Evil is conquered and the blade’s work done.
“Then share this, as well,” said Dallben, who had been listening closely and now held out the heavy, leather-bound volume he had kept under his arm.
“The Book of Three?” Taran said, looking wonderingly and questioningly at the enchanter. “I dare not…”
“Take it, my boy,” Dallben said. “It will not blister your fingers, as once it did with an over-curious Assistant Pig-Keeper. All its pages are open to you. The Book of Three no longer foretells what is to come, only what has been. But now can be set down the words of its last page.”
The enchanter took a quill from the table, opened the book, and in it wrote with a bold, firm hand:
“And thus did an Assistant Pig-Keeper become High King of Prydain.”
That’s the difference between God and me.
You’ve seen Steve Benen’s timeline, and calimac’s use of Dunsany is impeccable, and Phil Nugent’s perspective is as close to a last word as any of us will need, but I ended up smiling the most at this. —It’s the little things, y’know?
The long creamy spill (and fall).
I suppose it should come as no surprise—Dad loved ’em, Mom’s folks had ’em by the shelf-load, those cheaply designed but nonetheless beautiful Fawcett Gold Medal paperbacks, each with the color and the iconic figure of a “girl” rendered variously by Divers Hands, I was reading ’em long before I could make sense of the drearily complicated business shenanigans or relate to the paternalistically didactic sexual politics, they’re bred in the dam’ bone, for all I haven’t read one in twenty years—it shouldn’t, but still, it surprises the hell out of me to find the bass line I’ve been playing in the metaphoric pop band of my style is a lifted hook; that the characteristic stink I can’t scrub away whiffs so redolently of John D. MacDonald.
It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is—along with “truth,” “Bush,” “administration,” “extraordinary,” “scandal,” “free,” “single,” “instance,” “corruption,” “unearthed,” “the,” “that,” and “of.”
Those brave truth-eaters are at it again:
The truth is that the Bush administration has been extraordinarily scandal-free. Not a single instance of corruption has been unearthed. Only one significant member of the executive branch, Scooter Libby, has been convicted of anything. Whether the jury’s verdict was right or wrong, that case was an individual tragedy unrelated to any underlying wrongdoing by Libby or anyone else.
That’s one of the boys at Minnesota’s most popular blog, Power Line, written yesterday, Saturday, April 28th, 2007. —David Kurtz wants to know when the piper’s gonna get paid:
If you’re a hard-core conservative reading Powerline, does this sort of nonsense make you feel better about yourself or about your beliefs? For the uninformed, maybe it offers the assurance that things are okay. For the semi-informed, maybe it comforts them that things aren’t as bad as they may seem. At what point does the internal dissonance of those who read and write such garbage exact a personal toll—morally, emotionally, spiritually?
Kurtz is looking at it the wrong way. The piper’s already been paid and done packed up and left the building; that post at Power Line isn’t so much a strategy or a tactic as it is a symptom. —“I realize,” said John Holbo (some time ago), “it is really a quite serious matter that the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back.” Yup; once again, yup.
“Apparently,” then, but: are they really not coming back? Is it possible to reach someone who’s so far around the bend? So removed from the world as it indisputably is? —I’d like to think I’m as open to dialogue as Detritus, who’d rather try teaching a young Hitler English than just shooting the little fuck; I’d like to think I could have a civil conversation with John Hinderaker, should I bump into him between planes at O’Hare, say, and not just punch him in the nose. But he has accused you and me and everyone we know of betraying America. And I’m only human.
But forget the punching, and leave aside for a moment the rather large question of whether such a conversation civil or otherwise could even begin to reach someone so far around the bend. What we’re talking about here isn’t a conversation. It’s a blog post, yes, and so it looks like it’s part of our great political multilogue, our give and take of political argument and debate, but it’s a truth-eating post. It’s no more an argument than David Broder’s columns are political journalism, or the Attorney General’s appearance before Congress was testimony. —This is cargo-cult stuff, hieratic gestures that mimic argument and journalism and testimony, incantations no more meaningful than a magic spell, attempts not to engage the world as it is but take it and through sheer force of will bend it to what it damn well ought to be.
