or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
•
"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
September 23, 2006
Bush Kicks Sanity's Motherfucking Ass
Here's yet more from Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. According to Hubris, this exchange took place during a May 1, 2002 meeting between Bush, Ari Fleischer, and Adam Levine (who worked for Fleischer):
As Fleischer recounted [an exchange with Helen Thomas about Saddam Hussein] for the president, Bush's mood changed, according to Levine. He grew grim and determinedâ€â€Âsteely. Out of nowhere, he unleashed a stream of expletives."Did you tell her I don't like motherfuckers who gas their own people?" the president snapped.
"Did you tell her I don't like assholes who lie to the world?"
"Did you tell her I'm going to kick his sorry motherfucking ass all over the Mideast?"
If I were teaching a course called "Insane World Leaders: 1945-2006," I'd devote at least two classes to this. There's a lot you could say about it, but my favorite parts are:
1. Bush's belief he somehow was personally "going to kick [Saddam's] sorry motherfucking ass." I guess I missed the part where Bush parachuted into Iraq and went mano-y-mano with Saddam and bested him in a round of Extreme Kickboxing.
Speaking of which, before the war Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan picked up on Bush's weirdly personal animus and suggested that he and Saddam fight a duel. "In this way," he said, "we are saving the American and Iraqi people." The White House scoffed at this preposterous notion. I suspect this was because Bush is so incredibly manly it wouldn't be a fair fight.
2. Bush, Fleischer and Levine were meeting to discuss an upcoming History Channel interview of Bush about similarities between him and Reagan. According to Hubris, on a pre-brief memo Bush had scrawled such phrases as "moral clarity."
I assume it was this moral clarity that led Reagan to help motherfuckers gas their own people. Reagan's moral clarity also led him to "lie to the world" and claim the Soviet Union was using chemical weapons in Afghanistanâ€â€Âat exactly the same moment he was assisting Saddam do it in Iraq.
After discussing this, my class would take a short break so we could all lie down and try to come to terms with the fact this planet is run by motherfucking lunatics.
Posted at September 23, 2006 03:50 PM | TrackBackThey should use this monologue in the next season of The Sopranos.
Posted by: abb1 at September 23, 2006 04:26 PMFleischer overload in your first paragraph! You mean of course Adam Levine, who went on to a mediocre pop music career which nevertheless improved on his previous gig. I don't blame you for wanting to forget it.
Posted by: jpm at September 23, 2006 04:36 PMWhether or not you like G.W.B., you've got to admit he's one rough-and-tumble cheerleader!
Posted by: Seen and Heard at September 23, 2006 09:30 PMI hate Bush so much that I couldn't even read the blockquote. Nevertheless, it's clear to me that Saddam would destroy Bush in a duel.
(Maybe an alternative would be a "Hot or Not" contest between Bush and the "new" bearded Saddam.)
Posted by: Adam Kotsko at September 23, 2006 09:51 PM
Bush has a problem with the fact that Saddam killed Iraqis? How's that for teh ironic?
The motherfucker is Walter Mitty on crack.
Hugo Chavez could kick junior's ass. Maybe Junior would cheat, which would piss Chavez off, and result in him pushing Junior while Ahmedinejad got down on his hands and knees behind him, forcing Junior to fall over, like in the stooges.
HC:"You may be el Diablo, but you are still a punk. Hay mio, it smells in here."
I also think John Dos Passos could have kicked Hemingway's ass, but don't get me started...
Posted by: Jonathan Versen at September 23, 2006 11:19 PMI love the Three Stooges, one afternoon I went to the video store and rented out every Stooge video they had and watched them for six hours straight, great stuff.
But what does Gore Vidal have to say upon the topic at hand?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060919_gore_vidal_reflections_9_11/
What then did our very own Romulus Augustulus do during the rest of September 11th? He read some more of The Pet Goat, knowing that his puppet-meister, Vice President Cheney, was safely embedded in some secret spot. Then the little emperor was hustled away in Air Force One for a tour of our most luxurious bunkers, where he might avoid the attentions of new attackers, should they come.
