Gresham’s Law in action.
Well, no, maybe not. But watch the numbers flicker by on this cost of war clock and see how every second drives more money into imperial dreams and the Halliburton Highway and out of ideas a sinking, poverty-stricken nation could use. —Or more usual nostrums, like health care, education, public housing…
Actually? Maybe so, but in another way. It’s a limb, but I’m willing to test its weight: maybe the whole idea of bad X driving out good X has a lot to do with this very visceral frustration, one that’s growing and souring in more bellies than mine. “Anyone who can beat Bush has my vote.” Jesus. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Shut up shut up shut up!
It’s not just Democratic representatives, trying to get a reading of a bill at the last minute before a committee vote. It’s also TV stations that dare to air ads critical of the President and scientists who can’t tell them what they want to hear. It’s even fellow Republicans who dare to deviate an iota from the party line. Hell, it’s even you and me and anyone else who wants to maybe try to get some sort of customer service from the folks currently occupying our White House. —Ah, well. At least we’re all of us in good company.
Oh, ye’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll hit Perdition afore ye…
Steve Lieber has a chat with Jen Contino about what it is that’s keeping him off the streets these days. Also, because it’s totally random, and has something to do with the previous post, but wouldn’t quite fit, and it’s really late and I should be writing but I’m in one of those moods: a review of the latest massively multiplayer online RPG. (Do note the skew in one’s original position.) —And, via Patrick: Happy New Year.
So I’m more or less back.
Actually, it’s a toss-up: on the one hand, there was the jubilant chaos of the impromptu party on the little mezzanine balcony overlooking the lobby of the Embassy Suites: Jenn on the floor happily sketching away with Patrick Farley; various Pants Pressers littering couches and chairs hastily assembled into ad hoc conversational nooks: Jen Wang’s sprawled in Derek Kirk Kim’s lap for a photo, Erika Moen’s actually off in search of food, Vera Brosgol just stole my seersucker, I’ve got no idea where Clio Chiang went, and Bill Mudron and Dylan Meconis and Phil and I are trying to figure out this wacky Hamlet game Phil bought the last time he was in Oberlin. I’d drawn the ending where all the kids had to end up out of Denmark and safe, and my first step is getting Ophelia into a nunnery (go!); Phil decides Claudius is going to try to execute Gertrude in the first act (it didn’t work); Bill just wants Hamlet and Lærtes to fight, dammit (how do you solve a problem like Lærtes?); and I never did figure out what Dylan was up to. Craig Thompson stops by, but he can’t stay, and Justine Shaw’s been there all along, and I think that was Cat Garza, and was Indigo Kelleigh there for a bit, or am I confusing this whole merry mess with that first night at Dick’s? I’ve lost track. I’m trying to get Hamlet to France. —When Vera and Erika and Lori Matsumoto and a couple of other people return with hors d’oeuvres and pitchers of beer and Coke it turns out one of the writers of Pirates of the Caribbean is picking up the tab. Over there, smiling quietly, there’s Scott McCloud and Ivy McCloud and Larry Marder, and you know what? This is all their fault, really. In far more ways than one.
But the next day: the next day, Phil grabs me out of the booth Jenn’s sharing with Chris and he drags me halfway across the con floor until we find what passes for a quiet place—one side of a round table under Frank Quitely’s enormous poster of the Endless, in the concession block behind New Line’s schizoid, bloodsoaked forest—half massive shrine to The Lord of the Rings, half creepy recreation of that summer camp where Jason slaughtered so many promiscuous teens. (Apparently, Jason’s fighting Freddy in a movie later this year, which explains as much as anything can why that portly wizard and his vinyl-wrapped slave girl are both sporting bloody make-up furrows on the left sides of their faces.) —Across the table from me some kids are sorting their Yu Gi Oh! decks; up on the balcony three or four sunglassed Agent Smiths are surveilling the con floor, their hands on their earpieces. Phil drops a portable CD player and some headphones in my lap and says, “Play tracks 6, 12, and 18. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” And so I do, and it’s a voice from way back when, Steve Espinola singing about googols in a way that some might denigrate as “mere” wit, as “only” clever wordplay, as if somehow they’ve missed the deep melancholy, as if they’ve forgotten language is the only game in town. So I close my eyes and shut out the smell of spilled mustard and listen to Steve sing about desperately needing to indulge in jubilant, merry chaos through the streets of Manhattan to wipe the tombstones out of the corners of his eyes, and I take my first deep breath in days.
