The American Spectator

It’s now nearly six years later, and our country’s weakness is that we allow those “nuanced” questions to be taken seriously.

What Joe Strummer said is all you need to know about how to fight terrorism. And anyone who dares to muddle that thinking with complexity should first engage in a preliminary dialogue with those wonderful people in vests. The vests packed with explosives. Those folks love to chat, after all — and they never forget a word in those lovely videos they make.

They could probably do my job!

I LOVE MY JOB, by the way. The people are wonderful — John Gibson is a delight — and the hours are great — but sometimes I feel my brain has become as deflated as a child’s ball stuck up on a roof. On an average day I have to think of 25 things to talk about — 25 things I can’t possibly begin to understand — so instead, I practice what I learned when I used to read the Daily Californian, the school paper back at Berkeley. I would find out what its editorial stance was, and I would stake out the opposite. It made me right all the time.

I now do the same thing with Ellen Goodman, Frank Rich, anyone from MoveOn.org, and, of course, Brussels. It helps me keep things simple — and simple is stupid, and stupid is smart.

A sliver of complexity can be entertaining, however — especially when you find someone who clings to it because it’s all they’ve got. It’s funny and dangerous! It’s dangerous because once someone knows a little about something, they use it to extrapolate a lot. A good friend of mine — a liberal with great teeth — tried to educate me on carbon offsets. She explained that they work a little like this: you use energy, and you purchase a carbon offset. My other friend Andy pointed out that for every 2,000 miles you drive, the carbon offset would be a tree.

I would like to hang myself on the tree.

The essential truth to global warming is that no one knows what the truth is, but it doesn’t stop them from reconfiguring the way we live, and the way we feel about the way we live. For the richer members of the coastal elite, it’s a simple thing: just spend more money for carbon offsets to alleviate your guilt over the gargantuan mansion and the heating oil it uses — and you will still be invited to the cocktail party. If you’re poor, you’re crap out of luck — but it doesn’t matter because you weren’t invited to the party anyway.

That’s the other real truth about global warming: it’s just an invitation to a cocktail party full of hot air. It’s not that I hate cocktail parties. I just hate the people there who expect me to agree with them about all the things they know for a fact to be true.

Unlike Gore, I don’t know all the awful things we’re doing to the earth, and unlike Howard Dean, I don’t even know how stupid Bush is. I do know, however, that Lee Marvin is simply remarkable in Point Blank and I could talk about that for hours.

OTHER STUFF I KNOW (all in simple sentences prepared to be spoken on television or carved into Bono’s back with your dad’s penknife):

* Middle-aged single women with four cats who watch The View regularly are a decade away from being an old lady with 100 cats, all of which have eaten her.

* I am not a cop, but I still think fighting crime is a good thing. Likewise, I am not in the military, but I think fighting wars is necessary.

* I’ve never met an ugly person that I’ve liked. Good people appear attractive whether they are physically good looking or not. Ugly people are generally bad people (you can see this manifest itself in the correlation between bitter anger and homeliness in the likes Al Franken and Charles Manson).

* Generating hysteria over an idea is worse than doing nothing at all. This is why doctors came up with the term, and why Al Gore will die of frostbite.