In accordance with blogger/pundit/barfly ordinance 719-j/22, here is my unsolicited advice to John Kerry for the debates: Break the rules.

Kerry needs to do something dramatic to turn this thing around, and this just might work. According to the memorandum of understanding, the candidates are not permitted to ask one another direct questions. That means Bush won't be prepared for Kerry to do so, and that's exactly why Kerry ought to. It doesn't really matter what the question is. Anything tough that Leher won't ask, that Bush would rather avoid, and that Americans care about will do (which leaves a lot of options).

Keep in mind that while we all know about these rules, the vast majorty of Americans who will be watching the debate have never heard of them and will interpret Bush's response completely differently from how the wonks do. Best case scenario for Kerry: Bush gets that stunned look (c.f., "what was your biggest mistake?") and stammers out a protest that Kerry isn't allowed to do that, that he's not playing fair, and then refuses to answer. Even if viewers pick up, and Leher explains, that this is indeed the rule, viewers hearing about it for the first time are likely to find it a stupid rule, and not see what the big deal is about being asked a question during a debate. Bush, who has staked everything on his confidence, will look like a pussy. The clip of Kerry confidently asking a serious question of great import to Americans and Bush wimpering about arcane rules of import only to Beltway elites will be played over and over again until November 2nd, with Kerry winning converts each time.

Continue reading "The Kobayashi Maru strategy" »

12:13 PM :: Comments (4)

You may already have read Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi's e-mail to friends about "the situation" in Iraq. If not, you should.

Journal editor Paul Steiger defends Fassihi's right to make personal observations about the war, noting, "Ms. Fassihi's private opinions have in no way distorted her coverage, which has been a model of intelligent and courageous reporting, and scrupulous accuracy and fairness."

The defense is proper, but there's something very odd about describing the e-mail as Fassihi's "opinions." To the contrary, 99.5% of it is not opinion at all but statement of fact based on Fassihi's reporting. I found only one sentence I'd call opinion: an Iraqi tells Fassihi that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for president, he would win, and she says, "This is truly sad."

There is only one other sentence some people might point to, and probably what Steiger had in mind: "The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle." But that comes at the end of the long message, and would more accurately be called a fair conclusion based on all the reporting that comes before it.

The problem here is the modern journalistic notion of objectivity as a matter of "presenting all sides" rather than faithfully reporting the truth. Fahissi, through obviously careful observation, has determined what the truth is and feels free to tell her friends in a way that she can't tell her readers, because her editors will call it opinion. In print, she'd have to have an equal number of official lies and evasions to balance out what she's actually learned.

Fortunately, critics have started to rebel against this he said/she said model of objectivity. None have eviscerated it as shrewdly and effectively as this Daily Show parody of the Swifty controversy.

11:19 AM :: Comments (1)

Where was this post when I needed it?

2:49 PM :: Comments (2)

A while back I made a half-assed blog style argument that Howard Dean should have been the Democratic nominee. Now Peter Beinart makes the carefully written, full-assed version of the case.

Were Dean the nominee, the Bush campaign would probably be going after him not as a flip-flopper but as a lefty. Lefty isn't exactly a term of endearment. But at least it evokes issues rather than character. Character debates sank Al Gore and threaten to sink John Kerry now. A debate about issues, on the other hand — especially the biggest issue of all, Iraq — is something Democrats could win.

Via Tapped, where Yglesias pulls at the flip-flop thread in an effective but not completely persuasive way, and Eschaton, where Atrios wryly notes that Beinart wasn't exactly backing Dean's position on Iraq when he had the chance.

1:42 PM :: Comments (4)

From Amazon.com: People who bought "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" also bought "The Family" by Kitty Kelley.

I went looking for this after reading that Wal-Mart (which won't even sell Maxim) had been selling the racist tract on its Web site with the following desciption: "If The Protocols are genuine (which can never be proven conclusively), it might cause some of us to keep a wary eye on world affairs. We neither support nor deny its message."

Of course, that the book is a fraud has long been proven conclusively. To its credit, Amazon makes this very clear and persuasively explains the nature of the book and its reasons for selling it.

Why Amazon is still selling Segways is a different story.

12:07 PM :: Comments (1)

One of the things that drives me nuts every four years is the way legends spread about things the candidates supposedly said or did that just happen to confirm the conventional wisdom about them.