The rest was mostly sex and death with the occasional comic book. Sex and death? Badges of, representations of, icons and eidolons: thrills not sought but sketched, gestured at, pointed to. Consumed. Colliding most often in the prevalent image, inked, airbrushed, modelled in Photoshop, of a sword-wielding, gun-toting woman, her thighs bared, her face either set in a grim rictus or a feral grin—but splintered and scattered throughout: post-pubescent boys in black Punisher T-shirts, fake 9 mils in their hands, browse blood-drenched Champions of Hell comic books while the booth proprietor snatches up his digital camera to zoom in for a close-up of the angel’s ass as she totters by on her six-inch Lucite heels; under her fluffy white wings (held up by an uncomfortable-looking armature of PVC piping), you’ll note she’s wearing her lacy G-string outside her hip-hugging translucent white tights. —Sex and death, and we can tut over the booth bimbettes in their slutty schoolgirl costumes and the swords and the guns and the white boy leers, we can ponder the wisdom of the woman wearing a decent-enough recreation of conquistador plate in the muggy San Diego heat, we can goggle at the tall thin guy in nothing but white socks, Keds, and his boyhood Spider-man Underoos, but we’re missing the point: it’s thrills. Not sex, but the thrill of desiring, and being desired. Not death, but the thrill of danger nimbly avoided in the nick of the last minute, and death cheekily mocked. Or as close as we can safely get, mind. Images, signs, and symbols; icons and eidolons; imagos and half-remembered fevre dreams. Other thrills are easier to realize more directly: the thrill of recognition (“I’ve been reading Bruno since 1996!”), the thrill of brushing fame (being growled at by Lou Ferrigno, and did Angelina Jolie ever fly in by helicopter?), the thrill of hanging out with your peers in your chosen art and the thrill of dropping names (though I never did meet Neil, sigh), the thrills of giddily sudden, Proustian nostalgia and cognitive dissonance, the thrill of finally tracking down the CD with that song that comes at the very end of Cowboy Bebop, the thrill when you realize this new comic really is as good as everyone’s saying it is (Blankets, that is—much like the same thrill when you first read Stuck Rubber Baby), the thrill of finding a brand-new comic or TV show or movie or game or idea—a brand new world—to fall into. To lose yourself in. We may be (however briefly) discussing the state of the comics blogosphere with Dirk Deppey, picking up Tria marker techniques, or dishing the current state of a micropayment beta test (quite healthy, apparently)—but we’re also hunting for the NeiA_7 soundtrack and peering in wonder at giant Japanese robots and when we giggle at the stormtroopers and Starfleet officers facing off for a minute in the middle of a crowded aisle, it’s as much in delight as it is—what? Scorn? Superciliousness? There but for the grace of God? —To pretend that our reasons for being here have nothing in common with whatever it was that brought that woman here in her G-string and angel’s wings would be—dishonest. For all that our respective cups of tea aren’t to each other’s liking.
Thrill-seeking we will always have with us. Comics—like gaming, like cartoons, like (to a lesser extent) movies—make up a potent toolkit for limning the signs and symbols of things too dangerous to confront directly, but nontheless desired deeply (and in many cases dangerous because so deeply desired). Comics allow us to harvest these thrills by brushing up against their illusions. There’s other things comics do well, quite well indeed—the unparalleled intimacy of what is essentially a handwritten note from the artist directly to you makes them ideal for memoir and autobiography, clefed or otherwise: Maus, Stuck Rubber Baby, One! Hundred! Demons!, Blankets, Eddie Campbell’s Alec MacGarry stuff, Derek Kirk Kim, etc. and so forth. And that’s just one of the other things. But it’s the thrills that pull at us (all of us) the most strongly, whether it’s a wittily sophisticated recontextualization or a crude depth charge. Giggle in shock, and tut and frown and look on with concern—there’s a lot to worry about in those nubile half-naked angels of mayhem, those armored robot zombie berserkers. But think back to 1986, or 1990, even 1995 or 1998, and look at what else is going on now, how radically comics are opening up old-fashioned assumptions of what thrills are sought out, and who’s allowed to seek them. It’s not without its problems; hell no. Nothing’s ever perfect. We’re dealing with desire, after all, and desire’s inherently destabilizing. But it’s opening up to let more people in, and that’s as close to a definition of progress as I can come at the moment.
