THEY’LL NEVER STOP SAYING MARIA! So sang a love-sick young man. So sings Anne Kornblut today: // link // print // previous // next //

CONTINUED RUBE-RUNNING FROM JOSH’S REPLACEMENT: We read a string of e-mails yesterday, many built on this line of thought: “No, McCain didn’t literally say it, but...” By the end, we were mainly struck by the number of progressives who think we can beat McCain this year only by making inaccurate statements. We’ll grant you this: Given the way our “liberal” “intellectual leaders” have functioned in the past sixteen years, it’s understandable when liberals and progressives can’t even imagine their team constructing a winning argument. Over those years, our “leaders” haven’t tried to win very hard; their careers have tended to come first. Which brings us back to the person who has kidnapped Josh Marshall. Good God! Josh’s replacement was still aggressively running the rubes in this clownish, Wednesday afternoon post:

GOOD FOR HER

Hillary decides to whack McCain for his 100 years in Iraq claim too.

How many ways can a guy play the rubes? This short post is a classic.

First, note the way Josh’s replacement implies that Clinton has just now started whacking McCain for his hundred-year comment. If you’re one of the “low-information liberals” Josh’s replacement seems to be stalking, you might believe, from reading this post, that Clinton has only now joined Obama in whacking McCain for his comment. That is baldly false, of course; she and Obama have both been criticized for misstating what McCain said. Beyond that, Josh’s replacement fails to note the most obvious fact about Clinton’s most recent statement—the one he praises in this post. In fact, Clinton has now stopped making the statement for which she was criticized—she has changed her original statement. In his post, Josh’s replacement links to a (typically bungled) on-line report by the New York Times:

NEW YORK TIMES/CAUCUS (4/9/08): Senator Barack Obama has come under some criticism for suggesting that his colleague in the Senate, John McCain, wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years, even though Mr. McCain was speaking hypothetically. Today in Pennsylvania, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not shy away from using that line of attack either.

At a speech at Hopewell High School in Aliquippa, Pa., Mrs. Clinton praised Mr. McCain, but then added that the Senator “has said that it would be alright [sic] with him if we kept troops in Iraq for up to 100 years and again yesterday, he basically reiterated his commitment to the course that we are on in Iraq. Well, I don’t agree with that.”

That hopelessly bungled New York Times post also implies that Clinton just joined Obama. Who knows? Josh’s replacement may be so stupid that he thought this was accurate. (Maybe he’s too tied up running the business.) But something is clear from that New York Times post: As anyone can easily see, Clinton has changed her earlier statement, the one for which she was criticized. In our view, the first part of Clinton’s Hopewell High statement is a bit silly—but at least it’s technically accurate. McCain did say it would be OK if we kept troops in Iraq for 100 years—under peaceful conditions. But in her original statements (for which she was criticized), Clinton had said something different. Who knows? Maybe if we repeat the elementary facts enough, people as dumb as Josh’s replacement will even start understanding them:

RICH (4/6/08): Really, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is ''willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq'' (as Mr. Obama said) or ''willing to keep this war going for 100 years'' are flat-out wrong.

As Rich noted, Obama and Clinton had both been criticized for claiming that McCain said he wanted a 100-year “war”—something he plainly hadn’t said. Yesterday, Clinton changed that part of her statement—and Josh’s replacement failed to notice. Maybe he’s still running the rubes. Or maybe he’s busy. Or dumb.

Let’s review this story, and it’s simple:

Originally, Clinton misstated what McCain said. She was criticized for her misstatement—and she has subsequently changed what she says. But Josh’s replacement is so dumb that he can’t seem to follow these simple developments. Either that, or he’s running the rubes—chasing those low-info voters.
Olbermann was even worse on this topic last night; he and Gene Robinson were baldly deceptive. Is Olbermann really this dumb? Or was he just running the rubes?

OLBERMANN (4/9/08): Just as President Bush became a uniter, not a divider, perversely by uniting America against his presidency, so too has John McCain tonight achieved the unlikely goal of uniting Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Our third story tonight, despite howls of G.O.P. protest, Senator Clinton has now joined Senator Obama in asserting yes, Senator McCain really did say he was OK with America staying in Iraq for 100 years.

Has now joined Obama? Really, that’s pathetic (and the rest of the segment got worse).

Olbermann and Robinson were awful, as always. (We’re amazed that the Post lets Robinson do this.) But then, these are the boys who followed the scripts which got us into our current mess. They’ve failed you utterly, right from Day One. Why on earth do you send us e-mails in which you torture fact and logic so you can play along with them now?

