Artificial insemination from a sperm donor is bad because a donor baby might accidentally commit incest. If artificial insemination is allowed, people should have to adopt sperm, with all the background investigations that entails, not just buy it on the open market. However, anybody ought to be able to have a baby through old-fashioned Pope-approved fucking.
Erickson. It was difficult not to resort to the title, ‘Dishing Out The D’oh!’ Because what did that ‘dishing out the dough’ expression even mean, just before? And right after that, it was like he was trying to put together a hot dance mix, except with the savoir-faire of a meaty-handed white guy who dances by nodding with an overbite, and with metaphors instead of Digital Underground’s ‘Humpty Dance’ segueing into Queen and David Bowie doing ‘Under Pressure.’ That is, he followed up ‘the dough’ by bringing ‘the chips’ into it again, from that earlier post with the title about chips falling — implying that he thinks the expression refers to potato chips, and that potato chips ought in some way to be added to or mixed with dough. It was difficult not to resort to some title like ‘Goodbye, Mr. Chips.’ And then we’re what, stuck making Peter O’Toole jokes?
I mean no, hold on a second. His name is ‘Peter O’Toole,’ and no one has ever said anything about this? Did his stage career take place during a period in which the British theatre had as yet felt the influence neither of gay men, nor of sarcasm? Was this before Joe Orton? Or, as happens, was there a Dickie Ballslurper or a Harry Palmer-Manstaff drawing the attention away from the quotidian run of Highcocks, of Woodpoles, Shakespeares, and O’Tooles?
This was on the world’s narrowest bookshelf, between Polish Navy Victories and Things I Know by Dan Riehl.
I can’t say that I am surprised by the level of aggravation and acrimony in the comments of my “Letting the Chips Fall” post. I certainly promised more than I delivered. You should have seen the first six drafts. They were much better.
Ooh, ooh, I had a whole bunch of funny lines here, but then I used this one. Ha ha! Dude, you’re so burned; they were like, whoah, could there possibly be more zingers, like rapid-fire, like bang-bang-bang? Unlike now, you were laughing big-time.
I’m certain from the context above that Erickson pronounces ‘acrimony’ like ackra-moaney, but cannot explain or prove this.
For the few cheery souls remaining, I appreciate that you got the point — it’s exactly what Will Folks has been doing, but doing in a ridiculous third person narrative. The emails and phone calls from people in the media wanting to know when exactly I was going to do the big reveal on this were more than a little illuminating.
What’s this? A telegram. Ah. See, just as I was about…oh, the phone. Wait. Hello? Indeed, we’ll get to that in due time, my good man. Yes, toodles, guh-bye-bye. Uh, telegram says watch out for the falling [splintering crash with discordant klong of piano notes]
To the rest of you, I apologize for clearly rubbing you the wrong way on this one. I thought it was necessary to make a few points.
First, getting some additional facts out into this conversation that no one else either had or was putting forward including that Will Folks has been trying to push this out for a year
Somebody ought to give him a fiber bar or something. Jeez.
What are they going to do, sit on the edge of his tub Blackberrying stories like, BREAKING: TURTLE HEAD and being all, “Woo, this is a conversation that no one else either had or was putting forward including that Will Folks.”
…and that the Haley team knew about it. Also, that the Bauer camp had been using it for a while to try to keep people from supporting Nikki. Given all the connections there, I do think the Bauer campaign coordinated this.
Second, and most importantly, I think it is necessary to push this conversation beyond what did and did not happen to who, if anybody, is getting Will Folks to try to ruin Nikki Haley. And the intended audience of the post has gotten the hint. I think we’ll be seeing some enterprising journalists start asking questions along those lines.
I think some funny jokesters have already been inspired by this post to start making up some of those funny jokes that we all like so much, as was my secret intention. [sprays breath spray, smells armpit] Most importantly, it is necessary to push beyond that which did not or did happen to who. In other words, we need to start pushing back on that thing so Will Folks doesn’t push it any farther out.
