Emily Litella's Favorite Blogger

Disingenu-PUNDIT

I have over the years taken a special interest / dislike for one of the alleged “deans”of the blogosphere as we know it. That alleged “dean” being one Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a.k.a. “Instapundit”. Many moons ago, I commented at another blog, Tony Pierce's Busblog—one of the first I ever read regularly, about ol' Insty, and I was to say the least...brutal. I hadn't been boppin' about the “verse” for very long, but it didn't take much time for me to see Reynolds for the mendacious, disingenuous and often cowardly hack he was (is).

One of the things that struck me about him was that calculated aloofness he'd trot out when there was a policy or talking point he wanted to pimp like his name was “Silky” while maintaining a bogus patina of “But hey, I'm not really pimping this.” He trots this angle out whenever a truly heinous blogospheric fellow traveler says something so off-the-wall racist / xenophobic / hopelessly retrograde / war-mongering that it cannot be defended by sane, decent-hearted folk.

So, he simply links with a quote-grab and follows it with a “Heh.” or “Indeed”, or the truly madddening “This is interesting / troubling / a cause for concern”, and leave the just-squeezed-out turd there a' steaming on the page.

Another favorite tack of his (outside of his infamous tendency to ignore wingnut damaging stories and scandals for days and weeks, only to say “I don't know enough about this to comment, but it seems like nothing.”, and his even more craven tendency to throw up odd photo pictorials when something truly ghastly bites his conservative pals on their pasty asses—usually a weird “I'm walking around the campus with this camera so I don't have to be at my desk fielding calls and seeing online coverage of the horror I know is going on.”) is to run a particular line of reasoning into the ground when it supports his GOP masters—often with his own brand of sour, bitchy snark—and then when that same point rears its head when it cuts the other way and can help a progressive, utterly forget how he thought it was okay when his side did it, and then pillory liberals for it like they fucking killed somebody.

The rope-belted perfesser's latest play on this was his eye-bulgingly insipid OpEd piece in the New York Times this past Monday where he championed the dialing back of the vice-president's powers now that his pal Dick Cheney is about to slither off into the mists like one of those awful hell-wraiths from the movie “Ghost”:

The presidential campaign has taken a detour into a dispute over the constitutional status of the vice presidency. It all started when Sarah Palin asserted in her debate with Joe Biden that the vice president should play an important role in the legislative branch.

Ms. Palin has been roundly mocked for her claim. But she was probably right.... Aside from the job of replacing a president who dies or is unable to serve, the only vice presidential duties that are spelled out in the Constitution are legislative in character.

But if the vice president is a legislative official, then the exercise of executive power by the vice president raises important constitutional questions related to the separation of powers....

----------------------------------------------------

Extensive vice presidential involvement in the executive branch — the role enjoyed by Dick Cheney and Al Gore — is not only unconstitutional, but also a bad idea.

This is as much as I will link to this passive-aggressive cyber-lout, but if you're a blogospheric crawler like me, you're pretty clear on the following...

You can find almost nowhere where on this clown's blog where he's as much as a whispered “boo” about Dick Cheney's abuses of power being extra-constitutional. In fact, He snickered, “heh-indeeded”, and lame-snarked his way through every one of Dickie-boy's excesses.

Why? Because Vice-President Cheney's enemy was also his enemy—liberals, progressives and Democrats—and Reynolds got his spiteful jollies over how the flint-hearted bastard pushed our every button. Now, as it is becoming apparent that “his” team may well come up empty, he's gone all furrow-browed and concern troll-y on us and “gasp!” suddenly fears for the democracy.

And note his wanna-be crafty attempt to conflate Gore and Cheney in his little whining grafs. If he was going to be forced even mildly rebuke the excesses of Halliburton's man at 1600 Penn, he made damn sure he was going to do it while taking down the last Veep, who was nowhere near as powerful, and in fact was shut out of much of then President Clinton's decision-making (due to those strong egos clashing, mostly), and relegated to much of the drudgery that the position draws its mockery for.

We can break it down simply...

Do you recall anything about Vice President Al Gore being involved if the manipulation of intelligence information to justify a needless war?

Heaven help us! Where was the outcry over Gore's obvious conflict of interest over profiting from one of said war's biggest contractors as a corporate officer of that company?

Was Albert Gore Jr. a secretive paranoid who sought to illegally hide everything he did / had a hand in while in office, and failing that, shredded just about important paper with his name in it—and that which was not destroyed was locked away in mammoth, custom-built safes like they were spent nuclear fuel rods?

