Why don't you all take a minute to try to process that headline?

I realize the words don't seem to make sense when used together like that, but just sound your way through it.

Recovered? Getting over the cognitive dissonance? Good. We can continue:

Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, star of a new flick about the aftermath of 9/11, believes the United States "is responsible in some way" for the devastating terror attacks.

...

"I think what's good about the [9-11 themed movie she's promoting] is that it deals with 9/11 in such a subtle, open way that I think it allows it to be more complicated than just, 'Oh, look at these poor New Yorkers and how hard it was for them,'" Gyllenhaal told the NY1 cable channel.

Yes... you want to be more "subtle" than that, certainly.

Those firemen who died in the ensuing collapse... dirty whores. They knew what they were getting into. Look at how they were dressed.

"Because I think America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way and so I think the delicacy with which it's dealt allows that to sort of creep in," she added.

Prediction: Ask this stupid bint to name one of those "reprehensible" things and she'll stare at you like a chicken asked to explain quantum mechanics.

Give her enough time, and she'll maybe manage to come up with "Guatemala," and when you ask, "What about Guatemala?," she'll run out the door crying that you're "oppressing" her.

A lower East Side native, Gyllenhaal's new film focuses on a handful of New Yorkers coping with their pain about a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror strike.

Ahhhh... well it's not like she lives near the site of the greatest mass-murder in human history. One can forgive her, for, living seven or eight blocks away, she really can't comprehend the scale of the tragedy we suffered that day.

Thanks to My Pet Jawa, but I just linked him, so I'll link the guy he got it from, Say Anything, who has a picture of this... specimen.

Kinda cute but stupid as a box of Nilla wafers.

Update: Maggie Gyllenlyllenhalllenlyl, whatever, the girl who James Spader spanks in Secretary, is one of "world's best and most creative minds" and will be featured on the gangblog started by Arianna Huffington, who I'm told can speak in unaccented English but chooses to speak like a Gabor sister because her PR people informed her that, without the accent, she "just wasn't fucking annoying enough."

Wow... I haven't been this excited about a "supergroup" since Northern Lights, Canada's answer to USA For Africa.

There were four people in the group: Bryan Adams, Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, and also Bryan Adams (on guitar and background vocals).

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (53)
Post contains 469 words, total size 3 kb.

Note to Self: If I ever become a terrorist, and I have a clutch of grenades and a bloody machette in my trunk, don't jackass-up my car with all sorts of anti-US slogans and bumper stickers.

For some reason... that draws attention.

Posted by: Ace at 02:02 PM | Comments (34)
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

I have stated over and over again on this floor that I would refuse to put an anonymous hold on any judge; that I would object and fight against any filibuster on a judge, whether it is somebody I opposed or supported; that I felt the Senate should do its duty. If we don't like somebody the President nominates, vote him or her down.

ANSWER (in white font; scroll over to see): Pat F'n' Leahy, D-Ben & Jerry's Hot Tub

Thanks to Powerline, picking up a feature from Sen. Cornyn's website.

And thanks to KCTrio for this quote from the good Senator's website:

The truth is that, until now, Senators on both sides of the aisle have condemned the use of filibusters against judicial nominations. And until now, a majority of Senators was always sufficient to confirm a judge. But as Senate Republicans attempt to restore the Senate tradition of a majority-vote threshold for judicial nominees after four years of obstruction against the President's nominees, a partisan minority of the Senate is attempting to demagogue the effort. They've used such terms as "banana republic" and "un-American." Given the statement above, perhaps they'll recant.

Now who's being naive, K?

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 204 words, total size 1 kb.

Great read at TCS:

... Monsters are loose, and some people know it, while others pretend not to.

It's a standard theme, from old tales to modern stories like Harry Potter and Buffy. The modern twist is that some people see it as moral to take the side of the people-eaters. One suspects that this isn't so much in spite of the people-eating, but because of it.

...