So, as we head into the weekend, my apologies for building up your expectations, but not my regrets. It’s necessary to start pushing this story in the direction it needs to go, which is motivation and other interested parties.
Even morer, or moster important is to start pushing beyond the direction of motivation, if what is how hick wap whichm whom wah. Wait. Dammit, my apologies for not my regrets! No, wait.
Goddammit, you should have seen the first six drafts! [belches] [pumps keg]
Feel free to use this as a thread to beat me up as best you like.
Feeling free to use this as a post to beat him up as even better we like! …Uh, I actually seriously don’t know where the verb went in that sentence, and it freaks me out a little.
Maybe you’ll find it cathartic. As for me, I’m going to go see Robin Hood and maybe Iron Man 2 too.
That’s what we rented Fantastic 4 for. Then we got tickets to the deer and the antelope play.
Without a guilty plea for beating a woman, but with a Devil May Care attitude, RedState.com’s fearless editor, Erick Erickson, endeavoring to write about himself in the third person, though omniscient or limited is still up for grabs, will now proceed to dish out the dough and let the chips fall where they may in the whole sordid affair in South Carolina.
He’s doing that style with the celluloid collar and battered fedora. I think that style began as a clever imitation of Walter Winchell, then quickly ripened into an annoying imitation of Walter Winchell — then gradually, as happens, it drifted into pastiche as people started adding bits of tone and phrasing from Damon Runyon, Irvin S. Cobb, newsreel announcers, and people imitating same. Using ‘same’ in that way is a tic of the style overlooked in his shallyings by Erickson. And great Caesar’s ghost, it’s none other than me now adding funtistible verbiage and speaking like W.C. Fields announcing the cataclysm of the Airship Hindenburg, O! Icarus descending, emblazoned in fire’s fell robe, a steel-boned conflagration in gravid expiry, disgorging a roiled and pungent cumulus to blacken unto the centuries the sixth day of May, today’s date being same, in this Borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey.
With the dough and the chips, hip-haroo.
Only today did intrepid Erick Erickson get permission from sources to reveal a few key details about the Will Folks allegations. Though Erickson hinted, as sly editors do, that he had more information that would explain RedState’s full throated defense of Haley despite having been burned by a…
I can’t take it.
Notes:
* RUDY: Huh? Why you call me ‘Walter Chell?”
FAT ALBERT: No win.
Last night I was kicking around the web trying to find out where the rest of the Sadly, No! crew had gone — another one of their three-week viagra-fueled tequila and meth benders, no doubt — when I stumbled into Brent Bozell going off on shit and by that I don’t mean going off on stuff, but going off on “shit” the word. But not even really going off on “shit” the word. He was going off on “$#*!” — a bleeped version of the word “shit” because he heard that “$#*!” (the character jumble, not the word) was in the title of a new show on the TeeVee.
Things have gotten ridiculous when the guardians of our Constitutional values are reduced to complaining not about the naughty stuff itself but about the stand-ins for the naughty stuff. At this point you can’t even cover up the breasts on statues because, you know, the breasts (and nipples!) are still there behind the hastily draped blanket and just looking at the blanket will make you think about the breasts themselves and, even worse, the nipples themselves. Blanketed boobs are the reason that thousands of men spend hours with a tube of K-Y and a box of kleenex looking at pictures of big boobies on the Internet. Or worse.
CBS deliberately introduced a new show called “$#*! My Dad Says.” That’s right — the fecal curse word starting with an S in the title. They pronounce it “Bleep My Dad Says.” They could simply have called it “Stuff My Dad Says” and not lost a scintilla of descriptive power.
The reason why Bozell can only be employed writing screeds against curse words for wingnut websites is that he believes that “Stuff My Dad Says” and “$#*! My Dad Says” are equally marketable titles. Brent also thinks that The Catcher in the Rye would be just as good with all the naughty words removed. Holden Caulfield could simply have said “silly phonies” and the book would not have lost anything.
The network also lamely noted the show can be blocked using the V-chip. But the V-chip can be organized to block out L-codes for crude language, but it blocks the actual episode (if it’s coded), not titles.
