THIS MODERN WORLD

Conason has a rundown on the whole Domenech mess that Greg mentioned a few posts down, for those of you who haven’t been paying close attention. And since this blog is now one of the select portals through which you can bypass the Salon ads, you can Read the Whole Thing.

I suspect that young Ben’s remaining time at the Post can be measured in hours. I’ll be extraordinarily surprised if he survives the day. Of course, the Post has shown itself to have quite the tin ear on these matters in the past, so maybe I’m wrong.

… via Atrios, here’s a classic example of the right’s refusal to ever acknowledge inconvenient facts — in this case, young Ben’s irrefutable acts of plagiarism:

And now those opposed to Ben have googled prior writings that on the surface appear suspicious, but only because permissions obtained and judgments made offline were not reflected online by an out dated and out of business campus newspaper. But that’s all the opponents want – just enough to sabotage a career, though in the process they will sabotage themselves. Facts have no meaning. Only impressions have any bearing on this. The charges of plagarism are false, meant to bring down a good and honest man. The presented facts to prove plagarism are specious — products of shoddy work. One could easily think the producers of 60 Minutes II were behind them.

Facts have never been debate winners among the haters…

That last line especially speaks for itself, though not in ways the author intended.

…more: Digby nails it:

Of course poeple don’t have to read him. But we do have to consider the obvious fact that Kurtz and the Washington Post believe that this blatantly partisan Republican blogger “balances” an allegedly “left leaning” White House critic. That they still don’t understand the difference between the conventions of overt partisan media and mainstream online criticism like Dan Froomkin’s column is painfully clear. That this particular blogger has been exposed virtually overnight as a racist and plagiarist proves that they had no idea how the right wing media works. Still.

(snip)

They are like sheltered children. They do not know when they are being played. Indeed, they don’t even seem to know the game exists.

* * *

… and the boy resigns. His whining non-apology about the Very Mean Leftists is here. (Anyone really believe he got an email suggesting his mother should have aborted him? Does that sound like something an actual liberal would say–or what a shallow young conservative writer would imagine a liberal saying?)

Note the insistence that he didn’t really plagiarize anyone. Then go over to Atrios’s place and scroll down through examples of plagiarism too numerous to list, and decide for yourself.

We’ve seen this over and over again, from conservatives over the past few years, this apparent belief that saying a thing is all that is necessary to make it true. If only it were so. As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Here’s a good example of the immoral healthcare system that conservatives are trying to protect :

Authorities released a videotape this afternoon of what they say is the dumping of a 63-year-old woman on the streets of skid row.

The videotape, recorded by security cameras outside the Union Rescue Mission entrance on San Pedro Street on Monday afternoon, shows a taxicab pulling a U-turn and then driving out of view. A few seconds later, a woman wearing a hospital gown and no shoes walks from the same direction, wandering in the street and on the sidewalk for about three minutes before a Union Rescue Mission staff person escorts her inside the mission.

LAPD Capt. Andrew Smith said he believes the taxi took the woman, a 63-year-old Gardena resident, downtown against her will after she was discharged from Kaiser Permanente Bellflower on Monday.

You’d think examples like this would prompt the American public to say to themselves “Hmmmm….I wonder why this doesn’t happen in other countries?”, but the very concept of providing healthcare to everyone is pilloried as a step towards despotism (unlike, say, the disposal of the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments). Here’s how Tom Neely and I sent-up the GOP talking point a couple of years ago :

If the Democrats knew what was good for them (ha!), they’d collect stories like this as evidence that the United States is long overdue for a universal single-payer healthcare system. Sometimes showing a willingness to go down in flames on principle prevents that very thing from happening.

I haven’t written anything about The Washington Post‘s hiring of Ben Domenech because I support their first amendment right to piss away their credibility by hiring an asshole, but the dirt people have been digging up on the self-described spokesman for “the majority of Americans” has really shocked me. No, not Ben’s double-life as “Augustine” or his overt racism. The thing that I find amazing is that Ben Domenech is so ethically challenged that he plagiarized movie reviews. Movie reviews! These weren’t assignments that required research, interviews, or even a basic degree of accurracy. All he had to do was sit through a movie and write a couple hundred words about what he thought, but he couldn’t even do that without stealing.

The Smoking Gun got their hands on Dick Cheney’s tour rider. (via HuffPo)

It looks like our favorite hunter is too delicate to pick up a damn remote and change the channel himself. This rule is probably for the best though. With Cheney’s health problems and advanced age, it takes him a lot longer to trash a Presidential Suite than it used to.

I’m guessing Tom is too busy with his tour preparations to plug a certain book that’s coming out today….

Looking at the book’s page on Amazon, I noticed this slightly disturbing association :



I don’t know who would be interested in a book by a torture-loving goober like Horowitz and a book of hilarious political cartoons, but apparently there’s at least one of you out there. Since you already know how great This Modern World is, I’ll forgo the sales pitch and offer this bit of advice :

Don’t buy The Professors by David Horowitz

Seriously, it’s the same “radical professors” crap that conservatives have been whining about for years. We’ve seen this argument a million times before and it’s still as simple-minded as it was forty years ago. To conservatives like Horowitz, liberalism on college campuses is the result of political bias and intolerance for alternative views. While cherry-picked examples of political correctness run amok can certainly be strung together to support that thesis, there’s a more obvious answer that’s being overlooked by the egomaniacs on the right. When educated people disagree with you, it has nothing to do with political bias. They disagree with you because you’re wrong. If Horowitz and his peers had the slightest bit of humility, they’d take the unpopularity of their views among intellectuals as a sign that they might need to reevaluate their views. But that would require flip-flopping and we all know how wingnuts feel about that.

So now that you know which book you shouldn’t buy, lemme highlight part of what Giant Magazine had to say about Hell in a Handbasket :

It also showcases how infuriated he is with the current administration. We probably don’t need to tell you that Tomorrow’s opinions lean to the left–the book’s cover, which features President Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove sporting devil horns, speaks volumes. Yet he never falls into blind partisanship. Even as Tomorrow rips into the president’s buffoonery, his political advisors’ twisting of the truth and fox news’s insulting and divisive rhetoric, he comes off not as a vengeful sour-grapes Democrat but as an articulate and thoughtful man who is genuinely concerned about the future.

Daniel Perkins has been making cartoons for over 20 years, and his work has never been sharper. This Modern World stands out as a voice of reason, pointing out the trouble we’re in and providing comfort to those who already recognize it. Who knows–maybe someday we’ll be able to look back on all of this and laugh.

So pick up Hell in a Handbasket and catch Tom next week on tour.