Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

“The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith,” Hume said. “He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

What a glorious start to the new year! Brit Hume of Fox News, offering his unique brand of unsolicited dickish ignorance and advice. I offer wonder whether these folks are for real but this guy, with his grim humorless monotone–he’s a true believer. A true, dickish, arrogant believer. Happy New Year, everybody!

I guess I’m just confused.

It is difficult to over-estimate the degree to which last night’s vote in the House, passing a comprehensive health care reform bill, was a huge victory for the Catholic Church … The belief that heath care is a right, not a privilege, took a giant step towards legislative enactment last night.

Pro-lifers think health care is a right, not a privilege? But the Catholic Church is for universal healthcare? Or what? You know what, I don’t even wanna know.

That’s not gonna happen, at least for now. In Maine they voted to repeal the law allowing same-sex marriage, and naturally the religious forces played a big role in this. Why? Because contrary to everything it stands for, religion serves to divide instead of unify.

The Catholic Church was a leading supporter of the repeal campaign, even asking parishes to pass a second collection plate at Sunday Mass to help the cause.

It is times like these that I am extra-super-especially glad I didn’t allow the Catholic Church to be involved in my own marriage (normally I’m just extra-glad). An institution such as that has no business presiding over a unification ceremony–what can it possibly know of such a thing? What insight can it provide?

The Catholic Church, along with less powerful cult organizations, serves as a barrier for love, a dividing line for reason, and a blindfold for its own crimes against humanity. It is an ancient, irrelevant male-dominated clubhouse that ignores its own gayness–overcompensates for its own gayness–by actively campaigning against civil rights. A religion that considers some more equal than others.

And yet, I am going way too easy on them.

Ah, and here it is! I had forgotten about the site onegoodmove, which I used to visit quite regularly. It has been a while, and so as I now see, it is my loss. You can see great clips like this one, or Al Franken kicking ass, or any number of things. Larry David = Genius.

I don’t have HBO so I’ll have to wait for this one, but it sounds pretty sweet:

At one point in the show, David goes to the bathroom in a Catholic home and splatters urine on a picture of Jesus; he doesn’t clean it off. Then a Catholic woman goes to the bathroom, sees the picture and concludes that Jesus is crying. She then summons her equally stupid mother and the two of them fall to their knees in prayer. When David and Jerry Seinfeld (playing himself) are asked if they ever experienced a miracle, David answers, “every erection is a miracle.”

That’s Catholic League sourpuss Bill Donahue commenting on the show. Man, I would love to have seen his face as he took that episode in!

Ahh…Scientology. Nutty cult of the stars. Look, I can’t claim to understand why anyone needs this stuff but this Scientology certainly has to be one of the wackiest available to waste your time (and money) with. So this letter that “Crash” director Paul Haggis wrote is a real doozy, a real insight into the cult mentality, and it’s a lot of fun too.

In Scientology, I guess, you have to “disconnect” with people who leave the church, or something. It’s like, fine, go ahead and leave, but your parents can never talk to you again or vice versa. They deny this, of course, but it seems to be quite true. So… Haggis’ wife disconnected from her own parents because of Scientology and…sorry, this is just so wacky and confusing, I don’t really understand it. But it appears to be like Catholic guilt, except with added vindictiveness or something.

The craziest thing though, is that Haggis was a member for 35 years and it wasn’t his wife’s traumatic situation with her parents that got him to thinking, it was the church’s lack of support for gay rights. Good reason to leave the church, no doubt, but…what about all that other shit that came before?

“I was left feeling outraged, and frankly, more than a little stupid,” says Haggis in the letter. Um, yeah? They say that cults prey on the weak of mind and the weak of soul, but man, I think Haggis is dead on. You gotta be just plain dumb to fall for this stuff.

Them vandals need to learn how to spell.

I say up there that in The Booze Cabinet you will find beer, ideas, fiction or ice, but rarely do I come through with the fiction. There’s lots of beer and ideas and ice…but no fiction. So here’s an excerpt of a longer piece, completely out of context and only explicable if you read the whole thing. Which is not finished of course, but godammit, I’m working on it. Enjoy, or scratch your head:

Such sadness, to be cognizant of all of life’s missteps and undiscovered treasures before the end, enough to put it down on paper. Poor woman. It was unfair. I don’t know that we all deserved better but she certainly did. And so where had I not been and what had I not done? The list was endless. The rain slowed to a drizzle with occasional flashes of lightning across the night sky and my head swam with dark thoughts, the gloom of unfinished business. I talked to Ben about Sandy and how I was pushing her away and then there was Dora, and I tried to explain about the magnet she had placed squarely in her crotch. “You’re hopeless,” he said, of course.