Did he unprecedentedly sit in on presidential depositions as some sort of consigliere, whispering evasive hints and answers to a deer-in-the-headlights / lie-stymied Commander-in-Chief when tough questions the country needed answers to were asked?

And I do believe we all missed Mr. Gore's drunkenly shot-gunning a man in the face on a hunting trip for losers, and then abusing his powers to cover the act up long enough to get his people's lies together—before the press got wind of the Rumplemintz-fueled debacle, didn't we?

No. Those things didn't happen to Al Gore. But there actually were a couple of extra-constitutional things that Al Gore was at the nexus of, that Reynolds is very much on record of having a huge problem with...

Those things being Gore's winning of both the Oscar™and the Nobel Prize.

And being the duplicitous, fork-tongued shill that he is, his game now is to “tsk-tsk” at this newly dudgeoned vice-presidential “overstepping” and change every rule he's looked the other way on for the last eight years. It is now time for 'restraint!' to be championed as “The Barely Competent Snow-billy” appears to not be in line for the job. And if it means now lengthening the playing field, raising the goalposts forty feet, making a touchdown count for merely three points and extra points kicked while blindfolded, “so be it!” The republic is at risk...um, now that is.

Watching Reynolds do this routine is like watching a typically badly written and worse-acted “amnesia” story arc on an old soap opera. We, the viewers know the character well—for years—know the character's deeds pre-blow to the head, and can see the reversed, post noggin-knock ones. But you're never fooled, really. You know it's the same damn person, and as soon as the “sweeps month” is over, they'll go right back to their familiar old ways and schemes. Best of all though, are the melodramatic plots where said character is obviously faking the amnesia for sympathy, or... to perhaps further a bigger scam.

There will be more of this sort of revisionist folderol from the whiny-ass titty babies on the right should Wednesday, the day after, turn out to be the red, black and green-flagged, unwaking nightmare they so dread. It will now be the time for cautiousness and thoughtfulness for them—meaning that the big-footing their side engaged in for much of the last eight years will be pooh-poohed by them as a kind of unfortunate, but distant eons-past annoyance. Now the brake must be ridden hard and bold, and majority maneuvers must be brought to heel. Reynolds is something of a master at mealy-mouthed “thoughtfulness”. He plays at moderation and impartiality with his off-blog persona, working the concerned geek role like a slave-driver at harvest time. This is the faux-vanilla Reynolds folks see on CNN's “Reliable Sources” and the Times' Op-Ed page. But while milking that for what little integrity he may appear to possess, it is his every-day gig under the maroon flag JPEG where he is truly himself, bleating and squawking GOP approved talkling points in that “Oh, I dunno...I just heard about this and I'm so surprised I find myself believing it. Imagine that!” tone. Worse yet though, is his real stock and trade—his shady-assed linking to and barely-masked promotion of the most batshitteous people and stories on the right while playing the role of above-it-all “aggregator”.

When his side is in the crapper over something—“big time”—he gives himself away with those psyche-exposing posts that dare go beyond a few words. The ones where his spitefulness and pettiness erupt like a just-popped boil. It was only last week when the desperate fool hopped aboard Drudge's “Chifferobe-gate” failboat and drowned twenty feet from shore in Hate Harbor with this 'premature no-factual-ation':

MCCAIN VOLUNTEER ATTACKED AND MUTILATED IN PITTSBURGH:

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said. . . .

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

(Ed. Note from LM— HERE IS REYNOLDS PISSY PITHY CODA:) This is so serious that I predict it will get almost one-tenth as much national coverage as something some guy may have yelled at a Palin rally once.

Yes...he was waving the bloody-“B”-stained towel around as:

A.), A talking point to get his digs in at a media that displeases him when it doesn't run with the message of the day he and his masters wants them to (and let's be real...to hate on a media his un-telegenic, vanilla ass can't ever quite supercede in spite of the millions sunk into “Pajamas Media”)...

...B.), A completely false (in every way we would discover) comparative between the behavior of the respective camps supporters...

...And C.), a lame dodge for the video-documented, creeptastic racism displayed at McCain / Palin campaign rallies. And note the bitchy tone he huffs along with in his “Taggies, no tag-backs! Nyah-nyah!” capper to the “game-changer” he snagged in his teeth after it was squeezed out by his pal Drudge.

That's the “thoughtful”, sober-thinking, third-tier law professor / concern-troll who wrote that Op-Ed in his true form—that of a bitter wingnut with a persecution complex—and nary an intellectually honest bone in his body.

