June 06, 2004
June 05, 2004
And now, Deep Thoughts from the Left:
"I don't care if John Kerry is a sack of cement; we're going to carry him to victory."
The headline here is about Crock saying that journalists thank him for his work, but Crock has less credibility than my dog, so let's look at something curiously buried here... John Podesta, as you may know, was Bubba's chief-of-staff... He's now head of the thoroughly dishonest Center for American Progress... Anyway, he had this to say at this "Take Back America" conference Thursday:
Podesta also took a jab at Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly when an audience member asked about the possibility of filing lawsuits against news outlets that "propagate direct lies."Er, didn't we just have a major firestorm over an incredibly silly lawsuit by Fox News against Buck-Toothed Moron... And now we have an ex-chief-of-staff to the president threatening the #1 cable news personality with a lawsuit? How come I'm only seeing this only on CNSNews.com when the former incident got an astonishing amount of press? And for what, exactly, would he be sued? It appears libel, but without any specifics, that's a rather reckless charge. And if he's not serious, what does that say about about Podesta, who held such a powerful position in this country, and still does on the left? Now, of course, O'Reilly brought this up briefly tonight, challenging Podesta to appear on his program, but I don't know if he would have even found out if not for CNSNews.com. Let's watch and see if there is any further reporting of this, outside of O'Reilly's own show...Podesta responded, "What about television? It's time to sue Bill O'Reilly." The crowd of liberal activists showed their approval by erupting in applause.
Care to wager a guess what Rep. Moran is under fire for now?
Gee, could it be... anti-Semitic remarks? Why hasn't this asshat gotten the full Lott treatment by now? Ah yes, he has a "D" by his name... Never mind.
Fascinating stuff on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square from the LAT...
The U.N. reminds us of the horrors of the Hussein regime, but still refuses to do anything of substance about abuses in its own name... (Thanks to the Blogfather.)
Hollywood sources tell LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke that former President Ronald Reagan's medical condition has suddenly worsened. "He really took a downslide today," the insider told Finke Friday evening. "Doctors are at the house. Things aren't good." At the start of the day, several news organizations chased down a rumor that the ex-president had died, but it wasn't true... Family members gathered at the Reagan's Bel Air home late Friday... Developing...
June 04, 2004
The Pope's hypocrisy on criticizing Bush for abu Ghraib is duly noted, but Bush's uncharacteristic tardiness is also inexcusable, and I'm sure we'll hear much from his critics on this the next few days... the same critics who had no problem with Billy Jeff's tardiness as a matter of routine...
Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry said Thursday that the Bush administration has instituted a "backdoor draft" by requiring thousands of soldiers to stay in the military if their units are ordered to Iraq or Afghanistan.FACT: The Big Me did it too... where was JFKerry? (Thanks to Taranto.)
Revealing article from Nick Cohen on the fifth column... (Thanks to the Blogfather.)
Proving that even the best of us can be swayed by the fan-dance that is the Buck-Toothed Moron's disingenuous claims, Robert Cox (who links to the audio) is glowing with praise for him because he is obsessed with the totally inconsequential issue of whether or not the Talkmaster liiiieeeeed about inviting him on his radio show on CNN... Here's what the TM says:
Franken seems to be obsessed over whether or not I did or did not invite him to host my show at some time in the past. I do remember asking those clowns from Democratic Talk Radio to host the show once, but they demanded full control of all production aspects and the phone calls, and we said no. All that Mad Al could talk about yesterday was whether or not I had specifically invited him! You know what? Frankly, I can't really remember. After 35 years of talk radio how in the hell can you remember who you did and who you didn't ask to guest host. Besides .. it's really just not that important! So ... just to get the record straight, I went ahead and invited Franken to host the show while I was on the air with him yesterday. His answer? "No." Then he segued into more charges that I was a liar and somehow changed the topic into whether or not Democrats were opposed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wow! Compelling stuff!Mike Malloy, the left's Savage (or the male Randi Rhodes) is hardly the paragon of politeness, so when he comes off better than Buck-Toothed Moron, there's a problem...This is supposed to be fun, folks! We're supposed to be entertaining listeners. I do guest shots with talk show hosts, conservative, libertarian and leftist, virtually every week. Mike Malloy and I do a bit on CNN Daybreak every Tuesday morning (around 6:40 EDT). We agree on almost nothing, yet we've been friends for years, remain friendly on the air, and manage to have a bit of fun with Carol (sigh!) Costello. The difference? Mike Malloy is a professional broadcaster. He gets it. Ed Schultz, another leftist talk show host, is a professional broadcaster. He gets it. Mike and Ed are professionals who know how to entertain. Al Franken approaches his show with a nasty demeanor and mean temperament. This meanness permeates the entire Air America broadcast day. One Air America host even suggested on her show that Bush should be taken out and shot. Franken? He's a comedian who has lost his sense of humor. He walks around with clenched fists, which makes it impossible to shake his hand. No wonder he's working for free! Life's too short, Al. See ya later. Don't call me, I'll call you. Maybe.
