Sadly, No!

Not Much Shorter Mickey Kaus:

kf’s BS Detector Explodes

• A bunch of liberals are trying to make everyone get all boo-hoo-hooey over homeless children and so they’ve issued a report claiming that there are a bunch of them. In fact, since I haven’t personally seen any homeless children, there can’t really be all that many. But these bleeding-heart bozos are claiming that kids who’ve lost their homes and moved in with other people are homeless. Who came up with that dumbass idea?¹ Why do kids have to have their own homes? Whatever happened to mi casa es su casa, mi cabra es su cabra and all that? Besides I don’t claim I’m homeless every time I go visit my brother. And the liberals count kids living in motels as homeless.² Why does a home have to have a kitchen? What’s wrong with a hot plate? These kids in motels probably have swimming pools, maid service, ice machines and free HBO. They’re living better than I am! Also, kids who lost their homes in Katrina don’t count because there’s nothing that anyone could do to stop a hurricane. But worst of all, the report uses appealing pictures of tots when honesty would require using instead pictures of obese welfare queens, toothless men panhandling in front of liquor stores, and drug addicts with tattoos and track marks.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

¹It’s from the definition of homeless children in section 725 of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act.

² Cf. note 1.

“Obama Persists on Iran”

• Obama’s slow and steady style may be fine for dealing with healthcare and the economy, but it’s not the way to go about foreign policy. I want lots of bombs dropped on Persians, like, immediately.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Above: the dye bottle says fox,
the expression implies hedgehog.

“Learning How to Think”

• It’s so true! We professional pundits are totally incompetent! And I, knowing full well that absolutely nothing will endanger our job security, encourage you to hold us accountable!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

MOAR: Kristof comes up with the most self-serving take on Isaiah Berlin I’ve ever seen:

The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

So hedgehogs are Manichean, loudmouth hacks like Jim Cramer; meanwhile, the foxes are sensible and centrist like… yes, like Nick Kristof. How conveeenient. True to his kind, the wishy-washy, tepid-toned Kristof believes that his compulsive need to seek “rational” middle ground (and it’s always a perceived, not objective, middle; i.e. not middle at all) is not itself an “ideological” bias nor is it corrupted by emotion. Of course he is wrong.

I too may be wrong, but as I learned it, the fox/hedgehog distinction wasn’t so much about temperament as about mentality and worldview. A hedgehog is a specialist whose mind is convergent: he sees things through a single prism, apt to have only a handful of maxims which he applies to every possible problem; his toolkit is limited. On the other hand, a fox is a generalist whose mind is divergent; he has many tools. Both may be shrill or cautious, fiery or restrained; both may or may not have principles, though a fox is better able to adapt many principles against or aside each other (and not always cynically). Contra Kristof, foxes can be just as ate-up with certitude as hedgehogs. And both animals, as it were, can be rigid or pragmatic, right or wrong.

Pistof wants to contrast himself with Jim Cramer. This no doubt pleases liberals, whose affection Kristof courts. But Cramer’s simply the bad guy of the season, and seasons change — indeed, have changed. Kristof’s bad guy could just as easily be a radical leftwinger (and therefore too “ideological”), with scary “strong convictions” outside the extremely narrow — and right-leaning — spectrum of received opinion Kristof stupidly puts himself squarely in the middle of. Caution doesn’t make one a fox; it makes one, by definition, conservative.

Daniel “Leaky” Pipes considers the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, Jimmy Carter’s diplomatic masterstroke. The first clue to how he feels about it is that he brackets the word peace in irony quotes. Har har.

Above: Totally looks like… Or.

Then he’s blunt — or as blunt as a passive–aggressive jackass can be:

I have long since given up on the treaty. In a 2006 article, “Rethinking the Egypt-Israel ‘Peace’ Treaty,” I deemed it a “failure” for having been based on multiple fallacies and wishful predictions[…]

One of which is that

“[w]ar can be concluded through negotiations rather than by one side giving up.”

There, in very innocuous language, is the root of Pipes’s — and pretty much every neoconservative’s — geopolitical sociopathy. Negotiation? Compromise? In Pipes’s opinion, precious Israel (and by extention, the United States) is too good for these things, and the filthy wogs too bad. Put another way, Pipes believes that Israel should only sign treaties with Islamic countries she’s annihilated, humiliated, and forced into unconditional surrender.

Aside the 30th Anniversary of the treaty, what prompted his post is the fact that non-sociopathic people generally see the treaty in a good light, a supposed error “which is very important, for if one misunderstands the 1979 treaty, its repetition becomes, unfortunately, the more likely.” Right, because it could, at least in theory, be repeated with Palestinians, Syrians, et al. OH NOES!!

Shorter Wes Vernon:

Obama’s terrorist pals get away with murder? Literally?

