John Cole works himself into quite a state today over an LA Times story he believes suggests that the President may have “lied”—a pronouncement upon which John’s commentariat pounces like snappy terriers on a bloody lamb shank.
John’s outrage, he tells us, stems from his provisional acceptance of the facts cited in this LA Times story, facts that, if true, would make statements Bush made about the NSA “spy” program in his Saturday radio address “inexcusable” (in brief, Bush notes that his authorization of the NSA program addresses intelligence deficiencies that might prevent terrorist attacks, and to make the point cites overseas communications between two of the 911 hijackers and al Qaeda as the kind of intel that was missed; the LAT, however, refers to a 2002 House and Senate intelligence inquiry blaming interagency communication breakdowns—not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—for the intelligence breakdown, and notes that it would have been easy to get a warrant under FISA, because the safe house in Yemen was considered a hot target).
Two things: first, from my reading of his statement (“But we didn’t know they were here until it was too late” […] “The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after Sept. 11 helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities”), Bush was simply using the communications between 911 hijackers and al Qaeda overseas as an example of the kinds of things that the NSA program will now address automatically—without the necessity of a FISA warrant, which presupposes we always know where to look and whom to look at —simply because these men were conversing with certain potential targets overseas. Further, Bush is reassuring his audience that such an expansion of intelligence gathering program is both constitutionally permissable and necessary, given his mandate to protect the country.
Now, you can agree or disagree with Bush’s assessment of his powers (and we’ve spent several days debating that very question), but I think it goes too far to try to suggest, as the LAT has (and Cole, it would appear, concurs), that the President’s statement was meant to imply anything other than that the ease with which we are now able to surveil such calls between overseas targets and domestic contacts (and vice versa) has been greatly aided by the ability to circumvent the warrant process.
At the very least, I think it a stretch to suggest the President was “lying.” Could the program in place today have made it easier and more likely that these intercepts could be used to act on potentially critical intelligence? Would not a bypassing of the FISA bottleneck—a bottleneck acknowledged by the 911 commission (and made famous in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui)—improve our chances of stopping domestically-situated foreign agents from acting before they do so? Isn’t that what we want?
Second, Cole’s reaction is so hyperbolic as to beg credulity. Money quote:
On days like this, the Bush administration reminds me of heroin addicts. Junkies will lie to you- about everything. Sometimes they lie intentionally, sometimes accidentally, sometimes they can’t tell truth from fiction. But they never have any long-range concepts of time- it is just say whatever they can to get out of the current mess, with no regard for what is going to happen tomorrow, or what is going to happen when this false truth is uncovered. It is just deal with the right here and the right now, get their fix, and deal with tomorrow when it comes.
They don’t respect themselves. They don’t respect you. And they just do whatever they have to do and say whatever they have to say to get by.
John then goes on to say he doesn’t believe the President an “evil man,” but that “if this latest piece in the LAT turns out to be true […] I simply will refuse to believe anything this administration says.”
Uh, okay. But here’s the thing: the LAT story is true: the President used a particular example of communication between 911 terrorists and al Qaeda oversees to present a concrete example of the kinds of things NSA will now surveil without a warrant; and the House and Senate intelligence committees concluded that interagency breakdowns were responsible for missing the information prior to 911.
But the two assertions are only related in the sense that they both use the same raw material to make their arguments. In the end, though, they seem to be arguing two entirely different things.
Ultimately, I’m almost certain that the technology involved is what is problematizing certain aspects of the warrant process—that the sheer volume of intercepts required for the instantaneous gathering of some sort of rapidly expanding communication chain—and that the President used his powers to circumvent the problem without tipping off our enemies.
Until the leak, that is…
****
update: More on eavesdropping, from Matt Heidt
****
update 2: John suggests in an update that I’ve accused him of bad faith and cites as examples of my nefarious rhetorical skulduggery the following two sentences: 1) “John Cole works himself into quite a state today over an LA Times story he believes suggests that the President may have ‘lied’â€â€a pronouncement upon which John’s commentariat pounces like angry terriers on a bloody lamb shank”; and 2) “Second, Cole’s reaction is so hyperbolic as to beg credulity.”
How either of these statements constitute a suggestion of bad faith is quite beyond me; from where I’m sitting, both are descriptive and don’t imply good faith or bad faith. They are, in fact, rather faith neutral—JUST LIKE THE ACLU WANTS AMERICA TO BE!
