I get kind of an ’80s album cover vibe from this (via one of the blogs we monitor and mock as needed).
More of This, Please: Doghouse Riley
If we’re all going to have to put up with the Media Village courtiers’ touting Mitch Daniels as the serious GOP candidate for serious times, at least we’ve got Indiana-based blogger Doghouse Riley at Bats Left / Throws Right to keep us informed of the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit:
INTERESTING how this seems to be the week when Beltway insiders have decided to start the Republican Presidential campaign, with or without Republican Presidential candidates…
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The unwilling, indolent, but semi-dedicated Daniels watcher, for example, has been pummeled daily by the Dailies… you couldn’t swing a cat this week without hitting Mitch Daniels, unless you took care to swing it a minimum of five feet off the ground.
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Marcus, who says she couldn’t imagine actually voting for Daniels, nevertheless thinks his Seriousness would make Obama a better candidate, thus raising the question of the last time she, or anyone else, was justified in believing Serious Issues actually enter into one of our Presidential campaigns, let alone make either candidate “better”. I’m going with Grant-Greeley.
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Despite all the grudging it requires, I respect the job Team Daniels has done to this point, considering the hand they have to work with. They shoehorned a malignant and diminutive wonk into Lamar Alexander’s Jes’ Folks campaign, and even found a plaid shirt that would fit him, with the result that, five years later, Rich Lowry would tell the world (ha ha! He told readers of National Review! Exaggeration for comic effect) what an authentic consumer of fried pork and pig feed Daniels was, even though no one with passing familiarity of the genre could possibly believe it. Following his proposal, ten minutes after his first inauguration, to raise income taxes on the top earners in Indiana in order to pay to reduce the “deficit” and burnish his combover, Team Daniels saw to it the man never spoke extemporaneously in public again. After a couple months of watching him lunge across tables or run down city streets to grasp the kneecaps of hecklers, they saw to it no one with anything over a 12 handicap would ever get within a hundred yards of him again, save Fairgoers and photo-op truck-stop waitresses, widely spaced. Their man somehow went from Bush popularity ratings in 2007 to a landslide victory only partly explained by his opponent’s non-existence and his own enormous war chest. The Post marriage article has Daniels’ opponents running from his “intellectual heft”; this for a man whose five favorite books are Atlas Shrugged…
Go over, enjoy the man’s oeuvre, and let’s hope we don’t break Blogger again.
Shark sandwich
A blog, I think, is like a shark, it has to constantly move forward or it dies. So I’m kind of happy about ClosedCommentsGate. When I show up here and the comments for the day are all about how cute the pet pictures are or how we all agree that Nick Gillespie is an idiot, it makes me nervous. When it’s a bunch of people screaming at each other about race or teh ghey or hipsters or Israel, I smile.
No one asked me, but I’ll say two things about ClosedCommentsGate. One is that getting trashed in the comments does hurt one’s fee fees. I now avoid certain topics — hipsters, Israel, Washington Post reporter chats — because they bring out the haters. I’ve come very close to banning a few commenters who bug me.
The other is that tribalism and prejudice are a complicated stew. I’ve always been comfortable writing about race, because I know I’m not racist. That’s not for any awesome reason about myself, it’s probably because all the black people I know well are high-achieving types I met in college and grad school, or are people I now do research with. I did grow up around a lot of rural, white poverty and I used phrases like “trailer trash” and “white trash” in the past, and I feel very bad about that, because it really did come out of prejudice that I had.
I don’t think ABL’s post was about calling anyone “white trash”, I think it was about the absurdity of Donald Trump supporter types claiming Obama’s not an American, that he shouldn’t have gotten into Columbia, and so on. But there is one place near to that post that I don’t want any of us to go — and, to reiterate, I don’t think ABL went there — and that’s a place where we say “Obama is an intelligent, educated man and you haters are lower class trash”. Just remember that the guy leading the birtherism charge is a privately educated billionaire highly-leveraged and serially bankrupt son of a multimillionaire.
Anyway, that’s all.