To whom I simply say, kindly stick your selective, bullshit amnesia where the sun don't shine.

You dished it out for eight years. Now, you take it, tough guy.

But that Times piece proves you can't, can you? Well...go for it, Insty. Knock yourself out.

No, Literally. Knock yourself out.






























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That Crazy Genie Is Loose And Happy...And Hates Its Goddamned Bottle

“Um...yeah, Master? About that 'Your wish is my command' crap?' Um...Nope!”

It's the age-old parable. Man creates uncontrollable monster. Man uses uncontrollable monster for his own selfish gain. Uncontrollable monster is of course, un-controllable and does heinous things. Man tries to bring uncontrollable monster to heel. Uncontrollable monster says “Fuck that!” and it all goes downhill from there. From the legend of Frankenstein, to tales of lamp and bottle-chucking genies going for theirs, to the attempted “taming” of King Kong and Disney's in-over-his-head Sorcerer's Apprentice it's a well-worn story where ego-fueled “masters” grossly underestimate the destructive forces they unleash when they tamper with that which no man can truly harness.

We spoke on the original “Three M's” from last week—“McCain, The Mattresses, and Menace”, his campaign's harsh and incendiary words. And thanks to John McCain's desperate, reckless political gambit, we find ourselves reminded of three other “M's”, linked through tales we all know, and as noted above, once released, nigh impossible to re-contain—Magic, Monsters, and Murderous Rage.

The play backfired. Badly for him. Shakily mounting the Ayers stalking horse himself like some city-poser playing cowboy-tough, and with Sarah Palin doing the vile scut work of trawling the depths of wingnut fear-mongering and regurgitating that crap with such dippy glee that folks wondered if she was medicated...it all seems to have come apart. He has stoked his crowds—his racist, hate-filled republican base crowds to such a high temperature of intolerance that the news media felt that ugly heat a mile away and reported on it, and ol' Johnny boy himself took some third degree burns to whatever prestige remained attached to him.

He may have also helped to crispy-critter his party's brand with this reach into the realm of ugly. And his in-party co-horts are pissed.

Senior members of the Republican party are in open mutiny against John McCain's presidential campaign, after a disastrous period which has seen Barack Obama solidify his lead in the opinion polls.

And as disputes raged within the McCain camp yesterday, Democrats took another symbolic step towards healing the party after their bitter primary battles, as Bill and Hillary Clinton made their first joint appearance in support of Mr Obama.

From inside and outside his inner circle, Mr McCain is being told to settle on a coherent economic message and to tone down attacks on his rival which have sometimes whipped up a mob-like atmosphere at Republican rallies.

Two former rivals for the party nomination, Mitt Romney and Tommy Thompson, went on the record over the weekend about the disarray in the Republican camp. And a string of other senior party figures said Mr McCain's erratic performance risks taking the party down to heavy losses not just in the presidential race but also in contests for Congressional seats. Mr Thompson, a former governor of the swing state of Wisconsin, said he thought Mr McCain, on his present trajectory, would lose the state, and he told a New York Times reporter he was not happy with the campaign. “I don't know who is,” he added.

GOP'ers love to trot out the old “11th Commandment” of Ronald Reagan: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.”, as evidence of their party unity. Evidently there was a little-discussed “Commandment 11A” scrawled at the bottom of Saint Ronnie's jellybean jar that only a few read back then, but many seem to know now. Said addendum reads...“unless the idiot's gonna blow our shit sky high.”

And Johnny's fucking with dynamite, kids.

It was evident he was rallying the nutbar base of his party as independents have begun to tune him and his cave-bright co-hort the hell on out. A desperate ploy, this going all native, you see. But this maverick whipped mule, with the polls sliding and his chances getting away from him released that genie, sought to domesitcate “Kong”, and messed about with the Sorcerer's powerful spellbook, and of course the ensuing situation got away from him embarrassingly. When you have one guy campaigning on “Hope”, and “Change”, and detailing how he's gonna fix the broken stuff in political D.C., while the other guy's got screaming, crazy supporters citing chain-letter, black helicopter bullshit as the reason they're “a-skeered”, and how the opponent must be bombed, defeated, or killed, well...that's gonna look bad for the latter guy.

