Adam Hunault

I think there are some good lessons for all of us here.

So, I didn’t write anything about the Doctor Who Christmas special after it happened. It was the most Christmas-y special ever. Rather than write a review (tedious) I’ll just tell you what I liked!

- The bridge of the star liner: bright white with lens flares, poking fun at the new Star Trek movie.

- Amy and Rory’s slutty cop and Roman centurion role playing. ‘Cause you know that if Rory guarded you for 1,900 years as a Roman centurion, you would want him to role play it later. Beats that old Raggedy Doctor role play any day!

- “It’ll crash, sir.” “Oh. Well, that’s a kind of landing, isn’t it.”

- The Doctor coming down the chimney. “Sorry, Christmas Eve on a roof top, I saw a chimney and my whole brain just went, What the hell!”

- “Father Christmas, Santa Claus, or as I’ve always know him, Jeff.”

- A lie too big for the psychic paper to back it up: “I’m universally recognized as a responsible and mature adult.”

- “How do people ever get bored? How did boredom even get invented?!?”

- “We’re boys! And you know what boys say in the face of danger? Mommy!”

- Flying shark!

- “It’s going to eat us!” “Well, maybe we’re going to eat it, but I don’t like the odds.”

- “Doctor!” “Doctor!” “Doctor!” “Kazran!”

- The Doctor and young Kazran in the fezes and the Tom Baker scarves.

- “When a girl is crying, are you supposed to talk to her?” “I have absolutely no idea.”

- The Doctor’s rubbish card tricks.

- “Good luck, NIGHT! Good night.”

- “It’s either this or go back to your room and invent a new kind of screwdriver. Don’t make my mistakes.”

- “We need to leave really rather quickly. I may have accidentally gotten engaged to Marilyn Monroe.”

- Abigail’s songs: “Silent Night,” and “When you’re alone silence is all you see.” Is silence gonna fall? Huh? Is it?

- “They really love their snowmen around here, don’t they? I’ve counted about twenty!” “Yes, I’ve been busy!” “Yeah. Yeah, ya have.”

- “Got any more honeymoon ideas?” “There’s a moon that’s made of actual honey. Well, not actual honey, and it’s not actually a moon, and technically it’s alive and a bit carnivorous, but there are some lovely views.”

- “Everything’s gotta end sometime. Otherwise, nothing would ever get started.”

- “Half way out of the dark.” Indeed we are. Only three months to April!

I’m glad that the new Tea Party congressmen are reading the Constitution on the floor of the House. It will give them a chance to find out what it says.

To make your Christmas a little more merry, here is the best Christmas special ever made: The Snowman.

Here’s a kid who would hate getting a Christmas present from me.

I am really a tremendous geek, because hearing Christmas music 24/7 leaves me cold yet I’m really getting excited about the Doctor Who Christmas special. And now, preview clips!

And, wait just one second… What was I saying about Christmas music?

I have three words to say to the stupid liberals who are loudly complaining about Obama’s compromise with Republicans over the Bush tax plans. Those three words are: READ MY LIPS.

As in George H. W. Bush’s infamous “read my lips, no new taxes.” It was the death knell of the first Bush presidency when Bush broke his campaign promise and raised taxes in a bad economy. Which brings me one of Obama’s key campaign promises — he promised he would not raise taxes on Americans who make less than $250,000 per year. This campaign promise has been Obama’s defense on all Republican claims that Obama was coming for our money. “I’m not coming for your money, Middle Class,” Obama said, “I’m only coming for the rich people’s money. They can afford it.”

What does this have to do with the current situation? If Obama had broken his campaign promise not to raise taxes on people making less than $250,000 a year, it would have been EXACTLY like Bush’s “read my lips.” It would have been the exact same blunder. And that is what he would have had to do if he wanted to play chicken with Republicans in the current situation. Everyone knew he couldn’t get the votes to keep the tax cut for the middle class only. His only other options were to take the compromise and keep all the tax cuts, or let all of the Bush tax cuts expire, raising everyone’s taxes. The second option would mean breaking his campaign promise to raise taxes on the middle class during a recession. Aside from having very real negative effects on the economy, it would have given the Republicans all of the ammunition they needed to label Obama as a reckless tax and spend liberal. His administration would be ruined in the eyes of all conservatives, all moderates, all independents and a fair number of liberals. Game over.

