I bow to his brilliance

OK, so Christmas (and, for that matter, the annual return of the "War on Christmas") is over, and I'm recovering from a stomach flu that I'm going to blame on my dumbass Marine son, returned for the holidays from his mind-meltingly difficult tour in fucking Hawaii (and remind me to tell you sometime how he had the unmitigated balls to complain that his first post in the service of our country was to a tropical paradise). And sometime in the next few days, I have hopes of coughing up a relatively relevant post, as opposed to the mindless drivel I've been spitting out of late.

At this point, it may involve Wikileaks, but I make no promises.

On that subject, though, let me point you to the great Doghouse Riley, author of Bats Left, Throws Right, who I discovered only this year. A man with a love of the English language, who possesses a way with words that would bring tears to the eye of the sainted Robert Burns hisself (if our Rabbie had been into politics, as opposed to developing the Eighteenth Century version of the Holy Trinity of Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll).

I love the way the man crafts a sentence. For example, some two weeks ago or so, Mr Riley, in tearing apart a NY Times op-ed, wrote a post entitled You're Not Helping. Not That We Aren't Beyond Help Anyway, wherein he formulated possibly the perfect opening paragraphs. (The remainder of the post was more than worth reading, but I'm just highlighting the initial 200 words or so.)

I've spent a lot of time lately wondering whether the Second Coming of Richard Nixon will answer the age old question If History's A Farce The First Time 'Round, How Does It Get Repeated? or, maybe, How Many Idiots Can Tapdance On The Edge Of An Apocalypse? I don't believe in Apocalypse, for reasons having less to do with a rejection of Semitic fairy-tales, and more to do with the question of what level of collateral damage would be required to make the elimination of the species something other than a net positive, but I think if one does then one should probably admit that if God is perfection, then Her comic timing has got to require milking this gag for a while yet.

And let's have this much clear: I do think the Republican party is a big part of this. I do think that the Nixonian Impulse, which I would describe as the hyperreality created at the intersection of the abject and squalid profit-taking which has hidden behind American Exceptionalism for decades and an infantile sexuality that would have put Krafft-Ebing off his lunch, is the very juice and marrow of the modern Republican party. And I think that, having in yet another election managed to milk a bull and produce ice cream, it will be drawn once again to demonstrate its essential nature the way a flasher inhabits a playground.

Don't be embarrassed if it takes you twice through to soak all that in. It's worth it.