Fascinoma

Today when I arrived at the Ministry I stepped into an elevator redolent of someone's very recent and vitriolic fart. How rude! It was still vaguely there about half an hour later, having, I supppose, infused the carpetimg. It got me thinking about recent news, which is to say the trend of the last 50 years or so, and it inspired this little lift from Auden: To Republicans hypocrisy is like the smell of their own farts; they secretly like it and they think nobody else notices.

One of Obama's great "strengths" is his prowess at ignoring such farts in the elevator, as if they came from Granny -- the poor dear. The GOP knows that he can be counted on to never point a finger at the authors.

A second, only tangentially related point here: the other day the headline of the year was published, "Crack Found in Man's Buttocks." Tres amusante. Less amusing was the story beneath it, the one which details the drug bust which produced the headline. My bullshit detector went off with a loud flatulent tone when I read it.

You can bet large amounts of money that what happened here was the man in the photo was pulled over for driving while black, then shaken down, and afterwards the probable cause -- the "leafy substance" on the floor of the car -- was dreamed up to make the search sound legal. Soon the officer who squeezeed that one out will be in court testilying, commiting a felony in the name of law enforcement. This happens every single business day in every single city in America. It's just one of the many benefits of America's eternal War on Drugs, one of the reasons our why our prison population is so disproportionately black, and one of the infinitely many fragrances of right-wing hypocrisy.