Of course, he didn't realize that until the external poll numbers began fleeing away from him, and didn't even hint at changing up until the internal numbers clearly (although they'll NEVER admit to it) imploded. The sane among us saw those crazies at his rallies—the “He's a terrorist!”, “Bomb him!”, “Kill him” crowd and didn't have to make a Bob Beamon leap to see the dangerous place that anger was going. Those lunatics are that hard-nut core who will back the worst, most retrograde shit, and cannot stand the very idea of being either called out on their obvious biases or being out of impactful power. Both of those things trigger a pathological response in these “people”—a misplaced, transferred play at victimhood. The same kind of victimhood” seen in D.W. Griffiths' “Birth Of A Nation”, where beleagured Whites were forced—forced I tell you!—to take up arms, sheets, coned hoods and blazing crosses against the Black menace that post-emancipation “threatened” the country.

The unnervingly bitter folks in these videos speak volumes.





Yes, I said “bitter”. What turned these moments into a pro-Obama springboard was their clear validation of a painful early Obama campaign narrative come a' cropper...namely that “bitterness” he spoke of during the primary season. It manifests itself in these brusque moments and the countless others chronicled since John McCain decided to beat the whackdoodle beehive with a tree limb and think he could tell the bees that swarmed out what to sting and when. It plays to Obama's not only having been right, but also sagely prescient about how these folks will “go to ground” when the shit hits the fan.

And for them it is clear, a Black person at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and not working in the kltchen is the shit hitting the fan.

McCain and Palin knew exactly what they were doing when they played these cards with the crazies across from them at the table. They just didn't figure on everybody else instead of following these sad lunatics, standing back and disassociating themselves from the bigoted batshittery. And in isolating those morally sick people with the candidates who amped them up, and then puiblicizing the stupidity of their words, McCain's gamble wound up crapping out. “Regular” folks didn't want to be lumped in with “those” vicious goons who sounded like the loudmouth sidewalk bystanders from old newsreeels screaming invective at civil rights marchers.

Shame is a helluva thing. When the polls worsened for McCain after this ill-thought-out / ill-timed tack, the situation in fact, blew up so badly that McCain had to beat his “monster” back with a flaming torch alá Frankenstein's Monster by talking his most insane “supporters” down from dementia as noted above. The stumped “No?” from the crazed anti-Arab woman is priceless. It's as if she's saying “But that's what I got from what you were saying, John...”

McCain even had to issue a press release disavowing the wild rhetoric he sired, and worst of all for him—for once he had to publicly acknowledge Senator Obama as a human being with feelings in trying to clean up after his 'followers' hateful verbal diarrhea.

And then, it put wingnuttia's most prominent shills on the defensive as well. When you have the likes of the rope-belted perfesser, Glenn “Instahack” Reynolds and Michelle “Diss The Cheerleader And You Save The World” Malkin running scared, and running interference to cover for the nuts they play to, but make believe they don't, you know a line got crossed.

First, Reynolds: (No links. Crawl through the cybersewer “Shawshank Redemption”-style to find their turds.)

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)...

...The double standards involved --particularly on the part of the press -- are what are feeding this anger...

...So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory? Self-control is for everybody, if it's for anybody...

And then, our poor, special child Shellykins has the blogospheric equivalent of a two-year old's shit-fit while sprawled on the floor of a Stein-Mart:

The Obamedia is attempting to set yet another false narrative: The narrative of the McCain “mob.” McCain-Palin rallies are out of control, they wheedle. Conservatives are mad! They’re yelling mean things about Obama and calling him names! It’s scaaaaary!...

...Please.

Let’s talk about “insane rage” and “violent escalation.”
This is insane rage — Madonna bashing Sarah Palin and shrieking “I will kick her ass:”...

...This is insane rage — Sandra Bernhard bashing Sarah Palin and cursing her head off with hate warping her crazed face:..

...And speaking of violent escalation, let’s revisit the Unhinged: The Mugshot Collection for the violent escalation last election cycle that the Obamedia ignored:...

