(Jeff Danziger’s website)
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Even with the Hoosier Homeboy officially out of the race, Doghouse Riley remains a source of comfort & enjoyment to those of us in the Reality-Based Community:
Ross Douthat has a job at the New York Times because he spent fourteen months or so giving the Republican party free advice on changes it needed to make post-Bush. This did not exactly catch on, even with Douthat. (There is also the fact that the man knew the HTML for linkage, and could do it fifteen-twenty times per 800-word copy without flagging, which whatever Sulzberger is responsible evidently figured put him right in the middle of the Youth movement.)
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Leave us remember: three years ago it was possible for Republicans to try to tell Republicans something. Not successfully, maybe. But possible.
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George Eff Will, as any student of pop culture in the Middle Ages knows, has a job at several popular mass-market “journalism” troughs because he wears bowties. And because he remembered enough of his Greek & Latin Derivatives class to confuse the suits at ABC about his role in Briefingate, at least long enough for Reagan to win and the rules of broadcasting and ethical behavior to change.
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Now, if you’ve ever found yourself suddenly plunged into seawater several hundred nautical miles from shore, and noticed a small assortment of straws floating by, you can understand what both Douthat and Will faced in 2009: a supposedly grassroots, supposedly transpartisan supposed political movement which was, obviously, just a cover for the base of their party, a base neither Douthat nor Will really chooses to share a neighborhood with. Or even a section of the country. Sure, both eventually “came around” after the third of fourth gulp of saltwater, but not altogether happily…
And finally, if you can find some extra scratch, this would be an excellent time to contribute to the Wisconsin recall:
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What’s going on in your neighborhood this evening? Let this be a Distraction-of-the-Day Free Zone. I don’t even want to know what you’re grilling, if it involves sausage products.