I got nothing but love for you baby
Why do so many of you hate DailyKos so much? Sure, there are a lot of nuts in the diaries, but the front page is fine. I don’t agree with every bit of it but the polls are great and the analysis is generally intelligent. What’s the problem?
My Mother’s Day Card
Not Helping
If ever there was anything that would increase my doubts about the legality of the mission to kill Osama, it would be an editorial from Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap:
SOME ARE questioning the legality of the raid in Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. Was it lawful for a team of Navy SEALs to launch a mission in Abbottabad without permission from Pakistani leaders? Did they comply with international strictures when they killed the al-Qaeda leader rather than capturing him and bringing him before a court of law?
In a word: yes.
One of the things I found interesting about the inevitable flame post yesterday (inevitable because I quoted Greenwald), is the number of people who are mad that Glenn would ask basic questions like “Was this legal? Was this an assassination? Why are these stories not adding up?” It’s kind of funny to me, and we had an email exchange about it. Glenn is a civil libertarian, he cares deeply about extrajudicial killings, about targeted assassination, about government secrecy and cover-ups. He’s not being some sort of hypocrite asking about those things, even though Osama was an absolute monster. He’s just sticking to his principles.
I’m the hypocrite here. I’m stridently against extrajudicial killings, the death penalty, targeted assassination, etc. I’d wager most of you are, too.
But when I heard that Osama had been killed, I’ll be damned if I didn’t think “Thank God that monster is gone.” Sure, in my ideal world he’d be brought back to the US, tried, and then imprisoned for the rest of his life. But you know what? I can not honestly say I give a damned that he took a double tap to the skull. Sorry. And I’d be also willing to bet that is where most of you all are- this may or may not have been legal, but you don’t give a shit, because that scumbag is at the bottom of an ocean somewhere and got what he deserved. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a primitive part of me was sort of sad he didn’t experience any pain.
The thing to remember, though, is that it isn’t Glenn or those who question the administration who are out of line or straying from their principles. It is me. This kind of reminds me of that ass in Orange County who emailed the blatantly racist Obama pictures to every one, and when caught, immediately started screaming “I’m not a racist! Everyone knows I’m not a racist! Ask all of my former black friends!” We’re in some bizarro world where being called and labeled a racist is somehow worse than, you know, being a racist and sending racist emails.
People are more worked up about the fact that someone might be calling them a hypocrite than looking at the monster in the mirror who may be acting hypocritically in regards to Osama. I know I’m being a hypocrite, and like Jonathon Capehart, I am ok with it in this case. I’ll promise to do a better job sticking to my principles and caring about the law when it comes to someone who hasn’t murdered thousands of people. I swear.
Hitting Unsubscribe
Yesterday Rush Limbaugh issued an obviously sarcastic rant about the killing of bin Laden. Andrew Sullivan’s reaction was that Limbaugh was “going out of his way to celebrate Obama’s singular role”. Even after his readers alerted him that Limbaugh was being sarcastic, Sully added:
Some readers seem to think Limbaugh is being sarcastic. I didn’t.
After it dawns on him that Limbaugh wasn’t serious, and about the time that Media Matters posted the clip embedded above where Rush points and laughs at a Hill item that says essentially the same thing as Sully did, he posts a “world may be flat, opinions differ” item about what Limbaugh said. Finally, seven hours after it was obvious to anyone who listened to the three minutes excerpted above, he begrudgingly admits that “It’s become pretty clear it was sarcasm.”
Because this happened so quickly, the only difference between it and the lengthy Ryan fiasco was that Sullivan didn’t have time to shower his critics with Moore awards for being insufficiently respectful while pointing out the bloody obvious.
I can stomach wrongheaded analysis, different political views, bad musical taste and a whole host of other annoyances if the blog I’m reading at least gets the facts right. Sullivan is wrong on the facts far too much of the time to be trusted on anything, and when he’s wrong, he commits the even worse sin of being unable to issue a speedy and complete correction. I’ve subscribed to his blog for years, but I hit unsubscribe this morning with very little regret and a fair amount of relief.