The Zong

Thank. Fucking. Christ.

General manager Brian Sabean said on his weekly KNBR radio program on Thursday that, “It’s safe to say the bullpen is being reviewed,” and that, “we’ve got to the point where we are going to have to do something.”

That’s what I’ve been talking about!

I don’t know who the fiddly-fuck Randy Messenger is. I don’t really care, because if the Giants had paid Benitez the rest of his money to go fishing then I would have been fine with it. I’m sure he would have found a way to fuck that up, too, but that’s only good news for the fishes. He’d probably have some other guy on the boat catch like 9 of them, then he’d go throw the fish back into the ocean and then blame it on the guy driving the boat.

As it is, Sr. Gasolina gets to go to a team that plays the Mets a bunch more times. Life is sweet, and even if he saves 30 games for the Marlins for the rest of the season, I give props to Brian Sabean for admitting that he made a mistake.

Now, about that anemic fucking lineup…

Man, it must be good to be a Mets fan these days. After all those years of being pissed on by the Braves and outnumbered two-to-one by guys wearing Jeter jerseys on the subway, you finally have a team of brawlers that are good enough to draw a crowd to that giant blue septic tank you call a stadium on the weekends.

Life only gets sweeter for you when Armando Benitez takes the mound at Shea. I watched the proceedings last night, and after seeing Omar Vizquel save the game in the 9th with his spectacular play, then seeing him score the go-ahead run in the top of the 12th, I was just about ready for bed.

I woke up this morning with my fists still clenched, but for a moment I forgot what I was angry about. Benitez fucked my mind so violently that I actually forgot what happened.

Then I turned on the radio, and it all came back to me. KNBR has been taking phone calls all night, since Delgado’s walk-off, and people are still calling in this morning trying to make up new cuss words for what Benitez did last night. On national television, no less.

Oh Mets fan, it must have been tough to hold your beer, so great was the euphoria at seeing Sr. Gasolina balk the tying run into scoring position just before balking him home, but I’m sure you managed. Still, seeing Delgado end it with his second homer of the day might have been too much for you to take. That kind of condensed sweetness can have adverse affects on the brain after so much misery. I advise you not to watch the rest of the series. Go take it easy for awhile.

Over here in Giants country, the tiny win streak that the starting rotation put together has been nicely flipped by Armando Benitez, that fat fuck who has all our money. Two losses in the last few games, plus countless examples of his inability to get more outs than runs allowed, and we get this quote right on cue:

“I have to take the consequences. Tomorrow’s a new day. I’ll come back tomorrow. You’ll see. You’ll see what I can do.”

In front of God and everybody, he says this.

If Benitez is still a Giant by sundown, I’m gonna find me a gypsy to put a curse on the front office of the Giants, ensuring that Peter Magowan barfs all over himself every time he tries to say the lineup is “better than OK,” and that Brian Sabean’s feet start burning with the fury of a thousand suns every time Joe Nathan records a save. A pox on all your houses!

I guess that taking a couple weeks off to cool my jets wasn’t a very good idea. I hope you like alliteration, because now I’ve got a backlog of bullshit to bitch about.

First on the docket: Cindy Sheehan’s Resignation. The Chronicle will run an article on her that sounds a lot more like an obituary tomorrow, and it serves as a rather meek and peripheral coda to the end of the democrat-controlled congress’ insignificant rebellion. We all heard a lot of blah-blah over the last couple months about the Power of the Purse, and the fact that not a single national poll shows that the American people support additional funding for the war without a timetable for withdrawal or at least a series of verifiable benchmarks, and yet somehow our elected representatives decided to trip over their dicks once again, all they managed to do was to demonstrate an incredible adeptness at wasting time.

Riddle me this, Mr. Congress: What the fuck was the point of passing the funding bill with a timeline in the first place if you were just going to cave in eventually anyhow?

This week one of the anti-war movement’s most recognizable figures said she was “resigning” from the movement. Emotionally exhausted and politically frustrated at Congressional Democrats for continuing to fund the Iraq war, Sheehan said she was leaving public life — albeit temporarily — to figure out her next step.