There's lots of interesting stuff in Baron's book about ecological change, and the folly of seeking "wilderness" without recognizing humanity's role in nature, but to me the most interesting behavior isn't the predatory nature of the cougars -- which are, after all, predators -- but the willful ignorance of human beings. So many were so invested in the notion that by thinking peaceful thoughts they could will into existence a state of peaceful affairs that they ignored the evidence right in front of them, which tended to suggest that cougars were quite happy to eat anything that was juicy, delicious, and unlikely to fight back.

Read the whole thing.

This idiocy is important in its own right, but I think Reynolds is talking not just about cougars here, but about other "monsters" that self-deluding lefties think they can "love" into peaceful coexistance.

An old piece which I still like quite a bit hits some of the same themes. Reynolds' piece is superior, but the amateur leftist webzine Slate took on the "Shark Apologists" a few years back, the sort of people who would, when a little boy's arm had been eaten off by a shark, piously instruct us that the boy was, after all, swimming in the shark's territory.

Call me crazy, but in disputes between human beings and animals, or human beings and space aliens, I sort of like the sort of people who take the side the human beings, and I'm not very happy with those who say crap like "Let the sharks continue in their magnificient murder spree! It's like a nature film come alive!" or "Let's not blow the brain-sucking aliens up; let's see if we can study them and figure out how to become freinds... before they suck out our brains, of course."

And, again, crazy Ace, but in disputes between my fellow Americans and the French or, worse yet, Islamofascists stroking themselves over murderotica porn videos, I'm not really too thrilled at those who leap to defend our adversaries or sworn enemies.

Sometimes true sophistication and enlightenment means taking your own fucking side for a fucking change.

Thanks to NickS for the TCS tip.

On Sharks and Islamofascists... AllahPundit tips to this great old Mark Steyn riff, connecting up all this years before I, or Instapundit for that matter, did:

On the Eastern Seaboard, the weeks leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, were the summer of shark attacks. Jessie Arbogast, an 8-year old lad from Pensacola, Fla., had his arm ripped off, but his quick-witted uncle wrestled the predator back to shore, killed him, and retrieved the chewed-up limb from his jaws. In a thoughtful editorial, the New York Times came down on the side of the shark: ''Many people now understand that an incident like the Arbogast attack is not the result of malevolence or a taste for human blood on the shark's part,'' explained the Times. ''What it should really do is remind us yet again how much we have to learn about them and their waters.''

In other words, we need to work harder to understand ''why they hate us.'' Just blundering into their waters in ever more culturally insensitive bathing suits will only provoke the vast majority of nonviolent members of the shark community to hate us even more.

Two years after ''the day America changed forever,'' the culture is in thrall to the same dopey self-delusion it held on Sept. 10, 2001: There are no enemies, just friends we haven't yet apologized to. The terrorist won't be a problem if, like young Jessie with the shark, we just give him a helping hand. Or, as the novelist Alice Walker proposed for Osama bin Laden, ''I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love.''

The good thing about movies is that the dopey scientist saying "Let's study them!" usually gets his head wrenched off by the end of Act II. Unfortunately, in real life, those propagating hatefully insipid ideas rarely are forced to confront the actual consequences of their antihuman ideology.

Let's just say that it would make a nice object lesson for Alice Walker to try punishing a wild-eyed Islamomaniac, with "love." Just before a squad of SEALs burst in, risking their lives to save her jackass life, demonstrating what real "love" is... and also, of course, what real punishment is too.

Of course, she could also try reading the Islamomaniac some of her insipid, Oprah-approved prose... that would, like the poetry of the Vogons, also constitute "real punishment," I think.

Sometimes Life Does Work Just Like the Marshall MacLuhan Scene in Annie Hall Update: I woudn't actually wish it on anybody, of course, but when "shark experts" get eaten by sharks and "bear experts" get mauled by bears... well, not only is it a human tragedy, but it sort of calls into question those "expert" credentials.

Primer on Expertise Regarding Bears and Sharks, Chapter One, Paragraph One, Sentence One: They're really, really fuckin' dangerous, diphshit.

Sentence Two: They're not called "wild" animals because they party like Spuds MacKenzie.