Oh no! You’re going catch your kids sneaking off to look at the cable programming guide on your teevee to giggle at a title with “$#*!” in it. Then they’ll be taunting their playmates on the playground by shouting “Hey, Joey, you’re full of dollar sign number asterisk exclamation point.” Or, worse, they’ll tell you to “ampersand dollar asterisk parens off” when you tell them to go to bed.
Bozell, of course, has a point. Studies have shown that children exposed to character jumbles as substitutes for naughty words are more likely to experiment with gay sex, smoke crack cocaine, text while driving, waste time on Facebook, make fun of Glenn Beck, and declare bankruptcy before the age of thirty than children who only see polite words that are completely spelled out.
UPDATE – MORE NEWS FROM THE POOP FRONT: ABC, clearly fearing that Bozell would call it a Toilet Network too, rejected this advertisement for using the word “poop.” Watch it. And see if you don’t agree that if you were David Vitter, these are the diapers that you would wear.
1Actually, given that we have cable networks devoted to Hitler, to restaurants in foreign countries that serve bugs and rats as food, and to white trash losers with too many children, the idea of a toilet network is, you must admit, a somewhat refreshing change of pace.
One of the goals behind repealing DADT is to change the standard military combat uniform to a flouncy sun dress. The other goal is forced universal transfusions with tainted ghey blood.
ABOVE: Back Cover of John Derbyshire, Prime Obsession
Shorter John “Humbert Humbert” Derbyshire,* America’s Shittiest Website™ Martin Gardner, R.I.P.
The recently deceased Martin Gardner was such a swell guy. When he was too old and too sick to read my book Prime Obsession he said (and now you can’t prove otherwise!) that I could write whatever blurb I wanted to under his name and put it on my book. So I did. My only regret now is that I didn’t add something in the Gardner blurb about my enormous penis. You know, for the benefit of the young girls, er, ladies.
Just to prove that I’m a selfish, mean-spirited, pseudo-Christian fucknozzle douchebag, let me put a Lost spoiler in the title to my post on the series finale. You fuckers who meant to watch it later on TiVo should be saying the rosary and not wasting your time watching the TeeVee.
UPDATE: Okay, I’ve now watched the series finale on my TiVo and, as it turns out, the Anchoress’s spoiler wasn’t a spoiler at all. It’s as if she revealed that Marion’s sister Lila was the real murderer in Psycho. I apologize to everyone for momentarily imagining that the Anchoress could follow a plot.
*Judging from the latest photo that the “Anchoress” posted of herself, she is evidently engaged in a demented project to try to look like another crazed über-Catholic, K-Lo.
**Scalia took down the post, benignly unaware that it was too late to prevent RSS feedreaders from propagating her post title all over the Internet. I saw it in Google Reader.
If you tell a restaurant that they must serve Negroes then you can tell them that they must also serve drug dealers with guns, although that pretty much amounts to the same thing.
ABOVE: Actual honest-to-God I-swear-on-a-stack-of-Bibles picture of Alyssa Cordova which she voluntarily used as her profile picture on her own Facebook page. (No Photoshop used.)
Justice Scalia is more pro-woman than Elena Kagan because he believes in the First Amendment rights of corporations and the Second Amendment right to carry a concealed handgun and she does not.
Redistributing grade point averages from smart students to dumb students is exactly like socialism. Ninety percent of students I polled thought redistributing GPAs was a bad idea, but one student I talked to thought redistributing income was okay. This proves that all students are stupid hypocrites who favor economic socialism even though they wouldn’t apply that to their own GPAs.
Liberals, who hate the free market that brings them their Birkenstocks, are the ultimate hypocrites. Without the free market they couldn’t boycott Whole Foods because there would be only one food store and THEY WOULD STARVE TO DEATH if they boycotted it!!!!! Bazinga!
1Alyssa holds a sinecure as “Lecture Director,” whatever the hell that is, at the Clare Booth Luce Institute. Her bio reveals that she became a conservative in fifth grade when Greenpeace asked her for a small donation.
