If ever you were under the illusion that Greater Wingnuttia was anything other than a bunch of partisan goobers wholly uninterested in the truth and wedded only to the needs of the Republican party, surely the last week has shed you of that illusion. As I write this, only one fringe nutter has even mentioned the emerging Rudy Giuliani financial scandal. None of them has mentioned the fabulist at NRO. How can this be? Where are our brave truth detectors?
Let’s compare:
– When a 12 year old kid had the nerve to state that he benefited from a government program and thinks other kids should too, a massive orgy of ‘Truth detecting’ took place. Counters were examined. Houses were visited. Property records were scrutinized. Statements were parsed.
– When a private in the army wrote some tales with a few anecdotes about what he had experienced in the war in Iraq, and a few disagreed, no grain of sand was left unturned. Scale models of armored vehicles were built. Experts were called, emailed, and interrogated. Myspace accounts were looked up. Entire fields of Cray Supercomputers had to be brought online just to handle all the “debunking” and commentary from the wingnuts.
But now, a Republican front-runner FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT has clearly played fast and loose with the public’s money to hide/finance his extramarital dalliances, and the truth detectors on the right are silent. When an NRO columnist admits straight-up to making shit up to radically overstate a military threat to a key ally, perhaps to agitate for American military involvement, our fact-checkers snooze. The sum total of the response can be summed up as a giant yawn.
Crickets. Not even a “heh, indeed” can be found on these topics from our brave and intrepid citizen journalists. Hell, they are lagging FAR behind all the traditional media, who are cranking out tons of stories about Giuliani. Greater Wingnuttia should change their motto from “We’ll fact check your ass” to “We’ll fact check your ass, if you aren’t a Republican.” At least that would be honest.
*** Update ***
The Captain weighs in, only to downplay and all but dismiss the charges and then brushes off the brewing scandal as ‘marital woes’:
While I believe this to be a minor issue for Giuliani in terms of ethics — it tells us nothing new about his relationship with Judith Nathan before their marriage that didn’t already make contemporaneous headlines — the Giuliani team has not handled it very well. They should acknowledge that they made mistakes in handling the billings in 2000 and 2001 and apologize for the errors. The longer they issue threadbare rationalizations, the longer this will stick to the campaign.
Allegedly misusing public funds to drive around your girlfriend and engage in all sort of accounting shell games to hide your behavior is, according to the Good Captain, no big deal. Can anyone imagine the stories if this was, say, Hillary Clinton instead of Giuliani? By now, they would be investigating all state and local laws to see if they could indict her for adultery. All together now- IOKIYAR.
After reading Captain Ed it is pretty obvious how the right wing blogosphere will handle the Giuliani business, as it will be Plame redux. The same group of folks who were able to scour fonts in the Dan Rather case, make the most intricate arguments about bullet casings in Baghdad with Beauchamp, examine every aspect of health insurance policies in Maryland for the Frost family, will all of a sudden become “confused” by all the accounting numbers. The virtual certainty about all things divined from anonymous Free Republic investigators will be replaced with assertions of “confusion” and “trickiness” and complaints about “complicated accounting.” It will be “difficult” to come to a conclusion whether he has done anything wrong, and it will not be “clear” if he violated any laws. Just take the phrase “Was she really covert” and replace it with “Did he really do anything wrong” and you have your blogospheric talking points from Greater Wingnuttia for the next two weeks.
The same folks who got degrees and a Nobel Peace Prize in neurosurgery during the Schiavo affair will, by the end of the week, be forced to pretend they can’t balance a checkbook. It should be pretty funny to watch. That is if they don’t just manage to ignore it altogether.
Dug Jay
LMAO! May be the funniest post you’ve put up since Schiavo died. Keep it up and you may qualify for an early medical retirement on the basis of growing dementia.
John S.
Now that is funny.
You’re getting better at this spoofing stuff.
Psycheout
Ahem! Cough! I’m sorry, I seem to be coming down with a cold.
Carry on.
John S.
Sorry, but your third-rate blog is part of Lesser Wingnuttia (or more likely New Spoofistan).
capelza
Oh I need a catchy bumpersticker..something short and sweet…””Lewinsky” will be the new First Lady of the United States of America if Giuliani is elected” is too long.
