2016 GOP Frontrunners

The midterm elections have come and gone, which means it's time to play a game we've been waiting for since 2012: Pick the GOP Frontrunners! Another slate of Democrats has been stomped, leaving a fertile field of Republican bullies ready to whip holy hell on Communists, sodomites, licensing firearms, and unlicensed vaginas. Not to mention Ebola.

I know what you're going to say: there are so many options already! That's true. There's Wall Street creep Mitt Romney. There's (probably a) crook Chris Christie. Almost certainly a crook Scott Walker. There's serial-plagiarist and bong-level political science theorist Rand Paul. All those are good candidates. Very good candidates. That's an impressive roster. But let's get real: not one of those guys is a slam dunk.

I know of some people who are, and a tweet I wrote on Election Night reminded me of them. Last year, Mr. Destructo contributor Dan "General Gandhi" O'Sullivan, Classical editor David J. Roth, nomad political writer Alex Pareene, and SBNation writer Bill Hanstock and I, amongst others, collaborated on a world-beating slate of 2016 GOP candidates. Not just candidates for president but candidates who could run the table in every open Senate seat as well.

This is the future of the GOP. This is your future, America.

Let Them Eat Pussy: The Moveable Feast of Rob Ford

I feel conflicted about Rob Ford. On the one hand, it's impossible not to feel a wrench of pity and also a sense of self-loathing creepiness at bearing witness to someone's total self-destruction. On the other hand, Jacobin neatly outlines all the ways in which Ford is a civically and socially destructive asshole of the first order. If he's going to do his damnedest to blow everything else up, the motherfucker might as well take himself with it.

Then we also have to admit that everything about Rob Ford is strangely awesome. Not in the approving, "Rad, dude!" sense of the word, but in the original sense of inspiring a kind of bewildered awe. Beyond any sense of body-shaming, Ford is awfulness writ large. He has the decency to do gross things grossly, where there's no chance of anyone arguing inference and insinuation on the part of critics. You couldn't find a lustier representation of the I-enjoy-now, you-pay-later schtick of modern conservatism. Someone gave Falstaff a city, and all he had to give up in exchange was his brain. It's fun.

Maybe this is just me. I remember basically enjoying everything about Marion Barry. He was with a prostitute; who cares? She got paid, and she was an adult. He was doing drugs; big deal, everyone I knew admitted to having done drugs. I enjoyed the fact that he was pissing off a bunch of Reagan Democrats who spent the sixties smoking grass and the seventies taking Seconal. Meanwhile they were threatening to sue teachers who used harsh language at Caitlin or Brantley, while sporting huge hard-ons for high school principal Joe Clark because he was threatening black "thug" kids with a baseball bat. Not that this was about race.

Destructo Salon: Does Matthew Yglesias Enjoy Murder?

Matthew Yglesias—a Norelco marketing experiment to see if a hand-drawn Sharpie beard on a peeled potato could sell men's earrings—wrote a morally and intellectually odious article at his second job yesterday. His Slate column, "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK," addressed the deaths of 161 workers in a factory collapse in Bangladesh with the tone they so richly deserved: bored.

Writing off the death of 161 people with 370 words of vacuous unconcern requires the machine-like efficiency we've come to expect from places where pre-teens assemble Air Jordans. Yglesias' thesis, what little exists, is that the Bangladeshis are a people squalid enough that death is an acceptable randomly applied career path, and that dead Bangladeshis are what keep flat-front chinos at $29.99 at the outlet store. Our pants are cheap because their lives are, and cheaper things are innately good. Just think how much Upton Sinclair saved on hamburger as a young man. What an ingrate.

At best, one could chalk Yglesias' attitude up to the neoliberal worship of free trade, but ascribing any ideology to Yglesias is like trying to pin a Bad Citizenship medal on fog. He differs sharply from his Slate colleague Dave Weigel, who takes pains to acknowledge his affiliation with Koch-owned Reason. While Weigel seems like an affable guy who delights in mocking the ridiculous—and, with the GOP the party that forgot math, science and history, he finds common cause with the left—it's clear that liberals probably would not enjoy handing the budget over to him. This is how honest compromises are struck.

Yglesias offers nothing so concrete. He is a process acolyte, who never strays far from the orbit of Beltway centrist think-speak. His ideological bona fides extend to thinking that slightly-left people saying things identical to everyone else are slightly better than everyone else—all of whom are essentially right anyway, because why else would people agree? Ideas are less important than the formalism of tautologically explaining them, reiterating them, then deforming reality to accommodate them. His job is not to challenge them but hammer out a 500-word explainer detailing how wrong you are, while reassuring you that we're on the right track. Matthew Yglesias' voice is the same soothing one you use on your dog while the vet is euthanizing him.

