Right Wing Nut House

It is very likely in the next few hours that I will be forced to flee my home due to flooding. It appears only a miracle will be able to save the house and most of my possessions. We don’t have an “upstairs” that we can move things although we’ve taken a lot of stuff to the loft in the garage.

This happened to me back in ‘94 but at the time, I was living on the second floor of an apartment building. This time, I’m not so lucky.

If blogging is interrupted for a few days, I hope you keep checking back. For make no mistake, the first chance I get, I will start posting again.

UPDATE: 7:00 PM

Dodged one bullet. Three more behind it. Then along about 9:00 PM, another round sweeps in from Iowa.

Forecast tomorrow? Yep. More T-Storms day and night.

UPDATE: 10:15 - “SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME”

The band of storms that were supposed to hit here between 7-10 missed us by around 25 miles to the south. O’Hare got drowned. I hear the Woodfield Mall parking lot is a lake. But we haven’t had a drop since 6:30 and the water has actually receded a few inches.

Funny - measuring hope in inches. But when you’re looking for a sign that catastrophe is avoided, you’ll grasp at anything.

I wonder if Noah had a lifeboat?

One more round to go - early in the AM. Firemen told me to sleep in the living room in case I have to move quickly. Hopefully, I’ll be here to blog about things in the AM.

UPDATE: STILL HERE

Wow. Just Wow. If my luck keeps holding like this, I may just abandon my atheism and embrace religion.

Everything that was being forecast to hit us, drifted to the south instead. We got a little drizzle a bit after midnight but that was all. This morning, the creek has receded several feet.

Not out of the woods yet. They’re still predicting T-Storms for most of the day. And the ground is very saturated - swampy to be precise. But the water in my sub basement hasn’t harmed anything and is starting to go down.

Blogging will continue as normal for the time being.

My internet has been acting goofy since a terrific T-storm hit around 6:00 AM this morning. It seems that my next door neighbor and I are the only ones experiencing this on again-off again phenomena. Comcast says someone will be out around noon to see what the trouble is.

I apologize for not having anything new and invigorating for your to read. However, until I do get something up, allow me to direct your attention to the comments in my post from yesterday about our beloved truthers.

Aside from having to delete a good dozen comments for obscenities, the rest of our querulous gang of self deluded nincompoops tried their hand at comedy writing - with mixed results. Some of their pleas to LISTEN TO THEM - and you can always tell when they are serious because THEY ALWAYS CAPITALIZE THE WORDS - are indeed, worthy of the Daily Show. Others are more indicative of the scribblings of 7 year olds who have been given paper and crayons at the institution in which they are rightfully ensconced.

Either way, if you wish to peer into the minds of the truly lost, peruse the comments from yesterday. I guarantee an eye opening experience.

I’ll have something up around mid afternoon I hope.

There didn’t seem to be a link to any kind of a form to register. At least, I can’t figure out where it is.

Therefore, we’re back to where we were comments wise. NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

When I open my new site next month, I will definitely have comment registration. Until then, enjoy.

I’ve finally given in and enabled comment registration. I’m sick of moderating comments just to keep one or two juvenile delinquents off the site so once you register (and your first comment is moderated) you should be able to post comments without any problem.

Sometimes, IE goofs up in registering. If so, click on the contact form in the upper right sidebar and let me know. Make sure you leave a legitimate email address and a preferred username so I can email you back a temporary password that you will be able to change once you are in the system.

Friday afternoon and not much shaking in the world - nothing that really grabs me by the short hairs and starts to pull anyway.

How about a nice little diversion - one guaranteed to start the contrarian juices in all my lefty trolls running hot and heavy. And one that’s a certified winner with my conservative readers because most of these quotes will highlight good old fashioned American values (well, most of them anyway).

How about everyone list a few of their favoite one liners from movies?

No speeches. Gotta be one line (okay - we’ll make allowances if the two lines are inseparable.) And we like to be accurate here so here’s a link to the Internet Movie Database where I’m sure you can find the exact quote.

The very fact that these lines are favorites probably means they are already cliches. But in the context of watching the movie, they are still special and deserve to be honored. If you are going to be obscure about it, that’s fine but I hope you get in the spirit of the game and allow everyone the pleasure of fondly recalling the line in question.