John, it’s really early here, but I am not sure what NRO fabulist you are referring to…
demimondian
Follow John’s link, and there’s a post with the useful and descriptive title “Note to readers” on the memeorandum page. That’s the…err…well…I wouldn’t call it a retraction more a “yeah, I didn’t have any evidence, and the evidence that others have presented shows that I made things up, but I made things up which weren’t true but they must have been true anyway” kind of post.
Notorious P.A.T.
Wingnutistan is too busy conducting retinal scans on debate-questioners to determine party affiliation. You know, important stuff.
Punchy
Never thought we’d actually get the “no shit, Sherlock” post from Sir Cole-A-Lot, but here it is.
demimondian
The memeorandum link points to this item, as well as to discussion of that item. As John says, there’s a remarkable shortage of comment outside of a few left wing blogs.
cleek
tread carefully, it’s a short step from this to cynical political apathy.
wonkie
“At least that would be honest”?
Greater Wingnuttia doesn’t do honest.
capelza
demi, thank you…I wound up at some other place and was confused.
So:
to:
200 or 2..same thing! No.
wasabi gasp
Fact-free, yes, but there’s surely plenty of republican-on-republican ass checking going on.
dslak
Fortunately, for Cole’s detractors, the cynically apathetic still count as liberals.
Cindrella Ferret
They are following ol’ Dutch’s 11th Commandment:
Evidently the chips are down, eh? Its worked pretty well for more than 27 years. Why stop now?
dslak
I wonder if he would know the difference between AK-47s and Kalashnikovs, by sight, in the first place. There’s a story for our Citizen Journalists right there!
ThymeZone
The right in America continues to be a barren wasteland on the landscape of intellectual integrity.
Not surprising, since intellectual integrity serves no purpose in the context of what they are doing.
dslak
I think the 11th Commandment was in play when, to stop all the Republican-on-Republican bloodletting after the CNN/YouTube debate, Greater Wignuttia decided to go after the questioners rather than the crazy people who answered them.
Rick Taylor
Wow. This has got to be the end of Rudy, right? I mean this is what they tried to impeach Clinton for.
dslak
Yes, but this is different. Clinton was a Democrat.
Cindrella Ferret
He can’t be that stupid! Kalashnikov is a punk rock band.
Dug Jay
Not really. Perjury is an actual crime and a basis for impeachment. Mere diddling of a compliant member of the opposite sex is not.
Cindrella Ferret
Lying about something that is not a crime, is impeachable. Lying to get us into an unnecessary war, is not an impeachable offense?
Welcome to the world of the Former Cheerleader and his Gang of War Criminals.
RSA
Bush certainly learned that lesson: Never testify under oath if you can help it.
On the NRO story, I think the best way to describe it would be “fake but accurate”.
John S.
Perjury is only a crime if you’re a Democrat.
Ask Scooter Libby.
Bush was never under oath (the oath he took when he was sworn in as president doesn’t count) when he lied – even to the 9/11 commission.
Zing!
Rick Taylor
Hee. Then we need to get Guliani under oath.
wasabi gasp
Clinton’s penis didn’t lead to mo’ matrimony. Giuliani’s penis, on the other hand, is a sanctity machine.
jcricket
First of all, I have not been silent, nor am I plural :-)
And yes, “citizen journalism” isn’t. There’s no Murray Waas or Sy Hersh amongst the conservatives. It’s basically a well-funded version of the “moon landing is a hoax” people in a giant internet circle jerk.
Fixed. No, seriously. Wingnuttias investigations are to journalism what Jack Van Impe is to predicting the future.
jcricket
Geez, compare the right-wing “investigations” (of anything) or anything leaked to Drudge to smear people with (“Obama is a fake Christian terrorist plant”) to what actual journalists, or even the bloggers on the left do.
If you’ve been following Glenn Greenwald’s takedown of Joe Klein and Time, you’ll see what real fact checking is, and how it works.