See what you did, you pussies? You let down Casey’s mom, and now all of her opponents are gonna call her a quitter. God bless you guys.

I don’t think Sheehan was perfect by any means, and many of her actions were roundly criticized as being exploitative of her son’s death. Nevertheless, the publicity she drummed up had a great symbolic and cultural impact, and at least she had the stones to actually go out and try to do something. She didn’t just sit on her hands and say “fuck it” like the rest of our congress just did.

I mean, not until she said “fuck it” this week, that is.

But who wants to talk about boring old Iraq anymore when George W. Bush has finally turned his attention to the Sudan? I guess he must have had a cocktail with George Clooney or something, because here comes the big bad U.S. of A to pour a nice warm cup of Go Fuck Yourself for all the genocidal assholes in Darfur!

By, uh, tightening sanctions.

George W Bush, the US president, has imposed new sanctions on Sudan and sought support for an international arms embargo out of frustration at Sudan’s refusal to end what he called a genocide in Darfur.

Bush announced that 30 companies and three senior Sudanese individuals are now on a list of specifically designated nationals with whom no American can do business with.

Political analysts say the expansion and tightening of sanctions by the Bush administration against the government of Sudan is sending a strong message. The Sudanese will not solve the crisis in Darfur by themselves.

Oh, snap! Suck it, the Sudan.

Wait a minute, though. Before the Sudanese government sucks it, they’ll probably be able to keep on keeping on through their oil revenues, which the New York Times says they do every time the international community waves the sanctions stick at it.

But the sanctions will do little to stem Sudan’s oil exports, which are the main source of the country’s wealth, analysts said. They also noted that existing sanctions against Sudan, which date back to 1997, have been unevenly enforced.

“Sudan has been quite adept at avoiding sanctions for the past decade, and this is not going to have a lot of bite,” said Philippe de Pontet, a political risk analyst at the Eurasia Group in Washington.

Well, shit. I guess we can’t go fucking with the oil supply now, can we? That would evidently strain our relationship with China a bit, and they actually have an air force and a navy and tanks and stuff.

But in aiming at Sudan’s economy, Washington seems to be toeing a sensitive line. It wants to increase the pressure on the Sudanese government without alienating China, a top American trading partner. It is also apparently unwilling to consider outright oil sanctions against Sudan at a time when global energy prices are high.

“The U.S. does not want to alienate China and it doesn’t want to take steps that take oil off the market, especially in the current environment,” said Mr. de Pontet of the Eurasia Group.

Putting aside the fact that something should have been done about this years ago, it’s hard for me to fathom how this is anything more than a small attempt to divert some attention from Iraq on the heels of the funding bill passing. Leave it to this president to use a genocide to run interference for a civil war.

I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night, partly because I was watching some other depressing bullshit and partly because I think it’s stupid to watch a presidential debate between people I’ll never vote for.

Other people will vote for them, though, and after reading through a few synopsi of the proceedings, one particular exchange really caught my eye and tickled my “Are You Fucking Kidding Me?” bone. It was about torture, specifically waterboarding, and it went a little something like this:

The Fox moderators introduced a fictitious scenario, in which terrorists have attacked several shopping centers, resulting in hundreds of deaths. But some of the terrorists were captured, apparently with information about another attack. How aggressively do you interrogate them, the candidates were asked.

It gave McCain another opportunity to repeat his opposition to torture, a cause he championed in the Senate. As someone who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, McCain said that the U.S. would lose far more from torturing prisoners than it would gain, he said. He asserted that those who have served in the military – as opposed to those who had not – tend to agree with him. His opposition to torture included the process of water-boarding, a technique McCain said began during the Spanish Inquisition.

Other candidates, while not endorsing torture, refused to rule out water-boarding. Tancredo was most succinct. “I’m looking for Jack Bauer at this point,” he said, referring to the character on the popular Fox TV show “24″ known for showing unorthodox interrogation methods.

