Good article by Noemie Emery over at The Weekly Standard. It chronicles at some length the mental game of Twister that leftists have to play for their non-stop parade of anti-Bush assertions to make sense. Excerpt:

God sometimes seems to be toying with the Goracle, scheduling frigid weather and ice storms on the dates of his speeches about global warming, but his fans have an answer for that: all weather changes, if they are dire, come from global warming. Here are some other choice fancies that the Party of Reason believes:

* Global warning causes both hot and cold weather, just as elections are stolen when the Democrats lose them, but are stolen too when they win.

* A country in which dissent is a flourishing industry is on the brink of a great fascist crackdown, as you can tell by all the books written attacking the president, the plays put on that call him an idiot, and the movies that call for his death.

* When exit polls indicate a different result from the actual vote count, the polls are correct and the vote count is fraudulent, a fact covered up by journalists who are (a) Democrats by something close to a nine-to-one ratio; and (b) dying to uncover a huge government scandal, so that they too can be famous like Woodward and Bernstein, make millions of dollars, and be played in the movies by Hollywood stars.

* That the Presidents Bush, from Yale and a long line of Yankees, who made the careers of the first black secretaries of state ever named in this country, are secretly longing to bring back the South of 1859.

* And, that the Republican party, whose frontrunners are a once-divorced actor (just like Ronald Reagan), a Mormon from Massachusetts by way of Michigan, and a thrice-married Italian Catholic from the streets of Brooklyn, is a shrunken husk of a regional faction, punitive, narrow, and wholly obsessed with extreme social mores, relying on extralegal repression to perpetuate itself in power. To the more intense members of the reality faction, all of this makes perfect sense.

Ah, reason! How sweet it is, and to what lengths it can lead you, when you think that you have a monopoly on it. Political parties are coalitions of interests, fighting it out in a series of struggles, in which no side has a patent on wisdom and virtue, and no wins are ever complete. People who understand this maintain their own balance and bearings, but those who insist they are fighting for reason lose what remains of their own.

Over and over, they do what they claim their opponents are doing, want to do, or have done: make vast leaps of faith on almost no evidence, get carried away on large waves of emotion, build towering edifices on small collections of factoids, omit, deny, or denounce all contrary evidence, build fantastical schemes which they project on the enemy, put two and two together and get 384. People are entitled to say what they want, but it takes something other than reason to look at raging debates and discern in them fascistic oppression, to look at large Republican losses (wholly in line with a sixth-year election) and see massive fraud on the part of the losers, to look at today's South and see John Calhoun's, to draft both the Bushes (and the entire Republican party) into the Confederate Army, 150 years after the fact. Facts on the ground have no effect on their fantasies, which exist in a realm of their own.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 07:22 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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John Hawkins has compiled a list of what he believes are some of Ann Coulter's best lines during the past year. Yes, she says asinine, dick things to promote her books, but she still gets off some of the best one-liners around. Here's one of my favorites:

I'm astounded that debate has sunk so low that I need to type the following words, but: No law is ever enforced 100%. We can't catch all rapists, so why not grant amnesty to rapists? Surely no one wants thousands of rapists living in the shadows! How about discrimination laws? Insider trading laws? Do you expect Bush to round up everyone who goes over the speed limit? Of course we can't do that. We can't even catch all murderers. What we need is "comprehensive murder reform." It's not "amnesty" -- we'll ask them to pay a small fine.

If Ann would stick with her strength, which includes caustic bon mots, she'd be fine. However, you and I know that she'll say something even more offensive this year, because I'm guessing that she has another book in the works and she'll want to gin up sales.

Note to Ann: Not everything that offends and infuriates the left is wrong. You might check once in a while to see if your ideological brothers and sisters are offended, too. That would be a sign that maybe you are actually wrong.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And the winner is... Jeff Goldstein, of course. It helps, of course, that his opponent is an illogical, lying, hypocritical sack of horse squeeze, but Jeff would have whipped his ass anyway. Just my opinion; I could be wrong.

But I doubt it.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 03:17 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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