It doesn't matter whether I support the candidate or not. For years it angered me well beyond what was called for that people believed George H.W. Bush was amazed by a supermarket scanner or that Bob Dole called Arnold Schwarzenegger's True Lies a "family friendly" film. [Update: Or that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet, obvs.] This isn't about politics, it's about lazy punditry becoming lazy public opinion.

So thank you Mike Pesca in Slate for exposing another too-good-to-be-true campaign moment: John Kerry's, "Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?"

That's right, Kerry never said it.

Continue reading "Who among us expects this misquote to go away?" »

5:23 PM :: Comments (1)

Scientists hoping "to learn why we think things are funny," are studying responses to New Yorker cartoons. Comments are open for your snide remarks.

Longtime readers will recall that I conducted my own survey of New Yorker cartoons a few years ago.

12:00 PM :: Comments (5)

Gersh explains why there will be no debate.

"The candidates may not ask each other direct questions, but may ask rhetorical questions." So, Kerry can't ask, "Mr. President, what are you going to do to ensure a swift transition to democracy in Iraq," but he can ask, "Just how dumb are you?" -- a rhetorical question that always stumped me when I was a kid. I mean, if you think about it, there really is no good answer.

For weeks I've been telling my more optimistic friends that Bush is going to trounce Kerry in the debates.

Continue reading "Very, very dumb. Also, as bad as Hitler." »

11:38 AM :: Comments (2)

This just in!

Space flight 'extremely difficult'

11:09 AM :: Comments (0)

Newly discovered Hemingway story found

Discovered and found on the same day? What are the odds?

10:08 AM :: Comments (3)

Radosh.net Heartland correspondent Kevin Guilfoile writes in about the following Page Six item.

John Kerry had better watch his tongue — it's starting to betray his elitist leanings. The other day, he said, "This president sort of wandered back." Language mavens say the use of "sort of" as an adverb is a subtle indicator of upper-class origins or aspirations. You won't catch any good ol' boys in those vital swing states saying "sort of."

Says Kevin: "I use 'sort of' as an adverb all the time, as did everyone I grew up with in rural upstate New York. I assure you few of us were ever mistaken for upper class elites when we bought tubesocks at the Farm and Home Bargain Center and Wolverine boots at the Agway."

It didn't sound right to me either -- were they perhaps thinking of "sort of" meaning "type of"? -- so I ran the accusation by Jesse Sheidlower, North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Here's what he had to say.

Continue reading "Richard Johnson is sort of losing his mind" »

1:10 PM :: Comments (1)

How carefully did you read Matthew Klam’s New York Times Magazine article about "Web loggers"? Take this quiz to find out!

Which blogger does Matthew say is most "fun to hang out with"?
A. Wonkette
B. Atrios
C. Markos Moulitsas
D. Josh Marshall

Which blogger does Matthew say has "peachy cream skin"?
A. Wonkette
B. Atrios
C. Markos Moulitsas
D. Josh Marshall

Continue reading "Sounds like somebody's still on the ecstasy" »

11:34 AM :: Comments (0)

Ladies and gents, I give you: Lohanboobies.

[Previously...]

5:41 PM :: Comments (0)

Australia and the UK are flipping out over TV commercials for Elle Macpherson's lingerie line, Intimates.

The ad, called "knife fight", opens with a woman standing in Intimates underwear picking up and putting down knives in a kitchen. It then shows two women having a naked knife fight and ends with a woman cleaning blood off the kitchen floor. At no point in the ad can the women's faces be seen.

If you watch the ads you'll see that it's not quite a "naked knife fight," inasmuch as only one faceless woman is naked. The other is wearing a tattered, possibly bloody nightie. Wait, that's worse, isn't it?

Continue reading "The most disturbing thing in a lingerie ad since Bob Dylan" »

5:26 PM :: Comments (2)

And you thought she was stiff in Attack of the Clones. (Click to enlarge, if you must.)

[via OttyHotties]

4:10 PM :: Comments (2)

"I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died." -- Jimmy Swaggart

[via Direland]

3:34 PM :: Comments (2)

USA Today quotes Bush on Iraq: "If we left, the world would be worse. The world is better off with us not leaving."

Air America (and to its credit, though it's probably an oversight, the White House) has the actual quote (MP3. I'd write it out, but it's funnier to hear him say it).

2:19 PM :: Comments (0)

"Rap, rap. Who's there? Nelly the rap star, that's who." -- New York Times "writer" Lawrence Van Gelder duly informs readers that "rap rules".

