THIS MODERN WORLD

… but this was the first thing that occurred to me as well:

Now, “some” might say since the Bush administration has been proved to be planting propaganda in both the Iraqi and US press, since we’ve “found” many spurious documents in Iraq before, and since they are lying scumbags about virtually everything including whether the sun came up this morning — that we should be skeptical of such things. I am not one of those people. Clearly, the war is won and we can bring the troops home.

I think it’s really lucky, though, that al-Zarqawi was keeping such meticulous notes and blueprints. Why do you suppose he was doing that? Was he required to send regular reports back to headquarters? A potential book deal perhaps? Maybe he was a blogger.

Would someone please ask Ann Coulter what church she attends each week, and what important life lessons she has learned from her pastor?

(More here, via Bob.)

Prepare yourselves to be shocked. Are you ready for this? Apparently Parents Television Council, the American Family Association, and their thousands of deputies in the self-appointed moral police are completely full of crap. It’s bad enough that they’ve taken it upon themselves to decide what you and I should and shouldn’t be allowed to watch (and hiding their crusades behind “the children”), but they aren’t even watching the damn shows they’re complaining about :

Virtually none of those who complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the teen drama Without A Trace actually saw the episode in question, CBS affiliates said as they asked the agency to rescind its proposed record indecency fine of $3.3 million.

All of the 4,211 e-mailed complaints came from Web sites operated by the Parents Television Council and the American Family Association, the stations said in a filing on Monday.

In only two of the emails did those complaining say they had watched the program, and those two apparently refer to a “brief, out-of-context segment” of the episode that was posted on the Parents Television Council’s Web site, the affiliates’ filing said.

“There were no true complainants from actual viewers,” the stations said. To be valid, complaints must come from an actual viewer in the service area of the station at issue, the filing said.

“The e-mails were submitted … because advocacy groups hoping to influence television content generally exhorted them to contact the commission,” the CBS stations said.

These lying crybabies, who are apparently too stupid to use their V-chips, are but a very tiny minority compared to the millions who watched the broadcast :

About 8.2 million people saw the Dec. 31, 2004 broadcast, which was a repeat of an earlier airing of the same episode that drew no indecency complaints. E-mails about the episode began arriving at the FCC on Jan. 12, the same day the PTC sent an alert to its members, the CBS stations said.

The FCC in proposing the fines of $32,500 upon each of 103 CBS stations said they had “broadcast material graphically depicting teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy.”

Even if we took the 4211 complaints at face value, that’s still only 0.05% of the viewing audience for a show being responsible for more than $3.3 million dollars in fines. Predictably, PTC president Brent Bozell is wrapping his wrapping his little witchhunt in a patriotic package :

“Every complaint filed comes from a United States citizen who, last I heard, had the constitutional privilege to petition his government,” Bozell said. “Rather than these stupid legal maneuvers, CBS and Viacom should spend time pondering why it’s wrong to broadcast scenes of teen orgies in front of millions of children.”

Ahhh…it’s nice to see a patriot like Bozell defend our democracy by exercising his “constitutional privilege to petition his government”. Inspired by his bravery, perhaps we can use our first amendment right to email Brent and tell him that if he doesn’t like something on television he should change the fucking channel.

I know an embarrassing amount about the Iraq/WMD story. One side effect of being familiar with all this crap is I’m acutely aware of the precise way in which every claim made by war proponents was inaccurate. I mean that literally: every claim. Moreover, I don’t mean in hindsight, I mean based on what was known at the time.

Sometimes their claims were 20% false, sometimes 80% false, and sometimes 100% false. But they never once got things 100% right. And curiously enough, every “error” always fell in the same direction, that of making their case appear stronger.

One of these people was then-New Republic editor Peter Beinart, whom I’ve previously said unkind things about, here. So out of idle curiosity, I fact-checked one of Beinart’s statements in a recent interview (reg. req.) about his new book The Good Fight.

Guess what?

I won’t post here everything I wrote, because it’s long and frankly kind of boring if you’re not a huge freak. But if you are a huge freak, you can follow the link and get 100% of your daily recommended allowance of freakitude.

Max Sawicky:

JAKE TAPPER IS AN IDIOT

Unbelievable…

Whoever said Cindy Sheehan et al were infallible? Not a single fucking person. MaxSpeak will donate $20 bucks to the charity of your choice (I’m no Bill Gates, so back off) for anyone who can produce a quote from someone not posting to Democratic Underground to the effect that Ms. Sheehan or the 9-11 widows are infallible or above criticism for their substantive remarks.

The real problem with said critics is that it is not so easy to immediately dismiss them with ad hominem, the preferred mode of discourse for jingoists, economic royalists, and other political prostitutes of the Right. Ann of a Thousand Remainders is really complaining that she can’t employ her usual tools as easily, though for her it wasn’t much more difficult, as we have seen.

The mainstream media pundit machine cannot disintegrate into a smoking pile of rubble soon enough for me.

The rest is here.