That should bother you. Today, we hope to explain why in another "Destructo Salon." Please read on.

Busta Poesy: Amanda Palmer's Unpublished Paeans to What's on TV

In a week that saw major global earthquakes, a bombing at a marathon, a city shut down, a series of deadly shootouts, the defeat of even a toothless piece of gun-control legislation, the Internet and the New York Post proudly labeling several innocent people as terrorists, hate crimes against Muslims, and a massive and deadly explosion in Texas—well, after a week like that, it takes some serious stones to make it about you. Amanda Palmer doesn't have a modesty problem.

You might have heard of Amanda Palmer. A punk rocker turned folk singer, she embraced the leveling social-justice agitation of both genres, married it to Kickstarter's DIY funding, asked for $100,000 from fans to make an album and wound up being given $1.2 million. Then she used most of the money on frivolous shit and paying off personal debts, while expecting local musicians to play on her tour for free, and fans to feel rewarded by the same "HERE IS A GIFT CERTIFICATE FOR ONE (1) HUG" lazy compensation she was doling out for a donation total smaller by a factor of 11.

Palmer clearly exhibited significant difficulty in picking up context clues from even her own personal history in music. Thankfully, her degree of obtuseness extends beyond shitkicker balladeering and fan plunder. After bearing witness to the horrors in Boston, Palmer published "A Poem for Dzhokhar," addressed to the alleged Boston bomber who was captured in a boat after a frightening daylong manhunt. Her poem—35 aired-out lines of lowercase e.e. crummy—does an excellent job of cataloging the ennui of privileged insipidity. Which is to say, it sings a song of Amanda Palmer to Amanda Palmer that, one supposes, Dzhokhar might eventually overhear by accident. It is glurge clickbait, the kind of thing that appears in your inbox only after being forwarded by that one grandmother who had parts of her brain suffocate for a little while.

Naturally, we here at Et tu, Mr. Destructo? were flabbergasted. More importantly, all of us received extensive CIA training in remote viewing. Using only the power of extra-sensory perception, we were able to individually "hack" Amanda Palmer's brain, gaining access to as-yet unwritten poems dedicated to other tragic events in the national news cycle. We have presented these unpublished poems below. However, as remote viewing is sometimes inexact, we have added our names to each poem to account for how different viewers interpreted the raw Palmer data. Thank you for your indulgence.

Cordial Greetings to 45 Pocket Toys of Death Merchants

Yesterday, the US Senate killed even a candyass, quintessentially senatorial approach to gun control. You could have cocked a single eye at the television with lid at half mast while falling into a K-hole and still had enough situational awareness to be furious at the lobbyist capture of our most venerated, sclerotic chamber full of war profiteering racists, foot-draggers and bozos. This was, after all, nothing new.

Yesterday's vote—against a treacly version of measures supported by 90% of the American people and even a majority of gun owners—had the virtue of malicious consistency. The essence of its unconcern was obvious to all because it came as a fulfillment of fate. In the face of real, existential problems, the United States Senate can be relied upon to sublimely split the difference between the cruelest act and the least difficult. In Washington, the blood rolls downhill.

Yet just because something is obvious or foreordained does not spare it from outrage. Given how far away it's possible to see stupidity coming only makes it that much worse when it inevitably arrives. As such, it's probably not terribly surprising to see people tackily lusting for violence. Especially when a walking anti-Habsburgian chin deformity like Mitch McConnell uses his Facebook page to do the public policy equivalent of "u mad, bro?" trolling about the tryhard epic "care" of people who have negative attitudes toward human flesh being torn apart ballistically.

Point-Counterpoint: Is Satire Even A Thing?

Last Monday, New Inquiry blogger Aaron Bady audited the word satire and made it clear. He wrote, "If something is not taken to be satire, it fails as satire. [It's] an effect, and everything depends on how the joke is received, what the author intended, what the circumstances were in which it was made, and so on."

It's an interesting definition, both for the way it's made and the assumptions on which it relies. He establishes criteria for the existence of satire based on its audience, citing people who mistake The Onion and The Daily Currant for real news as evidence for the genre's fragility, tying satire's ontology to whether it achieves food for thought for the permanently slackjawed. Leaving aside the fact that a satire's being mistaken for reality is often a satirist's dream, basing the existence of something on the perception of idiots is a powerful argument. Spend enough time hustling Gap jeans for the braindead in a deadpan tone and you could disprove the existence of sarcasm. Choose the right textbook, and there is no Enlightenment.

