Tuesday Briefs

●As wildfires raged through Southern California last October causing thousands to flee, Glenn Beck, right-wing talking-head, was delighted that people who hated America were being burned out of their homes.

Besides this being another case of a right-wing-nut taking pleasure in tragedy being visited upon Americans (one hesitates to say “their fellow Americans”), it never occurred to Beck, prat that he is, that most of the neighborhoods going up in smoke were full of conservatives. What an ano grandes.

In the meantime here in Amarillo our own cat's prat ranted against "rubber-room escapee/third-tier cable TV talking head Keith Olbermann" for blaming the inferno on global warming, pouting that no one blamed the phenomenon for the disastrous grass fires that swept the Panhandle last year.

There is a simple explanation for that: Californians believe in global warming; Texans don’t. You can’t blame it on something you don’t believe in, twit.

●Things are much better in the Amarillo Globe-News now that every other Friday has become the “Autobiography of Virgil Van Camp.” However pointless, these little vignettes about his life beats the usual ignorant, bigoted drivel, his life being, we assume, something he may actually know something about. Now we are condemned to an endless stream of inane, meaningless, nostalgic cotton-picking stories. Still we have to wonder, for a war-mongering, genocidal sociopath, how it is he kept himself out of WWII so long and had to be drafted? Boll weevils in a pilonidal cyst?

●Amarillo votes for torture. If you can’t blame something you don’t believe in, you can still be for something we don’t do. Provoked by a letter condemning the use of torture the usual wing-nuts have come out in support of it by a margin of 2 to 1. Let us remember, these are the same folks who declare this is a Christian nation, that it was founded on Biblical principles, and will beat the crap out of you with it if you don’t believe them. Abu Ghraib was a frat prank; waterboarding a splash of water in the face. So let’s go torture us some rag-headed darkie savages. After all, as Mary Chumbley so aptly put it: “We're civilized; they're not.”

●A pleasant evening for The Organization Formerly Known as Drinking Liberally Amarillo I am told. Held in the quiet environs of Mr. Westmoreland’s “The Vineyard,” liberals could finally hear the political discourse they've been trying to have for some time now. And a happy -- if all too short -- visit from “cat’s meow.” No kitty spats, as spacedark slipped 100 mg of valium into calamus venenum’s merlot anticipating such an encounter. Calamus did make a little “rowr” sound, but it was hard to tell if it was because of the cat’s meow’s pajamas or the pin-cushioned D*ve H*nry voodoo doll he slumped over on.

Ciao.