He was right about me—it was sick how easily I fell back into it—but I was all caught up in the drama and I had no intention of figuring out why or trying to change. It made things more interesting, to pathetically hop from one failure to the next, getting burned or burning it all down, the romantic arsonist. She was right, that sweet innocent at the Courson House, it was a world on fire, and no wonder I loved that falling star. Ben didn’t understand at all and to his credit he simply ignored me and got to the point.

His mother’s note requested a desire to be littered across the “dry death heat and cactus landscape” of the desert, never having visited such a climate, not once in her life, never even crossing the Mississippi to the west, it was like some fantasy foreign land she had only seen on television or in pictures. I sat there thinking about it and grew more and more depressed. There was no way anyone could properly fill up a life. There would always be something left, always somewhere else to go, and in the end we would all have to accept that the world held places we would never see, pyramids, jungles, exotic locales; mountains, skyscrapers or a burning hole in the ground where a satellite fell. Somewhere was a girl I would never meet, standing at the foot of the Great Wall or walking the beach on a remote island in the Pacific, or maybe just around the corner on a street I sometimes walked. She would close her door just as I went past and go inside to an empty house and I would see a shadow behind a curtain and then a light switch off. It was a world too big, a life too small, and I could hardly move, paralyzed with despair.

Ben shook me out of the haze and demanded that I accompany him. “I can’t do this alone,” he said, “I need a witness. It would mean a lot to me if you came.” I wondered if his mother had simply given up waiting for the course of her life to change, given up on anything but the routine and invested it all in her son. The Burden of Benedict. And were we living the life she was never able to? I had a hard time believing that, not this life.

“A son has to fulfill a mother’s wishes,” I finally said.

We were living within limitations. Why? Why follow the guide? Why allow the cock to rule the mind? I was angry at God for not existing and for allowing me to exist. It was going to have to end somehow—and alone and without warning—and who would I leave behind? I thought of Walter and his false sense of comfort. What part of the equation had he left out in order to find peace? Eternal happiness and proper salvation and superstition and empty slogans. Another conversation, never started, never finished. I wished to have never lived and to never have to die and I could feel the fury building and the terror and the misery and all the while Ben stared at me slack-jawed and maybe even slightly amused.

“Is that a ‘yes’?”

“Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

- DHS Report

“This is the height of insult here.”

- Michael Steele

“[Y]ou have a report from Janet Napolitano and Barack Obama Department of Homeland Security portraying standard, ordinary, everyday conservatives as posing a bigger threat to this country than Al Qaeda terrorists or genuine enemies of this country like Kim Jong-Il.”

- Rush Limbaugh

“[T]he piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives. My b.s. detector went off the chart, and yours will, too, if you read through the entire report — which asserts with no evidence that an unquantified “resurgence in rightwing extremist recruitment and radicalizations activity” is due to home foreclosures, job losses, and…the historical presidential election.

- Michelle Malkin

An elderly gunman, said by authorities to have a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past, stepped inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, opened fire with a rifle and fatally wounded a security guard before being shot by other officers.

- The News Today

“I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.”

- Murderer of Dr. George Tiller, Scott Roeder

You be the judge.

The right-wing religious wackiness has come to a natural conclusion: abortion doctor George Tiller shot dead, in a church no less. Earlier in the year conservatives, Republicans and other right-wing nutjobs were feigning outrage over the DHS report that expressed concern over right-wing terrorism, among other things. Why be surprised? Four doctors were murdered during President Clinton’s two terms, along with two receptionists and a security guard. Tiller himself was shot too, in 1993, although he survived until Sunday’s shooting. But that’s not all. There were bombings, stabbings and shootings that injured many more.

Strangely, there were no shootings during President Bush’s calm eight years. This is because the anti-abortion foes are easily pacified by a false sense of progress. Although Bush, and every other Republican president has done absolutely nothing to address their concerns over the past thirty-plus years, the religious terrorists seem to hold their fire until a Democratic president is in office. That’s when the threat of keeping Roe v. Wade as law is intensified.

(Yes, that last sentence is supposed to sound ridiculous.)

The DHS report was exactly right to be concerned about such extremists, and they should include Bill O’Reilly along with Operation Rescue in their analysis. But I’ve already said too much about that tool.

If a man can be shot dead in his own church in the name of Christian ethics, well, this gives you an insight to how I feel about the validity of Christian ethics. I’ve already seen comments and opinions regarding Dr. Tiller from such Christianists that would make a Satanist proud–no, that’s giving Satanists a bad name.