Needless to say, we were greatly exercised by Mr. Bady's essay. One of our contributors (Hitler) noted the date of Bady's essay's publication (April 1) and quipped that it says a lot about your criticism website when your jeremiad only works as satire—when one could only add argumentative heft to it by looking at the dateline and crying, "April fools!"

Even talking amongst ourselves, however, we noticed that our opinions on satire and Bady's argument were not in harmony. With that in mind, we chose to offer our first open-ended philosophical discussion. In so doing, we decided to examine the nature of satire via the old inquiry. We here at Et tu, Mr. Destructo? have always been partial to the old inquiry, wherein one asks questions or challenges the opinions of another in the hope of reaching consensus or synthesis. In the main, it is both arcane and bourgeois, but it is also a timesaver compared to newer inquiries, like asking a room full of people what something is, then asking them if the photographer has arrived yet. Then tweeting.

Come, join us for a free-ranging examination of the ideas that shape our media and ourselves, especially those of us in media. Welcome to our first ever "Destructo Salon."

The Sweet Smell of Failure: Dinesh D'Souza, Colonial Apologist and Right-Wing Loser

Note: Today, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to our Managing Editor General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria. He last joined us for a look at Big Mark Brendle's Radio Fragments.


Dinesh D'Souza: Portrait Of The Failure As A Done Man
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

In the pantheon of hard-right holy rollers who have spectacularly strayed on the road to New Jerusalem, Dinesh D'Souza—the Indian Mr. Bean—is a pitifully dull case. But Jesus wept all the same, anguished as he was by Dinesh D'Souza's wayward penis.

The lodestar of suck, the one that propelled this greased weasel to fame on the right-wing rodeo circuit, shines even on his tepid excuse of a sex scandal: he showed up at some Bible-thumping conference with an extramarital companion—the also-married Denise Odie Joseph—introducing her as his fiancee, before retiring to a shared Comfort Suite. This induced a collective case of "the vapors" among the Board of Trustees at King's College, the barely accredited evangelical diploma mill where D'Souza served as president. A marathon Board meeting, and it was all over: D'Souza was fired, stripped of his six-figure salary (he only took a vow of intellectual poverty), and booted back into the GOP scullery from whence he came.

Letters to Vogue: 'Come, Come, Nuclear Bombs'

In these times of economic peril—will the Dow crack 14,000 again? Where can I sell my plasma for cash? Can I volunteer for jury duty?—we, the creatives at Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, draw what succor we can from the only financial forecast any human heart needs: the word of the Prince of Peace himself, Jesus Christ. As the First Epistle of Peter tells us, "God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble."

Wise words from a former fisherman, but you don't have to have such a broke-ass job to be a paragon of humility. If you're a humble person, flaunt it—say so, loudly and proudly. Telegraph your abiding modesty until your tasteful understatement cannot be ignored. And if you happen to be a scribbler at a glossy fashion magazine like Vogue, set aside your monkish ways just long enough for your multimillion dollar Brooklyn brownstone to be captured in a multipage spread for the February issue.

Thank God that landscape designer and Vogue Contributing Editor Miranda Brooks, as well as her Gallic concubine, the architect Bastien Halard, took my advice, selflessly opening their "four-story Neo-Grec Boerum Hill brownstone" to just such a laudatory write-up and photo shoot, penned by Murphy Brown's very posh daughter. And while the reactions are still pouring in, this whirlwind jaunt through a mansion stuffed to the rafters with Moroccan rugs, ponies and wonderful people has seemed to provoke one common reaction: readers want to smash all the windows out with bricks, throw dynamite in the furnace, and guillotine Miranda and Bastien in Prospect Park.

The General's Fiction: A Military Internment of Literature — No. 2

Note: Today, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria. He last joined us to explain how Christopher Hitchens should burn in hell, how we can help Andrew Breitbart get there and how killing Bin Laden was the last spasm in the American fever dream.


Pavane For A Dead Country: Mark Brendle's Radio Fragments
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

You probably know the holiday blues, if not personally, then at least by reputation. And you probably know them more acutely when the celebrations end, when there's no one left to lie to—winter without the trappings. Wallace Stevens wrote, "The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us," and in the twilight of an economically corroded and spiritually bereft America, it is more vital than ever that artists shine a light. Mark Brendle, an Oregon-based writer and colleague here at Et Tu, Mr. Destructo, has published a new book of poetry, Radio Fragments.