It is here that you are free to become retarded with disbelief that someone who is running for president thinks that a fictional character from a television show can actually save America from the terrorists with his “unorthodox” interrogation methods. Props to John McCain to standing firm on the only issue he hasn’t changed his mind about since we got to know him. He should totally run for president on a “Torture is for Assholes” platform.

Almost as eyebrow-raising was the response of current front-runner and America’s Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani, who was mayor of New York during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, said extreme interrogation techniques would be justified if an attack was being planned.

“I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they could think of,” said Giuliani. “Shouldn’t be torture, but every method they can think of.”

Those methods could include the controversial use of “waterboarding,” he said. “I would support them in doing that because I can see what can happen when you make a mistake,” he said.

I guess nobody of consequence has decided yet if waterboarding is considered torture. Either way, it’s nice to see that being the mayor of a big city qualifies you to run the entire fucking country. Maybe I should run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and in a few years they’ll let me be the Governator!

Extra Credit: Read this article from the New Yorker about J-Bau and his stupid show.

Let’s remember the legacy of Jerry Falwell, in his own words.

On Civil Rights:

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision [Brown v. Board of Education] would never have been made…. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

On gay marriage:

This was made an issue when the Supreme Court gave constitutional protection to sodomy. So here we have now same-sex marriage. What’s next, polygamy? … Why not? And why not bestiality?

Just before the 2006 midterms:

And you go to Washington — there’s some great and godly men and women in the Congress, but for every one of them, there’s a Hillary Clinton. For every one of them, there’s a Nancy Pelosi. Imagine “San Francisco Pelosi” speaker of the House.

And of course, on why 9/11 happened:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

Far from being a man of the cloth, Falwell was just another politician, as full of hatred as the terrorists we’re at war against. He did as much to divide Americans along religious and political lines in his lifetime as anyone I can think of, and he leaves behind a country confused about its relationship with religion, with legions of people equating war and the killing of people in other countries with fighting for Christ.

Whoops.

News Flash: Curt Schilling is a fucking asshole. But in true Christian fundamentalist fashion, I guess you can be whatever you want as long as you apologize for it later.  From Curt’s pulpit/blog:

The only perfect human to walk the face of the earth died a few thousand years ago, that much I know. I am far from perfect and make more than my share of mistakes, which is something I have no problem with because that’s part of being human. However when my mistakes adversely affect other peoples lives, that’s a big deal. It was a callous, wreckless and irresponsible thing to say, and for that I apologize to Barry, Barry’s family, Barry’s friends and the Giants organization, my teammates and the Red Sox organization as well as anyone else that may have been offended by the comments I made.

Great, then. While you’re apologizing for stuff, why don’t you apologize to the entire world for campaigning for (and presumably voting for) George W. Bush? I mean, I realize Barry Bonds cheated at baseball, but is that really as bad as supporting the re-election of a traitorous, mouth-breathing war criminal to the presidency just because he says he digs Jesus? I’m gonna say no, and I’ll bet there’s a lot of innocent dead people who agree with me. How does your boy’s foreign policy fit in with your religious views, Schill?

Have fun walking Barry four times when he comes to Fenway looking for #756.

Every so often, I start to believe that Dana Milbank is actually a pretty hilarious guy. I mean, he looks like you’d expect a Washington Post reporter to look, and his writing is frequently sort of ho-hum in a vaguely journalistic way, but every so often he breaks off the kind of piece he did yesterday, and I realize that the two of us are more alike than I’d normally expect.

There’s a war going on, American soldiers and untold numbers of civilians are dying, and the foreign policy of this country has destroyed entire nations and our standing as a force of good in the world. In the face of several scandals and a rising frequency in calls for his impeachment, you’d think that the President of the United States might make some sort of concerted effort to at least pretend he’s trying to do something about it. I mean, when things are as fucked up as they are right now, I’d like to think the only thing Bush and his people have time to do is work on fixing all the shit that’s going wrong.

Instead, we’ve lately seen the genius of the P.R. campaign that the administration called “The New Way Forward,” which was to authorize a surge in troops, and then sit around and do absolutely dick while continuing to say that the surge needs to be given time to work its crazy magic on the terrorists.

