All Over The Place

James Poulos looks at various blog-responses to this week’s GOP debate and sees nothing but wild incoherence and continuing conflict:

Fascinating, that is, because on the basis of these observations some possible facts emerge:

(1) McCain isn’t fading anytime soon, though he’ll only win if the others kill each other off;

(2) Huckabee is for real because he has a real constituency — Fred Thompson’s plus Gersonites;

(3) The Ron Paul wing(s) of the Republican Party are now irreversibly present in GOP politics;

(4) Mitt and Rudy maintain their death grips on one another at their peril.

…it’s the Huck-Paul exchange on honor that really captures the major fissure in this race, in the GOP, and probably in the country — and it runs right through both parties…

The big question to me now seems to be who’s the anti-Huckabee, other than Ron Paul?

I think it’s clear that the Republicans will run on staying in Iraq indefinitely. And that could well be their undoing.

Banksy Does New York

Banksy

A London hipster opens in Chelsea next week. One critic laments:

It’s hard to know which celebrity artist to dislike more, sculptor Damien Hirst and his  jackass affinity for labeling every new work, “his most mature yet”, or graffiti artist Banksy and his seemingly endless juvenile commentary on art.  In a head to head match, it’s unclear who would win, though Banksy’s splash page directed at the collectors who recently purchased he work at record breaking prices reading  “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.” certainly gives Hirst a run for his money.

But Brad Pitt loves him!

(Image from Vanina Holasek Gallery.)

Monopoly and WWII

For all you war-history buffs, a classic tale:

During World War II, the British secret service hatched a master plan to smuggle escape gear to captured Allied soldiers inside Germany. Their secret weapon? Monopoly boxes. The original notion was simple enough: Find a way to sneak useful items into prison camps in an unassuming form. But the idea to use Monopoly came from a series of happy coincidences, all of which started with maps.

Rudy’s Thugs

The small man in search of a balcony, like all two-bit bullies, has the usual thuggish security detail. And he doesn’t like being forced to respond to allegations about his shady past:

“We’ve already explained it,” he said, walking past reporters after a town hall meeting. Giuliani, who is normally friendly to reporters, bristled past them, and campaign staffers were unusually physical in keeping the press away. Several campaign aides told campaign reporters to return to the press area, and some of his security detail manhandled reporters.

If his goons act like this on a minor issue in a primary campaign, can you imagine how he’d handle his police powers as president?

National Review’s Fabulist?

Read these two items, dropped into the blogosphere late on a Friday afternoon: Smith’s defense and Lopez’s editorial note. It’s somewhat shady that Smith does not provide links in his apology to his original disputed stories, doesn’t name or link to his critics, and appears, by his own account, to have reported events and facts that were actually relayed to him by anonymous sources as if he had seen them himself. Here’s a flavor of the kind of issue involved:

Did I physically see and count 200 men carrying weapons? No. If I mistakenly conveyed that impression to my readers, I apologize…

On another matter:

This is a case where I should have caveated the reporting by saying that I only witnessed a fraction of what happened (from a moving car) …

Hmmm.

I’ll leave the follow-up to others. I’m not an expert in the area, and have only read the two posts linked above. As Smith and Lopez assumed, I’m headed home now for the weekend. But let’s see if these reportorial exaggerations and alleged fictions get as much scrutiny in the right-wing blogosphere as the TNR Beauchamp contretemps. I’ll be especially curious to see what Howie Kurtz and Glenn Reynolds do with the story. How many posts did the Corner have on two minor factual issues – still unresolved – in a TNR Diarist? How much preening and posturing has Reynolds done with respect to Beauchamp? And this is on a blog by a reporter still employed by NRO, with a long history of writing for the publication. For those interested in examining Smith’s archive, it’s probably a good place to start some more fact-checking. What goes around … Or as Drudge would put it, developing …