Category: The Dish

D’oh!

Prime-minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown leaves the Treasury for Buckingham Palace on March 20, 2007 in London. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

About the most irritating bunch of losers you’ll ever come across. A. A. Gill has them pegged:

Brits are rarely seen in New York without their magic cloaks of invisible irony—they think that, on a fundamental level, their calling here is as irony missionaries. They bless everything and everyone with the little flick quotation marks, that rabbit-ear genuflection of cool, ironic sterility. How often their mocking conversations about the natives return to the amusing truth that New Yorkers have an unbelievable, ridiculous irony deficiency, which ignores the fact that a city that produced Dorothy Parker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Abstract Expressionism, Woody Allen, and Woody Allen’s love life has quite enough irony to build the Brooklyn Bridge.

The whole piece is a treat.

You know times are changing when an ad like this airs on network TV.

Hat tip: Mark Simpson.

Stephen Bainbridge provides a very good reason: the cardinal is a liar.

"If you are in DC on Thursday May 3 you might want to register for the AEI discussion on Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?  There will be TWO Discovery Institute types there. I shall begin by asking them, as I always do, if they have discovered anything yet," – the Derb. Heh.

Some readers have complained that I was unfair to DailyKos and other liberal blogs by even linking to a piece pointing out their ads from Democratic presidential candidates. I said in the post that I didn’t see anything wrong with it, but was glad the dislcosure is out there. Of course, the very ads themselves are de facto disclosure and the price is public information. Some readers have therefore said I was trying to pull a passive-aggressive Instapundit-style smear. I’m sorry if it came off that way. Thinking out loud on a blog can lead to misunderstanding. I see nothing wrong with fully disclosed political ads on blogs. I also recall that years ago, when I was one of the very first bloggers to consider advertizing, my proposal to run an ad from Pharma was decried as an abominable corruption. I never ran the ad, and never took the money. The criticism then came mainly from the bloggy left. I’m glad they’ve come around.

Larry Kudlow is right: last evening, the president did not actually give a rationale for why the eight targeted U.S. attorneys were fired. But Larry doesn’t say the obvious: the reason they were fired was politics. No other reason makes any real sense. But Bush can’t say that. And he can’t say anything else persuasive. So he has tried to reconfigure this whole thing as a fight with the Dems. But not even NRO can swallow that. It’s actually a fight with the Republicans – at least those Republicans who think the justice system should be more than a tool in winning elections. I have an image in my head of Karl Rove wondering how he got beat in the November elections, figuring that sleaze and corruption hurt the GOP, and wondering how to turn it back on the Dems. Without compliant U.S. attorneys, he cannot counter-attack. So he made a list and got them fired. Isn’t this kind of activity routine for Rove-Bush Republicans? Isn’t it, so to speak, right in front of our nose?

"I think ‘blasphemy’ is just a form of exploring. It’s just a youthful exuberant manner of exploring the whole concept. I think, I’ve often found that people that are the most ‘blasphemous’ often wind up to be the truest believers because they’ve taken the time actually to question, pull things apart, be angry and then either submit or find certain answers," – Patti Smith, on Fresh Air.

There are consequences.