Sentence Three: We also call them "predators;" if you haven't seen the film Predator, you really should check it out, because it sort of lays out that whole "really really fuckin' dangerous" theme we were just so amiably chatting about.

Who Are the Real Villains Here? The Undead-Murder-Machine Zombies, or Us Human Beings? Update: In case you're not in the mood to try to have a "constructive dialogue" with a zombie or make it clear to them you "tolerate" their cannibalistic flesh-rending faith traditions, you might want to check out this important essay on suviving a zombie attack.

Every Time I Think I'm Out, The Cougars Keep Pulling Me Back In Update: Good Lord A' Mighty, this one post has set off a chain of links that I just can't seem to break.

Okay... one more. And then not another link about bears, sharks, cougars, poisonous snakes, venomous spiders, or socially-maladjusted Gila monsters, okay?

Upset Reidents Mourn Cougar Shot By Police:

Faced with a storm of protest from animal lovers over the "needless murdering" of a mountain lion shot by officers after it strayed into a Palo Alto neighborhood, police stood by their decision that an attempt to tranquilize the 99-pound cat could have endangered the community.

That's it! This is a political/D&D/porn/invective blog! It's not the g-damn Discovery Channel!

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (30)
Post contains 1145 words, total size 7 kb.

Lots of good stuff today, but the funniest is her rip on the MSM and its favorite word to describe Republicans who care what the NYT thinks about them.

The word, of course, is "maverick," and she wants to know-- if there are so many "mavericks" by the MSM's lights, how can they be mavericks?

Kind of like that episode of Laverne & Shirley when Lenny wanted to start a gang called "The Lone Wolves." (Think about it, retards.)

"Maverick" is in the eye of the beholder, of course. Everyone wants to be a maverick. But just as goth-geeks aren't really all that "different" -- they act and dress and talk like all their goth-geek friends, after all -- neither are MSM-deemed "mavericks" all that "maverick."

Okay-- so they buck the Republican Party line. They are, however, lemmings when it comes to the liberal MSM line, aren't they?

The Mainstream Media

Either do what we want or we'll talk smack about you.

I, myself, had a brief couple of days of liberal MSM maverick-love. I slammed Ted Stevens -- a Republican -- for suggesting that we regulate cable as we do broadcast media, and suddenly I was being mentioned on MSNBC and even in the archliberal CJR.

It seems all I had to do to make myself interesting, thoughful, and quotable was to bad-mouth a Republican.

Funny how that works.

Posted by: Ace at 09:24 AM | Comments (23)
Post contains 242 words, total size 1 kb.

Howard Dean continues on with his Positive Message of Hope and Tolerance.

Dr. Howard Dean, Super-Genius

Because if nonstop insults work for Don Rickles and Triumph the Insult-Comic Dog, why not for a major political party?

Meanwhile, on Drudge...

BREAKING: SOMEONE IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA WANTS TO PIMP THEIR STORY SO THEY GIVE ME AN "EXCLUSIVE" OF A COUPLE OF KEY QUOTES THREE HOURS BEFORE IT'S AVAILABLE ON-LINE ANYWAY...

ANOTHER JOURNALISTIC COUP FOR ME... PS, YOU CAN BUY MY BOOK "DRUDGE: MANIFESTO" FOR $1.95 IN THE BARGAIN SECTION AT BARNES & NOBLE...

IMPACTING WITH TURGID ENGORGEMENT...

You made one mistake, Drudge. You betrayed me and you left me alive.

Posted by: Ace at 09:05 AM | Comments (13)
Post contains 125 words, total size 1 kb.

At least he can say he "did something," which is 90% of politics.

I'm having trouble deciding who I'm more annoyed with-- people who hate SUV's, or people who own SUV's.

I have nothing against SUV's, I guess... except, you know, everyone seems to have forgotten about previous gas-price spikes, and decided that gas would be cheap forever, and so they bought these Asphalt Yachts and now they're complicit in giving the Saudis leverage over us.

