It’s election season, so the leftwing blogosphere is demonstrating its class by smearing John McCain’s chief of staff.  From the Puffington Host (No link to this garbage) (H/T):

Mark Buse is not just a Chief of Staff for a homophobic United States Senator, but he is helping that Senator get elected to the White House.

Does Mark Buse fit the Barney Frank rule? Without a doubt. While McCain voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, he supports amending state constitutions defining marriage as between a man and a woman. McCain knows our country needs everyone who wants to serve in the military and he knows that DADT is wrong, yet he swings to the right on repealing it.

Worst of all, and a demonstration of his inability to act rationally and with the country’s best interests at heart, he picked someone who, if she becomes president (very likely), will be the most homophobic in American history.

With that in mind, and after confirming the information with two other sources, I decided it was time to present Buse the Roy Cohn Award for working against the interests of the lesbian and gay community while living as a gay man.

After dropping in some more smears, the Puffington Host says this about its source for the rumors:

My source, who did not know if Buse and his partner had an open relationship had a brief sexual encounter with Buse alone. The source, due to work considerations must remain anonymous.

A profile in courage, if ever there was one.  The source should be named for this to be believable—and also so everyone knows that he makes Judas Iscariot look like St. Thomas More.

Hubbard posted this at 8:48 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 as Pop Culture Is Filth, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

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The best analysis of the Palin pregnancy comes from Megan over at The Atlantic.

If only certain other Atlantic writers could contain their effusive enthusiasm for Obama long enough to stifle the vapors and provide such an insightful analysis.

Jamie posted this at 4:29 PM EDT on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Audacity of Hype

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I’m tired of the Bristol Palin pregnancy story.  But I did see two commentaries about it that deserve more attention.  First up (H/T) is a piece that discusses the evangelicals reaction, which is much different than how lefties think evangelicals react:

For what the Left sees as hypocrisy, most folks who are not Obama voters just see as falling short. As, of course, we, as humans, all do.

Bristol Palin’s journey is a human story. She tried to be good. She fell short. Instead of aborting the baby she will carry it to term and marry the father. To socially conservative America, there is nothing tragic about this.

You see, to many of the voters Barack Obama has not yet seemed to reach and who have thus far been ambivalent about McCain, this is exactly how these things are supposed to go. Their reality has not been shaken, the scales have not fallen from their eyes.

Sarah Palin did nothing “wrong.” And Bristol Palin did nothing other than sin, which we all do. She is now managing her sin as prescribed by tradition. To the traditionalist the situation is not ideal, no, but it is not a disaster.

This is a human story. The more the left attacks, attempts to expose “hypocrisy”, the more the personal will very much become the political. Unfortunately it will become political in a way that leads all those hard working Bubbas, all those church-going single mommas, right out to the polls to vote for that war hero and and those women they now identify with, Sarah and Bristol Palin.

What’s more concerning is the second take.  David Frum essentially asks, why didn’t the McCain campaign handle this better?

Many conservatives, including my friends at the Corner, are outraged that the pregnancy of Bristol Palin has drawn swifter and more ferocious media attention than the adultery and (probable) out-of-wedlock fatherhood of John Edwards. They blame media bias, and probably they are right. Sexual adventuring or embarrassment involving Republican politicians is usually covered much more eagerly than that involving Democrats.

Question though: Is media bias a new or surprising fact about American politics? Wasn’t the reaction to the Palin pregnancy foreseeable? If so, why wasn’t it foreseen?

Thoughts to consider. 

Hubbard posted this at 1:31 PM EDT on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 as Faith, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Audacity of Hype

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Obama leads the charge against Palin claiming he has more experience dealing with natural disasters than she does.
Whew! Thank God, Barack is only running for Vice President, oh…wait…

Jamie posted this at 12:23 PM EDT on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Audacity of Hype

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The Ace of Spades (H/T) proposes a new policy to deal with Andrew Sullivan (please note that I’ve edited out some of the cruder parts of Ace’s own assessment, not because Sullivan doesn’t deserve this electronic keelhauling, but because I don’t like that garbage on our blog):

I’ve written a bunch of the heavy hitters in the right-leaning respectable blogosphere to suggest a full boycott of linking Sullivan, forever.

Yes, I wrote, if you need to refute [his] daily dose of dementia, do so; quote and critique with attribution. But don’t link. Let anyone compelled to go to his site type in the URL and find the post themselves. . . .
There is a limit, and our addled attention-whore of perpetual drama went beyond that a while ago. Now he’s way beyond it. He is not a serious commentator; he is a vicious bridge-troll of a propagandist, a nasty little rotten-hearted b**** who gets his jollies assailing a sixteen year old girl because her mom threatens his wannabe boyfriend’s chances of being elected.

Given that links can spread the venom, I think the “quoting without linking” policy might be the best as regards the High Priest of the Holy Obama.  (Precisely for that reason, I didn’t link to the Ace of Spades.  I think his idea is good—but what a tasteless way to push for it!)  What do my fellow paupers think?

