Quel courage!!

Cheney went out like a man and took full responsibility for shooting his friend Harry Whittington. And the headlines read:

• Cheney Takes Full Responsibility for Shooting Hunter


• Cheney Takes Full Responsibility for Shooting


• Cheney: 'I'm the Guy Who Pulled the Trigger'

Wow. That's mighty manly of him. Especially the revelation that he was the one who pulled the trigger. No shit. Everyone knew you were the one who shot the guy. Reall frickin' brave of you, Jack. And this is supposed to be news.

One thing for which Cheney was not apologetic was the way the news of the shooting was delivered to the media.

I think I'm much less concerned about how the news of the shooting was delivered to the media than I am about how Dick Cheney deigned to speak to law enforcement for 14 or more hours about how he shot a dude in the face. And I don't really care to hear an apology, I care to see the guy hauled up on charges of obstructing justice. He claims "he had one beer at lunch, but that no alcohol was consumed during the late afternoon outing." It would have been interesting to hear what someone who's not directly in Cheney's employ or sycophantic circle of cronies thought about that.

I'm not fooling myself: I know this won't happen. But it's fucking infuriating. What an arrogant piece of shit. If I shot someone in the fucking face and tried to make an "appointment" to talk to the Sheriff about it tomorrow, how far do you think I'd get with that? Not very fucking far. Alberto Gonzalez says no one is above the law, but here's a clear illustration that that's bullshit.

Pithy

I am a great believer in the power of t-shirts to convey messages. And I think that this is the message that I am thinking of most of the time.

No REALLY, he's an idiot

While I am a fan of guns and would like to go hunting, my complete lack of experience in that area has kept me from doing so. So I didn't feel comfortable in my last post saying, flat out, that the explanation for why Cheney wasn't at fault was bullshit. It seemed to go against what I thought about hunting safety and certainly what I know about gun safety, but I dunno, maybe it was reasonable.

Well, while hardly a scientific survey, Josh Marshall got feedback from hunters and their reply is... eh, not really. My suspicions were, on the basis of this, correct: Cheney fucked up. Bad.

Dick Cheney Is A Fucking Idiot

Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter. Anyone remember the Can't Shoot Straight Gang? And this is the guy that we're supposed to trust with the big guns in the government. Unbelievable. But then I end up saying that about these idiots just about every damned day.

Nicholas Kristof Helping Bill O'Reilly

Behind the TimesSelect firewall, Nicholas Kristof proposes raising funds to send Bill O'Reilly to Africa to raise awareness of the situation in Darfur. Here's a few choice selections:

I challenged [O'Reilly] to defend traditional values by joining [Kristof] on a trip to Darfur... A few days ago... Mr. O'Reilly declared in his column: "I do three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio. There's no way I can go to Africa..." [M]aybe Mr. O'Reilly's concern is cost, so I thought my readers might want to give him a hand. You can help sponsor a trip by Mr. O'Reilly to Darfur, where he can use his television savvy to thunder against something actually meriting his blustery rage.

If you want to help, send e-mail to sponsorbill@gmail.com... and tell me how much you're willing to pay for Mr. O'Reilly's expenses in Darfur... Don't send money; all I'm looking for is pledges. I'll post updates at nytimes.com/ontheground.

Sure, this is a desperate measure. But with several hundred thousand people already murdered in Darfur and two million homeless and living in shantytowns, the best hope for those still alive is a strong dose of American outrage.

Of course, the thing is that Kristof is right: O'Reilly has enough of an audience that his attention to the issue really would make a difference. And, although this issue is often characterized as something only namby-pamby liberals would care about, it's actually an issue that is very important to many evangelical and other faith-based groups, which of course is a very important constituency for the Republicans. But the Republicans find evangelicals feeling their oats and getting involved in issues besides gay marriage and prayer in schools, including environmentalism and human rights. This would give the Republicans a gold star on the human rights card and could also conceivably help save the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

Look, I'm not about helping Republicans. But I am about saving people's lives. If it takes getting Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, and the GOP a gold star, I could care less. Unfortunately, Kristof's challenge is behind the pay wall at the NY Times, so I'm hoping to help spread this news.

At what cost peace in our time?

Sometimes a comment can mean more than someone really intends it to mean:

Mona Omar Attia, Egypt's ambassador to Denmark, said after a meeting with Rasmussen that she was satisfied with the position of the Danish government but noted the prime minister had said he could not interfere with the press... "This means the whole story will continue and that we are back to square one again. The government of Denmark has to do something to appease the Muslim world," Attia said.

"Appease" is the perfect word. Appeasement. Just like Bush using the term "crusade" exposed the disconnect between the Western perception of the Islamic world and the reality of the Islamic world, the user of the term "appease" exposes the disconnect between the Islamic world's perception of the Western world and the reality of the Western world. Kowtowing to Muslim concerns on this issue would be just that: appeasement, a debasement of, I would argue, the core value of the Western world, the freedom to speak your mind and express yourself and your opinions, however discomfiting, offensive, or outrageous someone else might find them. Attia and the others demanding that the nation of Denmark apologize for what citizens of a free nation say or write completely miss that point.

High-school girls are whores?

Go check out this story. Accompanying it is a photo essay. Click on the 8^th thumbnail down the left side.

Now, if one of those girls was my daughter and got her picture in the paper like that? I'd whip her ass and be all, whaddup with being a whore? I know things are different from when I was in high school, but I have a fair amount of contact with high school girls who aren't whores, so I know that that's not just "how it is" or something (and no, there's nothing nefarious going on with my contact with high school girls; they're relatives and babysitters).

I'm not saying I didn't wish that more girls were whores or whorish or whore-like when I was in high school. But just because a high-school boy wants high-school girls to be whores doesn't mean they should be whores.

A clown at the circus

On a unicycle or a member of the Pickle Family Circus could not backpedal any faster than this.

Man oh man. So many things to say about that that I don't even know where to start.

Light, light posting lately. I've been really busy. Heh, initially typed "busy" as "busty." To quote Butthead... if I had boobs like that, I'd never leave the house...