Sadly, No!

Professor Althouse has a rational explanation for her, uh, incident of a couple of days ago. Since Babelfish does not yet offer translation services for Althousque, we offer this annotated version by way of public service.

Things I’m not talking about.

Translation: “Things I am right now talking about.”

As you may have noticed, that Bloggingheads episode I did with Garance Franke-Ruta — did you know I came up with the title “This Time It’s Personal”? — attracted a fair amount of attention yesterday.

Translation: As everybody has noticed, that bizarre, belligerent tantrum of mine during the Bloggingheads episode I did with Garance Franke-Ruta — oh look, I have cute toes! — had tens of thousands of people laughing at me yesterday.

Many characters in the leftosphere used the two-minute segment where I get mad to rake over the old flame war that I spent those two minutes saying I wouldn’t be dragged into talking about again.

Translation: During my five-minute harangue at Ms. Franke-Ruta, which lasted two minutes, many were reminded of the pivotal case of Smelt It v Dealt It, which established that cutting a big, cheesy gasser is not prejudicial if another party hostilely mentions the false charges of flatulence brutally hurled at you by desperate and vicious critics out of jealousy — and you explain with pointed finger that you are not going to tolerate their farting anymore!

I may be sorry I got as mad as I did

Because laughter has begun to haunt my nightmares.

— but I think showing some anger in an argument is not a huge deal. There’s so much repression and passive aggression out there. It’s so easy to process your emotions with those grim tools. It’s what we usually do. The notion that it’s crazy to display emotion is…. crazy.

It’s not me who’s crazy, it’s the rest of you — society, the world.

But I’m not sorry I didn’t go back into the old flamewar, either in the video, where I was tweaked about it

…through a hostile, passive-aggressive attempt to “answer a direct question” with a “factual statement” on the “same topic”…

— and reacted extravagantly — or when all those blogs goaded me about it yesterday.

Only further proving that their attackingly obsessive attempts to slander and victimize me with my own words are no match for my fierce courage and — may I say — heroism in the face of unspeakably mendacious and hostile negativity, which I will not tolerate anymore.

So, have fun grinding over the old times amongst yourselves.

My extravagant self-expression in attacking Ms. Franke-Ruta for no reason demonstrates that I have long moved on from this controversy of a hundred billion trillion years ago, i.e. September of 2006. Similarly, gratuitous talk about my current behavior only shows who is really the crazy one — for it is you and you and you.

posted by Ann Althouse at 7:54

Update:

[Hanx! Chris Clarke, J-]

Worse is the new better.

Remember when we announced with a great deal of excitement that we would be moving to a new hosting provider and that all would be well and gay once we had? Oh, such promises were made… And now? Now, we’re starting to miss the old folks and chances are you are as well.

We’re currently looking for bigger hamsters and hope to have the situation resolved soon.

The obviously overwhelmed and undertalented management

Hey, guess what, we’re winning in Iraq.

It’s Official, We’re Winning

That’s what Blog of the Week–rapidly turning into Blog of the Spring–Jules Crittenden says, anyway:

By The Way, It’s Official …

… we can win in Iraq, we are winning in Iraq, and George Bush’s surge strategy is responsible for it. Not even the AP can ignore it* anymore:

Al Qaeda’s Waterloo?
—Ace

Great Vent about the coming (?) major offensive on the Al Qaeda-controlled city of Diyala and its environs.

Petraeus’ recent request of 3000 additional troops is apparently impelled precisely by his desire — or rather his believed need — to deal with this terrorist stronghold decisively.

Worst Nightmare
Filed under: Politics, War — Gaius at 10:13 am on Tuesday, March 27, 2007

After Nancy Pelosi and John “Unindicted Co-Conspirator” Murtha led a slim majority of the House Democrats (plus two Republicans) one pork chop too far with their supplementary spending bill, about the worst thing that could happen is for the surge to begin working in Iraq. Which it appears to be doing. Reports are coming in that the Iraqis are turning on al Qaeda. The progress is such that the media can’t even ignore it.

Check in next week to watch them reappear in the previous reality — in which civilization hangs by a thread as we lose in Iraq, thanks to the terror-emboldening leftist liberals and their lapdogs in the biased, liberal-leftist MSM.

