Category: Grave

Welcome to multimedia corner here at low culture!
In keeping with this week’s visit to the United Kingdom by President Bush, the British comedian- cum- scandal-artist -cum-filmmaker Chris Morris has re-posted his two “Bushwhacked” cut-and-paste parody collages of the President’s 2002 and 2003 State of the Union addresses.
While these have circulated as audio files since, well, a few days after the initial speech(es) were made, those of us with “digital divide-less” broadband connections are now treated to the full audio-visual experience, which is a vast improvement on the nearly year-old MP3s.
To borrow a phrase that the papers seem so fond of citing, “nearly seven months since President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq,” there’s something quite perverse about seeing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi grin wickedly at Bush’s butchered announcement that “the American flag stands for…cutting out tongues…and rape.”

President Bush, who apparently reads People magazine just like the rest of us, is hip to B-level pop culture. According to Fox News, when the president was asked about the large-scale protests that greeted his arrival in England this week, he indicated his appreciation of the phenomenon by acknowledging that
"the last American to cause such a ruckus in the city was illusionist David Blaine, who recently spent 44 days in a self-imposed fast in an elevated plastic box above the Thames River. For the first few days, Blaine’s box was pelted with food and the people jeered at him.
‘A few might have been happy to provide similar arrangements for me," Bush said, adding that he was grateful to the Queen for interceding and allowing him to stay at Buckingham Palace."
Oh, and one other point about this article. While it’s so, so passé to marvel at the amazingly limited worldview of Fox News and its audience, some of their antics continue to provide fresh opportunities for amazement. Such as today’s headline (since relegated solely to an appearance on the front page) for this "Blaine-dropping" article: "Bush Gets Royal Treatment."
"Royal treatment" apparently no longer implies "pampering," "adoration" or a waitstaff tending to your every need. This new iteration somehow incorporates negative poll numbers indicating that a majority of British citizens were opposed to and inconvenienced by his visit, as well as managing to invoke the plans for nearly 100,000 protesters to march upon and topple a Saddam-esque effigy of the President in Trafalgar Square on Thursday.

Hello, anglophiles and throne-watchers! Quick: what have you been missing out on here in the U.S. for the past six years? That’s right, a visit by Prince Charles, the future King of England, who hasn’t set foot on American soil since coming to New York in 1997.
While this may seem topical only due to President Bush’s current visit to the United Kingdom, or maybe recent events in Massachusetts’ judiciary, it has nothing to do with American intolerance of homosexuality. We think. The Prince of Wales, after all, isn’t gay, for one thing (just check out the photo above: President Bush would never, in good conscience, shake hands with a gay bloke).
But he can shake hands with the “pro-Palestinian” Prince Charles. The Guardian quotes a source close to the issue as saying,
“It [concern over Charles travelling to the US] revolves around the perception that the Prince of Wales is fairly Arabist. He has, in American terms and international terms, fairly dodgy views on Israel.
“He thinks American policy on the Middle East is complete madness and he used to express that quite loudly to a lot of people, including ministers and various ambassadors.”
The source added: “The system basically thinks that he is unsound on America and he has not really wanted to go anyway. He doesn’t much like American culture.”
But, Charles, don’t be so unfair! Americans love both selective inbreeding and tampon reincarnation.
It’s just this “gay” thing we need to work on. And the Middle East, I guess.

Brace yourself for the most embarrassing interview by a G.O.P. politician to appear in a porn mag since Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in Oui two decades ago…
Washington Post White House correspondent Dana Milbank, who’s received some praise here before on at least a few occasions, has fallen a bit short with today’s piece detailing President Bush’s gift of an all-too-rare exclusive print interview with a Rupert Murdoch-owned topless tabloid in the UK.
The article’s good enough, mind you, and does a good job of illustrating the fact that it’s a bit hypocritical for this most Christian of presidents to be appearing in a paper that features nude women and Enquirer-type stories…it’s just the headline that misses its mark. The Post goes with “Prez in Topless Tabloid,” which, though theoretically meant to parody the headlines of the tabloid in question, comes off more like an Army Archerd-esque Variety lead.
Come on, Dana…be a little more adventurous! “Boobs, Bullies, and Bollocks: Bush meets Blair,” for starters. Or “Dish n’ Hips,” perhaps. Or even the oh-so-blunt “Topless Girls–Featuring Bush!”
We here at low culture know you’ve got a sense of humor, Dana. Check out your closing paragraph:
After McClellan’s bombshell at yesterday’s briefing, this correspondent asked whether the other publications present would get Bush interviews if they ran nude photos. “I hope you’re not talking about yourself,” McClellan replied.

