Sadly, No!

Even Malkin has given up on Auschwitzgate, but Dan Riehl and his band of desperados soldier on:

Okay, so we have supposedly learned that it was Obama’s Great Uncle that liberated a sub-section of Buchenwald, not an uncle at Auschwitz. But if sources are correct and unless there’s some arcane military history in his favor, Obama still has a problem.

Apparently, Dan-o couldn’t figure out the great uncle’s middle initial, so that must mean he doesn’t exist. The word went out: KERNERS ARE GO!

Riehl compadre Steve Gilbert of Sweetness & Light did some digging and discovered a website dedicated to preserving the history of the 89th Infantry Division of World War II, the division in which Obama’s great uncle served and helped liberate the Ohrdruf satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Seeking to get to the bottom of a mystery that had been solved hours earlier, Gilbert dutifully fired off an email to the site’s owners, Ray and Mark Kitchell, thus setting up the greatest bitch slap in history:

 

—– Original Message —–
From: Steve Gilbert
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 6:14 AM
Subject: Any Record Of Charles W Payne?

Mr. Kitchell,

As you may have heard by now, Barack Obama has claimed that his great uncle Charlie Payne was a member of the 89th Div that liberated Buchenwald.

According to records his full name is either Charles W Payne or Charles T Payne (most likely the former), and he was born in 1924 — and he is still alive today.

He most likely was from Kansas at the time of enlistment.

Do you have any record of this gentleman?

Thank you,

Steve Gilbert
sweetness-light.com

PS – If you go to my website, you will see that I was probably the first to note the error in Mr. Obama’s first claims about his “uncle.”

Obama Claims His Uncle Liberated Auschwitz | Sweetness & Light
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/obama-claims-his-uncle-liberated-auschwitz

The reply was quick and to the point:

Please crawl back under the rock you came out from.

Good day

Raymond Kitchell, veteran 89th Inf Div

Hate Scott McClellan Hate Hate

• At the moment, the fault for any given thing rests with Scott DISLOYAL INCOMPETENT SNITCH McClellan, as we have known all along.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Bonus Shorter Newsbusters:

• It is biased that the liberal media ignores books that contain no startling disclosures.

Bonus Shorter Gateway Pundit:

• Worm. Snitch. Oh yeah, that’s a good one: For some reason the liberal media ignores books that, uh, like Newsbusters said.

Above: Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker, Paul Mirengoff

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Bonus Powerline primate-behavior moment, featuring while-you-watch rationalization and social construction of reality:

Is this book really necessary?

When Scott McClellan was the president’s press secretary, I usually winced when I heard him speak. The wincing finally ended when Tony Snow replaced McClellan.

Now, with the publication of his new book, we get the chance to wince once more. It’s an opportunity I intend to pass up.

Paul is offering as a new piece of information that he did not enjoy watching McClellan perform his duties as Press Secretary. For that reason, he is saying, there is liable to be nothing greatly of interest to him in McClellan’s book.

It will be interesting, though, to compare the degree to which the MSM reviews and reports on McClellan’s book with the negligible extent to which it has reviewed and reported on Douglas Feith’s inside look at the conduct of the war on terrorism during the first Bush 43 administration.

Continuing, Paul suggests that the ‘mainstream media’ is likely to give greater coverage to McClellan’s presumably uninteresting book than to a book by neoconservative Iraq War architect Doulas Feith, which Paul considers to be interesting but insufficiently covered. The implicit reason for this is that the ‘mainstream media’ is biased against official statements and therefore reality.

JOHN adds: McClellan was a lousy press secretary. A much better spokesman, Tony Snow, once told me that the best thing about his job was the opportunity to follow President Bush around and observe his conduct of the Presidency. Tony said…

Here John also reveals a heretofore-unvoiced disapproval of McClellan’s competency — one stronger and more direct than Paul’s, as befits John’s status as the Alpha Powerliner. He then establishes expert knowledge of the subject by reporting an anecdote told personally to himself by Tony Snow, possibly on Friday, September 14, 2007, during the part of a day in which he visited the White House as part of a group of Bush-friendly bloggers. His claimed insider status is underlined with locutions such as “Tony says.”

…that he came away with a deep appreciation of President Bush’s character, judgment and knowledge of the issues. Unless McClellan can come up with some facts to back up his claims–

John is asserting that Tony Snow’s official praise of President Bush while on duty as Press Secretary, told to John in personal conversation, stands as ‘facts’ against which other more compelling facts must be presented if any credence is to be given to the ‘claims’ made by McClellan in his book which John has not read.

facts have been notably absent from the press accounts I’ve seen of his book–I think Tony’s assessment is considerably more reliable.