In fact, Glenn’s takedown is another great example of the difference between the left and the right. The left wants the media to work right (not pass on scandal/rumor as fact, fact-check PR and spin, not trust dishonest politicians). The right wants the media to be friendly to Republicans all the time, pass on smear as fact, etc – in other words, become the PR arm of the Republican party.
jcricket
OK – Rudy scandal’s gonna have legs:
r€nato
yeah, it’s right there in the Constitution – ‘lying under oath in a civil suit which has no bearing whatsoever on a President’s fitness for office – even if that civil suit is later dismissed – shall be grounds for impeachment.’
Lesley
Mere diddling of a compliant member of the opposite sex is not.
Of course, the scandal’s about using and hiding city funds to do so. Not the affair itself. But let’s ignore that little fact.
Lesley
BTW, it’s not clear whether or not that’s illegal under New York City law. It is under New York State law (using state funds to chaperone his sick wife is what got Hevesi in trouble). But you’d think the courageous fact-checkers of the right might use some of their fact-checking time to investigate that. But by and large, not.
Elvis Elvisberg
If this were pretty much anywhere but TPM, I wouldn’t believe it. But apparently, city funds were spent on “NYPD cops to walk Nathan’s dog.”
How can this only be coming out now? How could a New York City cop be assigned to this wasteful, demeaning task, and no one would ever find out? I guess all Giulianis find their corrupt, omerta-practicing Keriks.
Libby Spencer
I might point out that Clinton was never actually indicted for perjury or even charged with it.
corwin
Clinton was not actually impeached for the Lewinsky affair. That was nothing more than a cover. His real offense was that he raised taxes on the rich shortly after getting in office. The republicans spent the next three years looking for anything they could use to get back at him. His lying about his affair just barely rises to the level of a crime, but raising taxes, to the republicans, is practically treason.
cleek
and the Clenis has successfully derailed another thread.
craigie
Oh stop it with the relevant facts and stuff.
RSA
What?! But all the wingnut sites I read say that he was convicted of it!
John Cole
The Clenis got nothing on the upcoming Clagina craze.
Xenos
Another angle on the Plame approach is to simply assert that some peripheral issue is the center of the scandal, and then to lie endlessly about it, so that any discussion can be routed into an eddy on pettiness – ‘Plame did TOO send him on the trip!”
In this case, we will hear something really stupid soon, like:
“Nobody can prove Kerik was the driver for those trips!”, or,
“It was not really adultery under the NY code!”
-anything to give the captive media talking heads a basis for reporting anything other than a partisan dispute.
Notorious P.A.T.
Now THAT is the kind of development that could get this story on the front page. If Rudy stops joshing with reporters and doesn’t invite them to his cocktail parties anymore, they might just decide to go after him.
Xenos
Perjury needs to be based on a lie about a material fact, too. I have no idea how the fooling around between Monica and Bill was material to the sexual harassments suit from Jones. It is not even clear that, should Jones’ suit have been tried, the deposition testimony regarding Monica would have been admissible.
Voice of Reason
Still the funniest damn thing I’ve read all week!
dslak
Xenos is right, the judge did rule that it was immaterial, and that it was not to be made public. It was, however, made public by someone on Jones’s team. Three guesses as to who that was . . .
capelza
So Giuliani prepaying 400,000 on a city AMEX card (charged to the agency charged with finding legal defense for poor defendants) for future “travel expenses’ is difficult for them to understand?
And that some of the 100K that was spent going out to the Hamptons where Nathan had a condo. Or that it was so “odd” to do this that Bloomberg got 298K back from Amex when he took office.
Why is this so hard for the big brain “rational” righties to understand? Talk about your “Travelgate”.
jcricket
So basically we’re going to start hearing that indictments for the reporters covering the case are imminent?
Remember – it’s not just that it was “no big deal” about Plame or that she “wasn’t undercover”. It was that Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were going to be convicted of all sorts of crimes.
And the whole dodging of this is just classic IOKIYAR behavior. I don’t expect them to police their own, but someone should. And that someone is the media, the Democrats and the voting public.
Waxman and others need to keep up all the pressure for the next 4+ years (or however long it takes to uncover all the crimes + damage Bush and the Republicans have done). No listening to the concern trolls about how Americans are tired of investigations.
What Americans are tired of is corrupt Republicans. Don’t forget it.
jcricket
BTW – I expect Wingnuts to say something (with a straight face) like “Stop criminalizing criminal behavior – that’s just anti-Republican”.
