Sunday Short Takes

by digby

• I suppose most of you have already heard about Billo’s latest Fox freakshow, but I missed it. Dave Niewert at Orcinus has the whole bizarre story of Billo’s obsession with “a ‘national underground network’ of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America.” I kid you not.

• Pastordan caught another example of the press simply rewriting oppo research, this time against a Republican. I’m happy to see Mitt Romney being kicked to the curb by the religious right, but not so happy to see the AP regurgitating articles from Focus On The Family, no matter who it’s about. This is exactly the kind of thing that drives me crazy about these journalistic conventions. Sure the “facts” presented may be true. But after reading it, I have no idea what the truth is. It’s maddening.

• Rod Dreher reads “All Quiet on The Western front” and discovers that war is hell. Perhaps we are making a mistake in requiring high school students read the book and would do better to have members of congress and the elite media all read it — and write a book report — before the next insane march to an unnecessary war takes place. (*And along the same lines, I remember that about two years ago Lucian Truscott IV wondered in an email exchange with me, “where is the great Iraq novel?” Where the hell is it?)

• David Halberstam (in what I think was his last piece) writes about the Bushies new obsession with “history,” one of my favorite topics. I particularly enjoyed this:
  

  Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest—and vaguest—sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon

Haha. It reminds of an early-ish Bush campaign speech in which he quoted Pericles and I just about fell off my chair laughing. You just knew they’d had to tell him how to pronounce the name…

• Finally, here is a wonderful Hendrik Herzberg piece about Dick Cheney. It reads like a bill of impeachment. Beautiful.

Enjoy!

H/T’s to all the usual suspects.