let's all drink to the death of a clown


Albert Oehlen, A Foggy Day, 1996

* The Rude Pundit on Alito. excerpt:

"Remember that it's a rule that holds fast and true: if George W. Bush gets to appoint someone to a position, that person will be a motherfucker. John Roberts, motherfucker; John Bolton, motherfucker; John Negroponte, motherfucker; Michael Brown, motherfucker and little bitch. In the hopper right now is Ellen Sauerbrey, who is a motherfucker of proportions that will ensure the rest of the world hates us even more than they already do. And, now, of course, we have Samuel Alito, the latest Supreme Court nominee after Harriet 'Nope, She's a Motherfucker, Too' Miers withdrew after being gang-raped by the conservative right."

"Samuel Alito is such a motherfucker that he supported the rights of cops to strip search a ten-year old girl who was not named in a search warrant because, as he stated, '[I]t is a sad fact that drug dealers sometimes use children to carry out their business and to avoid prosecution,' which also means that it's a sad fact that the girl's got no rights to unreasonable search and seizures. Which means, really, none of us do if we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."
...
"And, yep, like a good motherfucker, Alito offers support for other motherfuckers: he's for abused wives being forced to tell their motherfucker spouses if they're pregnant, he's for non-whites to have the color of their skin used as a factor for hiring by motherfuckers, and he believes motherfuckers running colleges can discriminate agains the disabled."

* The New Yorker reads Scooter Libby's 1996 novel the apprentice so you don't have to. excerpt:

"Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire ('[She] finally came to him in the bed and shouted ‘Arragghrrorwr!’ in his ear, bit his neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him') to Buckley ('I’d rather do this with you than play cards') to Liddy ('T’sa Li froze, her lips still enclosing Rand’s glans . . .') to Ehrlichman (‘It felt like a little tongue’) to O’Reilly ('Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants'), extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney’s books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress."
...
"Like his predecessors, Libby does not shy from the scatological. The narrative makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath, torture, urine, “turds,” armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus, boils, and blood (regular and menstrual). One passage goes, 'At length he walked around to the deer’s head and, reaching into his pants, struggled for a moment and then pulled out his penis. He began to piss in the snow just in front of the deer’s nostrils.'

"Homoeroticism and incest also figure as themes. The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the 'mound' of a little girl. The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter. Many things glisten (mouths, hair, evergreens), quiver (a 'pink underlip,' arm muscles, legs), and are sniffed (floorboards, sheets, fingers). The cast includes a dwarf, and an 'assistant headman' who comes to restore order after a crime at the inn. (Might this character be autobiographical? And, if so, would that have made Libby the assistant headman or the assistant headman’s assistant?)"
...
"And, finally:

"He asked if they should fuck the deer.

"The answer, reader, is yes.

"So, how does Libby stack up against the competition? This question was put to Nancy Sladek, the editor of Britain’s Literary Review, which, each year, holds a contest for bad sex writing in fiction. (In 1998, someone nominated the Starr Report.) Sladek agreed to review a few passages from Libby. 'That’s a bit depraved, isn’t it, this kind of thing about bears and young girls? That’s particularly nasty, and the other ones are just boring,' she said. 'God, they’re an odd bunch, these Republicans.'

* Sexplotation Lobby Cards.

* "Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop." -- H.L. Mencken