dropped. "To use the old cliche, the general consensus was that we shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good."
[via Wall St. Journal]

Or the bullshit the enemy of the ridiculous. Or the severely compromised the enemy of the forget-it-why-bother.

I don't know where these people live. What planet they are on. What language they speak. What air they breathe. They step into our world from another dimension, squawk shrill noises at us and give our babies wedgies and push homeless people off bridges and tell us we are free.

This is not "reform." It's a "tweak."

Originally published at mooreroom.

This moneyquote from Hollywood Elsewhere on the political implications of James Cameron's Avatar is making the rounds. But it's pretty juicy, so here goes:

The political import of Avatar -- and there's no waving this aspect away because it's right in your face start to finish, and especially in the third act -- is ardently left. It is pro-indigenous native, anti-corporate, anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. Iraq War effort, anti-U.S.-in-Afghanistan (and anti-troop-surge-in-that-country, or strongly against the thinking of President Barack Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal), anti-rightie, anti-Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, etc.

I am all of those things, too, but I can't get quite as enthusiastic about it as Jeffrey Wells. My first (and subsequent) impression, based on the trailers and a New Yorker fluff piece on Cameron is more in line with snarky right-wing assessment by AllahPundit: "A three-hour lecture on imperialism starring Smurfs." Audience reaction to a special preview shown at Comic-Con last summer, judging by the tweets from my friends who attended, focused on the Smurfy qualities of Na'Vi, the natives of Pandora. Yet the more I think on it, they remind me of Ewoks.

What neither Wells nor AllahPundit seem to recognize is that for all of "pure Che Guevara (more the Motorcycle Diaries or Che-in-Cuba version than Che in Bolivia), Naom Chomsky, Hugo Chavez, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Oliver Stone, etc." politics, Cameron's portrayal of an exotic indigenous culture and white boy assisted uprising is squarely within the traditions of imperialist literature. Start with James Fenimore Cooper, follow the trail to Kevin Costner's "Dances With Wolves" -- but, please, do make a detour at Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man", which subverts the genre -- and note along the way how indigenous cultures are romanticized in the eyes of the white protagonist. You'll see this trope in several movies on the American war in Vietnam from the 1980s, although Joseph Conrad pushes that view in a darker, yet no less romanticized direction. The plot hinges upon the White Savior's ability to rescue the indigenous culture from the ravages of the imperialist forces. If he fails, it's a tragedy; if he succeeds, he's Luke Skywalker chuckling at the quaint minstrelsy of the Savage Teddy Bears.

The nutjobs on Sean Hannity's forum are incensed by Cameron's "liberal fantasy", mostly because they reject reflexively anything reminding them that their American privilege rests upon the violence Europeans have inflicted upon the rest of the world. But they do have a point. It's a small one, but it's worth teasing out. The liberal fantasy does not deny the ravages of imperialism, and can eloquently decry it; but then what? We watch the movie's portrayal of cultural genocide and ecological devastation, and either feel the white protagonist's sorrow in surveying the carnage; or we cheer that some small blow has been made against the Evil Empire. Then we walk out of the multi-plex movie theater attached to the ginormous shopping mall full of goods manufactured overseas by people subsisting on less than a dollar a day; get in our cars that put CO2 in the atmosphere, warming the planet and raising sea levels that threaten to erase entire island communities that have existed for thousands of years; and marvel at the 3D special effects that cost almost half a billion dollars to produce.

In sum, this is the same blind "feel good" shit that our current President traffics in, even as he pursues policies of war, torture, detention and globalization. Even as his negotiators in Copenhagen weaken and subvert global efforts to address the negative impacts of climate change felt by indigenous people around the world.

Originally published at mooreroom.

In journalism there is perhaps no end to shitty beats. But the anonymous drone for Associated Press who wrote this story must have really pissed someone off. Let the headline suffice to convey the self-loathing and dismay the assignment must have instilled.

Obama dog Bo has own Christmas stocking

The article notes that it took an Oprah interview with Michelle Obama to draw out this "revelation." That word was indeed used.

No word from Bo about his feelings on the philosophy of "just war" as elucidated by his master upon receiving a "peace" prize.

Originally published at mooreroom.

Found via Leigh Dragoon.



Yeah, that "pop" thing reeeeaaaallly scrapes my testicles.

Click it to read the whole thing. Very worth it.

Originally published at mooreroom.

I know it's shooting shitheads in a barrel, but this is too good to pass up. Here is a teabagger explaining why legislation is necessary to force school children to sing Christmas carols (via HuffPo).

