3Bulls uncovers the latest development in the Americablog controversy.
It is impossible to continue living without visiting 3Bulls right now. (When the paramedics have left, also see Tristero, at Digby’s.)
…Andy, are you goofin on Nixon?
Are you losing touch?
I begin to belieeeeve,
That you are a looon,
(You are a looon–ooon)
Andy McCarthy has really started to lose it all — wits, sanity, composure:
With most Democrats not wanting to get within a million miles of this, Sen. Feingold has John Dean, of Watergate fame, testifying in favor of his censure proposal this morning.
It’s actually very good symbolism (however inadvertently orchestrated) for how times have changed. Feingold has obviously dragged Dean out there because the latter represents all that Nixon connotes for the civil liberties lobby — domestic spying, corruption, the conceit that our imperialist government is much worse than our “enemies,” the self-image of liberals as the guys in the white hats, etc.
Uh huh, yeah, contempt, exaggeration, and heavy sarcasm noted. But such things are par for the wingnut course and would merit little of our attention. Fortunately, it gets “better”:
But for people who care about the security of the country and about stopping what we well know al Qaeda is trying to do, what Dean and the Watergate legacy symbolize are the shackling of the executive branch, the notion that we just have to accept threats to public safety, FISA, the Wall, the decline of the CIA, etc.
There it all is, in wingnutty spades: A sneer to the effect that the obsolete post-Nixon, post-Watergate concerns of civil libertarians are not only quaintly retained by liberals, but contemporary objections levelled by Nixon hacks at anti-Nixon reformers were valid all along! See? Andy’s implying that Nixon was right! The filthy liberals did mean to shackle the poor executive branch, which only wanted to protect good Amurikans from whatever enemy was in vogue that week. And now they want to do it to Dear Leader, who, like Nixon, would never abuse executive power. Traitors! Sentimental traitors!
Read the rest of this entry »
First, a fun fact: did you know that the “Shorter” routine has become so popular that even wingnuts are “shortering” their own posts? It’s true:
“Shorter Jeff Goldstein: ‘I eat paste and the A-rabs, they make me a-scared!’�
Well, yes.
Anyway, down to business:
Shorter David Frum:
If only the Mexicans would embrace voodoo economics, and sell some of their national resources to our oil companies, so many of them wouldn’t be forced to emigrate.
Shorter Mark R. Levin:
Dear Leader, Your Worshipfulness, I know you are a great judge of character, but please pay no attention to Vicente Fox’s promises.
Shorter Jay Nordlinger:
The Chinese, so inscrutable! Killing people in order to harvest their organs? Why can’t they just kill people for revenge or ideology or to steal their national resources? You know, like normal people do.
Shorter Flashback:
Thank God John Hinckley didn’t derail the Reagan Revolution’s momentum: now when the President recovers, we can get on with selling off national parks, supporting South African apartheid, and obstructing “crazy requirements” for cripples.
Calm Down, Senator, It’s Politics
March 30, 2006It started the first day. The day Ned Lamont announced his run for the Democratic Senate nomination, Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s campaign put out a blistering press release.
“Attacking Senator Lieberman’s character and integrity was a predictable but dishonorable way to begin this campaign,” it started. “Mr. Lamont is clearly going to run a very negative and angry campaign where the truth doesn’t get in the way.”
Can’t you imagine the sparks flying as they typed that bad boy? What could Lamont have done to poor Joe?
He called him “Republican Lite.”
He said he was “George Bush’s favorite Democrat.”
Vicious stuff, huh?
Quod Mark Steyn:
. . .But I felt gradually exhausted since September 11th, 2001, [because] it’s very dispiriting trying to keep going in this phase of what is a very long conflict. And the reason I do it is because I want us to win. I don’t particularly like journalism. I don’t particularly like writing newspaper columns. I’m sick of having to make what I think should be an obvious case again and again and again. And I’d much rather pack it in and sit on my porch in New Hampshire and enjoy the view of the mountains. But I do it because I want us to win.
We were waiting on Hugh Hewitt to say something like, “I don’t use the word ‘hero’ very often, but you, Mark Steyn, are the greatest hero in American history.” But instead, he used Steyn’s lead as an opportunity to whine about how lefties were so very mean to him over his Empire State Building comments, directed at Time Mag’s Iraq correspondent, Michael Ware:
I’m sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I’m sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target. Because in downtown Manhattan, it’s not comfortable, although it’s a lot safer than where you are, people always are three miles away from where the jihadis last spoke in America. So that’s…civilians have a stake in this. Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago.
