Build Date: Tue Jan 13 00:40:13 2026 UTC

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
-- John Perry Barlow

O America! -- Reported 1998-12-28 09:00 by Thom "Starky" Stark

I weep for my country that it has come to such a pass.

That we have allowed control of our ship of state to fall into the hands of such small, mean-spirited and short-sighted ideologues is to our discredit as citizens and as electors. That this baying mob of fools and scoundrels should have the temerity to impeach our President in such a mindlessly partisan vote, all the while cloaking its base motives in noble rhetoric, shames us far more in the eyes of the world than does the knavish misconduct of that President.

History will not be kind to them for conducting this travesty--and we, their constituents, deserve history's censure for permitting it.

I call upon the Senate promptly to reject these petty Articles and harshly to rebuke the House of Representatives for abusing the awesome Constitutional power to impeach with which it is entrusted. Let the senior body swiftly end this national agony and thereby restore some small shred of luster to the reputation of a legislature now so badly tarnished by the conduct of its lower House.

And I mourn the once and future greatness of America which has so casually and so thoughtlessly been squandered by those whom we have charged with its preservation and enhancement. These are dark days, indeed.

 

nvious@pigdog.org

T O P   S T O R I E S

The Awl

C L A S S I C   P I G D O G

Quickies