As much as I’d like to claim authorship of this idea, Andrew Sullivan beat me to it. Sully weighs in with his favorite:

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”
(Dolores Claiborne)

Well done. I know women like that. And as Sully says in his post, this will not be Hillary’s campaign slogan!

10. “I hope this doesn’t make my cold any worse.”
(Jane Fonda before having sex with Donald Sutherland in Klute)

9. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
(The Great and Powerful Oz in The Wizard of Oz)

8. “Welcome to Sherwood!”
(Errol Flynn in Robin Hood)

7. “One God, that I can understand, but one wife, that is not civilized.”
(Hugh Griffith in Ben-Hur)

6. “It’s entirely innocent, I am!”
(Errol Flynn in Captain Blood)

5. “Republic. I like the sound of the word.”
(John Wayne in The Alamo)

4. “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”
(Charlton Heston in A Touch of Evil)

3. “Say allo to mah litta frient!”
(Al Pacino in Scarface)

2. “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
(Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind)

1. “Leave the gun. Take the cannolis.”
(Richard S. Castellano in The Godfather)

Have fun! Comment moderation is off.

Michelle Malkin links to my last post on the Blogs and Beauchamp, showing her disagreement by linking to this eloquent, dignified post by Bryan at Hot Air on why, in fact, the Beauchamp story is considered very important by the military:

How important, in the grand scheme of the war, is the Scott Thomas Beauchamp story? By itself, it’s not all that important. But contrary to the opinions of those who can’t be bothered to care about it but nonetheless opine on it for whatever reason, and then mainly to downplay its importance, Beauchamp hasn’t happened all by itself and to those of us who served, its context and trajectory make it very important.

For the record, my downplaying of the importance of the story doesn’t mean that I believe it to be inconsequential. Nor, as Ace believes, does it mean that I am denigrating the efforts of those who brought elements of the story to light that eventually debunked Beauchamp’s claims. Why must everything in blogs be all or nothing? Is there no place where proportionality matters? A little nuance? A little deeper look at something rather than the raw, emotional primal scream of irrationality?

I read Ace’s post with a growing sense of perplexity. It’s impossible to respond to because he is criticizing what I was thinking while writing. He confidently ascribes motivations to me when he doesn’t know me from Adam and I doubt whether he’s read me in a year - maybe two. Maybe never.

Criticizing what I write is one thing. Criticizing what I believe is fair game. Smearing me for being reasonable? For having an original thought? Divining my “true” intent how? Does Ace have a window into my soul? Is he a mind reader? If you can read that post at Ace’s without scratching your head in wonderment at how someone who doesn’t know me, never met me, rarely, if ever, reads me can accuse me of all that perfidious thought, then perhaps you would be good enough to come back here and explain it to me. It is simply and literally, beyond belief.

Perplexing, indeed.

But Bryan’s points deserve a response.

There were few who stood up for the troops after Vietnam, but that’s a shame that shouldn’t be and won’t be repeated. The Beauchamp story comes down to a simple thing that most who never served in the military may not understand, and that’s the linked concepts of service and honor. It’s an honor to serve in the US military. With that honor comes responsibility not to besmirch the uniform or let down your comrades. Some obviously don’t live up to that honor. It’s up to the rest of us to protect that honor, keep its value high and keep the traditions of the service worthy of honor.

No, I have never served in the military. I have written in the past about my associations with soldiers and how they were different than most people I knew - especially when I was younger. Military people have a sense of duty and honor that that they have no problem wearing on their sleeve. They don’t brag about it. But they are obviously proud that they have a strict code by which they live their lives. I came to respect that aspect of my military friends enormously. In a very real way, I was jealous of that kind of commitment.

So it is not surprising that military bloggers would take the Beauchamp story personally. I understand and agree. I said in the post that it was important to debunk the claims of Beauchamp in order to undo the damage done to the military.

What more should I have said? And herein lies the concept of proportionality. Is it that I’m not sufficiently triumphant? Another MSM scalp nailed to the lodgepole so break out the drums and let’s party? Alright, allow me to express my pure joy at sticking it to TNR - they deserve the shellacking.

But no. It appears that because I point out that all of this amounts to a hill of beans outside Blogdom by making the ridiculous claims that it won’t win the war or mitigate the effect of Abu Ghraib all of a sudden, people want links to bloggers who actually make those claims? What? Where do I say any bloggers say those things? I am deliberately blowing out of proportion the effect of claiming Beauchamp’s scalp to illustrate the futility of taking it too seriously when contemplating the larger picture of the war and even fixing the black eye given to the military by TNR’s lies.

