Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

When I woke up Sunday morn and happened upon local Fox News’ airing of the Fox News Sunday program (tv was left on that channel from the Bears game the night before?) I saw a portion of the interview with Glenn Beck. Poor Mike Wallace’s son Chris was interviewing him, and I say “poor Mike Wallace” because look at what he hath spawned…but anyway, Mike’s son asked questions and Beck gave answers that spun around into little balls of nonsensical twine and then shot out again, like when he asked him whether he was losing his eyesight:

Beck goes into some long, incomprehensible word goulash recitation where he says, he realized “I’m not seeing something because I have eyes.” Essentially, at some point a doctor told him he might at some point go blind, and he laughed and said, “My mom told me that when I ran with a stick.”

Um, no, Glenn. Your mom said that if you masturbated too much you would go blind. Get it right. But really, the only thing that really struck me from the “interview” was when Beck said he was one of those guys who boozed it up heavy way back when and then at some point he stopped and replaced that addicts’ thirst the way that so many do, with some kind of extreme religious conversion. Just like our favorite ex-president, perhaps?

It used to be “never trust anyone over 30,” until that stopped being useful, so now my new motto is “never trust an ex-boozehound who filled that void with excessive Jesus.” Seriously!

Look, I don’t like churches any more than the next guy, but that doesn’t mean I’m against anyone building them, even when I know the b.s that’s going on inside of them. I just choose not to go in them. It’s real easy. This whole mosque-that-is-not-even-that-close-to-Ground Zero-business is ridiculous. Only really really stupid people could get worked up about–what? Huh?

“There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.”

Newt Gingrich. Ah. Yeah, that guy. Whadda dick. What’s with these right-wing nuts thinking they know what New Yorkers want? Ground Zero is not Republican-owned territory, despite what George Bush tried to do with the megaphone act. It’s a place where people from all different countries, backgrounds, religions and beliefs died. End of story.

I like what Joe Klein wrote about Newt yesterday:

Newt Gingrich is clearly running for President. How do I know? He gets dumb and angry when running for office.

Possibly. Or maybe he’s always that way and we’re just not paying attention to him all the time. It’s a good idea, though, to ignore goofs like him. Build the damn mosque, who gives a shit? Jesus Christ!

Map via Matt Yglesias’ blog.

Bill Maher does it again. It’s true, what he says. The pope has never threatened my ass for all the shit I give him. All of those silly religions I have ridiculed–”cults” if you will–I haven’t heard a peep from them. Maybe I need a bigger forum? Have they heard what I’ve said? Well, whatever, I approve of Maher’s message.

As Ireland withstands Rome’s offensive apology while an Irish bishop resigns, I ask Americans to understand why an Irish Catholic woman who survived child abuse would want to rip up the pope’s picture.

I have long wanted Sinead O’Connor to say something more about all that, and maybe she has and I missed it. But this op-ed in the Washington Post answers a lot. At the time, when she ripped up the picture of the pope on SNL, I thought: “awesome.” But not really sure why, just a powerful sign of rebellion. As is usually the case, the more you know… My distaste for Catholicism just grows with knowledge, and so these new revelations are for me no more than another nail in the coffin–what else can there be now? How many nails to seal it?

But it’s not just Catholicism, it’s religion, the man-made concept. So flawed, so very very flawed. And it seems as if the worst men for the job hold the highest positions (ha, women in religion? subservient at best!). Follow the money, follow the power, and you will find them. I watch all of this with interest, but surprisingly little emotion. You’d like to see some justice but then, I don’t really expect it to happen. I don’t really think most people care that much. And I don’t know many people who are/were religious anyway.

To Irish Catholics, Benedict’s implication — Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem — is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn’t believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is.

Here’s the Hitchens-Maher version (UPDATE: embedding working.) I like this version very much.

How do I really feel about the Catholic scandal in which “church leaders chose to protect the church instead of the children” (and when they say “church leaders” I think we all know who they’re talking about)?

Oh, you don’t want to know.

At home drinking a glass of red on St. Patty’s Day, watching the Blackhawks late on the west coast and reading about the pope. What else is there? Christopher Hitchens really kicks it in this one (title: “The Great Catholic Cover-Up”; sub-header: “The pope’s entire career has a stench of evil about it”). So you can see where this one’s going.

To put in context:

Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that.

The comments are as entertaining as the article, both the supporters and the dissenters.

“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.