A short time ago, a good friend pointed me in the direction of this (registration required, sorry - I recommend BugMeNot), promising the ultimate divide-by-zero error in the form of "Jesus was a very bad Christian." For those not big up on computers, a divide-by-zero error is just that - an instance in which a computer is asked to divide something by zero and freaks the hell out because that's, you know, not possible. I'm sure you see how this is very similar to the assertion that Jesus, the source of all Christianity and the paragon of its virtues, was a "very bad Christian." If we were all Windows machines, that statement would likely cause us all to throw up a Blue Screen of Death. If we were all Macs, we'd likely get the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, or that really nicely designed screen that explains in several languages that something has gone really really wrong. If we were all Linux machines, we'd all... uh, I don't know... spit out a long and detailed report of what happened that requires a lot of programming knowledge to even begin comprehending? What do Linux boxes do with that sort of thing? And don't tell me "They don't crash..." I'm making a joke.

Records, of course, much like computers, are made to be broken. In that spirit, I give an even greater divide-by-zero. Oliver North wrote a piece for Fox calling Bill Clinton on the carpet for law-breaking, which is, on its own, a pretty big act of chutzpah. That's not all, though. Oliver North, the man central to the selling of arms to Iran (an enemy of the United States) in order to illegally finance war in South America, is shocked - SHOCKED! - that Bill Clinton admitted on national television to authorizing the assassination of one Osama bin Laden. You may remember the rather heated exchange between Clinton and Chris Matthews - we on the left were proud of our boy for standing up to the widely spread falsehood that he was too busy enjoying Oval Office blowjobs to pay attention to bin Laden and al Qaeda. In that exchange, Clinton said "I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding at the CIA to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since."

The US government is not allowed to authorize assassination. There are executive orders that forbid it. That it's pretty much winked at does not excuse the fact that Clinton did admit to breaking that prohibition. I would much rather see Osama bin Laden captured and prosecuted in a court of law than with his brains blown out from a thousand meters. Either way, he'll end up dead (I'm being realistic, here), but with the former we make a statement about how we do things, what justice is. Hell, with the latter we make a statement about how we do things, but I prefer the other statement. Still, the boundless hypocrisy of anyone on the right picking at Clinton's attempts to rid the world of the man they themselves hold up as the purest embodiment of evil since Hitler (well, used to hold up, at least) turns my stomach. To hear it coming from a man who helped in the creation of a massive criminal enterprise to further antidemocratic war in South America is far worse. North even goes so far as to compare Clinton's authorization of assassination attempts against bin Laden with Pat Robertson's call for attempts against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Subject A> Terrorist leader responsible for the deaths of thousands of US and other citizens. Subject B> Repeatedly democratically elected head of a foreign government, routinely labeled a "dictator" ("tin-horn dictator," to use North's words) because he's a staunch leftist and isn't playing along with US economic interests. The intellectual dishonesty is staggering.

The brain seizes up.

Ctrl-Alt-Del.