I think I’ve been listening to that last Cowboy Bebop song too much already: “Everything is clearer now, life is just a dream, you know, that’s never ending… I’m ascending…” Whatever. —Look at it this way: the population of a middlin’-sized town came together in the massive barn of the San Diego Convention Center to create a space safe enough for those who want to dress up in Spider-man Underoos or a faux fox tail or a full-on Imperial Stormtrooper’s kit to do so. To flirt with, put on, play with all those eidolons of sex and death, trouble and desire. It’s appallingly geeky, embarrassing, hysterical, hypocritical, stupid, gorgeous, impressive, deadening, exhausting, enervating, infuriating, magical, dull, quotidian, cool, dorky, depressing, distressing, lame, and inherently subversive.
It’s just it doesn’t stop with the stuff you or I might want subverted. Caveat emptor.
If it’s comics you’re after, though, you might enjoy APE or SPX or MOCCANY more. Apples and oranges and kettles of fish of a different color.
(The runner-up? And a close one, too. Wasn’t even a night in San Diego. The night before we got there, in LA, we’re in the theater at the top of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Jenn and I, and Lori and Patrick and David Wilson, watching “Our Lady of the Sphere.” But before that—before that, Patrick had brought a tape of the old Isis show—remember Isis? And we watched a couple of episodes of that, howling with glee and disbelief at the acting and the costumes and the trite morals and the Filmation danger music that was beaten into the coils of my lizard brain so very long ago. Saturday morning madeleines. —It’s a deliriously enchanting place to visit, but would I want to live there?
(Do I have any choice?)
It’s a spy plane! It’s a rock band!
Actually, it’s the table where I’ll more likely than not be hanging out while in San Diego for the next few days: U2, in the Small Press corner of the ridiculous expanse of the San Diego Convention Center. It should be listed under “Baldwin and Lee” in the program. Do stop by if you happen to find yourself in the area.
Morning becomes eclectic.
Scott McCloud has started up the Morning Improv again. Every day, an hour a day, he draws, you know, stuff. Comics based on titles suggested by the viewing audience. Past favorites include “When Luna Smiles,” “Flap Those Flagella Like You Mean It,” “The Meadow of the Damned” (1, and 2), and—of course—the incomparable “Monkey Town.” And he’s adding a feature that will allow you to vote on the next title to be comicked up through micropayments. (Because it�s all about the tiny bits of benjamins.) —Scott: here’s some background on a title I’d love to see you try your improv hand at:
Pork Martini.
Heaping coals of fire on his head.
Roz Kaveny writes a beautiful, well, it’s an obituary, really, for Christopher Hitchens. (Via Electrolite.)
“—just one sentence—”
Okay, maybe I do wish we still had cable. This, from The Daily Show last night:
White House officials are telling me it strikes them as a little nitpicky. If it turns out that instead of Saddam Hussein trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein was not trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons, I mean, that’s a one-word difference in a long, long sentence.
—Thanks to The Note.
Last call for Chuck Taylors, ladies and gentlemen; last call.
Well, fuck. Nike’s trying to buy Converse:
Converse sales steadily declined in the 1980s and ’90s, and its parent company filed for bankruptcy in January 2001. Later that year, the company was bought for $117.5 million by private investors who have tried to revive the brand. They filed to make an initial public stock offering sometime this year valued at $300 million, but it stalled when Nike came knocking, analyst Shanley said.
Maybe we could get Moveon.org to take some time out from pushing Congress on WMD fact-finding, standing up to President Bush’s extremist court-packing, and overturning the FCC’s rampant stupidity, to organize a letter-writing campaign to the FTC? Get them to reject the deal on the grounds of simple human decency? This, after all, is what the deal stands for:
The marriage of the two brands gives Nike a way to shore up its low-price product line without diluting its marquee image, industry observers said. Converse also gives Nike further ammunition to capitalize on a consumer craze for products with retro and classic styling.