I don't believe in regulating people's personal choices. But that would be an easier position to take were people's personal choices not so frequently stupid and short-sighted.

People are buying more gas-efficient cars now... but the price of oil will fall again, and then the next big craze will SAMT's-- Suburban Avenger Monster Trucks.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (26)
Post contains 146 words, total size 1 kb.

Apparently they couldn't find their go-to "men on the street" -- former Baathist apparatchiks, artists who counted Saddam as their only patron, etc. -- and so they made the mistake of asking questions of Iraqis whose opinions they didn't already know.

It's a good, quick, happy read.

Via Instapundit, one of those non-influential bloggers who caught a story that Matt Drudge somehow missed.

Meanwhile, over at Drudge...

SHOCK: PROSECUTORS INTRODUCE EVIDENCE THAT MICHAEL JACKSON IS A "FRIGGIN' WEIRDO"

BREAKING WITH MAXIMUM HARDNESS...

You broke my heart, Matt. You broke my heart.

Posted by: Ace at 08:34 AM | Comments (2)
Post contains 117 words, total size 1 kb.

Riding the Bus With My Sister, a Hallmark Hall of Fame Presentation.

You know the cool thing? Rosie was allowed to just use her personal wardrobe. Saved a coupla sheckles.

May 1 on CBS. No kidding, I am setting my TiVo for this one.

Let me slip into Drudge movie-pimp mode:

EXCLUSIVE: CONTROVERSY RIPS SET OF RETARD-EPIC!

ANDIE MacDOWELL AND ROSIE O'DONNELL WERE BRIEFLY ANGRY AT EACH OTHER DURING THE SHOOT, AFTER ANDIE ATE A CADBURY CREAM ROSIE WAS "EYEING UP..."

IMPACTING HARD....

Thanks to John, who I can now report is "seriously considering buying a Ski-Doo."

DEVELOPING...

Wait, THREE of My Favorite Things Update: I don't think there's a man in America who doesn't immediately spring into tense anticipation when he hears there's going to be a movie on about the relationship between sisters.

Fascinating, sisters are. I don't think anyone can really adequately explore the nuances of the complex love-hate compete-support dynamic between sisters, so I say: Let's stop trying, okay? Make more movies about the complex relationships between cyborgs and the people they kill.

Obvious caveat: There are certain movies about sisters that should continue being made. I'm being Good Ace lately, so I'll leave it to you to imagine the sort of films I'm talking about.

Posted by: Ace at 07:43 AM | Comments (34)
Post contains 230 words, total size 2 kb.

Sad but true:

"For some reason the media elites aren't as hostile to me," Drudge says. "It makes the job easier. In some ways it makes it less controversial."

As he approaches his 10th anniversary as an online clearinghouse for forthcoming news stories, unreleased books, tabloid yarns, Hollywood chatter and unconfirmed, sometimes bogus, rumors, Drudge, 38, is now treated more as an amusing diversion than a threat to journalistic integrity. The white-hot debate these days is over the role of bloggers, whom Drudge says dismissively he doesn't bother reading.

Has the quirky kid from Takoma Park become an appendage of the media establishment he once tormented, a '90s relic eclipsed by smarter and more provocative online writers?

Drudge complains about new sites that are "all glib, all mockery."

I don't read as many blogs as I should, but that's not me being dismissive, that's me being lazy and having other things to do. But Drudge seems to take it as an affront that others dare to encroach on his game.

Give the man his props-- he invented the game. But those guys from Indiana invented basketball, too, and that doesn't mean they are basketball.

What annoys a lot of bloggers about big bloggers is that some big bloggers get massive traffic chiefly because they get massive traffic -- in other words, once you're big, you stay big, just because everyone knows you and everyone looks to you, based on your size and influence, to drive the day's debate. In that respect, Instapundit is like the New York Times-- just as the NYT determines largely what will be on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and even Fox, Instapundit determines, or at least strongly influences, what the blogosphere will be chattering about any given day.