Please, nobody tell him about crunk.

1:46 PM :: Comments (0)

Looks like I owe everyone an apology. While I've been busy selfishly listening to Perfectly over and over again on my iPod, I've forgotten that Huckapoo belongs to the world, not just to me, and have neglected blogging some major developments on the Huckapoo front.

Fortunately, Alex Matt at Throwing Things has picked up the slack. We've always known that Huckapoo was about more than just the music (as if that wasn't enough). Now that Alex has done a trademark search, we know how much more. Word of advice, gals: "educational computer software and downloadable educational computer software for instructing children in school subjects," is all well and good, but make the "bubble bath" first. I feel dirty just thinking about it. And I think we can all join together in a prayer that they win the legal battle to make toy treasure chests.

Meanwhile, the Huckapoo web site has, believe it or not, only gotten better!

Continue reading "I Heart Huckapoo" »

12:50 PM :: Comments (11)

In the latest Entertainment Weekly, George Lucas claims that he never intended Han Solo to shoot first. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, just skip this post, trust me).

Continue reading "Have you even seen the goddamn movies, Lucas?" »

3:21 PM :: Comments (5)

This is bad enough, but this is intolerable. Maybe we can blackmail him into coming back by threatening to reveal his secret identity? (Hint: Dony Tanza)

1:32 PM :: Comments (2)

"Forty-three days before the election, my opponent has now suddenly settled on a proposal for what to do next, and it's exactly what we're currently doing." -- George W. Bush, Sept. 20

"John Kerry's latest position on Iraq is to advocate retreat and defeat in the face of terror." -- White House spokesman Steve Schmidt, Sept. 20

[via Atrios]

11:30 AM :: Comments (0)

Now I've said before that anything Bush did or didn't do in 1972 is a loser as a campaign issue because voters have four years of his presidency on which to judge him. But that doesn't mean that the details that keep dribbling out aren't constantly entertaining. Take this anecdote from Russ Baker's exposé in The Nation.

The family that rented Bush a house in Montgomery, Alabama, during that period told me that Bush did extensive, inexplicable damage to their property, including smashing a chandelier, and that they unsuccessfully billed him twice for the damage--which amounted to approximately $900, a considerable sum in 1972. Two unconnected close friends and acquaintances of a well-known Montgomery socialite, now deceased, told me that the socialite in question told them that he and Bush had been partying that evening at the Montgomery Country Club, combining drinking with use of illicit drugs, and that Bush, complaining about the brightness, had climbed on a table and smashed the chandelier when the duo stopped at his home briefly so Bush could change clothes before they headed out again.

Climbed on a table? A real man woulda just shot the fucker.

10:20 AM :: Comments (0)

Karl Rove is half right: "The guy seems to have this belief that every time he speaks it's a blank sheet, and he doesn't have to worry about contradictory things he's said in recent days, weeks and months."

Now he's right that John Kerry contradicts himself, but you can hardly say he doesn't worry about it. In fact, his campaign has been so troubled in large part because from the start he was terrified of being called a flip-flopper. Instead of simply stating his current position on something, he tries to be very careful to make sure it doesn't literally contradict what he said before -- with the inevitable result that his language is tortured and indecisive, and he only ends up highlighting the differences between his current and former statements.

The guy who really believes he has a blank sheet every time he speaks is George W. Bush. Bush flip flops repeatedly but each time, he fully commits to what he's saying, trusting -- perceptively -- that as long as he sounds sure of himself, people won't care that his position has, let's be generous, evolved.

This is what Kerry should have been doing all along (from a purely strategic standpoint at least; obviously genuine consistency is preferable).

"The president should never have gone to war in Iraq." "But didn't you support the war at the time?" "The president should never have gone to war. How much more clear can I be?"

Sure, reporters will dig up an old quote, but as long as Kerry refuses to address it they'll eventually give up -- and even if they don't, the public won't listen. That's how Bush was able to structure his entire convention around his post-9/11 promise to get "the people who did this," when in fact he let those people get away so that he could avoid the difficult work of nation building in Afghanistan and pursue an unrelated campaign in Iraq.

I'll bet Kerry could pull it off even now. Listen to Karl Rove, John: don't worry about contradictory things you've said in the past. Say what you mean right now, and voters just might respond.

