Maybe I have a serious mental problem but I thought the quote in the last paragraph was pretty funny.

You want to catch them off guard,” Sergeant Bruhns explained. “You want to catch them in their sleep.” About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.
Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:
“You run in. And if there’s lights, you turn them on–if the lights are working. If not, you’ve got flashlights…. You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that’s outside.
“You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you’ll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there’s no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.
“You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you’ll ask the interpreter to ask him: ‘Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all–anything–anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?’
“Normally they’ll say no, because that’s normally the truth,” Sergeant Bruhns said. “So what you’ll do is you’ll take his sofa cushions and you’ll dump them. If he has a couch, you’ll turn the couch upside down. You’ll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you’ll throw everything on the floor, and you’ll take his drawers and you’ll dump them…. You’ll open up his closet and you’ll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.
“And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes.”

This Week in TV

I follow the entertainment gossip somewhat (certainly not to the extent of my colleague TXB) and I'm a little bummed that Mandy Patinkin has decided to vamoose from Criminal Minds, leaving behind a modestly compelling show and an extremely boinkable co-star. But rumor has it that the Crestor spokesman, who sometimes works under the name J.D. Kolnick, already has other irons in the fire. According to an unnamed source, Patinkin has signed a three season contract for a re-make of of the popular British TV series The Persuaders!, with Grey's Anatomy's Isaiah Washington set to co-star. "Mandy will play the updated Roger Moore part," says the source, "Isaiah will be Tony Curtis." He then clarified: "Isaiah will not be Tony Curtis from Some Like It Hot, although he has the utmost respect for cross dressers and one of his dearest friends is a tranny." The biggest change from the old show to the new is that it will be set inside a Reformed Jewish detoxification facility in Skokie, IL instead of various European playboy haunts. "I'm really excited to be starring in a remake of such a popular show, but I think the whole Skokie thing is overdoing it," admits Patinkin. "And they promised me Fred Thompson and now all of the sudden he's unavailable. I don't know if I can work under these conditions."

John McCain: R.I.P.

PROFILE IN SUCKING ASS

Here's a little trick for the campaign trail if yer older than dirt: try not to look about thirty or forty years older than dirt. Also: try not to be a sellout motherfucker who has kissed Brush's ass every day since he's been in office. Along with that: don't try to outcrazy Brush with your tired, deluded rhetoric...or, haven't you been paying attention to his poll numbers? If you wanna imitate someone more popular than Brush, Mr. Syphilis would be a start. Later, you can work your way up to imitating sputum (we won't tell Katie Couric on ya). Finally, if you really wanna win back that Republican base, you might casually mention every now and then how much you hate, hate, HATE gays and Mexicans...and how much you really hate Alberto Gonzalez, the first gay Mexican Attorney General. But as for txb, he hopeth that J.M. takes none of the above advice and gets thrown under his own (now ironically titled) "Straight Talk Express" bus. As Prince Hal once said, "We would have all such offenders so cut off." It ain't gonna happen to Brush or Cheney, cuz the Dems plan on riding their sinking-poll-number-asses to a D victory in the next prez election (and if the U.S. nukes Iran and/or kicks off WW III cuz you dumbfucks refused to impeach those assholes, all that blood is on your hands). But there's no reason why vocal supporters of Brush shouldn't get they asses kicked right now. And speaking of senile old fucks...we should say a few more words about McCain before he drops out of the prez race and his kids have him committed to an old folks' home. After seeing him (apparently without the usual layer cake of makeup) on C-SPAN this past weekend, I'm thinking that the Man From Hanoi Hilton should forget about Iraq and declare a war against liver spots. Seriously, Hoss...David Vitter's wife called and axed that you stop wearing her leopard print travesty on yer face.

On the road again

Have any of you seen this billboard out on the road of metro STL ? I am curious to know where you saw it if you did. This is the first time I've seen Rush advertised on a billboard and I've been a fan for 30 years.