Oh well. At least now we know how John can misread the President’s statement so miserably.
John is starting to scare me as much as his commenters. At least it’s not Daily Kos. Barely.
TW: means. We must attack the Bushhitler by any means necessary.
Only because Armando doesn’t comment on his site. Once he does, this comparison will fit like a glove.
It would appear John has stepped over the line here. He calls himself a conservative, but this is just ridiculous.
Fortunately he has friends like you Jeff to reign him in when required. Sure, it can get a little ugly, but ya gotta do it.
Friends don’t let friends refuse the Kool Aide
And with friends like Jeff, who needs enemies?
Hey, I hang with Cole. That should bring his conservapoints down a bit.
Sure, Bush purposely lied about an objective fact set that could almost instantaneously be fact-checked. Because he’s that smart. Or that dumb. Eff, I dunno. All I knows is that despite the “fact” that Bush exhibits classic symptoms of OCD with regards to lying, his political opponents seem to concentrate an inordinate amount of time and energy working that Husquvarna 455 Rancher – you know, the one the lying President uses to *snigger* clear brush on this ranch – through that limb they’ve climbed out on.
I got a Franklin that John soiled his Spidey undies. Who wants to go even up on John’s Batman finest, the one’s without the hole in the front?
Cole has always struck me as something of a cypher. Quite frankly, I could never get a sense of any core beliefs guiding his commentary. He styles himself a conservative, and sometimes his opinions fall to the right of somebody but he grows more reactionary every day. I see a full Sullivan on his horizon.
Evidently there are no adults at the LAT or Cole’s site.
Jeff, since your posts at Obsidian Wings tend to suggest that you’re interested in a rational discussion, I’ll jump in again. So here are my (a Democratic lawyer) talking points:
1. Just because Clinton wanted a particular power doesn’t mean it’s Constitutional. Oddly enough, many liberals—myself included—are perfectly capable of criticizing the former President.
2. No one (sane, that is) is arguing that the President shouldn’t use his power to protect national security.
3. No one is arguing that FISA is unconstitutional, or that FISA prohibits eavesdropping on US persons. (As I posted on ObWi, I disagree with your interpretation of a FISA case. I think the case holds, consistent with FISA, that the Executive must obtain a warrant when he wants to eavesdrop on a US person.)
4. The ONLY significant question is whether the President has the power to ignore FISA when he decides that it’s inconvenient. If you believe that he may, my view is that you believe in an imperial presidency that ignores both the Article I powers of Congress and the 4th Amendment rights of US persons.
5. Those who assert that the AUMF (authorization for use of military force) bypasses FISA need to address section 1811 which states that the President has certain additional powers following a declaration of war. It would be extraordinary to me that a statute which contains an explicit provision to be exercised in time of war would be overruled by a declaration of war. If that is true, then Congress’s Article I power to set rules for the government of the military would be utterly ineffective.
6. One problem with granting the executive imperial powers in time of war is that there is no Constitutional support for it. Please point out where in the Bill of Rights the President may eliminate those rights in time of war.
I thought John Cole made a lot of sense. His point in the follow up comment that any questioning of Bush’s good faith seems here to be like questioning the divinity of Christ to a Medieval pope.
The priority placed on defending the Bush Administration over really analyzing the intelligence issues becomes clearer and clearer. The only “debate” over the legality of the NSA actions, except for a few liberals who get trashed for it, that I see is debate over the fine points of particular laws and facts that can be marshalled to defend Bush. It is the kind of “debate” that might occur within a PR firm hired to represent him on the issue, not a political debate among citizens about the issues of legality at all.
I don’t know if even this very criticism might be considered (for trashing and bashing purposes) “out of bounds” or outside Spock’s ‘universal language’ or not.
My betting is that at least 2/3 of any responses will evade any confrontation with the content of the points here.
ooooh! how many conservapoints do i get for you deleting my comment?
and althouse deleted Cole’s comments and my comments–do we get negative conservapoints for that?
lol.
Cloudy —
Do you ever write a post that doesn’t contain a metapost about how we refuse to address the substance of your posts because we are all unwilling to have discussions?
It’s tiresome.
If it is clearer and clearer to you that I am bent on defending Bush rather than “really analyzing the intelligence issues”—after I’ve spent the last three days buried up to my fucking eyeballs in statutes and executive orders and have linked and read just about every position I can find on this issue—than you are a hopeless case who is wasting my bandwidth.