Yes it is important to the military folk that this is done. And for the reasons so eloquently written by Bryan. And yes it is important to debunk false claims on anything made by the media. I hope blogs will always do this.

But not surprisingly, no blogs or commenters below have addressed the thrust of my argument; that these blogswarms blow things out of proportion until the story takes on an importance far beyond anything having to do with the world outside of this cliquish little circle of blogs and blog readers. Is there another way to accomplish exactly the same thing without this happening? Is that such a ridiculous question?

Allow me to post Bryan’s summation:

Besides all of that, truth matters. “Fake but accurate” amounts to a lie, TNR. And in a post-modern war such as the one we’re fighting, and especially as we place more emphasis on the morality of our actions in war than on actually winning it by defeating the enemy, Beauchamp represents an informational attack on our ability to wage war. Words are weapons. Loss of morale leads to loss in war, by the way we fight wars now. Letting his smears stand has the potential of letting another toilet-Koran story to get out there into the infowar zone unchallenged. So again, stopping that from happening is just the right thing to do.

To read my post and say I disagree with any of that would mean you should be working on your cognitive skills, gentle readers. And if my lack of enthusiasm for this victory upsets you, I’m sorry. But there is no need for the kind of wild denunciations made by Ace nor some of your comments below which put words in my mouth and thoughts in my head that simply aren’t there.

Getting caught up in a blog swarm on a particular topic can be hazardous. The very fact that so many are writing about the same thing can generate its own momentum, its own “narrative.” Each succeeding blogger who writes about the subject feels compelled to attach just a little more meaning, a little more importance to the story until the original subject has been blown so far out of proportion that it becomes lost amidst the cacophony of dramatic “revelations” and “gotchya” moments.

It is a phenomena of our media that continues to make us look like a bunch of idiots. Dissecting a topic until the short hairs are showing solves nothing, reveals nothing except our contempt for proportionality and the truth. Is it any wonder real reporters and editors are a little perplexed when they observe something like the outburst that accompanied Jill Carroll’s release from captivity or the huge to do over the Jeff Gannon episode?

Regarding Scott Beauchamp, everyone take a step back, inhale deeply (put the bong DOWN first), and let’s look at what the blogs hath wrought.

Blogs have exposed a military fabulist in Scott Beauchamp. His lies did not contribute to a lessening of war fervor among the American people. George Bush, the Pentagon, the left, and the Iraqi government have all seen to that little detail, thank you. Nor did Beauchamp’s fairy tales embolden al-Qaeda, the insurgents, the Iranian backed militias, or any of the other bloody minded, murderous thugs who are making Iraq a living hell for the people there. And while Beauchamp’s fibbing did not do the reputation of the military any good, Jesse Spielman and his 4 compatriots, the soldiers just convicted of raping and murdering a 14 year old Iraqi girl and her family, harmed that reputation on a scale that poor little Scotty Beauchamp and his stories of dog killing and teasing disfigured women could never approach in a million years.

This is the reality outside of Blogdom. Exposing Beauchamp was a good thing, don’t get me wrong. But holding TNR and their soon to be ex-editor Franklin Foer to account for their laziness, their bias, and their incompetence is enough. That and putting a poultice on the black eye Beauchamp deliberately gave the military is all the victory that blogs can claim in this matter.

Decloaking Beauchamp will not bring us closer to “victory” in Iraq - if such a thing existed outside of the fevered imaginations of an ever dwindling number of conservatives. It will not make up for Abu Ghraib - another story whose perceived importance far, far outweighed any relationship to the reality of what actually happened. It will not induce the American people to change their minds and embrace the war effort. Nor will it shut the left up which, while something devoutly to be desired, is alas an effort doomed to failure.

This medium, we have to keep reminding ourselves, is still fairly new. And as more and more people enter the blog universe - many looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - it is inevitable that they too, wish to get in on the fun of scalp hunting. One way to climb up the winding stairs to the top of the ziggurat is to outshout your competitors while attaching more importance to a story than it deserves. This will get you traffic, links, and the admiration of your fellow bloggers.

