Don’t Buy Books from Crooks

Shrub His ghostwriter read NYRB? No way.

In both excerpts I still picture Cheney yelling at Wolfowitz and Kristol Meh to stop playing with their fucking armies and throw the damn dice on the RISK TM board.

This is all shades of awesome. This is the funniest thing I’ve read in days. After a day of dealing with hulking st8s hired to lift huge stones, imprecations hurled at me from Paris, and shoveling mountains of dirt, this has made getting up this morning worthwhile.

Tommy snapped a salute. Get you, Ada, for ninepence. Like are we supposed to believe this shite? That makes it even funnier.

The only form that could really scale these heights is… Musical Theatre!!!! Do I dare to dream the rights are still available?

Well, that’s *one* way to make sure that everyone keeps their stories straight…

What would really take the cake would be if he’d cribbed from Scott McClellan’s book.

@Mistress Cynica: HuffPo called it the “New York Times Review of Books,” which in certain precincts is as hilarious as the subject of the post.

It all sounds like Dragnet.

This guy is even too lazy to make shit up.

Travel TJ: Jeez, stories like these really makes me not want to have to fly. Anyone here experience the nekkid-picture machine yet? I haven’t, and was planning to ask for a pat-down when/if I was forced into the nekkid picture machine, but after reading some of those accounts of pissed off TSA workers violently fondling people, I’m debating which is worse.

ADD: Edited for TJ warning

@SanFranLefty:
I did when I left SD last Sunday.

I’d rather have folks check out my junk on a screen (and point and laugh) than grope me. I’ve been frisked for weapons several times in my life (don’t ask) and it’s not pleasant.

@Dodgerblue: But who, who, who arranged it all into sentences of five words or less?

Has Republican prose sunk so low? From the cloud-capped heights of Peggy Noonan’s lyrical, heartstirring, emotionalasming spoetry to this Sport announcer bark-speak?

I’m wondering if there isn’t some Ur-Text out there in NeoCon Land they all crib from when they ‘write’ their ‘memoirs’. Like the Ur-Hamlet we can only guess at (apart from Harold Bloom who just makes it up) as we try to work out what He had propped on his inkstand while, paraphrasing madly, He struggled to get Act IV finished before his last candle guttered out. So when W or Rummy or Wolfie or Cheney or Condie or Krisco or Boltie or any of the rest of the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight opens their respective MacBooks to Think Big Thoughts they can log on to NeoCon.evl to scan the Ur-Text and simply extract whatever catches their eye to slam into their own tome destined for the remainder bin at abebooks.com.

I envisage a performance piece. Reading aloud from W’s buk. We might call it W’s Buk. Someone grandly pompously orotund. Patrick Stewart springs to mind. Take it all very very seriously. (One can almost hear the soundtrack that was playing in his head as he thought about dictating it. I’m hearing Mars from The Planets though it was more likely the theme from Star Wars.) Could be the comedy hit of the year.

@Benedick:
If anyone has to read W’s buk. It has to be Larry the Cable Guy or Jeff Foxworthy. Patrick Stewart’s talents are wasted.

Background muzik? Yakity Sax.

@SanFranLefty: It’s worse to have some TSA goon feel you up. I’m sick of it. They don’t do that at Ben Gurion Airport, by the way.

@ManchuCandidate: Agree. They can post a photo of my johnson on Flickr for all I care. But hands off.

The Readers’ Digest of Neo-con books. In this way the Bush Liberry will need only one book.

@SanFranLefty: I eagerly await my first full body scan by the Overlords. It’s got to be quicker than the portal-then-wanding routine.
@Benedick: I think having Mrs. Radcliffe’s 3rd grade class reading excerpts would be best, or maybe just PeeWee Herman.

@Benedick: Two words: William Shatner

@Dodgerblue: @ManchuCandidate: Since Homeland Security is refusing to comply with FOIA requests from the ACLU and EPIC as to test information on radiation exposure from these things, and their position on whether they are keeping the nekkid images changes weekly, I’d rather not. Pat downs (which I’ve experienced several times, including an aggressive one where I felt like I should have at least gotten a dinner out of the groping), while irritating, are less invasive than strip searches, IMHO. Although the 4th Amendment is on fumes with this current Court, I strongly believe that the government isn’t entitled to inspect my nekkid body because I did nothing more than buy a plane ticket. Nor do I think they’re entitled to fondle me, for that matter.
So far the machines aren’t functional at SFO, but Sandy Eggo was one of the first to have them.

