President Gore has an op-ed in today’s Times on how to debate George Bush. Gore’s oratory has improved a lot over the past three years, becoming decisive and incisive and only occasionally overheated. But this editorial disappoints, largely because it turns out not to be a debate cookbook, but rather an enumeration of all the ways that Bush has despoiled this country over the last four years. All good and true stuff, but I was hoping for some juicy insights into what it was like to lock horns with Dubya.

The piece redeems itself at the end, though, with possibly my favorite Gorequip so far:

And I hope that voters will recall the last time Mr. Bush stood on stage for a presidential debate. If elected, he said, he would support allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada. He promised that his tax cuts would create millions of new jobs. He vowed to end partisan bickering in Washington. Above all, he pledged that if he put American troops into combat: “The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well defined.” Comparing these grandiose promises to his failed record, it’s enough to make anyone want to, well, sigh.

Good one, Al 2.0. Where were you four years ago?

It has recently been reported that top officials in the Bush administration hold secret Dungeons & Dragons sessions in the oval office every week. Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game in which players take on the personas of various heroic characters in a fantasy world controlled by a “Dungeon Master.”

I managed to obtain a transcript of their most recent game.

Dick Cheney: Dungeon Master
George Bush: Thief
John Ashcroft: Paladin
Karl Rove: Assassin

Cheney: Ok, you’re outside DNC headquarters. It’s a towering black building with slit windows. There are Democratic gargoyles with the faces of Walter Mondale and George McGovern and William Jennings Bryan along the roofline. There are several staffers going into and coming out of the building.

Rove: Are any of them carrying babies?

Cheney: Hold on. [rolls a die] Yes. Some of the women have babies in their …

Rove: I kill the babies.

Cheney: What?

Rove: I kill the babies.

Ashcroft: Karl, as a paragon of goodness and justice, I feel I must object. These are defenseless children.

Rove: Defenseless future Democratic children.

Ashcroft: Yes, but …

Rove: Defenseless future Democratic voters, judges, congressmen.

Ashcroft: Hmmm.

Rove: Maybe you could look the other way.

Cheney: There’s someone selling marijuana to a cancer patient across the street.

Ashcroft: Good lord! Stop! Fiend! I gallop over and arrest them.

Cheney: Ok.

Rove: I kill the babies.

Cheney: Ok. You’re about to kill the babies when Al Gore comes out of the building. He’s wearing full plate mail and carrying a sword. His daughter is behind him, wearing a long flowing robe.

Rove: I kill Al Gore. And his daughter. And then I eat them.

Bush: [grimacing] Democrats don’t taste good.

Aschcroft: Ok, I’m taking away the cancer patient’s marijuana and giving him a medicare prescription card.

Cheney: Which one? There are about a thousand to choose from, give or take.

Ashcroft: Which one will help him the most?

Cheney: I have no idea.

Ashcroft: Me neither. Just pick one.

Rove: How slowly can I kill Al Gore?

Cheney: Ok. Al Gore lifts his sword and says: “In my capacity as a protector of the people and true president of the United States, I must strenuously object to your stated aim of killing these innocent children. It is my duty as both a former senator and an American and a former Vice President and a human being to uphold …”

Bush: This is boring.

Cheney: Al Gore is still talking: “… the basic rights of all children and adults and men and women to continue to draw breath as called for by our great constitution crafted by our founding …”

Rove: Shit! He’s casting a Boring spell on us!

Cheney: You’re all getting really sleepy. Roll a Will save.

Rove: Fuck fuck motherfuck fuck motherfuck. [rolls] I got a twenty.

Cheney: Good roll. You shrug off the effects of the boring spell. Mr President?

Bush: [rolls a six-sided die] Twenty.

Cheney: Sir, that’s a six-sided die.

Bush: Yeah.

[Pause. Cheney looks at six-sided die. It does indeed show twenty.]

Cheney: Good roll, sir. [picks up and examines the die] I see that every side of this die is a twenty.

Bush: Yeah. All of my dice are all twenties, even the four-sided one. They’re a gift from my Daddy.

Cheney: It’s no more than you deserve sir. You shrug off the effects of the boring spell. John, what are you doing?