Anyway, when the Talkmaster says he invited Democratic Talk Radio on, he's telling (gasp!) the truth, as a column from last year shows:
In a grand and magnanimous gesture (for which I am renowned), I once offered the two gentlemen from Democratic Talk Radio the opportunity to fill in for me on one of my all-too-infrequent vacation days. They gladly accepted – and then came the conditions. Their principal demand was that they be allowed to produce and conduct the radio show exactly the same way they handle their website. They were to have complete control over screening all phone calls, and no calls critical of Democratic politicians or policies would be permitted. We withdrew the invitation.This coincides with everything he said on CNN and attributed to Buck-Toothed Moron...
What is bleeding obvious here and what the TM tried to say when Buck-Toothed Moron interrupted him was that when you make an error, it's NOT A LIE (and when he asked for 30 seconds to talk, he was interrupted again). The TM confused Buck-Toothed Moron and Democratic Talk Radio, period. He did this interview at the crack of dawn and it's not impossible to believe that when confronted with it, he really did believe that he had talked about them in the interview and it was a transcript error.
Here are Buck-Toothed Moron's blog's words, in a post below some of those filled with righteous indignation that the TM wouldn't admit to a "lie" when he was guilty of human error: "The O'Franken Factor is a Zero Spin Zone. So if you hear something inaccurate on our show, it isn't a lie--it's an error."
This appears to be the only time Buck-Toothed Moron has publicly admitted that when something is wrong, it's not automatically a "lie," as Rich Lowry pointed out in his devastating Spinsanity post refuting him.
That's not all... Even worse is Buck-Toothed Moron's disingenuous analysis of the Civil Rights Act vote, a subject people might actually give a rat's ass about, for a change. He claims that the Democrats voting against it were "conservatives," but he's committing a "No True Scotsman" fallacy because two of the biggest opponents against the '64 Act were ex-Klansman Sen. Robert Byrd, left-wing hero and onetime leader of the Democrats in the Senate, who filibustered against it, and Watergate hero Sen. Sam Ervin (whom the Washington Post described as " the delight of liberals for supporting civil liberties"). In fact, Byrd's name never comes up in the discussion (not that the Talkmaster got a chance). Just goes to show you that when Buck-Toothed Moron's on the attack, he's often projecting, as he clearly was here by calling the Talkmaster "disingenuous"...
"Zero-spin zone," my @$$.
Stern continues to shoot himself in the foot by turning this into a Dem vs. Republican thing...
The Dems seem to have made a massive miscalculation in thinking that JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam would steal veteran votes from Bush... Still not too late for the Torricelli option (is it ever?)...
UPDATE: Is this the new "foreign leaders?"
"We're-not-dead!" has gone full bore into leftist apologia for terrorism... Remember the days when they insisted "there's no anti-war left?"
Finally, a major story that shows that BUSH KNEW!!!:
More than a year before 9/11, a Pakistani-British man told the FBI an incredible tale: that he had been trained by bin Laden’s followers to hijack airplanes and was now in America to carry out an attack.It goes on to say that this took place in 2000... surely this means that the president... er... I mean to say... 2000? Ahem... well, as the great guru Dick Clarke told us, the mighty and powerful Clinton was totally on top of all things al Qaeda... This is just NBC pushing right-wing propaganda, those bastards!