The absurd insouciance of it all reached a fucking fever pitch, if absurd insouciance can do that, when the frigging QUEEN OF FUCKING ENGLAND came to our shores, and it became time, all of a sudden, to forget about all the shit going on that England and the United States are doing together and wax historical about some bullshit that Bush probably didn’t even know happened until five minutes before Lizzie got off the plane. From then on, it was all pomp and circumstance and limp-dicked pageantry, and Dana Milbank’s piece on the whole affair suggests that he might have been a little dizzy from all the blue blood in the room. To wit:

But the president seemed to be enjoying himself mightily yesterday. After Bush and the first lady took an impromptu walk with the queen and Prince Philip across Pennsylvania Avenue to Blair House, White House pool reporter Tara Copp of the Austin American-Statesman reported that “the president was in as sunny a mood as the sky above.”

And why shouldn’t he be sunny? The queen would not bicker with him about the Baghdad security plan, and there would be no prickly news conference in which he would be asked about the Newsweek poll putting his support at 28 percent, equal to Jimmy Carter’s in 1979. Yesterday gave Bush a chance to put aside the messiness of being head of government and enjoy the trappings of being head of state: cannons on the Ellipse, an Army fife-and-drum corps, a troop review and red geraniums on the South Portico.

It might be hard to sound sarcastic when writing stuff, but Milbank has it down, and it gets better when he writes about the prepared statement Bush read about the Global War on Terror, and Queenie’s response:

That met with a dissonant answer from Queen Elizabeth, who read: “A state visit provides us with a brief opportunity to step back from our current preoccupations to reflect on the very essence of our relationship.”

But enough with the heavy stuff. Tony Snow, the president’s press secretary, announced at his briefing that he would take no questions about the queen’s conversation with Bush. “We’re going to allow them to go ahead and have very pleasant conversations,” he said. “It’s a pretty cool day, you know?”

I guess my point here is that Dana Milbank, who I won’t claim to be unbiased, has pretty much captured my general state of mind about this matter simply by writing as if he’s completely lost his mind. It’s enough to make you want to laugh yourself silly: Why the FUCK is this kind of stuff allowed to continue? How much money did it cost to put on this ridiculous procession of fucking inbred puppet-monarchs and NFL quarterbacks? Is the 400th anniversary of Jamestown and a goddamn horse race as important as trying to find a way out of Iraq?

It’s more of the same here in God’s America, where we’re still just trying to ignore everything we’ve screwed up until it goes away. Want to know why people are plotting to kill us? Maybe they’re just trying to get our attention.

The Zong puports to be about the absurdity in both politics and sports, and the nexus thereof, when it seems like the glittering, guilt-ridden sweat beads rolling off the scalp of Alberto Gonzales morph seamlessly into the glittering, steroid-laced sweat beads rolling of Barry “Who, me?” Bonds, as he hits another dinger.

A few weeks ago, in front of a Senate hearing, an event took place seemingly so custom-made for The Zong, I’m surprised one of my compatriots didn’t scoop me on it. Beneath the glare of those made-for-TV lights and overexposed, in both senses, by the paparazzi with the automatic shutter hold, Pvt. Jessica Lynch and the family of Pat Tillman, professional football player and public servant, stood their ground and had their say.

To their credit, they did much to reverse the sanctimonious tapestry that had been woven around their familial names, all to the end of bolstering the The Decider and his covey of cronies. For Lynch, the less jarring of the two testimonies, she had the guts to admit she wasn’t the action figure pre-packaged for the media consumption that she was made out to be, with a kung-fu action arm and repeat-firing Patriot-missle launcher. She did much for her own rep, as well as what this country actually stands for - truth, justice, the power of free speech - regardless of whatever jingoistic PR mission the tail-waggers sent her on a few years ago.

“The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies,” Lynch said. Someone give this girl her civics merit badge.

