TOBY PETZOLD

You know, putting a personal embargo on [the news] the past week or so has been one of the healthiest choices I’ve made in a long time. I don’t give a good goddamn about any of the crap any body is selling. I’ll bet I’ve cut my consumption of [the news] by 85 or 90 percent. That’s no joke.

Remember the coverage of that disgusting freak who copped to killing the little girl in Colorado ten years ago? Well, that was just a dress rehearsal for the shit that came after with Mark Foley. Big Media can take anything and make it into whatever they want and shove it down the public’s throat forever because there are agendas to be driven, by God! You shall care!

But not me, craphounds. So, I’ve checked out.

Wake me up when we win the war.

I hear Paris is on the verge of another meltdown.

Enjoy the ride, backstabbers. Just make sure you don’t let them smash the Nike of Samothrace.

Just waiting for one political era to end and another to begin.

On the personal front, though, everything is just fine.

Guess which one I care about more.

I was looking at Wolf Blitzer’s stream of sound bites and clips from the other Sunday talk shows a while ago. One of the clips was of Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senator from New York. He said something to the effect that, “for the first time,” it is the Democrats’ approach to the War for Iraq that is the right one or the popular one or whatever.

Well, whatever their view is —besides withdrawal— I do not know it.

Are we still talking about Jack Murtha’s “over the horizon” posture of “redeployment”? Are Democrats going to stand up and say that we should put more troops into Iraq? Maybe the Democrats have a secret plan to reinstitute the draft. I’m sure Charlie Rangel would like to float that one again.

So what is the alternative that Schumer alluded to? What have the Democrats proposed that is a means to victory? Or are Democrats so hungry for electoral victory that they only want to withdraw and leave Iraq to the partisans and terrorists?

Where are their thoughts? Opposition without a proposition is defeatism.

My vote goes to the Holiday Inn ad with the three goobers who run into baseball announcer Joe Buck at the elevators. They ask him if they can feel his throat as he says the phrase “Swing and a miss.” Ridiculously enough, Buck consents.

Yet, rather than risking any further weirdness on the upcoming elevator ride, Buck suddenly begs off, telling them that he’s just going to take the stairs instead. And they don’t even seem to take offense.

Ha, ha. Hilarious.

That was one hell of a game between UT and Nebraska! A quality win in one of the toughest venues in all of college football. Go stick that in your computer, poll-smokers.

Why won’t my guys be allowed to play for the National Championship? For one thing, the Eastern Establishment’s sports media machine won’t allow it. They’d rather promote clown-assed nonsense like West Virginia or Louisville.

In other news, the Irish are struggling at home against the Bruins. Gotta love that!

Have a look at this post by “Samhita” at Feministing on Muslim women wearing the full-faced veil in European society —an issue raised lately by Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and Salman Rushdie. Samita’s is the kind of thinking that makes you want to blow shit up:

Many women wear veils to stand in solidarity with nationalist imperatives. Agree with it or not, it is not really yo biness. Furthermore, these annoying obsessions with the veil as the “ultimate” sign of subjugation are misleading. The veil is but one issue Muslim feminists are working on (and that varies VERY much by geography and country).

This is low-grade gibberish. The poor woman starts off with plenty of bravado for Otherness and Submission, but slinks into the corner by the end of the paragraph. “Nationalist imperatives” are expressed in a self-imposed sumptuary law dictated by a religious belief? I can’t imagine why any Englishman would think that that’s at odds with true assimilation into one’s host culture! But, then, Samhita says that the veil is but “one” issue Muslim women are “working on”? What is there to “work” on, madame? Are you suggesting that there might be some progress made? Some change in the habit?

Two men discuss what they think is appropriate for women in “other” countries. And in a sweeping statement Rushdie gives the anti-Muslim world but another reason to focus on the overemphasized symbolism of the veil. But our gaze is still one way. Why not just stop looking? Get over the fact that the male gaze cannot reach them, as they are covered.

I don’t think Blair or Straw care about the veil in other countries. They are talking about a personal choice being made by Muslim women in their country. And in Great Britain —as elsewhere throughout the West— it is clearly unnatural and alien for women to cover their faces. It is, as Rushdie says, a means of taking power from women. And, so, we have the spectacle, as it were, of multiculturalist feminists defending the right of men to subjugate women? That’s perverse, clearly. People who hide their faces are essentially dishonest members of society. How can you trust someone whose face you are not allowed —because of some absurd sense of propriety or shame— to even see?