• Become outraged, reader, for Barack Obama’s fascist murder thugs have taken the word ‘gullible’ out of the dictionary. Okay, no, seriously — pull my finger.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Notes:

Longer Glenn “I Know You Are But What Am I” Reynolds:

Posted at by Glenn Reynolds at 11:07 pm

• Knowing as I do that the ‘tea party movement’ was conceived and organized by Republican consultants and right-wing 501(c) foundations with major assistance from high-traffic right-bloggers, talk radio figures, and remnants of the Ron Paul campaign, I inhabit an opaque self-narrative common to the libertarian mind, imagining myself as a mordantly sly rogue, a winkingly engaging but soul-weary realist suggestive in my case of the con men in Spider Robinson’s Lifehouse and Kornbuth’s “The Time Bum,” or actually, come to think of it, more like Fritz Leiber’s foundational sword-and-sorcery character the Grey Mouser, as conceived in books such as the classic novel The Swords of Lankhmar and the equally classic story anthology Swords Against Death, and as envisioned by artist Paul Jaquays in early printings of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons supplement Deities and Demigods (a.k.a. Legends & Lore) — as opposed to how others see me as I keep trying to dupe my readership into believing that the ‘tea party movement’ is a spontaneous mass uprising of ordinary citizens while liberal groups are fronts for unspecified conspiracies, which is as a shifty and vain provincial lawyer orbited by a growingly despised resource of fools, one indeed that seems to be purifying through self-attrition into an n-dimensional hyperturd of elemental Duh.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Tintin adds:

ABOVE: Rhys Southan

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Professor InstaHick’s first link in his post is to an article by Rhys Southan, a budding tea-bagger and wannabe filmmaker, whom a right-wing site “embedded” on the ACORN bus tour. Rhys has had a rather spotty journalistic career, having been fired by the now-defunct New York Sun for reviewing a play that he admits he’d only seen “about half of.” So one has to wonder whether anything he reports back from the bus ride is true or not, including his little “amusing anecdote” about how the bus riders were all dumbfounded when an organic grocer said that the AIG execs, who shopped at his store, were “nice people.”

If you want to know more about Rhys, go read his stunningly awful blog which currently appears to be read only by his brother and a few other members of his family.

Shorter Timmy Geithner Pitching Private Investors For ‘Toxic Assets’:

Toxic Asset Plan Foresees Big Subsidies for Investors

• Bill, great to see ya, pal. Charlie, have a seat. How was Cabo, buddy? Need a bump, Billy-Boy? You too, Chuck? Yeah, it’s great fucking gear. No, my guy doesn’t cut it for shit. Swear to God I can party all night on this and still sleep like a baby. So look, fellas. I’m not gonna sugar-coat it. The government needs you hedge fund fucks to help us buy a couple trillion dollars in paper so covered in shit even Hank Paulson wouldn’t go near it with Ben Bernanke’s dick. No, hear me out. That’ll free up the lenders so’s they can start lending again, right? You grok where I’m going with this? So then the economy can reboot, see, and eventually we get back to a place, in say 2012 or so, where the bullishness on leverage is so out-of-fucking-control bananas again that every last Wall Street jackal is chomping at the bit to parlay Joe Dumbfuck’s 401k for the first smelly deal that comes along. Like, say, gobbling up a couple trillion dollars in shit-covered paper like said shit paper we’re about to buy. Aha, now I can see you get it. You’ll make a friggin’ killing, I’m telling ya. We all will, pardon my motherfucking French. Deal-of-the-fucking-century. What’s the catch? That’s the beautiful thing … there is none! It’s all totally risk-free for you from start to finish! You’re last in, first out! The rubes front 97 percent of the buy-in with their taxes! And for their troubles, they get 100 percent of the exposure! If they start to ask questions, we throw some extra bones on the sly at Extreme Makeover or American Idol or some shit, get a few of the dumb donkeys a new clapboard house or something, a fucking-whaddya-call-it, a record deal. That always shuts those chumps up. We can even do a mezzanine credit tranche on the friggin’ clapboard house! Maybe not the record deal … ah, shit, why the hell not? We’ll slice and dice the record deal to friggin’ high heaven too! Look, it’s a sure thing! We’ll have ’em coming and going! You guys better man up. Do your goddamn duty by your goddamn country for once! America needs … ha ha ha, who the fuck am I kidding! Had you for a second, didn’t I? So is it a plan? Good, good. Let’s go look at tits, gentlemen!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Shorter Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair:

Above: Vanity Nair™

Barack Obama Is a Terrible Bore

• Barack Obama lacks substance, for he is failing at his task of amusing me.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

¹ Cf.

Bonus Shorter Mark Steyn:

Re: I guess it’s official

• Even A-list liberals like Michael Wolff are beginning to wake up to the recession caused by Commissar Hussein Obama.

Bonus Roughly Proportionate Glenn “At-By” Reynolds:

Posted at by Glenn Reynolds at 6:59 pm

• Even leading liberals criticize Obama with outrage like the gigantic grassroots Tea Parties missed by the MSM, who properly asked Obama “Are you punch drunk?” while Mark Steyn with the Michael Wolff shows that we conservatives were right all along because of the first link again, plus a right-wing blogger made the exact same joke that another right-wing blogger made over a month later. Because here is a link to a buffoon yelling nonsense at the TV. Still more confirmation comes via the buffoon’s comments, as a far-right royalist who believes in predestination and practices polygamy discovers in the Obama/60 Minutes transcript an infelicity of speech that had previously gone unnoticed, making Obama now be caught making another gaffe yet again.

