Yes, No, Maybe, I Don't Know...Can You Repeat The Question?
A number of occurrences and observations allow me to make a They Might Be Giants reference in my title....
1. First, I just bought the They Might Be Giants Greatest Hits album. If you haven't heard of TMBG, you've missed a quirky treat. They are the ultimate in nerd rock, perfectly comfortable writing songs about James K. Polk, the agonizing search for love, purple toupees, and the chemical contents of the sun. If you're in need of catchy pop with obscure references, they are your band.
2. After a series of prevarications worthy of the title to this blog entry, Karl Rove has finally admitted he was the guy who leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent in order to score political points in the run-up to the Iraq war. The agent, Valerie Plame, was married to ambassador Joseph Wilson. In the run-up to the war, Wilson published an op-ed pointing out that Bush's claim that Saddam was seeking uranium from Niger in order to obtain nuclear weapons was wrong. Then Rove leaked Plame's identity to reporters.
At best, Rove leaked Plame's identity in an attempt to make Wilson's (perfectly correct) op-ed look like bureaucratic in-fighting between the more cautious CIA and the gung-ho, "let's go to war" Defense Intelligence Agency. At worst, Rove broke the law by knowingly exposing a covert agent, possibly placing her in danger and certainly screwing up whatever operation she was doing, in order to intimidate those who dissented from the Bush Administration's war plans. We know Bush and Co had already made up their mind to go to war, so it's possible they decided to undermine anybody who got the way of that goal.
This would be par for the course for Rove, the mastermind behind the strategy to discredit John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 by having people hand out flyers claiming McCain had fathered a black child from a prostitute and was mentally unstable after his years as a POW in Vietnam.
Rove may have done nothing illegal in this leak, but if he did and gets caught, he would be getting his just deserts.
3. Finally, my title fits because I'm intrigued by a new movie called Yes. I'm mostly intrigued b/c the dialogue is in iambic pentameter. You know, the poetry that Shakespeare used for a lot of his dialogue? Yeah, it's that. I'm not sure if the movie's any good. And I need to write a whole separate post on my ambivalent feelings on sex in film, which this film apparently has in abundance. (Brief summary: I'm sick of our culture's obsession with sex and devaluing of this wonderful God-made act of love into something purely physical....but that is done in some damn good, artistically fascinating films.) But you don't run across iambic pentameter every day.....
1. First, I just bought the They Might Be Giants Greatest Hits album. If you haven't heard of TMBG, you've missed a quirky treat. They are the ultimate in nerd rock, perfectly comfortable writing songs about James K. Polk, the agonizing search for love, purple toupees, and the chemical contents of the sun. If you're in need of catchy pop with obscure references, they are your band.
2. After a series of prevarications worthy of the title to this blog entry, Karl Rove has finally admitted he was the guy who leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent in order to score political points in the run-up to the Iraq war. The agent, Valerie Plame, was married to ambassador Joseph Wilson. In the run-up to the war, Wilson published an op-ed pointing out that Bush's claim that Saddam was seeking uranium from Niger in order to obtain nuclear weapons was wrong. Then Rove leaked Plame's identity to reporters.
At best, Rove leaked Plame's identity in an attempt to make Wilson's (perfectly correct) op-ed look like bureaucratic in-fighting between the more cautious CIA and the gung-ho, "let's go to war" Defense Intelligence Agency. At worst, Rove broke the law by knowingly exposing a covert agent, possibly placing her in danger and certainly screwing up whatever operation she was doing, in order to intimidate those who dissented from the Bush Administration's war plans. We know Bush and Co had already made up their mind to go to war, so it's possible they decided to undermine anybody who got the way of that goal.
This would be par for the course for Rove, the mastermind behind the strategy to discredit John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 by having people hand out flyers claiming McCain had fathered a black child from a prostitute and was mentally unstable after his years as a POW in Vietnam.
Rove may have done nothing illegal in this leak, but if he did and gets caught, he would be getting his just deserts.
3. Finally, my title fits because I'm intrigued by a new movie called Yes. I'm mostly intrigued b/c the dialogue is in iambic pentameter. You know, the poetry that Shakespeare used for a lot of his dialogue? Yeah, it's that. I'm not sure if the movie's any good. And I need to write a whole separate post on my ambivalent feelings on sex in film, which this film apparently has in abundance. (Brief summary: I'm sick of our culture's obsession with sex and devaluing of this wonderful God-made act of love into something purely physical....but that is done in some damn good, artistically fascinating films.) But you don't run across iambic pentameter every day.....
posted by Ben at
11:50 AM
2 Comments:
You're not the boss of me now...
By
Jeff, at 7/12/2005 12:51 PM
And you're not so big...
(Even though you're all bigger than me -- well, at least taller than me ;-)
By
Mike, at 7/12/2005 1:10 PM
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