What am I missing here?

Assuming he said what he said and/or his people said what they said, how is it plagiarism for both people to accurately recall what each of them said?

@SanFranLefty: The Presidents of US Airways and American Pilots’ Union has advised pilots to avoid the scanners.
The Pres of US Airways Pilot Union goes further and says:
“…after a pat-down, the pilot should determine if he or she is emotionally fit to fly.”

News last night relates story about a pilot so upset he vomited in his driveway before going into work.

Whoa. I was shutting off my my new Metallica/Slayer/Megadeth/Anthrax DVD when I switched the inputs on the TV and there was this black and white WWII footage on the screen. The driving beginning to “Am I Evil” went pretty well with it.

/under the influence of The Crud That Shall Not Be

The Big 4, bay-bee!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cchVCkwZig

@SanFranLefty: I went through it in Amsterdam, where they were generally polite about it and I didn’t feel quite so likely to be violated. The machine itself is pretty innocuous, in that “huh, radiation” sort of way. FWIW, I really do think that the radiation levels in those things is so small as to be of no concern whatsoever, compared to simply living in the modern world.

However, for my Xmas travel this year, I’m going to great lengths to avoid air travel. It’s the cheapest, fastest and surprisingly about the same level of pollution as driving. Even so, the train with its 23 hour travel time, or driving, with its two days and a hotel travel time (both options ranging from $100 to $300 more than the plane), are looking way more attractive than battling holiday crowds at the fondle-mo-tron machine. It turns out that money does buy happiness, when the alternative is getting yelled at by petty power wielders.

@Dodgerblue: I’m with you and Manchu. You want to look at me nekkid–hey, they’re your retinas. But no touching.

I remember writing columns for the Daily Cardinal at UW Madison in 2003 on the March to War. Of course, I was much more forgiving of student marchers then than I was now. I even sat in on organize meetings — I was the guy trying to craft a message that people might actually want to listen to, apart from everyone else who wanted to out-shrill the Socialist Worker types.

Anyway, my first column post-start focused in on a Time magazine report which featured two moments. One was Dubya walking through an ongoing meeting featuring Condi Rice. She — true to her nature as an adherent of Tree — was giving a reasoned analysis. (Wrong, yes, but with something at least resembling facts and logic.). Bush interjected — “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.” That reasonated with me.

Then there was his pre-Address to the Nation moment where he gave a little fist pump and said, “feels good.”

This hagiography of his probably glossed over those moments, if I have my guess.

Keef cancels segment on Shrub, sez excerpts were selectively chosen.

Keef doesn’t mention source of selectively chosen excerpts.

Good thing I kept a HuffPo/Keef screenshot the other day…

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: It’s the matchy-matchy wordy thing. If they matchy-maychty too much – like per example Shrock’s wardrobe – it’s like he got them someplace else and didn’t pay for them or give them credit. Which is a Bad Thing.

As per moi the plagiarism (aka matchy-matchy) issue doesn’t mean as much as the fantabulous hilarity of the write. Paul Reubens, aka PeeWee, is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too talented for this. Shatner has a sense of yuma so he’s out. No. Only Patrick Stewart has the requisite stentorian bonkishness to do W’s buk justice. No doubt he’s on call for Hobbiting but might could be coaxed back for vast amounts of money. Noje? You have the keys to the Stinque Volt. How’s about it?

@chicago bureau: That’s not good.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: Looks like I’ll have a minor follow-up in the morning (lefty catfight!), but part of the charge is that he’s lifting reconstructed quotes from other sources — not, say, relying on the same transcripts.

The other part of the charge is that he’s doing thinly disguised rewrites of the work of others — cut-and-paste with minor intervention.

Thus: He’s not just a liar and a war criminal, he’s a hack.

Unless, of course, the hack turns out to be the dude who wrote the story.

Bottom line is this FUCK-SHIT of a human being is responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people. He really is not so far removed from Stalin, Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, and Hitler. Let us not forget that.

The fact that he is not faced with charges of war crimes (i.e., Nuremburg: aggressive war), crimes against humanity, torture, etc. pushes into everyone’s face the fact that our vaunted democracy is an utter sham in the service of the corporatist oligarchy.

This system is beyond fixing — better to let it die.

Palin 2012!