Sadly, No!

Yes, he got me again. It was his very next post after this one, and I haven’t even gotten to the rest yet. Here’s our prominent booster of right-wing ‘citizen journalism’ showing us the standards to which he believes all media should attain:

Gore Shame

The worlds greatest environmental hypocrite wastes so much energy that his consumption would power 232 normal homes.

Sigh. The link goes to a blog post at the user-content site, Digital Journal. The post sums up an ‘investigative report’ by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, the folks who brought us last year’s thoroughly hinky Al-Gore-uses-electricity contretemps.

But wait. Check the ‘investigative report’ and you’ll find that it’s actually nothing more than a press release. It includes no actual citations, checkable figures or verifiable information of any kind. It reads like this:

In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

Yes, they’re actually quoting themselves. Plus, of course, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research is one of those apparently infinite phony-nonpartisan groups that produce conservative nonsense and flapdoodle as their raison d’etre. Its head, Drew Johnson, is a 28-year-old American Enterprise Institute beneficiary and frequent right-wing TV and radio guest. Its Director of Legal Policy is a right-wing activist fresh out of law school, who hasn’t even taken his bar exam yet.

At that point we stopped digging, because this investigative report is obviously solid gold!

Sadly not content with even that level of wastefulness, the Goracle has now taken to directly belching balls of energy into the atmosphere.

Okay, that’s actually pretty funny.

But the adverb, ‘sadly,’ yields insight. “What’s a word that goes naturally with funny?” asks Confederate Yankee’s subconscious. We’ll be onto him for certain if he starts picking up characteristic locutions like ‘bonk-headed’ or ‘poo-cano.’

Update: Steve Strum notes (correctly) that Gore’s annual usage would power 232 normal homes for a month. Not quite as bad as originally thought, but still horrific.

Well, that’s one correction so far. Another is that the so-called Tennessee Center for Policy Research is wrong in claiming that Gore “scurried to make his home more energy efficient” in response to their first cornball investigative report (i.e. press release). That part of the story is summarized here. Also, the ‘normal homes’ assertion actually says ‘average households.’ Which means that Mr. Yankee has swallowed the bait and is comparing a 10,000 square-foot mansion to, you know, a figure that includes a vast preponderance of smaller dwellings, including apartments. That’s an old one, the sneaky use of ‘average’ to conceal disparities in the things that you’re comparing.

Anyway, to sum up, a questionable conservative activist group has asserted in an unsourced press release that Gore’s 20-room, 10,000-square-foot house uses 19.3 times the amount of power of an average housing unit of unknown but much smaller size.

And repeating these assertions blindly equals journalism.

Are we embarrassing him yet?

No, I didn’t think so either.

Correction: As Evan reminds us, it would be more accurate to say that Gore’s 20-room, 10,000-square-foot house in which he and his family run small businesses employing a staff of 20-odd people, and have a round-the-clock security detail — plus a guest-house and some outbuildings -– uses 19.3 times the amount of power as an average housing unit.

To which we would also add that Gore participates in Nashville Electric’s Green Power Switch program, in which he pays a premium for power that comes from renewable sources. And also that the house is carbon-neutral due to offsets. And so on down the line, and so forth.

Is Confederate Yankee embarrassed yet?

Further Correction: If you look at last year’s attention-seeking press release from the Tennessee Center For Policy Research, they claim that Gore’s electricity usage in 2006 was 18,400 kilowatt-hours per month. Now they’re claiming a 10% increase to 17,768 kilowatt-hours.

Employing mathematics, we find that the number 17,768 is not larger than the number 18,400.

Embarrassed yet, etc.? And not to pick on Confederate Yankee unduly, so how about our old pal Glenn Reynolds?

AL GORE: Still guzzling energy in Nashville. “Despite adding solar panels, installing a geothermal system, replacing existing light bulbs with more efficient models, and overhauling the home’s windows and ductwork, Gore now consumes more electricity than before the ‘green’ overhaul.”