Put it that way, and I think our responsibility is clear: engage them in conversation, yes; try to reach around that bend when you can, when reaching is possible. But don’t return those gestures. Don’t respond to the call of their spells. (We were supposed to be outraged when Giuliani promised another 9/11 if he weren’t elected president. Better instead to point and laugh. —Perhaps it seems unfair to sweep an entire wing of our national discourse beyond the pale? Very well, it is unfair. But all our arms are too short to box with a whole damn world of straw. Why should we bother?) —When they put on their robes and gin up another solemn ritual to mimic the fillips of civil discourse, do what you can to minimize the infection by discrediting their authority. Point and laugh. Point and laugh.
It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.
O to be in Brooklyn in the Spring!
On May 18th, my older younger sister’s birthday, Rose Thomson, Hanna Fox, and Tim Thomas will all be onstage again in their various separate incarnations, at the Magnetic Field. —Explains all the searches lately for Babe the Blue Ox. (Laura: you gotta go and tell me all about it.)
No controlling authority.
Ladies and gentlemen, your Attorney General and mine:
During those conversations, to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign.
And it’s not that the guy who’s, y’know, in charge of the Department of Justice thinks he just dodged the bullet of a bad decision by saying, hey, look, I didn’t make the bad decision. It’s that he can’t even weasel without weaseling. “To my knowledge”? How on earth do you not know that you might have just made a decision? How can you be in doubt as to whether a decision had been made by you? —No, seriously. How?
All it takes is one bad apple.
Remember how mega-agribusiness Dole had a little problem with E. coli-infested bags of factory-farmed spinach last summer, so that all over the country restaurants and supermarkets went through a spinach dry-spell? How on earth will we protect Oregonians from ever-increasing outbreaks of food contamination? —By slapping draconian regulations on small farmers, of course, driving local farmers’ markets out of business.
Goose and gander?
I’m not so sure about the wisdom of the sauce prescribed, and far be it from me to jump in a bigblog pie-fight, and it’s not like I even have the knowledge to say for myself whether this is the stupidest thing Markos Moulitsas has ever written, but I hope to God it is, because it’s staggeringly, mind-bogglingly stupid. —Lisa Spangenberg rounded up some links to actual, intelligent grappling with the vital topics squirming under the hateful things that were done to Kathy Sierra, and follows up by unpacking a joint statement from Sierra and someone who might could help Kos realize how smart it would be to own up, publicly, to the implications of his admitted ignorance of what happened, and stop playing stupid.
Defending the republic from the likes of Kimberly Prude.
On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County—I’m going to mispronounce the name—but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.
I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.
“There were no voting locations in the county in 2000,” he explains. “It was all strictly by mail. This was the first election after vote-by-mail passed, and everything was mailed in. People could go into the county elections office to pick up their ballot if they didn’t receive one, but there weren’t other locations to drop them off.”
As for the bizarre library card claim, “I have no idea what he’s talking about. A library card has nothing to do with people being able to vote.”
—Scott Moore, quoting Multnomah County Elections Director John Kauffman
It bears repeating: Republicans depend on preventing as many people as possible from voting. —The New York Times details some of the collateral damage in this foul, anti-American quest for permanent hegemony: folks deported and rotting in jail for filling out the wrong form at the wrong time. Josh Marshall puts the damage in perspective.
“This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth.”
Yeah, I know, Douglas Feith, but in looking for a hook for the previous I stumbled over this toxic gem of weapons-grade stupidity from Daniel Pipes and just had to share:
Karl Marx famously did much of his research in the 1850s into socialism—work that would culminate in the creation of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other political monstrosities challenging the United Kingdom to its core—in the reading room of the British Library, the elegant public space of the country’s vast national library.
And now, we learn, Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence in a US maximum security prison for (among other charges) conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, spent time plotting the downfall of the West in the 1990s also in the British Library. Newly released court papers from Moussaoui’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia, includes photographs of his five-year British Library reading pass, which he received 1994 after enrolling in a master’s degree course in international business at South Bank University.
Comment: Both these men were immigrants. The British don’t seem to learn. (August 6, 2006)
Two great hostile camps,
or, The increasing us and the decreasing them.
“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism.”
The British Ministry of Defense is prognosticating, trying to part the mists of time for a glimpse of the year 2035: criminal flashmobs, city-killing EMPs, ethnic cleansing with neutron bombs, and still that dam’ specter haunts Europe. —Momus has a good question:
Isn’t “the world’s middle classes uniting, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest” pretty much a definition of the normal workings of any republic?
