She’s resigned the governorship of Alaska, and the word is that she’s planning on staying out of politics for good. She never struck me as being particularly evil, but she did seem particularly uninformed and just way out of her depth on the national stage, so I hope this for real, and not some hairbrained publicity stunt intended to relaunch her presidential aspirations.

It has been said, not altogether unfairly, that Kal can draw very well but doesn’t write very good jokes. There’s not much of a punchline to his most recent one, but I still quite like it.

Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress.

They’re both written from a left-wing/progressive perspective, and they can be very, very funny too.

Rofflewaffles.

Generation Kill is a HBO miniseries about a platoon of marines involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In Ireland, it’s shown on FX on Sky Digital (channel 164). If you have any interest in the Iraq war, or like war movies, or just like good television, then you should probably check it out. It’s the best thing I’ve seen on TV in years.

Here’s an NYTimes review in case you want to read more about it.

Many creative people churn out great stuff while simultaneously taking lots of drugs and generally behaving recklessly, and it’s quite possible that some kind of frantic, spastic artistry emerges under certain conditions of vice. Thompson rode this chaotic creativity to its limits in work like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and in the consistently over-deadline missives to Rolling Stone that he knocked out and instantly forwarded onto editors while hopped up on speed. Some of his writing during this time is fantastic and some of it isn’t, but for a few years he was a generally functional writer operating at the height of his powers, despite the insane amounts of drugs he was taking.

To say that Thompson succeeded in these years in spite of his drug habits is somewhat debatable, since the whole story of Las Vegas revolves around how fucked up he and his attorney were at the time. It’s certainly not the kind of book you could write about a sober trip to Las Vegas, or even a trip where you got very drunk. At the same time, Thompson admitted to making up a lot of that book, so it’s debatable just how many of the drug-fueled antics recounted in it actually happened. Still, rip out drug abuse from Las Vegas and there’s not really any kind of story left.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is in many respects a better book, even though it’s basically a lot of Rolling Stone articles lashed together. Thompson’s binges during this period seem more restrained, and for the most part he just appears to have drunk his beloved Wild Turkey while covering George McGovern’s doomed bid for the White House. Here his energy and flare derives almost solely from outrage and a deep-seated, visceral contempt for Richard Nixon, and he’s all the better for it.

Indeed it seems like Nixon was the only constant muse in Thompson’s life. Even after the shambles of his notorious non-article on the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ (Thompson got drunk in his hotel swimming pool in Zaire while Ali and Foreman duked it out, with the result that no article was ever forthcoming) and the ensuing decades of sloth, Nixon was still capable of bringing out the best in Thompson, even though he had by this stage degenerated into a drug-addled old coot. On the occasion of his death in 1994, Thompson wrote of Nixon that:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

Before going on to aver that:

You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

Unfortunately, such amusing bursts of spleen were so rare in Thompson’s later years that when he finally died in 2005 he had essentially spent most of his life financially coasting on his early successes, as he whiled away his time on his Colorado ranch where he could shoot his prodigious collection of firearms whenever he pleased. It’s ironic that the life of such a strong proponent of drug use stands as one of the better examples of why drugs are generally, all right-on liberal/libertarian sentiment aside, such a bad idea.

Something I stumbled across on YouTube. It’s pretty striking, seeing a camera track a falling body as it flails and spins. I’d forgotten just how wretched the whole event was.

As usual, the whole situation is a mess and neither side can stake much of a claim to the high moral ground. I’m just glad that I don’t live there and that my government doesn’t having any role in funding this madness.

12.11.08: Regarding NIN music used at Guantanamo Bay for torture

It’s difficult for me to imagine anything more profoundly insulting, demeaning and enraging than discovering music you’ve put your heart and soul into creating has been used for purposes of torture.
If there are any legal options that can be realistically taken they will be aggressively pursued, with any potential monetary gains donated to human rights charities.
Thank GOD this country has appeared to side with reason and we can put the Bush administration’s reign of power, greed, lawlessness and madness behind us.

Trent Reznor

MSNBC story here.

It would be easy to crack some lame joke at this point, but this isn’t a funny subject. January 20th can’t come soon enough…

Even leaving aside all concerns about Bill Clinton’s potential influence, and, in turn, the potential influence of foreign donors to his Clinton Global Initiative foundation, selecting someone who disagrees with your policy to conduct your policy seems like a bad idea.

Jesus Christ…

Anyway, it doesn’t matter at all how I feel. Well done, America. And thank you.