Glenn vs. Glenn Pass-the-Popcorn Special
When Glenn Reynolds gets riled and writes more than one or two distracted sentences at a time, which is seldom, the effect is like dozens of clowns piling out of a Mini. Were they all crammed up in there the whole time, or is there, like, a trap door that opens from a backstage reservoir?
Exempli gratia: Whilst taking apart Mark Steyn for his hubristic gassings-off during the early days of the Iraq War, Glenn Greenwald notes in passing:
The only thing I have seen that competes with this Steyn column for its mix of pure wrongness and gloating self-celebration over being so wrong is this humiliating April, 2003 screed from Glenn Reynolds.
…Which really popped the cowlick on Reynolds’s Alfalfa-do. (The screed is worth reading in its entirety: It’s a single dense-packed paragraph of arch bwaa-ha-haaing and smug charges of disloyalty.) Reynolds sticks an update into the old post directing readers to a recent rebuttal:
Glenn Greenwald links this post in the — as usual — deluded notion that it proves his point. I’ve responded here.
Then the clowns start piling out, ransacking quotes and statistics from such liberal solons as cartoonist Ted Rall and such unbiased analysts as Gateway Pundit.
Let’s just grab one single clown out of the whooping multitude:
I should also note that despite predictions of 50,000 casualties in the initial invasion, three years later we’re at less than 5% of that.
That would be a Sadly, No! unless one is using a special, contingent definition of ‘casualties’ that’s identical with the subcategory, ‘fatalities’ — i.e., one that excludes wounded and only counts troops killed. And characteristically, the ‘50,000 casualties’ prediction comes from a reader email in which somebody says they remember hearing Gary Hart say that three years ago. A further link leads to a March ’06 Mickey Kaus column, and another there leads to a March ’06 Huffington Post piece by Hart, neither of which mentions any such prediction.
Galloping goalposts, thy name is Reynolds. (It is perhaps unfair, but nonetheless accurate, also to note that these reader emails have long drawn suspicion as to their authorship — much like Tom Friedman’s infamous chattering cab drivers and Andrew Sullivan’s frequent anonymous boosters, whom we have come to refer to, respectively, as ‘Thomasz Friedmab’ and ‘Andrev Sullivam.’)
Greenwald also adds:
Many Iraq war advocates were honest enough to admit that they were wrong, that Iraq was and is falling apart, but the most dishonest of them — the Steyns, Krauthammers and Reynolds — prefer to embrace transparent falsehoods than change their thinking about anything or admit that they were wrong about anything. Preventing individuals of this type from leading this country into more disasters is genuinely urgent.
Um, Glenn G., as Brad keeps saying, what’s genuinely urgent is finishing Reynolds’s robot body so we can blast him off into space….
Let’s just blast Reynolds off into space, robot body or no….
Jam a shulle booster up his ass, and off he goes!
Shorter Instapundit:
I don’t know the difference between a casualty ward and a morgue.
Shorter Instapundit: “Heh. Indee.”
Shorter Glenn vs. Glenn:
Reynolds brings clown shoes to a knife fight.
“Shuttle booster.
frickin typos.
BWAAH-HAAA-HAAAAAA!!!11!!!1!
I dunno. Anybody who can still look at the whole picture – the ideologically driven process by which our government systematically demonized another nation, lied about their capabilities and ultimately invaded and occupied that nation, the process by which that nation was brutalized, it’s citizens impisoned, terrorized and murdered, the wholesale corruption and hypocrisy that has informed the intervening years, the insurgency growing in power and sophistication, the clever moves by which Sistani outmaneuvered our bumpkin in chief to attain power for the Shi’a, the hatred that arose, not just from the centuries of religious enmity but also from the decades of minority rule – anybody who can look at where we are today and claim it to be anything but an unmitigated disaster is either utterly deluded, or more likely just lying. There shouldn’t even be an argument left, save perhaps a frank, adult discussion of what do we do now?
mikey
The fact that we doubt the Perfesser’s assertions is surely evidence that we have been brainwashed by the pro-terrorist mainstream media.
The “Offical” casualty count stands at 19,890.
Gotta give “Black Knight” Reynolds some credit I guess. He still attacking Greenwald’s ankles.
Its sad when a person can’t recognize how cruel and pathetic they reveal themselves to be. Could someone close to G.R. let him know and get him some professional help?
This
is ironic from someone who refuses to admit his premature post-war gloating about the lack of casualties or quagmires is flat-out wrong.
Shouldn’t we be counting Iraqis too? Or do casualties only count when they’re ‘official’?
