The AP Has Fun With Their Headlines

Sarah Palin is straight up sending mixed messages to her sheeple in the Tea Party: they should keeping standing but, in fact, they should probably shut up for the good of the movement. But what are they supposed to do while they're standing up? Protests are LONG! And should Sarah Palin also stand up but shut up?

We are all Sarah Palin today.

Anals Annals of Pour Copyediting,

Oh my God, I've finally done it for reel, y'aul, and done it real good. While reading the latest collection of words by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker last night between sets of squat thrusts at my gym—an article in which he once again turns conventional wisdom on its head, then concludes by saying "That's right, I said it"—I discovered the Holy Grail of bitter, unrequited authors everywhere: a copyediting error in the New F**king Yorker, ha!

This feet of eagle-eyed apprehension has rarely been accomplished in the history of this magazine, because the tyrants at the New Yorker send anyone on their staff who makes such an error against humanity to Gitmo to be "reeducated" by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., the stylists behind English grammar/writing bible The Elements of Style. Sure, both men are sadly dead, but they left behind them a powerful series of books on tape. (Twisted Sister provides the "enhanced" incidental music.)

The mangled passage is rendered thusly on page 27 of the January 18, 2010 edition (also click on the above image for the photographic proof):

In 2008, his firm made five billion dollars. Rarely in human history has anyone made so much money is so short a time.

Correction: rarely in human history has there been such a frightful and unseemly mangling of the English language in such an august publication. As Stephen Doocy on Fox and Friends might put it in his powerful falsetto, "This is HUGE!" The sentence should obviously read "in so short a time." (Or "is so short of dimes"? Who knows!)

Did Sarah Palin edit this article?

In conclusion, the New Yorker can no longer be trusted with prepositions and the verb to be.

Fox's Expanding Brains Trust

I'm surprised there's been no mention, in the aftermath of the Bill O'Reilly reacharound with Sarah Palin (is that sexist? Towards O'Reilly?), of the fact that, when they started chattin' about North and South Korea over there, namely her alleged lack of understanding of why they are separate countries, Palin didn't offer any nuggets of stone cold knowledge learnin' about the Korean peninsula in her defense. She could have smirked 'n rolled her eyes (as she does), brought on the "high school bitchy" that Tina Fey famously referenced, and made some statement about how of COURSE she knows about the history of the DMZ and whatnot, proving forever that she can at least make an effort to Know Things. But she didn't and O'Reilly didn't even ask her to, deferentially. It was a gaping hole in the conversation.

Bill: You know about North and South Korea, right?
Sarah: Of course.
Bill: Good enough. Now, tell me this: why are you so gorgeous?

And how much do you wanna bet that Palin's answer to the question "Which of the Koreas is your favorite" would be: "All of 'em."

Editorial: Speedos and Our Precious Freedoms

People, the killjoy lefty media is at it again, attacking our freedoms for their own ideological satisfaction. The Daily Beast's Sean Macaulay has written the most ridiculous opinion piece in the history of Internet jernalizm and it must be called out for its lies, damn lies, distortions, falsities, misrepresentations, deceit, untruths, and fabrications.

In his hit piece on the world's greatest ever invention, the Speedo, Macauley argues that the time has come for a ban on "offensively small bathing suits". I....I can't even relate to that statement. Is this Macauley character even human? What language is he typing? Where is his birth certificate?

Certainly Macauley has a point about the frightening and dangerous possibilities inherent in allowing someone like Rod Stewart or Carson Kressley access to the mighty weanie-bender, beloved by everyone with a pulse. That is because Speedos are not made for men such as Rod and Carson. They are made for men such as David Beckam, Ricky Martin, and some guy named Justin Gaston that I just found out about by reading this awful article.

If you just ban the Speedo outright, you may be saving yourself from having your eyeballs melt to your face at the sight of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Giorgio Armani or George Hamilton or Jack Nicholson in a sagging pair of colored underwear; but you also face the real, and much more chilling, possibility of never being able to witness this guy, this guy, or these guys in the blissful state of undress God intended them to maintain all day, every day, for eternity. This is not only a loss for us as individuals. It is a loss for us as Americans. A tragic compromising of our very humanity that I, for one, cannot countenance.




If we have to live in a world without the Speedo, the terrorists have already won.