Hubbard posted this at 10:48 AM EDT on Monday, September 1st, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, What Ever Happened to Andrew Sullivan?

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I’d been drafting a post defending Sarah Palin, citing Camille Paglia’s take, amongst other things.

I took a break, browsed my favorite blogs for a bit, and then saw that Mrs. Scalia had made all my points, plus several others that hadn’t crossed my mind.  So I let my post vanish into electricity; go read her!

Hubbard posted this at 4:40 PM EDT on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Audacity of Hype

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Mark Steyn liked to crack that George Bush was Tony Blair with a ranch, which is unfair to the much classier Bush.  I hadn’t known, until I read Nicholas Wapshott, that Blair had tried to cancel the planned state funeral of Margaret Thatcher:

Since her party ousted her in 1990 in a typically passionless British coup, she has remained a prophet largely ignored in her own country. While Americans worship her, the British have found it hard to forgive the hectoring and sometimes brutal fashion in which she harried them into changing their ways. It is of little credit to Tony Blair, who shares Lady Thatcher’s fate of being an American idol derided at home, that he vetoed the state funeral she deserves. (To his credit, Gordon Brown swiftly overturned Mr. Blair’s mean verdict.)

According to Daniel Johnson, Thatcher is losing her memory in the worst possible way:

It was generally known that Lady Thatcher, 82, had suffered a number of minor strokes, but until now her memory loss — which sometimes makes it hard for her to finish sentences — had been hidden from the public.

From my own brief encounters with Lady Thatcher during the past 25 years, I can testify that she is still capable of occasional flashes of the old fighter. But for at least a decade she has been fighting a losing battle with Alzheimer’s that is sometimes painful to behold. In a newly published memoir, “A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl: A Memoir,” her daughter describes how Lady Thatcher kept forgetting her husband Denis’s death in 2003, forcing her to relive the bereavement every time she was reminded.

I think my favorite story about Thatcher’s class happened in the early 90’s, when Reagan was losing his memory but before he announced his Alzheimer’s disease.  At a dinner in Thatcher’s honor, the old thespian stood up and gave a graceful and seemingly off the cuff tribute to her, and naturally everyone gave the Gipper a standing ovation.  Later on in the evening, he stood up again, and gave the same graceful and seemingly off the cuff tribute to her.  The guests were shocked, but Thatcher immediately stood up and lead the crowd in a second standing ovation to try to prevent an old man from feeling confused—and the crowd followed her lead.

She can no longer lead, but may we continue to follow her example.

Hubbard posted this at 6:11 AM EDT on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 as The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

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The Joker has been in two major movies, portrayed by Jack Nicholson in 1989’s Batman and by Heath Ledger in 2008’s The Dark Knight. Both Nicholson and Ledger managed to capture the essence of the Joker, a perverse and gleeful destructiveness. How this evil was portrayed on screen roughly a generation apart shows how our imaginations declined.

In both movies, his victims and henchmen get his fatal punchlines. (One wonders why anybody would work for the Joker, since he seems to kill off more of his henchmen than the police or Batman ever manage.) Although both Batman and The Dark Knight were rated PG-13, the latter’s much higher body count and disturbing images should have given it an R rating, particularly if movies like Clerks and Southpark got the scarlet R. Parents could feel comfortable taking older grade school aged children to Batman, but not to The Dark Knight.

In each movie, both Jokers justify their mayhem with philosophy. “I’m not a monster,” says the Ledger Joker. “I’m just ahead of the curve.” After explaining that rules for normal people don’t apply to him, the Nicholson Joker proclaims, “I make art until someone dies. See? I am the world’s first fully functioning homicidal artist.” Ledger waged war on the present, but Nicholson ravaged the past.

A key to the Joker’s character is that he would love to see civilization destroyed. The Ledger Joker made this point with explosions in hospitals and by trying to manipulate police into killing patients rather than criminals. Few things are more perverse than trying to trick good men into killing the innocent. The Nicholson Joker, however, did something at once less violent and more grotesque: he desecrated a museum. With the glee of a child squashing sandcastles, he sprayed graffiti on portraits and shattered sculptures. It’s not enough for the Nicholson Joker to kill the living; he has to destroy the past’s connections with the future. A grade school kid probably won’t get the full implications of the desecration of the art, but he’ll understand that he’s watching a terrible evil.

The great strength of The Dark Knight over Batman is that it deals with bigger issues: human goodness in the face of meaningless and random evil. The great weakness of The Dark Knight is that it relies on violence to make points that Batman made obliquely; it’s the difference between bombing a hospital and wrecking a museum. We seem to be in an era where nobody expects the audience to use their imaginations, and that explains why The Dark Knight had to be more explicit than Batman was to show the same evil. The screenwriters showed wild imagination to show evils in The Dark Knight, but the screenwriters in Batman trusted viewers to use their imaginations to see evil.

Hubbard posted this at 9:29 PM EDT on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Film Rants

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