TownHall Recap -- From Mordor, Where the Shadows Lie
Hooray, it's Hump Day! And what do we think of when we think of humping? Yes, our favorite TownHall columnists, like the Virgin Ben Shapiro!
Anyway, the meme today is "What's the difference?" as in, "Before 9/11? After 9/11? What's the difference? And who the hell cares what a former Treasury Secretary and member of the National Security Council says anyway?" The recurrent theme is "Bush's Immigration Reform Plan stinks." The secret phrase is "liberal media."
Kathleen Parker
So what if the White House wanted to invade Iraq all along?
I gathered from the electronic deluge that I was supposed to be shocked by this revelation and writhe like a salted slug in self-contempt and shame for supporting the war in Iraq.
No, Kathleen, you were supposed to writhe like a salted slug for that Gay marriage: A trip to the moon on Gossamer wings? piece from a couple of months ago.
Michelle Malkin
A New Jersey Assemblywoman is proposing a bill requiring home-schooled kids to have an annual medical test; she says one impetus for the bill is those foster kids who were found severely underweight and malnourished. So, is Michelle in favor of a law which would provide a slight safety net for home-schooled kids who might have no other contact with the outside world? Heavens no! Because it's more important to save them from socialism!
Indeed, legislators and the liberal media (witness CBS News' anti-homeschooling hit piece last October) are pushing for increased regulation of homeschooling parents, including criminal background checks, because the grass-roots movement gravely threatens their socialist agenda of promoting dependency. God forbid children be taught by their own parents without oversight from the all-knowing, all-caring, infallible wizards of the child welfare-public school monopoly!
Brent Bozell
There IS TOO a liberal bias to journalism, and Tom Brokaw is just scared of Brent's mighty Media Research Center.
I challenged Mr. Brokaw to agree with me to assemble a neutral panel to review our evidence of liberal media bias and let them determine whether this mountain is a molehill. I pledged that if the panel agreed with him, the MRC would contribute $1 million to the charity of his choice. But if it agreed with us, he'd have to give the MRC a $1 million gift. Brokaw is liberal, but he's also wise: He didn't accept the challenge. But it begs the question: Why even bother to deny the bias?
So, Brent is using all those Scaife donations for GAMBLING? Next, we'll find him in a Vegas S&M dungeon with Bill Bennett, doing research on the MRC's dime.
Walter E. Williams
Sure, the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer in America, but it's a GOOD kind of poor here!
I'm betting if God condemned an unborn spirit to a lifetime of poverty but He left him free to choose the country in which to be poor, he'd choose United States.
Thomas Sowell
Poor Thomas really shouldn't have sold that kidney (even though the price was so good that it would have invalidated his entire economic theory not to), because now the high levels of uric acid in his blood are causing incoherence.
Can't liberals afford arches? All sorts of people are referred to as arch-conservatives but almost never do you hear anyone referred to as an arch-liberal.
At one time, I could tear a Washington phone book in half. Not only was I a lot younger, the Washington phone book was a lot smaller.
Linda Chavez
Linda got nominated for the Bush cabinet too, and while she didn't get a job (what with that extensive criminal record and all), SHE didn't think George was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people. No, he was more like a blind man in the kingdom of the one-eyed.
O'Neill's collaboration with former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind on the book "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill" may soon land O'Neill in a heap of trouble. The Treasury Department is already investigating whether the former secretary improperly took government documents with him when he left, some of which may have been classified. (O'Neill claims they were all cleared with the general counsel of the department.)
So, let that be a lesson to you -- disrespect the President and you too may be in a heap of trouble with the Feds, whether or not you actually did anything wrong.
Mean Ben Shapiro
Paying workers a "living wage" encourages illegal aliens to come to America, since businesses, who can't afford to pay people munificent sums like $8.00 an hour and still give their CEOs 7-figure bonuses, have no choice but to hire people off the books and pay them crap. So, John Kerry and the unions should just stay out of it, and let the market regulate itself -- the illegals will stay home once they learn that American jobs only pay 25 cents an hour.
It is no coincidence that in October, Wal-Mart was investigated for hiring 250 illegal immigrants in 61 stores across 21 states. It is also no coincidence that Wal-Mart is eating its competition.
Jonah Goldberg
Howard Dean says stuff that, when reduced to sound bites, sounds goofy. And then Dean tries to explain what he meant, which is even worse! Sure, Jonah once derided Ed Koch's "academic pedicure," but at least he wasn't fooled by Dennis Prager's clunky "parody." Oh, wait, he was!
In his - shall we say godlike - arrogance, Dean thinks anything that leaves his mouth must be wise. But in reality, true wisdom lies in taking his no-doubt well-pedicured foot out of his mouth.
Dennis Prager
"My readers are the stupidest people on Earth."
But what is most interesting here is how many people thought the statements I made up really were said by President Carter. Jonah Goldberg, an astute observer of contemporary life, actually excerpted my column, "Jimmy Carter: 'Compassion for Mordor,'" on his National Review Web site.
Debra Saunders
Back in 2002, Wes Clark said there was "a connection" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And now he says there that Iraq wasn't responsible for 9/11. What a big hypocrite!
Except that saying that there is a connection between George Bush and Neil Bush isn't the same thing as saying that George is responsible for giving Neil's wife herpes. So, maybe he's not a hypocrite, is he, Debra?
Clark lied. According to Monday's New York Times, in 2002, retired Gen. Wesley Clark said, "Certainly there's a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda." Now that it is an anti-war tenet of faith that there was no Iraq-al Qaeda connection, thinking Americans should be outraged at Clark's deliberate and cynical attempt to mislead the American people.
Jeff Jacoby
Back in the good, old days, immigrants assimilated! They learned English, got jobs, and became white. Of course, we allowed them to celebrate a foreign holiday and cook a foreign dish or two (if they did it on the sly), but they never used their ethnicity to get preferential treatment over REAL Americans. And we liked it that way!
For generations, immigrants knew from the day they arrived that they were expected to become "good Americans."
Joel Mowbray
The Democrats have teamed up with the liberal media to misrepresent the Labor Department's advice on how employers could comply with the new regulations about mandatory overtime for low-income workers, while actually not paying them more money. Joel admits that the facts the liberal media presented are "technically correct," but it's the FRAMING that's wrong, in that these tips weren't actually faxed to employers by "Bush operatives," as far as Joel knows.
The article continues, “Essentially, employees would be working more hours for the same pay.” Except, that's not true. Most would actually end up making at least as much as before under this “option,” maybe even more.
See, the media misled the public, for, as Joel pointed out, while most workers would make "as much as before" for working more hours, some would actually end up making LESS. Damned hippie reporters!
Bonus TownHall Quiz:
Which is the real Dennis Prager, and which is the parody?
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Answer: they are BOTH the real Dennis Prager, in a fictional but not false way.
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