I don’t want to hear it any more. You are free to leave at any time, but such monotonous reiterations of the same objectively false point only makes the point true in your world.
Enough.
Yeah, what he said.
Jeez… is it so unreasonable to question John’s good faith when the post in question compared the Bush Administration to heroin junkies?
Move on, people… no breathless hyperbole here.
I lost a lot of respect for Cole when this was his reaction to the President saying that he was for students being exposed to “different ideas” in response to a question about intelligent design:
All the President said was that it might not be a bad idea for kids to be exposed to “different ideas.” And, well, he’s right. I’m no ID fan (devout atheist, in fact) but it seemed to me that the President was just trying to defuse a question about an issue that really doesn’t have anything to do with him. After all, he’s the President, not the head of some state’s education board.
I sometimes think that people like John Cole go out of their way to jump on the President when things like this emerge because it lets them cement their “moderate,” “middle-of-the-road” bona fides.
The founding fathers were quite familiar with fighting war. That’s why the system is set up the way it is. That the No War Never Ever bunch don’t get how it works is not suprising.
Jeff, you are assuming that John Cole can read in the first place. Or at least read with comprehension. The evidence appears to be against him.
That’s a pretty loaded question. I would suggest trying to phrase it a little more objectively, then spending some time mulling over the definition of unreasonable.
re cole:
2. the lefties are a bit more renumerative with the blog money 
why as a rational “conservative” actor does cole take the worst fucking case scenario of every supposed scandal printed in the lame stream media? let’s apply cole’s standards to himself. 1. he does it for the traffic
shit look at atrios, kos, and willis their blogs are crap but they’re rolling in the dough.
ron
Such the charmer! You don’t get any points ‘cause I’d hang out with you anyday. We could, like, dance! And talk about our SAT scores!
Jeff
I do NOT dispute that you do a lot of research to try to back up your positions. You misunderstand me on that point. What I am distinguishing is not between your merely fulminating off the top of your head versus doing research. Rather, the question is whether one is researching to find all sides of an issue, or merely to look for talking points to promote a given position. It is an approach to information issue. National Review is a very good example of a publication that has a lot of information and well-informed writers, but which is basically not interested in anything except promotion of a particular viewpoint.
At its best, publications like The Wall St Journal and The New York Times will present analyses, like news analyses, that try to articulate the best possible case for each side. If there are reports of civil liberties abuses, there isn’t only the attempt to dismiss or discredit them, but to explore them and evaluate their validity. I hope this makes some sense.
I must say that I find it odd that you have little concern about what one poster described as “trolling a troll”, while another RWer at this site at least conceded that I am not a troll. But we are left with the trolling of a perceived troll, or a progressive (a term I am sure you would find an objectionable label for me to use).
But you don’t mind that, only my statements in response to it.
I know perfectly well, as you have made amply clear from the first thread I ever posted on, that I am ‘free to leave’. But I do NOT consider it “objectively false” that few if any on this blog are interested in engaging the substantive points by ANYONE who is significantly to the left of the Washington Times. Here is how one person put it about her own views, which I think are reflective of many or most others’:
I took issue with the first clause, unless it was read as presuming that, having responded to the general “Bush Sucks” message that is all she sees from ‘lefties’ overall, that my own points had therefore been “repeatedly” addressed.
So, any time someone comes in to question the legality of the NSA policy, or the honesty or accuracy of Bush’s statements, etc., it just boils down to “I hate Bush and/or Republicans” and is not worth answering. This is what I mean about debate and engaging issues.
I have also mentioned that the trashing rather than engagement pattern is not unique to me. patience, actus, and at least two or three others have met pretty much the same response. I suppose that THAT pattern doesn’t bother you, but my raising it does. I suppose we simply disagree on that point.
Well, it sounds like Jeff and John Cole are re-enacting several scenes from Brokeback Mountain.
Not good.
Hand puppets would have sufficed, mind you.
[insert “Deliverance” line here_________]
FWIW (and you can dismiss this completely if you’d like), I think if someone has specific problems with Cole’s views, take it over there and hash it out with him. Obviously, general comments can be made.
Anyway, my own view mind you. Others may disagree.
SMG
Actually, I was IMing with John when I wrote this. Not gonna waste time posting over there what I can post here. Besides, his response was a good jumping off point from which to discuss the LAT story.
If I wasted all my time responding to people in THEIR comments, I wouldn’t have time to run a site of my own.