Dug Jay
Easy to answer: The righties are simply following the precedent established by the lefties who simply said, move on…nothing here.
Psycheout
Huh? Are you Rudy’s PR or something? I cannot believe how many stupid people cannot see that this isn’t about diddling, it’s about the misuse of TAXPAYER MONEY. The diddling is secondary.
Look at it this way. The diddling was cheating on his wife. The misuse of public funds was cheating on the city of New York. Do you want to give this egomaniac the opportunity to diddle the entire country?
It’s the corruption, stupid.
dslak
Has anyone considered the possibility that Scott Beauchamp was laundering Rudy’s money, without the latter’s knowledge?
Damn you, Scott Beauchamp!
Psycheout
OK, I get it. You’re a liberal troll. Move.on.dot.org. Go away.
jake
No, no John. They aren’t to the stage where they can be confused by the numbers. They are still in a state of shock brought on by the idea that a Double Gitmoing, LawnOrdering*, Mayor of Americaing Republican could do anything that wasn’t completely above board and straight forward. Of course it is easy for them to cope with the idea that DemoNcRats do nasty things, that is what Democrats do so they can go straight from Ah-ha! To Counter Checking with nary a blink. But hearing that one of their own has been naughty has sent them to the swooning couches. Again.
Soon enough they’ll start the process of grieving and enter Stage 1 – Denial. Next comes … Oh wait, we’re talking about the denizens of Wingnuttistan, it’s all denial for that lot.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Family Values, bitches!
I hope you don’t mind if I steal that.
*Not to be confused with Mr. LawnOrder(TM) Fred Thompson.
Xanthippas
You know, I’ve taken the time to leave three comments about this NRO thing on our great media critic Confederate Yankee’s blog. And though he’s managed to find time to write about another story of supposed liberal media bias, he still can’t quite bring himself to write about this one. And my first comment disappeared, oddly enough. But, no bias or anything…it’s all about finding the truth.
Libby Spencer
And they will argue that forever even when faced with hard proof. Reminds me of my first husband. You could play him a videotape of his drunken assholery and he would still deny he did anything.
Meanwhile, Judy didn’t just get a police car taxi service, she ordered up the ‘black and white cabs’ for her friends when she wasn’t even in the car and got the cops to take her to visit the folks in PA when she wasn’t with Rudy. Surely that isn’t covered under city business.
And I’m sure NYers are happy to find out that anyone who is threatened by a stranger in the city deserves police protection around the clock. Hell, I’ve been threatened in NY by strangers. I expect my police escort to meet me at the city limits next time I visit Gotham City. Or is boinking Rudy a prerequisite — in which case I’ll take my chances on being murdered by a bum…
Libby Spencer
By the way, I think the NRO fabulist is getting short shrift on this thread and deserves one of his own. Has a single major fringenut addressed this yet? I’m very disappointed in our citizen journalists — whose only interest is in protecting truth in media. Surely by now they could have come up with a street address, phone number and the guy’s high school year book picture.
Where’s the accountability?
capelza
Would it help Ed and the other confused folks if I got out my kids dolls.
See here..(holds out a beat up action figure, manly but not anatomically correct) here’s Giuliani. The old brunette Barbie will be Judith Nathan. And this little group over here (a herd of Rainbow Bright ponies) is the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office. By it I’ll put some Monopoly money and call it 400K.
The “Rudy” doll will take the money from the ponies. Since my kids weren’t into planes, I’ll fold up a piece of paper to make one. (has “Rudy” and “Judith” take the Ponies money and walks them to the paper plane).
Then on the other side of the sand box, I’ll put in a Fisher-Price dollhouse and…I’ll call that “the Hamptons”……….
dslak
capelza, I considered suggesting that somebody try to make a scale model of the area between NYC and the Hamptons, but I found the possible Beauchamp angle to be more plausible.
jcricket
Remember, his motivation was that “hizbullah are terrorists, so lying to make them look worse is helping our side”, which as well all know is the role of journalists.
His response to the whole “lying, packing heat, etc. endangers other journalists” was basically “only if you’re on their side does it matter what the terrorists think”!!!
Fucking right-wingers are now actively working on getting other journalists killed.
