Strapping In

This may be my favorite advertisement ever:



Then there's Matt Taibbi, the hardnosed young journalist who took the self-pitying resignation letter that AIG exec v.p. Jay DeSantis ran in The New York Times and not only shredded it, but has balled up the pieces into bullets and shoved them back down DeSantis' throat:

Only a person with a habitually overinflated sense of self-worth could think he deserves a $700,000 retention bonus, even if it has to be paid by taxpayers, when in reality no one "deserves" that much money. It may be that some people do get paid that much, but most people who make that much money have enough sense to realize their cushy lifestyles are an accident of fate, of birth, of class, not something that is "supported" by some unwritten natural law of compensation.

Hey Jake, it's not like you were curing cancer. You were a fucking commodities trader. Thanks to a completely insane, horribly skewed set of societal values that puts a premium on greed and severely undervalues selflessness, communal spirit and intellectualism -- values that make millionaires out of people like you and leave teachers and nurses, the people who raise your kids and clean your parents' bedpans, comparatively penniless -- you made a lot of money.

Good for you. Consider yourself lucky. But your company went belly-up and broke, almost certainly thanks in part to you, and now you don't get your bonus.

So be a man and deal with it. The rest of us do, when we get bad breaks, and we've had a lot more of them than you. And stop whining. Jesus Christ.

Taibbi's just as much fun to hear in person. Prime time's not quite ready for his truth, but he's so dead on that they're enjoying having him on the show:



But the big game is changing once again thanks to the change agent we elected last fall. Today the President picked his war, the one he said we needed to finish all throughout the campaign, and now it is upon us:

In announcing a plan on Friday that could be his signature foreign policy effort, Mr. Obama said that he would send more troops — some 4,000 — but stipulated that they would not carry out combat missions, and would instead be used to train the Afghan Army and the national police. He left himself open to the possibility of sending more as the situation warrants.

All is could think of was John Cale, whom I saw in London in 1980 performing his biggest "hit" off his career-defining Sabotage/Live album, "Ready for War". At the end of the performance I saw, Reagan ascending, Cale screamed into the microphone until the band dropped their instruments and scurried off, ultimately leaving himself only to stick his head out from behind the curtain one or twice more to scream the anthemic line again.

This performance from a few years later may end more quietly, but it says exactly what I've been thinking ever since our new President announced his War:



Strap in.