Not gonna waste time posting over there what I can post here.
Makes sense.
My comment was really directed at posters/commenters and not you.
Good time to say thanks for the blog.
SMG
I gave up on John Cole earlier this year when he gave up his principles in order to attract a larger readership by catering to blogdom’s scummier elements. My greatest regret in blog surfing is that I foolishly contributed money and Amazon books to his site.
fwiw – a John Cole/Jeff Goldstein Righttalk collaboration would be spiffy.
That said – I take some small comfort that Bush did *exactly the right thing* at the time.
My only concern, and this is where Cole goes off the rails, is the possibility of the GodSquad types going that extra-mile beyond common-sense.
I think it’s a rather low likelihood.
Cole, it seems, places it somewhere around 99.3%
John, Jeff’s not accusing you of bad faith; he’s sughgesting that you are, in all good faith, bugfuck crazy.
Now, you two shake hands and be friends.
cloudy:
Look through some of the previous threads, and notice posters like tim and francis. They have views contrary to most of the regulars on this board, but they express those views in clear, concise, well-thought out posts. And in return they are treated with respect and their positions addressed seriously for the most part. You are not being mocked because of your position, but because nobody can figure out what the fuck your point is.
I have to agree with John Cole. The tone you use to frame John’s concerns coupled with your response to his response, indicates at best a serious level of tone deafness.
The Clinton/Carter precedent meme you previously cited is a stone cold misrepresentation. Andrea Mitchel has even debunked it at his point, but yet you have yet to address this. It’s time to come clean. There are people in the president’s message machine who are playing with fire, and your inability to recognize this given your obvious high level of intellect is begining to paint you as part of the problem. Given the magnitude of the crisis unfolding this is not a smart place to be.
It’s easy to get lost in the intensity of the moment, come back to life and reality.
“Magnitude of the crisis of the moment.” Your kidding right? There is a crisis because the President did exactly what? Oh, informed everybody but God he was going to take these measures to identify and stop possible attacks against this country.
Let’s get something clear here, if NSA had any doubts about the authority to do what the President asked them to do, they would not have done it!!! PERIOD. Believe it or not, there are people in the Government whole like their careers and would prefer not to go to jail for committing a crime. So let’s move on from the President broke the law meme, ok. If people are upset about the fact the President has the authority to do this, CHANGE THE FREAKIN LAW. Talk with your Congressperson/Senator and have them change the law. Good luck with that though, because it ain’t gonna to happen.
I have to say I’ve never seen a political party try so hard to prove to everybody they have absolutely no understanding of National Security and what it takes to defend our country.
TW: Needed, if the Dims every needed someone like JFK it would be about now.
Um, there’s this whole bit that comes before the Bill of Rights. Just so you know.
Dude is a lawyer? Don’t they have to take conlaw in hteir first or second year at law school or summin?
The solution is simple: Don’t read the LAT. I canceled my 10-year subscription during Operation Enduring Freedom, when the LAT published the same photo of a wounded Afghan baby in color on one day and in black and white the next day.
Plus they had Ronald Brownstein in the third week of OEF using phrases like “The administration scambled to explain…” in a supposed factual piece. Afghanistan was Vietnam before Iraq was Vietnam.
And all this was before the LAT photoshopped an image of a British soldier leveling his rifle at Iraqi civilians.
The only time I know what the LAT prints is when a blog or radio talk-show host quotes it.
“Given the magnitude of the crisis”
patience why don’t you do a little more practicing and less preaching. there is no freaking crisis. whatta marroon. a crisis is planes flying into buildings containing upwards of 50000 people. this bidness is what you call dirty politics. if this was really freakish shit then the times would have released this crap last year when they first got ahold of the info.
ron
I’m having a hard time following a lot of these arguments pro and con, not least because I feel uncomfortable accepting folks’ arguments w/o having a good idea exactly what this operation involved in the first place. That’s why it’s either hard or easy to reconcile the use of this example (as examined in the LAT piece), depending on what you fantasize this “wiretapping” to involve in the first place. IMO it smacks of one gigantic begged question, and we’re the proverbial blind men groping an elephant.
’come back to life and reality’
The reality of life after 9/11 has never left our conscience, that’s why those who leaked this vital key to our National Security should be arrested for treason. IMO they’re lucky, in times past they would have been shot!
(sorry, I didn’t edit that comment very well…)
Who would have guessed “patience” would have sided with John Cole?