Gus
capelza, you should make a youtube video. The script is half written, and the other half practically writes itself.
jake
Bu-but jcricket, someone has to counter the terrorist-hugging Librul MSM and their biased reality. WST, Jr. is just making another reality, a better reality, where there are never ending legions of heavily armed terrists that need to be fought over there or we’ll be wearing burquas over here.
RSA
The Captain is pretty funny, actually:
Right. . . charging the New York City Loft Board $34,000 for Giuliani’s security expenses would certainly confuse the Mob. It’s just an unfortunate accident that it also confused the city’s comptroller and auditors. Unless maybe they’re part of the Mob too!
Echo without Bunnies or Men
Come on people, fucking Turd boy Rove is out there screaming ‘The Dems wanted to invade Iraq’ and NO ONE is calling him on it. Oh, no one but the angry unwashed bloggers and we all know they just mocked and ignored by Leslie Blitzer and Tweety bird.
So, with your ‘librul’ media, not only to right wing scandals and lies get a free pass (unless it’s gay sex), the numbnuts in the MSM have to work overtime to prove how balanced they are, so I expect a Democrat sex scandal to be unearthed anyday, to show that, gosh golly, the other side does it too!
Rudy will continue to ignore this scandal, and his enablers in the media will fawn how ‘tough and resolute’ he is, and that he’ll focus on ‘the real issues facing Amuricans’
Mumon
Spot on. I respect you more & more for stuff like this…
adsk
HehHehHeh. All of us longtime NYCers (50 yrs), have been saying for months that there’s no way Rudy’s *actual* record and character could stand close scrutiny.
Besides being venal, petty, bullying, shameless, dismissive of consensus, grandstanding, and not all that swift, he is also fabulously corrupt…not in an Abramoff/Reed “I entered politics to become rich” way, but in the stupendously arrogant “I’m the king, and everything is naturally my due” sort of way.
This stuff w/ his concubine is merely the tip of the iceberg — you all are going to be appalled in the coming months.
Elvis Elvisberg
Well, RSA, according to Peter Hoekstra, al Qaeda may have infiltrated the CIA, causing them to warn against doing stuff that President Bush wanted to do. So maybe the Mob did infiltrate the comptroller’s office. They were going to demoralize America by disclosing Rudy’s affair– in a post-9/11 world!
See, if you just assume the entire world is an omnipotent conspiracy against you, right-wing logic makes a lot of sense.
folkbum
You should get that woman who parodies Atlas Shrugged. There’s the money.
jake
He certainly has the droit de seigneur thing down pat.
Since the media is ignoring Shag-Gate because There Are Anonymous E-mails about Obama’s True Religion in the Tubez, and Hilary Is Inaccessible to Reporters (unlike Dubya) the only good thing about stuff like this is it shuts the fRightened up for a bit.
Tsulagi
Correct, the zeroes are immaterial. In fact, he should have said 2,000. Because what does it say about Hezbollah that we would easily believe it to be true. Close enough for Wingnut work in getting the truth out.
jcricket
Compare funny, ha ha, joke in BJ comment thread:
To actual statement by high-level Bush Aide in 2004:
Is it really a surprise that people who think journalism, science and history are all basically better replaced/trumped by “the will to believe”, political propaganda and neo-con world-domination “a-la-Risk” fantasies got us in our current hellish never-ending war nightmare?
Take for example when Democrat politicians make reality based statements about the fight on terrorism (Kerry’s comment about global policing being a great example). It’s all Republicans can do to not exceed the sound barrier furiously typing out cheeto-flecked missives of “nucular” apoplexy.
So instead of doing something to confront the existential problems of our time (global warming, global income inequality, rising fundamentalism/terrorism) we spend all our time trying to move the fucking “rhetorical center” back somewhere to the left of Pat Buchanan before we can even have an honest conversation.
Sometimes I just want to give up.
Conservatively Liberal
Ya made the top of the front page at the Great Orange Satan again John. You keep this up and the Wingnut Moonies are going to think you are a card carrying member of MoveOn.org.
Yes, the silence on the right says it all for me. I am betting that the talking points are still being compiled, so everyone is zipping their lips until they get their marching orders.
The problem with living in a glass house is that there is the danger of something breaking. I view the current situation of the right as living on the top floor of a glass skyscraper. They have tossed so many stones through the floor that they have finally broken through and are now in a free fall, smashing through floor after floor on the way down.