Lots of talk, but more bloated than ever. It’s almost like a metaphor.

Something is, no doubt.

Survey time: if you could make one pundit who has a regular gig at a major newspaper or magazine stop writing forever, which one would it be?

I’ve narrowed my choice down to Easterbrook, Bill Kristol or Hitchens. However, I recognize there are several other worthy candidates (Maureen Dowd, anyone?).

UPDATE: Oh, I forgot that Jonah Goldberg writes regularly for the LA Times.

Crap. This is gonna be harder than I thought.

UPDATE II: Hoo lordy. Dean Broder just shot up the charts with this:

David S. Broder: Joe Biden and Richard Lugar offer hope for foreign policy that crosses party lines.

We’re going to need to do an actual vote to resolve this, methinks.

As I’ve said before, the amazing thing about Gregg Easterbrook isn’t just that he gets paid to be wrong, but that he gets paid to be wrong on such a broad range of topics, from politics to sports to science to film. Reading a Gregg Easterbrook article is like listening to a rousing speech delivered by one John Blutarsky describing America’s resolve in the days after the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. Except, instead of getting basic facts wrong about one particular historical event, he gets them wrong about everything. The guy is a bloody polymath of wrongness, on par with Clifford C. Clavin, Jr.

And yet prestigious magazines continue to publish him.

Why?

Over at America’s Shittiest Website™, K-Lo posted a video of a disheveled Jonah Goldberg (sporting a shiny new mullet) and Laura Ingraham, in a Faux News segment titled “To Drill or Not Drill in Arctic Nat’l Wildlife Refuge.” Guess who was on the side of not drilling? No one, of course! (That was a trick question.)

So that busy Sadlynots don’t have to watch the whole thing, we have thoughtfully condensed the video to five seconds:

Bonus LoadPants-ism: Jonah swoons over the 10 billion barrels to be found in ANWR, and then says that the U.S. imports 10 billion barrels of oil a day. Woohoo! One day’s supply of oil in ANWR. Totally worth it, dude.*

*Actually, the U.S. imports about 10 million barrels per day.

Yes, the right-wing media is like an all-you-can-eat buffet line: If you’re foolhardy and let yourself be tempted by the mashed potatoes, the mac and cheese, the regular and German potato salad, and so forth, your plate will be full by the time you reach the roast beef and salmon.

A tempting steam-pan of starchy comestibles is Confederate Yankee. Any given item at the top of his page, anytime you look, will be zanily wrong in some flagrant, clownshoe-flapping respect, such that it takes a better man than me to resist loading up on him on the way to, for instance, today’s far more crafty and important argument against habeas corpus by John “Whatsamatta” Yoo. That argument is full of small carefully-spaced holes, like a colander, whereas Confederate Yankee’s arguments typically have a big gaping hole, like when someone moons you from a speeding car.

I suppose what I mean to say is that he got me again. I went to see what he was up to, and voila:

Obama Gaffes Again

Somebody get a history book for the clueless freshman Senator from Illinois (my bold):

See, I’ve been out of town for a few weeks, and there’s a certain ever-thus uncanniness in coming back and encountering such a title and opening sentence, all right there in plain English right in front of one’s face. It was like the time a few weeks before when I’d wandered into the 7-11 and noticed a copy of New York magazine for the first time in a couple of years. On the cover was Sarah Jessica Parker. It was like. . .how should I explain this? It was like the astonishment you don’t feel when the sun doesn’t explode.

The ‘Obama gaffes’ thing is a right-wing chant of the eternal shifting Now. Its meaning is that ‘gaffes’ are a bad thing as applied to John “Gaffer O’Blabby McGaffalot” McCain, but if you take out ‘John McCain’ and substitute ‘Barack Obama,’ then. . .opposite! The idea, as with all of these chants of theirs, is to repeat it a lot, winkingly for awhile, until they forget that it’s just something they made up to be saucy and pugnacious. Then it becomes true, and thus are worlds created through gradual accretion. It will become a fact through which other facts can be proved.

