the proper time and place

... for astounding hypocrisy.

yesterday, conservative commentator michelle malkin on the murder of dr. george tiller:

president obama is right about this: "however profound our differences as americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence." unfortunately, some are not content to leave it at that for now. they fail to respect that there is a proper time and place to indulge in political battle. ... tiller's family is grieving. those who have jumped to score political points before tiller is even buried are no better than the phelps family thugs of the "westboro baptist church" who respect no bounds of civility. unfortunately, it's too much to ask the cable news networks and hyper-partisan snipers on the internet to have the decency to restrain themselves. prepare for a wall-to-wall onslaught of gleeful finger-pointing on the left and heated responses on the right.

today, conservative commentator michelle malkin on this morning's murder of a military recruiter and wounding of another:

i wonder if the justice department will send marshals to beef up protection at recruiting centers — especially given the past targeting of military centers on campuses and elsewhere across the country. too early to say anything about suspect, motives, etc. but these facts are worth bearing in mind: flashback: special report: tracing the left's escalating war on military recruiters flashback: the continuing war on recruiters that the left doesn't want to talk about flashback: document drop: unclassified memo warns military personnel of anti-war threats to recruiters, army installations/facilities flashback: bastards: vandals strike at berkeley marine recruiting center again ... posted in: they don't support the troops, veterans

not just a river in egypt

overheard on the net:

am i the only one that thinks palin has been sandbagging in interviews to get biden to put his guard down? she came out so brilliantly when she was announced, and has seemed to fade a little.

i have this confident feeling that she's been setting up the enemy and she's going to knock 'em dead in the debate.

i know she's a great vp candidate and a very smart lady. i just have to wonder why she's been "homely" when it comes to interviews. i know that the interviews she has been in weren't appropriately conducted and that she is the only candidate asked hardball questions throughout her interviews.

try harder next time

the blogosphere asks: is this satire?

hmmm ... maybe not so much:

it represents the basic stuff that you get from the right about obama, but it neither mocks nor exaggerates them. it's a sad state of affairs that conservatives are hard to satirize or parody because they're so insane, but that's where we are.

ok, so the new yorker obviously didn't try hard enough. they fell victim to the political version of "poe's law".

they didn't take the non-stop paranoia the right wing smear machine force feeds its minions all the way to its (il)logical conclusion:

the real limbaugh-hannity dittohead fantasy nightmare: THE DATE: january 21, 2009 THE SCENE: a large outdoor prison labor camp, manned on its perimeters by doberman-walking, heavily-armed, aviator-shaded, afro-&-sideburn-sporting, toothpick-chewing, purple revolution-jumpsuited soul-brothers. behind barbed-wire, under the hot sun, bent over rows of cotton, wretched white slaves toil in close chains as strains of parliament funkadelic waft out of the guard towers. one slave curses himself for having been a brainwashed libtard dumbocrat tricked into voting for president barack obama. enraged at the confession, another slave — sporting a "mom loves mccain" tattoo on a bicep swollen and glistening from servitude — throttles him with his own chains. the guards fire into the air and bark for order as the slaves scatter and the victim's last spasms subside ...

could be worse

so you think the obama-clinton fights at liberal blogs daily kos, booman tribune and mydd are nasty?

associated press: norristown, pa. — montgomery county authorities say a man stabbed his brother-in-law during an argument over who should get the democratic nomination for president. what's more, jose ortiz, 28, who's charged with felony assault, is a registered republican. district attorney risa ferman said ortiz supports hillary clinton and sean shurelds supports barack obama. she told reporters monday that the two got into an argument in a collegeville home thursday night and shurelds tried to choke ortiz. she says ortiz then stabbed shurelds in the abdomen. shurelds was taken to a hospital in critical condition, but is expected to recover.

afaik, no one on those blogs has had to take a trip to the emergency room ... yet.

impossible idiocy

physicist sean carroll of the blog cosmic variance reports the birth of a wrongness singularity in the blogiverse.

and just what is a wrongness singularity?

a statement is either wrong or it is not wrong ... by the conventional rules, n declarative statements can be wrong at most n times. by the pauli exclusion principle, you just can’t be more wrong than that!

to be wrong more than that should defy the laws of logic, but this is the right-wing blogiverse we're observing, so singularities are theoretically possible. carroll focuses his blogometer on reynolds' recent bloviations regarding u.s. energy policy in the middle east:

of course, if we seized the saudi and iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. but we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then.

four statements, four instances of preposterousness. (can we call these falsehoods prepostulates?):

prices would plummet — no, they wouldn’t. as it turns out, the saudi and iranian oil fields are running at very close to full capacity; any increase would be at most a perturbation. dictators would be broke — not sure which dictators we’re talking about here — the ones we just deposed? in fact, dictators have shown a remarkable ability to not be broke even in countries without vast stores of oil wealth. poor nations would benefit — because it’s really the poor countries that guzzle oil? this one baffles me. we’d be called imperialist oppressors — now, in a strict sense this is not wrong. we would be called that. because invading sovereign countries in order to take over their natural resources is more or less the definition of imperialist oppression. however, reynolds’ implication is clearly that we should not be called imperialist oppressors, that it would somehow be unfair. which is crazy. so can we count that as wrong? yes!

so far, a straightforward proof. now, onto the hidden fifth element:

as tim lambert points out, instapundit managed to be wrong yet another time, by begging a question and then getting the wrong answer! the subjunctive clause opening the first sentence cleverly slides from invading saudi arabia and iran to running pumps at full speed. actually not something that would happen in the reality-based world! as tim says, "yeah, because that’s pretty much the way it worked out in iraq." so in fact, reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! this is the hackular equivalent of crossing the chandrasekhar limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. it is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. we may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.

the right-wing blogiverse: an endlessly fascinating place to visit, but i can't see how intelligent life could exist there.