And his wife's a partisan hack.

Read the whole thing. It's damning. This son of a bitch has been lying about virtually everything to do with this matter since the beginning.

Partisan Hack? Some readers want to know where I get off calling Plame a "partisan hack." I get it from this:

The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

Seems to me that Plame decided the report (now verified by Lord Butler as likely true) was "crazy" without having any information about it, then recommened her husband -- closely aligned with the liberal, anti-war wing of the Democratic party, and clearly not a straight shooter on any of these issues from the beginning -- as a "reliable" agent for knocking the report down.

Conclusions first, evidence second, no?

No one can argue that Joe Wilson was a unbiased, disinteresed, objective arbiter on this question. Plame decided, on first blush, that the report was "crazy." She connived to have her liberal hack husband "investigate" the report. And by relaying the agency's request by stating that the claim that he was being tasked to investigate was "crazy,", she was letting her husband know in no uncertain terms which way she expected his report to come out.

You might not call this behavior partisan -- perhaps she's merely incompetent -- but I do.

Posted by: Ace at 11:38 PM | Comments (18)
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Kerry & Edwards: Running Mates.

And, as some of you might know, Jimmy "J.J." Walker is actually a hardcore politcal conservative, and he's even got himself a blog.

Is it any good?

It's dyn-o-mite, of course.

Thanks to RDBrewer for both.

Posted by: Ace at 07:58 PM | Comments (3)
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This should provoke a big, funny post, but I don't have it in me today.

Has this fugly woman ever been funny?

I can attest that the answer is "no." HBO gave her a stand-up special a lonnggg time ago. This was her very first exposure outside the comfy and supportive confines of Berkeley lesbian coffee-houses. My girlfriend at the time was sort of alternative and funky, and she had read the predictable raves for this important new comic voice. So, I sits me down beside her to watch the special.

I watched in slack-jawed horror. The horror of social embarassment, that sinking feeling you get when someone is drunk and confessing all sorts of things he ought to keep to himself. It wasn't funny. The best that can be said of it was that it "had a good message," if by "good message" you mean "trite liberal message."

My then-girlfriend attempted to force laughs in the beginning -- as people do when they're expecting something to be funny, but then it turns out to really, really suck -- but gave up about midway through.

And since then... goodness. Her big "jokes" in her movies are 1) telling guys they have small dicks and 2) telling guys she's going to kick them in the balls.

Ehhh, such put-downs and threats have some place, I suppose. But I generally expect a little more inventiveness from a professional alleged comic. (And those jokes are pure Whoopie-- she put those in there. It cannot be the case that she receives nothing but a steady stream of small dick/"kick ya in ya balls" scripts. No one gets that lucky!)

And Comic Relief. Comic Relief! I would say that watching Whoopie on Comic Relief was much akin to suffering through the Yoko Ono songs on a John Lennon album, except that I wouldn't want to malign the dead by comparing Lennon to Billy Crystal and Robin "I'm 'improvising' all this shit I've been doing for 30 years" Williams.

So the analogy doesn't really hold. Let's hypothesize that Yoko Ono put a lot of her screechingly painful songs on Foghat albums. Okay, then: Watching her on Comic Relief was much like having to listen to Yoko Ono songs as the price for hearing all that amazing Foghat.

Now we're informed that the Whoopster made a clever play on the name "Bush," apparently making some sort of heretofore undiscovered connection between that name and slang for the female pundendum. Good one. Seriously.

I've got an eight-year-old nephew, Whoopie, if you need a new writer. He's the fucking nuts when it comes to pee-pee, poo-poo, and butt jokes.

Throw in Dick Cheney and Colin Powell and you've got yourself 50 minutes of solid material you can take on the road... assuming this is 1988, and people haven't heard this rather-obvious stuff eight billion times already.

"President Vagina." All sorts of comedic possibilities.

The jokes practically write themselves... practically, that is. Unfortunately, they don't actually write themselves, but the Whoopster keeps waiting for them to do so.

Actually, she's a little like Wonkette, in that neither writes actual jokes, but just use dirty words and expect that to garner laughs. I don't know-- is there a rule that women need only write or say "cock" or "pooter" in order to be deemed outrageously funny? That doesn't seem to work for me, or any other man I know; "cock" and "pooter" can be part of a joke, of course, but men seem to be expected to actually have some humorous observation or turn of phrase to be credited as having made a funny.*

For Wonkette and Whoopie, I guess, the word "dick" constitutes a set-up and punch-line in and of itself. Because, you know, they're women. It's "outrageous" when women say dirty words, even in 2004, when 90% of women in the workplace are quite comfortable saying "motherfucker."

Or something.

