HOW I WON THE WAR ON DINGBATS®

Like most of you, when I want detailed hard-hitting, analytical news coverage of the War On Terrorism, I turn to Rolling Stone magazine.



Last month they published an investigative piece on the Joint Terrorism Task Forces that the FBI set up to coordinate the work of federal agencies and local cops to fight teh terrorisms. 619 arrests so far, and Team Bush says that each and every one of them have totally saved America from another 9/11.

Only [and you saw this coming all the way up Main Street] that’s not entirely true:

[A] closer inspection of the cases brought by JTTFs reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything. According to a study by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, only ten percent of the 619 "terrorist" cases brought by the federal government have resulted in convictions on "terrorism-related" charges -- a category so broad as to be meaningless. In the past year, none of the convictions involved jihadist terror plots targeting America.

In other words, the Big Strategy for defeating al Qaeda seems to be the equivalent of taking down a drug kingpin by busting high school seniors selling nickel bags of pot to each other behind the portables (or whatever the hell the kids do during recess in 2008).

To be fair, the FBI’s excuse for all this is that in fact they routinely arrest genuinely dangerous terrorists all the time and stop very real and dangerous plots, only they can’t make those public. See, if they did, they’d “tip their hand”. Cos at the moment, dangerous terrorists are so dangerous that they have absolutely no idea the FBI is trying to catch them.

Ooh, poor lambs. It ain't easy bein' in the FBIs.

None of this is strictly new information, but helpfully (and more crucially), RS has also compiled a very impressive list of high-profile arrests detailing how dangerous the FBI claimed the perps were, how dangerous they actually turned out to be, and – by the most amazing coincidence – what other story got conveniently bumped from the front page.

You start noticing a pattern by the end. Which goes something like this: Team Bush is winning the War On Terrorisms® by arresting the least dangerous people they can find and playing the Fear Card to make them seem as dangerous as possible in the name of puffing up their terror-cred and distracting the public from embarrassing headlines.

Or is that too cynical? Maybe. But considering all those privacy violations the FBI has been racking up in the name of protecting you from relatively harmless dingbats, somehow I feel entitled.

Grave danger,

This is dF

BIG GAY AL’S BIG GAY PLAYLIST

And while we’re on playlists, Australian GLBT web site SameSame.com.au has just wrapped up the voting for the Top 50 Gayest Songs Ever Ever Ever – as selected by authentic gays and lesbians, apparently. So you know it’s definitive. At least in Australia.

Here’s the top ten:

1. ABBA, “Dancing Queen”
2. Village People, “YMCA”
3. Gloria Gaynor, “I Will Survive”
4. The Weather Girls, “It’s Raining Men”
5. Kylie Minogue, “Your Disco Needs You”
6. Pet Shop Boys, “Go West”
7. Kylie Minogue, “Better The Devil You Know”
8. Olivia Netwon-John, “Xanadu”
9. Madonna, “Vogue”
10. Alicia Bridges, “I Love The Nightlife”

[All are available on the YouTubes, incidentally – go to the SameSame pages for access. Or ask yr local search engine toolbar.]

A little predictable, really – except for “Xanadu”, of course.

What’s that? Do I have any better suggestions? Well ... it’s hard to improve on this. I suppose Madonna, The Weather Girls and at least one Kylie song would have made my own list (though I’d have gone with a different Pet Shop Boys song, personally). I also would have listed a couple of the other 40 songs in the top 50 (particularly “Sweet Transvestite” from Rocky Horror, and perhaps a Donna Summer tune, though it’d be “Hot Stuff”, not “I Feel Love”).

Still, it seems there’s a few obvious omissions here, whether you go by camp value or actual GLBT content. And you know I can’t resist making a list, so:

TOP 10 DEF SONGS I’D LIKE TO HEAR AT THE SYDNEY GAY AND LESBIAN MARDI GRAS

1. Joe Jackson, “Real Men”
2. Queen, “Killer Queen”
3. Sleater-Kinney, “Ballad Of A Ladyman”
4. The Kinks, “Lola”
5. The B-52s, “Quiche Lorraine”
6. Willie Nelson, “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond Of Each Other”
7. Johnnie Ray, "Ooh! Aah! Oh!"
8. Tom Robinson Band, “Glad To Be Gay”
9. Samantha Fox, “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)”
10. Anything by Pansy Division

Yes, I know, #8 is probably too obvious, but so is “YMCA”, so why not?

Honorable mention: Judas Priest, "Hellbent For Leather".

Judy Judy Judy,

This is dF

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EDITED TO ADD [two hours later]: Wouldn't you know it? Right after I post this, I leave the office and put on the iPod, and a few songs later I get to Pete Shelley's "Telephone Operator". Which in turn reminds me of "Homosapiens". So you might as well put those on the playlist, too. As well as anything else I might have forgot.