My Brush With Brush

So I met Brush on the mean streets of Hillsboro, MO last nite. No Secret Service detail or nothing. Just walking alone, a bit dishevelled, muttering to himself. We rapped a bit and from the few coherent phrases I could understand, I gathered that he wuz in a funk b/c of how his plan for immigration reform crashed and burned into a taco stand. I wuz like, "Dude, what were you thinking? Are you actively trying to destroy your image now?" He laughed like I had just told the funniest joke ever, a real maniac laugh, and muttered on about how too many folks these days--even good Christian folks--are strapping on rubbers or popping the pill, so we need the "mexis" to keep up our labor force. I mentioned that Gerry and Lisa Becker fought like hell to add to the labor force, and they succeeded. He laughed again, yelping, "AmeriCANS--not cans of tuna!" I wuz starting to worry a bit about the guy, so I tried to give him advice: "Look here, why don't you just say that the latex or whatever in condoms make's a dude's joint fall off and run away and join the circus--and tell women that the pill has all these possible horrible side effects. Oh, wait..." Brush just kept cracking up, like I wuz doing a stand up routine for him. He finally stopped laughing and got all stern and said, "No. Mexis. Fucking Christian babies pickin' lettuce? Rucking Ryan Recker running a roadside restaurant? Not on my watch. Besides...we need the fucking votes!" After that, he just went on with a two or three minute full bore Tourette's Syndrome monologue that involved various combinations of words like fuck, cunt, shit, Lou Dobbs, asshole, Sean Hannity, tacos, burritos, puta, and so on. Now twas I that had to laugh: "Oh, Brush...you slay the shit out of me, dude. You still don't get what happened, do ya, poor bastard? Fucking Reagan got immigration reform shoved thru, dude, so it's not like 100 percent of yer redneck base has been sitting around hating Mexicans from time immemorial. But fuck...you've even got the picket fence crowd fearing the brown menace!" Brush got all lucid for a sec, saying he loved the little brown people and he wuz taking it in the asshole every godamn day for his little dumbfuck Alberto, so how could he have caused all the anti-mexi sentiment? I thumped him on the forehead and said, "You pushed the panic button, Hoss! The fucking fear button! Over and over again. First you made everyone fear the Arabs and then you didn't get why Americans wouldn't want Arabs guarding our ports? Now what's left of your base is scared shitless of all dark-skinned people and wants the architects who designed the Great Wall of China to come up with something similar for the USA, and that shocks you? Jesus fuck...are you doing coke, again, son?" Just then, a Secret Service limo screeched into view and Brush was swept into it by three men in black. A fourth one looked out at me from an open window and said he'd kill me if I talked to anyone about Brush's mental state. I belched loudly and said, "It's cool, amigo. He didn't seem that different from how he's been at press conferences, lately." And, with that, the limo sped off and I got in my own car and drove to Los Portales for a beef chimi.

Icky Thump

"White Americans, what?
Nothing better to do?
Why don't you kick yourself out,
You're an immigrant too."

--The White Stripes

"Send in the clown...uh, I mean 'The Closer'"

"Jesus...you're hot, but you're not on fire.
Call off the fire engine red, sweety!"












******************I know how to get a reaction from the gibblers (at least one of them). I'll just rip on "The Closer." Heh. Actually, I've started to like the show. Caught about 8 or 9 hours of that marathon a couple of weeks back, and now I'm watching the new season. Only one thing has been bugging the shit out of me, and I wuz gonna blog about it recently but never got around to it. Anyway, here's the thing: Kyra Sedgwick's lipstick. What the fuck?! For some women, bright red lipstick works. I don't know how, and I don't know for whom. I'm sure it works for a lot of whores. Prolly even a good deal of non-whores. Worked for The Joker and that Buffalo Bill dude in "Silence of the Lambs," that's for damn sure! And I'm the last guy usually to notice such cosmetics details, but the bright red lipstick made Anne Hathaway look ghastly in "The Devil Wears Prada," and it makes Miss Sedgwick's mouth look completely fucking ri-donk-ulous on "The Closer." Anyhoo, I guess a lot of fans thought so, too, because the show's writers actually wrote a scathing critique of Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson's clown makeup fetish into the most recent episode via a plastic surgeon character. And apparently we're gonna switch to a darker, more brownish-red kinda lipstick from now on. Thank Christ. Now if only Brenda's bland, doormatty boyfriend could just get killed in a drive-by or a Mongolian clusterfuck gone wrong, "The Closer" would be pert near perfect.