Radio Fragments consists of a few dozen prose poems beneath a lovely illustrated cover, depicting a cordon of riot cops forming a human abatis, as a ribbon of radio waves bends and curls between them. How is Radio Fragments? It is superb, because as an author, Brendle gets the stakes. This poetry is neither for the aloof liberal who sets great store in a few clean tweaks, nor the reactionary clinging to his long-dead liturgy. Radio Fragments is sad, strong, crystalline, beautiful, like the thick ice atop a dark lake. This is poetry for people who, in Andrea Dworkin's words, "Don't find compromise unacceptable—[they] find it incomprehensible."

The book's strength comes from its unity of vision—a dire one. In one of the book's final poems, "An Elegy For Cinna The Poet," the speaker plainly doubts the ability of any creative work to puncture the violence and anomie that has come to dominate our lives: "What are words to the angry mob, or anyone else for that matter? The patricians have been fighting with each other over their toys again." The poet is ignored, Caesar gets whacked by his equally loathsome usurpers, and "atomized, dissonant voices howl in the marketplace." As Brendle writes in another poem, "The equivalence of words brands us with proper nouns like Charlemagne, Babylon, Gilgamesh, Constantinople, Prospero." Let any dissidents bay; they've always been ignored in time for the next collapse. What change could a poet possibly effect?

GAWKER: Andrew Breitbart's Dead

Good. General Ze'evi and I take a moment to look back comprehensively on a life that the media either mistakenly, squeamishly or warily summed up as mostly benign. You know, one or two regrettable bits, but otherwise a gauzy, sunny family portrait — like what Madison Avenue thinks wheat and beaches look like when you're menstruating.

Click on the dead fraud's impression of John Lithgow from Third Rock from the Sun to be taken to the article.

'The General's Fiction': A Military Internment of Literature — No. 1

Note: For discussion of Muslim figures in literature, we turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. His multi-part series on Libya, Slouching from Benghazi, resumes later this year.


Amazing Gaze: The Western Eyes of Soulful Scribbler Caleb Powell
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"'Algonquian women in New England,' wrote William Wood in 1634, were 'more loving, pitiful, and modest, mild, provident, and laborious than their lazy husbands.' Wood imagined that oppressed Indian women would gladly embrace European gender roles with their presumably lighter burdens of female domesticity."
— Kirsten Fischer

The holidays are long over. Liquor sales have stabilized; few of the year-end suicides remain undiscovered, and, if you are like me, you have a major haul of gifted books. Stacked on my bedside table, towering over my bloated, holly-jolly frame, the books are a leering accusation: "You're like all the others," sniffs The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. "Just direct me to the bookshelf best situated to intimidate your landlord."

As I limply cast aside the hose of my opium huqqa, ash sprinkling the datemaki sash of my authentic silken Nipponese kimono, I despair: literature is dead. Then suddenly, there is a change. There is a Powellful discovery. Who is Caleb Powell? A question I pondered not two weeks ago — now I have some sense of the answer, of an author who asserted himself in my mind's eye. Thus far, his vision has been inscribed only within a few brave avant garde presses, like Prick of the Spindle, Yankee Pot Roast, and Zyzzyva. I aim to change this.

In this special inaugural issue of "The General's Fiction," I invite you to imbibe deeply of the rose-colored drippings of Caleb Powell — author, stay-at-home father, poet. Let us, in the words of the late, great Christopher Hitchens, "let in daylight upon the magic."

Burn in Hell, Christopher Hitchens

Note: For discussion of Middle Eastern affairs, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part III: Killing the Bastard Bin Laden, Stage IV of the American Fever Dream.


Reflections in a Gimlet Eye
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
— Voltaire

Hitchens was human trash, and his corpse should be interred in a grave worthy of his towering legacy, an eternally burning garbage fire, rising as high as a Baghdad sunrise, a smoky immolation of all the worthlessness that could be crammed in his "contrarian" paunch.

Even this dream, of the phoenix never rising from the ashes, preserves that peasant’s megalomania more powerfully than any embalming fluids currently coursing through his veins. Formaldehyde's more potable than his lifeblood's cocktail of lies and booze, a tincture only the diseased imbibe. Hitchens was strictly for suckers, a mouse that roared, a VH1 I Love the 80s panelist with a fancy accent, a rap sheet and cirrhosis. "Rationalist," "skeptic," "contrarian," "public intellectual" — court jester. He plied that ancient trade for the deadliest predators on Earth; his was the reflexive, suck-up, kick-down cruelty of the British madding crowd. That’s all, folks.