It’s like thinking you can get better eggs by dipping the goose in gold. —Sigh.
Bonus giggle up the sleeve, also from the Oregonian article:
“It’s a step in the right direction,” said John Shanley, a Wells Fargo Securities analyst in New York who doesn’t own shares of either company.
—Emphasis added. I don’t follow the financial press much. Is that sort of disclaimer de rigueur, these days?
This dog, on the other hand, will hunt.
Forget Wilkinson; that’s so yesterday. Gregory Thielmann is the real deal. The former director of the State Department’s bureau of intelligence, he had access to the raw materials that the administration used to build its case for war on Iraq. His conclusion?
“I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq.”
He conceded that part of the problem lay with US intelligence, but added: “Most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided.”
Demosthenes digs into Thielmann’s Rumsfeld Reprise? report and finds “faith-based intelligence” to have always been a tool of the Bush administration and its constituents—long before 9/11. From Thielmann’s report:
In recent weeks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has come under fire for his part in the Bush administration’s misuse of U.S. intelligence to justify the US invasion of Iraq. But Rumsfeld’s tendency to hype selective portions of intelligence that support his policy goals was already familiar to intelligence professionals. They remember his chairmanship of a 1998 congressionally chartered commission charged with evaluating the nature and magnitude of the ballistic missile threat to the United States. As with Iraq, Rumsfeld’s work on ballistic missiles often ignored the carefully considered views of such professionals in favor of highly unlikely worst-case scenarios that posited an imminent threat to the United States and prompted a military, rather than diplomatic, response. Just as is likely to be the case with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), time has proven Rumsfeld’s predictions dead wrong.
—Bolding courtesy Demosthenes. Go, read how and why. And then, if your outrage has merely been whetted, consider these devasting blows by way of Josh Marshall. First, about how the yellow cake got into the State of the Union in the first place:
It was in the speech for at least ten days prior to its delivery. And the appropriate people from all the key national security agencies and departments signed off on it.
Bartlett’s drawn the line pretty clearly, leaving only two real possibilities. Either the speech was intentionally deceptive or folks at the State Department and the CIA were guilty of some mixture of gross negligence and incompetence.
Second, what Secretary Rumsfeld has to say about the whole yellow cake flap:
Rumsfeld, in a terse exchange with Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., said he learned only “within recent days” that the Africa claims were based on faulty evidence. UN officials determined the documents were forgeries before the war.
And third, there’s Ari Fleischer, caught in an out-and-out lie:
Fleischer is lying—there’s no other way to describe it—about what Wilson’s report said to make it seem less significant than it was. (If Fleischer had said Wilson’s reasoning was flawed or his investigation incomplete, then you could say he was spinning or distorting. But saying he said something completely different from what he said means he’s lying.)
We were lied to—whether through Straussian mendacity or faith-based incompetence, it doesn’t matter; we were lied to, and we went to war because of those lies. Thousands of people died. People—“theirs” and “ours”—continue to die every day.
We have committed a horrible crime, and no amount of reeking cordite wafting from inside the Beltway will set it right.
We are all pirates now.
Me, I’m perversely looking forward to catching Johnny Depp as he sashays through the Caribbean. I thought the Pirate Shop was great, even though we weren’t supposed to have been in there, and next APE I’m going to make sure we have time to poke and prod. I’m looking forward to Talk Like a Pirate Day.
It is, after all, because I’m a pirate; we are all pirates now.
(Then, Cory Doctorow wonders about, you know. The real pirates.
(Oh. Them.)
The envelope, please.
The 2003 Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards ceremony, presented in comic strip form. Congrats to Bill Mudron, Vera Brosgol, Jen Wang, and of course to the divine Justine Shaw, among many others.
That shaggy dog won’t hunt.
You know how you hear a story, and it fits with your gut instincts, your ideal read of the lay of the land, just snaps right in there like the missing puzzle piece the cat kicked under the sofa a week ago? It confirms what you know to be true, what you feel in your gut to be right, what you have the utmost faith will out when all is said and done? You know how you stop, just for a moment, and say to yourself, you know, self, this is just too good to be true?