They have a long way to go on their trip to the bottom. They built this glass monstrosity they live in, and it is so tall that you can’t even see the top of it. And all we can hear is the endless cacophony of breaking glass.
We are only starting to hear about Rudey. I bet things are going to get better (for us), and it will be interesting to see if the right breaks and runs from him and exactly what will be the
strawturd that breaks the elephants back.Any guesses?
Xanthippas
To be fair, here’s what CY had to say when I asked him why he has yet to write about this matter on his blog:
In other words, the only question is to the extent which the NRO is going to do something about it, and for that it’s “wait and see.” No combing the haystack for any other exaggerations, no questioning of NRO’s motives, no accusations of right-wing media bias, not accusations that these fabrications substantially serve the purpose of the right-wing website that published them. Nope, nothing to see here…move along fellas.
In the meantime, CY has written his 834th post on the TNR/Beachuamp story, crowing about how they’ve “folded.”
tBone
I have it on good authority that our intrepid citizen journalists did,in fact, investigate the NRO fabulist. They determined that he has cheap laminate countertops, so he’s in the clear.
Fixed.
Tara the anti-social social worker
Hey now, it was only a fake Nobel Prize “nomination,” not an actual fake Nobel Prize!
jcricket
tBone… I’m already experiencing schadenfreude poisoning (like being over-hydrated from drinking too much water), and now I have to deal with getting cancer from all the microwave popcorn I have to eat to fully enjoy the Republican scandals?
Thanks a lot Republicans, now I have something else to blame you for :-)
Rick Moran
I posted on it today at AT:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/12/is_rudy_in_trouble_over_questi.html
It saddens me that your audience now consists of these kind of people cheering you on, John:
LMAO! May be the funniest post you’ve put up since Schiavo died.
BTW – haven’t seen anyone posting on TNR yet. Hope the crow isn’t too well done.
tBone
I think he’s saving the crow for your party. You know, the one where you take down your scale model of Bradleys failing to run over dogs.
Rick Moran
T-Bone:
Get around much?
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=51f6dc92-7f1d-4d5b-aebe-94668b7bfb32&p=1
Money graf for the reading impaired:
And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.
So let me get this straight. The magazine has stopped standing by the stories but T-Bone continues with the “fake but accurate” way to report the news.
Brava…
borehole
That “American Thinker” link reminds me of a joke from an old Archie comic that always stuck with me because it was so out-of-place: “You’re known as a real thinker. By people who lisp.”
And no, that’s not how people with lisps pronounce “stinker,” but it’s still pretty ambitious for “Archie.”
tBone
Yeah, I read it a half-hour before I saw your post. I wasn’t very clear – I meant that you’d be having a party and taking down your scale model because the claims that rightwing blogs made to discredit Beauchamp were completely vindicated by the TNR retraction. Weren’t they?
All right, you got me. The retraction totally justifies the hysterical frenzy that gripped Wingnuttia during the Summer of Beauchamp. Mea culpa.
RSA
I’m not a Beauchamp defender, but I think there’s a difference between his case and Smith’s. Assume that they’re both liars: in one case you have some soldiers accused of making fun of a disfigured woman and running over a dog; in the other you have a story about thousands of Hezbollah militia moving into Christian areas of Lebanon. There’s a huge difference in policy implications, isn’t there? On purely journalistic standards, Smith and Beauchamp might be in the same boat, but not for the potential impact of their writing.
Anne Laurie
Giuliani, who is normally friendly to reporters, bristled past them, and campaign staffers were unusually physical in keeping the press away. Several campaign aides told campaign reporters to return to the press area, and some of his security detail manhandled reporters.
Count on our Kneepad MSM to interpret this as “toughness” on Guiliani’s part. If he (well, his henchmen) are “brave” enough to shove the paparazzi, surely Osama bin Forgotten is trembling at the thought of Preznit-King Rudy!
My bet would be on David Broder to post this meme first, but there are soooo many contenders I’m looking for an opeditorial no later than Monday. Extra points if the same Kneepadder manages to include a note about how Hillary was “distant” or “dismissive” of our brave MSM stenographers.