Whoopie Goldberg is a loathesome woman. Not necessarily because of her politics, but because she's never had a lick of talent ("lick!"-- maybe another Bush joke!) and yet we're all supposed to pretend she's funny. And she has the arrogance to actually take her courtesy-chuckles and polite applause as proof of her brilliance.

She's not funny. Isn't now, wasn't then, won't be in the future. To say she's a has-been would be slander the past.

* Correction: I guess it's not quite true that no man can just say "cock" and get laughs. Norm MacDonald can. But it's all the delivery there. And, while he can get laughs by just saying "cock," he actually -- get this -- works in a few jokes here and there.

So: apart from Norm MacDonald, who is one of the most gifted comics in history in terms of pure delivery, no man can get laughs just by saying the word "cock."

Update: Don reminds me she played "Guinan" or whatever on that horrendous Star Trek snoozefest. Another reason to hate her.

Oh, and here's another reason. Three words: Center. Fucking. Square.

In Hollywood, you're not officially washed-up until you take that scary-important center square. Sad, really, when the funniest things a comic says were written for her by notorious non-talent Bruce Villanche.

Posted by: Ace at 09:19 AM | Comments (41)
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I've been wondering if there were any smoking-gun Kerry quote about WMD's. Finally, someone on Free Republic has done my homework for me.

This transcript from an August 2003 Meet the Press includes a transcript from Kerry's 2002 remarks about Saddam's WMD's. I've added my own emphasis in bold:

MR. RUSSERT: No regret over your vote?

SEN. KERRY: My regret is that the president of the United States didn’t do what he said he would do. Look, he told us that he was going to—that we needed to do this because they had the capacity to deploy weapons in 45 minutes. Not true now. He told us that he would go as a matter of last resort. Not true. He told us that he was going to build a real international coalition. Not true. They told us that there were unmanned vehicles that were able to fly. They even showed photographs. Not true. We haven’t found them anyway.

MR. RUSSERT: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on, Senator.

SEN. KERRY: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: I went back and re-read your speech on the floor of the Senate October 9, and I want to share that with you and our viewers...

SEN. KERRY: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: ...because you repeated many of exactly the same claims and concerns that President Bush did.

SEN. KERRY: Correct.

MR. RUSSERT: LetÂ’s watch.

(Videotape, October 9, 2002):

SEN. KERRY: Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating agents and is capable of quickly producing weaponizing of a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery on a range of vehicles, such as bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives which would bring them to the United States itself.

In addition, we know they are developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents.

According to the CIAÂ’s report, all U.S. intelligence experts agree that they are seeking nuclear weapons. There is little question that Saddam Hussein wants to develop them.

In the wake of September 11, who among us can say with any certainty to anybody that the weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region? Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater, a nuclear weapon?

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Unmanned aerial vehicles...

SEN. KERRY: Sure.

MR. RUSSERT: ...a nuclear threat. Those are exactly the things that you suggested in New Hampshire President Bush had lied to you about.

SEN. KERRY: That’s precisely the point. That is exactly the point I’m making. [???-- It is?!?!] We were given this information by our intelligence community. Now, either it was stretched politically in the many visits of Dick Cheney to the CIA and the way in which they created a client relationship, but the information we were given, built on top of the seven and a half years of what we knew he was doing, completely justified the notion that you had to respond to give the president the right to put inspectors in. The president said when he put them in “War is not inevitable.” Colin Powell said to us, “The only rationale for going to war was weapons of mass destruction,” and it was legitimate to hold Saddam Hussein accountable to get the inspectors in. I’m saying to you that I don’t believe this president did the job of exhausting the remedies available to make us as strong as we should have been in doing that and certainly didn’t do the planning to be able to win the peace in the way that we need to. And I still think we can do it, Tim, but we’ve got to get about the business of doing it.

MR. RUSSERT: But you had access to the intelligence. You had access to the national intelligence estimate...

SEN. KERRY: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: ...which said the CIA had a low confidence in Saddam Hussein using weapons of mass destruction or transferring the terrorists. And the State Department, which is included in the national intelligence estimate, said there was not a compelling case, that he reconstituted his nuclear program.

SEN. KERRY: I didnÂ’t base it on the nuclear, but the most important and compelling rationale were the lack of inspections and the non-compliance of Saddam Hussein. Even Hans Blix at the United Nations said he is not in compliance.

MR. RUSSERT: Were you misled by the intelligence agencies? Were you duped?

SEN. KERRY: No, we weren’t—I don’t know whether we were lied to, I don’t know whether they had the most colossal intelligence failure in history, I don’t know if the politics of the White House drove them to exaggerate. The bottom line is that we voted on the basis of information that was given to us, that has since then been proven to be incorrect. The bottom line is also, Tim, the president had an obligation to put the United States in the strongest position possible. I warned the president in January, “Mr. President, do not rush to war. Take the time to build the coalition. Take the time to exhaust the remedies.” And when he made the decision, I said, “I would have preferred that we took further time to do further diplomacy.” I think we should have.

