An Eye Like A Ripe Grape

Got your attention? That phrase is, if I remember correctly, one of the signs of the End Days from Islam -- the Anti-Christ will come, and you will know he is the Anti-Christ because, among other things, he will have an eye like a ripe grape. You wouldn't BELIEVE the amount of time we spent discussing what exactly "an eye like a ripe grape" would be like. At one point, our professor quite reasonably said that the Anti-Christ was not the only part of the signs of the End Days, and explaining exactly what his looked like was definitely not the most important part of the topic.

Speaking of End Days...

I bring this up because the progressive AND center- left, swayed by siren song of beating mediocrity (or stark horribleness perhaps) with mediocrity, voted en masse for a candidate who not only voted to confirm Antonin Scalia, but said he could see appointing "somebody with a different opinion" on abortion than pro-choice (as long as it didn't result in, his example, a Supreme Court with a majority inclined to overturn Roe v. Wade. I still haven't found the primary source Counterpunch.Org used, but here is the Washington Post repeating that he did, in fact say it.

Why is this a sign of end days? Because it's likely that a Republican will be, and would've been, the one to oppose confirmation of anti-choice judges. And this Republican is in line to be the Chair of the Judiciary Committee. That's right, Arlen Specter, being moderately pariahed right now, apparently "[made the comment] last week that anti-abortion judges would be unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate".

So we have a (defeated) Democratic presidential candidate who as prez may have appointed the next Antonin Scalia (now with more scariness!), a Republican Senator lined up for chairmanship essentially vowing that anti-abortion judges wouldn't get to the floor, the Christian Coalition essentially saying that this is *not* what they expected as a result of their fealty ("This isn’t what we worked for,” he said. “It sends the exact wrong message to the core of the Republican Party that helped win this election. No matter what Senator Specter says, there is a complete lack of trust between him and us now, no matter how much he tries to do damage control”), and a pro-choice Republican ex-Senator rejecting the question of whether there even IS a Christian Right, much less whether or not Bush now owes them political favors, and essentially accusing Bill Maher of being a gay-basher, Wyoming-basher, Christian-basher, and Republican-basher.

These are no sun running backwards in the sky (or ripe-grape eyes), but at least they're funnier signs of the apocalypse than last week.

(and now I'm really, really actually going to work on my thesis...)