I understand the game. I’ve played it for three years, shamelessly piling on and then shooting off emails to big bloggers hoping they would find my insightful, pithy comments about the swarm du jour good enough to link. There’s nothing inherently dishonest in this method of self-promotion - unless what you write isn’t what you truly feel in which case you won’t last long anyway. But I truly believe now that blogs have to move beyond this phase. To what end, I have no idea. I couldn’t have foreseen where blogs are now 3 years ago when I started so my powers of prognostication when it comes to blogging and internet media are practically nil.

I only know a growing sense of unease elicited by the notion that by overhyping stories like the Beauchamp caper, the credibility of the medium suffers. For that reason alone, it may be time to put down the blood stained hatchets and begin to seriously examine just what we should be doing that will increase our influence rather than make us look like a bunch of one dimensional attack dogs.

I will be on the O’Reilly Factor tonight to talk about YearlyKos.

Michelle Malkin will be guest hosting and I’ll be on with NPR’s Juan Williams to mix it up over the radicalism or not of the attendees.

Since I live 55 miles away, they’re sending a limo to pick me up. I’ll think about all of you as I’m sipping champagne and eating banned foie gras in the backseat.

UPDATE: LIVEBLOGGING MY TAPED APPEARANCE ON THE FACTOR

Off camera - saying hello to Michelle. She’s nice.

7:01 - There I am. SHEESH! Lose some weight, dog.

7:03 - Contradicting the host - surefire way to get yourself invited back - especially after she set up the piece with a slice of Hillary. “It’s Kucinich, not Hillary.”

Dope.

7:05 - Blah, blah, blah - oh yeah keep smiling dummy.

7:06 - (Breathe…in…out…in…out…)

7:07 - HATEMONGERING LEFTY LIBTARD PHILISTINES!

7:08 - “By the way, Juan. Please pass the Grey Poupon…”

7:09 - And we’re out. Take that thing out of my ear - not you, the nice looking woman who unbuttoned my shirt to mike me up.

Hubba, Hubba.

Thanks to Michelle for inviting me. Next time, I’ll try “English as a second language” so that everyone understands me.

UPDATE: 8/7

Here’s the transcript from last night’s show.

And Allah, as always, has the video.

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.Com referred to Michelle Malkin.Com and Michelle’s video blog Hot Air as “hate sites.” His reasoning, as always, is obscure. Evidently, Mr. Greenwald believes that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If Michelle Malkin is going to refer to DailyKos as a “hate site” for the thuggish commenters that consistently spout the most outrageous and hateful nonsense about Bush, Cheney, and conservative Republicans then, in the interests of fairness, he should be able to point to comments on Malkin’s sites as examples of similar “hate speech” so that he can triumphantly stick out his tongue and say “So there.”

The problem for Mr. Greenwald is that in his eagerness to smear Michelle Malkin and her blogs, he neglected to mention the elementary fact that Malkin never said anything about the DailyKos commenters on The Factor show that she hosted. Instead, Malkin highlighted remarks by Kos himself (”I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries [sic]. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.”) as well as those diarists who were featured or recommended. These posts were not “cherry picked” comments as inferred by Mr. Greenwald, although Mr. O’Reilly evidently used that tactic when confronting a spokesman for Senator Clinton.

Since Malkin never used the tactic, Greenwald’s article would appear to be even less relevant than most of his tiresome, overheated rants turn out to be. However, let us give Greenwald his head for the moment and examine his charges.

As the Comment Moderator for her site, Michelle was kind enough to grant me the privilege of posting a response to Mr. Greenwald’s unwarranted attacks on her blog. I do so with pleasure because I am proud of my association with Michelle Malkin and the vast majority of people who have become part of her blogging community.

First, a little history is in order. For nearly 3 years, Michelle Malkin did not allow any comments at all on her site. The reason was simple; liberals, who supposedly pride themselves on their tolerance toward those of different races were leaving the most disgusting, the most nauseatingly racist, bigoted comments imaginable - epithets slung in Malkin’s direction even to this day - and on so-called “respectable” liberal blogs that even Mr. Greenwald would find objectionable if not “hateful.”

A recent site redesign allowed Malkin the opportunity to once again make her blog an interactive site by opening registration for those who wished to obtain commenting privileges. And a privilege it is. The Terms of Use for commenting are explicit:

“I reserve the right to delete your comments or revoke your registration for any reason whatsoever. Rarely will I do so simply because I disagree with you. I will, however, usually do so if you post something that is, in my opinion, (a) off-topic; (b) libelous, defamatory, abusive, harassing, threatening, profane, pornographic, offensive, false, misleading, or which otherwise violates or encourages others to violate these terms of use or any law…”

In addition, above every comment thread, there is an additional disclaimer:

“This section is for comments from michellemalkin.com’s community of registered readers. Please don’t assume that I agree with or endorse any particular comment just because I let it stand.”