UPDATE: In all seriousness, this is a good reminder that the attack wasn't planned on January 20, 2001, and that Clarke's insistence that the agencies under Billy Jeff were working fine and dandy and they were all on alert for terrorism in 2000 is just another exaggeration, if not outright lie...
UPDATE II: Henke comments...
June 03, 2004
It's past time for JFKerry... to resign from the Senate...
Lanny Davis just said that the Big Me practiced the politics of "civility" as president on "Scarborough Country"... Wow, I've never seen anyone's nose grow like that...
The now-infamous "Bushism", picked up by the likes of Milbank, gets the Spinsanity treatment... Here we have hard proof of the good we've done in Iraq, one of the many reasons to support the war... The left uses that to say "Bush is dumb"... At this point, the level of Bush hatred seems to be making these people as stupid as they think Bush is... Another example here...
The Dems' money man continues the abu Ghraib obsession, comparing it to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, which killed 3000 innocent people...
Turns out Mikey doesn't exactly have Ray Bradbury's blessing...
UPDATE: I just saw the trailer to Mikey's film and the quick cuts give you a very good idea of his arguments in the film, all of which look to be predictable, none of which look to tell the full story, or an accurate story... Even lefty Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly, though she praised the film overall, was turned off by its sloppy arugmentation, saying it favored fist-pumping over fact-checking... I also notice "Baghdad Jim" McDermott and Byron Dorgan cooperated with Mikey... we'll wait and see what they said to him and if they seem to share his beliefs and goals with this film, I suggest they be confronted with some of his statements as Weasley was... look where he is now (Under consideration for the Vice Presidency? - Ed. Exactly my point!)...
UPDATE II: Today on the radio, O'Reilly is calling Mikey out for taking a quote from O'Reilly, "I want to kill Michael Moore" totally out of context... The context was a discussion with Giuliani about his "desertion" charges, which Mikey stuck to even after it was widely reported that desertion is punishable by death. So we had Mikey not even flinching at the idea that he was calling for Bush's execution, and O'Reilly sarcastically said that if this is acceptable, he can say he wants to kill Mikey, which of course on audio and video is noted and seen as sarcasm, period. This is especially galling coming from a guy who says it's just "entertainment" when he's called on for his laundry list of false claims...
Meanwhile, one congressman who was interviewed by Mikey didn't say what Mikey wanted...
UPDATE III: For his next trick, Mikey spins a convoluted conspiracy theory (link is probably not office-friendly) to explain away his continued use of the $43 million-for-the-Taliban trope... like somehow the UN was in on Bush's evil scheme to pay off the Taliban... Then there's this:
The FBI was upset because in a murder investigation, the police like to talk to the relatives when you can't find the murderer. "What do you know? What do you know?" The FBI wanted to interrogate them. Bush said, No, you're not to interrogate any of the bin Ladens. They get a free pass out of the country.Now, he's just making stuff up... American Grandstander Clarke and the FBI, as we now know, were going back and forth on this and he made sure that they were satisfied with the situation, plus Clarke himself doesn't see what the problem is... there is, to this day, zero proof that Bush ordered the "free pass." On top of that, it's an outright lie, at least based on what has been reported, that they were not allowed to question the bin Ladens:
Again, it's hard to make the case that the FBI was denied any opportunity to question bin Laden family members given that they were directly involved in the process of rounding them up and gave the go-ahead for the flights to leave. Moreover, news accounts indicate that the FBI was not only "all over" the departing flights (grounding some of them temporarily), but had the opportunity to question passengers, and in at least some cases actually did[...]
And now, Deep Thoughts from the Left:
I want to know why we are so protective of Iraq, when in actuality, the people of Iraq voted in Saddam Hussein originally?UPDATE: As for the Maher interview itself, it's basically self-Fiskable (and, as has been noted before here, he flip-flopped on the war even more than JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam), especially the part where he asks why we didn't go into the Sudan... Never confuse Maher with an informed person...