THEY’LL NEVER STOP SAYING MARIA: You’d think they’d program their cyborgs better. On page one of this morning’s Post, Anne Kornblut is finally allowed to do her profile of Chelsea Clinton. Is Kornblut poorly programmed—or just broken-souled? Her first paragraph gives us the “tell:”

KORNBLUT (4/10/08): With little fanfare the other day, Chelsea Clinton did what no one around her is ever supposed to do: She voluntarily brought up the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Poorly programmed? Or empty, base—broken? Finally allowed to profile Clinton, Kornblut couldn’t get through a single paragraph without including those two magic words. (She fleshes them further in paragraph 4.) And note the tricks these life-forms use. Why did Kornblut say that Clinton had brought up “the Monica Lewinsky scandal?” Duh! Because Clinton hadn’t mentioned Lewinsky herself! Go ahead: Watch in horrified stupefaction as a leering cyborg types on:

KORNBLUT (continuing directly): Speaking to a packed crowd of college students and recounting her mother's history of working with Republicans, the youngest Clinton talked for a minute about Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who as a House member during the impeachment hearings against President Bill Clinton was "one of the people who prosecuted my father in the 1990s," she said. Not "someone you would think would be an ally for someone with the last name Clinton, the 28-year-old added wryly.

Nor someone her audience would expect her to mention...

You see? Clinton hadn’t mentioned Lewinsky at all! But Kornblut wanted to mention Monica—wanted to say her name very much. And so, like that a slick decision! Lindsey Graham was close enough! Kornblut said Clinton had mentioned the “Lewinsky scandal,” not Miss Lewinsky herself.

Yes, we’ve seen a variant of that move before; we’ll refresh you with “Howler History” below. But first, let’s move ahead to the Post’s page 3, where one of Keith Olbermann’s broken-souled robots opened his “Washington Sketch” like this. Good God! Same thing! Spawn of Kornblut!

MILBANK (4/10/08): What does Gen. David Petraeus have in common with the alleged D.C. Madam? More than you might think.

Poor Milbank! Petraeus’ testimony was deeply important. But he longed to discuss that alleged D. C. Madam. And so, he wet-dreamed this.

For years, we’ve pondered two possibilities as they’ve behaved in this manner:

First possibility: They’re simply empty-souled palace dwellers. Their souls have been broken by their celebrity—by propinquity to wealth and “power.” Only one thing stirs their blood—and so they discuss it again and again. If Kornblut can work a certain name into a profile, a thrill might even run up her leg—might even land in a secret spot. In Milbank’s case, he has to find a way out of Iraq—a way to chat about hot love instead.

Second possibility: Clearly, these life-forms aren’t of this earth. Cyborgs or extraterrestrials? On that, we’ll let you be the judge.

That said, Kornblut and Milbank’s leering today answers a recent question:

Back when the idiot David Shuster was wondering if Clinton was being “pimped out,” his colleagues pretended to ponder a question: Why won’t Chelsea Clinton do interviews? The answer, of course, was perfectly obvious, though they were programmed not to reveal it. To state the obvious, if Clinton were interviewed by a cyborg like Kornblut, the first question would go like this: Chelsea, how did you feel when you learned that your father got blow jobs from someone who was almost your age?

It’s the question they all were longing to ask; no other topic enters their minds. Did anyone doubt that’s what they would ask? Did Kornblut prove it this morning?

WE OFTEN THINK OF GUROV: When we watch these broken-souled losers trying to make the blood flow through their veins, we often think of Gurov, the aging roué in Chekhov’s great Lady with Lapdog. In all his conquests, he’d never felt love, even once. “Every new affair...inevitably developed into an extremely complicated problem and finally the whole situation became rather cumbersome,” we’re told. And yet, “at every new meeting with an attractive woman he forgot all about this experience, he wanted to enjoy life so badly and it all seemed so simple and amusing.”

We think of Gurov when we read this sort of work by these empty, broken-souled losers. It seems they “want to enjoy life so badly”—but they only seem to know one way to move the blood through their veins. But uh-oh! Given journalistic events of the past year or so, we might also recall this part of Chekhov’s portrait: “He always spoke ill of women, and when men discussed women in his presence, he described them as the lower breed.”

Gurov finds his soul in the end; some at the Post haven’t been so fortunate. While we’re at it, might we also cite this part of Chekhov’s portrait—of Gurov as he initially finds him? “He could not help feeling that he had enough bitter experience to have the right to call them as he pleased, but all the same without the lower breed he could not have existed a couple of days...”

To us, the Kornbluts and the Milbanks seem similarly lost, from their own hearts’ desires.