9:53 AM :: Comments (0)

"A year from now I'd be surprised if there's not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush" -- Richard Perle, just about exactly one year ago.

I've been hard on John Kerry's failure to stake out and hold a decent position on Iraq, thus fumbling what should have been his winning campaign issue. And I'm hardly the only one. Charles Krauthammer nailed him to the wall on this a few days ago. But it bears repeating that any insinuation that Bush's position on Iraq is the better one because it's more consistent is ludicrous. I know Americans prefer strong and wrong to weak and right, but on this point, Americans are freakin' idiots.

Continue reading "You know who was strong and wrong: Stalin! (I was going to say Hitler, but you know how that makes the left look bad)" »

9:39 PM :: Comments (2)

Jake's heal Britney artwork reminded me of a short story I recently thought about writing. I now accept that I am too lazy and untalented to actually write a short story, but I still think the idea is kind of clever. The title and first sentence, which is as far as I got, is "Britney Spears imagines she is famous." It's the story of a poor white trash girl who likes to escape from her miserable life into a fantasy world in which she is the world's biggest pop star. The narration slips seemlessly back and forth between reality and fantasy. The sad joke is that our protaganist is so limited in her experience and imagination that even in her fantasy, instead of being truly glamorous, she's still living basically the same tacky life. She twists her ankle running for the bus and loses her job at Wal-Mart and she transforms it into an accident on a video shoot and a canceled tour; She dumps her ashtray out the window of her trailer and imagines that the act is caught by hordes of fascinated paparazzi; she spits her gum onto the street and in her mind, it's already selling for thousands of dollars on eBay.

Done right, I think it could be funny, but also touching. Of course, it could never really happen...

Mazel tov, Brit-Brit!

8:41 PM :: Comments (2)

You remember Tigger, the Disney World employee acquitted of lascivious molestation. Well, he's back.

"Of course he was goofing around because he was Goofy!" Kaufman said, who added that the two Kodak employees shoved Chartrand back, as part of routine horseplay among cast members and greeters meant to entertain patrons.

"That's the joke about this," Kaufman said. "You're supposed to fool around, be animated. I knew for Michael it would tough for him to go back. I told him he would be a walking bull's-eye. Now, it's goofy gone wild.

"He just can't catch a break."

3:52 PM :: Comments (2)

My New Agey friend Jake is recently back from Burning Man, where his contribution to the outsider art extraveganza was this retouched poster that challenges us to imagine a better world in which Britney Spears is an Earth Goddess.

I'm just happy to see that while Jake's hippie Brit-Brit is less grooming-obsessed than the unhealed real world girl (unless you believe Durst), she hasn't gone overboard to the point of rejecting silicone.

1:58 PM :: Comments (0)

Articles about Dan Rather's perceived liberal bias, and particularly his antipathy to all things Bush, are entirely appropriate right now. But in a typical case of reporters ignoring evidence that goes against their storyline, I have yet to see a single one of these articles mentioning these Rather quotes:

"George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions, and, you know, it's just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he'll make the call."

"If he needs me in uniform, tell me when and where--I'm there."

I'm not saying this post-9/11 change of heart refutes the premise, but it's a complicating factor that a fair-minded critic would mention.

Continue reading "You're paying for Nexis, people. Use it." »

10:36 AM :: Comments (5)

I think this would be a good opportunity to remind y'all that I supported Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries (with Edwards a second choice). Dean may not have been ideal, but the whole rationale for Kerry never made a jot of sense to me. The problem with picking someone solely because he is electable is that if it turns out (ahem) that he is not, what are you left with? I'm not saying Dean could have defeated Bush. Honesty, he probably couldn't (Edwards had a better shot). But you can be sure that right now we'd be having a real national debate about the issues, and that Howard Dean would be setting the terms of that debate. Kerry has been playing defense from day one because nobody knows what he really believes, other than that he was a war hero (and I'll bet even he's not so sure about that anymore).

Continue reading "Don't blame me, I would have voted for Dean if the primary system didn't render my state meaningless" »

6:08 PM :: Comments (11)

"California has shown the way by banning the sale of large ammo clips and weapons with grenade launchers, bayonet mounts or other features that turn rifles into killing machines." -- USA Today

1:42 PM :: Comments (0)

German radio begins broadcasting in Klingon.

11:27 AM :: Comments (0)

Answers to Some of the Tough Questions Posed in the Song “Why” by Jadakiss.