What, someone asked, was my first response? Amazement at how little protected we were despite all the megalomaniacal posturings during that cold war deliberately set in motion by Harry S. (for nothing, as he liked to say) Truman a half century ago with a son et lumire celebration at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is still not known to the American public that every single important commander of World War Two from General Eisenhower in Europe to Admiral Nimitz in the Pacific pleaded with our first really small president not to atomize two cities of a defeated nation desperately trying to surrender. But Truman, and his Metternich, Dean Acheson, wanted to replace Hitler and Fascism with Stalin and Communism. It was under Truman that the ever greater lie came into its glittering own. Despite the unanimous objections of the American military Truman insisted on dropping two nuclear bombs. I was serving in the Pacific theater of operations at the time and we were assured, along with the rest of the world, that 1 million of us would die in the coming invasion of Japan. Did we love the Bomb? Yes, we did. But little did we know that had we invaded as originally planned there was no way that we would have encountered the survivors of the Japanese army from the mainland of Asia as they did not have sufficient transport to return to their home islands.
If the lunatics have taken over the asylum, what happened to the guards?
Posted by: En Ming Hee at September 24, 2006 02:04 AMThey've gone shopping.
Posted by: abb1 at September 24, 2006 03:58 AMI'm not even sure Mr. Nixon swore like that. Though LBJ surely did.
What's up with the teaching of vocabulary in Texas and Connecticut?
Posted by: wkmaier at September 24, 2006 07:40 AMI hope someone can point me to the original for this - a sentiment something along the lines of "Insanity is unusual among individuals, but common among nations."
Posted by: Freddy el Desfibradddoro at September 24, 2006 09:18 AMIt's not motherfucking lunatics, it's motherfucking gangsters.
Look, if the lies were made by Bugsy Moran or Lucky Luciano, would you be outraged, or would it be par for the course?
I rest my case.
Posted by: John at September 24, 2006 10:48 AMRob,
when I first read your comment I said to myself for a moment, "man he's old," then I realized you were quoting Vidal.
I don't know how much scholarship there is regarding the historical evidence that the generals didn't want to use nuclear weapons against Japan, but James Carroll in House of War (which I haven't read yet), apparently suggests the same thing, at least regarding how the Japanese did in fact try to surrender beforehand.
Posted by: Jonathan Versen at September 24, 2006 10:43 PMJonathan Versen,
Sorry about that, I wish I could write like Gore Vidal then I could move out of Hicksville USA to somewhere like Cape Cod or Monterey.
What Vidal said sure surprised me because that was news to me that Japan had tried to surrender but it do fit in with the theorem that to the victor goes the privilege of inventing history. I have read a few books on WWII but this was never mentioned. House of War sounds like an interesting book as does Hubris so I am going to look for both when I am in the bookstore next.
...a sentiment something along the lines of "Insanity is unusual among individuals, but common among nations."
"Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
I've heard the guy was quite mad himself, though.
"Did you tell her I'm sick of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane?"
If there was anyone I would think twice about giving a firearm, it would be His Majesty.
Posted by: lilorphant at September 25, 2006 02:04 PMIt's not hard to imagine Dubya standing in front of a mirror, channelling DeNiro: "Hey Saddam -- you talking to me? I said ARE YOU TALKING TO ME? Are you motherfucking talkin' to ME? I'll kick you ass all over the Mideast, motherfucker."
Posted by: Whistler Blue at September 25, 2006 03:41 PMY'all be careful, that Bush be one bad hombre when
he's whackin' away at the brush with his chain saw - hell, like every Texas country boy, I used to have my very own chain saw back when - Bush with the ol' chain saw would be a sight to behold, even better than Cheney with the shotgun. If I was Saddam and free, I'd think hard about runnin' from that ol' saw were Bush to be sighted comin' down the road.
