Wednesday, June 08, 2005
(7:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Oh, God forbid
that a President should display any learning. I see at the Volokh Conspiracy that Eugene Volokh (who is one of the smartest bloggers ever and a fine upstanding human being, and who backed down from supporting torture as a standard social practice because he realized it was a political non-starter) is glad that we have a stupid and inarticulate president, rather than one who says things like this:"Let us stop drinking from the enchanted waters of Lethe, which strike with amnesia those who want to quench their thirst, and let us dare to taste those 'fresh waters that run from the Lake of Memory'--as the words say on the golden bars of the disciples of Orpheus, that bard of metamorphosis and of ascending reincarnation."--Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin in a recent essay, quoted in London's Daily Telegraph, June 5Sure, maybe it was pretensious, but at least Villepin probably could realize that disassemble and dissemble are two separate words. I'll take Villepin over Bush any day!
That little gem comes from the Wall Street Journal's very own Best of the Web feature. It also includes this absolute piece of utter shit that makes me want to scream:
Our item yesterday on John Kerry*, his military records and his Yale transcript prompted this criticism from a reader:Reading that made me feel absolutely livid. The absolute disregard for objective facts, for honesty and forthrightness, for logic -- and the best part, automatically claiming in some "witty" way that now the pro-Kerry people are party shills because they think that the Swift Boat people are more likely to be telling the truth immediately after serving with John Kerry than they are forty years after the fact when Kerry is a major public figure who recently ran for president -- it's just immoral. Absolutely immoral. The fact that there's a public out there who just eats this shit up -- I mean that, who literally takes the conceptual equivalent of feces and eagerly stuffs it down their gullet -- is shameful.Your failure to acknowledge that John Kerry's Navy records contained praise from (future) members of the Swift Boats outfit demonstrates your lack of integrity and your fundamental dishonesty. You are a shill. Congratulations."The Swift Boats outfit," of course, is the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and sure enough, yesterday's Boston Globe did say this:The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service. . . . An earlier release of the full record might have helped his campaign because it contains a number of reports lauding his service.OK, so we goofed. We should have noted this yesterday. The reason we didn't is that we remembered reading in the paper that the Swift Boat guys were a bunch of liars, so we assumed their praise was not to be trusted.
Now that their credibility has been re-established....
Oh, quick! Someone point out that there are people who tend to favor the Democratic party, too, and that I'm not criticizing some "liberal journalist" for misplacing a comma in a footnote on page 14 of his report on Abu Grahib, so I'm a hypocrite!