John has thus fairly judged the matter and found that no change is required from his prior authoritative position regarding President Bush.

PAUL adds: McClellan’s predecessor as press secretary, the far more able Ari Fleischer, wrote a book about his time in the post. Rich Noyes at Newsbusters reminds us that Fleischer’s book went virtually unnoticed by the MSM.

Paul, the Beta male, seconds John’s assessment and offers a helpful piece of additional confirmation, signaling unanimity amongst the clan.

She just won’t be deterred. Despite being roundly ridiculed by, like, everyone for her latest jihad against Rachel Ray’s scarf, Michelle Malkin has dedicated her entire weekly column to the affair. Read. Weep:

The keffiyeh kerfuffle
By Michelle Malkin • May 28, 2008 09:38 AM

My syndicated column today examines the keffiyeh kerfuffle with Dunkin’ Donuts and Rachael Ray that I noted on the blog last week. As you’ll recall, I linked to an item by LGF’s Charles Johnson about the scarf she wore in a recent Dunkin’ ad. Keffiyeh chic has been covered on this site and at Hot Air extensively (see here, here, and here). Anti-American fashion designers abroad and at home have mainstreamed and adapted the scarves as generic pro-Palestinian jihad or anti-war statements. Yet many folks out there remain completely oblivious to the apparel’s violent symbolism and anti-Israel overtones.

I remember a time when left-wingers were continually stereotyped as humorless paranoids who looked for symbols of racism, sexism and homophobia in just about every area of popular culture — novels, television shows, advertising, and so on. While there was obviously some truth to this caricature, it was generally limited to college professors who pushed critical theory as the primary tool for analyzing texts.

The entire right-wing blogosphere, on the other hand, fits this stereotype better than any egghead college perfesser ever could. As George Carlin would no doubt say about this entire affair: “I see them as symbols, and I leave them to the symbol-minded.”

Gavin adds: Shorter Michelle Malkin:

The Keffiyeh Kerfuffle

Above: Explanations are due.

• The Boston Globe accused me of “yowling,” however, if you actually read my post and the column below, you’ll see that, yowl, the Left is to blame. Yowl, flag-burning, yowl, disloyalty. Hat tip: Atlas Shrugs. Murders, treason, beheadings, yowl. Yowl-and-yowl, Klan hoods, leftist dupes, bigotry. Yowl, death, 9/11. Snort, shriek, enemies, blame, ah-oogah.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

ABOVE: Screams for ice cream

---

Over at the World’s Shittiest Website, Jay Nordlinger offers evidence of the spectacular grasp of cultural fundamentals that earned him the prestigious Silver Sow award for excellence in farm reportage:

Interesting story behind this. I have a friend who’s a young Wall Streeter and a freedom-lover. A hobby of his is to collect baseball cards. And this is not just a hobby, but also a form of investing.

And, of course, as a young Wall Street investor and liker of freedom, I’m sure he never sends any business to that repressive dictatorship in China. But let’s never mention that again and get on with the thrust of the piece:

Used to be, baseball-card companies made . . . well, baseball cards. But then they branched out into other athletes: My friend has Michael Jordan, Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods, and so on. Many of these cards include signatures, by the way.

Did…did you people know that there are baseball cards that do not feature baseball players? We’ll have a special report on this right here on WNYX, right after Bill McNeil’s hard-hitting expose of outrageous lyrics in rap music, and Matthew Brock’s feature on the “Dilbert” cartoons that are sweeping the nation.

Anyway, last year, my friend noticed that Topps put out a Fidel Castro card. It shows him in a baseball cap, and is all cute and cuddly. My friend was disgusted at this sweetheart treatment of a murderous dictator. So what did he do? He bought the card. He didn’t want it in anyone else’s possession.

Uh, Jay Nerdlinger’s friend? I hate to break this to you, Mr. “Investor”, but it’s fairly likely that Topps made more than one of those.

Then the question was, “What do I do with this card? Do I have some kind of ceremonial burning?” My friend decided against this — too much like book burning, and you can’t burn an idea. So he decided to deface the card and auction it — giving the proceeds to the anti-Castro, pro-freedom cause.

I guess book-defacing is okay, and you can deface an idea. Anyway, what kills me about this is that with any collector’s item (which, of course, this isn’t), it’s going to raise more money if you don’t deface it. These dimwits don’t even understand capitalism.