To cite an author he hamfistedly emulated (more or less successfully), Hitchens was Squealer the pig, a silver-tongued correspondent to the middlebrow, flattering of power, contemptuous of the weak, the bashful, the foreign — the sincere. He was a kept man to the bitter end, the part-time iconoclast. As Norman Finklestein recalled, "'The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,' Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler's seizure of power. 'You always wore it the 'right' way around.'" Hitchens afflicted the weak and comforted the powerful, an abnegation of any public service a gadfly could perform. Though his Oxbridge accent and erudition were crucial in fleecing the provincials he knew the USA was composed of, it was his more American qualities that endeared him to the terminal-stage Republic.

The multiple comparisons to Lord Byron that Hitchens received are so disturbing as to deserve no response. I'll try anyway. Byron — a superhuman defender of the voiceless, an impossibly good-looking sex machine, the noble son of "Mad Jack" Byron and sole voice in excoriating the destruction of Ireland, a Bengal tiger capable of ripping apart any of Wordsworth's reactionaries in verse or in person, a man disgusted by the fatuous, self-satisfied corruption of the Tory elite and the once-radical Lake poets (who should "change their lakes for oceans"), a man contemptuous of an imperial masculinity defined by cruelty and weakness, fled that stinking island — died a hero's death in Greece, fighting empire.

Hitchens died in Houston, Texas, headquarters of Halliburton.

'The Shadows of the Night'

We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are a pretty collegial lot. We like to chat on instant-messenger services with each other, because often one of us will discover an illegal stream and password to an Irkutsk-originating pay-per-view video of human or animal bloodsport. Last night, as I polished a new column for Vice, and General Rehavam Ze'evi worked on Part IV of his three-part series on Libya, our thoughts turned to ways to help drive more traffic to this website:

You should embed a Pat Benatar Youtube to get more pageloads. Everyone loves her.

It would probably have to be the video for "Shadows of the Night," for the one-two punch of Judge Reinhold and Bill Paxton.

Wailing Walls: Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part III

Note: After the death of Osama Bin Laden, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part II: The Real Story Sucks: Bin Laden, the ISI and a Dawood Sandstorm.


Killing the Bastard Bin Laden, Stage IV of the American Fever Dream
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
— Revelation 18:2

"An America that uses its military power less promiscuously, more intelligently and in a targeted and focused manner might once again gain the world’s respect and fear, if not affection."
— Fareed Zakaria, Time, May 20, 2011

The boozy cheering of the blood-mad spectator echoes across a lacuna in the brittle American soul. Never forget the slaughter of 9/11 and never forget that the brick and mortar of this nation was slapped atop a continent-wide Indian burial ground. The American Revolution was an assertion of human worth that has been studied and admired by everyone from Simon Bolivar to Ho Chi Minh. And since that clinching moment at Yorktown, America has paved the low road over any peoples in its way and assumed it would pay no price.

The world should embrace America the way cattle egrets dote on elephants, and America should elevate the world in the same way, a symbiotic beneficence between the gentle giant and the greater multitude of the flock. Instead, usually, we shirk, creep away from the trajectory of our best instincts and better potential, a fiend loping off into the weeds to kill something. We'd rather be a pack of hyenas than anything as noble as an elephant. Those cannibals will eat almost anything when hungry — bones, metal pots, their shit and their children. They should be hunted to extinction, yet they roam free and plentiful on the African continent; elephants and buffalo and other noble animals are always the endangered creatures.

Of course we would misname a strutting punk like Bin Laden "Geronimo"; when you hunt in the high grass, you don't care if you've bagged a gazelle or garbage. They're all something to be torn apart. There is no moral symmetry in which Osama and Geronimo can be compared; a reedy child-murdering sybarite like Bin Laden doesn't deserve to be so much as incinerated in the same sentence as an actual freedom-fighter like Geronimo. The only thing they share is a status as enemy of America, to be disposed of like every other villain. In the eerie silence of falling footsteps pursuing their quarry into a back bedroom, safety off to eject Osama's intellect onto a greasy daybed, the SEALs ran kill-confirmation through their heads, lest they be the lucky triggerman: "GERONIMO... ENEMY KIA."

Those three garbled little words constitute an express elevator to the bowels of the American soul, to the same killing rage that metastasized in the heart of every pioneer. We can hear the deafening roar of our forefathers in that hidden, potent store of true bloody-murder grit, adrenaline from beyond the grave, a hypernationalist virus that grips like tetanus and holds on harder: "FASTER. KILL, KILL, KILL. EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES."