2A rare case in which the title itself is perhaps the best shorter ever!
ABOVE: Big hands mean big . . . gloves? The white guy is GAY and is taking the woman home for jazz hand lessons and appletinis.
Over at the American Thinker Brain Trust someone who calls herself “Robin of Berkeley,” obviously a close relative of “Frederick of Hollywood,” has discovered that the problem with the Obama administration was that he was elected only because he was a hot black throbbing mantower of burning love.
When pundits analyze why the masses flocked to the untested, mysterious Obama, they cite the usual suspects: anger at George Bush, white guilt, desire for some elusive change. But there’s a missing ingredient here: sex.
I can already see that this column is not going to end well and that it will only be a matter of time before “Robin of Berkeley” works crack cocaine, teen fisting, gay marriage and shemales into her discussion.
Now I didn’t vote for Obama.
Big fucking surprise, that.
When I see the dude, I ache, but not out of lust. However, millions have fallen under his spell and remain smitten.
Just yesterday as I walked by the White House I saw three sex-crazed young women tear off their clothes and try to scale the fence in the heat of Obama lust before they were stopped by the Secret Service.
For a long while, it wasn’t safe to wander over to a store’s magazine section. Every other magazine, from Newsweek to Men’s Health, featured Barack’s well-toned bod.
Not to mention the Calvin Klein underwear ad that Obama did for a billboard in Times Square and that revealing guest appearance that Obama did with Adam Ramrod on the Bad Puppy website or with the Czech twin brothers over at Bel Ami.
Some of my friends started acting like pre-teens when the O word was mentioned. My chum Wendy literally kissed her Obama bumper sticker right before my unbelieving eyes.
That’s the first time a bumper sticker has ever been seen as a veiled penis reference but, hey, “Robin of Berkeley” claims to be a psychotherapist and she writes for a web site known for, in equal measure, delusional thinking and cognitive disabilities
Of course the press sold Obama like the newest form of crack, getting the public fixated on his every word. The same media that stalks Angelina and Paris anointed Obama the ultimate celebrity. And to the addicted masses, entranced by leering reality shows and 24/7 texting, the Obama Show was just another sexually charged extravaganza.
Crack cocaine reference: check
From the moment he arrived on the scene, Obama sent out a sexual tone. Suddenly, sexuality is in our faces, whether it’s gay marriage, queering school kids, or elevating the transgendered to high places in government.
Gay marriage, teen fisting and shemales: check, check and check.
As conservatives, we have to figure out some way to snap the Obama Girls and Boys out of their virtual realities.
How ’bout, say, learning what’s meant by a “virtual reality” in the first place? Then I am certain that writing bunches of articles on the Internet about the Obamaschlong, his pecs and gay stuff will do the trick and will cause all the Obama Boys and Girls to join up with the legions of conservatives who all love Sarah Palin solely for her keen intellect. (VMILFR.)
From the noted miliblogging site Free Range International comes this confirmation of Big Government and Big Journalism’s exclusive story by Brad Thor about the capture by Pakistani authorities of Mullah Omar:
Which brings me to my final topic
Now that’s burying the lede!
and it is not something Americans should be happy about.
Happy, you say.
I have been hearing for weeks
Earring, you say.
rumors about the detention of this guy:
Rumours, you say.
Detention, you say.
Forsooth, when Brea King is finished with Brad Thor and company, it’ll be time for a long journey through the lands of his brothers Drin and Wan.
Cornerdomite Andy McCarthy thinks that he’s the best U.S. Attorney ever, even though his single accomplishment was shooting a blind sheikh in a barrel and even though he is now reduced to collecting wingnut welfare for flapping his gums about his glory day in that single case. As part of his duty as self-proclaimed best U.S. attorney ever, McCarthy has been conducting a blog jihad against Eric Holder. McCarthy’s latest car bomb in his jihad is a post at America’s Shittiest Website™ titled “The Most Transparently Irresponsible Administration in American History.” (The effect of that title would have been complete if McCarthy had only appended “!!!!1!!11!” to it at the end.)