Q: “Why is Jadakiss as hard as it gets?”

A: Jadakiss uses a restricted carb diet and exercise regimen that combines high-intensity aerobic activity with weight training.

11:07 AM :: Comments (2)

Jagshemash! My latest for The New Yorker is The Borat Doctrine.

Continue reading "I like you. Do you like me?" »

9:26 AM :: Comments (9)

Twelve pictures now worth 945 words.

1:39 PM :: Comments (3)

Here's a charming house for sale, though the view from the window in the third photo down is maybe a little too charming.

[Via Happy Scrappy.]

Continue reading "It's nice, but I'm really looking for something with more closet space and less humping" »

12:26 PM :: Comments (0)

Gay American has been asked to "report for duty" for the Kerry campaign -- but he's just a little nervous about getting shot.

This emphasis on the military in a call for volunteers is jarring given that in June John Kerry told the 'Army Times' magazine that he was not sure that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" should be abolished... “I’m not going to sit there and tell you that if you had six cracker-jack people who had all kinds of experience and one person [came out as gay] and the unit went crazy -- that I’m going to junk all five of them,” the Globe quoted Kerry as saying. “I’d be a liar if I told you that. It’s just not practical. If you put three people in a small boat and send them up the river at night and they hate each other, somebody might be kind of nervous as to where a gun might be pointed.” ...

I have not yet responded to Kerry's call for me to report to duty. I want to first find out if it is possible that anyone might "go crazy" over my serving in his campaign, and of course whether or not there are any guns involved.

9:06 PM :: Comments (0)

During my career, I've crossed paths a couple of times with internet entrepreneur/hardboiled crime writer Charles Ardai. Looks like Ardai's good side finally conquered his evil one (either that or his evil side made enough money to finance his good one) because he's just launched Hard Case Crime a publishing venture dedicated to reviving pulp crime fiction, with a combination of reissued classics and new tales in the classic style, all packaged in affordable ($6.99) editions with glorious new painted covers.

The book pictured above is Ardai's own debut novel, and while I've only read one chapter, I can vouch for it based on this sentence alone: "In her photo, Mandy was cradling breasts some mad doctor had built for her out of equal measures of silicone and cruelty."

My only beef: They've overlooked my own contribution to the genre, Hit Me, My Lovely: A Mystery Incorporating the Fifty Most Popular Internet Search Terms of the Past Year.

5:46 PM :: Comments (1)

Bush's visit to Florida today gives me an excuse to call your attention to something I posted after Hurricane Charley, when a Wall St. Journal writer argued that John Kerry should have also toured the damage. I put some actual research into that fisking -- which showed that a supposed analysis of campaign tactics was merely a logic-free attack on Kerry -- but it took too long to get to the best stuff, and I'm pretty sure almost no one ended up wading all the way through it.

So here's the highlight. Whether you read the rest or not is up to you.

By contrast with Mr. Kerry as well as the elder Mr. Bush, Gov. Clinton was made [sic] a show of concern for those affected when he toured the destruction.

When he toured the destruction a full eight days later that is. Admittedly our news cycle is faster these days, but given Miniter's point about how well Clinton handled Andrew, perhaps he should mention that at this amount of time after Andrew hit, Clinton had done no more than Kerry had. In fact, his first reaction two days after the storm hit was to call for an inquiry into the government's poor handling of the disaster -- for which the Bush campaign accused him of "trying to exploit what is a terrible situation for political gain."

Of course it's unlikely Miniter knows this because the ABC News article that is clearly his source erroneously says Clinton, "carefully avoided jabbing at his opponent over the halting response." Print the legend, as the saying goes.

Mr. Clinton didn't carry Florida, but he won the election.

Translation: the net effect of visiting or not visiting a disaster site is probably completely uknowable. Sorry to have kept you reading this long before I mentioned it.

"Certainly Bill Clinton set the pattern," Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution told a reporter recently. "You want to be there. You want to be involved. You want to be helpful. You want to feel their pain."

Think-tank people always sound so confident in their analysis don't they. A certain Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution sure did back in 1992 when he said pretty much the opposite to a New York Times reporter for a story headlined "Returning to Devastated Area, Bush Uses Powers of Office to Help Others, and Himself" -- about how smartly George HW Bush was using the disaster: "When President Bush is suddenly on the front page -- when he's the lead story, on the evening news, and all eyes turn to whatever he's doing -- it stops Bill Clinton in his tracks.... Anybody who's been in a disaster knows the state and Federal governments can't come fast enough, so of course they're mad. But the rest of us, not in that disaster, are seeing the President take action, seeing him flying to Florida, calling out the troops from Fort Bragg and so on."