UPDATE II: More Deep Thoughts, courtesy Larry Elder...
The quote the mainstream press doesn't want you to hear (or read):
"I would like to thank the coalition, led by the United States, for the sacrifices they have provided in the process of the liberation of Iraq."This is from Allawi, the new Iraqi prime minister... Good luck finding that quote anywhere else, outside of Fox News... Can't get in the way of the Enron or Scott Peterson coverage... or the free advertising for Mikey's movie...
Kaus reports that The Note has conceded the Bush-hatred point to Lowry...
SHOCKING story from the NYT - presidential campaigns enlist churches! Why, the Democrats have done it since time immemorial and... oh, wait they're talking about Bush. Yeah, I'll hold my breath until they talk about the other party's long history of using these tactics... nice knowin' ya.
Tenet out... 'Bout damned time...
Barberie out... Whatever will she do with only twelve other TV shows?
Can anyone deny that Raines is and was firmly on the left now? Another wakeup call for the likes of Altie and Somerby...
In its short life, the Center for American Progress has certainly distinguished itself for its dishonesty... No wonder Altie's with 'em...
A look at how Reuters finds their "angry Iraqis"...
June 02, 2004
Yet another UN scandal and this could top UNScam, especially if it is widespread... There's video to prove it...
Kudos to Tim Noah for refusing to embrace JFKerry-who-by-the-way-served-in-Vietnam's new slogan... I earlier referred to it as "meaningless," but there's quite a bit of meaning in the roots of this slogan... it is a total rejection of America as the "land of the free" and the pro-Communist author who inspired it was a supporter of Stalin's purges (Taranto mentioned the Communist connection earlier)...
This is the slogan wholeheartedly embraced by some major bloggers on the left and any suggestion from anyone to the right of Noah about Communism is labeled, you guessed it, "McCarthyism"...
Too early to tell but the trends look to be back in Bush's direction... There's also a new poll with more potential Bush voters than JFKerry... voters... 64% of undecided voters will consider Bush versus 48% for JFKerry...... 91% of those considering JFKerry... will definitely vote for him, while Bush has 81% in that category...
A new Opinion Dynamics poll shows 69% saying that the mainstream press has covered abu Ghraib too much... not that that's stopping anyone, of course... some perspective on the latest...
Thanks in part to Stephen Hayes' new book, the growing evidence linking al Qaeda and Hussein is chronicled here...
UPDATE: Even more...
June 01, 2004
In a long piece by one Alex Polier (remember her?), the one person looking most vindicated, surprisingly, is the Lord of the Links... he explains his actions convincingly, and indeed Lehane comes off as the most likely source for the story... It is confirmed that the story was being spread along the campaign trail, which was the LotL's angle on the story in the first place, and even Weasley Clark's son appears to confirm that his father made the "implode" statement though he tries to explain it away as "out of context" (as if not referring to this specific rumored affair makes it better), ... Ryan Lizza and company, of course, won't apologize for their inaccurate attacks...
The Congo uranium "business" is apparently booming... Now a couple of flashbacks for you (plus this too)...
Dana Milbank gives us a misleading statistic, based primarily on, well, his own assertions... Look out for myrmidons to swallow this whole, and regurgitate it...
UPDATE: The Godbrother responds to Milbank... Milbank should cut the crap and put this stuff on the opinion page already...
UPDATE II: Further response from Byron York...
May 30, 2004
Courtesy the Blogfather, more on the defeat of al-Sadr here...
May 29, 2004
Don't you think we'd hear more about this, if it came from, say, CNN... or the NYT, for that matter (of course it's not abu Ghraib, so it wouldn't stand a chance of making the front page)?
Another example of a "Bushism" that only the Bush-hating true believers will find interesting, amusing, whatever... At least "Kerryisms" make it abundantly clear that he has an actual speech problem...
Speaking of Slate wastes of bandwidth... what exactly can we gather from two lefties discussing presidential ads? At least have Kaus replace one of these guys...