Finally, giving a piece of cloth, a symbol so much power is problematic. What about the greater patriarchal structures that are taking away women’s power, like blocked access to voting or education? Why isn’t Rushdie commenting on that? Simply stating that the veil is the source of oppression is a tad bit of an oversight wouldn’t you say?

If wearing the veil is no big deal, then why make it one? Dispensing with such a slight barrier between Muslim women and the societies in which they choose to live shouldn’t be any problem at all, right? But what makes it a problem is the retarded rationale that goes into the wearing of the veil. It is an anti-social act imposed by men on women whom they are instructed by the so-called word of God to treat as second-class citizens.

Monday morning, to give you an example of why this issue annoys me so much, I was idling in line at the drive-thru at McDonald’s. In front of me was a woman in a full veil —sitting there behind the wheel of some sort of SUV and ordering fast food. I couldn’t help but glare at her. And I’m pretty sure she saw me because I was watching her eyes reflected in her driver’s side mirror.

Who do you think you are?

You’re in the drive-thru line at a McDonald’s —and I’m supposed to believe that you can’t go one more step and accept this infidel society by losing the mask?

I don’t accept that.

Live —on MSNBC, CNBC (!), and Headline News— is an attorney for Mark Foley giving a news conference in which he’s revealing that Foley has advised the archdiocese of Miami of the identity of a priest whom he claims molested him 36 years ago.

This is breaking news, see.

Unfuckingbelievable.

I am ashamed of the media and press in this country. They are absolute fucking garbage.

They are a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of two travesties of a mockery of a sham. 

I don’t mean to sound like a sadistic jerk, but what the hell is this?

Doctors say it looks and smells like a fruit drink, but the taste isn’t so great. And the aftereffects, well, would someone call the poison center?

The product is Fabuloso, a cleaning fluid that children — and even some adults — mistake for a drink, ending up sick, according to a Texas study being released today by the American College of Emergency Physicians.

The study by doctors at Darnall Army Medical Center found 104 records of Fabuloso poisonings at the Texas Poison Center Network between January and April. Three patients were from Austin, said Douglas Borys, director of the Central Texas Poison Center at Scott & White Memorial Hospital.

Doctors at Darnall noticed children coming into the emergency room after drinking Fabuloso and wondered why. They found that Fabuloso’s liter bottles, especially its yellow Limon, green Fresco Aman and blue Ocean Fresh varieties, resemble popular drinks.

“It smells very fruity,” said study co-author Dr. Marc Levsky, an emergency doctor at Darnall, the Fort Hood hospital that mainly serves military families. “It smells like it would taste good.”

Good God! What sort of “sports drink” features a picture on the bottle of a mop and bucket?

In the immortal words of Frasier Crane, “If only there had been some clue.”

When I was a schoolteacher, I used to think about the possibilities of teaching my kids an entire unit about the important terms that they would see in everyday life: stuff like reading product labels, fine print, advertisements, street signs, etc. I still think it’s a valuable idea because, if our schools are going to keep on churning out semi-literate cleaning agent-drinkers, we can at least teach them a few words that might keep them from poisoning themselves.

A hideous turd has been sentenced:

Lynne F. Stewart, the firebrand lawyer who was charged as a terrorist for helping a client in prison on terrorism charges to communicate with his followers, was sentenced today to 28 months in federal prison, far less than the 30 years the government had sought.

Prosecutors had argued that Ms. Stewart repeatedly flouted the law to aid the violent designs of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted in plots to blow up five New York landmarks and assassinate Egypt’s president. Ms. Stewart represented him at his 1995 trial.

The government said she and two men convicted with her helped the sheik transmit messages to the group’s leaders in defiance of prison restrictions.

The Bush administration has touted Ms. Stewart’s conviction as a major counterterrorism achievement, and prosecutors had asked Judge John G. Koeltl of Federal District Court in Manhattan to sentence the 67-year-old lawyer to prison for what would essentially be the rest of her life.

But in his remarks, the judge demonstrated that he did not believe Ms. Stewart represented the threat the government described.

Regardless of what Koeltl says about her, Stewart is a traitor. She is also a monstrously ugly woman. Very often, ugly people grow to revere and identify with other ugly people and ugly causes because there they may go unjudged. They become morally and intellectually perverse to mimic what they are in the flesh.

I hope Stewart spends what’s rest of her life bearing fully the burden of her crimes.