MR. RUSSERT: What Democrats are saying is that there’s a difference in tone from John Kerry, different emphasis. Back last fall, when the war was popular, he was for it. Now that Howard Dean is surging, he’s a little bit more ambivalent. This is what Ron Brownstein reported you saying in January, telling a questioner, “If you don’t believe Saddam Hussein is a threat with nuclear weapons, then you shouldn’t vote for me.”

Howard Dean crystalized it. This is what Mr. Dean said way back in February: “What we can’t have is somebody who says to you in Iowa the Iraq war is bad, goes back and votes in favor of the [Senate war] resolution and then comes back and tells you at your county dinners why it’s not a good thing.”

And Deborah Orin in the New York Post cast it this way: “Kerry Follows Dean’s Lead. Call him Copycat Kerry. The best proof of how Howard Dean has spooked the other 2004 Democratic presidential candidates can be found... in the shrill tone of John Kerry’s slashing attack on President Bush, all but painting him as liar-in-chief. ‘President Bush should tell the truth - and get out of the way and let us find the truth - about the intelligence gap,’ fumed Kerry, claiming Bush is stalling probes into 9/11 and fudging the facts on Iraq. ...Kerry sounded as if he was trying to sound just like Dean. In fact, it sounded as if Kerry was kicking himself - hard - for having ever voted for the Iraq war last fall and wishes he had been a naysayer from the start, like Dean.”

SEN. KERRY: I donÂ’t wish IÂ’d been a naysayer from the start. I did the right thing. My vote was a vote for the security of the United States of America based in the information we were given. Tim, for seven and a half years, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and we found them. We destroyed them. We knew they were there. We also knew there were some there that we hadnÂ’t finished destroying, at which point the inspections stopped. For four years you had no inspections. During that time, we are told by our intelligence community and by the president the following things are happening:

he’s reconstituting, he’s building. We were even shown photographs: “Here’s what’s happening in this building, Senator.”

MR. RUSSERT: Where are they?

SEN. KERRY: ThatÂ’s exactly correct. Now, we may find them in the next months. I donÂ’t know the answer to that. What I do know is that it was right to hold Saddam Hussein accountable, absolutely correct. And anybody who doesnÂ’t believe it wasnÂ’t correct ought to go dig around in those graves or even make a judgment about what would happen if you left Saddam Hussein alone to do this.

.......................

Check it out: When it's Kerry attacking Bush, the war was wrong and there was no justification.

When it's Kerry defending himself against Dean's attacks, going to war was the right choice. As Kerry says, "And anybody who doesnÂ’t believe it wasnÂ’t correct ought to go dig around in those graves or even make a judgment about what would happen if you left Saddam Hussein alone to do this."

Oddly enough, when Kerry is against the war, Kerry is right; when he's in favor of the war, he's also right. His positions are as changeable as the desert winds, except for one: that he ought to be President, whether he was right, wrong, duped or doube-talking on any particular issue, and on that one claim he's as unchanging and insistent as the desert sun.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 PM | Comments (7)
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On the off chance that Sullivan plans a Sergeant Schultz defense on the topic of outing closeted gays who transgress against the cause, I sent him the following email:

With all due respect, you have been one of the most strident voices on the issue of sexual privacy.

Now a gay advocate is set to begin outing closeted pols and their aids whom he deems insufficiently strident in support of gay marriage (Barbara Mikulski was just outed by your old pal Micheangelo Signorie), and yet you've remained conspicuously silent for three days running.

Do the ends justify the means? If so, don't you think you have an obligation to announce this belief, rather than concealing it, as you did your support of John Kerry?

For someone whose stock in trade is providing opinions, you sure do suddenly seem to lack for them when it's politically convenient.

I don't expect a reply. And I certainly don't expect to be chosen as Email of the Day.

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 PM | Comments (19)
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Goldfinger told Bond that they had a saying in Chicago: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."

How about six times in three weeks for the AFP?

Meanwhile, Vichy President Jacques Chirac piously instructs us all on the dangers of racism and, giggle, antisemitism.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 PM | Comments (1)
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I have this bizarre dream in which one day the mainstream media actually dares to ask John Kerry about his rather credulous deference to the French, who have all but announced they are our enemy and can always be counted upon to oppose us.

Like I said: just a bizarre dream.

So, a few tens of thousands of Sudanese will be slaughtered because France wants to wear its Big Boy Pants and stick its cigarette-stinking thumb in America's eye. And oh-- the oil interests. Let's not forget about France's oil interests in the Sudan.