The whooshing sound that you are now hearing is a collective sigh of relief emanating from the graves of Ulysses S. Grant, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon, all relieved to have been finally outpaced in their own transparent irresponsibility by the Obama Administration in little more than a year.
So what outrage justified McCarthy to slobber out a post naming the Obama administration as one of the most irresponsible administrations in the history of the United States? Did Eric Holder burglarize the Republican National Committee Headquarters last night? Did any Obama appointees skim off millions of dollars of tax revenue from the government to their own financial gain? Did Ken Salazar just take a bribe to award public oil concessions? Did Obama lie about the threat posed by a country before invading it and killing thousands of U.S. soldiers and untold hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?
Er, no. Eric Holder said something about the Arizona “Show Me Your Papers” law without having read the text of the law itself and based only on what he had read about the law in the newspapers. Of course, even though The Bestest U.S. Attorney Ever had himself not read a word of the health care reform legislation, much less all thousand pages of it, and had only read about it in the newspapers (if that), this did not stop him from spouting off about that legislation. No indeedy, not so much and no siree Bob! McCarthy called it “socialized medicine” and then later called it “rationing and death panels.”
Showing off one of the awesome tricks he learned as the Best U.S. Attorney Ever, McCarthy doesn’t reveal all of the exculpatory evidence in his possession about the Holder statement. According to McCarthy’s evidence linky, but unmentioned by McCarthy, Holder went on to say that this meant his opinion on the bill was not yet finalized precisely because he had only read about it in the newspapers and that he will have read it all, each and every word, before coming to a final conclusion.
Mr. Holder is conducting a review of the law, at President Obama’s request, to see if the federal government should challenge it in court. He said he expects he will read the law by the time his staff briefs him on their conclusions.
“I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is,” Mr. Holder told the House Judiciary Committee.
Oddly, Mr. McCarthy didn’t append that little qualification to his own nonsense about rationing, death panels and socialized medicine. Nope. I suppose that makes McCarthy the most transparently irresponsible blogger in the history of blogging. Or, I suppose, it just makes him a gigantic douchebag.
This proves Elena Kagan is an open and avowed socialist. The woman declares that socialists must stick together instead of fracture in order to advance a socialist agenda, which Kagan advocates. 1
Is that a footnote? It is one! It’s a footnote that takes you about two inches down the page, like the water slide for little kids at Action Park. You know, we invented those.1
A footnote. This is like having Erickson’s college thesis, if there were any such requirement over at John Birch University.2
You can see for yourself right here (PDF).3 Keep in mind that Kagan wrote her thesis at the height of the cold war praising a group that collaborated with our enemies
Here, courtesy of Doug “Not Frank” Ross are the worst, indeed the socialestpassages from Kagan’s college thesis, which also positively identify her as ‘a radical.’
We learn as well from Ross that she’s a ‘crypto-Marxist,’ as if writing a whole, entire thesis about the collapse of the Socialist Party of the early 20th Century wouldn’t ordinarily clear up some of the possibilities, Marxwise. Isn’t she, like, the open and avowed socialist and radical kind?
If not, then chillingly, the answer may reside here…or even here.
I’m getting blowback on this statement. When you couple Kagan’s thesis with her op-eds in the 80’s and her later work, I think it is a complete and fair statement. Look at the forest, not the trees.
There is unrest in the forest. There is trouble with the trees.
Notes:
1 Not water slides.
2 Mercer University, where Erickson got his ever-confounding BA in Political Science and History as well as his equally gob-dropping and/or jaw-smacking law degree, lists Birch among its notable alumni under ‘Other Public Service.’ Honorary alum Robert E. Lee (1866!?) is right up top with Nancy Grace under ‘Arts, Education, Media, and Industry’ rather than languishing under ‘Military’ like some run-of-the-mill general or army guy. Also listed: civil-rights opponent Jay Sekulow, HUAC chair John S. Wood.
