THIS MODERN WORLD

Sometimes I feel like the entire Ron Paul grassroots movement was specifically designed to make me laugh my ass off. I know his supporters are sincere in their love of Ron Paul (even if I think they’re fools for supporting the loon), but some of the publicity stunts these guys come up with are almost like a Paddy Chayefsky-esque satire of ineffective activist naivete.

A blimp? A blimp!

Imagine.. the mainstream media is mesmerized as the image of the Ron Paul blimp is shown to tens of millions of Americans throughout the day (and throughout the month). Wolf Blizter, stunned and as if in a trance, repeats the words “Amazing, Amazing”.

As GPS co-ordinates stream to the website a map shows the Ron Paul blimp’s location in real time. The local Television stations broadcast its every move. The curious flock together and make a trip to see history in the making. Emails with pictures are sent, then forwarded, then forwarded again. Youtube videos go viral and reach tens of millions of views. Ron Paul becomes the first presidential candidate in history to have his very own blimp. The PR stunt generates millions upon millions of dollars worth in free publicity, and captures the imagination of America.

Please join us in our goal to raise $350,000 to make and fly the first ever Presidential Blimp in history.

What planet are these guys from? In 2007, do people descend into a state of reverent awe whenever they see a large gray cylinder flying in the sky? Call my a cynic, I really doubt that the entire nation would collectively pause with wonder to follow the journey of a rented blimp.

Do they really want to invite the obvious joke here?

Finally, am I the only one that finds it ironic that the supporters of Ron Paul, the ultra-libertarian who votes against every bit of government spending he can, want to throw away more than a quarter million dollars so people can look into the air and say “Oh, hey. Is that the Goodyear blimp?”

UPDATE : It gets better. Not only are they wasting money, but this image posted on the official Ron Paul blimp site takes pride in the fact that they’re “dumping” the cash into a ridiculous stunt to hype their next money bombing :

So they’re comparing donating to Ron Paul’s campaign to dumping a bunch of tea in Boston Harbor? If you think giving your money to Ron Paul and his magical blimp is a good idea, you might be better off just throwing your money into the harbor instead.

UPDATE from Tom: pulling the backwards “LOVE” out of the word “REVOLUTION” is an especially nice touch.

Tomorrow’s Voice has another little surprise. I’ll post a link when it goes online. For now, let’s just say it’s one of the reasons blogging has been even more sporadic than usual over the past month or so.

Fairly stunning story on Giuliani just went up on the Village Voice site:

Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city’s skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir’s own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack—a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM—al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families of its victims. Rudy Giuliani, apparently unaware of what the FBI and CIA had long known about Qatari links to Al Qaeda, appeared on CNN with al-Thani that night and vouched for the emir when Larry King asked the mayor: “You are a friend of his, are you not?”

* * *
In retrospect, Giuliani’s embrace of the emir appears peculiar. But it was only a sign of bigger things to come: the launching of a cozy business relationship with terrorist-tolerant Qatar that is inconsistent with the core message of Giuliani’s current presidential campaign, namely that his experience and toughness uniquely equip him to protect America from what he tauntingly calls “Islamic terrorists”—an enemy that he always portrays himself as ready to confront, and the Democrats as ready to accommodate.

The contradictory and stunning reality is that Giuliani Partners, the consulting company that has made Giuliani rich, feasts at the Qatar trough, doing business with the ministry run by the very member of the royal family identified in news and government reports as having concealed KSM—the terrorist mastermind who wired funds from Qatar to his nephew Ramzi Yousef prior to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and who also sold the idea of a plane attack on the towers to Osama bin Laden—on his Qatar farm in the mid-1990s.

More.

This is from a few months back, from Matt Taibbi, but it’s well worth reading. As others have noted, anyone who lived in New York under Giuliani, and was paying attention, has to be somewhat befuddled that his candidacy did not implode in its earliest stages. Yes, he was a calming presence in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — I believe I noted as much at the time — but that was largely in comparison to the leadership of George W. Bush, who finished reading a children’s book and then ran for a hidey-hole, before eventually appearing on television looking — in the words of an NYC man-in-the-street interviewee I’ll never forget — “like a scared little bunny.” Of course, Giuliani was also the guy who put the city’s emergency command center in the fracking World Trade Center — six years after the first attack in 1993…

But anyway:

Giuliani has good stage presence, but his physical appearance is problematic — virtually neckless, all shoulders and forehead and overbite, with a hunched-over, Draculoid posture that recalls, oddly enough, George W. Bush, the vestigial stoop of a once-chubby kid who grew up hiding tittie pictures from nuns. Not handsome, not cuddly, if he wins this thing it’s going to be by projecting toughness and man-aura. But all presidential candidates have to play the baby-kissing game, and here is an early chance for Rudy to show his softer side.