Apparently a mid-level holocaust is a small price to pay for Jacques Chirac to strut around like the ridiculous preening peacock that he is.

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (14)
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Down to 310,000.

Pretty good, but the article is loaded up with (apparently on-the-level) caution that not a whole lot can be read into this particular number, because there's some sort of seasonal adjustment in the car-parts-manufacturing sector that's a little sketchy.

The cowbell has been discounted due to the potential unreliability of the reading.

Johnny Coldcuts Says: Don't be such a fuckin' pussy. You're really starting to piss me off, asscracker. Better it shows a 4-year-low than a two-year-high. Ya frigging dickweed. You fairy.

In Other Positive Economic News: Arnold King explains why the boom in productivity -- the best four-year increase in productivity since at least 1960 -- is a good thing.

He then turns to the question of why the media refuses to report on it:

The other reason that the productivity story is not big news is that the current Administration is unpopular with the media. As much as the media is averse to reporting good news, I think that productivity would receive greater coverage if the big gains were taking place on a Democratic President's watch. The upbeat productivity data would "fit" the story of competent Democratic stewardship of the economy. But it would spoil the narrative of the Bush Administration as bumbling and Hoover-esque to point out that the most fundamental measure of our economic strength is shooting through the roof. It's not that I think that high productivity growth is a partisan story that reflects well on President Bush. But the failure to report on the phenomenon is a partisan story that reflects poorly on the ability of the press to rise above its biases and keep the public informed.

Posted by: Ace at 11:40 AM | Comments (6)
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MAJOR CONTENT WARNING! I'm not kidding here. I'm putting the content warning up first so you don't miss it.

Nick sent me the link for a new comedy site called The Banterist. It's pretty funny.

The current top post is the Paris Hilton X-Box game. It's funny, but one of the photos posted is of the infamous night-vision video of her in fellatio delicto, and, while it's not the clearest picture ever taken, you can, in fact, see exactly what she's doing. There's no pixelation or such.

(Note to The Banterist: Why post this one photo which renders your whole site unsafe for work? Aren't there dozens of Paris Hilton video stills that don't include an actual sex act?)

Funny, but you're strongly advised to wait until you get home. Unless you work at Penthouse, in which case I'm forwarding you my resume.

Greg and Kevin, meanwhile, both emailed me to let me know that some moron columnist at ESPN is leaning towards calling his blog-style commentary page "More Cowbell."

That's pretty cheap. I thought of "More Cowbell." I mean, after SNL ran the sketch, and RDBrewer suggested that I use the .gif as a siren. So, okay, I didn't "think of it." But I stole it first, and that, honestly, ought to count for something.

Hey, Bill Simmons. Get yourself a new title. "More Cowbell" is taken.

Update: Bill "Jacky McJackass" Simmons has now officially changed the name of his stupid blog (nope, no link) to "More Cowbell."

Feel free to borrow Johnny Coldcuts as needed, Bill. That's my job-- sitting here, thinkin' of cool stuff for you to steal.

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (28)
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It's absolutely incredible to me that Andrew Sullivan-- who is forever having minor conniptions over the outing of personal sexual information -- has nothing to say about Signorile's outing of Mikulski.

Of course, this outing is in aid of Sullivan's top objective-- gay marriage. Is it possible he's decided that perhaps sexual privacy can give a little in the interests of gays getting hitched?

Seems like an awful lot of Sullivan's former passions are yielding to the interests of promoting gay marriage.

Some might say, But maybe he hasn't read the piece yet. It seems flat-out impossible to me that Sullivan doesn't know about this article. If I know about, he knows about. He's got 100x the email traffic; someone sent him this story. And look-- he's a homosexual. A gay blade of grass does not bend beneath a straight foot without the gay grapevine whispering into Sullivan's ear.

I almost posted something saying "Sullivan had better condemn this, if he doesn't want to be exposed, yet again, as a Machivellian hypocrite." But I didn't, because frankly, I expected him to condemn Signorile's outing. I didn't even think that Sullivan could at this point simply "forget" his previous positions on sexual privacy. So it seemed like a gratuitious admonotion.

Seemed, I says.

Contra me: Right Side of the Rainbow disagrees that sexual orientation is or should be private information. He argues that some things about a politician should be known by the voters, as such information is indicative as to their likely stances and biases.

I'm unconvinced. Without doubt, sexual orientation has some usefulness as a position proxy. But so do a lot of things. Whether or not a man engages in sodomy with his wife might be indicative of his positions on sodomy and sexual permissiveness generally. But I think the connection is so attenuated that the privacy interest greatly outweigh's the public's purported right to know.

Posted by: Ace at 10:20 AM | Comments (2)
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