3 Now no longer breaking, but broken, and reading:
You can see for yourself right here (PDF). PULLED AT THE REQUEST OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY EXERCISING ITS COPYRIGHT RIGHTS.”
SONG: “Copyright Rights,” sung by Erick “Son” Erickson and the Righty-Whities.
Tintin adds: EXCLUSIVE! We have found Erick Erickson’s senior thesis at Mercer University
Late this afternoon Lt. Colonel Oliver North confirmed that Taliban leader and Osama bin Laden ally, Mullah Mohammed Omar has been captured. The exclusive news of Omar’s capture was broken by Big Government Monday evening.
According to Colonel North, Omar was picked up in Karachi on March 27th by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) who placed him under house arrest in what they call “community care.”
Per North’s sources, “[Omar] has since been transferred to a secret ISI lock-up under the Pakistani euphemism: “institutional care.”
North goes on to state, “According to several reports, all of this information was confirmed to U.S. officials by a senior Pakistani military officer ‘several weeks ago.’” A fact also broken in Monday’s Big Government exclusive.
Last weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton created a “diplomatic firestorm” when she…
We didn’t know you could be like, “Breaking — somebody published a column here earlier today.” But hey, we also didn’t know that a perjurer reciting the phrase, “according to several reports,” could be relied upon to send a genuine fact fluttering down to land on your finger or other perpendicular appendage.
For that matter, we never thought of a fact as a thing that might be broken in an exclusive, but rather as something like a Lego piece with which you can build a story — if a story were something made of…um, ah, right, I guess I walked straight into that one.
Last month, while I was still in Afghanistan, the ISI had detained Mullah Omar in Karachi on March 27, and placed him under house arrest in what they call “community care.”
Oh, because here’s something cool: If you blink in time with that phrase, like blink — blink — blink — , and then switch to the downbeat, like [-ink] blink [-ink] blink, [-ink] blink, it’s like you’re reading Brad Thor’s breaking, sticky exclusive again, and there’s nothing visible that gives the original source of the story as “rumors were circulating.”
Back to that:
In light of this confirmation of Mullah Omar’s apprehension, a whole new set of questions now arise and have already started being asked around Washington. In particular, who knew what and when did they know it?
Brad Thor knew he was cooked right around Tuesday evening? Oliver North ‘knew’ Frank Ross in the drawing room with a candlestick? We knew better before we even got here? Yes, questions. A whole new set of questions now arises about these questions. But ah! In particular, who will ask what, and when will they ask it?
The Omar capture is only the tip of the iceberg. Expect to hear a lot more in the days and weeks to come.
This seems about right. As long as a wingnut keeps talking, technically he isn’t wrong yet.
Notes:
Title cf. In the next incarnation, I want to come back as several dozen punk rockers so I can use up all these punk rock names.
Not surprisingly, the country’s oldest continuously published magazine, The Nation, is turning a jaundiced eye toward Brad Thor’s explosive scoop that the notorious Mullah Omar has been captured.
Always turning, this jaundiced and lonely eye. But let’s return to the practical for a moment. Brad Thor’s Explosive Scoop sounds like a detonation of dog waste and raisins, but if they put out an album, Pitchfork would totally review it. I’m just saying: Brad Thor doesn’t have to actually be in the band any more than Jefferson had to be in Starship, and I play drums a bit, so…
Originally an abolitionist broadsheet, The Nation has evolved into the most radical leftist publication in the U.S.; among its more notable moments was the publication in 1966 of the Cloward-Piven strategy for social destabilization.
And we all know what havoc Clowntard-Piven wreaked. Okay, he got me: I’m going to go look it up.2
The Nation isn’t even the mostradicalleftistpublicationinBarnes & Noble, but it’s certainly more ‘leftist’ than The New Republic, and to a Ross (or whatever his real name is), those are just two ways of saying the same thing. One of these days, and he’ll never know how, Ross will wake up to find the exact, fence-straddling middle of his mainstream occupied by The Weekly Standard, with Newsmax as a scrappy investigative entity daringly going after tomorrow’s headlines.