Glenn Greenwald and His Friends Make Me Tired, Irritable

Ok, I'm about to get a little "inside baseball," sorry. And it's long. (Sarah, might as well stop reading now.) Glenn Greenwald is a journalist at Salon. He's a constitutional lawyer and a really smart guy. He does great work and is good at needling establishment journalists. See a great post he recently did on nepotism in American media and politics here. Glenn Greenwald (hereafter GG) relentlessly tries to hold public officials' feet to the fire and, you know, more power to him. He is also really great at updating his blog posts constantly, giving his readers the opportunity to do nothing all day but READ F**KING GLENN GREENWALD. (I imagine hanging out with GG is exhausting. "Ok, update, you guys," he says every five minutes before heading to the bar and sending constant text updates after ordering a drink. "update: w8tng 4 wsky sr." "update viii: "wsky sr almst re-D." "update xvi: jst xd 4 xtra chry.")

Glenn Greenwald is also, sadly, a tiresome, needlessly bitchy queerbag sometimes. I can say this because my boyfriend Jimmy is also often needlessly bitchy and queer.

One of GG's hobby horses (and rightly so) is the whole torture thing. GG is a true believer; he thinks that investigations of and prosecutions for torture should happen and should target anyone involved, top to bottom. And that would be so great if it were possible. If only we all lived in a vacuum, where there were no political realities and the former vice president hadn't successfully started turning torture into just another partisan issue that the right and the left can fight over. A few months ago, GG took issue with NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd (full disclosure: I'm a big fan of the Chuck) asserting in an interview on Morning Joe that the topic of torture investigations was "cable catnip" and that what Obama really wants to focus on is getting the public's trust on the economy and health care.

In my humble opinion, that's not a controversial statement. Chuck was simply letting everyone know, perhaps inartfully, where the president's priorities are. And remember, this has never really been in doubt--how many times has Obama said he wants to look forward? But leave it to GG to take Chuck's words and blow them up into something they did not mean. Sayethed Glenn in response:

Our media class literally believes that high executive branch officials have the right to break the law. For that reason, they cannot even recognize illegality as an issue worth anyone's attention. Thus, all this "torture" and "lying to Congress" and violating oversight laws is just "cable catnip," political posturing that obscures what truly matters. So sayeth NBC News' White House correspondent.

Yes! That exactly what Chuck was saying. It's so clear and not ginned up at all. Good God, Glenn, calm the f*ck down. In response to this brouhaha (GG's readers are pretty much in lockstep with him, kind of like Rush's dittoheads), which was picked up by HuffPo and all the other usual suspects, Chuck, who seems like an eminently decent guy, agreed to talk to Glenn on a podcast to be uploaded to Salon's site. They had a good discussion, and it was great to hear them both argue their points, which can be simplified down to INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE GODDAMMIT vs. WELL, THAT'S JUST NOT POLITICALLY REALISTIC. I agreed with both of them, because I'm a Libra. But one thing was certain: You would be hard pressed to take from that interview any feeling that Chuck believes the executive branch is allowed to break the law and that he doesn't take the issue seriously. That was a hyperbolic and useless charge to fling at Chuck, and Glenn knows it.

But it didn't end there. Do you guys know Jeremy Scahill? He's the guy that wrote that book on Blackwater, a self-described "rebel reporter" (what is this, middle school?) who's hobby horse is, duh, Blackwater (an uber-creepy Christian mercenary army devoted to wiping out Muslims and that is also a contractor in the War on Terror, yikes), but also torture (again, rightly so). Again, Scahill is a smart guy, he's got balls of steel, and, like Glenn, he is relentless in pressing his points. (Full disclosure: he's also hawt, so he's obviously worth listening to.) Anyway, another one of Scahill's hobby horses is the awfulness of the mainstream media; he appeared on Bill Maher a few weeks ago on a panel that also included the Chuck, and he went after Chuck, as the lone representative of the mainstream media, for being unwilling to investigate and report on the awful acts perpetrated by Blackwater (acts that include murder). He again brought up the "cable catnip" comment as proof that Chuck is a gutless reporter.

Ok, yes, the media needs to grow a pair and press our leaders (even Obama!) about this organization and what they are doing in Afghanistan and why their contracts keep getting renewed. Sure. But Chuck shouldn't have to answer for the entirety of the mainstream media. (The mainstream media includes CNN's "Just Sayin'" girl, for God's sake.) And Chuck was sandbagged. Scahill went on that show with the intent to go after Chuck, it was dead obvious. It almost made one think, hmmm, I wonder if Scahill is friends with Glenn Greenwald.

Ta-da! Two days later Glenn embeds a video of the Scahill-Todd exchange with a few bitchy comments (ex: "While Todd was fiddling around with pretty colored maps and fun polling games, Scahill was courageously investigating one of the most corrupt, dangerous and lethal private corporations in the world"). Then he publishes verbatim an email he got from Scahill detailing a backstage exchange Scahill had with Chuck that made Chuck look kind of bad (and, surprise! It made Scahill look good.)

