Now this is what I love to see:
Joey Harrington will start for the Dolphins against the Patriots on Sunday, ESPN’s Chris Mortensen is reporting.
Beautiful. Now if only Brian Dawkins can give Terrell Owens a career-ending injury during today’s Dallas-Philly game…
He outed my thing.
That’s some mighty tasty lemonade, mister! But you know what they say about lemonade: Around the corner, fudge is made.
Welcome to our ‘L.’ Notice there’s no poo in it.
If there were a mad crush to buy our weird stuff (e.g. the penis flash drive), then I guess I’d be pissed. But it’s art pour l’art, pretty much. 11×17 poster:
Resa “LaRu” Kirkland (yes, it’s a made up name, like Seb or Travis G.), she of helpful maps for all, is showing off her expertise on all matters Korean:
Time For ‘A Hangin’: Wild West Justice Needed In The East
Fortunately, John Bolton has got two big ones hangin’:
Because I absolutely hate my life, I decided to see what Powerline had to say about the Mark Foley scandal. This is what I found:
Various Democrats are accusing Republicans of covering up Congressman Mark Foley’s boy problem, a charge for which there is no evidence. One wonders, though, whether that is exactly what the Democratic Party did.
I… sigh… wow.
I can’t wait to see how out of touch with reality Hindy gets when the Dems clean house in a few weeks. It’s gonna be some funny shit.
Good ol’ J-Pod gets an ‘A’ for effort for his clumsy attempt to turn a bumper crop of lemons into a batch of delicious lemonade:
This column is directed entirely to the sleazy, scuzzy, unprincipled and entirely Machiavellian Democratic political operative who helped design the careful plan resulting in the fingerprint-free leak of Mark Foley e-mails:
Bravo!
This whole Foley business is one of the most dazzling political plays in my or any other lifetime – like watching an unassisted triple play or a running back tossing a 90-yard touchdown pass on a double-reverse.
For reasons having to do almost entirely with funding the war in Iraq, I am profoundly concerned about the consequences of a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. But as a close student of American political gamesmanship, I so admire what you’ve accomplished that I almost have to root for a Democratic landslide in November.
That last graf is a virtual unassisted triple play of wingnuttia, advancing a conspiracy theory, taking swipes at Democrats and hinting darkly that this sordid episode could end with troops placed in harm’s way (by Democrats!). J-Pod goes on to list nine, often contradictory points (e.g., “There was no defense” followed immediately by “It wasn’t too gross … even for Republicans fearful about the loss of the House, this scandal is kind of fun”) to back up his praise (or does he?). But the last graf contains his most salient point, such as it is:
The one great irony is that if Democrats do prevail in November, everybody’s going to know the election wasn’t a referendum on Bush, which is what they most wanted. But you can’t have everything.
That’s some mighty tasty lemonade, mister! But you know what they say about lemonade: Around the corner, fudge is made.
Welcome to our ‘L.’ Notice there’s no poo in it.
So David Ignatius thinks he has a novel idea in today’s column: he thinks that the Democrats should be running as the party of “accountability and reform.” *sigh* Let’s just cut to the shorter version…
Shorter David Ignatius: I’m getting paid to say things that people in the blogosphere have been saying for months… and they’re not even getting paid for it! Suckaz.
Sorry this is late, but…
I told you so that the anti-war Left would say, ‘I told you so’.
Or, alternately:
LIBERAL HAWKS ARE SO NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS MESS!111!!1
He seems to want to confirm my characterization of bullshit centrism as a mendacious strategy:
Anyway, so far as I can tell, we’re basically fighting a two-front domestic battle: on one side we have to battle against Bush’s attempt to destroy much of what we’ve spent the last 225 years building in this country. On the other side, we have to battle against the frothy-mouthed nutcases who dream about making the American left as crazy and dogmatic as the American right has become.
Know what I don’t understand? Idiots who think that extremism is only bad when it’s the OTHER guy’s extremism.
But to equal the wingnuts’ extremism, the anti-war Left (which was right about Iraq) would have to be flaming Stalinists. Also, we’d have to be as near to power as the wingnuts. The former is a fantasy, the latter an imposibility. This is the essence of bullshit centrism. Though he says the Left is only 1/20th as crazy and 1/200th as powerful as wingnuts, his gist is still that one is just as bad as the other. David Broder would be proud.