Above left: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

I got distracted and missed a lot of the more ridiculous statements Alberto Gonzales made last night as I watched his laughably disingenuous interview on NBC Nightly News because, like any other time I see him speak on television, I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that the real attorney general, Judge Reinhold, is somewhere out there, totally hamming it up in his son’s fifth-grade classroom.

Ann Althouse goes rooty-tooty on camera, and Crooks & Liars takes you there!

Above: The peroxide seeps ever inward.

[Commentary at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and context chez Bérubé.]

Ok, Lefties: Why Are You so Silent, Now?
By Mark Noonan at 12:38 PM

As Captain Ed points out, Iran says they are going to charge the captured British sailors with espionage…even if they did go deliberately and with malice aforethought into Iranian territorial waters, they went in clearly uniformed as regular military personnel and thus cannot, under the Geneva Convention, be charged with espionage.

So, how about it, lefties – will you gin up some demonstrations? Make demands that Iran adhere to every iota of the Convention? Or are you just going to blame this on us?

Dear Iran,

We demand that you honor the Geneva Conventions, because contempt for these most honorable and civilized of international treaties puts you on a level with Mark Noonan and Ed Morrissey.

We are sending a ginned-up demonstration. Please accommodate the 30,000 2-3,000 or maybe 5,000 patriot-warriors angry Bush supporters who will be arriving to protect the captured sailors curse at people and wave anti-Pelosi placards.

Signed,
Teh Left

cc: The Gathering of Eagles

PS: We almost forgot about this, and this, and also this.

The great thing about Mark Levin’s NRO blog, And Another Thing…, is that there’s always some other thing on it. Usually it’s toxic spew. Sometimes, though, it’s transparently dishonest, morally crooked toxic spew with a coating of rancid oil. Let’s have a look!

Above: The poor man’s Michael Savage

Krugman’s History

Paul Krugman, Enron’s former consultant, is really a loathsome hack. I think he’s an economist. And for the last six years he’s been predicting the next Great Depression. His woeful incompetence in his own field of “expertise” doesn’t stop him from frolicking in other areas of public life — with equal ignorance.

Never mind the ‘Enron’ thing, which is an old one. This is the Paul Krugman who’s been on the short list for the Nobel. Mark Levin, on the other hand, was recently notorious for a Nobel scam in which he pretended to have the authority to nominate Rush Limbaugh for a Peace Prize.

Levin’s current expertise is in performing angry talk-radio harangues about ‘liberals’ in a strangled chihuahua voice. I think he’s a lawyer.

This Monday Krugman wrote a hit piece on Ronald Reagan entitled “Don’t Cry For Reagan.” In his screed he included a smear about “the state of the Justice Dartment under Ed Meese, a man who gives Alberto Gonzales and John Mitchell serious competition for the title of worst attorney general ever. The politicization of Justice got so bad that in 1988 six senior officials, all Republicans, including the deputy attorney general and the chief of the criminal division, resigned in protest.”

Yes, that was pretty much in all the papers at the time.

Now, I understand that he’s a spittel-spewing Reagan-hater, but that doesn’t give him leave to trample on the factual record. As Ed Meese’s chief of staff at the time, I can attest to the fact that there was no effort at any time by the Reagan White House to influence or politicize any criminal investigation.

Duh, ok! Indeed, Mr. Levin’s subsequent career stands as its own monument to the political impartiality of Ed Meese’s Justice Department.

You know what’s coming next, right? The traditional Clinton blame-shift:

That sort of behavior didn’t occur until Bill Clinton and Janet Reno came to town. They fired all 93 United States attorneys as cover for removing two U.S. attorneys who were investigating business transactions involving the Clintons and corrupt Democrat Congressman Dan Rostenkowsi’s bribes. It was Reno who used her public trust to assert frivolous privileges on behalf of her boss and whose lieutenants were undermining Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s investigations. And it was Reno who refused to act against Al Gore’s illegal fundraising at a Buddhist temple and calls-for-cash from the White House. The list goes on, but who’s keeping track … obviously not Enron’s former consultant.

And it’s amazing that there’s never been any kind of exhaustive, multimillion-dollar investigation of these charges, as well as any other possible charge that some Republican like Levin might’ve thought up one morning on the can. That’s another reason why Gonzales shouldn’t have to testify under oath or transcript — because it would distract from America’s generational mission of finding stuff to pin on the Clintons.

But wait, what about those resignations under Meese?

