Might As Well Rearrange the Furniture a Little

As I mentioned previously, I decided to give in to the temptation of novelty for its own sake and make a couple of changes. While the URL is the same, the name has changed. I still wish to honor the excellence of George Orwell, but also to be a little less obscure about it. A blog could be described, metaphorically, as a place of sorts -- it has, after all, an address -- and so I took from Chapter 7 of 1984 the name of the Chestnut Tree Cafe. This was a place where persons on their way to unpersonhood could sit all day, drinking Victory Gin and playing chess, waiting for the bullet in the back of the head, more or less, while the telescreen played the song:

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

I also have decided that, while it might well have been a good idea to blog under a nom de net, I may as well include my offline identity here, since the GOP hackmeister Mitch Harper has seen fit to reveal it to the world. I left a polite comment at his blog-whose-name-shall-not-be-mentioned-here, thinking that the usual practice would be used: that my signature would show up as "Bartleby," and would link to this blog. Well, wrong again. I had entered my email address in the appropriate field, from which Little Mitch ("Big Mitch" being the current governor of Indiana), like his nominally-opposing hackmeister Kevin Knuth, was able to divine my name. So Little Mitch appended my actual name to my comment -- complete with middle initial, no less -- and made it a link to this blog. I'm booted from the closet! I'm outed! I sent Little Mitch the following email -- still reasonably polite, I thought, although I'll leave that to the reader's judgement:

Mr. Harper --

Last night, I posted a comment to a thread on your blog:

http://indiana.typepad.com/fwob/2006/11/low_voter_turno.html

Nowhere on your blog is a warning that posting a comment gets the commenter's name published. And -- amazingly! -- my name turns out to be a link to my blog! So now, I don't suppose there was any point to my blogging under a pseudonym.

A couple of questions, and a couple of requests:

Q1. How did you learn my name? With the middle initial, yet ... I certainly did not type my name anywhere in your comment fields.

Q2. Have you ever been introduced to the concept of "manners?"

R1. Would you kindly remove my name from your blog?

R2. Would you kindly remove the link to my blog from your blog?



Jim Wetzel

Well, Little Mitch couldn't be troubled to reply to my email, much less to apologize for his egregious lack of online etiquette, so I suppose my second question has been implicitly answered. He also honored my second request -- I no longer exist, not being linked anymore from the Official Northeast Indiana Blog of Record And If You Don't Believe Me Just Ask Him -- but not the first; my name and my blog link are still in his comment thread. So, may Little Mitch have both some severe indigestion and some bad dreams; and beware, O Reader, of leaving comments on his blog.

And enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Camp Now, Change Later

Well, friends, now that I've voted just the way Osaddam bin Hussein wanted me to, I'm heading out tomorrow for the 2006 edition of the Men's Fall Campout. No, we don't beat drums ... but we will fart, belch, pee on the ground, practice over-the-fire haute cuisine, and cull some of the stale, slow brain cells from the herd by loosing that ferocious predator, beer. It'll probably rain and rain ... but it's been on the calendar for months now, and off we go, no matter the weather.

When I come back, I plan to change the look-and-feel of this blog a little. I'm thinking I'll give that Blogger Beta thing a try, and I'm becoming heartily sick of this template, which I've been using for very nearly two years now. Maybe I'll dream up a new name that makes a little more sense (and maybe I won't, I guess).

Meanwhile: enjoy the weekend, and I'll do likewise.

Me & Ted Haggard

So: the Rev. Ted Haggard says: "There is part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life."

Well, that's one thing I have in common with him. And at lunchtime today, I left my workplace and gave in to my own Dark Side. As my first step to recovery, I need to simply be clear and honest and transparent about just exactly what it was that I did. I voted for Hayhurst.

Now, in an earlier post, I tried to get all cute and deceptive about this. I said that I wouldn't really be voting for Hayhurst, although the machine would probably think I did. What a laughable attempt at avoiding responsibility! I might as well have said, a la Haggard, that I'd gone to a hotel room with a sodomite prostitute for a "massage." Uh huh, oh yeah, a massage. I might as well have said, sure, I bought some crank, but only so I could throw it away. My trash cans always work better with some methamphetamine ballast, right?