Gary Hart says “It is strange to contemplate the possibility that the greatest army in world history could be slaughtered in a Middle East conflagration. But prudent commanders have no choice but to plan for this danger.”
But hey, you have to actually click links and read stuff to find that out.
Ok, fixed.
Well, I actually think that Glenn Greenwald wants to be me, though if so he’d be well advised to stop lifting his stuff from Tom Tomorrow.
?
Wait . . .
?
That was the lamest comeback ever
But the quoted passage comes from this 2003 post, and actually I think it holds up pretty well. It’s not something I’d be bringing up if I were on the left today, though.
Again, WTF? Since 98% of Glenn’s posts are about how stupid the left is, who gives a fuck whether he would be embarrassed by his post if he were on the left? It would be like if William F. Buckley said, “You know all those columns I used to write about blacks being inferior, I think they hold up pretty well. I’d only be embarrassed if I were on the left today.”
An eternal Glenn Reynolds. That is my vision of hell.
Not to bring down the seriousness of this to potty humor…
But are we talking about Glen Reynolds, or Burt Reynolds??
Certainly the laugh is indistinguishable
Jam a shulle booster up his ass, and off he goes!
I would prefer the Draka method, i.e.:(1) a sturdy, sharpened stake planted firmly in the ground, pointy end about navel-high. (2) hang around sipping lattes whilst ascertaining just exactly how long Reynolds (and approx. 60 million of his cohorts) can stand on tippy-toes.
Reynolds = racist. He hates Arabs and others with “brown skin.”
He sees their deaths as positive developments in Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.
A waitress at dinner last night told me that Republicans were ruining America, and he specifically blames all the conservative bloggers who propped up the failing administration with lies and dishonest cover.
No, really he did. I just asked for some breadsticks, and he started talking.
Then the bus driver on the way home said that Bush supporters had no foreign policy ideas at all, and were dumb sheeple afraid of the dark. Also, my friend emailed me to say that Republicans want to destroy our children’s future.
bite on that, reynolds.
I know whatcher saying, Kathleen. Last nite, three neighborhood kids lit a Flaming Bag of Poo ™ on my front porch. When I asked them why they did it, they said it was to protest the bush administrations unfair, dishonest and cynical support of israel while they were destroying Lebanon and killing innocents.
Forwarned is forearmed, so instead of stomping out the fire I used the extinguisher…
mikey
You know, one wonders if Reynolds really could find some critic of the war predicting 50,000 fatalities if that prediction would be based on the assumption that Iraq actually possessed weapons of mass destruction. Assuming that Sadaam would use the weapons on our invading troops.
Because Iraq did NOT possess those WMD, those predictions turned out to be wrong. So now Reynolds uses the absence of WMDs to prove how wrong the critics were all along and ignores the facts that the predictions were wrong because the administration’s claims about WMD were wrong.
Confusing if true. Heh.
Bush said he called your Iraq and raises an Iran.
For my money, anyone who uses “as usual” as an arguement is discredited and shamed for generations to come.
He’s not a mathematician and he’s only 35% off in his comparison, although I’m not sure the purpose of comparing a real number to a fictional one. Or maybe he meant that casualties among the Keyboard Commandos is less than 5%, which is no doubt true.
Some Guy is right, as usual. Oh crap.
It must be a lot of fun to sit around punching at the keys trying to make some silly-ass point in order to amuse your not too bright fellow commenters. God, is the left side of the blogosphere filled with nothing but nitwits, and fairly dumb ones at that.
it’s my favorite thing! on a saturday! watch as we argue ourselves into whether or not glenn was off by 35 or 75 percent, when of course he made the whole fucking thing up. the total amount glenn was off was, i think, a googleplex. percent.
that guy could drive a truck into and out of his ass without feeling it, given the amount of shit he’s pulled out of there over the past 5 years.
It must be a lot of fun to sit around punching at the keys trying to make some silly-ass point in order to amuse your not too bright fellow commenters
Is it also fun to punch those keys to make a both silly-ass and sneeringly condescending point?
PS the stupid is contagious. Save yourself!
Haha. It’s not as much fun as going to other blogs to attempt an insult of the commenters, I’ll give you that.
Is there such a thing as a smart nitwit?
Discuss.
casualties among the Keyboard Commandos is less than 5%, which is no doubt true.
I heard a public radio program (no link, don’t remember the show) and from what they said about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
At least, in the taste-bud sense, and what are the Keyboard Commandos about, if it isn’t taste?
drew said,
August 26, 2006 at 22:46
It must be a lot of fun to sit around punching at the keys trying to make some silly-ass point in order to amuse your not too bright fellow commenters. God, is the left side of the blogosphere filled with nothing but nitwits, and fairly dumb ones at that.