As for those resignations, the deputy attorney general (Arnold Burns) and the assistant attorney general for the criminal division (Bill Weld) attempted to drive Ed Meese from office to advance their own careers.

They must be increasing Bill Buckley’s intravenous drip of scotch and soda over at the National Review. It’s been a suspicious while since we heard his bayings of mortified dignity carrying across the midnight heath.

I have no idea who’s at fault in the latest mess. Either or both sides could be stating their claims in good faith — the boundaries in the Gulf and the Shat al-Arab are disputed — and either or both could be offering tissues of lies. I’m happy to assume the Iranians are lying. I’m also conditioned by history to assume the ‘Coalition’ is lying. Doesn’t matter — both sides’ governments are composed of and supported by troglodyte, reactionary trash just begging for a fight they personally will not have to physically wage. Fuck em all. Anyway, the following quotes are offered without further comment:

Hmm:

[F]oreign policy experts of an anti-Bush hue compete to offer elaborate scenarios of how the U.S. could spark a conflagration. American policymakers “intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [the U.S.] would be forced to retaliate for,” former National Security Council official Hillary Mann told Newsweek. Another former NSC aide, Flynt Leverett, told the New Yorker, “The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond, and then the administration will have an open door to strike them.” In Senate testimony, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski conjured up a “plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran,” which would be provoked by a “terrorist act” that would be “blamed on Iran,” “culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire.”

Huhh:

in a NR feature article, Mario Loyola suggests that Iran may very well be telling the truth about what happened here, and that this incident was the by-product of efforts by the U.S. and Britian to provoke Iran into war — justifiably, in Loyola’s view (needless to say):

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Iranians were actually responding, in this case, to a carefully planned provocation of our own. As Churchill said, sometimes the truth is so precious that she must be attended by a bodyguard of lies. . . .

The gloves are coming off. And the risk-calculation here is: If someone gets nervous and starts shooting, the timing would be more auspicious now for us than for the Iranians. Therefore, it only makes sense that American and British naval units operating in the Gulf would be in a more forward-leaning and aggressive posture than the Iranians.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the British sailors were detained because the British did something to make the Iranians really angry. Khamanei dramatically upped the ante this week. We probably raised. And they probably raised back. The stakes in this nuclear-poker game just got a little higher.

So the U.S. and Britain are deliberately provoking Iran in a “nuclear-poker game” and then lying about what they are up to, and Loyola thinks that’s all great. A whole new war — it’s all so exciting and pulsating.

Ahh:

That [a likely Gulf of Tonkin-style ‘incident’] involves the British, not the Americans, is a double victory for the on-to-Tehran crowd: the war-weary Brits, who recently announced the withdrawal of their troops from southern Iraq, will presumably be dragged along in the wake of the coming U.S. military assault as their sailors are paraded before the cameras in Tehran. Once again, “coalition” forces are about to take down a Middle Eastern government, and they are already on the move.

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By the gods, I love Blogs for Bush. I love it more than I’ve ever loved anything, more than my family, my friends and all the girls I’ve loved before combined. I love it more than baseball, Stanley Kubrick films and Rogue Chocolate Stout. It is a love that is undying, a love that will go down in history of Great Loves, up there with Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Editors and Barack Obama.

If you’re having trouble understanding my passion for this amazing website, look no further than this incredible post, penned by one “princella”:

Sean Hannity is amazing. That is the best word I can think of to describe him right now. I attended the Stars and Stripes Dinner where he was the guest speaker, and I must say that I wish every conservative could have heard his address. He encouraged us to remember that despite the criticism that seems to strike us from the left, we must still keep the faith.

Kiss me, beautiful! Make love to Bradrocket! He lies here waiting for you wearing nothing but a baseball cap and a leather thong!

Incidentally, here is what Sean Hannity said that got princella so excited:

The truth of the matter is that even when you’re right, it is sometimes hard not to loose focus. I am saddened and disappointed by the politics that the left is playing with war, social security, health care, border security, education, and fiscal issues.

My God! Those liberals are playing politics with political issues?? Forsooth, what devilry will they not stoop to?!!

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About this, I think Yglesias is more right than Scott.*

Yglesias writes:

Garance put up a post yesterday evening that I thought was a bit of a low blow, suggesting that Sam Rosenfeld, Ezra Klein, and I all just don’t like Hillary Clinton because we’re men. I don’t want to get into that[…]

Well, I will get into that, even though I probably shouldn’t:

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