Having exhausted his idiocy re: baseball cards, Nordlinger unearths some exciting new idiocy re: his recent trip to Italy:

In the realm of demographics: There are many blacks in Florence now — black Africans, living and working. And many, many Chinese. That is really new. (New to me.) I was told that there is a town outside of Florence that is almost all Chinese. And they specialize in laundry. A stereotype, maybe, but a fact.

But do the blacks enjoy watty-melons? The reading public demands to know!

Santa Croce has changed a bit: For one thing, you have to pay to get in there. Pay? We used to just march through the front door. Now you go to a side door, forking over 5 euros. And you can’t get close to the art, memorials, and monuments: They’re all roped off, and you have to stand sort of far away. Gotta squint, hard. Stinks.

Well, Jay, that’s the legacy of market capitalism, small government, and the anti-terror panic for you.

Here’s something I never noticed in the adjoining Pazzi Chapel – or maybe I once knew about it, but merely forgot: a memorial to Florence Nightingale. What’s she doing there? At any rate, what a great person.

Man, is it just me, or is Nordlinger wandering into Abe Rosenthal/Larry King territory? I know that’s sort of the metier of his Impromptus column, but he’s straying dangerously close to senility here. But wait, it gets worse!

In the Pazzi Chapel, women were going into the men’s room, and men were going into the ladies’ room. Why? Because the doors were marked Signori (meaning men) and Signore (meaning women). And those words were way too close for bathrooms that millions of foreigners use! I mean, way too close. What were they thinking? What terrible signage!

How dare the Italians presume that foreign tourists learn two extremely basic words before visiting their country?

Move, now, to the Bargello Museum — whose hit item is Donatello’s David (the bronze one, not the marble one). You know that swishy little guy? Marvelous sculpture.

There you have it, folks: Jay “Il American Brutto” Nordlinger has just characterized one of the crowning works of Western art as faggy.

Finally, I went into an “artisanal” ice-cream shop — it was simply calling me — and had their peanut ice cream. Yes, peanut ice cream, and it was ambrosial. I of course thought of WFB — who would have loved it.

A fitting tribute, this peanut iced-cream, to the founder of modern conservativism. All hail Jay Nordlinger, who at 45 years old is now the right wing’s Andy Rooney.

Glennzilla:

Just consider how remarkable that is. George Bush’s own Press Secretary criticizes the American media for being “too deferential” to the Government.

If only Bush had refused to wear a flag pin, then they might have asked him some tougher questions.

Pace Michelle Malkin, illegal immigrants are dirty, rotten scoundrels, as likely to drive a school bus off a cliff as look at you. And let’s not even get started on the mess the wetbacks made of the azalea beds at our ancestral estate — they’d been instructed time and again to mind their horrible, smoke-belching gardening contraptions while edging the lawn, but to no avail. I rather think we shall have to deport them.

But to Michelle’s main point about the horrible school bus tragedy in Minnesota: ‘It didn’t have to happen.’

Authorities have confirmed that the the driver of the van that struck the school bus that killed 4 students on Tuesday is an illegal alien.

Officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement are checking to see where she came from and how long she’s been in Minnesota. FOX 9 has also learned that the name she gave to police, Alainiss Morales, is an alias.

We have our own suspicions about who this person might really be, but the important thing to note is that Michelle Malkin is correct — this didn’t have to happen. Any other view would be the most noxious sort of fatalism. If this ‘Alainiss Morales’ person hadn’t been allowed to insolently wade across the Rio Grande (or as we suspect, Lake Michigan), this wouldn’t have happened.

Of course, that’s a tall order given our current enforcement policy. And anyway, even if ‘Alainiss Morales’ had been stopped, some other illegal might have hit that school bus. Whether a ‘Debbee Gibsonzales’ or an ‘Avrilla De La Vignillenueva’, we can’t really know — only that it might have occurred.

So clearly we needed for all illegals to have been duly rounded up and deported well before this incident even took place, so we could be sure that it really, really wouldn’t have happened. Nor would that effort have been particularly impractical, of dubious merit, cruelly draconian or have resulted in any unforeseen and unintended consequences. Anything to get each and every ‘Alainiss Morales’ off that particular road at that particular time. Because isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? When you crash into a school bus full of children, on your deportation day?

