All right-thinking peoples are probably concerned about the content and underlying motives of news coverage, whether it be by CNN ("What human rights violations in Iraq? Hear no evil, speak no evil, and for darned sure report no evil.") or FNC ("We report. You buy our personalities' books unquestioningly.") A cautionary tale can probably be issued to both Eason Jordan or Walter Isaacson and Roger Ailes: Be careful how you report. People make decisions based not just on the content of your broadcast, but the style thereof as well.

Luckily for us, the style of recent broacasts concerning events in Iraq has had a pro-Bush effect in one man. John of Argghhh!!! relates the story of one man who goes by the name of Psycho Dad. (I didn't know your father blogged, TCP. --Ed. Get bent. --TCP) In his post entitled I'm Joining the Right!, Dad tells us of his prior ambivalence and disinterest in politics, but which have been turned into strong support for the President, all based upon the content of broadcast media reports in the last little bit.

I reckon he's tired of hearing the modern-day equivalent of, "American troops today landed at Normandy and successfully established a beachhead on Omaha Beach. However, American troops failed to capture Hitler and neither liberated Paris nor defeated Imperial Japan."

Welcome to Blogs for Bush and to the Right as a whole, Psycho Dad. As a brief introduction to our activities (aside from using Mary Matalin to keep James Carville in check¹), we're involved in various projects such as:

-robbing cavefish of their sight²
-holding back electric cars
-making Steve Guttenberg a star
-keeping the metric system down

We've been less successful at the Guttenberg project lately, and rigging every Oscar night hasn't always been successful---see the Denzel Washington & Halle Berry wins---but we're doing pretty good.

Glad to have another participant in the generally rightish area of influence.

1 Talk about sleeping with the enemy! She deserves a medal, for crying out loud! I still wish Tucker Carlson had slapped the trashcan that Carvile put over his head in November 2002 after the Republicans picked up more seats.

2 Actually, we accomplished this one but it's still cool to talk about.

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1 Heh,heh... Funny stuff. Glad to be RIGHT.

Posted by: Psycho Dad at November 24, 2003 03:41 AM (4q6vH)

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The first time I heard the phrase "England's rose", I think it was applied to the late Lady Diana Spencer, ex-Princess of Wales.¹ The next time I heard it was in the context of the British actress Sophie Ward. (She's not all bad looking, but darnit, she defected to the other side!)²

I'm not entirely sure what the term really applies to, but I need an artsy component to excuse what is otherwise an exercise in pure Gallic-bashing and lowbrow celebration of English women and their spirit.

With that disclaimer out of the way, this post comes from what seems to be a relatively new blog based in England, Free Market Fairy Tales. In France & the Rugby World Cup, Mr Free Market tells us a tale about "fine English maidens with the correct outlook on life. I've reproduced the picture in question in order to save him bandwidth and to disseminate this throughout the Anglosphere, all in the interests of cultural exchange. Marvel at their stoic British character as they, clad in diaphanous white, brave the watery precipitation that sends men rushing to ponchos and rain gear! (Either that or wonder just how many sheets to the wind they were before they started. --Ed.) Anyways, affix your gaze upon these women, as they display what Kevin Costner's Robin of Locksley called "English courage". Huh huh huh.

I bet Saint George wouldn't have minded seeing his cross reproduced on these particular maidens.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Free Market Fairy Tales for this image.

1 Sounds like I'm talking about a Royal Navy warship to be nitpicking about 'ex-Princess of Wales' or something, but never mind that.

2 The Country Pundit, being a traditionalist and not particular sympathetic to the ridiculous "inclusive language" doctrine forced upon him in undergraduate, considers calling a woman who acts an 'actor' is tantamount to an insult against her femininity.

Miss Ward shares circumstance with Episcopalian Bishop V. Eugene Robinson in that both of them have bailed out of heterosexual marriages and taken up with a homosexual partner. As Robert E. Lee says in The Guns of the South, "Too bad! Oh, too bad!"