Sullivan, is that you?
It must be a lot of fun to sit around punching at the keys trying to make some silly-ass point in order to amuse your not too bright fellow commenters.
Goddam it, I miss Irony. Wherever you are, please come back. I promise to appreciate you now…
mikey
I am against blasting people into space on environmental grounds (waste of energy is enormous). I recall a Jules Verne’s novel “Journey to the Center of the Earth” where the eponymous journey starts in the crater of Hecla volcano. This could be a better inspiration than the space program: subject Reynolds to hecling.
It wouldn’t matter if you built Glennolds a robot body and launched him into space. Like any other Cylon, he would simply download into a new wingnut body and continue spewing the same empty talking points ad nauseam.
Insta-pudhead: “And U.S. casualties are falling as Iraqis pick up the load.”
SADLY NO, Glenn, unless the Pentagon’s figured out how to bring to life the brave men and women the Bush administration needlessly put in harm’s way.
Or perhaps I’ve let slip Bush’s new victory strategy for Iraq: Zombie army.
Don’t know about you Drew, but I actually type on my keyboard, not punch it.
Maybe that is where you are going wrong.
I do beleive Glenn Reynolds could be adequately replaced by a simple computer algorithm.
An old Tandy would do the job, I would think. Just rescript one of the old RP games with a handful of responses:
“Heh. Indeed.”
“Disturbing, if true”
“The left blogospheric tendencies….”
“Unserious.”
and so on.
Sheesh. I BELIEVE. BELIEVE, dammit.
Jam a shulle booster up his ass, and off he goes!
(Leaving the misspelling aside), is that the same thing as a “Hindrocket”? Maybe we could get rid of two wingnut bloggers at once!
Let’s stay on message here people. You don’t want Kos getting mad, now do you???
We live in Blogtopia! Instayokel, Pastor Swank, etc. (and their drew-ling minions, too) come from the Blogostomyâ„¢.
When are we going to include the US wounded that die days, or weeks latter as killed in action. Just because they suffered longer before they died shouldnt deny them being included in the count. Our number of dead is actually greater than we acknowledge.
Oh, dear God, can we please bring them home, and start the long teadious job of treating them psychologically.
…Which really popped the cowlick on Reynolds’s Alfalfa-do.. LMAO
pat, you just don’t get it. Caring about the troops in wingnuttia only means pretending to pray for them, and remembering their names after they die, if they were photogenic and/or known in the outside world. Tits McGee at atlas sucks off UN ambassadors still has a pat tillman icon on her messy little myspace site, nevermind the friendly fire and cover-up and etc….
Caring about the troops’ actual welfare, worrying that, say, depleted uranium is giving them all “gulf war syndrome”, wanting them not to die, that’s unserious liberal hippy bullshit. Here’s the thing. Christians, naturally, want to be like Christ. Christ, assuming he ever existed at all, is dead. Therefore, dead soldiers are more like Christ, and we should be happy for them. They’re far better off now than they were with that pesky thing called life making their bodies all animate n shit.
Duh.
Oh, dear God, can we please bring them home, and start the long teadious job of treating them psychologically.
Y’know, I’ve been thinking about this. Really, this is the wrong forum, and it would take a whole lot more words than I’m gonna use here to make my point, but lemme do the short version.
I’m thinking that these kids are going to be a lot less damaged than the class of vietnam. Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re gonna have a lot of PTSD and a lot of combat stress. I’m not saying that a year in Anbar or night raids in Baghdad or Mosul aren’t the serious shit. And I’m in NO WAY belittling the strength and courage it takes to live as a combatant in a war. But here’s the thing. These kids get to sleep inside the wire. There has not (yet, at least) been an FOB or camp or airstrip overrun in Iraq. They go out and do a hard job, and some of ’em are going to be hurt by the things they see and the things they do, but there’s a place to wind down.
You didn’t have that in vietnam. Hell, that was in-country R&R. You went out into the boonies. You fought all night in a muddy 24 inch deep hole under 82mm illum rounds with another guy (maybe your buddy, maybe a stranger) bleeding from a gut wound at the bottom of that hole, and you have no choice but to crouch on top of him. Sometimes it came down to hand to hand.
Or you sat Night Ambush. All night, rain, bugs, terror, trying to stay awake, a clapper in one hand and a frag in the other. Nodding off. Snapping awake, wondering if that was a noise or a dream? Or the worst, to me. Lima Papa. One fire team, outside the wire. Your job was to alert the camp to an impending enemy attack. How would you know? Usually you found out when they killed you. Sometimes they actually wouldn’t know you were there, so you’d be out there all night with a few hundred NVA all around, pretty much just waiting to die. Hard.
