BROADSIDES

January 21, 2003

Bloombergermeister Meisterbloomberger
Remember the 1970 Rankin/Bass animated classic Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town? It's the one where we find out that in her youth, Mrs. Claus was a hot, bootylicious babe. Alas, she's now a hefty monument to the dangers of a high-carb diet. Memo to Mrs. Claus: less candy canes, more reindeer meat.

Anyhoo . . . in addition to Mrs. Claus, Misters Rankin and Bass introduce that Teutonic toy-hating tyrant, the Burgermeister Meisterburger. The story goes that the Burgermeister has a bugmeister up his buttmeister because he injured his foot stumbling over a stray toy on the steps of city hall. Consumed with vengeance, the Burgermeister decrees a ban on all toys and obsessively enforces the prohibition. Of course, jolly Kris Kringle undertakes a course of civil disobedience and repeatedly defies the toy ban. The Burgermeister, his authority undermined by an overreaching, unenforceable edict, is increasingly ignored by the governed and fades into irrelevance. To accentuate the point, we're shown a portrait of the Burgermeister plummeting from a wall into a trash can.

In the first known example of Life imitating Rankin/Bass cartoons, Matt Drudge reported yesterday that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg was so incensed that the Rolling Stones were smoking cigarettes during a live-televised concert from Madison Square Garden, he ordered police to immediately cite the wrinkley rockers on-the-spot. Drudge quotes a "stage source" as saying that the police arrived with summonses but never got around to serving them, choosing instead to watch the concert. (Fortunately, New York City's police have better judgment than New York City's mayor.) With Kringle-like stealth, the Stones slipped out of the Garden and eluded the tyrannical reach of the Bloombergermeister.

Hell's bells, rather than being pissed at the Rolling Stones for smoking in the Garden on live television, Bloomberg should just be grateful that Keith Richards didn't look square at the camera and inject heroin into his forehead. Then again, considering Bloomberg's mayoral track record thus far, he'd probably have less problems with the heroin than the cigarettes.

At a time when New York City is facing unprecedented financial and security perils, Bloomberg, a Democrat in Republican drag, exhibits an astonishingly twisted sense of priorities. After having seen up-close what the nation, and his city in particular, went through on September 11, 2001 and knowing that his city is a high-profile target for more attacks, how is it possible that the mayor of New York is fixated on something as trivial as cigarette use? Had Bloomberg established priorities in his business dealings this cluelessly, he would have ended up being a windshield-washing squeegebum annoying motorists for a handout.

So why the inability to prioritize now that he's mayor? Election to public office changes many people, particularly those people who are already a tad -- and I want to be delicate here -- nuts. And in Bloomberg's case, I think his election as mayor overloaded his already fragile wiring and transformed him into a full-blown Captain Queeg obsessing over cigarettes rather than strawberries.

Speaking of cartoons and the Rolling Stones . . . I wonder if Mayor Bloomberg realizes that The Simpsons season opener a few months ago has a scene in which an animated Keith Richards smokes a cigarette and that that image was broadcast to New York City!

GASP!!!

Pick up your steel balls and dispatch the summons, Cap'n Mike! And while you're busy with that, the voters, hopefully, will toss your portrait in the trash.

B. Sides @ 7:55 AM

January 17, 2003

Verbal Ipecac
"No one has inspired more blacks for hope in America than I have."
-- The Reverend (chuckle) Jesse Jackson, MSNBC, 1/15/03
(via Andrew Sullivan.com)

Reverend, shmeverend. Jesse is a reverend much in the way Harold Hill is a professor in The Music Man.

B. Sides @ 9:54 AM

January 16, 2003

An Infectious Sense of Humor
Dr. Thomas C. Butler, the head of the infectious-diseases division of Texas Tech's Department of Internal Medicine, is retarded. Don't believe me? Read this.

B. Sides @ 1:22 PM

Witnessing 'An Inhumane Hell'
How evil is North Korea's Stalinist regime? This disturbing NBC report provides the answer. All of North Korea is, as one U.S. official observes, a concentration camp. Knowing that, it's difficult to imagine the fate of the men, women and children banished to a concentration camp within the concentration camp. However, the litany of human rights atrocities cited by NBC leaves nothing to the imagination. One example:

Soon Ok Lee, imprisoned for seven years at a camp near Kaechon in Pyungbuk province, described how the female relatives of male prisoners were treated. “I was in prison from 1987 till January 1993,” she told NBC News in Seoul, where she now lives. ”[The women] were forced to abort their children. They put salty water into the pregnant women’s womb with a large syringe, in order to kill the baby even when the woman was 8 months or 9 months pregnant. “And then, from time to time there a living infant is delivered. And then if someone delivers a live infant, then the guards kick the bloody baby and kill it. And I saw an infant who was crying with pain. I have to express this in words, that I witnessed such an inhumane hell.”

