Neanderpundit

Today, in Condi Rice’s confirmation hearings:(Bloomberg)

Boxer questioned Rice’s credibility, citing past statements on Iraq that appeared to contradict subsequent findings, including her prewar warnings that Iraq was stockpiling banned weapons, assisted the al-Qaeda terrorist network, and tried to buy thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes only suitable for nuclear weapons programs.

Rice said she “never ever lost respect for the truth in the service of anything.” She then told Boxer: “ I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity.”
Or, in Ogspeak:

“Shut the fuck up before I slap you down like the insignificant moron you are, you tree hugging liberal fuckface. You wouldn’t know truth if it jumped up and bit your saggy ass”

I am still learning things about Ms Rice, and I haven’t formed a lot of opinions yet about what kind of a public servant she is; but I like her more as a person, with every breath she takes, with everything she says.

No, it doesn’t hurt that she’s cute. And she’s 50!!! As Ms Ochieng says, Black don’t crack.

A good looking, brilliant woman as Secretary of State. We live in wondrous times, my friends.

Update: Confirmed

It may be that I am beyond the abnormal; I don’t do sports. I have never had even the slightest inclination to either watch, or play, any kind of sports, thought i had the opportunity and was drafted into doing so on a painfully regular basis through my youth.

I played soccer, basketball, some baseball. I got coralled into playing golf. I played football with neighbor kids.

I wasn’t the best at any of these sports, but neither did I completely suck.I probably could have gone on to be, well, something more than mediocre, anyway.

Fact was, it all annoyed me. I didn’t see the point in any of it, didn’t see the point in competing like that, didn’t see the point in winning or losing a battle where nobody died.

I grew up on flyfishing, and quail hunting, and dog running, and rabbit hunting. I loved being in the woods, on the water, loved being involved in the process of life and death and eating or being eaten. I resolved that I would stay on top of the food chain as long as I could. I also loved working, and getting paid for work. I examined sports from either of two directions: A hunt which didn’t end up feeding me anything, or a job which didn’t pay me at all. I abstained.

Watching someone else play a game that I wouldn’t play myself, well, that was just asinine beyond words.

So, to the confession. No, the above wasn’t it, I am not ashamed of my mindset and would never apologise for it.

the confession is, last saturday, between one automobile repair and another, I did something I never expected to do.

I watched part of a football game.

No, i didn’t watch it all, and i didn’t even notice who was playing. One team had red shirts and white pants, and the other team were, oh, I don’t know, gold? Anyway, it was as boring as I could imagine anything being.

So I thought up some things that could make those games a WHOLE lot better.
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Mr Poretto posts a piece of poetry that I read for the first time when I was in my early teens. I loved Kipling, longed to roam the Indian continent in khakis, to hunt and stalk the most dangerous of game, to immerse myself in the cultures. I still feel that longing, still want to see those places, do those things. “City of Brass” is not about the adventure but about the theft of freedom, among other things, go read and see.

Mr Poretto speaks to the idea that Poetry is not the playground of pansies, that Real Men read poetry too. He’s right. Not all poetry is flowers and butterflies, and a lot of poetry is as manly as it comes. Read the iliad and the oddysey; poetry about war and betrayal and murder and death is as manly as it gets.
My favorite poem is about cows and stones and apple orchards and firs.

Mending Wall
Robert Frost

SOMETHING there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

That’s from memory.

When I was nineteen I read that poem and loved it so well I wrote it down, word for word, I used to carry paper with me and copy the poem over and over again until i had committed it to memory.

Real men read poetry. Damned sure real men wrote it.