Wailing Walls: Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part II

Note: After the death of Osama Bin Laden, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part I: A Shadow of Ourselves.


The Real Story Sucks: Bin Laden, the ISI and a Dawood Sandstorm
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

We're being lied to with all the crude smugness of an Irish Setter with crumbs on his whiskers, oblivious as to who ate all the kaiser rolls off the counter. This horseshit bandage being spun around Osama's powder-burned chancres is enough to make any decent self-loathing American want to attempt a header off the Golden Gate. We have no decoder rings, yet, with the power of elementary deduction, we can cut through the web of lies ensnaring Lady Liberty.

In Part I of this piece, I told you about Al Qaeda, the most comically monstrous gang of murdering cretins to never have starred in a Roald Dahl novel. That group's "BFG" was recently introduced to the concept of mind-expanding hollowpoint bullets, a door of perception Mr. Bin Laden may not have been entirely prepared to traverse.

No matter. No one goes straight to the shrink when they find themselves fixated on the idea of carving 666 onto their bus driver's forehead or tearing apart their Keurig machine to see if the CIA has installed a tracking device in the coffee filter. It takes some building up to a point where one can accept they are nuts, and that is what a general practitioner is for — a medical hand who can gently break it to those clad only in tinfoil that it might be worth trying the Thorazine. The calorie-free, sociopathic banality of this Bin Laden hit is similarly more digestible if we first admit: one, that this official narrative does not make a great deal of sense; and, two, that it is a terrifying indication of how little the "War on Terror" has achieved.

If you want to accept the truth of the Bin Laden killing, you have to accept that you will be condemned as paranoid, unstable and soft on hard terror. From where I sit, true-blue madness and narcissistic delinquency came from the depravity of the American jubilation over the murder of that withered old Saudi lecher, but that will have to wait until Part III. Our task today is much more rote. Busting the lies of fat-necked warmongers and armchair militarists is always a boring, thankless, easy job, but it's an important one.

Wailing Walls: Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part I

Note: After the death of Osama Bin Laden, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Slouching from Benghazi, Part III: The Libyan War Is Decadent and Depraved.


A Shadow of Ourselves
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue."
— Robespierre

The warm waters of the Persian Gulf deserve better than the pollution of Osama Bin Laden's leaking carcass. The return of that croaked wraith to the sea marks but the final sunnah in his jihad against the world — against the blue Satan. It is criminal that Bahrain's placid pearl oyster beds, or the verdant coral reefs of Marrawah, or even the rusting, awesome shells of supertankers sunk during the Iran-Iraq war, may someday house a shred of Osama's beard. An image shadows me, of a serene whale shark, peacefully gliding along the seabed, filter feeding upon krill and algae, ignorantly sucking up a Bin Laden testicle. The miasma of his putrefying body will infect fish eggs and psychologically warp bottlenose dolphin calves, twisting them into angry teenagers their parents will not recognize.

Osama Bin Laden, the Most Evil Man in History, is fish food, will never be seen again in any recognizable, corporeal form. The fear, the banality, the panic he provoked will remain behind, streaks of blood in the water charting his descent. Many village experts have obligingly explained to us that Bin Laden was a failure. This is true one minute and false the next. The Arab revolutionary movements of this year are a more bracing repudiation than two Navy SEAL stingers to the eye; they killed Bin Laden before we did.

But we must face it: Bin Laden tossed a pocketful of seeds and woke up in a rainforest. He wagged the dog. If anything, the failures of his nearest and dearest efforts, frightfully modest in comparison to the destruction of the American Empire, only serve to highlight the enormity of the scalps he pocketed. Historians will be hard-pressed to find an agitator who castrated an empire using less money and exerting less energy than Bin Laden. His jackal pack induced a full-court psychological meltdown with a disgusting ease. His coalition of Salafist mutants, rejected from polite company in every corner of the Middle East, conspiratorial failures of Arab capital who could've stepped out of a Conrad thriller and kept on bumbling — this was the drifting garbage mound that beggared a superpower.

Here is the cautionary tale the last decade has telegraphed to every person on the face of the earth with working eyes, ship-shape ears, and no cable: a reedy rich boy Tusken Raider with a voice like static can burn three thousand helpless human souls as if they were garbage, find comfort in the arms of America's South Asian allies, then spend six years in a leafy dacha growing tomatoes, dyeing his beard and napping.

Wailing Walls: Slouching from Benghazi, Part III

Note: As NATO forces intervene in Libya, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. This piece is continued from Part II: The Magical Monied Muammar's Comeback Tour, or: 'The Most Disgusting Story Ever Told'.