B. Sides @ 8:06 AM

January 11, 2003

The Order of the Knave
In its weekly Nobles and Knaves awards, the Washington Times gives the latter distinction to the Ku Klux Klan's favorite humorist, Michael Moore:

Knave: Michael Moore, for his despicable assault on America's icons of the war against terrorism, the heroes of Flight 93.

We may never know who, or how many, they saved there — high above America aboard a hijacked airliner on September 11. But we will always remember what they did there. We can never forget the heroics of Jeremy Glick, Edward Felt, Mark Bingham, Todd Beamer and the rest of passengers, who died while attempting to wrest control of the plane from their captors.

Just don't tell sulfurous showman Michael Moore, to whom they were not just stupid white men, but rather cowards. In the account of columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in London's Independent, Mr. Moore "went into a rant about how the passengers were scaredy-cats because they were mostly white. If the passengers had included black men, he claimed, those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes."

Mr. Moore fancies himself a humorist, but his rant at a London club was at best repugnant — at worst, racist. There's no justification for such an outrageous and unpatriotic outburst. One would think Mr. Moore might show a crumb or two of gratitude towards his native land — after all, he's amassed a fortune estimated at $20 million from his freedom to attack American institutions and icons.

Instead, he's used his cinematographic pulpit to bluster, bully and bludgeon. His next project is a diatribe on America's patriotism since September 11 titled "Fahrenheit 9-11: The Temperature At Which Freedom Burns." Stay tuned — with a flamethrower.

B. Sides @ 7:50 AM

January 10, 2003

The Reagan Rule
Pete du Pont surveys the Bush economic plan in today's Wall Street Journal, and likes what he sees. He also compliments W "because he followed the Reagan rule for successful public policy advocacy: Paint your vision in 'bold primary colors that make it unmistakably clear where we stand.' Mr. Bush made the case for his growth and jobs plan in bold primary colors all right, and so will find growing popular support for it."

Is it just me, or is the president poised to zing the Dems again?

B. Sides @ 3:40 PM

Memo To Scorsese
Spend less time on foreign policy and more time on your films -- each of which since Goodfellas is a big-budget Bio Dome.

B. Sides @ 11:50 AM

January 07, 2003

Moore Racism
Given that socialism is ultimately rooted in the bigoted notion that some peoples are naturally inferior to others and thus require lifelong nannying by a selfappointed, know-it-all elite, it's hardly surprising that America's Most Repulsive Socialist, Michael Moore, would inadvertently out himself as a racist.

Matt Drudge's sharp eye caught this story in the London Independent by columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Just before Christmas, Alibhai-Brown and family attended one of Moore's performances in North London and nearly walked out:

What we did not expect was to feel so enraged at one point that we almost walked out. It was when Moore went into a rant about how the passengers on the planes on 11 September were scaredy-cats because they were mostly white. If the passengers had included black men, he claimed, those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes, who as we all know take no disrespect from anybody.

That's quite a kneeslapper -- that is if you're a klansman, a fossilized senator from West Virginia, Patty Murray or Noam Chomsky.

If you're reading this, odds are you're not a klansman, Robert Byrd, Batty Patty or Chomsky. So consider for a moment the mindset that's required to conjure such a thought and then regurgitate it for public consumption.

Only a bona fide racist would contemplate the ethnicity of the airline passengers murdered on September 11 and then conclude that it was relevant to that day's horrendous culmination of events.

And only a monster would see the mass murder of innocent children, women and men as an occasion for humor.

Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder's career was destroyed after he was fired by CBS 15 years ago this month for making racist generalizations which were, compared to Moore's comments, rather tame. Will Michael Moore's publisher and film distributors do the same with him?

B. Sides @ 11:42 AM

January 04, 2003

31 to 24
"We've believed all year long." -- Miami Hurricanes captain Matt Walters

Last night, Ohio State made believers out of Miami.

B. Sides @ 1:20 PM

January 02, 2003

"Felipe, U.S. Marine"
In today's Wall Street Journal, Fox News anchorman David Asman writes proudly of his stepson, Felipe.

Felipe, a Nicaraguan immigrant, arrived in the United States in 1988. But due to the lethal incompetence of the INS, his application for citizenship was never addressed. Three years ago Felipe decided, as he put it, to "earn" his citizenship by joining the Marines. And by September 11, 2001, he had advanced in rank to corporal.

Aswan writes:

Felipe was in Okinawa at the time of the attack. He called us shortly after to say that he was likely to be shipped with fellow Marines "to the region." He wouldn't say exactly where that was, but we figured out when he added, "I'm willing to make the full sacrifice if I have to." My wife had been holding up pretty well until that point.

But then Felipe said something that should be considered by all those with children in the military. "I'm prepared to fight under any condition and fire practically any weapon," Felipe began. "And I'm not the target. You aren't prepared for war and you are the target. So who should be afraid for whom?" That simple wisdom stopped us cold. For a brief moment he had forced us to stop worrying about him and consider the risks of simply living in a free country.

Felipe's point is a sobering reminder of why we must fight -- at home and abroad.

B. Sides @ 1:17 PM