Sadly, No!

A combination (very) small fridge and CD player:

Bonds is the co-Home Run King until he hits 756. I’m going to be at Wednesday’s game against the Nats, so I’m hoping he waits until then.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: best hitter I’ve ever seen. Top 5 player on the all-time list. My rankings:

1. Willie Mays
2. Babe Ruth
3. Barry Bonds
4. Ted Williams
5. Honus Wagner

Bradrocket adds: See, I know Giants fans don’t really care that Barry Bonds is only home run king BECAUSE HE FUCKING DID A SHITLOAD OF PERFORMANCE ENHANCING DRUGS, but it should be pointed out. Because, sorry, doing greenies is just not the same as taking human growth hormone.

OK, my top 5:

1.) Babe Ruth
2.) Willie Mays
3.) Ted Williams
4.) Alex Rodriguez (assuming he’s not on ‘roids too)
5.) Lou Gehrig

Gavin adds:

Above: Gamma ray theory not ruled out

I’m in Baltimore right now. Here is a Saturday night present:

This is my first attempt at making a video. It’s a collection of some of Dear Leader’s finest moments. Hope you enjoy.

Also, after reading Gavin’s chronicle of the Scott Beauchamp affair… sigh…

Of all the useless f_cks who write crazy shi_t on the Internet, the cult of _ssholes who have dedicated the past four years to claiming, “the Iraq war would have worked were it not for you darned kids and the liberal media!” are by far the most tiresome. It doesn’t matter how many times they get humiliated, shamed and proven wrong: at the end of the day, they’ll concoct some other sub-retarded conspiracy theory that reinforces their creepy “stabbed-in-the-back” narrative. Trying to keep up with these guys is like journeying to the center of a black hole: you’re basically trying to crawl through something that’s infinitely dense.

So when I get back from vacation, I’m going back to my meat-and-potatoes of Pastor Swank and Renew America. They may be stupid and illiterate, but at least they won’t leave permanent mental scarring.

(And currently percolating underneath the glad and cheery surface of SadNo.)

1) A stupidity that passeth all measure, as Hillary Clinton attempts to seem tougher than Obama by expressing a willingness to launch a nuclear first-strike on an ally (i.e. Pakistan, i.e. a nuclear power).

2) Rot attacks the foundations via the FISA thing currently hurtling through Congress, as the White House attempts to write itself a get-out-of-jail-free card for some kind of surveillance operation in ’04 (cough cough ahem) that was apparently so illegal, most of the Justice Dep’t threatened to resign over it.*

And now stay tuned for a word from our sponsor:

* This is taking place as half the liberal blogowhatsis is at Yearly Kos, so the response is somewhat muted, but also see Glenn Greenwald here.

The distant rumbling sound you hear is right-wing bloggers in their computer chairs stomping and clapping to ‘We Will Rock You’ while they repost copies of this:

Col. Steven Boylan, Public Affairs Officer for U.S. Army Commanding General in Iraq David Petraeus, just emailed me the following in response to my request to confirm an earlier report that the U.S. Army’s investigation into the claims made by PV-2 Scott Thomas Beauchamp made in The New Republic had been completed.

He states:

To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas?

Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas’ platoon and company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.

The whooshing, clattering sound you hear is the strict rules of evidence that they so recently applied to the New Republic being slam-dunked into wastebaskets, as the broad official denial suddenly becomes the gold standard of investigative research:

Presumably thorough, in-person interviews of all of Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division, and Beauchamp’s platoon within Alpha Company by military investigators, and not one of those soldiers could confirm Beauchamp’s stories as told in The New Republic.

Note that the investigation didn’t just stop by stating that the claims were uncorroborated; Col. Boylan states categorically that Beauchamp’s allegations were false. Not a lot of wiggle room there.

Since Ace has apparently suffered some kind of mental breakdown, here to provide contrast is Bryan at HotAir, circa two days ago, explaining why TNR’s fact-checking can’t be trusted:

And what’s he asking us to do today? Why, he’s asking us to trust his relaying the word of a bunch of anonymous sources. “I can’t show you any evidence or introduce you to a single corroborating witness…”

Oh, he has “corrorborating witnesses,” or so he says. But they’re all anonymous. And they might all be the same person. We have no way of evaluating what the witness or witnesses say, because conveniently for TNR they’re not identified.

We’re waiting to see what Bryan says next. We have no idea how he’s going to pull this one off.

It seems like we can hardly stay on top of the narrative these days, pace the Beauchamp affair.

