Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

A consequence of cucumbers

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Republicans in disarray!

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

The revolution will be supervised.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

No Justins, No Peace

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: On Showing One’s Arse in Public…

Open Thread: On Showing One’s Arse in Public…

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Okay, I’m a gleeful partisan, but this is too good not to share. Dave Weigel, “Daily Caller Cites 24-Year-Old Fake Princeton Newspaper to Attack the NYT’s Benghazi Reporter“:

…Three days into the new year, Johnson appeared again in the Daily Caller with an apparent scoop about David D. Kirkpatrick, the New York Times Cairo bureau chief who’d just filed a lengthy corrective history of the 9/11/12 Benghazi attacks. Never mind Kirkpatrick’s reporting; Johnson proved that Kirkpatrick had “show[ed] his naked body to all” while a student at Princeton 25 years ago….

Turns out, Kirkpatrick was busted for ‘public lewdness’ while in college (art class pranking & streaking), but the more outrageous claims Johnson cited were from a college parody paper. Johnson replied to Wiegel’s “So … what do college stunts during the George H.W. Bush administration says about Kirkpatrick’s journalism now?”:

… I am rather notorious for not understanding sarcasm or satire and I am deeply embarrassed by the whole article…

And some people say the Daily Caller has never printed a single factual statement. Haterz!

… As an aside some people are arguing that I was trying to discredit Kirkpatrick’s controversial reporting on the Benghazi attack which is false. I simply wrote up the story because his name was in the news. I have no idea if what he reported was accurate…

Well, Mr. Johnson, if you’d stopped after “I have no idea”, even your meanest critics would’ve conceded your accuracy!*

* Incidentally, this falls under the “sarcasm or satire” rule.

Reader Interactions

51Comments

  2. 2.

    Schlemizel

    Chuckie is deeply unhappy that nobody – NOBODY – wanted to see his body, unclothed or otherwise when he was in college

  3. 3.

    Shortstop

    Complete inability to understand sarcasm or satire? There’s a lot of that going around today. ;)

  4. 4.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    Back from Honduras. My wife is trying to come up with things to be happy about, like there isn’t sand in the beds or in our underwear, and that we now have a bathtub and hot water, and that we can drink water right out of the sink, and we can flush our toilet paper rather than having to throw it in the trash can; but I’m not sold here. It’s cold, and there’s a front yard in the front yard, rather than the Caribbean Sea, but I guess I’ll have to find a way to deal with it anyway. I hope to have some pictures and pithy commentary soon, if John Cole will let me put it on the front page…

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    Has the Daily Caller ever printed an accurate story? You know, just for the novelty value.

  7. 7.

    Big R

    I will give him this much: he owns the screwup. That’s something that’s missing from most modern conservatives and journalists, though I repeat myself.

  9. 9.

    max

    I am rather notorious for not understanding sarcasm or satire

    And you write for a living?

    max
    [‘Consider the merits of accounting.’]

  11. 11.

    dmsilev

    @Violet: I don’t remember to be honest. Though the right wing’s view of Journo-list (“liberal media conspiracy! !”) was just a tad exaggerated from the reality, so I’m not sure I’d count that as an accurate story even if the Daily Tucker did break it.

  12. 12.

    jl

    “show[ed] his naked body to all”

    What? I never saw it. Johnson never called me about the story to verify either.

  16. 16.

    Anne Laurie

    @BGinCHI: Kids these days! Too fat and lazy to run naked through a public place, like we did in the good old days when we had to make our own fun! (/geezer)

  17. 17.

    Comrade Jake

    I suspect most of the Daily Caller writers attended schools where humor was considered some kind of a sin.

  20. 20.

    Shortstop

    I have crude (haw) footage of my older then-neighbor streaking in the 1970s. He had one of those concave ass-cheek things going. And if he tells me one more time on Twitter that atheists lack a moral center…

  21. 21.

    RareSanity

    @Comrade Jake:

    Reminds me of this exchange from Men in Black:

    Beatrice: You here to make fun of me too?

    Agent K: No, ma’am. We at the FBI do not have a sense of humor we’re aware of. May we come in?

    Beatrice: Sure. You want some lemonade?

    Agent K: Yes, please.

  23. 23.

    MoeLarryAndJesus

    I’ve seen pictures of Tucker Carlson with a live salmon up his ass, but not recently.