Cut to: this week. Glenn Greenwald is now in a slapping contest with Time's Joe Klein, who is pissed at GG for publishing disparaging comments Klein had made about GG on a private listserv for journalists called Journolist. GG was called out by Mediaite.com's Tommy Christopher (I love guys with two first names) for doing that, saying that it broke a rule of journalism ethics (in the same article, Christopher took Klein to task for some of his ethical lapses--i.e., printing private email exchanges with the emailer's info clearly visible). GG responded:

Speaking of “journalistic ethics,” you just wrote a piece accusing me of violating journalistic ethics. Have you ever heard of the ethical rule about including the side of the story of the person you’re accusing? I have a long, detailed post today responding to this accusation that you not only failed to link to, but even failed to summarize or acknowledge at all — to say nothing of your failure to seek my comment. That’s what is called a failure of journalistic ethics.

Wow. Ok, three words for GG: pot, kettle, black. As my friend and fellow chuck maniac Hilary commented at the Media-ite site,

Oh, really, GG? Like when you credulously published the email Scahill sent you about his private conversation with Chuck Todd? I take it you worked day and night to track down Todd’s version of that conversation, yes?

Zing! And that is why Glenn Greenwald and his friends make me tired and irritable.

By the way, Hilary has an interesting theory about some lefty media folks' reflexive tendency to freak out, and I think this theory deserves a wider audience, so I'm sharing it with all three of my readers, with Hilary's permission:

New theory I'm working on, see what you think. When soldiers are on the battlefield, they tend to kind of keep their heads down and just push forward... The trouble usually starts when they get back home to safety... THEN they freak the fuck out, reacting in ways that are totally out of line with their current reality. Remind you of anyone?

Does the leftie media have post-traumatic stress disorder?

Exhibit A: Greenwald, Scahill, Jason Linkins, Cenk Ugyur etc have all gone bananas at one time or another over this idea that Chuck doesn't think torture is "worth" prosecuting--it's even been extended, since the Bill Maher appearance, to saying he doesn't think Blackwater is worth investigating, which is completely mental. None of it has anything to do with Chuck's original argument. BUT. The phrase "torture investigations" is a PTSD trigger... after all those years of the Orwellian stylings of Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo and so on, they hear that phrase and the red mist descends and they can't think straight.

I totally agree. But I would need to do a thorough physical examination of Jeremy Scahill (cupping his balls as he turns and coughs, for example) in order to prove this theory.

Note to the New Yorker: Make David Denby Shut Up

You know a new word is officially drained of its usefulness when it is uttered by a film critic for the New Yorker. And, though the word “snark” has been irritating for a while now, David Denby is hellbent on introducing it to the ascot-and-monocle crowd so that they can be insufferable in a whole new way. Denby has been out on an excruciating book tour to promote his new book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation, which is probably a direct quote from someone wearing lederhosen at Denby’s last cocktail party. In the book, he takes issue with the Washington gossip blog Wonkette, whose jaundiced take on the idiocy of Washington and politicians in general Denby thinks is “lowering the discourse” or some dumb shit—like Washington politicians haven’t already lowered it to levels that nearly obviate the need for satire.

Speaking for myself, one of the only things that has allowed me to get through the shitstorm of incompetence and the breathtaking stupidity of the federal government over the past 8 years has been the existence of a site like Wonkette, which has no qualms about calling Tom Delay’s replacement in Congress by her God-given birth name, “Dracula-cunt.”

Now, I’ve never really minded Denby. As film critics go, he’s not terribly offensive, and he has an appreciation for the male physique that I most certainly share (he is a New Yorker writer, after all). But he really has shown his ass during this whole Wonkette fight he picked. It’s bad enough that he has completely misrepresented the site in his book—claiming that they’ve poked fun at Ted Kennedy for almost dying, for example, when they hadn’t—and attributed a Wonkette post about Chelsea Clinton to “young women who may have hated Chelsea’s bland words as she went around the country supporting her mother’s candidacy” when if he had spent one MAN-second looking at the byline of the post he would have seen it was written by a MAN known as JIM NEWELL, aka A MAN. He also repeatedly claims, in press interviews, that Wonkette is owned by Nick Denton, owner of Gawker, Defamer, and other blog sites, when it is not. (It used to be, but it was sold. At least a year ago.)

All of which would appear to clearly violate Denby's Principle of Snark No. 5, which he outlined thusly in an interview with the LA Times: “Total disregard of routine journalism. No phone calls, no checking things out. Journalism should try not to slander people.” Um, yeah, David. And what routine journalism methods did you use before slandering Wonkette and making false—if harmless—claims about who owns them, hmmmm?

So, New Yorker, please grab David Denby by the ascot and place him in an undisclosed location where, as penance for being a dumb hypocrite, he must write a rave review—snark free!—of Hotel for Dogs.