Well, it usually is.
In other news, that Terrance J. Wilkinson guy? Who was saying all that stuff?
(See, if you hedge your bets when you go with that sort of story, and allow as how it might just be too good to be true, then pride doesn’t paint you into a corner and you don’t have to eat your words and you don’t end up saying such arrant nonsense as, “I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.” —I bet Ari Fleischer woke up Monday morning and said to himself, “I’ve just got a few days left until retirement!” Then his mirror broke and he spilled some salt at breakfast and then on his way to the White House when he was skipping out of the path of that black cat he ended up ducking under that ladder and, well.)
Bang! Zowie! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!
Christ, I’m linking to The Corner again. But this is pretty funny. Apparently, it all started when Jonah Goldberg mused idly as to whether Stephen Strange was gay (be quiet, Ana Marie):
Let’s review some facts. He’s a remarkably thin and extremely neat older bachelor who claims when asked to have never married because a woman broke his heart years ago. He’s an upscale urban professional who lives alone except for his young Asian manservant and “business partner” “Wong.” He and Wong are devoted to yoga and alternative medicine. His brownstone is immaculately decorated with the finest antiques. He is extremely well-kempt with an at times bushy but usually thin mustache. He wears very bright, flashy clothes made from imported silk and other natural fibers including an actual red silk and gold lamé cape and what appear to be skin-tight blue satin pants. His jewelry is ostentatious and right beneath his chin he wears a flashy one-eyed amulet. And, by the way, his name is a synonym for “Dr. Queer.”
Once a reader wrote in to assure Jonah that Strange was, indeed, married (in some weirdo magic ceremony) to, you know, a girl, Corner newbie Peter Robinson penned this brief jeremiad:
Trying to find something last winter that my eight-year old son would actually read, I did my best to think back across the eons to when I was his age, recognized that I used to love Spiderman, then went online and ordered my son an issue a month for a year. My first surprise was that comic books don’t cost 15 cents apiece any more. The bill for twelve issues? Almost twenty-five bucks.
My second surprise occurred when the first issue arrived. Flipping through the comic book before handing it over to my son, I found that smack dab in the middle of the story we find our hero naked, in bed, and engaged in unmistakeable activities (with a woman, which is why I know Spiderman is hetero). I simply couldn’t believe my eyes. Believe me, amigos, that sort of thing just didn’t take place in the comic books I used to leaf through in my pediatrician’s office. In every issue since, it’s been the same: midway through the story, sex, and pretty explicit sex at that. Since I can’t figure out how to cancel the subscription, I simply keep tossing the darned things out.
The question: Are there any innocent comics left? My eight-year old son could still use something that’s fun and easy to read—especially now that it’s summer. What superhero has forsworn soft-core porn?
Apparently, Peter hasn’t gotten the memo. Jonah has, though his industry analysis falls short of the nuance a Dirk Deppey, say, can bring to the table:
The fact is that comic book publishers and Marvel (publisher of Spider-Man) in particular never managed to hold onto the youth market. So the people who read comics when they were ten are the people reading comics today. I think the average Marvel reader is probably in his mid-twenties to early thirties.
Now, there are lessons to be drawn—apart from popping our eyeballs at Jonah’s insultingly casual bigotry, or sniggering at Peter’s cultural ignorance. (Would he have ordered a book sight-unseen for his eight-year-old? A video game? A DVD? What on earth led him to believe comics had escaped the general coarsening of the culture his compatriots decry at every coffee break?) —It’s a reminder that there is a market for kids’ comics out there, and—though Peter’s slapdash efforts are hardly a fair test—it’s woefully underserved. (In Peter’s defense—you have to click pretty far into the Spider-man minisite to find out Amazing Spider-man has a PG rating.) It’s also a reminder that comics are still the red-headed stepchild of entertainment; too many people just aren’t capable of comprehending that they’re no longer just for kids, darn it, and they never really were. (We can apportion the blame later, if you like.) And finally, not even a moderately decent mainstream superhero book is arresting enough to keep an average(ish) non-comics reader from chucking it in the trash.
Anyway. Go, read the list of eight-year-old–friendly comics a Corner reader sent to Peter, and giggle up your sleeves; send him a list of your own suggestions, if you like. And maybe reflect for a moment on how far comics have come, and how far they still have to go.