"Bottom line is Christmas is about Christmas," said Erin Ryan, president of the Redding Tea Party Patriots. "That's why we have it. It's not about winter solstice or Kwanzaa. It's like, 'Wow you guys, it's called Christmas for a reason.' "

Read that quote aloud to yourself in the dippyest voice you can muster. Fun for the whole famdamily.

Originally published at mooreroom.

I'm a little late in noting these things today, but the toons themselves arrived on time.


First up is In Contempt, today treating the delicate subject of the "Climategate" e-mail scandal with the surgical precision of a five-year-old with safety scissors. Can I sell it or what? I draw my analogies from life.


Next is Wanderlost, the 24th page of the current "Search Party" story line, wherein the barnyard is out en force, braving the extreme cold and snow to find the run-away Sheldon. Enjoy.

Originally published at mooreroom.

Frank Rich gets to the heart of magical thinking that guides American foreign policy:

Americans want our country to be secure. Most want Obama to succeed. And so we hope that we wont get bogged down in Afghanistan while our adversaries regroup elsewhere, that the casualties and costs can be contained, that the small, primitive Afghan Army (ravaged by opium, illiteracy, incompetence and a 25 percent attrition rate) will miraculously stand up so we can stand down. We want to believe that Obamas marvelous powers of reason can check a ruthless enemy and reverse decades of tragic history in one of the worlds most treacherous backwaters.

Em-fass-is mine. This is the Obama brand, the power of intellect using strategy and precision to bring order to the world in a calm, realistic manner. Maybe I should put ironic quotes around that last modifier, because the latest proposal for war seems no more grounded in realism than the democracy-fomenting fantasies propounded by the previous administration.

Admittedly, no one has any good answers when it comes to Afghanistan. I was in grade school the last time the country had a functioning society and a competent government, before it became a monumental casualty of the Cold War and the abandoned child of the Peace Dividend. The Russians and the Americans, along with other big powers in the region (India, China) have moral obligations to help Afghanistan to get back on its feet. This is not to say we can solve the country's problems -- we seem pretty overwhelmed by our own -- or that we have some globalization variation of the White Man's Burden to show them the way. They need space to sort their shit out, and the materials to do it with. That requires troops to provide training and security so that essential elements of nation-building can occur.

But we can't fight their civil wars. We can't fight anyone's, a lesson we should have learned forty years ago. And our whack-a-mole approach to Al-Qaeda is no less a waste of time. We delude ourselves if we think Al-Qaeda is capable of imposing the reactionary caliphate it sells as a pipe dream to angry youth disaffected by oppressive regimes, poverty, resource wars and that crazy mix of religious and ethnic identity politics. They threaten to destabilize any number of regions, true; but that such a threat exists at all raises more fundamental questions about the root economic and social causes of instability in the first place. Oddly, those problems remain as strong as ever.

To borrow Rich's formulation, we want to believe that whatever Great Daddy Figure we put in the White House can magically restore the country to economic solvency and productivity, checking the ruthless practices of corporate globalization and reverse decades of systematic destabilization of our manufacturing base and our social infrastructure -- while simultaneously using our ridiculously expensive military ventures to fight over-hyped enemies around the world. Teabaggers are not alone in ascribing to a mythical vision of American exceptionalism, a fuzzy vision of a glorious past that didn't exist. The Washington Consensus debates within the confines of a narrow, unrealistic ideology of American Leadership/Greatness/Foofarah. For all of his reputation as The Thinker, Obama smokes from the same bong as his right wing rivals.

Originally published at mooreroom.

This cartoon will change your mind. Whatever you think now, you will stop thinking after reading this cartoon. In fact, you will stop thinking, period. Your brain will shut down. Soon all other biological processes will cease to function and you will begin to decompose. Before reading this cartoon, call your attorney to update your will.

Originally published at mooreroom.

It's another page of "Search Party" up at the Wanderlost site. There is a lot of scenery this time. Plus Frank Zappa. Not in the story, that is - he's in the post.

Originally published at mooreroom.

There is a new In Contempt strip, featuring my summary of the sad history of the so-called "public option."



And there is a new page of Wanderlost. Now that I have studio space and a daily schedule, I am getting shit done. So Wanderlost is back to a weekly update schedule which will continue into the new year.

This will have an effect on In Contempt, however. I don't think that will go back to twice a week. As much as the daily political grind fills me with rage and despair and all that negative energy that somehow translates into creativity, once a week is about as much of that kind of inspiration as I can handle these days.

Originally published at mooreroom.