4:30 PM :: Comments (0)

I know we're supposed to be putting a stop to the Ugg boots trend and everything, but can we make one little exception? [NSFW; via Fleshbot]

1:49 PM :: Comments (1)

Now on sale: May Contain Nuts : A Very Loose Canon of American Humor. Volume 3 of the famed Mirth of a Nation series features — most importantly — a revised version of my PowerPoint Anthology of Literature (gone are Maxim and the Eggers joke, which was really only ever intended for a select audience; in are Pride and Prejudice and -- meta alert! -- May Contain Nuts).

As if two whole new PowerPoint slides aren't worth your $11.17 cents, the book has contributions from many other funny, funny people, including my pals Henry Alford, Kevin Guilfoile, Mark O'Donnell, Alysia Gray Painter, Neal Pollack, Stephen Sherrill, and John Warner.

5:35 PM :: Comments (5)

When news broke that seven Marines had been killed outside Fallujah on Monday, it was generally reported as a renewal of violence against the US after a few months of relative calm.

But as The Washington Post reminds us, "About 1,100 U.S. soldiers and Marines were wounded in Iraq during August, by far the highest combat injury toll for any month since the war began."

Of course we could hardly be expected to notice, what with all the action over in Vietnam.

12:15 PM :: Comments (0)

Headline: Clinton Breathing on Own After Surgery.

Oh, please. Everyone knows he inherited the conditions for breathing from the first President Bush.

10:20 AM :: Comments (3)

Three things I already knew but was glad to be reminded of by new blog on the block, Sociopathetic:

1. The word "hipster" has lost all meaning.

2. There is, in fact, a way Huckapoo could be even better.

3. Lohanboobies.

4:10 PM :: Comments (0)

Bush and Kerry trade blows on jobs

2:26 PM :: Comments (2)

It's terrible, but I immediately flashed to the Reagan hoopla and figured that if Clinton kicks it sometime around the first week of October, it might be enough to put the Democrats over the top.

2:11 PM :: Comments (3)

I've got two items in the final issue of New York magazine's convention daily. First up, Meet the Press, a look at how High Times, Hustler, YM, and US Weekly are covering the convention.

Then another think piece. George and the Jungle: The Republicans are Leaving New Yorkers with Unexpected Emotion: Envy.

I'm pretty happy about how this one turned out, but I do think my original ending was stronger. Go read the whole thing, then click "More" for my preferred kicker.

Continue reading "And now for my big finish... hey, where's everybody going?" »

1:04 PM :: Comments (2)

For a sign of how successful the Republicans have been at setting the terms of the debate for the media, look at this article on Dick Cheney in today's NY Times. David E. Sanger writes that Bush's emphasis on military response to terrorism "is intended to contrast sharply with Mr. Kerry's line about waging a 'more sensitive war on terror,' and that is exactly where Mr. Cheney was attacking Mr. Kerry last night. Mr. Kerry, he said, talked 'as though Al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side.'"

Why, yes, that IS exactly where Cheney attacked, but it is NOT exactly what Kerry said. His actual line, as you know, was, "I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side." You can ask for a correction from the Times if you like, but they won't run one because Sanger's partial use of the quote is technically correct no matter how misleading (cf. "not a problem anymore").

Continue reading "Me angry?" »

12:39 PM :: Comments (1)

It was nice of the folks over at New York magazine's daily edition to make up for spiking my column yesterday by giving me the lead feature in today's edition.

The problem is that they've apparently decided that the little humor thing that I do isn't really right for them after all. They wanted a more traditional opinion/think-piece, the kind of thing that I don't have much interest in and that plenty of people do much better than me. And the basic concept wasn't even one I came up with.

Still, having already agreed to write something every day, I gave it my best shot. They gave it the headline Girlie Men Need Not Apply, which give me an excuse to sound off here on Arnold's "Don't be economic girlie men" soundbite: IT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE!

Continue reading "On the plus side, I got to say "lady robot"" »

2:02 PM :: Comments (4)

Headline of the day: Dutch Foreign Minister Bot Invites Iraq's Allawi to EU Summit

9:56 AM :: Comments (0)