“So,” he whispers to the kids. “What do you all want to be when you grow up? Do any of you know?”

A bucktoothed boy raises his hand.

“I wanna be a doctor,” he says, “and a lawyer.”

The crowd laughs, then looks at Rudy expectantly. The obvious line is “A doctor and a lawyer? Whaddya want to do, sue yourself?” and you can see Rudy physically straining for the joke. But this candidate’s funny bone is a microscopic thing, like one of those anvil-shaped deals in the ear, and the line eludes him.

“A doctor and a lawyer, huh?” he says, grinning nervously. “Uh . . . whaddya want to do, sue the doctor?”

My notes from that moment read: Chirping crickets.

Rudy moves on. “How about you?” he says to the next boy.

“I want to be a policeman!” the kid says.

Rudy smiles. Then the next boy says he wants to be a fireman, and the crowd twitters: Wow, a fireman and a policeman, in the same room! Rudy is beaming now, almost certainly aware that every grown-up present is suddenly thinking about 9/11. His day. As he leans over, the room is filled with popping flashbulbs. Then, instead of capitalizing on the sense of pride and shared purpose everyone is feeling, Giuliani utters something truly strange and twisted.

“A fireman and a policeman, huh?” he says. “Well, the first thing that I want to do is make sure that you two get along.”

Huh? Amid confused applause, Rudy flashes a queer smile, then moves on to the heart of his presentation, a neat little speech about how the election of a Democratic president will result in certain nuclear attack and the end of the free market as we know it. I’m barely listening, however, still thinking about the “make sure you get along” line.

Although few people outside of New York know it yet, there is an emerging controversy over Giuliani’s heroic 9/11 legacy. Critics charge that Rudy’s failure to resolve the feuding between the city’s police and firefighters prior to the attack led to untold numbers of deaths, the most tragic example being the inability of firemen to hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been “designed to work independently, not together,” and that greater coordination would have spared many lives.

Given all that, why did Rudy offer this weirdly unsolicited reference to the controversy now? Was he joking? And if so, what the fuck? It was a strange and bitter comment to make, especially right on the heels of his grand-slam performance in the previous night’s debate. If this is a guy who chews over a perceived slight in the middle of a victory lap, what’s he going to be like with his finger on the button? Even Richard Nixon wasn’t wound that tight.

The latest from Greenwald on the saga of Joe Klein and FISA:

Joe Klein has just posted yet again about his FISA confusion, and it has now moved well beyond farce into an almost pity-inducing realm. If Time has any dignity at all, someone there will intervene and put a stop to this. It’s actually difficult to watch.

In the last five days alone, Klein has now written five separate times about his FISA debacle, and is further away than ever from having any idea what he’s even talking about — first was the column itself; second was the Swampland post the same day in which he emphatically defended the accuracy of what he wrote in response to my post; third was the post yesterday in which Klein said he “may have made a mistake in [his] column this week about the FISA legislation” — the understatement of the year; fourth was an Update he added to that post this morning claiming that he did speak to a Democrat but “may have misinterpreted a Democratic source’s point” and “if [he] did, a correction will appear in the print magazine next week”; and now, his fifth effort in tonight’s post, actually worse than all the others, in which he still professes confusion after “spen[ding] the past few days nosing around in the ongoing dispute about what the House FISA Reform bill actually says.”

The result of all this “nosing around”: “I’ve reached no conclusions.” And he then unleashes this:

I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right.

That’s been the point all along (although one doesn’t need “legal background” — just basic reading skills and a molecule of critical thought).

I now know who Klein’s editor for this piece was and I will have much more to say about all of this tomorrow. In comments to Klein’s new post tonight, the lawyer (and blogger) Anonymous Liberal quickly debunked the new, insultingly false claims from Klein about the alleged “dispute” over the meaning of the House bill. And the normally mild-mannered Ryan Singel of Wired earlier today — prior to Klein’s latest effort — wrote his second detailed post excoriating Klein’s completely ignorant, now-willfully false claims about FISA (“Klein now has two blog posts and one column (printed in Time magazine) that are all shot through with errors. . . . THREAT LEVEL, paraphrasing Klein’s column, continues to believe that Klein is well beyond stupid. He’s dangerous”).

Thus, for now, I just want to ask that everyone ponder the extreme lack of professionalism and corruption required for someone like Klein to write the article that he did accusing Democrats of wanting to give Terrorists the same rights as Americans (therefore showing, as always, that Democrats can’t be trusted on national security), and then — once he is exposed for having spewed outright falsehoods — he announces that he really isn’t interested in bothering to find out (and isn’t even capable of determining) if anything he wrote was accurate.

More, here. And the beginning of the tale, here.