The two whine-fests are funny for so many reasons. One, you can tell when something is under Instahack's onion-thin skin because you can feel the abject agony of his having to actually write something beyond “Heh”, “Indeed”, “Ouch!” or somesuch passive-aggressive pablum that ends up agreeing with heinous winger shit. Two, when he's going on about the mean, old press being responsible for these kooks' anger, remember...this is the clown who's been crowing like a rooster with short-term memory disorder about the death of the old media, and their loss of influence. As they are apparently being replaced by such new “Tiffany Network”-grade work as seen at Pajamas Media, of course. Malkin's piggy squeal though, first comes off like some over-the-top ad-lib shit off the “Mean Girls” cutting-room floor—“It's scaaaaaaary!” But that's almost appropriate, considering her emotional maturity level (Hey, she may have actually written this little screed herself, by gum!), and then she lapses into the lamest defense since The Patriots' fourth quarter ass-tumbling last winter against the Giants. “Waaaaaaaaaah! Lookit what they did!”—followed up with mealy-ass filler from her most recent bound failure of a string of consonants and vowels, “Unhinged”. (This will NOT bump up sales Malky, sell 'em outta your trunk like the hoodrat snuff-fiction you know it's equal to)

But notice one key thing about these two leading-low lights and their defenses. There's not a shred of contrition, folks. If anything, there's more of the “Raaaaaaaaargh! I hate, therefore I am victimized!” keening. Why?

Simple. It goes back to something I said two weeks ago about today's wingnuts when I called them “The Lost Generation”.

...And the likes of Palin and her fellow travelers, skipping down the road of stupid like Dorothy, The Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow...not in quest of heart, home, courage and yes...brain, but power instead—represent the core of what passes for leadership on the right. There is NO brilliant—but wittily evil mind on their side like Bill Buckley's any more. His generation is dead and gone, and he was at least entertaining in a thought-provokingly maddening sort of way. No. What we have is a cloud of dumb-assery, raining grating “Dontchas”, “Betchas”, “Hear-yas”, and “Back-to-yas!” upon us to where we stand knee-deep in in a sludge of bullshit and stupid.

There remains only a vestigial brain—just sophisticated enough to walk, breathe, chew gum and hate with.

The modern-day republican is hammer-to-the-temple stupid and is reduced to just a hateful “id”. Reynolds and Malkin and those hooligans at the rallies exemplify it. They are never wrong—somehow only provoked and misunderstood. Pushed to their state of crazy by a world gone mad.

Bullshit.

In Robert Louis Stevenson's original “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” the venal Hyde was not something that Jekyll became outside of himself. The brutal “Hyde” was a thing within him that if not acknowledged as a component, would repeatedly subsume him. (Which it does in the novel)

The GOP of today is the ascendant, unfettered Hyde. Jekyll is no more. Lamented in his passing by Andrew Sullivan and others through the reality of classic “conservatism's” having been overwhelmed by the lunatic fundie base. The genie is out of the bottle for good now, and that scares the living hell out of the sane and sober “silent majority” of classic republicans. What we see at these rallies is the inbred children of old-line Birchers, and Wallace-ites, raised on Rush and Coulter on home-school talk ray-diddio, and taught to read by reciting black helicopter-and-illuminati-filled chain letters. They were looked at as the “special” kid the shamed GOP elites kept in an attic closet or in a special hidey box like “The Gimp” in “Pulp Fiction”. Well, a desperate John McCain has set those maladjusted people loose—to spark something...Anything!—to get his campaign turned around and instead, it blew up in his face.

Exposing him as craven and feckless, and them as the damaged loons we always knew they were but were maybe too reticent to group in.

The reason you can't stop these people is because they are “the base”. That core 25-28% who still support Bush in spite of his royal 'King Feces Touch' and will back anything a nut with an “R” in front of his name and a bible under his arm says. They are the concentrated pure essence and cannot be diluted at this point—for they are what remains. You can't ask something that is what it is to be something else. The dangerously flawed John McCain chose to appeal directly to them—and not the independents who've abandoned him in droves, because they are the shock troops, the instant offense you go to when you need a furtive boost. Not what you base a winning team on.

John McCain's sweaty desperation helped him to forget that. And now the big, ugly gear of intolerance in the republican machine has laid itself bare. For the Reynolds' and Malkins of the world on piss-pot damage control duty, there is NO spin away. There is no masking what those crowds are down with.

You can try to stuff that genie back in the bottle, Johnny-Boy. But first, you'll have to glue that fucker back together after you smashed it open in a panic.

And now that the genie's (a pretty powerful one, too) tasted freedom, thanks to you...it's gonna be damn near impossible to get it to “go home”.

'Cause those blinks when it gets angry are no joke.

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Glenn Reynolds Instaputz

I wonder if Reynolds will have his 'PorkBusters' report on this:

Commerce, Treasury funds helped boost GOP campaigns

WASHINGTON - Top Commerce and Treasury department officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.

I know how much he hates government waste, earmarks, and pork, Funny how he started hating it from Nov. 2006. Lets see how outraged he will be about this waste of the taxpayers money

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