If Philosoraptor’s reasoning rings a bell it should: it’s the same reasoning that led many non-wingnuts to look at the anti-war crowd and say ‘Hippies, Chomskyites, Free Mumia wackos, Paleocons — given a choice between being seen with such people (and a great many ‘normal’ people whose existence I will ignore for convenience) and signing up with batshit wingnuts for mass murder in Mesopotamia, I’ll take war thank you very much.’
Lunar Freakonaut Retardo Montalban contemplates freeing Mumia, loading bong
And so they did. Now that that war has gone the way not only hippies and Chomskyites but people like Daniel Davies and Atrios thought it would, Liberal Hawks don’t much like it when such people point to the blood on their hands:
We certainly didn’t achieve what we should have, and those “far-left types” who worried that we were going to kill a bunch of people then screw the pooch certainly had a point.
This is tactful. Moreover, this is sensible (not ‘Sensible‘). Needless to say, by Philosoraptor’s calculus, it’s evidence of that insane Leftism which is the mirror image of Bush’s wingnuttery:
1. Um, liberal hawks were, to say the very least, split over Iraq.
2. Kosovo already filled the bill re: “a Grand Military Humanitarian Intervention.” Too bad we don’t do such things more often.
3. Iraq wasn’t a humanitarian intervention.
3. This blog is such a piece of crap now that I’m not even sure why I bother to stop by every month or so.
Winston Smith | Homepage | 09.11.06 – 2:49 pm | #
1. No, though they are now. There are keepers of the flame like Jonathan Chait, the Euston crowd, Hitchens and, implicitly, Philosoraptor. On the other hand, former Liberal Hawks like Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum have seen the error of their ways.
2. Only an abject moron — which is to say, a Liberal Hawk — would assume that Kosovo is a model rather than an exception. Moreover, only an abject moron/Liberal Hawk would assume that a flaming batshit wingnut, who stole an election here and represents the most anti-human and kleptocratic forces in the West, would be able or truly willing to adopt the high-mindedness and competence that drove the Kosovo operation. Kosovo is a duckbilled platypus, a which-what-who of wars. How clever the neoconservatives were to assume that their Liberal allies on the Kosovo matter would have such short memories. Thus when the crusade on Iraq was put into action, all the neocons who created it had to say to the clueless fucktard-stupid Liberal Hawks was, “remember Kosovo”, rightly counting on the Liberal Hawks to forget that before Kosovo, the neocons had cheerfully endorsed not only every tinpot dictator who was an American client, but also every awful and immoral, overt or covert intervention America had undertaken since the 1950s and indeed, had it been up to the neocons, we’d have never left Vietnam. Actually, it is probably right to say that neoconservatives only endorsed Kosovo not because of humanitarian reasons, but because they saw it as an exercise of American power — which can never not be a good thing, in their eyes.
3. No shit. But it was marketed as one. Who were the main purveyors of this sales pitch? Gee..
3. (sic) Ahhhh, there it is. Atrios — Duncan Black, mild-mannered economist — is a hippie! Scratch your screen as your browser loads atrios.blogspot.com and you will catch a whiff of the finest patchouli. Yes, Atrios is among that crazy Left which is just as bad as the Bush crew.
Phunky Philadelphian Duncan Black, the Wavy Gravy of the internets, encouraging phellow phreakazoids to attune their consciousness to atrios.blogspot.com
Most of the commentary on the Mark Foley scandal has fallen along predictable partisan lines. The left-wing douchebags at Sadly, No! have been “bwah-ha-ha”-ing it up over the many sordid e-mails and instant messages Foley sent to underage boys, while the right blogosphere has been blowing the whole thing off as a Democratic plot to make the Republicans look bad. In hyperpartisan times like these, it is more important than ever to recognize and acknowledge those original voices who refuse to conform to the conventional wisdom of the Left or the Right, either because they’re fiercely independent, or because they’re unintelligible and illiterate.
So with that, I give you the Very Best Commentary on the Foley Scandal EVER… by Pastor Joseph Grant Swank, Jr.:
FOLEY & PRIEST MOLESTATION: SIMILARITIES
J. Grant Swank, Jr.
What is similar between Mark Foley’s titillating dreamfield about teen Congressional male pages and Catholic priests’ titillating dreamfields about teen male parishioners?
See, now this is what I’m talking about. I’m only one sentence into Swank’s piece, and I’m already seeing the scandal in a whole new light. Sure, it’s a light that’s cracked in half and covered in dog poo, but at least it’s something new.
The baseline is lust from an adult male for an adult youth.
Next: why was this tolerated when known about? Specifically, some Congresspersons knew about Foley’s dreamfield. Why didn’t they scream WRONG? Specifically, some Catholic officials knew about priests’ dreamfields. Why didn’t they scream WRONG?
