Look, I hate to get all huffy here, but are we to believe that Dreher is incapable of picking up a phone or shooting off an email to his own brother-in-law before putting words in his mouth?

Because someone has to say it:

“You’re overlooking the restraining order Dreher’s brother-in-law took out.”

Well, yes, but that’s because you have the Church of England.

Mr Cole at Balloon Juice has thoughtfully summarised the responses, and it seems that the words “grandmother” and “under the bus” are now inextricably linked. Why was she not “kicked to the curb”, like everything else? Is this some form of residual chivalry?
I’m just trying to improve my understanding of the US idiom.

Hydrox cookies were axed in 2003? Who knew?

Really? I mean, I know Obama supporters want to believe that, but right now it is far from a prohibitive certainty he will get the Democratic nomination, much less the White House.

I don’t care how off the wall, mistaken, self pitying, vain, envious (teh breast and Bill incident) and liver destroying she is. It is just too damn easy to verbally massacre her invective laden posts (not that CY is exactly tough to refute or mock either). I will not pile on today.

You guys are better at it, anyway. ;-)

Uggh — 1 Althouse 1 cup

Dear god in wherever, I wish I could hate you to death for that.

In fact, looking at what the Bush administration and the Republicans have wrought on America; I wonder why more people aren’t pissed.

From “David Horowitz’ Long March”, The Nation

In early 1974 the French writer Jean Genet phoned the Ramparts office and got Horowitz on the line. Genet, who had taken up the Black Panther cause in the Bay Area, needed a translator. Might Ramparts provide one? One thing led to another, and it wasn’t long before Horowitz found himself in the Oakland penthouse of Panther leader Huey Newton, who had just returned from China. A heated argument about the revolutionary virtues of Maoism erupted between Horowitz and Newton, and the latter concluded the debate on a conciliatory note. Horowitz was delighted: “I had found a political soul mate,” he recalls.

Horowitz’s intellectual seduction by Newton constitutes some of the most fascinating pages in Radical Son. Newton made Horowitz his confidant, took him to glitzy parties and published his essays in the Panthers’ official newspaper. When Newton asked him to raise money for a new Panther school in Oakland, Horowitz eagerly obliged by creating a tax-exempt foundation that eventually netted more than $100,000 for the project.

Attaching himself to the Bay Area Panthers in 1974 was, it turns out, a colossal mistake: Their heyday was over, and the leadership had become increasingly violent and deranged. The educator Herbert Kohl, who was then involved in several Panther education projects, warned Horowitz that Newton was abusing cocaine. (“He had a cold,” Horowitz replied.) Uncomfortable being a white man in the upper ranks of the Panther hierarchy, Horowitz attempted to recruit qualified blacks to replace him, so he invited Troy Duster, a sociologist at UC-Berkeley, to meet Newton. But Duster was suspicious of Newton’s mercurial behavior and fled.

Horowitz then denounced Duster as something of a bourgeois “Uncle Tom.” “I must have been insufferable,” Horowitz says, reflecting on his younger self.

On July 22, 1974, Huey Newton shot a young prostitute, after which he fled to Cuba. “I should have left [the Panthers] then,” Horowitz says. In fact, many of his black friends in the party did depart at that very moment–a turn of events that enraged Newton’s successor, a striking, charismatic and voluble young woman named Elaine Brown, who, according to Horowitz, said the party was under attack and “the rats were leaving the ship.” Horowitz says he felt trapped. When Brown asked him to recommend someone to oversee the party finances, he suggested Betty Van Patter, a 42-year-old bookkeeper who had worked at Ramparts. Van Patter, who was white, eagerly accepted the position. On December 13, 1974, she vanished. A month later, her body, with a massive head wound, was discovered in San Francisco Bay.

It is a case, according to veteran Panther-watcher Kate Coleman, that has “haunted the Bay Area left for two decades.” A lengthy investigation by Coleman revealed that Van Patter had discovered questionable activity–rackets, dope, prostitution–at a Panther-run bar in Oakland called the Lamp Post and had reportedly complained about it to Brown, who then fired her.

Van Patter’s death plunged Horowitz into “a really clinical depression,” he says today. “For a good year, I woke up in tears every day because of Betty.” What inspired the guilt was not simply that he’d recommended Van Patter to the Panthers but that he’d been too frightened to warn her about the dangers she faced. But he was in a bind: Van Patter, delighted to be employed by the Panthers, was completely enamored of Brown and wary of Horowitz, whom she did not trust. So he let her proceed with the job.

“Today I can’t even justify it,” he says wearily. “I have no idea why I did it.” Horowitz and I are seated in his office. The room is tense and completely silent, except for the sound of his hand nervously striking the table. His voice, normally firm and confident, sinks to a barely audible mumble.

“It was inconceivable to me that the Panthers would kill Betty Van Patter,” he whispers. “I was nervous about what was going on there, but if I told Betty what I actually felt, I was afraid that she would tell Elaine, and that Elaine would harm me or my children. I was completely unprotected.”

If he could do it over again, what would he say to Van Patter?

“I would tell her flat out–get out of there,” he replies. “But the consequences for me would have been awful. I didn’t have any money. How was I going to move my family?”

Today, Tamara Baltar, Van Patter’s daughter, does not consider Horowitz in any way responsible for her mother’s death. “David didn’t kill my mother, and David didn’t participate in the killing of my mother,” says Baltar, breaking a long silence on the case. Is there something curious about the fact that he holds himself responsible? “No,” she replies. “I think I would, too, if I were him.” Not until 1984, however, did Baltar, who was a leftist and a supporter of the Panthers, accept the view that they committed the crime. “David Horowitz kept at it from the beginning,” she says. “And I was mad at him for keeping at it. But he kept at it.”

In the late seventies, relying on his old Panther contacts, Horowitz quietly began to reconstruct the crime, and he was a primary source for a lengthy exposé on Newton’s criminal activities that Kate Coleman published in New Times in 1978.

“I stayed on the story,” he says. “It’s a minimal atonement.”

But, remember, Barack Obama needs to be thrown out of polite right wing society because his pastor said some offensive things, and David Horowitz and his ilk needs to lecture us on our terrible liberal choices and immorality.

Here in the heartland, we don’t whine.

So Gary, you’ve never met my family.

March 19, 2008 at 16:29

Cool!!
Yay!!
That is so good to hear.

I read a comparison of Obama’s speech to Romney’s speech about religion: Romney never used the word Mormon once in his speech. Obama mentioned Wright something like 14 times by name. That fact is being noticed.

Look, I hate to get all huffy here, but are we to believe that Dreher is incapable of picking up a phone or shooting off an email to his own brother-in-law before putting words in his mouth?

Damn you, Scott Beauchamp!

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/18/k-lo-former-australian-pm-john-howard-for-president/

I just heard a soundbite of Bush on NPR, saying that “today because we acted, Saddam’s rape rooms and children’s prisons are closed for good.”

Last night I read the article in the New Yorker about Sabrina Harman, where she talks about participating in the Abu Graib abuses. There’s a lengthy paragraph about children who were imprisoned there.

And this guy has the balls to criticize Obama for the friendships he made as a young man?