But the real heart-breaker was the testimony about Tillman, from all accounts a nice and civic-minded guy, who broke with decades of sports tradition and actually took the smaller paycheck for the better cause. That alone should get him in Canton . As his parents and brother Spc. Kevin Tillman spoke about how betrayed they felt by the government, by the mission, by military, and lastly, by The Administration who led the charge, you couldn’t help but a get a twinge there’s something very, very wrong going on here.

I’m not a big fan of the word “hero”, - it’s too simplistic, and deification does no one any good -and I don’t think I’m going to use it here. Tillman was a man of great ideals and unfortunate circumstance. I will say, however, that if more folks in this country, and professional althetes in particular, were like him, we’d probably be better off. He was braver than I’ll ever be, someone who believed in higher ideals, and when feeling a call to higher duty, heeded that call.

And where was his Commander in Chief during all this?

Where was The Decider in the weeks since Tillman’s family called bullshit on the propganda? Staying up late nights, on conference calls with Syria and the Arab League to try and bring our boys out of harm’s way? Comforting injured soliders by making sure their care is the best in the world? Making a whistlestop tour around the country and speaking with war widows? No, sir, he was accepting a Purple Heart from a solider who found out how torn up poor Laura was about all those kids slaughtered in Iraq. How nice. Laura can’t sleep, and to make her feel better, The Decider does the manly thing and takes some guy’s medal, who actually won it fighting for this country. What a guy!

I thought I was out of outrage a while ago. But this event rekindled the fire stronger than ever. While men like Tillman die defending the country, and their memories are disgraced by lies manufactured to cover more lies, chickenhawk phoney-baloney fake cowboys with degrees from Yale like The Decider mince about in Crawford, Texas, putting on flight suits and medals, and playing army-man dress up. Isn’t that nice?

I’ll say it. You want me to say it? Fine, I will.

Our President is a big fat, coward.

Come get me, you pussy. Or should I say, “Bring it on.”

Dearest Mr. Ocean,

I would just like to take the opportunity to thank you personally for releasing the single “When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going” back in 1986. I recently re-discovered the song when trying to convince a friend that the most rockingest song you ever recorded was, in fact featured in the movie “The Jewel of the Nile” and not “License to Drive.” (I will go on record and say that, while “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” is a pretty neat song, if not a ballsy pickup line, it can’t hold a candle to the motivational-cubicle-poster bad-assedness of WTGGTTTGG.)

Anyhow, I had the song stuck in my head on Saturday morning, when I woke up with the remnants of a nasty cold which would accompany me throughout the entire distance of 83 miles that I rode on a bicycle that day as part of my training for “America’s Most Beautiful Bike Ride.” As you may already know, I’m taking part in a charity event to raise money in the fight against blood cancers, and this weekend’s ride was the major tune-up as our June 3rd jaunt around Lake Tahoe approaches.

So it was with great apprehension and no capacity for nasally breathing that I took to my trusty road bike that morning, and our team braved thousands of feet of climbing in the warming bosom of Livermore, California. It was during the early climb that the inspirational, if not slightly vague, line from the bridge “I’ll climb any mountain/I’ll do anything” crept into my consciousness. Somehow, as my mind reconstructed the finely crafted synth bass line countered by your decidedly euphonious voice as you harmonize “Can I touch you/and do the things that lovers do,” salacious though that line may be, I was transported to a place where no matter how badly my joints hurt, or how long the hill we climbed turned out to be, I had an ace in the hole knowing that I was putting the dream in motion, so to speak.

All I know is, I must have sung that song to myself at least 50 times over the course of the day, reminding myself over and over what The Tough would be doing in my situation. The ride got real windy near the end, and the going most certainly got tough right about then, but then the chorus came around just in time and I’ll tell you what: I went and got rough on the sonofabitch, just like you told me to.

(As a sidebar, did Danny DeVito really play that monster sax solo? My wolf-note cup runneth over!)

Although I definitely finished the ride, I know that I have a long way to go before I will be counted among The Tough. As it is, I think that The Tough are actually the folks that we’re riding for, but that doesn’t stop me from aspiring to get going. I’m certainly still taking donations for the cause, but don’t feel any pressure to contribute monetarily, Mr. Ocean. You’ve already done so much.