Below, two pieces of HOWLER HISTORY help illuminate this sad cohort’s familiar, twisted instincts:

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SOUND THEY EVER HEARD: Broken-souled losers who crawled from a swamp still longed to hear those magical words. It was November 1999—impeachment had ended nine months before—but all these broken souls wanted to do was sing the song of “Monica.” And then, as if by magic, it happened! They learned that Naomi Wolf was advising Al Gore! Wolf had about as much to do with Lewinsky as Kornblut has to do with real things of this earth. But so what? Wolf was a woman, just like Lewinsky! And so, as their Month of Wolf unfolded, they compared them again and again.

How sad! In their month-long trashing of Wolf, a cottage industry quickly sprang up in tortured, Wolf-as-Lewinsky comparisons. In a profile in the Washington Post, Ann Gerhart said that Wolf’s hair resembled Lewinsky’s. On Hardball, Chris Matthews said that Wolf sounded like Lewinsky. In her nationally syndicated column, Kathleen Parker said this: “At a glance [Wolf] could be the sister of another well-known, raven-haired former Washington belle.” Meanwhile, loathsome smut-hounds like Maggie Gallagher began to dream their dreams of blow jobs, as in this inane syndicated column, where she pretends to scold Gore:

GALLAGHER (11/6/99): So now I hear you’ve gone out and hired a feminist babe with big hair, friend of your daughter, to help boost your MQ (that’s “masculinity quotient” to you outside the Beltway)… So you’ve got this pretty little writer thing (don’t get me wrong, smart too, gives real good pen), who’s going to teach you how to be a man, Al, and you are going to pay her 5,000 big bucks a month for the privilege.

Wolf was a 37-year-old married mother who had written three acclaimed best-sellers, two of them chosen by the New York Times as “notable books of the year.” But in the minds of these broken-souled boobs, she was just a “pretty little writer thing” who, of course, “gives good pen.” But then, by the fall of 1999, blow jobs were the only thing these knuckle-draggers could make themselves ponder. Result? They began pretending that Wolf “advocate[s] teaching teen-agers...oral sex” (Tony Kornheiser, the Washington Post). No, it wasn’t actually true, but it was widely asserted all the same. Wolf was “a powerful advocate of onanism,” CNN’s Tucker Carlson gravely said.

Is there any earthly way that humans can get that stupid?

All that said, the most unfortunate Wolf-as-Lewinsky comparison came from Jim Pinkerton, writing in two famous liberal publications, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. Pinkerton opened a gruesome column with this unfortunate passage:

PINKERTON (11/4/99): Naomi Wolf even looks like Monica Lewinsky. Same creamy cheeks, same bee-stung lips, same startled-fawn eyes. Indeed, Lewinsky, an obviously intelligent woman a decade younger than Wolf, could, if she puts her mind to it, aspire to write a book like “Promiscuities,” Wolf’s most recent tome.

Laughably, it was now Lewinsky who was the “obviously intelligent person”—the one who could have written that acclaimed best-seller, as her “look-alike,” the former Rhodes Scholar, had done. And things went downhill as Big Pink labored on. After citing a negative review of Promiscuities, the deeply needy journalist returned to his Monica reveries. “Just as a needy intern found an even needier president, Wolf found her beta male,” he pathetically mused. “And as Clinton struggled to conceal his physical relationship with Lewinsky, so Gore labored to hide his fiscal relationship with Wolf.”

Go ahead—we dare you. We dare you to tell us that the life-forms who produced that are actually human.

“I'll never stop saying Maria!” So sings a love-sick swain in the musical, West Side Story (click here). Like him, these cyborgs will never stop saying a certain name. But go ahead, we dare you—tell us! Just tell us these life-forms are human!

THE SHAPE OF THEIR LOGIC: Kornblut wanted to say “Lewinsky.” But darn it all to the planet Zarkon and back, Chelsea hadn’t mentioned her! And then, she had it! She knew what to do! She’d cite the “Monica Lewinsky scandal!” It made her statement technically accurate! And her editors agreed! It was perfect!

And yes, you’ve seen that slick move before—that particular part of their broken logic. In the fall of 1999, reporters wanted to type “Willie Horton,” using that name to slime Candidate Gore, who they were working hard to destroy because of Bill Clinton’s ten blow jobs. (Career-sucking losers like Josh Marshall were working quite hard not to tell you.) But literally, Gore had never mentioned Horton in his life; he’d never mentioned Horton’s crimes either. Question: How could they use Horton’s name to slime Gore while keeping their statements “technically accurate?”

And then, they had it! They knew what to do! To see a gang of moral cretins arranging to send the U. S. to Iraq, be sure to review our past work on this matter (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/1/02). And after that, we dare you to tell us! Just tell us they’re flesh of this earth!