Three foggy mornings and one rainy day.
It was a while ago that Chris Bertram announced he’d finally pulled down Junius, his old Bloggered blog. So it was a while ago I sighed and went and searched the pier for whatever links I’d made to Junius, way back when. —Turned out there was only the one, to a write-up on three-sided football, but a rotten link is a rotten link. I copied the old href, brought up the Wayback Machine, and thumbed through the archives for an appropriate copy of Chris’ old page, then copied that href and replaced the rotten link in my entry with the internet archived deal.
Then I checked the other links in that entry, just in case, and found that Tales of the Legion: the Origin of the Legion had also rotted away. Ditto and so forth.
It’s becoming more and more of a chore, this scraping the hull for linkrot. And though the pier’s been a mostly going concern for five years now, it’s only got (checks) about a thousand entries with, I dunno, three or four outbound links per, on average? There’s no way an actual jumping joint like Eschaton or Crooked Timber could even begin to think of keeping up. (Not that I’m keeping up myself. I just check when I’m specifically reminded of something. Like the tickle in the back of the brain that says hey, I think maybe once you linked to Junius, back in the day. Depsite the constant bloggering it suffered.)
—About the same time as Chris was pulling Junius down, John Holbo was trying to figure out how to avoid linkrot upfront, maybe by using WebCite® right off the bat? But that links to WebCite®’s archived copy from the get-go and not the cited site itself, mucking with traffic and googlejuice and whatnot, and anyway WebCite® only wants scholarly papers to use their service, and even if it’s free I hitch at people so profligate in their use of marcæ registradæ®.
(Also of idle note: the various Bad Actors, over the ages. It’ll be a cold day indeed before I ever again link to a Yahoo news article, or anyone’s AP piece, or the Washington goddamn Post, let me tell you. —Plus, yes, there’s the linkrot I’m responsible for, Bad Actor myself, having once used an old Movable Type link-numbering scheme that I can’t easily mask to the new, sane, easily replicable link-naming scheme. I still get hits on those old pages, from time to time. No clue what they pointed to, without Waybacking myself. I wince a little every time I see one in the logs.)
Anyway, here’s what I want, oh plugin developers, oh API jockeys, oh Web 3.0 entrepreneurs agleam in someone’s eye: I want something that will spider through my site on a regular basis, testing outgoing links in all my various entries. Anything that returns a 404 gets automagically plugged into the Wayback Machine, and the href of the archived version closest in time to the date of the entry in question is returned and replaced in the rotten link. Once a week a report is generated: here’s what was found and fixed, so I can go through myself and re-correct any overly zealous corrections. If needed.
Lazyweb powers activate! Thunderbleg explodes into action NOW!
Forget evidence—is there a shred of dignity?
Glenn Greenwald wants to know if the folks at the National Review will bother to correct Clifford D. May’s latest egregiously false statement. It’d be nice if they did, but they still haven’t corrected this Cliff May whopper, which’ll be three years old on Sunday.
Happy Delany Day.
With a poem, Ray Davis reminds us of the other reason for the season. (“ATTN Will Smith’s agent: The Motion of Light in Water is the EPIC SAGA of a GENERATION shown via the TRUE STORY of a GENIUS who TRIUMPHANTLY OVERCOMES a NERVOUS BREAKDOWN!”)
That’s not what they mean by the Green Lantern Theory.
The latest from two of the Three Little Princes:
Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest US citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.
[...]
Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.
Superheroes react:
—art via Living Between Wednesdays
Hitchcock, dropping Jupiter.
I never did come close to figuring out what I was talking about last year, did I. (1; 2; some context; 3; elsewhere; some further context; 4; intermission.) —Maybe if I’d seen Rear Window recently, I’d have put it better. Maybe not.
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
It’s all, all of it, been one long prank, hasn’t it. “Sandra Day O’Connor has a horrifically vivid dream of how the ascension of George W. Bush to the Oval Office would mean the destruction of the American economy, the senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, the loss of American prestige both at home and abroad, and—worst of all—the utter dissolution of her beloved Republican Party as, upon being deserted by even the corporate media, it suffers a series of definitive electoral ass-kickings in 2006, 2008, and 2010 before giving up the ghost. She goes on to provide the swing vote that allows the Florida count to continue, thus guaranteeing that Al Gore’s election is confirmed…” —Go and sin no more.