Of Dr. Tiller’s death, Mr. Leach said, “To call this a crime is too simplistic,” adding, “There is Christian scripture that would support this.”

- NY Times

Christian scripture, by the way, is officially off limits at The Booze Cabinet. If there were a god, how sick would she be to see what is done in her name? Count me out of that silly game, religion.

But will the Antichrist be a homosexual? Having seen what the Bible says of sodomy, we have no further to look than the book of Daniel, chapter 11 to find our answer. It says, “Neither shall he [Antichrist] regard… the desire of women….”

- Crazy Alaska Pastor Article

That’s what’s in the book of Daniel? I thought he was living in a lion’s den or some such thing. I may have to read that one over again. Well, the Book of Doom says that Bible interpretations are almost always a reflection of the interpreter’s primal desires. Anyway, good stuff coming out of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin’s old stomping grounds. It all starts to make sense. The comments to this article, which asks with a straight face whether the Antichrist will be a homosexual, are overwhelmingly NOT on the side of author Ron Hamman. More importantly, they are hilarious.

Hamman is pastor for Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla and I can only imagine the crazy that goes on in that place every week.

There’s a lot to love about this article, starting with the title, “US religious Right concedes defeat:”

“It’s a failed movement,” he said. “We will end up like England, where the church has utterly lost its way.”

Score one for secularism and permissiveness, thanks to people like you, my loyal readers of The Booze Cabinet! Don’t be shy; it’s time to take credit. Your various displays of sick behavior and general silliness have paved the way for cultural depravity, and I commend your efforts!

If Notre Dame’s decision to invite President Obama to speak at its commencement is an “extreme embarrassment” to Catholics, then what does that make Cardinal Francis George? Sure, there are several ways to answer this question–thoughtful, meaningful answers and such–but I’m going to go with my gut on this one: it makes him kind of a dick.

UPDATE:

Interesting comments on that article–none by me, mind you! But here’s a summary of my favorites:

The Catholic church and its members (if you’ll pardon the pun) have perfected the art of hypocrisy. How many of the pro-George posters here truly follow church doctrine and use NO birth control of any sort, ever?

The ‘extreme embarrassment’ to Catholics in this situation is Cardinal Francis George. Single-issue thinking like his is one reason why the Catholic Church is in decline in the United States.

Just because Obama doesn’t agree with all the goofy stuff the catholics believe in he shouldn’t be allowed to to speak at ND. I guess they are only tolerant of those that agree with their nonsense.

Just because the Catholic Church is still living in the 12th century, doesn’t mean the rest of us should. Obama is trying to step up and help humanity, not relegate humanity to the dark ages.

Reagan and both Bushes were proponents of the death penalty that the Church opposes, but somehow they were allowed to speak? Uh, ok. Yeah. As a Catholic, I issue this warning to the Church: you are perilously close to losing my generation permanently. Don’t think so? Think again.

All the Catholic Church does is lose members. It is a joke of a religion.

I suppose Cardinal George would prefer to have another child-molesting priest speak at Notre Dame since such priests believe in the dictates of Rome — although they don’t live it. The hypocrisy is overwhelming.

Are all those child molesters dressed like priests an “extreme embarrassment” to Catholics too?

The catholic church needs to get over itself and move into the 21st century.

With Catholics getting worked up about the President of the United States speaking at Notre Dame–and why wouldn’t they? He’s practically an abortionist–I have a feeling that this story may fan the flames just slightly. Or at least make the heathens giggle (like me).

“You have a marvelous virgin!” said Hillary Clinton to Mexicans gathered at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where she left flowers and stood around looking uncomfortable (just guessing). She was referring to a painting of the fabulous virgin Mary, who never had sex but somehow conceived miraculously. Marvelously.

(Sidenote: what a story this is. Genius! How can we come up with a way to invent a messiah and leave the fucking out of it? Brilliant.)

This would be the funniest part of the story if not for Clinton’s earlier question regarding the apparently famous painting. Who painted it, she wanted to know, presumably expecting an answer grounded in reality or at least in oil-based paints.

“God!”

Th-th-that’s all, folks!

This is a timely article, after my viewing of Religulous the other day:

America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.

Found via Sullivan. I applaud the good sense of the younger generations. You don’t need it. There’s a lot more like-minded content on Sullivan these days despite his own deep-seated religious convictions. My theory is that he waited too long to try and eliminate them, and as much as he may be disgusted by what he sees, he can’t let go. Better to see than to be blind.