Ashcroft: I’m checking to see if the cancer patient is a terrorist.

Cheney: What are you looking for, specifically?

Ashcroft: Oh, I don’t know. Is he Arab?

Cheney: No.

Ashcroft: Is he sneaky looking?

Cheney: Um… [rolls] … no.

Ashcroft: Does he have an accent?

Cheney: No.

Ashcroft: Hmmm. I search him.

Cheney: He has a dollar bill on him, and a nail cutter.

Ashcroft: Aha! I thought so. What were you going to do with this nail cutter, terrorist scum?

Cheney: The cancer patients says he was going to cut his nails.

Rove: Kill him.

Ashcroft: No. I don’t want to descend to his level. Then the terrorists have won. [thinks] I’m going to send him over to Guantanamo for daily torture therapy with dogs.

Cheney: Done. Now what?

Ashcroft: I guess I’ll kill Al Gore.

Cheney: Ok, good. You all surround Al Gore. Roll your attacks.

Bush: [rolls a pencil] Twenty.

Cheney: Good roll, sir! But I’m afraid not good enough. His armor successfully deflects your blow. Karl?

Rove: [rolls, gets a 5]. Fuck. [rolls again, gets a five] Fuck motherfuck fuck. [rolls again, gets an 8] FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT FUCK MOTHERFUCK FUCK!!! [rolls again, gets a 20]. I got a twenty.

Cheney: Good roll. But not good enough. Your sword whistles over his head. John?

Ashcroft: I cast a Smite Evil spell on Al Gore.

Cheney: Ok. You call upon your god and channel his divine power into a Smite Evil spell. It shoots out of your fingers toward Al Gore, stops, and hovers there for a minute. Then it turns around and smites Karl.

Rove: God damn it John!

Ashcroft: Oh, sorry Karl. I forgot.

Cheney: Al Gore lifts his sword and swings it in a great arc. [rolls] Karl, he cuts your head off. [rolls] John, he cuts your head off. [rolls] Mr President, he cuts your head off.

[Pause]

Bush: So we’re all dead?

Cheney: I’m afraid so sir.

Rove: Fuck that. You forgot about my Supreme Court spell.

Cheney: Oh yeah. As Karl’s lifeless body falls to the ground, his prepared Supreme Court spell triggers and summons nine people in black robes. They materialize over your dead bodies and examine the situation, trying to decide if Al Gore’s victory is in fact legitimate.

[Cheney makes to roll. Rove grabs his arm, shakes his head.]

Rove: That won’t be necessary, Dick. I’ve made arrangements.

Cheney: Oh, that’s right. [smiles] The Supreme Court decides to reverse Al Gore’s victory. All of you come back to life. Al Gore dies. The DNC collapses into a heap of rubble.

Rove: Good. About fucking time.

Bush: Can we play Chutes and Ladders now?

Rove: We haven’t had a chance to remove all the chutes from the board yet, sir. It should be ready tomorrow.

Bush: Dang. Ok, well let’s play this again, then. But this time let’s try to win without the Supreme Court.

[Long silence]

Rove: I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Mr President.

Bush: [shrugs] Ok. Yeah, we might as well use them, I guess.

Rove: That’s what they’re there for, sir.

I just found this map of my congressional district on my representative’s website, and I … am … appalled. We got gerrymandered out of shape during the last election cycle because the democrats desperately wanted to unseat our congresswoman, Connie Morella. As a result, our district isn’t a goddam district anymore, it’s a Rorschach test. It looks like someone upset a bottle of green ink on a map of Maryland.

The Republicans are doing the same thing in Texas and elsewhere, of course, but the tit for tat argument just doesn’t wash here. Gerrymandering is such a filthy bastardization of the whole concept of elective government that I think it’s worth drawing a line in the sand and saying this far, and no further.

Kevin Drum suggests that we stop allowing our legislatures to create districts and just draw horizontal bands of a prescribed thickness across every state. Makes sense to me. Horizontal bands can’t be corrupted or swayed or intimidated by the imperatives of party politics. At least, not until Karl Rove gets to them.

The past couple of weeks have given birth to a new John Kerry. A Bigger, Stronger, Faster Acme Kerry who seems to have finally decided to step into the ring, rather than lurk on its perimeter and provide color commentary.

