Tommy Franks Is a Punk Ass Bitch and Other Things That Free Speech Allows Us To Say:
Didja see that in the title? "Tommy Franks is a punk ass bitch." He is a prison whore, traded around from diseased inmate to diseased inmate for cigarettes and porn, a fleshy face to be fucked repeatedly by those who own him thanks to penitentiary capitalism, and the worst fucking part is that he embraces his sexual slavery, giggling and moaning happily as he hungrily laps more prisoner cock than any other skirt-wearing man-cunt in the joint.

Didja notice that paragraph there? Didja see how it totally ignores anything about retired General Tommy Franks's past, however much of a bad motherfucker he might've been on a battlefield (or, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, however much he may have stood on a bank of computers and ordered men into battle)? 'Cause right now, as the Rude Pundit is writing this, he doesn't give a happy monkey fuck about anything that Tommy Franks said or did in the past, even his calling Douglas Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." That's cause the Rude Pundit's free to ignore all of that and just call out Franks for his idiotic speech made to the yahoos and idiots of the National Rifle Association (motto: "Our guns aren't penis substitutes, but wouldn't you like to touch my Uzi?") at their idiots' night out (or "Members' Banquet," a name that has its own phallic implications) in Milwaukee Saturday night, the climax of the NRA's three-day convention, or, in the real world, Nutzoidfest 2006.

See, Franks, in a display of freedom to be an illogical, deluded, combat-crazed shit flinger, recalled thinking, when an "idiot" reporter asked him whether a "liberated" Iraq and Afghanistan was worth 2000 lives, "Do you not understand what we’re talking about? It’s neither 2,400, 24,000 or 240,000 [lives]. Terrorism is a thing that threatens our lives. It doesn’t have anything to do with politics." See, Franks said, NRA members "get it;" whereas, one presumes, nearly three quarters of the nation does not. You "get it" if you don't give a goddamn over how many people die on the way to your El Dorado, even if you can't define what that city of gold looks like. Of course, according to Franks, the way you know if you are someone who "gets it" is that you are someone who "knows the difference between a semi-automatic and an assault gun." Then he took out a life-sized latex and silicone doll of Donald Rumsfeld and said, "Lemme show you what I like to do whenever I visit the Secretary" before he performed astonishing acts of oral gratification on the artificial cock of the silent, cold, stiff doll, much like blowing Rumsfeld must actually be like.

And the Rude Pundit can say all these things. He can say that John McCain is a gimpy opportunist who used a captive audience to make a presidential campaign speech. Remember: those students at the graduation at the New School had one choice - go to their graduation or skip it. And once they were there, they had another choice: be silent and suck it up or use that freedom of speech and expression they were told exists in this world.

Last year, in a little-noted incident, the Rude Pundit attended a graduation where the author, and noted fucker of many, Erica Jong spoke. It had been an overlong ceremony where too many politicians wanted to get in their canned lines, where even the Buddhist monk who offered the benediction went on way, way too long. So when Jong gave the commencement address to this politically mixed, but very working class, crowd, and then started to attack the Bush administration's war policies, and then kept talking for about twice as long as she should have, the audience broke. She was booed, shouted at, told to "Go home" and "Shut up." Some around the Rude Pundit were incensed at the alleged impropriety of the students (and their parents). The Rude Pundit smiled at their actions, even if the speaker was a lefty, as he thought, "Aaah, democracy at last." Right wing websites that picked up on the story were delighted by Jong's treatment. They felt that it was improper for Jong to invoke body bags and Tom Cruise in a graduation speech. Goddamn, if nothing else, however good or bad the speech was, Jong got the students to not simply be complacent vessels.

See, we've been conditioned that politeness means we just have to sit there and take it and not do anything about what the person on the podium is saying. But we're also used to being able to click the channel, change the station, and move on to things that are more pleasing to us. It's all so controlled, from free speech zones to screening people to get in to see their own President at an allegedly public event. One of the effects of all this control is that now, when given the opportunity to dissent, that bottled up dissent, which has no outlet in the mainstream media or at most public gatherings, is going to pop like a shaken soda bottle.

And with McCain and Condoleezza Rice's commencement speeches at ostensibly liberal schools (or at least schools with a higher ratio of liberals than they're used to confronting), dissenters were handed a fuckin' silver platter with an opportunity on it. At least Rice didn't explicitly mention Iraq; instead, she did offer the Boston College crowd the broader administration line on how everyone wants them a heapin' helpin' o' freedom, as well as lots of nice stories. All in all, a pretty typical graduation speech, and she was met with polite, silent protest. McCain, though, gave a stump speech, justifying his vote on the Iraq War, "Should we lose this war, our defeat will further destabilize an already volatile and dangerous region, strengthen the threat of terrorism, and unleash furies that will assail us for a very long time. I believe the benefits of success will justify the costs and risks we have incurred." And then he invited those who disagreed to dissent. He just wasn't expecting them to dissent right there in front of him. Angrily. Telling him to shut the fuck up and stop talking about how right he thought he was. And you don't get a pass just because you spent a bunch of time in the Hanoi Hilton.

That's free speech, both McCain's campaigning and the students' heckling, as well as Stephen Colbert's moment of sitting on George W. Bush's face and farting loudly. It is messy, it is beautiful, it is rude. And those who would ask us all to put on sailor suits and frilly dresses and behave like good little boys and girls, well, they're free to say that, too, just as the Rude Pundit is free to say that Condi Rice is a slaggy meat puppet for the slave masters of global domination.

So, yeah, that's speech, alright. Now, what about action?