Which is not to say that Instapundit isn't a good blogger. (Just as the NYT is still a good newspaper, despite its now out-of-control bias.) Sometimes I'm a bit chagrined at how many damn important stories Instapundit links in one day. But I'm saying that a good portion of Instapundit's hugeness derives from the fact that he's already huge-- if another news-aggregator suddenly got huge, like say Memeorandum, then Memeorandum could easily displace Instapundit as the blogosphere's NYT.

And this goes double for Drudge, who has far less analysis on his site than any other blogger, even those who are primarily linkers. Yes, Drudge has a certain appealing personality that comes through by his story selections and his headlines and such, but it's hard for me to believe that people are reading Drudge for the idiosyncracies of his headlines or obsessions with HELL STORM 2005 and the goings on at Disney. Drudge is read because Drudge is huge, and if you want to know what everyone's talking about, you check out Drudge.

I will say that I've been planning a news-posting site to take on Drudge, a hybrid of Drudge and Lucianne.com, but as of yet we haven't gotten it off the ground. It would take years to put a dent in Drudge, and much longer than that to actually compete with him as a distant second, which is part of the reason I'm not more interested in the project; still, Drudge ought not to get a big head about things.

No offense, Drudge, but as the NYT is legacy mainstream media, you are largely legacy blogosphere. It's not that you're not good; it's just that your continuing success has less to do at this point with how good you are and more to do with the fact that you do continue to be successful.

And as for why I say he's jumped the shark: Well, when you start getting hubristic, it's never really a good omen. Part of Drudge's appeal was that he was an anti-media, but as he becomes more acceptable media, he loses that cache. The blogosphere is all about alternate voices and a certain Ramones-like do-it-yourselfism; the more Drudge pimps upcoming movies through "exclusive leaks," the less anti-media he is and the more establishment media he becomes.

And on hubris: Philip Michael Thomas -- "Rico" from Miami Vice -- gave an interview in which he said his mantra was "Emmy, Grammy, Tony, Oscar" -- the awards he was quite sure he would soon be winning -- and then said one of the most hubristic and bizarre statements I've ever read: "I am Christmas."

And within a year we never heard his name again, except as the punchline to a joke.

Drudge, you're many things, but you're not Christmas. Beware the cautionary tale of Philip Michael Thomas.

The Huffington Challenge Update: Lord All Mighty, if there's one person I wouldn't want to see take down Drudge, it's Arianna "I'm so wicked-smart I married a gay guy" Huffington.

Still, she hired Andrew Breitbart away from Drudge -- Drudge's researcher, I think, the guy who would comb through the wires to find all those cool news stories -- and Quentin Tarantino was just never the same when Roger Avery left him.

Riehl World has the run-down on Arianna's latest attempt to annoy the rest of the country into a state of homicidal mania.

And He's Dissed Us Before Update: I never got around to linking this Times (UK) Online piece, in which Drudge opines:

"...“I’m a conservative and want to pay less taxes. And I did vote Republican at the last election. But I’m more of a populist.” ...“There’s a danger of the internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention.” He is no fan of the blogging phenomenon (weblogs linking sites): “I don’t read them. I like to create waves and not surf them. And who are these influential bloggers? You can’t name one because they don’t exist.”

Sounds like Christmas-talk to me, Drudge.

Dude-- let's be honest. You're one or two cognitive steps above a mid-functioning retard. Do you really imagine no one else could do what you do?

If I took over the Drudge Report for a week, do you think anyone would notice the difference? I can type "DEVELOPING" or "IMPACTING HARD..." as well as anyone. And I've got no problems writing AOLTIMEWARNERCNNABCCBSNBCMSNBCMSFT or whatever the hell it is you're always writing.

I'd just have to practice headlines like "DOUSE THE MOUSE: HOUSE THAT DISNEY BUILT ON FIRE" or "FREAK: FROG HAS LARGER-THAN-AVERAGE GENITALS" and crap like that.

Thanks for that to RCL.

Posted by: Ace at 06:54 AM | Comments (12)
Post contains 1074 words, total size 7 kb.