I read every comment made on the site and Michelle scans most of them as well. We are pretty ruthless in weeding out the vile, the threatening, the hateful remarks made by both right and left. And yes, we have several dozen liberal commenters on the site who, as long as they behave themselves and comment in a reasonable manner, are allowed to contribute. I sincerely doubt that there are many liberal sites with such a high tolerance for conservative commenters.

For those that can’t follow the Terms of Use, we ban them from commenting. Since comments were opened in mid-June, I have banned at least 3 dozen commenters for various infractions including anti-Muslim bigotry and racism. Michelle has also had to ban several readers for similar reasons. In addition, I have probably deleted a hundred or more comments in the 6 weeks commenting has been allowed, thus giving the lie to Greenwald’s ignorant remarks at the end of his piece:

On a daily basis, Michelle Malkin’s hate sites promote violence, rank bigotry, jihad against Muslim Americans, imprisonment of Democratic Party leaders. The comments are not deleted and are virtually never opposed.

Greenwald’s statement that the comments are “not deleted and are virtually never opposed” is simply not true. The idiocy of this statement is self-evident; how would he know if comments had been deleted or not? Greenwald’s psychic abilities (as well as his curious ability to morph into different personalities in order to comment on other sites) must be truly impressive if he is able to divine the fact that no comments have been deleted on this site. Perhaps he could hire himself out as a stock tout?

Many posts on the site are peppered with warnings from either myself or Michelle to dial back the rhetoric or risk being banned. This is something Greenwald’s crack researcher would have discovered if he spent time examining the blog for something other than his definition of “hate speech.” Indeed, this gets to the nub of the matter; just what does Glenn Greenwald consider “hate” speech?

Glenn Greenwald has a history of redefining terms to suit whatever argument he is making at the moment. This is not unusual - for a liberal. Language and definitions acquire a certain elasticity when in the expert hands of liberal wordsmiths like Greenwald. Hence, his idea of just what constitutes “hate speech” could very well mean one thing in one context and an entirely different thing in another. Would Alex Pareene writing at Wonkette referring to Malkin’s “ping pong balls” cross Greenwald’s threshold of hate speech? Since he failed to take that site to task for their infamy, one would have to assume that particular racist reference gets a pass from the New York Times Best Selling Author as, I imgaine, would other bigoted comments on blog posts directed toward Malkin

However, “Muslims go home!” rates an honored place in Greenwalds Hall of Fame of hate? I am not entirely sure in reading the thread that the comment wasn’t made in jest. Be that as it may, there is something that Greenwald apparently doesn’t understand about debate; not everyone who disagrees with him practices “hate speech.”

“Muslims go home” may prove the ignorance of the commenter but it hardly rises to the level of a hanging offense. Nor do any of the other comments highlighted by Greenwald necessarily reflect anything except a point of view I and many others disagree with. To be brutally honest, hindsight being a 20/20 blessing, I may have erred in not deleting one or perhaps two of those comments. They are borderline and perhaps my sense of their propriety would be different on another day. But I have deleted and banned people for much worse and a little less. Context is everything and taking a comment out of a thread and holding it up as an example of “hate speech” is, as Greenwald himself says, unfair.

Taking comments out of context may be unfair but Greenwald is not doing fair today. He is in attack mode which, given some of the obvious errors and misstatements he made in his article, would necessitate a clarification or two on his behalf. I’m not holding my breath. By lowering the pole to define hate speech on the right while raising it for those on the left, Greenwald proves himself an expert limbo dancer but nothing less than an angry, crass partisan engaging in a smear campaign against Michelle Malkin.

A very old friend of this site, Mike at Cold Fury, lost his wife in a motorcycle accident over the weekend. Mike is one of the more original bloggers out there and has linked here on occassion over the years. I extend my heartfelt condolences to him and his family.

I read her profile on the “About” page and she seemed a perfect match for Mike. Both love old cars and bikes. Both have the same off beat sense of humor. To have a loved one taken so suddenly and before their time is a tragedy.

Why not pay Mike a visit and leave a word or a prayer.