The Libyan War Is Decadent and Depraved
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

Seize an industrial laser — a diamond-bit drill, one of those explosively formed penetrators that wrought so much havoc on soft-skin Baghdad Humvees — because it is apparently going to be a Herculean effort to puncture the Große Lüge that is the Libyan War. Like Austin Powers in Goldmember, we've seen this movie before, and it's not any funnier.

Launching a "limited humanitarian intervention" in Libya with the goal of "securing freedom and perpetuating democracy" is the military equivalent of the third time Mike Myers drinks a coffee pot full of shit. The first time, you were mildly amenable to the gag, succumbed to the word of mouth and bought a ticket (Afghanistan). The second time, you were amped up; you were suckered into the theater, inexplicably expecting a revelation in the second stretching of a thin joke for ninety minutes (Iraq).

But a third time? You don't deserve a refund. You deserve strychnine in your popcorn.

The ogres of Georgetown fleece the country rubes yet again. The labels of "Democrat" and "Republican" are significations as distinct as the difference between Our Gang and The Little Rascals. If you really think the motives for the Libyan War are dramatically different from those of our Iraqi self-immolation, Barack Obama's peals of laughter are only inaudible due to the foot-deep soundproof padding they have blanketing the war room. In the darkened corridors of the West Wing at midnight, the haunting sound of courtier hi-fives and war drum bro-daps can still be faintly heard, echoing off the cranial sinus where this swaggering pig president's soul should nest.

Wailing Walls: Slouching from Benghazi, Part II

Note: As Libya descends into civil war, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. This piece is continued from Part I: The Skirt from Sirte.


The Magical Monied Muammar's Comeback Tour, or: 'The Most Disgusting Story Ever Told'
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

The only Tea Party worth a damn on this whole godawful planet is in Libya. And unlike our morbidly obese Rascal-scootering Glock fetishists ardently fighting for the right to die of untreated diabetes, the Libyan Tea Party is standing and fighting and dying and maybe going to lose. How fitting that a bloody, highly fluid totaler kreig is taking place today in Libyan cities like Tobruk, the same place that another Desert Fox, Herr Rommel, hunted the Brits for months during World War II. As Gaddafi regains military momentum to a degree I thought impossible, his forces sweep through recaptured cities like the sludge of a tsunami, smearing city blocks, whole families annihilated as if by the flick of the Colonel's finger.

I am positive that despite the crushing losses of cities like Brega, Ras La'nuf and Azawiya, rebel morale is higher than that of their adversaries — if only because, if the rebel front collapses, Benghazi and everyone in it will be subject to a Saddam vs. Shia kind of payback, a scouring that will make Hama seem like a mere urban redevelopment project.

In 1989, following the U.S. "Gulf of Sidra" air strikes, Gaddafi put down a brief internal revolt with ferocity, leaving a few unlucky protestors hanging like pirates on the lampposts of Tripoli. Gaddafi's odious war-criminal son, commando leader Khamis Gaddafi, subjected the city of Zawiya to a relentless artillery siege before taking it, concussing it into sand. The Khamis Brigade has since retaken the oil refinery port a half hour outside of Tripoli, and the retribution has been swift: mass executions, Sabra and Shatila style corpse-bulldozing, even the destruction of safe haven mosques. Now they surround Benghazi, seat of the revolution, trying to drive the revolutionaries into the desert and, failing that, demolish the city. There will be no mercy, as there hasn't been thus far.

I am torn on the issue of external military intervention. Perhaps it could provide Gaddafi the black eye the rebels need to slough him off. But it will mark the beginning of the Libyan War, full stop. And frankly, I doubt the motivations of intervention's most forceful advocates, and you should too. David Cameron is the kind of Tory who drove Lord Byron to die in Greece, and the egocentric Sarkozy still smarts from Gaddafi's role in strangling his beloved Mediterranean Union in the crib.

As I alluded to last time, Gaddafi has spent the past fifteen years ingratiating himself with the "good guys," flipping over small-fry terrorist schemers, churning the oil, scrapping his two-bit nuke program. This is a pretty impressive feat for a guy who made his name sponsoring full-throated bloody murder against American and British civilians. Those governments might not give a shit about anyone else in the world, but killing their people is sure as fuck off-limits. Gaddafi nearly killed Margaret Thatcher herself through his IRA support, hit U.S. servicemen several times in Europe, and downed Pan Am Flight 103, at a cost of two hundred and seventy Brits and Yanks.

