sfarber

Let’s continue our beating a dead quail to death in… Fudd-fest… We’ll move on to comparing accounts of how everyone’s favorite right-wing-operative-married-to-a-left-wing-operative, i.e. Mary Matalin, has presented herself about the whole Fudd-gate fiasco (thanks to Bruce the Veep for the term.) We’ll start with Mary’s allies at Right Voices, who believe Mary kicked ass in her dealings with Tim Russert and Maureen Dowd on the Sunday talk show that digby calls “Press the Meat.” Notably, Mary quickly scored points by attacking human “left wing clay pigeon” Maureen Dowd, invoking among other things, Hillary Clinton and the Vince Foster fiasco. I’ll...

It should surprise no one that I of all people refuse to give up on the Dick Cheney story. We’ll start with this “round-up Guide to Quail-gate“. We’ll move right on to “Cheney’s Chappaquiddick“. Some strange details emerge. For one thing, the shooting seems very endemic to Dick Cheney: he shot an endangered species (i.e., the last progressive Republican in the great state of Texas). For another, he seems to have surrounded himself with the typical trappings of royalty. We’ll start with our esteemed hostess, Katharine of Aragon Armstrong… daughter of a major rancher and her Mom was Ambassadress to...

The vice-president believes he dodged a bullet (even if his good friend Harry still got peppered) as Harry Whittington left the hospital, and, showing what a good loyal GOP team player he is, apologized to Dick Cheney for all the trouble he caused by getting in the way of Dick’s gun. Is that a friend? Ladies– see if this man is single… He’s not only loaded… he’s ready to go when his friends are locked and loaded. We all (when I say “we”, I’m referring to the 70-80% of the American people who actually believe that Republicans are capable of...

The President, as usual, expressed full confidence in his vice-president and the President stated he was satisfied with Dick Cheney’s explanation and his conduct of how he trickled out information regarding it to the press in derogation of the usual White House press channels and how he successfully avoided investigation of his probable inebriation at the time of the shooting. Except, of course, that this won’t do. This won’t do at all. There are lots and lots and lots of non-stories out there, that there’s no point in us talking about, like the scathing UN report demanding that Gitmo be...

The Vice-President broke his half-week long silence today by giving a statement in the friendly confines of Fox News to Brit Hume… Cheney admitted that it was his own damned fault that he shot his good friend Harry Whittington, and Cheney noted that he had “a beer with lunch”. This is the clearest confirmation possible that there indeed was at least some level of alcohol involved, and hence, there was significance in the fact that local law enforcement officials were kept at bay until the following morning. “One beer” of course could be a 12 ounce can, a pint glass,...

While the post-title reminds one of the old Dana Carvey SNL character Massive Headwound Harry, we are speaking of course, of hapless Harry, specifically Harry Whittington, the Austin, Texas based attorney who Dick Cheney accidentally shot full of pellets intended for farm-raised quail. More specifically, Mr. Whittington had a “mild” heart attack as a result of one or more of the pellets lodged in or near his heart bringing about a “fibrilation”. While the recriminations will fly over the apparent breaches of protocol and procedure associated with the nearly day-long delay in announcing news of this unfortunate accident to the...

Thankfully, help comes from Gary Farber and the Amygdala blog… most of the links can be found in comments to my posts below (thank you, Gary!), but I’d like to point out, in particular, this post on Administration lies associated with Guantanamo. Consider that our friends at the UN have issued a rather scathing report of their own about Gitmo. Of course, you discerning reader, know all this, because you’ve been getting it straight from the mouths of the horses who have been telling it… to the dog… who vouchsafes it on to you. Gary has lots of other posts...

Cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugged, while Julia continues hiatusing. While sitting here amidst New York’s second largest snow fall ever of 22.8 inches, and pondering going back out to shovel, I was suddenly alerted to the fact that the Vice-President of the United States shot a man. My dreams of reading about Dick Cheney having challenged Senator Pat Leahy to a duel a la Burr and Hamilton were dashed, when I saw that, in fact, it was a hapless 78 year old political crony and campaign giver, Texas lawyer Harry Whittington, who was, in fact, shot while hunting with Dick Cheney....

Could things be changing in the Taiwan Straits? Well, our overdue visit to our comrades from Eurasia over at Pravda gives us this examination of that question. The piece notes that in a somewhat unusual move, the United States has rather vociferously taken sides, this time with Beijing, to tell the “independence minded” in Taiwan to… shut up. Basically, the official fiction is that China and Taiwan are, were, and always will be, one country, with Taiwan in effect “a renegade province”. This is why Taiwan was kicked out of the U.N. (the KMT government of Chiang Kai-Shek, based on...

Cross-posted at Sisyphus Shrugged. This tagline refers to both the yawning national trade deficit with the rest of the world of over $700 billion more goods and services imported over exported, and of course, what I sound like repeating the mantra that this presents “some kind of a problem.” The fact is, Americans’ view of things is always “so what’s the problem?” As long as one’s credit card has enough of a credit limit to cover anticipated forward spending until past the next billing cycle… what’s the problem, right? Why worry about the fact that we’ll be broke in a...