Salon.com > cognitive dissonance

GOP’s fraud fantasyland

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:56:00 +0000

Still not convinced that Barack Obama won this month's election fair and square? Then Dean Chambers, the conservative blogger behind the infamous UnskewedPolls.com, has a new site for you with a wonderfully punny URL: BarackOFraudo.com. The site displays an electoral map with three key states -- Florida, Ohio and Virginia -- blacked out. Why black? Those three states, with 80 electoral votes between them, represent "Obama fraud" and are enough to sway the election, according to the site.

So far, the site doesn't explain the evidence that voter fraud swung the election in these three states, but does offer a Henry David Thoreau quote: "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." "Evidence of vote fraud is very much like that. Those who engage in it are slick and do all they can to hide it, so the evidence is often quite circumstantial," Chambers writes on the site.

Susan Isaacs loves a rogue: Here are her nine favorites

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:43:00 +0000

It's not all Jane Eyre out there. In her sweet, honorable, slightly passive-aggressive way, Jane was as perfect as a protagonist can get while remaining interesting; in fact, she's one of my favorites. But most characters are more morally ambiguous. And some are just plain bad – somewhere between nasty and bad to the bone.

In my new novel, "Goldberg Variations," I have four narrators. One, Gloria Goldberg Garrison, is a real stinker. Not evil, mind you, but cruel to amuse herself and others. She’s the sort who seeks out your most sensitive area so she can know precisely where to stick in the shiv. Gloria made me uncomfortable enough that during the writing I had to soothe myself by thinking: Hey, Dostoevsky probably didn't think Raskolnikov was a sweetheart.

What do these bad guys offer us? A chance to pray for their redemption? A safe way to relish sin? I’ve liked or loved so many novels that had main characters who either made morally questionable choices or were downright evil. The entire noir genre is theirs.

Still, beyond the Chandlers and the Hammetts, here are my “Naughty Nine,” first-rate novels that feature a gamut of no-goodniks.

“Homeland’s” Carrie Mathison and Nicholas Brody: A deranged love story

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Showtime’s glorious thriller “Homeland” is full-body television: It sets pulses to racing, stomachs to churning, minds to strategizing. Its first season was a visceral 12-episode ascent to an apex of anxiety, the finale leaving its two star-crossed protagonists not so much hanging from a cliff, as smashed at the bottom of a canyon, a beat after their hold had given way. Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) had just failed to set off the bomb in his suicide vest and kill the vice president, while Carrie Mathison, the manic genius CIA agent, played with incandescent focus by Claire Danes, elected to have her short-term memory — and knowledge of Brody’s treachery — wiped out by electroconvulsive therapy.

Season 2, which premieres on Sunday night, picks up six months after the aforementioned events, the action having slowed — temporarily. A fragile, disgraced, medicated Carrie, officially bounced from the CIA, is languidly recuperating, avoiding the spycraft that is her calling. Brody, now a congressman, is being considered as a vice-presidential candidate, while secretly trying to aid the terrorist Abu Nazir without committing violence himself. Carrie is soon called to Beirut for one last job — and you know how those tend to go. The series' thriller engine turns on, turns over and begins to purr. By the end of the first episode, as Carrie gets her groove back, I was fist-pumping. By the end of the second episode, I was doing whatever fist-pumping with every single nerve ending in one’s body is called.