Volume 269 | No. 10

Mon, Jan 27

2015—It snows so hard in Portsmouth that mail carriers fail to make their appointed rounds. 2008—The NSA warns that a malfunctioning satellite as big as a bus is about to fall out of orbit. 2005—Veep Dick “Dick” Cheney wears a down parka and ski cap to a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz. 2005—Salon reveals thathack writer Michael McManus has been paid $10,000 to promote Bush programs. 1973—The Paris Peace Accord “ends” the Vietnam War. An NVA artillery shell makes U.S. Army Col. William B. Nolde its last combat casualty, 11 hours before the cease fire. 1972—White house “plumber” G. Gordon Liddy presents Attorney General John Mitchell …

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Sun, Jan 26

2015—Another two feet of snow fall on Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 2006—On Sunset Blvd., Joaquin Phoenix is rescued from his rolled, gas-reeking car by Werner Herzog. 2005—Gay hustler and accredited White House correspondent Jeff Gannon asks Pres. G.W.[MD] Bush how he can work with insane people like Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton. 2001—Britain’s Guardian reports [falsely] that Air Force One was “stripped bare” in “an orgy of pilfering” by outgoing Clinton staffers. 1998—The Project for a New American Century sends a letter, signed by E. Abrams, J. Bolton, W. Kristol, R. Perle, D. Rumsfeld, & P. Wolfowitz, to Bill Clinton, urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein. …

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The Second Coming

by W.D. Ehrhart I woke up this morning thinking of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his unsettling poem ‘The Second Coming.” Yeats wrote it over 100 years ago, and I’m pretty sure that his title is a reference to the long awaited second coming of Jesus Christ; the poem itself, however, is an utter dismissal of whatever positive implications that concept might suggest. Certainly, Yeats could not possibly have imagined the situation here in the United States of America a century after he wrote his poem, and much of the poem bears little resemblance to what we are experiencing with the Second Coming …

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Welcome to the “Find Out” Phase

It would have been a perfectly suitable topic for debate in collegiate political science departments: should the planet’s most powerful nation elevate a felon whose mental, moral, and psychological fitness have long been questioned into its most powerful office? This is the good old U.S.A., though. Rather than pose this blatantly silly question as a theoretical exercise, we went by a principle familiar to many men tackling an unfamiliar project, the editor himself not excluded: “Let’s do something, even if it’s wrong.” There is another way to describe what we have just done, more vulgar but succinct: FAFO, i.e., “F___ Around and Find Out.” Having …

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