Blame the Supreme Court, not the epic incompetence of me and my fucked-up-stupid posse.

Jim Morrison, (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971)

I remember when Danny Sugarman’s book came out. I was in high school, less than a decade after Morrison died in France. I’d basically missed The Doors hey day, lacking an older sibling to show me what to listen to. Maybe I knew Light My Fire, I can’t remember.

But the book triggered a Doors renaissance of a sort, at least at my school in The Valley, at least among the school paper / honor’s English crowd. In retrospect, it was an eclectic time. I listened to The Clash, Bruce Springsteen, The Doors, Neil Young – I lacked the commitment to really be a punk or a head banger, I mostly listened to what Jim Ladd listened to, plus whatever punk/new wave my friend John Z turned me on to.

I do remember that my little brother, in junior high at the time, liked The Doors and The Boomtown Rats, before Bob Geldof tried to save the world.

Morrison died 27 years ago today. Now, my kid’s know who he is, can tell its The Doors when we listen to KLOS in the car — though maybe they think he looks like Val Kilmer.

I, wonder, actually if Morrison ever thought people would be digging on The Doors 27 years after his death.

I know the youtube linked cuts off a little at the end, but I liked the intro, so I used it.

C’mon, baby, take a chance with us …

Fred Kaplan of Slate has delved into the comments of General Wesley Clark about the qualifications of John McCain to be president. (Alex discussed the issue here).

Slate’s take has been that the remarks Clark made were not particularly beneficial to Barack Obama and Kaplan opines that we’ve seen the last of Clark as a national security adviser to Obama.

There are two explanations for Gen. Wesley Clark’s politically tin-eared remark about Sen. John McCain last Sunday.

First, Clark is politically tin-eared. Remember his 2004 presidential campaign?

Here, as a reminder, is what Clark said when asked about the Republican presidential candidate on the June 29 episode of CBS’s Face the Nation:

I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war.

That was where Clark should have zipped his lips. But, as if he couldn’t hold back some raging impulse, he went on:

He hasn’t held executive responsibility. … I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

In a sense, of course, Clark is right. There’s nothing about flying a plane—or, for that matter, driving a tank or shooting a rifle—that indicates a talent for high office. But if the retired general wanted to be on the team and possibly in the Cabinet of Sen. Barack Obama—who also has never held an executive position and was, on that very day, fending off accusations of insufficient patriotism—he should have known that it’s best not to wander this turf.

But Kaplan’s second argument is more interesting. He believes that the remarks were motivated by the fact that Clark was an Army infantryman in Vietnam, while McCain was a Navy airman. Kaplan details the rivalry between the two service branches in ‘Nam (for example, the Navy — and the Air Force — refused to provide air cover to Army soldiers on the ground, instead returning to dine in the officer’s club after their missions while soldiers ate scraps in the jungle) and believes that Clark’s remarks were a manifestation of old rivalries.

The article then describes how the competition between branches has diminished over time, in part due to legislation and in part due to the fact that there is so much money in the military budget now, there is less reason for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to compete — they all already just about get whatever they want.

But the rivalries haven’t altogether disappeared. I found this paragraph and the accompanying chart particularly interesting, prompting the entry you are reading:

Still, tensions persist. Some soldiers and Marines resent the Air Force and Navy for shouldering so light a burden in Iraq, bearing only 4 percent of the fatalities and 2 percent of the injuries in this war. (See chart below.)

That’s a large imbalance. Close to 4,000 of the 4,105 military deaths U.S. forces have suffered in Iraq have been taken by the Army and the Marines. Only about 150 were suffered by the Air Force or the Navy. Only about 1,000 of the 48,000 injured were Air Force or Navy personnel. The resentment by those in the Army and the Marines is understandable.

Kaplan concludes by summing up the Clark-McCain personal rivalry:

And that may explain what was going on in the mind of Clark on Sunday morning. In his case, the institutional resentments may have been stiffened by personal ones. McCain, as he noted, has never held a position of command. Clark, on the other hand, has held many—not just as a company commander in Vietnam and at Ft. Knox but also as the supreme allied commander in Europe and, in that capacity, as the commander of the air war in Kosovo. And yet in his bid for the presidency, Clark barely made it past the New Hampshire primaries, while McCain—this fighter pilot and war prisoner—is one of the two finalists to become the ultimate commander, the commander in chief.

Life, the Army man might have been thinking, just isn’t fair.

Goes even deeper than re-defining “dissassemble” to mean “not tell the truth.” Andrew Bacevich lists very real and far-reaching changes in the way our government functions wrought by 8 years of W:

Yet in crucial respects, the Bush era will not end Jan. 20, 2009. The administration’s many failures, especially those related to Iraq, mask a considerable legacy. Among other things, the Bush team has accomplished the following:

Defined the contemporary era as an “age of terror” with an open-ended “global war” as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;

Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;

Affirmed - despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;

Removed constraints on military spending so that once more, as Ronald Reagan used to declare, “defense is not a budget item”;

Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;

Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;

Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising “global leadership”;

Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty.

By almost any measure, this constitutes a record of substantial, if almost entirely malignant, achievement.

Summing up, Bacevich argues that “Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority.”

I would add that Bush has not accomplished these things by himself; He was abetted by a Republican dominated Congress for most of his term, by a largely complacent and feckless press which, with few exceptions, failed to draw attention to the consequences of many of these changes, and by an electorate too easily pushed into a compliant panic by fear-mongerers and war pimps.

As Bacevich further points out, it will be a considerable task to weed out the malignant growths of the Bush administration.