Anyway, it’s not the smartest thing they’ve ever come up with (that would probably be the Overton Window), but it’s to the wingnuts’ credit that ‘Obama is old’ never made it out of R&D. Not so much to their credit is Mr. Yankee, to whom we now return as he quotes Barack Obama saying something obvious and commonsensically true:

And, you know, let’s take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, “Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.”

Sensible people are now standing in front of bookcases wearing tweed jackets, soberly whipping off their glasses and putting on their stethoscopes. “Indeed!” they say. “Studies show!” “70% surveyed agree!” Sensible people are not Mr. Yankee, who paces the floor with broken crockery orbiting his head:

For the moment let’s ignore that terrorist recruitment in general (and for al Qaeda in particular) is on the decline and Barack is making up his inconvenient untruths as he goes along, to focus instead on his insistence that Bill Clinton’s flawed policy of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue is somehow a winning strategy. We’ll use Obama’s own 1993 WTC bombing example to debunk his claim.

It’s quite simple: where is the 1993 World Trade Center bomb-builder? Is he in a U.S prison, as Obama claims? Not even close.

First things first: Linking to a blog post by Walid Phares is a teeny-weeny-winey eeny teensy-weensy, iddle-widdle microscopic jot and tittle of a small amount of not-quite-the-same-thing as actually establishing something as objectively true. This is shown by the principle of mutuality. Example: Ha ha! Contrarily, terrorist recruitment in general (and for al Qaeda in particular) is on the increase!

It is on the increase!

On the increase!

…Look, quoting Barack Obama didn’t actually prove anything, did it? It just sort of impertinently turned the tables, yes? But now I find myself falling into a bad habit by addressing Mr. Yankee directly. It’s like arguing with a doycano. You try to explain yourself, and it just erupts and showers you with molten Doy.

Though grossly neglected in the media, Abdul Rahman Yasin…

Oh right, there was that. And we hadn’t even gotten past the blaming-Clinton-for-9/11 yet. (Inter alia, the preceding citation is signally different from the Walid Phares one in that it includes objective, checkable figures and factual claims.) So anyway, Obama’s gaffe was in saying that we put those responsible for the first World Trade Center attack on trial.

Which we did. Except for the guy Mr. Yankee is mentioning, who fled the country.

Though grossly neglected in the media, Abdul Rahman Yasin conducted the first attempted chemical weapons attack on U.S. soil by terrorists with the 1993 World Trade Center bomb. The bomb that detonated in the WTC garage in 1993 was built by Yasin to create smoke filled with sodium cyanide, which he hoped would rise through elevator shafts, ventilation ducts, and stairwells to suffocate 50,000 people.

Except for the cyanide, of which there wasn’t any. Oddly enough, the belief that there was cyanide in the bomb seems to come from a statement made by the judge during a sentencing hearing in the WTC bombing case. …A sentencing hearing for defendants that, you know, went to trial. Mr. Yankee’s sources for the cyanide claim? Ho ho, we found them here! The primary source is a since-amended Wikipedia entry reproduced at Answers.com. He says its claims are ‘confirmed’ by Wikipedia, if you can believe such a thing. Then as backup, he cites zany-eyed crackpot Laurie Milroie, who has lately become a font of ridicule even among her fellow neocons.

Fortunately for those in the World Trade Center that day, the bomb burned hotter than Yasin expected, and incinerated the cyanide as it detonated instead of spreading it in toxic smoke.

I’m not going to look because it’s late and there simply isn’t time, but this is the kind of thing you tend to find when you check into these recursive Wikipedia citations and Escher ladders of conservatives-citing-conservatives and so forth: Laurie Mylroie might even have been the person who added the ‘cyanide’ line to the original Wikipedia entry. That’s the kind of thing you find.

