I Read These Morons So You Don’t Have To

As we know by now the rightwing blogosphere instinctively favors mercenaries and private contractors over US troops, unless someone wants to argue that they agreed with Kos and the troops that unaccountable, trigger-happy mercs do more harm than good. They favor management over the mercenaries/contractors themselves (pick any whistleblower case). Whether this comes from an ideological preference for private enterprise over government and management over labor, or whether they instinctively attack anybody who upsets the blue-skies-in-Iraq storyline I can’t rightly say. Could be a mix of both. Whatever it is you won’t lose money betting on Bob Owens or Michelle Malkin’s reaction to a given story.

Case in point: gang rape. Two days ago I commented, snarkily:

How many hours until Bob Owens demands to inspect her vagina? Place your bets here.

Whodathunkit! 32 hours wins the prize.

Bob has a number of concerns, e.g. what actually happened to the rape kit, and wonders why an earlier sexual harrassment case involving the victim isn’t getting more play. Of course that second point helps rather than hurts the argument that KBR has gender sensitivity problems, so three cheers to Bob for bringing it up.

He ends with this gem:

A third claim made in The Blotter is that in the wake of the alleged rape, Jones was, “…held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR…”

Shipping containers typically found in Iraq (and elsewhere) are either 20’ or 40’ steel and aluminum boxes with little to no ventilation. On the days Jones was confined by KBR (July 29-30, 2005), the mean average temperature was 100-degrees, with air temperatures over 110 degrees for 6 hours straight both afternoons. It seems implausible that a person would survive such conditions without adequate food and water.

As much as it pains me to truth-squad a great writer like Bob Owens, repurposed shipping containers (Container Housing Units, or CHUs) are a fairly common type of housing in Iraq. Indeed, one can’t help asking whatever happened to the proud citizen journalist corps of Graeme Frost fame. Has anybody photographed her countertops yet? Harassed an ex-boyfriend? The only thing to do is keep digging.

***Update***

Or, one can stop digging. Six hours after the essay that I linked to, Bob clarified his position:

For those of you who might expect me to be trying to debunk the case… don’t.

No, of course not. Only pieces of the case, which without a disclaimer gives the impression of trying to debunk the case. I’m glad that we cleared that up.

***Update 2***

This post from Jon Swift takes a much broader look at reactions around the conservasphere. When your credibility is rescued by Ben Domenech, it’s a bad day.

Predictable As A Chili FartPost + Comments (55)

I was wondering who would be the first to suggest that the solution to the Omaha mall shooting was more guns, and our winner is Neil Boortz with an assist from the Instapundit:

I HEARD NEAL BOORTZ holding forth on the Omaha mall shooting this morning on the way to work, and I realized I haven’t posted on it. I don’t really have anything to say that I haven’t said before. But it’s worth noting — since apparently most of the media reports haven’t — that this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free” zone. It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free.

Yeehaw.

More guns makes everything better.

I Was Waiting For ThisPost + Comments (243)