Or you could savage Jonah Goldberg for his smirking homophobia. —It’s all the same to me, really.
Byatt’s Kool-Aid.®
Managment regrets to inform that otherwise intelligent, witty, and smashingly delightful conversationalists, with an Oregon Book Award to their credit and a heretofore infallible eye for the intriguing and offbeat, have gone and drunk it.
Falling on his sword for chickens? Chickens?
Well, PETA says he did, KFC says no, it’s just going with a new creative, and Jason Alexander’s people aren’t saying much of anything at all, which PETA insists is a classic non-denial denial. The facts, such as they are: Jason Alexander (you know, George) was the spokesmodel for a rather successful two-year KFC ad campaign. Back in May, it looked like he was going to be picked up for six more months of commercials: “It’s basically done,” said his lawyer, “not literally signed, but it’s done. Additional terms were built in and I fully anticipate going the distance.”
Then PETA threatened to boycott Alexander’s run in The Producers in LA unless he met with them. He agreed; they showed him hidden-camera videos of the appalling conditions under which chickens are farmed in this country; troubled, Alexander helped broker a meeting between PETA and KFC. (PETA’s threat to run the video on a couple of big-screen TVs on a truck and drive it through the suburban Louisville neighborhood where a couple of KFC executives live might also have played a part in those negotiations.)
The upshot: KFC has adopted a new set of humane® guidelines for farming chickens (which have nothing to do with this)—which KFC insists were in the works all along; PETA’s pressure, they say, played no part in the decision (a standard statement released in these sorts of circumstances). PETA insists KFC is lying about its record, and says it will take “all available options to stop them from deceiving people about the horrible abuse of animals they are supporting”; PETA is also claiming Jason Alexander as a chicken martyr. And Alexander is out of his “basically done” deal, and not saying much of anything at all.
—Via The Morning News: a fine, fine thing to browse over your first cup of coffee.
Yellowgate.
You’ve probably seen the transcript of Ari Fleischer’s mistakes-were-made-on-first performance yesterday. Josh Marshall sums it up nicely enough—
But let’s look at what the White House is saying. In essence, they’re saying that the Niger documents were forgeries. But then, we already knew that. Indeed, the White House has conceded this for months. Sometimes publicly; sometimes privately. Here’s what they’re saying now, according to the Post: “Knowing all that we know now the reference to Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.”
But, of course, the real issue is that there is at least very strong circumstantial evidence that knowing what they knew then, the uranium hokum never should have been put into the speech either. This is a classic case of trying to jump out ahead of a story by conceding a point that no one is actually disputing in the first place.
Add to that (as noted by Calpundit and MetaFilter) this little piece of rhetorical dynamite—
An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.
“The report had already been discredited,” said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. “This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings.”
Bush’s response was anger, Wilkinson said.
“He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn’t prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could,” Wilkinson said. “He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country.”
This comes to us courtesy Capitol Hill Blue, a mostly libertarian political news site founded in 1994 (the oldest political news site on the web, they claim) by Doug Thompson. Capitol Hill Blue, while unabashedly right-wing on many social issues, is mostly known for taking on Congress—its series on “The Criminal Class” is something of a classic in the field—and Thompson is the sort of libertarian whose principles take him off the standard right-wing reservation from time to time.
Skepticism is the watch-word for the moment; very few people are all that familiar with Capitol Hill Blue, after all, and they do have more than a whiff of the tabloid about them, and anyway, nothing’s coming up on a Google for “Terrance J. Wilkinson.” (Not damning in and of itself, mind.) And this is red meat, here; this would be the linchpin—grenade pin?—for mainstream consideration of the “Bush lied people died” meme. —On the other hand, their source is named—which is far more than you can say about a lot of recent reporting from the New York Times, et al—and Doug Thompson is actively backing up his story in Blue’s comments boards. It should be a simple enough matter for the press corps to track Mr. Wilkinson down and confirm (or deny) this report of blood in the water.
Right?
Actually, I’m going to throw my meager weight behind “The Yellow Cake Scandal.” It’s nice and Teapot-Domey.
There has been, as they say, a development.