Not me. That caught me totally off guard.
Totally.
John Cole is a whore. He’s just sucking up to all the limousine liberals who visit his site to vent their anti-Bush rage and then click through to buy overprice Kona coffee from his scummy liberal BlogAd advertisers.
George Bush knows what’s best, whether the wibwuls and their RINO bend-over buddies like John “Juan” Cole know it or not. Questioning the presidet’s policy can only help the terrorists. Don’t ask questions and nobody gets hurt.
I think it might be time to do a little bit of housecleaning here…
Boo that, Lauren!
Feminists can’t dance, least not the kinda dancing i’m inta. Tolja, hiphopheads like Fitty and David Banner act on feminists like garlic on vamphyres!
Ooh, ohh.
<groucho>
I’ve got a little list
I’ve got a little list!
Not one of them’d be missed,
not one of them’d be missed!
</groucho>
TW: “thirty”. Nope, more than that.
Jeff:
Clean up in aisle 8.
A Elinor/Smithy just knocked over two entire shelves of pudding.
Not accidentally I might add.
Lot of that going around recently. A new lefty game it appears.
SMG
Oh God! That’s not pudding!
Go ahead, tough guy?
Jeff….delete those comments…..come to the darkside….you know you want it…delete cloudy…delete elinor…they deserve it…they’re begging for it….come to the darkside…..yield to the power of the dark force…..
Chapter 33: Same as Chapter 1 of this particular saga.
Therefore rewind to–Chapter 1: I question the timing. Good froth generator, NYT.
Wake me up when the Gestapo/KGB/NSA/whatever sends Michael Moore to dig for oil in the ANWR. That’s when it will be both time to worry and to pull the tab on a cold Bud and watch tubby boy get to work amongst the caribou.
Playah Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl
, don’t be 
coy. Are you 
suggesting a dance-off? 
TW: Bad.
You know it.
sho, i’m in.
but its called a face-off now…. dance-off, ummm, sorta eighties.
i get to pick the music!
Brooke Valentine, Girlfight!
I hate explaining jokes so I’m going to leave this one alone.
YOU BEEN SERVED!
No, Jeff. Its-
CHU BEEN SERVED!
Southpark, right?
TW: dance
as in feminists can’t dance.
BECAUSE OF THE BROOMSTICK!
<objectively false point only makes the point true in your world.</blockquote>
What Jeff said.
Jeff,
If you need a shotgun to speed your housecleaning, Jeff, just say the word and I’ll drop one off.
Plus a box of shells.
PG, poor recovery.
5.3 overall
Somebody here order four truckloads of Lysol®?
It is foolish to base anything on the LA Times’ “reporting”. Perhaps this is the exception, but they’ve proven themselves to be unreliable too many times.
Bush is not spying on anyone. He is COUNTER-spying on some Americans-in-name-only. THEY are the ones who are “spying on their innocent fellow Americans”–not Bush. These are spies, saboteurs and traitors. This is not crime–it is war. These people are more akin to Confederates in full rebellion. They were Americans too, but Lincoln didn’t get a warrant every time he read their mail.
What Bush did was not only his right, but his duty. And he cannot abdicate that duty to or for any other branch of government.
Nothing I’ve seen convinces me that any laws were broken–except by the terrorists, their collaborators, the Permanent Blobocrats who illegaly leaked this highly-classified material and the Times who published it.
Have a look at this unqualified defense of the President’s actions, on Constitutional, statutory, moral and common sense grounds:
“Every president since FISA’s passage has asserted that he retained inherent power to go beyond the act’s terms. …the act still cannot, in the words of the 2002 Court of Review decision, “encroach upon the president’s constitutional power.”… I do not believe the Constitution allows Congress to take away from the president the inherent authority to act in response to a foreign attack. That inherent power is reason to be careful about who we elect as president, but it is authority we have needed in the past and, in the light of history, could well need again.”
That’s not John Ashcroft talking. That’s President Clinton’s associate attorney general John Schmidt.
(http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0512210142dec21,0,3553632.story)
The Constitution protects Americans against unreasonable searches. But it does not protect murdering traitors engaged in war against their own neighbors from eminently reasonable searches.
