Free Republic

This is what you won't see in the paper. This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any major media Web site anywhere and especially no goddamn way ever in hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News. You aren't supposed to see. You aren't supposed to know. You are to remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over there, carefully orchestrated and...

Here's my suggestion: let them have it. Just do it. Let the sexually bitter and morally frantic conservative groups now dictating governmental policy and FCC agendas and paranoid media attitudes have their time, their brief cultural burp, their little speed bump on the great and beckoning highway that will still lead us all, inexorably, irreversibly, though often agonizingly, toward grinning open-thighed progress. Because here's the fabulous thing: no matter what these faux-Christian groups do, no matter how hard they oppress and protest and clamp down, this is a road that leads, despite all dour headlines and sour prognostications otherwise, toward...

So, who are they? Who are the ones who have no problem watching a Monday Night Football game in which huge sweaty steroid pakced men in cute homoerotic tights smash each other as hard as possible hoping they break bodies, induce aneurysms and draw blood during out most violent, drug addled and corrupted national televised sporting spectatcle, but actually picked up the phone to complain to ABC about the 'racy' ad promoting 'Desperate Housewives' that led into the game? They are the same people that complained about 1.5 seconds of Janet Jackson's nipple, the same ones who complain about low...

It's a movement. It's a phenomenon. It's a Web site. Or maybe it's far more than that. No one can really be sure. No matter what it is, it's called sorryeverybody.com and it expresses, better than any outpouring so far, a sentiment that's omnipresent and palpable and still going strong, and every single Democrat and every single Kerry supporter and every single liberal of any stripe whatsoever probably felt it like a white-hot stab in the heart the minute Kerry's concession speech hit the airwaves and it undoubtedly went something like this: Dear world: We are so very, very sorry....

Is this why everything's so mangled? Is this why we're so divided? Is this why we're so damned confused and bothered and itchy and wondering why we are ever at each others' throats and ever snickering in each others' direction and ever sighing heavily and wishing we could somehow have a magic glimpse into the year 2104 to see how the hell we survive it all? Because there remains this astonishing and yet ever present fact: all the major cities of America, the great cultural centers and the places with the most concentrated populations and the most extraordinary restaurants and...

This just in: Millions of moderate Republicans and gay-terrified evangelical Christians and intellectually numbed conservative parents who thought they were doing some sort of good by blindly voting for Dubya and hence protecting their wee ones from swarthy Islamic evildoers who want to steal their kids' Kraft Lunchables and nuke Disneyland, all should be emerging from a deep fog of savage denial any minute now. Wake, they will, to the increasingly obvious fact that their beloved smirkin' president, the one who seemed to care about them so deeply just a couple weeks ago and who reached out to them and...

Oh dear God please not again. Oh dear God please don't let it be all convoluted and depressing and messy and stupid and please don't let it all embarrass us on an international level all over again even more than it already has and even more than it already is and even more than we've endured lo these past four debilitating and soul-crushing years. Hello? Please? Is it already too late? Why yes, yes it is. And lo and behold, it's apparently another completely tortuous and entirely knotted presidential election, still not finished and still not all ironed out and...

So here we are, staring down a rather historic moment amidst the sputtering ideological orgy that is the American experiment and if you're paying any sort of attention at all you're doubtlessly drunk on election hype and saturated with Bush/Kerry platitudes and you wish a white-hot death upon every screeching TV pundit who is right now analyzing yet another insidious national poll that seems to reveal everything and nothing at the exact same time. And Bush is out there right this very second stumping and sweating and blinking fast and defending his useless hideous little war and hurling snide little...

Secret societies? UFOs? The truth about what *really* happened on 9/11? The media cowers I get this a lot: Hey Mark, you're a rather weird, unconventional columnist, why don't you quit toeing the typical blasé journalism line and renounce the corporate-controlled news feeds and standard pop-culture drivel and instead write about the real truths, the real and sinister power structures at work in America and the world? Like for example how both Kerry and Bush are members of mega-yuppie Yale secret society/boys' club Skull & Bones, and therefore suckle at the same tit of nefarious primeval Illuminati power and draw...

Miracle worker or no, after the tyranny of BushCo, a "normal" prez will be a blessed relief There will not be a great parting of the clouds. There will not be brighter flowers and happier puppies. There will not be massive choruses of angels singing and birds chirping and dolphins finally standing upright and speaking fluent Latin and saying we knew it all along. Let's be real: Should Kerry win this election, we are most likely not in for a spectacular and unprecedented ride of shiny progressive glory that will astound the world and reignite the collective soul and float...