Well, it isn’t ironic at all, and is in fact a gross misuse of the word, which is, indeed, central to Michelle’s and my point. Nor is there anything resembling irony in the fact that even as the number of illegal immigrants in this country has risen, going from about 8.5 million in 2000 to some 11.6 million in 2006, the number of traffic fatalities per 100 miles driven has sunk to record lows.

And to any critic who might raise an eyebrow over the above statistics, Michelle and I would have you know that is disingenuous at best to attribute full causality to a single factor like illegal immigration when explaining a complex trend like falling vehicular death rates. Whereas blaming a person’s immigration status alone for one particular vehicular death and then extrapolating from your verdict the further conclusion that every illegal immigrant who ever lived must be collectively blamed as well, is, of course, perfectly legitimate. And if it’s four deaths, and they’re children … well, that is some steel-trap logic you will never defeat, moonbat.

More recently we learn via Malkin boy ward See-Dubya that the Papist conspiracy to foist Aztlan upon us all is infecting proper Christians:

The “New Sanctuary Movement” in mainline Protestant churches

By see-dubya • May 27, 2008 02:21 PM

First of all, can we change the misleading term “mainline Protestant” denominations? They’re not really that “mainline” anymore.

Gavin adds: Just like Sister Ray said.

They built ugly churches and began regarding the Bible as optional, and as a result they’re dwindling away like the Church of England. I like “sideline Protestants”, but I’m open to suggestions.

May we humbly suggest ‘Los Protestantistas’? Or perhaps the more piquant ‘spic-loving race-traitors’?

Anyway, the latest inspiration for the sideline Protestants is their new Magdalene, Elvira Arellano. Today the Washington Times has published a report on this “New Sanctuary Movement” that Arellano inspired.

Ahh, the Times. A more well-regarded and responsible agent of the fourth estate we would be hard-pressed to name. If only its publishers would heed my many requests to cease printing it upon recyclable newsprint — the hobos who gather ’round our rubbish bin to fight over the past week’s editions are a menace.

I’ll let you read the whole irritating thing, but let me draw your attention to this detail at the end: the whole movement hinges on a single legal loophole, one that could quite easily be closed by an interested Congress:

Although sheltering illegal immigrants is a felony, sanctuary organizers said in interviews that they had found a loophole in the law: They inform the local ICE office about an immigrant’s presence, thereby evading any charge of secretly harboring fugitives.

Shouldn’t openly harboring fugitives be a crime as well?

Indeed. And how terribly un-Christian, isn’t it just, to offer shelter and food to the wretched and poor. Next thing you know, they’ll be letting itinerant preggos squirt out their mewling brats in the rectory. Why, Jesus would be puking his guts out if he were alive to see what’s going on in His name!

Update: ‘hawkeye54’ (whose moniker, incidentally, gives us hope) in comments on the See-Dubya thread informs us:

And as [‘sideline Protestant’] congregations seem to put more emphasis on themes such as shamnesty and glowbull warming than what should be their primary goal, and tending to substitute entertainment and 5-minute PC soundbites in place of meaningful teaching – maybe the term should be “Sideshow Protestants”

Clever spelling of ‘global’ aside, what’s notable is that hawkeye54 never gets around to explaining what these congregations’ ‘primary goal’ should be. One assumes that ‘turning away poor people’ would be an insufficient example of ‘meaningful teaching’ in the great Christian tradition, so perhaps it’s alerting the police to their presence or better yet, citizen-arresting them.

Remember when Dick Cheney snottily described energy conservation as a “personal virtue?” Hey Dick, maybe if we’d spent the last eight years raising fuel-efficiency standards and giving people more public transportation options, we wouldn’t have to deal with bullshit like this:

As gas prices soar, thieves grow more brazen

[…]

[W]ith the average price of a gallon of gas having more than doubled in the last two years, thieves are branching out. Across the country, drivers are waking up to find their gas caps pried open and their tanks dry.

While there are no national statistics yet tracking an increase in gas thefts, police across the country say they’re investigating more reports than ever before:

• Using an empty gas can and a siphon, thieves were able to suck 30 gallons of diesel from a bus in a Bethesda, Md., parking lot.

• In Beaver Dam, Wis., “they’re just going to cars at night and siphoning gas out of them,” said Stephanie Lehmann, who said several cars in her neighborhood had been hit.

• Police in Evansville, Ind., said thieves drained all of the fuel this month from seven trucks belonging to a local office of JBM Inc., a metal fabrication chain. They put the loss at $700.