Our right-wing pals have, once again, fallen into one of those vicious recrimination-spirals that constitute their version of the ‘correction’ and the ‘apology’ — i.e., of those things that are proper to do when one has been proven wrong, and especially when one has falsely maligned another person. They’re arguing with waving arms and legs that the exact words they used actually meant different things than people misguidedly thought they meant, that various second- and third-order inconsistencies in Beauchamp’s writings are really the central issue all along, that it’s Teh Liberals who are truly the ones to blame for this regrettable affair, that Beauchamp is a bad person who ought to be imprisoned and/or beaten just on principle, and a lot of other things that all blend together into a long, sustained moo.

Also, that The New Republic’s credibility is destroyed, which they seek to prove by linking to the claims of a gay porn star who’s been under investigation for fraud.

Above: Matt “Dirty” Sanchez

The net effect is that we can’t turn the computer on without laughing and laughing.*

Here to help is Confederate Yankee, back again for more:

Update: A bit dog barks. Gavin M. at Sadly No! (cited above for claiming “WingNet accuses soldier/journalist of being an impostor”) tries to support liberal bloggers’ charges that conservative bloggers said Beauchamp didn’t exist, was fabricated, or was an impostor.

How does he mount his brilliant defense?

I know the answer, but I’m enjoying the way he’s setting this up.

He cites devastating examples, such as Bryan at Hot Air using scare quotes around the word soldier… Twice. He also highlights a truism observed by Bryan in that post that anyone in the military would be able to tell the difference between a fellow soldier’s uniform and that of a civilian contractor.

A great defense mounted so far, but wait, there’s more!

Gavin M. blasts Charles at LGF for using the phrase, “purported to be written by a soldier.” Charles used the “P” word to describe someone hiding behind a pseudonym? Why, that’s the exact same thing as directly calling him an impostor, isn’t it folks?

Shucks, maybe not. If ‘blast’ is a new term for ‘quote someone without any editorial commentary,’ then I guess words can mean anything. When Media Mythbusters gets off the ground, Mr. Yankee will be free to start work on a new conservative dictionary.

Until then, alas, I guess we’ll have to keep using the old liberal-biased ones:

pur·port
1. To have or present the often false appearance of being or intending; profess: [as with] selfish behavior that purports to be altruistic.

It makes me sad that I had to do that.

And yet Gavin presumably has a day job that doesn’t involve balloon animals.

Balloon animals by day, yes, but it’s what you have to do if you want to break into Zeppelin design.

But hang on, he has more evidence… Ace of Spades also used the damning scare quotes… twice. Gavin’s a regular Perry Mason, isn’t he?

And the killing blow… before Beauchamp came out, Michelle Malkin, vile, prevaricating Malkin, addressed the liberal blogosphere’s greatest unknown soldier as–and watch out for the scare quotes–as “alleged.”

It’s, like, recursing: He’s putting scare quotes around what Malkin said, which means it’s actually the opposite of what she was really not saying the opposite of.

Above: Diagram proving Confederate Yankee’s point

Purported and alleged, two bread-and-butter words in any journalist’s quiver for when the facts are hazy in the least, have–according to Gavin–become the same as calling him an impostor. Using scare quotes in the same manner is morphed by Gavin into a declarative emphatically stating that he doesn’t exist.

That’s his case. Really.

You know, this is the perfect setup for all sorts of invented calumny about Mr. Yankee: purportedly meth-free, allegedly never convicted of serial sheep molestation, a “sober driver” who has allegedly never beaten a puppy with a folding chair, etc.

But I swear to God, we can’t laugh any more tonight or we’ll start wheezing…

* Ol’ Ace is carefully avoiding the ‘fraud’ issue by pretending that the only problem with Matt Sanchez is the porn career, allowing him also to pretend that ‘gay porn actor’ and ‘gay’ are exactly equivalent concepts — and therefore, liberals are once again revealed as rabid homophobes for mentioning Sanchez’s private sexuality, which is nobody’s business (although publicly documented and for sale in both VHS and DVD formats).

You have to love Ace; he thinks this stuff up all on his own.

Don Surber channels T. Herman Zweibel channeling Victor Davis Hanson:

Dems split on the war

The Surge is working. The initial success on the field by the American army is splitting the Democratic caucus in the House between those who want to Lose At Any Cost and the Weathervanes Who Follow The Polls.

I have to admit it, I love this shit. And not just the way Surber’s randomly capitalized writing resembles a diary entry penned by the self-lettered heroine of a late-Regency period Romance novel. It’s also the cocksuredness of the statement, “The Surge is working.” Even the most rabid surge advocates tend to hedge their bets when proclaiming its success … covering their asses with qualifiers like “reports suggest that” or appealing to ‘war critics’ Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack.

But not Surber. That ‘the Surge is working’, is just a straight-up fact. No evidence need be presented that this is so, it’s as plain as the nose on your thumb.