Yep, that’s what Denny Hastert shoulda done- he shoulda gone up to Foley and said, “Hey, I’m onto your dreamfield, asshole… WRONG!!!” And the whole scandal woulda stopped.
Well, we’ve been watching to see who’d bite the rancid squid giblets dangled in the water by one Wild Bill, of a blog called Passionate America. He’s the guy with the press release below about outing the identity of one of the pages whom Foley was harassing — which he did yesterday in a lavishly-illustrated and -annotated post, in a fusillade of self-congratulation and approving linkage.
Think Progress has a piece today:
Pajamas Media, Instapundit Facilitate Outing Of Foley Victim
An obscure right-wing blogger, Wild Bill, has outed one of Mark Foley’s victims, a former Congressional page. It is a despicable act. Wild Bill however, gets almost no traffic, so the damage done to the victim’s life could have been minimal.
All that ended, however, when some of the most highly-trafficked right-wing bloggers decided to direct their readers to Wild Bill’s site. First, Roger L. Simon, co-founder and CEO of Pajamas Media — a portal and advertising broker for nearly every major right-wing blog — posted a link to Wild Bill on his personal site. (The Pajamas Media portal also linked to Wild Bill.) Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit — probably the most highly-trafficked right-wing blog — followed suit by linking to Simon’s post and the Pajamas Media post.
Other links include such usual-suspects as Brent Bozell’s Newsbusters, Ace of Spades HQ, and the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.
Here’s the lead to Newsbusters‘ uniquely-spun and breathless take on the story, since echoed in a statement by Dennis Hastert:
Identity of Foley IM Individual Revealed Due to ABC News Error
Posted by Terry Trippany on October 4, 2006 – 22:16.ABC news mistakenly released the IM identity of the page who exchanged IM messages with former Rep. Mark Foley. Bloggers Wild Bill from Passionate America and Ms. Underestimated tracked the AOL profile from the unredacted IM message and are reporting that the person is a 21 year old Deputy Campaign Manager for Congressman Ernest Istook in Oklahoma.
The current age of the person would put him at 17 or 18 years of age at the time of the IM exchange although ABC released a statement saying that the messages took place before and after the man’s 18th birthday.
Further, the bloggers discovered that the indivudual was a member of the departing 2001-2002 Page class. A check of the Thomson Library of congress shows that the person was not a member of the 2003 class.
Apparently, then, it’s ABC’s responsibility for allowing the page’s anonymous IM alias to appear on-screen early in their coverage, before redacting it. If a right-wing blogger on the Internet chooses to exhaustively research that alias, digging up photos and personal information, then trumpets the findings in a press release — culminating in a post linked and publicized by a major flotilla of high-visibility right-wing chatterers, including Bozell’s foundation-funded Newsbusters — it is apparently ABC’s responsibility, and no one else’s.
This particular page was 17 at the time the IMs began, not 16. Therefore…something. Media bias, Democrats, Clinton, bla. But note the weasel phrase above, “17 or 18 years of age,” and the “although” before the ABC statement. Since the page’s birthday was disclosed, a translation into clear English yields a result like this: “The current age of the person shows that the IM exchanges began when he was 17 years old and continued after he turned 18. ABC released a statement saying this.” Newsbusters doesn’t hire the best. They mimic the standard form of GOP misinformation well enough, but often ruin their efforts with obvious fudges and childlike fibbing.
The best spin yet, in this vein, was from a radio host last night (probably Drudge, although they all run together when you listen to them in series) who said that this new data is evidentiary and newsworthy because it “brings [the page] closer in age to Monica Lewinsky.” Yes, that leaves only five more years to go past his actual age. One must also note that if you go the other way and subtract the difference between Lewinsky’s age and the page’s, circa date of encounter, he becomes 12 years old. This is exactly as meaningful as the prior mathematical exercise.
From Instapundit’s fatal post, a reader disputes the newsworthiness of the page’s exposure:
UPDATE: A reader emails: “Do you really think no one in the Republican leadership has bothered to go back and look at the file to see how old the page actually was?”
To which he replies, propellor spinning on his beanie (on which, since the Foley Scandal, an applique patch of the GOP elephant smoking medical marijuana has been hastily Sharpie-Markered out and replaced with ‘As I said yesterday, I never really took sides politically’):
A competent Republican leadership certainly would have, but that’s pretty much already been ruled out, right?
Yup. And if there’s a fire down below, you know these guys all gonna go.
