Queen O The Harpies

by digby

They’re so desperate they’ve dragged Lynn Cheney out of her hive to go on CNN and screech “you are not a good man” to Wolf Blitzer, or something to that effect. She’ll be swooping in in a few minutes. Tune in, if you have the stomach.

The promo I just saw had Wolf pointing out that innocent people have been captured and imprisoned and “aggressively interrogated” and then set free. Her reply? “How do you know they’re innocent?” Wolf rather confusedly said, “well — they’re walking around free…” and she went on to say that one of then alleged innocents had had a bookstore in London that sold radical Islamic texts. So apparently, selling certain books now can get you kidnapped, waterboarded and imprisoned without trial until they’re done with you. Good to know.

Wolf just asked Jack Cafferty what he thinks of her criticisms of the CNN show he’s been involved with “Broken Government” (which she describes as Democratic talking points) and Cafferty said “Who cares?”

She’ll be on in full harpy costume (you won’t believe the bizarre outfit she’s wearing — it looks like one of those “tapestries” you see in Parade magazine every Sunday) in a few minutes.

Update: She’s spitting mad. She doesn’t like Blitzer reading from a DNC press release that says her novel “Sisters” was racy just like Jim Webb’s (which she describes as “triple X”.)

I sure wish he’d have brought up her husbands right hand man, Scooter Libby’s, book:

He said that boys from the village took the merchant’s daughter places, and word spread that she had many lovers. There were odd tales of her sexual prowess, and they said she had coupled with dogs and men and several of the boys at once. Then to their village came a young samurai, who spotted the girl as all did, and she folded him into her. She took other lovers in the village, which enraged him, but he would not be done with her . . .

The young samurai’s mother had the child sold to a brothel, where she swept the floors and oiled the women and watched the secret ways. At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. Groups of men paid to watch. Like other girls who have been trained this way, she learned to handle many men in a single night and her skin turned a milky white . . .

“They taught her how to draw pubic hair on her mound,” Ueda laughed, “because she was still too young to have any of her own.” A fat woman on the far side of the fire laughed out until tears streamed down her face and her sides rocked. She reached into her clothes while she was laughing and pulled sharply and made a little cry and her mouth opened and then, laughing harder, she pulled her hand out with pubic hairs stuck between her swollen fingers and flung them at the men around the fire. “No ink here,” she gasped, laughing, “No ink, no ink” and the laughing men beside her made grasping motions above the fire as if to catch the pubic hair she had thrown. Some clung unnoticed in her moist palm.

Lynn herself wrote this nauseating passage:

The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naiveté, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

I don’t say it’s nauseating because of the content — it’s nauseating because of the writing. Dear God.

This whole argument is absurd, of course. George Allen is passing around explicit passages from Webb’s book like a 12 year old boy at summer camp. This is not a real issue. It’s completely stupid. John McCain, for god’s sake, gave the books glowing reviews as did a whole bunch of others. This is a meaningless controversy that is only getting oxygen because the dipshit kewl kidz are all reading them and it makes them feel funny down there.

(Donna Brazile just gave a typically lame response by saying that she hasn’t read the books and has no plans to. Bullshit. She should have said, “I’m going out to get them right now. John McCain and Tom Clancy both recommend them as gripping depictions of the wartime experience.”)

Jim Webb is an adult and he writes for adults. Most of us have had sex and aren’t shocked by literary depictions of it in fiction. Scooter’s book may be terrific, I don’t know, it’s not my thing. My problem with him isn’t that he wrote those passages, it’s that he works for a party filled with racist morons like George Allen who pretend that they have a problem with it. All this santimonious sexual hypocrisy is too much to take from the party that couldn’t care less about their own representatives trying to seduce teen-aged boys three at a time.

Update II: You really have to see this interview. She’s a piece of work. She’s acting all indignant about answering these questions as if she was really invited on “The Situation Room” today to talk about her children’s book and Wolf is sandbagging her. The Queen of the Harpies is something else.

Update III: Amato has the whole thing up at Crooks and Liars w/ transcript.

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