The wingnut fauxtrage machine has cranked up into full gear, and it seems that there’s nothing that Obama can do that won’t elicit squeals of outrage from right-wing pundits and their blogger groupies. Oh my God, Obama gave shitty gifts to the Prime Minister of England! It’s Giftgate! Oh my fucking god, he uses a teleprompter!! Promptgate!11! And Michelle, that girl needs to wear some sleeves. Sleevegate!!! Even worse, they’re tearing up the White House Lawn for, of all things, a garden as if the White House were some kind of shack!!!! Watermelongate! And on and on and on.

But the best new example of manufactured outrage over the goings on in the White House comes from Bill and Fred’s Most Excellent House of Hacks, The Weekly Standard. One of their house bloggers, John McCormack, scraped up this calomnie du jour:

The White House has been non-responsive to inquiries as to whether the Situation Room–previously reserved for national security-related meetings–is now being used for political get togethers. Now we learn in today’s Washington Post that Rahm Emanuel called a group of veterans’ group leaders together to discuss a budget controversy “in the Situation Room,” with “Emmanuel seated in the President’s chair.” The article notes that the vets made a political pitch to Rahm–“We said ‘look, don’t give Republicans an opportunity to slam you.'”

So it seems that the Obama White House is using the Situation Room for meetings in a way no previous administration did. Such a meeting would have been held either in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, or maybe in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing (which is where the article says Obama himself met with the veterans 48 hours earlier)–but never in the Situation Room.

OMFG, the Chief of Staff in The Situation Room!!eleventyone!! What’s next? Dogs in the kitchen? Obama’s mother-in-law using one of the bathrooms? Why George W. Bush would never let the Chief of Staff use the Most Holy, Sacred and Precious Situation Room. He had standards.

Well, not so much. Lookie here at what the Great Gazoogle found in the New York Times for me:

Among the most important changes [during the 2006 renovation of the Situation Room], Mr. Hagin said, was the expansion of its use beyond the National Security Council to also include the Homeland Security Council and the White House chief of staff’s office.

So probably the reason why the White House didn’t return McCormack’s call is that somebody over there decided that if this dumb shit was too lazy to find the answer himself on Google, they weren’t going to be bothered to wrap it up, put a bow on it, and give it to him.

ABOVE: Brent Baker took home a gold
in the potato sack races. He was the only
entrant.

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Over at the Media Research Center’s website Newbusters (which we like to call around here the “Special Olympics” of media watchdog sites), Brent Baker is flailing his arms wildly in order to distract everyone from Britt Hume’s embarrassing admission that his “fair and balanced” news reports were ripped and read from Newsbusters’ right-wing ramblings:

I want to say a word, however, of thanks, to Brent [Bozell] and to the team at the Media Research Center and all the contributors for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report. I don’t know what we would have done without them. It was a daily, sort of a buffet of material to work from, and we — we — we certainly made tremendous use of it.

Needless to say, this led to lots of snickering and giggling from us leftards. And Keith Olbermann even pointed to Hume’s statement when naming him “Worst Person in the World” on the following evening.

Baker’s idea as to the best way to take the sting off of Hume’s unwittingly candid statement is the tried-and-true technique of trotting out some liberal bogeyman — Michael Moore, Rosie O’Donnell, Kyle Broflovski — and then start bawling about how they did the exact same thing. In this case, the bogeyman was Keith Olbermann, and Baker got all “as if” on him:

As if Olbermann doesn’t graze a “buffet of daily talking points” from an “ultra-liberal media site.” The headline over a post earlier in the day on Media Matters’ “County Fair” blog: “Accepting Buckley award, Fox’s Hume thanked Media Research Center ‘for the tremendous amount of material’ they ‘provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report.’” Unlike Olbermann, however, Hume almost always credited the MRC so viewers were informed of his source.

You may want to read that again just to savor the full measure of Baker’s gob-smacking stupidity. Baker “proves” that Olbermann gets his talking points from Media Matters by finding a story on Media Matters about Hume’s speech. Of course, Baker neglects somehow to mention that Olbermann might have gotten his “talking points” from MRC’s own site, which posted the video of Hume’s speech. Or better yet from Newsbusters itself, which posted a transcript of Hume’s remarks, including the bit about how the news went straight from Brent Bozell’s pen to Britt Hume’s lips. Perhaps the reason that Olbermann didn’t credit Media Matters is because he, um, didn’t get the story from them.

I really want to apologize for referring to Newsbusters as the Special Olympians of media watchdogs. That is profoundly insulting to participants in those games, all of whom know how to get from the starting line to the finish line, unlike Brent and his colleagues at MRC who simply jump up and down at the starting line screaming “I won! I won!”