Quite simply, Obama did what he had to do. He got the middle class their tax cuts. He got the unemployed their benefits back. He won the right to remind the middle class that the Republicans were willing to hang him out to dry to benefit the rich but he, Obama, was willing to overcome ideology to save them. And he won the right to make another point that I’m sure we’ll hear Democrats making a lot in the next two years: the first act of a Republican Congress that was elected to get the deficit under control was to make matters much worse, and they did it to protect the rich.

A lot of liberals are complaining a lot. Well, fuck the liberals. I’m sick to death of listening to them bitch and moan. They claim to be fed up with their ideological opponents, and yet when you ask them to make a compromise they balk and accuse their president of being weak because he is willing to compromise Democratic ideological purity. Despite all their claims to want an open-minded, inclusive government that reaches across party lines and embraces all ideas, it’s enough to make you suspect that all these liberals really want is a liberal Bush who will shout down the opposition, force members of his own party to conform strictly to party ideology, and trample over anyone with an opposing viewpoint. Beware of this kind of liberal, because what they want most of all is to make Democrats more like Republicans. To reach the kind of purity they desire they insist on getting their news from liberal news outlets (Huffington Post, liberal blogs) which, just like Fox News, edit out anything that questions their view of the world.

There’s already proof that these people are disconnected from reality. For all of their complaining about Obama’s decision to compromise, I haven’t heard a single one propose a credible alternative. I’ve only heard a few of them suggest that Obama should have let all the tax cuts expire if he had to. That would have been Christmas for Republicans, twenty days early. The Republicans would have loved it if he had been willing to do it. They probably would have let him go through with it rather than back down. He wuld essentially have loaded the gun, pointed it at his own head and put the GOP’s hand on the trigger. That’s what all these liberal pundits, in their frustration, wanted him to do. Reality check, pundits. When your hand is lousy, you don’t go all in. You fold and cut your losses.

So, to all of you sane liberals out there: No matter how frustrated you are, don’t listen to these crazies or America will have two ideological parties unwilling to compromise and all of the current problems with government will get much, much worse. Obama had to compromise or he would have destroyed himself. The Republicans knew it, and they used it against him. It sucks he got beat but this was the best possible outcome in the circumstances. And if you want to blame somebody, don’t blame Obama (he did what he had to), don’t even blame Republicans (they did what’s in their nature). Blame the chickenshit, soon to be out of work Democratic Congressmen who wouldn’t vote on this before the election. Not like being pansies saved their jobs.

Are you up late at night wondering what you’re going to get Adam for Christmas? Of course you are. And I’m here to help you get some sleep!

If you’ve read and enjoyed a book by any of the following authors, your gift searching is over: Mary Gaitskill, Norman Rush, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Jennifer Egan, Claire Messud
Mario Vargas Llosa, Colum McCann, Ha Jin, Robert Bolano, E. L. Doctorow, Nicole Krauss, Myra Goldberg, Jonathan Lethem, Allegra Goodman.

Leave a Comment! These are living authors whose books I’ve never read and don’t own. If you know of another you think I’m not familiar with, let me know who it is.

I was very excited to watch this trailer for this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, “A Christmas Carol.” I was even more excited when BBC America announced that they are going to air the Christmas special on Christmas day, the same day that it airs in UK!

This is a video of a photographer who has lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation talking about the history of the Lakota and showing a slideshow of the photos he has taken. It’s an excellent video that took me back to the eight months (not enough time) that I spent researching and writing The Ghost Dancers, three years ago.

The one criticism that I have of this video is that it does what so many histories of the Lakota do — it cuts off the history in 1890 and then skips forward to the present day. A lot of the most facinating things that happened on Pine Ridge happened in the 20th century. The history of the Lakota people did not end when Big Foot’s band of Miniconjou were massacred by the US Cavalry at Wounded Knee, while trying to flee from Standing Rock to Pine Ridge after the Americans murdered Sitting Bull. The US governments dirty deals on Pine Ridge in the 1970s are so deplorable that it’s hard to even believe — the government did things in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, that we usually associate with the CIA in Chile or Nicaragua. They fixed elections. They turned a blind eye to murder.

By all means watch the video, but when he skips from 1890 to 2010 keep in mind that there’s an entire other piece that he’s not telling you. If you want to know what he isn’t telling you, go read this book.