  25. 25.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)

    Feh. It’s supposed to be above freezing here on Friday. They don’t make January like they used to.

  26. 26.

    Ash Can

    Like BigR says @ #7, Johnson actually admits that he’s an idiot. That’s what’s really newsworthy here.

  27. 27.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    “I repeated bogus charges about him because his name was in the news. I have no idea who he is, what he wrote about, or if it’s accurate. Benghazi you say? Never heard of it.”

  28. 28.

    eemom

    @Anne Laurie:

    Kids these days! Too fat and lazy to run naked through a public place

    Not true. At UVA they still streak across Mr. Jefferson’s sacred Lawn. It’s tradition from when they used to ride their horses naked, or something.

  29. 29.

    MattR

    @Ash Can: Nah. His admission is preceded by the reason he is not really at fault. (He only saw the article, not the whole issue. Yet somehow the Daily Caller piece links to the entire issue) And he is completely full of shit regarding why he wrote his piece initially. If you think it was just “because his name was in the news”, I have a bridge to sell you.

  30. 30.

    Amir Khalid

    To all of you suffering in this bitterly cold North American winter, my sympathies from here in the nice, warm tropics.

  31. 31.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @eemom: Sending those shots and bells to warn the British that we wouldn’t be taking any cheek from them.

    I think that was it anyway.

  37. 37.

    Mike in NC

    Per Letters to the Editor, where I live all of the wingnuts who were previously demanding to see Obummer’s birth certificate have neatly pivoted and now want to know what BENGHAZI!!! coverup was engineered by Hillary. Must be a FOX News talking point, however stale. Still works for Lady Lindsey Graham, who cannot sleep at night for fear of the Tea Party fairies who cloud his dreams.

  38. 38.

    MattR

    @Mike in NC: Not surprising at all. One of the comments that Johnson left on Wiegel’s piece, emphasis mine.

    By the way, Joel isn’t a “birther.” He believes President Obama is eligible to be president but that his father is Frank Marshall Davis. Given how many lies we’ve heard about Obama’s family, I don’t think we can rule it out short of DNA.

  40. 40.

    PIGL

    I notice that the minceing little weasel used his fauxpology to smear as “controversial” the article he pretends he was in no way writing about. Why do these people never die horribly? Case in point, Breitbart. I mean, yes, he dead, but it wasn’t horribly enough. It’s like they have pacts with Satan.

  44. 44.

    StringOnAStick

    @PIGL: Breitbart died in a totally banal way, after spending the last few hours of his life hate-splaining in a twitter battle. Not how I’d want to spend my last moments, but I’m not a rage-hag nutbag either.

  45. 45.

    fleeting expletive

    This is just about the funniest BJ thread I have ever read, and I haven’t read all of it. Please carry on and bqwhatervre (Tshirt copyright there).

  46. 46.

    mclaren

    Apropos of nothing in particular, here’s a timeless passage from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments:

    We desire both to be respectable and to be respected. We dread both to be contemptible and to be contemned. But, upon coming into the world, we soon find that wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt. We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent. To deserve, to acquire, and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind, are the great objects of ambition and emulation. Two different roads are presented to us, equally leading to the attainment of this so much desired object; the one, by the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue; the other, by the acquisition of wealth and greatness. Two different characters are presented to our emulation; the one, of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity. the other, of humble modesty and equitable justice. Two different models, two different pictures, are held out to us, according to which we may fashion our own character and behaviour; the one more gaudy and glittering in its colouring; the other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline: the one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the other, attracting the attention of scarce any body but the most studious and careful observer. They are the wise and the virtuous chiefly, a select, though, I am afraid, but a small party, who are the real and steady admirers of wisdom and virtue. The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness. — Adam Smith, 1759.

  47. 47.

    PIGL

    @Omnes Omnibus: well, the Romans had a truly well thought out punishment for parricide, but since the sack stuffed with malefactor, hound, viper and rooster had be thrown into a specific river, us New Worlders will have to think of something original.

    And despite my evil nature, I am trying to think of the mortifying, ignominious and mythic, rather than the protracted and agonizing. Those are too easy….what we want is something that will set a notorious yet mock-ably bad example for thousands of years, something that will make our anti-heroes names ring with scornful laughter down through the ages, like an Icarus or a Judas after Jonathan Swift got through with them.

    Any ideas?

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