"I lost vast tracts of time and not a few T-cells trying to understand and expose this farce, and it’s a huge relief that this preposterous saga is over."

Andrew Sullivan exults at "[h]elping to prevent [Sarah Palin] from getting her hands on power was one of my guiding goals once I realized the MSM was never going to do it... Just knowing she isn’t a threat is a huge psychic relief if you care about America and the world."

From a Politico article by Ben Smith titled "Sarah Palin industry faces depression." ("Palin lovers, Palin haters, a half-dozen publishing houses, and elements of the mainstream media who tracked her plans long after the Republican campaign bypassed her suddenly face a future without their entertaining, unpredictable, and now scarcely relevant subject.")

Ben Smith is still trying to get his mind around Rick Perry's manliness..

... and my mocking of him for his problem getting his mind around Rick Perry's manliness....



Smith says Perry's manliness is "shtick" which can be taken too far. There's something weirdly beta about Smith's relationship with Perry's masculinity. I notice how he lapses into light lisping toward the end of that clip when he's lauding Perry in relation to Bachmann. As I said in the previous post, Perry seems to have thrown some macho whammy on the press boys.

ADDED: I don't think Smith refers to it — though perhaps he means to allude to it — but there have long been rumors that Perry is gay. Google "Is Rick Perry Gay?" and you'll easily find the sort of stuff that's out there. Byron York might have intended to allude to these rumors when he said, in the clip above, that Perry isn't the kind of guy that is interested in Lady Gaga.

Politico's Ben Smith has trouble getting his mind around Rick Perry's manliness.

This is a weird column — titled "Was Perry packing?"

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a leading advocate of gun rights who likes to boast of having dispatched a coyote on a recent jog, so I asked him during today's walking press conference at the Iowa State Fair whether he was armed.

"I never comment on whether I'm carrying a handgun or not," he said. "That's why it's called concealed."

Guns are, in fact, banned at the fair, so Smith adds a parenthetical about how Perry could get in trouble. I can just picture Smith scampering along after Perry, chattering about how Perry could get in big trouble.

Perry's appearance at the fair, where he challenged reporters on whether they were "tough" enough to walk with him, chomped on meat and a hard-boiled egg and struck rugged poses was a well-staged political triumph. (The word "manly" got thrown around a lot, with varying degrees of irony, in the press pack.) 

What the hell does that even refer to?  What kind of whammy did Perry throw on these press boys? He ate a hard-boiled egg and "meat" and somehow that gets macho points with these characters?

UPDATE: Ben Smith tries to get his mind around this mockery and I mock him again.

"SwiftVets revenge."

Ben Smith reports:

The Navy Times (no link) reported last week that Navy Secretary Ray Mabus stripped the Silver Star from a Vietnam swift boat veteran, Capt. Wade Sanders:

"Had the subsequently determined facts and evidence surrounding both the incident for which the award was made and the processing of the award itself been known to the Secretary of the Navy in 1992, those facts would have prevented the award of the Silver Star," [Mabus spokeswoman Pamela] Kunze said.

Sanders is now in jail on child pornography charges. But he's best known as the man who introduced John Kerry at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and, ironically, vouched for the authenticity of Kerry's service.

Former Solicitor General Paul Clement quits King & Spalding over his defending the Defense of Marriage Act.

He writes:

"I resign out of the firmly held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client's legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular clients is what lawyers do... I recognized from the outset that this statute implicates very sensitive issues that prompt strong views on both sides. But having undertaken the representation, I believe there is no honorable course for me but to complete it."

Politico's Ben Smith reported the firm's withdrawal from the case as "a real victory for supporters of same-sex marriage -- and marking what seems like real marginalization for its foes." It quoted the chairman of the firm, Robert D. Hays, Jr., saying: "In reviewing this assignment further, I determined that the process used for vetting this engagement was inadequate." I'd love to hear the gory details.

Anyway, we talked about Clement's role last week, here. I said:

I would like to see the Defense of Marriage Act go, and I encouraged the Obama administration to decline to defend it, but I don't think it's "indefensible," and in fact, it deserves to be defended, and the House Republicans did the right thing in hiring Clement. The country deserves a well-briefed, well-argued case presented to the Supreme Court. The other side is already represented by Theodore Olson, another former Solicitor General. I hope Olson wins, but not because he's the better lawyer. It is absolutely fitting that he be matched with a lawyer of equal stature, skill, and will to prevail.

Obama agrees with me about the mosque near Ground Zero.

Ben Smith reports:

Speaking to reporters today, President Obama drew a sharp line under his comments last night, insisting that his defense of the right to build a mosque does not mean he supports the project.

"I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding," he said.

Obama's new stance is logically consistent with his words last night, if a bit less "clarion," as Mike Bloomberg called the first remarks.

I had to Google "Mike Bloomberg." Oh, Mayor Bloomberg. Do we call him Mike?

Anyway... Ben, Mike... everybody... could you possibly take the trouble to pay attention to words?

And read the Althouse blog. It was all always obvious, as I told you here and here.

Obama's new remarks, literally speaking, re-open the question of which side he's on. 

Re-open the question only because you foolishly visualized a closed question.

"Literally speaking" ... what the hell does that mean? If you knew how to be literal, you wouldn't have read more into the old remarks than was there. You read subjectively. You let idiotically soaring hopes cloud your eyes.

Obama has made his brilliant career out of saying the most crashingly banal things to people who hear what they want to hear. Could everyone please wake up? Please!

Most of the mosque's foes recognize the legal right to build, and have asked the builders to reconsider.

But the clarification is, in political terms, puzzling. The signal Obama sent with his rhetoric last night wasn't that he had chosen to make a trivial, legal point about the First Amendment. He chose to make headlines in support of the mosque project, and he won't be able to walk them back now with this sprinkling of doubt. All he'll do is frustrate some of the people who so eagerly welcomed his words yesterday as a return to form.

Allow me to help you solve your little puzzle? You are a chump. You need to wake up, smarten up, and realize that words have meaning.

Ben Smith at Politico stoops to using his blog to promote a "new, progressive group" that's hawking T-shirts and coffee mugs.

So embarrassing. Even if his dearest dream in life is to fuck the Tea Party, wouldn't he want to go about it in a slightly sophisticated way?