• And police in Denver are investigating a rash of of incidents in which thieves drill small holes into gas tanks and siphon off the fuel. “This is clearly not the way it’s been done in the past, by taking a hose and putting it in a gas tank,” police Detective John White said.

Nice work, assholes. Thanks for the legacy.

Oh. And then there’s this:

Health problems feared for kids who lived in FEMA trailers

Doctors fear tens of thousands of children who lived in FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina could have lifelong health problems.

The trailers — up to 143,000 of them — may have formaldehyde fumes up to five times the safe level. Formaldehyde is classified as a probable cancer-causing agent, and kids are believed to be at particular risk.

One young mother, whose 15-month-old daughter was born while the woman was living in a trailer, says her little girl has persistent breathing problems. She says she never would have stayed so long in the trailer if she’d known the risk.

The formaldehyde was detected in the trailers when they were sent to the Gulf Coast following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But there was no push to get people out of them until this February.

Heckuva job, shitbags.

Incidentally, I’m looking to organize a Million Middle Finger March in Washington, DC next year. The premise is simple: we get a million people to gather in our nation’s capital to flip Bush the bird as he takes off in his helicopter after the new president is sworn in.

Who’s with me?

The Empire Strikes Back
by Joe Malchow on May 21, 2008

Whatever the varying definitions of “overreaction,” one must undoubtedly be the debauching of a governance system, tested by the centuries and manifestly contributory to the weal of the organization it controls, because the last three or four elections have not fadged quite as one desired. Yet those are precisely the circs at Dartmouth College, where four independent trustees have been elected over better-funded candidates who support the College’s executives unswervingly. And now? As mystery writer Roger L. Simon says, the empire is striking back.

Meet the $10,000 prizewinner of the America’s Future Foundation 2008 College Blogger Award.

Judges included Jonah Goldberg of National Review; Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit; Radley Balko of The Agitator and Reason; Jonathan Adler of The Volokh Conspiracy; Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation and RobertBluey.com; Mary Katharine Ham of TownHall.com; and Megan McArdle of Asymmetrical Information at TheAtlantic.com.

Prior recognition of Mr. Malchow’s enthusiastic contrafribularities include classmates laughing at his prose, a 2007 fellowship from the Wall Street Journal, and the role of The Fratboy in the TBogg epic, Blow it Out Your Ass, Fratboy.

So let’s see. Michelle-Malkinwise, the past four days have given us:

1) A nutty campaign against Dunkin’ Donuts to drop a Rachael Ray ad, for the reason that Ray was wearing a scarf that resembled scarves worn in the Middle East, and was therefore abetting terrorism. Result: Success!

2) A nutty and dishonest campaign against the Subway chain (and Scholastic, Inc.) for sponsoring a contest that excluded homeschoolers in that it allowed kids to win thousands of dollars of sports equipment for their schools. Result: Success!

This is in addition to the usual lunacy, conspiracy thinking, crude partisan smears, and mortifying far-right crankism that Malkin provides daily, as sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a tax-funded government agency of high profile and vital responsibility:

Yes, that’s a recruitment ad.

No, we don’t imagine they thought that one through very carefully.

“I wonder where all the nurses have gone?”

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Butt Scud (aka John Hinderaker) launches another dud from his hospital bedside:

Barack Obama must be the most gaffe-prone politician in memory.

Not. So. Much

What was really offensive about Obama’s New Mexico appearance, however, was what followed his very brief, but generally appropriate, tribute to America’s war dead. He continued with a town hall-style question and answer period that cast veterans in the only role with which the Democrats are comfortable–victims–and sought to politicize the holiday.

Apparently when Obama talks on Memorial Day about assuring that veterans with PTSD get treatment, this is offensive politicization of the holiday, whereas when McCain yaks on interminably on the same holiday about why college benefits for veterans should be limited, this is a heart-wrenching and completely appropriate display of genuine patriotism by a decorated war hero.

And speaking of gaffes, I just came across this little jewel from Butt Scud back in February:

[A]ward categories come and go, [Hinderaker] said. “We were Time’s blog of the year for 2004,” he recalled. “There has never been another one.”

And likely that was for pretty much the same reason people stopped filling dirigibles with hydrogen gas: the results showed it wasn’t such a good idea in the first place.*

*And to head off any snark, yes, I know that the reason the Hindenburg went up in flames was likely that the dirigible’s shell was coated with rocket fuel. It’s a metaphor, folks, not science! Who would have gotten the point if I said it was the same reason they stopped coating dirigibles with iron oxide and aluminum-impregnated cellulose acetate butyrate?