Yasin fled the United States after the bombing to Iraq, and lived as Saddam Hussein’s guest in Baghdad until the invasion.

I.e., in jail.*

He is still free, and wanted by the FBI.

Once again, Barack Obama is dead wrong on the facts.

Not again!

Come to think of it, the phrase ‘once again, XX INSERT LIBERAL XX is dead wrong on the facts’ is like when you look at the cover of a new Rolling Stone, and Dave Matthews is on it. It’s like the relief you don’t feel when you haven’t stopped banging your head in a car door.

* Update: I’d forgotten to reproduce Mr. Yankee’s link for the phrase, ‘Saddam Hussein’s guest,’ which points to a USA Today story from September 17, 2003. Here’s the executive summary:

U.S.: Iraq sheltered suspect in ’93 WTC attack
By John Diamond

WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities in Iraq say they have new evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime gave money and housing to Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, according to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials.

The Bush administration is using the evidence to strengthen its disputed prewar assertion that Iraq had ties to terrorists, including the al-Qaeda group responsible for the Sept. 11 attack. […]

Military, intelligence and law enforcement officials reported finding a large cache of Arabic-language documents in Tikrit, Saddam’s political stronghold. A U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said translators and analysts are busy “separating the gems from the junk.” The official said some of the analysts have concluded that the documents show that Saddam’s government provided monthly payments and a home for Yasin.

[…]

Even if the new information holds up — and intelligence and law enforcement officials disagree on its conclusiveness — the links tying Yasin, Saddam and al-Qaeda are tentative.

Solid gold!

Plus, ‘gave money and housing’ is the best-ever framing of putting someone in prison that has ever been attempted. Did you know that the Bush administration is giving money and housing to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? ZOMG.

Another year, another championship for Sparkledust City, a.k.a., Boston.

Boston: our sports teams are so good that 18-1 football teams are considered historic failures. El. Oh. El.

UPDATE: Oh, why not?

When Young People Get Excited

• Why can’t they be like we were — perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids today?

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

[Hanx! DRJ]

Now on sale at the Texas Republican Convention (seriously):

(Via.)

This is interesting:

Yet, with just a few words, Mr. Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” showed that he was willing to take on the party’s sacred cows and speak candidly to even the most entrenched party constituencies. The effect was palpable; in the words of one Philadelphia working-class voter, “the day he told off” Jesse Jackson “is the day he got my vote.”

(Indeed, just yesterday, Barack Obama had his own mini- “Souljah moment” as he decried the epidemic of fatherlessness and illegitimacy among black Americans. While it is a message that Mr. Obama has voiced before to other black audiences, speaking unpleasant truths about issues afflicting the black community may provide political benefit for a candidate whom some working-class white voters are suspicious of — just as it did for Clinton 16 years ago.)

It’s amazing but true: if you’re a politician in this country, attacking obscure rappers and deadbeat fathers is seen as a symbol of political courage.

This isn’t an endorsement of deadbeat fathers, by the way; I’ll leave those sorts of shenanigans to Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser. I just find it funny that attacking groups of people who basically wield zero political or economic clout is as politically profitable as it is.

Weekly Standard, Cliffs Notes Edition. The Gitmo Nightmare:

The Supreme Court’s decision is bad.

Compromises between the executive and legislative branches, when done in good faith, are inherently constitutional.

Neither lawyers nor judges should have any real influence over the conduct of the war on terror.

Proper deference means never disagreeing.

Anyone detained by the government on suspicion of terrorism is necessarily guilty.

The Supreme Court should write laws for the legislative branch if the latter is unable to come up with something constitutional.

The Supreme Court failed to outline every possible result of granting habeas rights to suspected terrorists. That’s a bad Supreme Court!

Meanwhile, from the department of questions asked in bad faith one could have answered by reading the decision one is criticizing, Continetti writes:
Read the rest of this entry »