Dum Pendebat Filius

Gordo put up an excellent post about Ben Stein’s foolish War on Science. I was curious to see if any of Ben Stein’s mawkish, lugubrious American Spectator columns were available on the Internet. I haven’t read that magazine since the late 1990s, but I remember Ben Stein used to have a pathetic column in which he would whine about how hard it was to be a wealthy man in Southern California, how difficult it was to have his own TV show, etc.

Well, it seems you shouldn’t be visiting the American Spectator website, readers:

It seems the American Spectator site has been infected with malware.

A (belated) Merry Christmas, readers, and a Happy New Year to all of you, wingnuts and moonbats alike.

Partisan rancor and truculence will continue in the next few days.

Question: Do all wingnuts hate the Urban Legends Reference Pages, a.k.a. Snopes.com?

I’m asking because the Costco Coulter recently slammed that site in an angry aside:

(No, I did not check the fallacious Snopes, which needs to be Snoped, itself. They get so many things wrong, and I’m not sure who appointed these liberals at that site King of the Truth. They ain’t.)

Needless to say, she did not elaborate on the matter, just called them liberal liars and left it at that.

Is it just a personal beef of hers, or do all wingnuts think Snopes.com is just a bunch of Liberal Lies?

Remember a couple days ago I put up a link to a disgusting, jaw-droppingly-stupid article by MSNBC “media analyst” Steve Adubato? You know, the one in which Steve-O complains that Hillary won’t explain “exactly how Vince Foster died”?

Today, Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler has named Steve Adubato “Pundit of the Year” for his foolishness. Read the whole thing:

It was [Rush] Limbaugh who jump-started the rumor, long ago, that Hillary Clinton helped kill Vince Foster — and broken-souled losers have clung to such fantasies down through all the years. In August 1999, for example, a certain red-faced cable ranter [Chris Matthews] had Gennifer Flowers on his show, for a long and bizarre half-hour; she spent her half-hour telling the world about all the people both Clintons had murdered. The ranter said he had no idea that Flowers was going to mutter such things, and who knows — it’s possible he might have been telling the truth, clueless as he so typically is. But when we liberals keep agreeing to disappear this part of our history, we agree to look away from the insides of Big Pundit World’s tortured head. Let’s throw away that “polarizing” euphemism: Why do so many people hate Hillary Clinton? Adubato reminded us this week — and he mentioned “Whitewater” too!

What could Adubato possibly have meant by that statement about Foster? We have no earthly idea. Earlier this year, some of the inmates began to toy with the Foster story again, amusing themselves by meowing that Clinton hadn’t been kind enough to her friend in the last tragic months of his life. But surely, even a man like Adubato knows what sorts of ugly musing he triggers with such a cruel, ugly comment.

If you’ve forgotten the ugly 1999 incident in which Chris Matthews brought Gennifer Flowers onto his cable show and permitted her to accuse the President (and First Lady) of the United States of multiple murders, an Internet wingnut anti-Clinton site has helpfully provided some of the “money quotes” –

FLOWERS: Well, in the first place I hope that [Hillary Clinton] does not succeed at becoming a United States Senator from New York. I think that would be a travesty. We’ve had enough of these people; these criminals, these liars, these murderers. We need to get them out of political office, please.

MATTHEWS: Murderers?

FLOWERS: Well, there is a Clinton death list. If anyone would like to go to my website and take a look at it…

MATTHEWS: Well, we have your website here – www.genniferflowers.com. But what will they find if they go there in terms of murder? I didn’t know that one.

FLOWERS: Well, there are a number of deaths associated with Bill Clinton and his administration and his operatives. I would just suggest that they go on and take a look at it.

MATTHEWS: Do you believe that the President ordered the killing of anyone?

FLOWERS: I believe that he did. And I believe that I wouldn’t be sitting here talking with you today had I not become high profile as I did. Even though I didn’t do it on purpose, it saved my life.

That was a high point in the history of cable news, readers. You’d do well to keep this episode in mind the next time you hear a wingnut decrying the “liberal bias” of Chris Matthews and MSNBC.

Steve Adubato seems to be carrying on what Bocephus might have called a “family tradition” over at MSNBC: Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

UPDATE — In case you missed it in the previous CDS post, commenter and comrade Stram pointed us to an online copy of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s final report on the death of Vince Foster.

Dave Neiwert today:

[Jonah Goldberg] seems primarily intent on [calling liberals "the real fascists"] by pointing out all of the irrelevant characteristics of the Nazi regime — things that had nothing or little to do with their ideology, and certainly were not unique to it, such as vegetarianism.

I mean, this is just dumb, bad logic: Hitler loved his dogs, too. So by Goldberg’s reasoning, dog lovers are innately fascist as well.

DPF readers are already quite familiar with these two canine fascists:

Just as with classical fascism, Mystery speaks of a “third way” between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are “false choices.”

Okapi is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But he is definitely totalitarian — or “holistic,” if you prefer — in that Okapi today sees no realm of canine life that is beyond political significance.

Exhibit A: The National Enquirer prints a nasty story about a “John Edwards Love Child Scandal!” Rush Limbaugh immediately rushes to the microphone to speculate that it’s a Clinton-campaign dirty trick. (Tomorrow, the Clinton campaign will arrange for the sun to rise in the east.)

Exhibit B: MSNBC “media analyst” Steve Adubato demands that Hillary Clinton explain “exactly how Vince Foster died.” (Your Left-Wing Liberal Media in action, readers!)

I’m still dreaming that these three blogs will be back one day:

1. Mykeru (gone from the Internet)
2. Buck Hill (last post 2007/03/31)
3. Dadahead (last post 2006/04/27)

Here’s some real-life wingnut logic –

1. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian.
2. Vegetarians are left-wingers.
3. Ergo, Hitler was a left-winger.

This is for real, readers. Bradrocket of Sadly, No! has gotten his hands on a copy of Jonah Goldberg’s brand-spanking-new opus Liberal Fascism: Just ‘Cause I Said So and has been posting excerpts from it. Don’t miss it, readers. Liberal Fascism is shaping up to be the dumbest book of 2007.

Who gives a damn about policy proposals? Who cares where presidential candidates stand on the issues? Apparently, what we’re really interested in is how they take their coffee, and what their coffee preferences might tell us (the voters, the American people) about our candidates’ “character and values.” Because, believe it or not, it’s possible to answer the coffee question wrong.

After all, readers, it’s not like there’s a war going on or anything. The press coverage of our last two presidential elections was almost completely driven by the political press corps’ character-based narratives. How do you like where it’s gotten us, readers? How do you like your endless war overseas, your frightening erosion of civil liberties at home, your executive branch openly and proudly claiming the right to spy on, imprison indefinitely, and even torture its own citizens, without warrants or oversight of any kind, all in the name of “national security”?

Who cares about any of that stuff? I’d rather not think about it… What kind of cheese do the candidates like to eat? What’s on their iPods? Would they be fun to spend time with at a backyard barbecue? Which of them would you like to drink a beer and watch the game with? That’s what matters.

Okapi, snoozing quietly

Mystery, in a rare pensive mood