Posted by: Country Pundit at 11:47 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Everyone knows that the United Kingdom's best and brightest hate the idiot chimp AWOL corporate tool President-select (Hail to the thief!!!!!) Bush, right? RIGHT?

Wrong.

The people over at the The Guardian usually don't produce much of note. (Buggers had the temerity to slam the character of Jean Grey in X-Men 2, don't you know.) However, as President Bush was winging his way across the Atlantic (should've been steaming into Southampton or Liverpool on SS United States) the Guardian up and published letters to the President from Britons.

Some of them are the usual tripe from people who need to be given close-range exposure to a Clue-by-Four. See Harold "I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments" Pinter.

Another couple of them are from noteworthy Britons, and they're excerpted here:

It is regrettable that Tony Blair misled you into thinking that he could deliver Mr Schröder, Mr Chirac and Mr Putin to vote for a UN resolution. The PM does, I am afraid, have delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately, the doomed strategy of making weapons of mass destruction the cause of war has discredited the war in the UK. You did better to say frankly that you wanted to remove the Saddam regime which so brutalised its people and destabilised the region.

I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.

. . . .

Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted, Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All the left's idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan.

But when the chips are really down, Britain is as always a firm ally, standing alongside the United States in the cause of making the world a safer place. That is what we have done for well over half a century and what we shall continue to do, whatever the chants of the demonstrators. It's called the special relationship.

Europe is bent on constructing in the EU a new nation on the old European pattern: flag-waving, glory-seeking, protectionist, exclusive of other races and creeds and full of touchy amour-propre, to say nothing of naked resentment of the US. This is a world that needs, just as much as it did in 1945, the unique American ability to be at once strong and principled in its global leadership.

Please pledge, Mr President, that under your leadership that proud tradition will be maintained and that the US will never, whatever the provocations from Europe or elsewhere, slip back into the bad old pre-1945 vices of nationalism, unilateralism, autarky and the laws of the jungle.

And a personal favorite:

Are you getting out enough? The world is divided into two groups of people and here I draw no political or social distinctions. I am, of course, referring to those that run and those that do not. When you kindly granted me an interview last year, your first question to me was "Are you still getting out?" I remember the look of puzzlement that settled upon the faces of your inner circle. "Yes, Mr President," I replied, "and I hope you are too." More puzzlement. In fact, I am sure they felt that they were being deliberately excluded from the conversation in some Masonic-type code.

Maintaining your daily running diet will keep your head clear and your mind focused, and will remind you constantly that, as a runner, you have the advantage over others, knowing that the road is often undulating and the gradient and surface uncertain. You will also know, as any runner does, that the session has to be completed and, unlike the bluffers who make up the ranks of the political intelligentsia, you do something on a daily basis that is objectively measured. Good luck and, as they would say in the north of England, "Get the miles in."

Go figure. Some of the responses I've been reading around the world of blogging indicate that the British are actually in favor of the President and aren't a bunch of slobbering toadies to totalitarianism, but one can never be sure with polls. After all, before them come lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Glenn Reynolds.

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The people at Right Wing News have published the results of a poll sent to 150 rightists in the blogosphere. The poll asked for the respondents to compile a list of their "Most Interesting Dinner Companions". The top twenty vote-getters:

20) Voltaire (4)
20) Sun Tzu (4)
20) Martin Luther (4)
20) John Locke (4)
20) Rush Limbaugh (4)
20) C.S. Lewis (4)
20) Andrew Jackson (4)
20) F.A. Hayek (4)
20) Milton Friedman (4)
20) Ann Coulter (4)
20) William F. Buckley (4)
20) John Adams (4)
1 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (5)
1 Muhammad (5)
14) Socrates (6)
14) Teddy Roosevelt (6)
14) Julius Caesar (6)
14) George W. Bush (6)
12) George Washington (7)
12) Margret Thatcher (7)
William Shakespeare (9)
Ayn Rand (9)
George Patton (9)
Leonardo Da Vinci (9)
7) Mark Twain (11)
6) Ben Franklin (12)
5) Thomas Jefferson (15)
4) Abraham Lincoln (16)
3) Winston Churchill (1
2) Ronald Reagan (19)
1) Jesus (20)