Sadly, though, I think a lot of this new momentum comes from a massive improvement in the quality of his soundbites. I don’t personally have a problem with Kerry’s tendency to give attenuated, clause-ridden answers to questions, because the kind of questions we’re asking (What do we do about terrorism? How do we extract ourselves from Iraquagmire? How can we handle the effects of globalization on our workforce?) demand long, nuanced answers. But anything that doesn’t fit into a nice ten second envelope isn’t going to make the evening news.

Take Kerry’s speech in Philadelphia, on Friday. It contained probably the best line of his candidacy so far:

But the Bush administration would have you believe that when it comes to our allies, it won’t make a difference who is president. They say the Europeans won’t help us, no matter what. We’re not going to get more cooperation in the war on terror, no matter what. Ordinary people around the world will resent us, no matter what. But I have news for President Bush: just because you can’t do something, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Bang! Succinct, to the point, honest and utterly devastating. If he can loose a bunch of these salvoes at Bush during the debates, I think he wins. Because where these kinds of statements are too simple and lacking in detail to be really enlightening, Bush’s are invariably simplistic: mushy, nebulous, and totally divorced from fact and rigor. Simple beats simplistic, every time.

Our media outlets are convinced that we’re too dumb to deal with complexity. I think that Kerry & Co. are finally realizing this, and embarking on an effort to be smart within the dumb parameters of soundbite politics. Which is the lesser of two evils, I think.

Friday night at home, and I’m cleaning out my room. Normally, this would be an extremely dull and just slightly depressing endeavor, but it’s just been redeemed by a wonderful discovery, deep in the bowels of my closet: an ancient album cover that my brother and I put together a long, long time ago.

Not an album, mind you (we’re not especially musical, and neither of us could carry a tune if it were made of feathers and fitted with anti-grav pontoons), but an album cover. I think I must have been thirteen, my brother nine, when we came up with this thing; and, considering our youth and relative inexperience in the art of albumless album covers, I think we did a damn good job.

My brother, being the artist in the family, took care of the artistic side of things. We decided to call the album Spit and Evil, so he came up with a very cool, spitful, evil design: “Spit” is rendered in black and white checks on a murky white background, with evil red confetti fluttering around behind; “Evil” is in solid red on an ominous blue background. Yellow slitted cat eyes peer out of the darkness between the V and the I, and the E sports a sinuous devil tail. It’s wonderful, a small masterpiece.

I was in charge of the song titles. They were as follows:

Side 1

Dead Baby Stew Microwave the Caterpillar Satan is my Friend I’m Going to Rip You Apart with My Sharp Pointy Teeth (A Love Song)

Side 2

Theme from “Friday the 13th Part 16: Jason Meets Godzilla” Kill Kill Kill Then Go Out for a Spot of Tea Teachers Taste Good Grunt

So … this is frightening. I’m not really sure what was going on in my head. Maybe it’s a parody of the death metal bands that were making headlines at the time, or maybe it’s a symptom of the profound psychological fucked-upedness that comes with entering the wilderness of adolescence. Maybe a little bit of both. In any case, just to be safe, I think I’ll file this away in the bulging “repress” file I keep in the cluttered backwater of my psyche, and go on assuming that I’m not a Satan-worshipping caterpillar-microwaving homicidal maniac with a taste for teacher flesh. It seems like the prudent thing to do.

Yesterday our Commander in Chief was asked if his bright shiny outlook on the situation in Iraq was at all darkened by a recent CIA report that laid out three different scenarios for the country’s future, ranging from bad to very bad to horrible. No, he said, looking baffled and slightly afraid (Brain, don’t fail me now!). Then he searched his tiny platitude retention engine for something safe and optimistic and nonspecific to say, failed, and finally summoned up something that sounded suspiciously like the truth, in Bushworld: that CIA stuff is all just guesses anyway, he said. Things will turn out just fine. Trust me.

This casual dismissal of an exhaustive report by our top foreign intelligence agency is pretty much proof positive of what the administration’s critics have been saying all along: that, when it comes to foreign policy, Bush and his cadre of neocons navigate the ship of state with ideology and brute instinct alone. They have maps and charts and compasses and depthmeters at their disposal, but they don’t use them. Because that kind of stuff is for flipfloppers and irresolute pessimists. They know the way to go. It’s that-a-way.