Why Don't Americans Care? Do you know who Halliburton is? Dick Cheney? How about Karl Rove? Alas, most Americans don't Let's be honest. Percentage-wise, few people in America really give much of a crap about what's going on in the hallowed halls of politics and power. This is what we in the media and maybe you in the media-consuming audience tend to forget far too easily: This country is simply jam-packed with millions of people who have no time for, or interest in, politics, or media, or environmental policy, or education, or global issues, or which presidential candidate lied his...

Let's be honest. Percentage-wise, few people in America really give much of a crap about what's going on in the hallowed halls of politics and power. This is what we in the media and maybe you in the media-consuming audience tend to forget far too easily: This country is simply jam-packed with millions of people who have no time for, or interest in, politics, or media, or environmental policy, or education, or global issues, or which presidential candidate lied his ass off about which aspect of his military career and which Orange Alert is totally bogus and how many soldiers...

You know it's true. You know if, say, San Francisco had just been blasted by not two, not three, but fully four lethal trailer-park-eating earthquakes, why, the Right-wing Bible set would be yelping with barely disguised joy. Of course they would. They'd be jumping up and down and saying I told you so and pointing to Volume 18 of "Left Behind" and claiming that this was, of course, God's wrath upon the sinners and the gays and the heathens and sodomites and the tofu eaters and the Toyota Priuses and the yoga studios and the anal sex and the incense...

Aww, screw it. I mean, really. You just gotta love this thing. You just gotta love the fact that some semitruck company somewhere called International Truck and Engine Corp. is now coming out with what they claim is the world's largest production pickup, called the CXT, all 9 feet high and 8 feet wide, a whopping 21 feet long and 14,500 pounds and 18 million excruciating earthly groans of it. And in most states that don't give a crap for their roads or the environment or any human life that might be existing in the various passenger cars surrounding it,...

I have a good friend who believes, gloomily, bitterly, resignedly, that not only are we in for four more years of painful and cheerless BushCo-branded tyranny and misprision and aww-shucks dumb-guy shtick, but also that we are actually at the beginning of a long, brutal, fear-based Republican juggernaut that will last a good 16 more years, at least. Because this is how long it will take for the current horrific conservative cycle to play itself out, and this would resemble a more typical and historically proven 20-year pendulum swing, in this case one toward neoconservative right-wing hate and homophobia and...

Polls are the genital warts of election year. They are the swarming gnats in your Jell-O salad, the dead escalator in your shopping mall, the sour milk in your coffee. Because clearly, if you attempt to follow any of them, the AP polls or the American Research Group polls or the Newsweek polls or the ABC News polls or the CBS News/NYT polls or the Zogby polls, you can only conclude one thing: These polls are designed solely to mangle your head and confound your synapses and elate you and titillate you and then plunge you into instant despair and...

This is the great thing about rabid fundamentalism. You really just don't have to give a damn. Take the environment. I mean, isn't it just a little pointless to care so damn deeply about the air and the soil and the water and the stupid little disposable animals on this silly spinning ball of expendable rock when the Second Coming is imminent and a blood-soaked fire-breathin' Jesus who looks remarkably like Mel Gibson will return very soon to smite the heathens and the gays and the vegetarians and the Francophiles, and who will rescue all those who worship patriarchy and...

I am searching for a few good things. Things to counteract, to dissolve the simmering dread, to deflect the waves of nausea and karmic pain induced by the incessantly depressing media maelstrom and the appallingly hateful gloat of the GOP convention and by the most tyrannical administration and least articulate American president in 100 years. You know how it is. And you say to yourself, these things, these radiant gems that live outside the mass-media miasma, I need them because they provide some balm, soften the fact that the nation feels massively off track and blinded and war torn and...

Bunny-curdling screams were heard throughout the Beltway last week and Laura Bush herself got all flustered and confused as vice president and noted hunk of rabid warmongering neoconservatism Dick Cheney broke ranks with his party of other hunks of rabid warmongering neoconservatives and admitted, in public, that he thinks gay people are, you know, mostly OK. Sort of. A little. In small doses. "With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be able to free -- ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they...

And isn't it funny how at least 13 members of Congress have actually requested that the United Nations monitor this year's U.S. presidential election, just because, just in case, just to ensure there's no voter rolling and election rigging and chad hanging and outright shameless Florida reaming like last time? And isn't it even more funny how, when firebrand U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, from Florida, brought the issue up on the floor of Congress, she was actually shouted down by the Republicans, scolded that she was out of order and told her comments should be stricken from the record? And...