Conservatively Liberal
Moran, when are you idiots going to drop the TNR/Beauchamp love festival? Jeez! Like most people, I never even read any story about Beauchamp at TNR and I did not hear about it in the MSM. Who are the town criers that are out proclaiming there is no story in the story? You damn Wingnut Moonies. Why are you so invested in this story? What is it about Beauchamp that makes you crazies act like cats rolling in a patch of catnip? It is a distraction to everything else that actually is important, and of actual relevance, to the rest of America.
Shit happens, and when the story gets retold, there will more than likely be some embellishing of it. That is human nature.
“I bagged a bear while hunting, and it was as big as a house!”
You guys go after someone of no relevance in a little read story for what you believe is lying, and yet you support a President who does nothing but lie when it comes to Iraq, or most anything else. Same with people like Cunningham, Abrahamoff, Cheney, Craig, Stevens, your neo-con cheerleaders and on and on and on. Your party is full of embellishing, lying asshats. And people like you feed and thrive on their bullshit.
New party motto: Republicans, the Mushroom Party. We thrive on bullshit!*
*and red herring.
Malignant Bouffant
Rick Moran: Were you able to read you might have noticed that Dug Jay, who wrote the Schiavo comment, seems to be on your side of the aisle, judging from his other comments, or is a “parody troll.” (Hard to tell w/o vocal inflection, but he’s not very funny, so he’s probably just another rightwing nut.) You, however, cheerfully accuse people of having little boy porn on their hard drives. It saddens me that you even exist.
By the way, the difference between Beauchamp’s “a few soldiers may have done some ugly crap in a war zone,” & Smith’s “This is a serious threat & we should do something about it” exaggerations (to say the least) is significant. But you appear to be dealing only w/ Il Douche’s corruption, not NRO’s. I’ll not be clicking to “Uncle Sam on a Log” to find out.
Conservatively Liberal
TPMuckraker is reporting that Giuliani pre-paid American Express $400,000 in 2001 for future travel expenses. That is right, the expenses had not even occurred yet. TPM is finding all kinds of interesting things in the receipt pile, like trips to the Hamptons to get laid at taxpayer expense. I like the name TPM is using for what could be called a slush fund: Rudy’s Shag Fund.
It is a riot that you can hear a pin drop in Greater Moonie Wingnuttia regarding this latest revelation. But you just know that they are seething under the covers about this, no doubt about it.
They must be suffering from Hive Mind Blogging Paralysis.
Rick Moran
cheerfully accuse people of having little boy porn on their hard drives
You bet I’m cheerful about it. That’s because even those with chipmunk brains realized it was a joke and anyone who took it seriously needs to have their head examined.
Conservatively Liberal
Oops! Wrong story at TPMuckraker (but still relevant to Roodi and his taxpayer funded affair).
Here is the right one: Rudy’s Shag Fund
Bruce Moomaw
Moran, let’s cut the crap, shall we? Beauchamp’s very first TNR piece (“War Bonds”) proves that he, and certainly not TNR, were NOT trying to consistently denigrate Our Boys. That piece (whose accuracy has also come under some question) was extremely FLATTERING to them. TNR was guilty (at most) of not fact-checking enough on one particular piece — which, of course, is what you also say about NR (although the latter hasn’t yet been caught printing a factually suspicious ANTI-war piece, which puts it one jump ahead of TNR in the Suspicious Bias Department).
jake
Here we go.
Got that folks? Just add a little context, sprinkle a few caveats and voila! 2 = 200. It could happen to anyone, amirite? I mean, how many times have you looked down at your hands and just for a split-second thought “Whoa! I must be an Indian god!”
Um…
Oh well, let us give thanks Mr. Wet Stained Trousers, jr. isn’t a surgeon. Without the proper caveats and context to keep him in check an attempt to harvest two inches of femoral artery for a bypass could get reeeeal ugly.
Ass hats.
Svensker
What I don’t get about the Beauchamp Affair is that the kid sounds like a relatively normal 24-year-old, telling about some of the dumb/bad stuff that happened to people in a war zone. Soldiers killed dogs, made fun of an injured woman — big whoop. You think soldiers do don’t this kind of thing, maybe worse?