Combined with the melodramatic punctuation, it’s like he’s narrating one of those epic sword-and-sandal flicks so popular with the wingnut set. You can almost hear him gravely intoning the above passage in a mellifluous Welsh accent, as sylized violence sends cascading patterns of blood and entrails across the screen:

EXT. IRAQ – ANBAR PROVINCE – DAWN

GEN. PETRAEUS stands before his SOLDIERS. He’s a burly man with a beard. For some reason, everybody is
wearing chainmail underpants and nothing else. SURBERIOS voices over narration as PETRAEUS and the SOLDIERS
battle wave after wave of misshapen ISLAMOFASCIST TERRORISTS.

                                                        SURBERIOS (V.O.)

                The Surge is working. The initial success on the field by the American
                army is splitting the Democratic caucus in the House between those
                who want to Lose At Any Cost and the Weathervanes Who Follow
                The Polls. But I beg you to remember how we came to this place of
                Turning Tides and Surging Morale! Barely a year ago, General Petraeus
                and his 20,000 took up arms … and saw fit, by Wingnut Law and by
                Wingnut Steel, to meet the Countless Hordes of Anbar on the Field
                of Battle!

CUT TO:

INT. GENERIC OFFICE BUILDING – SURBERIOS’ CUBICLE – 10 MINUTES TO LUNCHTIME

SURBERIOS looks furtively over his shoulder for signs of his SUPERVISOR, before returning to mutter the
words being live-streamed from his blog as a podcast.

                                                        SURBERIOS

                Long I pondered my General’s cryptic talk of victory. But time has
                proven him wise, for from Free Wingnut to Free Wingnut the word
                was spread that Bold Petraeus and his 20,000, so far from home,
                would not kneel to the Barbarians!

FADE TO:

MULTIPLE INT. ACROSS AMERICA – VARIOUS CUBICLES/CAFES/BASEMENTS – 7 MINUTES TO LUNCHTIME

WINGNUT BLOGGERS listen to SURBERIOS’ call to arms on their computers, munching Cheetos,
multi-tasking between the podcast and surfing for porn, grimacing comically, etc. etc.

                                                        SURBERIOS (V.O.)

                Now, here on this Ragged Patch of Earth called Teh Wingnutosphere,
                the Islamofascist Hordes face obliteration! Just there, halfway
                ’round the world, the barbarians gather, Sheer Terror gripping their
                Hearts with Icy Fingers, knowing full well what Merciless Horrors they
                suffered at the Swords and Spears of the 20,000. Yet they stare
                now across the Intertubes at 100,000 Wingut Bloggers commanding
                500,000 Free Wingnut Commenters! Ho!

                                                        WINGNUT BLOGGERS

                Ho!

CUT TO:

INT. GENERIC OFFICE BUILDING – SURBERIOS’ CUBICLE – 5 MINUTES TO LUNCHTIME

SURBERIOS, sweating profusely, works himself into a lather.

                                                        SURBERIOS

                The Enemy may or may not outnumber us a paltry Three to One! But
                more importantly, they are all the way Over There and not Over
                Here! Good odds for any Wingnut. This day we rescue a world from
                Mysticism and Tyranny, and usher in a Future Brighter Than Anything
                we could imagine. Give thanks, men, to Petraeus and the Brave 20,000!
                To Victory!

One of the most frequently abused, and easily caricatured, conventions of badly written liberal op-eds is that of excusing young people for committing crimes because there aren’t enough government programs to keep them out of trouble. So imagine my astonishment to see Charles Krauthammer employ the same device in defense of drunken astronauts:

It’s hard to entirely blame this state of affairs on a fickle public. Blame also belongs to the idiot politicians who decided 30 years ago to abandon the moon and send us on a pointless and endless journey into low Earth orbit. The Bush administration has sensibly called an end to this nonsense and committed us to going back to the moon and, ultimately, Mars. If his successors don’t screw it up, within 10 years NASA will have us back to where we belong — on other worlds.

Sometimes, as I click through Michelle Malkin’s blogroll and find myself draining another beer so I can use the empty bottle to beat myself in the head, I wonder if there might be a better use for my free time. But that would be missing the point.

Reading right-wing lunacy, much like following baseball or birdwatching, rewards the patient. If you sit there long enough, you might see something you’ve never seen before.

Assrocket:

While my wife and I watched news footage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse last night, many thoughts went through my mind. One thought that never occurred to me, however, was “How could I make political hay out of this tragedy?”

This is known as foreshadowing.

