Month: January 2007

He really does. Though maybe not as much as Donnie Davies below. (Hat tip: Dan.)

This is either horrifying or sublime. I still don’t quite know which. But South Park just got some new material.

More info here.

Not so much.

A salutary quote for these Orwellian times:

"The grammar of Newspeak has two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. …In addition, any word – this again applied in principle to every word in the language – could be negative by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant "warm" while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, "very cold" and "superlatively cold".

It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it was possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well – indeed better – expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by Unlight, or light by undark, according to preference."

When we get to Double Plus Down in Iraq, we’ll know it’s over.

A libertarian has a conniption:

"Is it D’Souza’s argument that if conservative Americans help their traditional Muslims stop homosexuality and condoms, Turkey will then become a better ally of the United States in the war against terror? Much as I’m trying for the sake of argument to entertain the idea, I can’t see how that would happen. More likely, conservatives will look ridiculous, Hillary will be elected president, and certain conservative think tanks will then get more money.

And it will be tougher than hell for bloggers like me to maintain (as I have repeatedly) that there really is a huge difference between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. Much as I hate to say this, I think Dinesh D’Souza has done more to advance Andrew Sullivan’s thesis of a "Christianist-Islamist alliance" than Sullivan ever could have."

Or maybe such an alliance is the only logical step forward for theo-conservatism.

A look back at Bush’s previous SOTU pledges.

Here’s some more info on the cool graphics tool I linked to earlier. Now get back to work.

I’ll be on CNN’s "Anderson Cooper 360" tonight after the State of the Union.

Smackdown in the court room, according to Byron York:

[Libby lawyer Ted] Wells told the jury that the White House went all out to defend Rove against accusations he revealed Mrs. Wilson’s identity, but did not protect Libby in the same way, leading Libby to suspect that he was being singled out for blame in the matter. "[Mr. Libby] was concerned about being the scapegoat," Wells said. "Mr. Libby said to the vice president, ‘People in the White House are trying to set me up, people in the White House are trying to make me a scapegoat.’  People in the White House are trying to protect a man named Karl Rove, the president’s right-hand man," Wells said.

Wells said he will present a note written by Dick Cheney himself about a conversation with Libby. In part, the note says, "not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others." Wells continued: "The person to be protected was Karl Rove‚ĶKarl Rove was President Bush’s right-hand person. His fate was important to the Republican party if they were going to stay in office. He had to be protected‚Ķthe person to be sacrificed was Scooter Libby."

Ouch.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

Paris, France, from a clock window, 12.03 pm.