Back when Treacher was doing takeoffs on the "Get Your War On" online comic strip, I thought it was a vast improvement on the original, and a great example is this recent strip in which it's charged that the Sudan is being "ignored..." Even a mediocre columnist like Nicholas Kristof isn't spouting that lie:
Sudanese peasants will be naming their sons "George Bush" because he scored a humanitarian victory this week that could be a momentous event around the globe — although almost nobody noticed. It was Bush administration diplomacy that led to an accord to end a 20-year civil war between Sudan's north and south after two million deaths.Contrast this, again, with the outrageous actions of the Big Me administration in regards to Rwanda...If the peace holds, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved, millions of refugees will return home, and a region of Africa may be revived.
Bob Woodward, lying liar:
We haven't found a vial, a bubbling vat, nothing...That's Woodward just now on Letterman, repeating what he said he told the president in the interview for his book. This after asserting we haven't found the weapons. We haven't found all the weapons, but it's undeniable that we've found some, and plenty of evidence of programs... this outdated "we haven't found the WMDs" claim is now just another disingenuous meme that must die, and for such an "esteemed journalist" as Woodward to repeat it... well, that says it all, doesn't it?
As for another meme about Iraq, Stephen Hayes has it covered... There's no challenging the Gorebot on the facts, remember...
May 28, 2004
Byron York on the Crock site...
UPDATE: Brent Bozell reports that Crock and the truth still aren't on the best of terms...
Somerby rushes to defend the Gorebot (big surprise there), and says that his critics won't challenge him on the facts... except here and here, I guess...
The Godfather (who is under attack by the usual suspects - isn't it a conflict of interest at this point for Buck-toothed Moron to try to get him off the air?) says that the latest terror arrest would be impossible under Jamie Gorelick...
Rep. Sam Johnson, no "chickenhawk," has a revelation that could be incredibly damaging to the JFKerry... camp...
Kaus points to this lie from Sandy Berger:
Berger said, “John Kerry has been amazingly consistent from the beginning on Iraq and he has been consistently right on the need for troops” and other issues.Can the Dems just give up on this whole "consistency" line already?But in the past eight months, Kerry has reversed his position on sending more American troops to Iraq.
In an April 30 Fulton, Mo., speech Kerry said that if U.S. commanders in Iraq need more troops then “they should get them.”
Yet last September in a debate with other Democratic contenders in Albuquerque, N.M, Kerry emphatically opposed sending more American troops to Iraq. “We should not send more American troops,” he said on Sept 4. “That would be the worst thing. We do not want to have more Americanization, we do not want a greater sense of American occupation.”
Looks like MorOn.org is promoting a movie about as intelligent as its readers...
This is arguably the worst gaffe JFKerry... has made in this campaign, yet it's hardly received any attention outside of Newsmax and perhaps the Godfather... So not a total waste of bandwidth anyway...
May 27, 2004
Jonah Goldberg spells it out about Hollings:
Hollings claims he can prove he's right about the war by providing quotes from Jews who supported spreading democracy in the Middle East or toppling Saddam to bolster Israel's security.I'm sure such quotes are available, but so what? How does that demonstrate Bush's motives? There's no evidence that he — or Karl Rove or Dick Cheney or anyone else including Paul Wolfowitz — were motivated by Israel's interests instead of America's.
In fact, the only politician I know of who admitted to that motive was Hollings. "The truth is," he declared on the Senate floor in 2003, "I thought. we were going in this time for our little friend Israel. Instead of them being blamed, we could finish up what Desert Storm had left undone; namely, getting rid of Saddam and getting rid of (his) nuclear (weapons) at the same time."
If the Iraq war had been a smashing success, I somehow doubt Hollings would be giving the Jews credit for his pro-war vote, instead of the blame. So, if there's evidence that Hollings is anti-Semitic, it's not that he blamed Israel, it's that he blamed his "little friend" Israel only when he needed a scapegoat.
Factcheck.org goes after the lying liars at the League of Conservation Voters...