But Abu Graib, now, what about those soldiers? They did a lot of bad stuff, didn’t they? (Or was it all just “fraternity pranks” like Rush says?) Were those soldiers a complete aberration? A few bad apples in an otherwise wonderful bushel basket of perfect soldiers?
Having been in the Army myself, I don’t remember most of the kids in my unit being paragons of square-jawed American rectitude. They were mostly lower-class not very educated kids, some nice, others not so much. We certainly did plenty of “bad stuff” in basic training and beyond, some of it probably illegal, lots of it certainly immoral.
Maybe the problem is, none of the wingers have ever been in the military? Keyboard Kommandos don’t do “bad stuff” I guess. They all have square jaws, perfect posture, and talk heroically about the American Way, or something.
Xanthippas
There’s a huge difference in policy implications, isn’t there?
grumpy realist
OK, we’ve got a supposedly serious Republican reporter who has confused 2 with 2000.
Explains why this present administration doesn’t give a damn about the deficit. Or the money going down the rathole called Iraq. Or the potential cost of a war with Iran. See? “2==2000”.
With that sort of math, how can we possibly fail to win this war?
Xanthippas
Well of course. As in, the possibly hyperbolic claims of on American soldier completely undermine the rationale for war in Iraq, and must be dealt with swiftly and without mercy. Whereas the possibly hyperbolic claims by one right-wing “journalist” completely serve the purpose of hyping the threat of terror, and so must only be given glancing attention even if they happen to be outrageously wrong.
Okay, but that’s me be snarky. Actually yes, you’re right. There’s a huge world of difference between a guy who might have made up some stories about things soldiers did, and a guy who’s writing about the large-scale activities of a powerful terrorist group in the middle of a country teetering on the brink of civil war. Yeah, there’s a pretty big difference.
grumpy realist
Oh, and for those who want a deliciously snarky view of Rudy’s latest meltdown, go read the GroupNewsBlog (www.groupnewsblog.net). LowerManhattanite’s reportage (as a bonafide NYCer) on this dance of the skeletons tumbling out of Rudy’s closet is a joy to read.
You have to realize that there are MANY people and groups in NYC who Rudy pissed off, left, right and center–probably in total only 95% of the entire NYC population. Said groups have been sharpening the axes, kitchen knives, and knitting needles in preparation for years. And now it’s all coming home to roost…..
Mister
I prefer the Clintoris.
demimondian
Indeed. And there is nothing like a New York political vendetta anywhere else in the nation. By the standards of New Yorkers, Chicagoans are gentlemen, DC-ers are soft-handed wimps, and Bostonians are pikers.
I *love* The City. There’s nowhere else like it in the US. Somebody got popcorn over here?
Lenny Bruce's ghost
It’s so hi-larious to accuse a gay man of being a pedophile. Har har. You are a winner.
Every time I think “Get a Brain, Morans!” has lost its comedic appeal, there comes Ricky to prove me wrong.
glasnost
Michelle Malkin has an actual post about this. I found it hard to believe, but it’s there.
Tony J
Wait, are you saying he’s not a spoof?
And I’ve been telling everyone to get over here because that guy from Ghostbusters is doing Teh Funny.
The Briscoe Kid
After reading TNR’s lengthy retraction (or whatever that was) I popped over to Wikipedia to check out the latest in the STB edit war. And found this bizarre post from The Weakly Standard’s primary source:
The Weakly Standard’s source is not only hyping his involvement in l’affaire Beauchamp, but he’s also reminding people that he starred in an award winning gay pr0no film 12 years ago.
Could this BE anymore bizarre? Is there an award for wingnut wackiness, because this is the wackiest bit of wingnut wackery I’ve ever seen.
Darkness
You know, the Republican candidates are very useful for one thing: making the Dem candidates look good. I’d vote for Obama if he were a Druid and wore a wolf skin and elk head during the full moon. I don’t care what his religion is as long as his name isn’t Romney or Giuliani. My standards used to be higher. They are sinking fast.
LWM
They used to be one and the same, a Russian design for a popular assault rifle, but a Kalashnikov is now an expensive and trendy Molotov Cocktail.
Spence
Shhh, stop it John! I want 9ui11iani to win the nomination so that we can have months and months of fun! Don’t sink him before he secures it!