What?! I wasn't asked to participate? I must register my sincere protest at the non-inclusiveness of this survey and its suspect methodolgy.¹

1 Also known as "the Moynihan objection", since the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan articulated said objection numerous times as one of the ways Washington does business. I don't have the quote in front of me, but he once said something on the order of "Most objections in Washington boil down to this: Why wasn't I asked?"

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Tyler Cowen at The Volokh Conspiracy for letting me know about this.

TECHNICAL QUERY: When I use the HTML blockquote tag, the entire list compresses to a paragraph, ignoring darned near everything I could throw at it. I didn't try the br tag because I figured that would somehow break the blockquote arrangement. If anyone knows how to get around this, I'd appreciate knowing it.

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Thanks to the good guys at Boots and Sabers for alerting me to this story in The Onion that neatly summarizes one of the deeply-held fears that many bloggers probably have, namely discovery of the blog by someone who doesn't need to know.¹

In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as "horrifying," Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog.

. . .

Upon receipt of the e-mail, Widmar mentally raced through the contents of his blog. He immediately thought of several dozen posts in which he mentioned drinking, drug use, casual sex, and other behavior likely to alarm his mother.

"I don't have one of those sites that's a big tell-all about one-night stands and wild parties," Widmar said. "I mostly write about the animation I like or little things that happen to me and my friends. But there are definitely things in there that I wouldn't, well, write home to Mom about."

Fortunately for Widmar, Lillian's comments about the site indicate that she has not delved deeply into its contents.

. . .

As of press time, Widmar had not decided whether to shut PlanetKevin down.

I'd been looking for an excuse to link to Boots and Sabers for a while, and this is that excuse. Owen and Jed regularly pontificate on law, firearms, a certain heiress and her recorded tryst, technology, and the military, all while being rather enthusiastic about bonfires. It must be a Texas thing.

A coordinate post at Tiger: Raggin' & Rantin' said that the greatest fear he had was having no one read what he wrote. Given my generally paranoid disposition, I can state that I share in his fears---and also worry that someone might actually read it. Talk about your fear and loathing in the blogosphere.

1 I know the Onion is fiction. Given the nature of blogging, and the often refreshing candor with which many bloggers write, I think the reaction of the fictitious blogger is realistic. Or so I would think.

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According to an entry at the Internet Movie Database's Studio Brief (reproduced in its entirety at the link ending this entry), the National Broadcasting Company has decided to suspend its broadcasts of the American version of Coupling. This version is after a British comedy of the same name which apparently does well on the BBC.

Who cares, you ask? Well, I don't care all that much. I hadn't watched a new series on NBC since they canned Dark Skies, and the only thing before that was ER along with Law & Order back in 1991-1992. The reason I care now is because of what Coupling was supposed to be. The IMDB blurb stated that the series "resolve[d] to push back the boundaries of sexual expression on television". That's right. In an era where we've got a cable network dubbed 'Skinemax' and an Internet whose underlying architecture is probably nothing more than a massive porn delivery network, NBC felt the need to push back the dreaded censorial hand of decency.

This isn't some great victory in the culture war, I suppose. We'll still be stuck with images of that repulsive relic Madonna sucking face with the trailer-trash Britney Spears, but at least the annoyingly repetitive in-your-face sex crowd's been pushed back for a little while.

I hope NBC lost a pile of money on this. If I wanted sexual content, I'd fire up my modem and check my inbox. I don't need it on broadcast television. But no matter---I haven't been big on watching a regular series or anything since The Lone Gunmen got taken off the air. more...

Posted by: Country Pundit at 09:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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