So I dunno. Again, I’m not saying these kids have it easy or there’s not going to be problems. I’m just thinking there’s going to be fewer folks coming home bugfuck crazy this time around. And that is a blessing…
mikey
Well, I actually think that Glenn Greenwald wants to be me, though if so he’d be well advised to stop lifting his stuff from Tom Tomorrow.
Is it wrong that I originally read that as a comment from Greenwald about Reynolds? How *much more* wrong that I also mentally added “And those pigs in Animal Farm“. ?
Meh, Indeed.
Um, Glenn G., as Brad keeps saying, what’s genuinely urgent is finishing Reynolds’s robot body so we can blast him off into space….
It looks like someone might be a little jealous.
It must be a lot of fun to sit around punching at the keys trying to make some silly-ass point in order to amuse your not too bright fellow commenters. God, is the left side of the blogosphere filled with nothing but nitwits, and fairly dumb ones at that.
Shorter Drew: I’d like to lick Glenn Reynolds’ balls.
Come on, let’s be fair. In his inimitable style, Mr. Reynolds was merely pointing out that he was correct about the portion of the war that lasted from about March, 2003 ’til May, 2003. If you look at the statistics during that time period, he is surely correct: his predictions held up pretty well.
As far as the three years of the conflict which have occurred since “Mission Accomplished,” well, come on…who was to know.
Come on, let’s be fair. In his inimitable style, Mr. Reynolds was merely pointing out that he was correct about the portion of the war that lasted from about March, 2003 ’til May, 2003. If you look at the statistics during that time period, he is surely correct: his predictions held up pretty well.
As far as the three years of the conflict which have occurred since “Mission Accomplished,” well, come on…who was to know?
Instarube has a woodie for Greenwald because Greenwald’s book is outselling Instrube’s book by a factor of at least 2-1. ‘Rube knows his audience and influence have long since peaked, and Greenwald is clearly on the rise, so ‘Rube is lashing out.
And, as another commenter noted, thank you for the Alfafa-do line. It is high time people pointed out, again and again, that bumpkins like Reynolds deserve only our derision. That he has spent even a moment on the public stage will never cease to amaze me.
“As far as the three years of the conflict which have occurred since “Mission Accomplished,â€? well, come on…who was to know.”
Hehehe. “C’mon. I lied. So scampish.”
I suggest that Mr. Greenwald simply stop reading Reynolds’ blog. It’s worked for most of his readership. Is the “Instapundit” really worth all this space?
seems all of the dialogue in WingNut revolves around a single premise, How could anyone have known: That the warnings of the daily’s read to Bush by his enema nanny would require serious consideration. _ _ _ That the “bullet” hadn’t been dodged for more than 30 hours in New Orleans just because CNN said it had been. _ _ _ That scam-bullying a crooked congress while misappropriating over 700 million diverted from Afghanistan toward a war that had been pre-planned in the early days of the Bush Cheney bloodless coup (also see Carlyle Group purchase of american governmental administration and main stream media) for the purpose of illegal annihilation, occupation and elimination of a sovereign nation while seizing it’s resources and cultural artifacts, would take longer than originally anticipated. _ _ _ And that all this not knowing would actually be to snap the head of the snake in Iran. Like Condoleeza Rice pointed out, while she lied through her shoe buying teeth about Iraq’s ability to produce mushroom clouds in a major United States population center in 45 minutes or less: How could anyone have known.
. Christians, naturally, want to be like Christ. Christ, assuming he ever existed at all, is dead.
Umm….not so much, as far as Christians are concerned.
Well, sure, Jebus is up there in heaven with the mormons and pet goldfish and pedophilic priests who get unlimited quality time with the cherubs, but His body on earth had to have died again, otherwise how could he come again?
He had to have re-died, somewhere along the way.
Or wait, He was called back up, wasn’t he. All I really remember from the Bible is Leviticus 19:19.
Yes, the reanimated zombie Christ was purportedly whooshed bodily up to heaven, just like the Rapturenauts plan to be. I don’t buy it in either case, however.
“I heard a public radio program (no link, don’t remember the show) and from what they said about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
At least, in the taste-bud sense, and what are the Keyboard Commandos about, if it isn’t taste?”
Much like Iraq, they had no exit strategy. They burn … twice.
So wrong in so many ways, but this was my favorite: “… the ‘antiwar’ movement has shrunk to such a pitiful remnant of its not terribly impressive former self …” “Remnant” is an odd term for over 50% of the American public.