I’ve been writing screeds for years and still don’t know what that word means, although I’ve long suspected in a vague way that it’s from the Norse, like ‘ski,’ ‘sky,’ and ‘skræling,’ as well as possibly ‘Scahill,’ so he got me: I’m going to go look it up.3
Also, title. The editors might supply these at The Nation, but how long would it have taken to come up with ‘Mullah it Over’ or even ‘Belly Up to Omar, Boys’? Eight seconds, that’s how long it takes to avoid a high-school-level Shakespeare pun by our measurements.
And it only takes four seconds to also avoid an Unsinkable Molly Brown pun. Think about it. No, think about it.
While Scahill might think it’s good journalism to bury the lead, we don’t. So let’s get right to it, shall we?
The lede? Oh right, what were we talking about again?
In his rush to criticize Brad Thor’s reporting that Mullah Omar has been captured, he waits until the middle of his piece before admitting:
I wouldn’t even be bothering to look into this now if I had not heard some parallel buzz about these rumors from military sources I actually trust.
But before Scahill gets to this nugget, he engages in some traditional liberal nihilism. Unable to attack the message, which he admits he has heard “parallel buzz” on, he attacks the messengers, saying:
It is a bit hard to believe that such a major development would have been leaked to a right-wing novelist with a name out of a Nordic porno, who is a regular contributor to Glenn Beck’s show, for publication on Andrew Breitbart’s web sites.
In some alternate world where ‘hearing buzz about rumors’ is the same thing as ‘reporting,’ some alternate Scahill’s ears are red now.
Even in this alternate world, it is hard to believe that such a major development as this would have been leaked to a right-wing novelist who is a regular contributor to Glenn Beck’s show, for publication on Andrew Breitbart’s web sites. The difference is that the novelist is not Brad Thor, but Jerkki Fäppalawänkkala, the Finnish author of right-wing cowboy, U-boat, and gladiator novels. The alternate Brad Thor is still named Brad Firbanks, and lacking the outlet of writing, bowls furiously on Thursday and Sunday evenings and is bitterly overinvolved in the HO-gauge model railroading community.
Scahill also conveys another telling item in support of Thor’s story:
No one is confirming anything at all, but I am told there are some pretty unenthusiastic denials making their way through the special forces world.
Really? Well, if Scahill has special forces sources,
SONG: “Special Forces Sources” sung by Ross and the Apollo Bicycles.4
and bases his reporting on them, then those SF sources must be good! Right?
I’m not even following the logical fallacies here, but apparently what happened was that Scahill dishonestly downplayed these rumors he heard, causing the rumors to gain all of Scahill’s credibility as a reporter and give it to Thor.
In fact, it would appear Thor and Scahill have very similar sources:
In fact, ‘it would appear’ is a phrase that reporters are taught to use in order to avoid the ambiguity of statements like ‘Scahill said’:
As for Thor, he has spent time with US special forces in Afghanistan–he claims they were a “black-ops team”– and may very well keep up some relationships with those men.
SONG: “Black Ops,” sung by Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones.
So are we to believe that Scahill’s military/SF sources are somehow more trustworthy than Thor’s? It would seem that Scahill reluctantly concedes that Thor’s sources are of value when, alluding to them, he says:
This would be the only way Thor has this story remotely right: If, by chance, he happens to know people on the ground who are in a very small, compartmentalized loop on this.
Aw, but let’s not let that get in the way. No one in his right mind should trust a best-selling novelist with a name out of a Nordic porno, who is a regular contributor to Glenn Beck’s show and publishes on Andrew Breitbart’s web sites.
Titlewise, our imagined summary post on this affair is now a tossup between ‘Thor Loser’ and ‘Wanknarök’ — although it really just keeps opening up, doesn’t it?
Notes:
1 Cf. recent, unexplained profusion of Simon and Garfunkel puns, cf. Lemonheads. 2Cf. 3Cf. ‘Scahill’ is one of many words in Irish whose utility is to identify lineages of Irish people. 4 Cf. muscle bikes.