So they turn the wheel, and redline the engines, and surge westward toward the glorious sunrise of freedom.

Missing: Twenty-Sided Die.

Age: 23 years.

Description: A small red polyhedron with twenty tiny flat surfaces, each inset with a number. Each number filled in with white crayon. Edges worn to the point where the die is almost completely spherical.

History: Purchased, along with the D&D Basic Set, around 1981, in Plano Texas, and transported over the Atlantic Ocean to Beirut, Lebanon, where it was rolled by its owner approximately fifteen-thousand times on various hard, unyielding surfaces. Subsequently transported back across the ocean to Bethesda, Maryland. Ignored and all but forgotten during owner’s post-collegiate experiment with the real world. Recently rediscovered and elevated to its former position of prominence.

Purpose: The twenty-sided die has many uses in Dungeons and Dragons: attack rolls, skill checks, saving throws, etc. More importantly, it serves as one of the owner’s few remaining links to his childhood. Furthermore, this die, and the fantasy world it supported, has helped him navigate the treacherous shoals of reality for many years, with tales of treasure-hunting, monster-killing, and various and sundry forms of derring-do.

Reward: Undying gratitude, and/or a big hug.

I am entering a new and interesting place that is, oddly enough, the same old and uninteresting place I’ve lived in for the past 34 years.

I haven’t actually gotten there yet, but I can see it in the distance: the same crowded stretch of 270, plunging down toward the dull melee of DC traffic; the same townhouse with the same front lawn, the same daily visits to Starbucks, the same walks around the same lakes, the same reluctant morning glances at the mirror. But, for all that, it’s a different world.

It’s like this: you get up in the morning, kiss your wife goodbye, pet your dog, trudge downstairs and open the door and step out of the house … and into another house; and then you climb a set of stairs that look very much like the stairs you just descended, and pat a dog remarkably similar to your own, and kiss a woman who might be your wife’s twin. And you realize you’re in the same place you were a minute ago, and that you’re not in the same place at all.

Which is to say: the world doesn’t change, you change. But it’s pretty much the same thing.

I have a bunch of gmail invitations to distribute. If anybody’s interested, contact me here: ramseys AT gmail.com.

Gmail a very cool webmail client, with lots of neat ideas, and it’s well worth trying out if you don’t mind the privacy issues. I’m a little bit conflicted about them, myself: I love the service, and the truth is that nothing you transmit over the internet is safe from extraction, examination, and analysis by various government and private-sector nasties. But gmail’s insane 1GB storage limit, and its routine scanning of your mail for its AdWords service could arguably make abuse of his kind easier, and more tempting.

Dunno.

Nowadays, whenever I encounter the latest horror that has issued from the Slavering Maw of the Bush administration, I just shrug and sigh and try not to think about it too much. I might feel a small flicker of outrage, but it’s just a tiny firefly of a creature, sparking fitfully in the infinite darkness of the Long Night of 2000. Because I’m numbed to it now. It’s kind of like watching a slasher flick: the first time Jason eviscerates a hapless young college student, it’s just unbearably horrible; the second time, it’s a terrible tragedy; the third time, it’s most unfortunate. By the fifteenth evisceration, though, it’s just another steaming pile of entrails that someone’s going to have to clean up, eventually.

Take today’s outrage, for example: Bush and his cohorts have decided to allow the Clinton-era ban on semi-automatic weapons to expire. House Republicans won’t even bring the measure to a vote, and, although our president claims that he’ll sign the bill if it gets to his desk, he hasn’t actually bothered to ask for it or anything. So, as of today, it’s now possible for our nation’s squirrel hunters to buy a machine gun that can empty the contents of a 200-round clip of ammunition into their rodent prey in the space of a couple of seconds. Because, hoo boy, those squirrels are tricky little bastards, and you can’t be too careful. Also, you know, 9/11, and the terrorists, and aren’t you glad we got rid of Saddam, and the death tax, and God and country and support the troops.

Anybody who votes this guy into office again deserves him. But the rest of us don’t.