Thanks for posting that. I was at the event, but I hardly heard any of Dennis. The sound was poor, and lots of people were talking in the room I was in. I forced my way into the main room to hear Juan Cole.

a good many sat there with pursed lips, and didn't seem amused with all the lib bashing I placed in the mouths of different characters

That's a class thing. You get the richest laughs from people who, at some point in their lives, either had nothing to lose, or empathized with people who had nothing to lose. Cautiously propserous people have a hard time letting loose. Dennis is not exactly what I'd call politically correct to begin with. . . and the event sounds like enough of stew to mildly offend all, and please just a few.

The Man Who Ate His Fingers - A Story About the Stupidity of War and The Idiots Who Glorify It

A powerful and graphic anti-war story narrated by a syndicated newspaper columnist about a homeless Gulf War vet who decides to eat a finger a day to speak out about war and to force President Bush to bring home the troops.

“He had seen a photograph on an Internet site of an eight-year-old Iraqi boy named Ali, whose fingers had all been blown off when he picked up a brightly colored unexploded canister from a cluster bomb. Sam wondered how it would be to go through life without fingers, to be unable to write or to hold and read a book. As he thought about the boy and the pain he must have felt, Sam conceived what it was he could do to stop the war.

“Sam proposed to fast for two weeks, except that he was going to chew off one of his fingers each morning for five days, take the weekend off, and continue the next week for five more days until they were all gone. He would stop if President Bush agreed to immediately bring home the troops. Knowing that concession was unlikely, all Sam asked of me was to write a daily column about what he was doing and why, publish a photograph to prove his progress and help keep his location secret from the authorities. He feared being arrested as a mental case and he was determined to finish once he had started. We talked all afternoon. I concluded that I couldn’t help Sam maim himself, but I did agree to tell his story.”