To which Steyn replied magnanimously:
[W]e’re all, in a sense, we’re all conscripted in this war. Those 3,000 people who died on September 11th, they weren’t serving forces, they were just fellows who got up in the morning and went to work, or went to Logan Airport and got on a plane. And that’s the thing. We’re all conscripted in this war, whether we know it or not.
Must be something in the wingnut water cooler, because Roy Edroso finds Jeff Goldstein exhibiting the same sort of self-aggrandizing self-pity:
…[Tbogg] and his fellow Iraq war critics have started to pretend that the threat from al Qaeda doesn’t exist, and instead spend the majority of their time poking their sticks into the sides of those who aren’t quite so sanguine about al Qaeda’s intentions.
This is almost plaintive: Goldstein only wants to save America, why are we making fun of him? Maybe Goldstein noticed that, too, and quickly butched back up to the belligerent sophistry that is his stock in trade
Anyway, this is yet another episode to add to the Steyn dossier.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Device tells you if you’re boring
MIT Media Lab researchers are building a device to help autistic people determine if they’re boring or annoying the person they’re talking to. The “emotional social intelligence prosthetic device” is a camera that clips on eyeglasses and feeds images to a small computer that uses image recognition software to characterize emotions. If the listener doesn’t seem to be engaged, the device vibrates to alert the wearer.
March 30, 2006
AN ARMY OF DAVIDS: The Mark Steyn review. “It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in a long time.”Cool. It doesn’t get any better than that.
posted at 06:52 PM by Glenn Reynolds
Um, we just got simultaneous links from Atrios, Josh Marshall, and Daily Kos, re: Brad’s important photos from his trip to Baghdad, and I’m not aware of this ever happening before, so if the site blows up, we totally didn’t do it.
Hi, I’m RETARDO Montalban of elementropy and I’m here at Sadly, No! to tell you about a wingnut technological breakthrough: The Gnatella Platform.
Actual photo of RETARDO
Here’s a picture of me, that you may pin to your dartboard find suitable for printing and framing, perhaps to give as a present to your grandmother, for am I not the most scrubbed and respectable-looking Progressive you’ve ever seen? Glad you agree!
Anyway, the Gnatella Platform: it is a peer-to-peer wingnutware device by which stories of pundits’ children are traded amongst wingnuts, then injected into their screeds as needed; the children’s privacy obliterated, their future embarassment, total; their future therapy bills, astronomical; the parents’ hackery, boundless.
Lileks, of course, is not only the wingnutware’s inventor, he and daughter ‘Gnat’ are also clients, while Meghan Cox Gurdon liked the product so much she offered to buy the company. The thing is wildly popular. Lately, one of its prime users has been Cathy Seipp, whose soccer mom mendacities regularly pollute the L.A. Times.
But in her latest exploitation she may have gone too far; some readers wrote in to complain:
regardless of whether you had her consent (which, as a minor, she cannot give without your consent – which would be conflicted), your disclosure of your daughter’s personal information was a shocking and unjustifiable invasion of her privacy. I hope it was worth it for you.
To which Cathy tartly if ingenuously replied:
Well, you know, anything for those opinion writing rates.
What’s better worse than a Two-Minute TownHall? It’s a Two-Minute Pajama Stains, sans Hot Dog Tree. Let’s get ready to shorten!
Shorter Anchoress:
Illegal immigration is a complex problem that demands complex solutions. So hopefully God will reveal them to Peggy Noonan in a dream.
Shorter Erik Svane:
The French complain about the media just like we do. Except it’s funny when they do it.
Shorter Drinking From Home:
Some of us are still fixated on that whole Danish cartoons thing.
Shorters Dean Esmay:
Some people don’t have a way with words. Fortunately, I… have way.
and:
If you thought Anchoress was going to beat me at the game of writing a long post without saying anything, guess again!
I just went through nine pages of supposedly “religious” clocks (several of which had pictures of Ben D., or at least his namesake), but there were NONE of Pastor Swank–or even Hillary Swank (either now or the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer Hillary).
Posted by: Ken Houghton | March 30, 2006 06:17 PM
(Prototype — development still under)