Sigh.
That’s the sound of a global sigh of relief, mind you, now that El Presidente has decreed that the U.S. will begin expediting the transition to Iraqi “self-rule”. Apparently, the Iraqi people have been expressing interest in becoming “more involved in the governance of their country,” according to President Bush in yesterday’s remarks on the subject of the post-war transition of power.
Well, with that in mind, it’s nice to know the United States has been victorious in the cliched “battle of hearts and minds” that Rumsfeld et al kept championing throughout the spring and summer. Just check out these editorial cartoons from the Arab press as collected by Al-Jazeera, the noted television news mouthpiece of the Arab world. The caption for the strip above, incidentally, is as follows: “You see! Democracy is good. Isn’t it?”
Why, there’s hardly any anti-American sentiment in sight.

Today’s New York Times has a good signed editorial by Andrew Rosenthal about hiding the soldiers who died or were injured in Iraq. After pointing out that the President (or anyone in his cabinet) hasn’t attended any funerals for the dead or publicly addressed these slain soldiers’ families, Rosenthal concludes:
The Bush administration hates comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, and many are a stretch. But there is a lesson that this president seems not to have learned from Vietnam. You cannot hide casualties. Indeed, trying to do so probably does more to undermine public confidence than any display of a flag-draped coffin. And there is at least one direct parallel. Thirty-five years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon took to shipping bodies into the United States in the dead of night to avoid news coverage.
If you’re curious to see what real war fatalities look like, try to track down a copy of Ernst Friedrich’s classic 1924 Passivist manifesto War Against War!. The 261 page book features hundreds of gruesome, heartbreaking photographs of soldiers killed and injured during the First World War along with an impassioned critique of war in general.
Since this isn’t Rotten.com, I didn’t want to post any of these photos here, but you can find them on this site. [Warning: Not for the faint of heart, or squeamish members of the Bush cabinet.]

Today’s New York Times features an odd little piece in the “Washington” section of the paper entitled, “G.O.P. Leader Solicits Money for Charity Tied to Convention.” The article, by one Michael Slackman, is a mildly infuriating examination of leading Congressional Republicans’ tactics for working around the McCain-Feingold limitations on soft-money acquisition for campaign purposes, and has some informative anecdotes about the various methodologies that House majority leader Tom Delay and Senate majority leader (Dr.) Bill Frist have begun using to effectively channel campaign funds through the guise of charitable causes. For children, of course.
Not a “must-read” at all, save for the closing three paragraphs, in which the author goes off on a completely irrelevant (but laugh-out-loud funny) tangent about the outdatedness of the Republicans’ fundraising terminology:
Whatever its ultimate virtues, the DeLay fund-raising brochure displays a certain out-of-date understanding of the New York scene.
The brochure, in which the size of donations are named for more — or less — exclusive neighborhoods, starts at the Upper East Side as the top $500,000 tier and it ends with Greenwich Village for $10,000, perhaps suggesting Mr. DeLay’s people have not surveyed the recent asking prices of town houses in the downtown neighborhood. He also placed Midtown (at $50,000) above SoHo (at $25,000).
“Midtown would be a lot less expensive than SoHo or the Village,” said Tory Masters, of Intrepid New Yorker, a relocation firm in Manhattan. “I don’t know what they are talking about.”
Looks like this Michael Slackman fellow undoubtedly has a pretty severe case of liberal bias.

You’ve been good lately, so you deserve a treat. Watch this ad and have yourself a nice chuckle. (It’s an embedded QuickTime file.)
Ahh, pandering.
Sidebar: The Onion was dead-on yet again with their headline from about two months ago, Outkast Accepted By All (not online).

Time Magazine may have seen fit to put the be-wigged visage of Hollywood’s surliest bastard on its cover last week, but it’s this week’s Newsweek that shows us the real life Master and Commander: Vice President Dick Cheney.
The story, by Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff, and Evan Thomas is so scary, I half wonder why Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker didn’t run it on Halloween. Tales of Cheney’s monomania on Iraq, his “free floating power base,” his near-clinical paranoia, his incredible influence on the President and the direction of foreign policy, the fact that he’s “far to the right politically,” and the most frightening reference to Thomas Hobbes you will see all year add up to the thesis posited by Hosenball, Isikoff, and Thomas: Cheney is a “vice president who may be too powerful for his own good.”
What they don’t say—but what hangs over the piece—is the addition: He may be too powerful for our own good, too.
If you don’t have time to read the Newsweek piece—c’mon, you can print it out and read it on your ride home—at least read Maureen Dowd’s summary from today’s Times. You owe it yourself and to your country.