No, I've got to get real. It's the only possible first step toward getting clean. I pushed the button on the ol' MicroVote next to the Hayhurst name. I saw the "X" show up onscreen, in the box adjoining his name. And, in due course, I pushed the big red "cast vote" button. And so, in the reality-based world, I voted for Hayhurst.

The shame, the shame. Damn.

Why did I do this? Have I bought into that "lesser of two evils" nonsense?

No, I have not. My real motivation is where that Haggardesque "dark side" comes in. In fact, I voted for Hayhurst because that's the closest I could come to smacking Marky-Mark Souder right across his triple chins. And that ain't very close. How cheaply I've sold my integrity!

There's one saving grace for me here. Hayhurst is not, in fact, going to win. Thus, I bear no responsibility for whatever it was that he might have done in office. (Continued the Iraq War, unless he was lying, which I doubt.)

OK, I'm off to rehab. Maybe I'll blog a little from there.

The Gallows Vote

If this is supposed to be the Bush administration's November Surprise, well ... it seems pretty weak.

The Joker

Yes, yes, yes: I know Senator Kerry was talking about Bush when he said that those who don't work hard in school end up stuck in Iraq. Of course Dubya isn't personally in Iraq; Kerry was using the same sort of metaphor that Dubya's folk use when they credit the Wee Emperor with "fighting terror," even though his closest brush with personal involvement was limited to a series of frantic dashes from one secret, secure spot to the next on 11 September 2001. And of course Prexy's handlers and minions are feigning outrage at their simulated misunderstanding of Kerry's "joke." I get all that, and I'm sure everyone else does, too. Everyone this side of the mouth-breathers in Limbaugh's audience, that is.

It occurs to me, though, that the source of Kerry's difficulties is that he can't simply speak the truth in plain language. Instead, he must denigrate the Chimp-in-Chief with little Pseudo-Zingers for Halfwits. And what is that truth? Well, Kerry's been at this game long enough that I basically have no idea what he really thinks -- or whether he really thinks anything, beyond the White House would look much better with me living there. If I were to guess, I'd guess that Kerry's plain truth would sound like: "Bush is a bungler; he's the nominal head of the Stupid Party, and they have a tough time whenever they're occasionally placed in power. You all should be sure to elect Democrats -- me in 2008, for example -- because we're more competent in handling the levers of the Big Machine: the permanent government. The Machine won't do anything fundamentally different; it will just do what it does more effectively, bigger 'n' better. Under Democratic leadership, for example, the U.S. won't be stuck in Iraq; instead, we'll be going through those Ay-rabs like shit through the proverbial goose."

He can't say that, though, because it would alienate the antiwar part of the Democratic Party base. (I suspect they're vastly overestimating the size and power of that part; I suspect it basically doesn't exist. But I could easily be mistaken.) He also can't say what I think is true: "Bush is a tyrant and a war criminal. If my party achieves power, American soldiers will be out of Iraq by next week, and will be home and being discharged the week after. They'll be in a tight race with the American soldiers in Afghanistan, Korea, Germany, Japan, and wherever else we have more than a token-sized embassy honor guard. As for Dubya and his henchmen, they're Hague-bait as far as we're concerned; if the World Court wants 'em, we're happy to extradite." He definitely couldn't say that; it wouldn't sit well with the magnetic ribbon and flag crowd on their way to the Toby Keith concert.

So, since he can't say anything coherent, he's reduced to working the comedy circuit, trying to zing il Duce with carefully-calibrated one-liners. Well, to paraphrase: you live by the dishonest sound bite, you die by same. A plague on both their houses.

Wednesday is Keyboard Kommandos Day

At least this Wednesday is, anyway, at The Poor Man's place. Have a look at this one. Put the coffee down first.