Today’s epic Pantload spoor is titled Can Obama rescue Bush?

If history is written by clueless Doughy Pantloads, Bush will be either venerated or overlooked, depending on how lucky he is or how successful we are in blaming others for his fuck ups.

Verbatim Doughy Pantload:

A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush’s memoir a success story.

Dear Donna,

I just wanted you to know — if you didn’t already — that Quentin Tarantino is talking about a remake of your favorite (and mine) Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!. And according to the New York Post his choice to reprise Tura Satana’s part is none other than Tera Patrick.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a Tera Patrick movie (though I think I once had a copy of Leg Show with her in it, doing some kind of bondage/mistress pictorial.) But I do think it’s cool that the Q continues to channel his inner Roger Corman.

This is Ms. Satana:

For finally stating the obvious:

Retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, an adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, said Republican contender John McCain has oversold his military and national-security experience.

~~~

“I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” Clark said.

The presumption that being shot down — which can only be considered a failure, even if one for which McCain is blameless — somehow qualifies McCain as a “war hero” and innately better suited to lead our nation in a time of conflict is one of the most baffling media conventions, along with the “Maverick” tag which McCain claimed before spending 8 years as Bush’s batman and rifle carrier for purposes of supporting each of his disastrous policy initiatives.

Sargent York was a “war hero” — he cleaned out a series of 32 machine guns nests pouring murderous fire on his fellow infantrymen, killing 28 enemy and capturing 132 others, almost singlehandedly. McCain was shot down while attempting to bomb a target.

But even Sargent York, while a truly heroic figure, was not any better suited to be President. And yet in terms of war accomplishments he is vastly more qualified than McCain, who claims that being shot down and confined to prisoner of war status somehow confers strategic judgment and wisdom, like manna.

K-Lo, all wound up crazy with nowhere to go:

I may be crazy. But Bill Clinton is not going to let himself be humiliated. He’s in talks with McCain before long if he’s not already. He’s going to salvage his name before this election is over.

If K-Lo thinks Bill Clinton is going to press his lips against John McCain’s angry ass and give him the kind of hug-and-blow-job McCain gave to Bush 8 and then 4 years ago, “crazy” doesn’t even begin to describe her.

Talk about “humiliation.” Clinton kissing McCain’s hand would be a humiliation worthy of the “Gimp” from Pulp Fiction.

While David Brooks may have been busy earlier this week publishing the latest “Mission Accomplished” screed in the pages of the New York Times, Reality continues to rear its ugly head, suggesting that whatever improvements teh Surge may have accomplished, they are not enough to justify the level of gratuitous mutual dick-sucking Brooks and other war advocates have engaged in to celebrate the perceived vindication of their costly and still-ruinous war:

Two insurgent bomb blasts struck at pro-American Iraqi targets in Anbar province just west of Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, and the police said at least 30 people were killed and 80 wounded.

Iraqi police officials said three American marines were among the dead in the Anbar attack, which came just as the American military command was preparing to hand control of the province, once considered the hotbed of the insurgency, over to Iraqi forces.

The bombings extended a pattern of multiple-casualty attacks in recent days that are clearly intended to kill local Iraqi leaders, in particular those who are believed to have collaborated with American forces against insurgents.

Yes, thanks to what Brooks called Bush’s “courageous and astute decision” in Iraq, we’re standing at the brink of victory in Iraq, it is said. Unfortunately Kamil al-Showaili, a judge on one of Iraq’s top two appeals courts, won’t be there to see it:

Top judge assassinated in Baghdad

A leading Iraqi judge has been ambushed and shot dead by gunmen in Baghdad.

Kamil al-Showaili, head of one of the capital’s two appeals courts, was driving home in the east of the city when the attack happened.

Police said masked assailants used two vehicles to block the judge’s path, before opening fire and driving away.

Mr Showaili, who was in his 50s, was one of the country’s most important judges, charged with handing criminal cases for eastern Baghdad.

Imagine if a US Supreme Court Justice was gunned down by assassins, and you get the picture.

And the day following Brooks’ triumphalist wankery, four Americans were killed at a meeting in Sadr City:

Ten people, including two US government workers and two US soldiers, were killed yesterday when a bomb went off at a council meeting in the Baghdad stronghold of the Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Six Iraqis died and 10 were wounded in the attack on a local authority building in Sadr City. The US military blamed the bombing on renegade Shia militias called “special groups” – jargon for rogue elements of Mr Sadr’s Mehdi Army that America claims is supported by Iran. Tehran denies the charges.

To top things off, the GAO report casts doubt on the ability of Iraqi forces to act independent of US military support. More than a year after the surge was announced, it’s been so successful that we’re more committed to continuing our occupation than we were before its started, and have yet to withdraw all the forces committed to increase our troop presence.

Purple fingerz=freedom

Or not so much.

Zimbabweans voted Friday in a runoff presidential election with only one candidate - President Robert Mugabe - and some said they had been coerced, fearing punishment or even death unless they could produce a finger colored with red ink as evidence of having cast a ballot.

But even so, participation at many locations was sparse, a contrast with the long lines of people who voted in the March 29 election in which, by the official count, Morgan Tsvangirai finished ahead of Mugabe, 48 percent to 43 percent.

~~~

In some other suburbs of Harare, the capital, residents said they had been rounded up Thursday night, forced to chant pro-Mugabe slogans until daybreak and then force-marched to the polls. They were told to copy the serial numbers off their ballots so it could be confirmed later that they had voted for their 84-year-old president.