Not so with Nick Coleman, the loyal Democratic party hack who writes a column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Less than twelve hours after the bridge went down, Coleman had in print a column blaming the collapse on Goveror Tim Pawlenty and all others who oppose tax increases.

Hinderaker bases his ensuing criticism on a point he concedes the columnist never intended to make, and applies a litigator’s narrow focus to the meaning of a particular word or phrase (in other words, what Hinderaker calls “blogging”):

If yearly inspections had caused engineers to think that there was a danger the bridge might fail, it would have been shut down. But the inspections apparently suggested no such danger.

Ahem, tragically, not exactly:

The 40-year-old bridge was rated as “structurally deficient” two years ago and possibly in need of replacement, the Star Tribune reported … [An official] noted that many other bridges around the country carry the same designation that the I-35W bridge received.

Essentially, these bridge had been determined to pose a significant risk. I’m sure there’ll be lots more reporting on this topic in the coming weeks. Back to you, Hindy:

[O]ne thing we do not lack for in Minnesota, or elsewhere in the United States, is spending. Over the past few years, we Minnesotans have spent something like a billion dollars of transportation money on a light rail system. “System,” actually, is too grand a term; it is a single line that runs from the Mall of America to downtown Minneapolis. Conservatives generally opposed light rail, viewing it as an inefficient boondoggle, and wanted to spend the money on road construction instead. But the liberals prevailed, and the billion dollars were spent. If we hadn’t spent that money on light rail, those dollars would have been available for other transportation projects. Like bridge repair.

Above: A young boy demonstrates Power Line
blogger John Hinderaker’s signature rhetorical technique

To be fair, this Power Line post was written around 25 hours after the bridge collapsed, and nearly 13 hours after the column that inspired it. Hinderaker further resists the charge of clumsy hypocrisy, because he hasn’t introduced politics into this discussion so much as reasonable doubt.

But it’s probably a waste of time to carry the argument that far.

Indeed.

Confederate Yankee has been doing some more of that bizarre right-wing blameshifting and self-justification that we love so well, this time over the Scott Thomas Beauchamp contretemps.

And so it is that “this whole thing”—the claim that conservative bloggers said Thomas didn’t exist or wasn’t a soldier—comes squarely back onto the shoulders of liberal bloggers who created the meme themselves.

When pressed to provide a specific quote from any conservative blog stating that Scott Thomas didn’t really exist, was fabricated, or was an imposter, these and other liberal bloggers have utterly failed to do so.

Why they failed should now be obvious: they made up these claims themselves.

That tone of voice is like a tonic to us. It’s like a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice in the morning. “Why, friends,” Mr. Yankee essais, “Can you believe the utter failure of these liberals? Accusing us of saying what we said, when they, yes they, are truly the ones to blame for actually saying what they said we said?”

You don’t need to actually parse that, by the way. Message: Confederate Yankee is so crooked, he has to butter his legs to screw his pants on in the morning.

Let’s go to the instant replay.

From HotAir:

Regarding the human remains story, the “soldier” describes digging through a mass grave and coming upon artifacts in more or less

The story of the woman in the DFAC makes no sense for the simple reason that the soldier claims not to know whether she was civilian or military. A real soldier ought to know at a glance whether she was one or the other if he was as close to her as he claims to have been

the bottom line is that the New Republic was damnably irresponsible for publishing that “soldier’s” tales without verifying them and without giving NR’s readers enough of a basis to fact check them for ourselves.

From Little Green Footballs:

Recently, The New Republic published an extremely far-fetched article titled “Shock Troops,” with disgusting tales of brutality and heartless behavior by US troops, purported to be written by a soldier serving in Iraq.

From Ace of Spades:

The New Republic has had a long and troubled past with too-ideologically-good-to-be-true, too-difficult-to-verify but too-juicy-not-to-run stories in the past. Now an anonymous “soldier” is reporting for them (illegally, one presumes) from Iraq, and is telling implausible stories that just so happen to portray his “fellow soldiers” as vicious monsters.

From Michelle Malkin:

Let me make one thing clear at the outset: To question the veracity of a soldier’s accounts of war atrocities in Iraq is not to question that such atrocities ever happen. They do. But when such accusations are made pseudonymously, punctuated with red flags and adorned with incredible embellishment, the only responsible thing to do is to raise questions about his identity and agenda without fear or apology–and demand answers.

For the past few days, debate has bubbled on the right side of the blogosphere about “Scott Thomas,” an alleged soldier serving in Baghdad who penned a piece for The New Republic about war atrocities he allegedly witnessed.

Perhaps next there will be a treatise on the use of scare-quotes, and how they merely emphasize the words they bracket.

We “look forward” to Mr. Yankee’s “intelligent” “thoughts” on this “important matter.”