We live in a world where Obama's kaffeeklatch with toothless ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers was a major campaign issue, yet Gaddafi — a man so radically unhinged and pathologically vainglorious that he makes Saddam look like Thomas Pynchon — was embraced by a startling coalition of Western elites. The difference was that he could buy them. These supplicants pocketed blood money ripped from the heart of Libya. The darkest stain, the damn spot that won't come out for decades, came from Gaddafi's billfold, crumpled and stuffed into the pockets of owl-eyed trans-Atlantic mediocrities dispatched to Tripoli with all the dignity of a bachelor party stripper van. Gaddafi has spent the last two decades buying respectability, and my, what a bargain it is when you know the right people. They deserve to be hounded into suicides for this, to never live this down. So let's name names.

Wailing Walls: Slouching from Benghazi, Part I

Note: As Libya descends into civil war, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. In his free time, he enjoys saying very little about himself, because he's terrified of Kachist/Islamist extremist internet aficionados.


The Skirt from Sirte
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

If there's a Middle Eastern dictator most likely to be Ceaucescued, lashed with electric cable to the missus on Christmas morning and Kalashnikoved off this mortal coil, it's Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Leader and Guide of the Revolution, Bedouin Father of Africa, a man with the vanity and physique of John Travolta, but with an even worse record in bombing.

Speaking in relative terms with the rest of the Arab world, Libya is a backwater, Tripoli a stodgy desert strip with a measly six million inhabitants (Cairo has twenty million in its environs). Gaddafi barely treads water against the sea of neighborhood Arab tyrant brethren. The Syrian Hafez al-Assad, "Butcher of Hama" and father of Bashar, always had the best torturers, frying recalcitrant Islamists on super-heated bedsprings or cracking their spines in the kampfy "German Chair." The urbane yet ruthless King Hussein of Jordan had the best spooks; no other country would have had a Mukhabarat handler in the room when an Al Qaeda double agent greased seven CIA agents with a bomb belt.

Even Saddam Hussein (believe it or not) led the Arab world in development, achieving ninety-plus literacy rates and nearly-First World medical access, prior to his Iranian misadventures. For a diva like Muammar, this is some rough hummus to choke down. Gaddafi was always the Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes of the Arab League: petulant, a little out-of-place, unbalanced, and jealous enough to burn down that which tested him. And now he's headed out like Left-Eye, hurtling into a ravine spinning over and over, his passengers strapped in and unable to bail out.

Wailing Walls: Death On The Nile

Note: As Egypt struggles toward democracy, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East and slowly learning Arabic, focusing especially on settlement activity in East Jerusalem. In his free time, he enjoys saying very little about himself, because he's terrified of Kachist/Islamist extremist internet aficionados.


Out, Out, Long Candle
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

There was a joke in the mid-nineties among CIA functionaries about how to brief Bill Clinton on the prospect of regime change in Iraq. "Mr. President, we cannot definitively predict the identity of Saddam's successor, but we know his first name: General."

You'll remember, dear reader, that far from his pre-2008 Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner assertion that he had "opposed the Iraq [War] from the beginning," Clinton had in fact been an open, rather zealous proponent of icing Saddam Hussein's leprous mafia government once and for all. Bubba spent two terms as president dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Iraq, financing all sorts of creepy, terroristic exile groups and engineering a truly monstrous sanctions program which succeeded only in enriching Ba'athist cronies and killing a few hundred thousand kids. While most people have forgotten about the sanctions (with some exceptions), the joke became newly relevant this past week. As with all CIA information on Iraq, the Langley water cooler brigade were totally wrong with their "Saddam successor" joke. But replace "Saddam" in that punchline with the name of Hosni Mubarak, and by Allah, that joke is dead-on. It explains exactly what finally happened last week.

Mubarak was going to survive so long as the Army didn’t view his continued presence as constituting an immediate liability. And Mubarak’s unbelievable Mr. Magoo speech two Thursdays ago — an incoherent word salad of Arab nationalist boilerplate and paternalistic condescension — finally did the trick. The media was awash with leaked assurances that Mubarak was about to submit to the inevitable and bow out, a buzzing zeitgeist playing soundtrack to the odd new images of the day. The Supreme Council of the Egyptian military — which last met, I think, when Ariel Sharon’s tank column was surging towards Cairo during the 1973 War — suddenly convened a televised meeting, in which Mubarak and churlish dungeonmaster Umar Suleiman happened to be absent. Hassan al-Roueini, the general tasked with security in the Cairo Governate, had the most fun assignment: go to Tahrir Square and tell all the protestors, "All your demands will be met today."