I dono, I read that article a couple of times and I still can’t really come to any solid conclusions based on it. Now I’m not the smartest bulb in the drawer, but this reminds me too much of the Plame case (of which, for a long time one blogger famously suggested it was really too complicated to follow), where a flurry of horrible worst-case senarios, sinister motivations, gleeful predictions, etc were made, none of which actually came to fruition. All in all, the more I hear people make the point that it was really very easy, really, to get these warrants in the first place, and they really were very rarely turned-down, really, the less my practical side really gives a damn, considering who was being monitored, the level of oversight that accompanied the program, its reviews, the Administration listening to the concerns being voiced, etc. Sure, my frosted side wants to scream at the top of its lungs for revolution; but my hunch is this will fizzle w/o me bothering to wade through boring lawbook scriptures.
Jason: John’s just cranky because his main dealer stood him up. It’s hard to get properly down with that brown shit the street peddlers sell nowadays.
APF;
Patterico put it well:
“Wouldn’t it be something if many legal experts believed that the program might actually be legal?
Well, guess what? Apparently, they do, according to a story in today’s L.A. Times. But you’d never know it if all you read was the front page. The editors bury the nugget on the back pages, almost as an afterthought.
But wait, you say. Doesn’t that sound, in the abstract, like a newsworthy story, worthy of prominence? I mean, here’s this program that the entire liberal media appears to believe is patently unconstitutional. If the legal experts disagree, shouldn’t that be Page One material?
Sucker! Important stories aren’t important if they help the president! Treating them as important just makes you look like a cheerleader!”
Plame? Isn’t she the gal who helped write the ‘98 NIE for Clinton that said Hussein had WMDs? Huh; I guess it depends on who is president. This is similar to Plame in that this is yet another black-op by the Liberal Ostrichocracy to undermine the president, national security be damned.
This is similar to Plame in that
It was seeing Cass Sunstein struggle to admit that he had trouble concluding that the program was illegal that nearly had me choke up my breakfast.
Now of course Cloudy doesn’t know who Sunstein is, but everyone who really attended a law school knows that Sunstein is coauthor of one of the most popular constitutional law casebooks used today. Not to mention very liberal.
The second to last graf of the LA Times article Paternico finds biased says this:
Is that comment real or is it a DougJ personna? It’s pretty nutty if it’s real.
Oh, hell, son, John accuses everyone of bad faith. It’s page 9 in the PJM PR manual…
huh?
guess i don’t get your “joke”.
i teach a hiphop class, and i tell you, feminists can’t dance.
and, poor Lauren, tant pis for you, b-girls don’t hijab.
they wouldn’t let you in da club.
The Clinton/Carter precedent meme you previously cited is a stone cold misrepresentation. Andrea Mitchel has even debunked it at his point, but yet you have yet to address this. It’s time to come clean.
Jeff doesn’t do the whole “come clean” thing.
It’s all about throwing shit against the wall and praying at least some of it sticks. And as for the shit that falls to the floor, it never existed.
And conservatives who are actually honest enough to question this administration? Throw them under the bus.
He has allegience to one only. And nothing that one does can shake this blind allegience.
He has allegience to one only. And nothing that one does can shake this blind allegience.
[Cue Jerry Goldsmith-style swelling soundtrack. Camera shows shot of bare rock. Camera rises for 6 seconds and shows scene behind bare rock. No zoom. In the distant darkness, an active volcano in the right side of the shot. Further, and in the left side of the shop, a tall tower with a bright light at the very top. Soundtrack swells to crescendo. Aaaaand scene.]
Yeah! davebo! Speak it! Truth to Power!
Call it what you will. But it’s undeniable.
It was a bullshit argument, has been thoroughly debunked, but no “update” from Jeff here.
As I said, keep throwing. Something’s bound to stick.
Or perhaps Cole is just hates Joos?
[Cue single viola. Close up on a small face, grimacing. Add cello, french horn. Pan back: reveal full body climbing a rock. Pause 2 seconds, then add orchestra: pan back further, revealing a small, frail figure climbing an enormous cliff in bare feet, no climbing gear. Another small figure below also climbs.]
Thoroughly debunked, davebo? In your anti-psychotic drug-induced dreams.
All your begged questions are belong to us.
Ah, rrrogerthat, davebo. Houstunnn willl TRANS-mit when thee Clouded Random Word MODule REnters the atmosphere innn TENNN … niiinnne …
And white boys can’t jump.
Oh, Lauren, you punchin’ way outside you weight class.
There are no two things as diametrically opposed as feminism and hiphop culture.
The difference is, all boys like basketball.
There are no feminists in my classes that i take, or that i teach, in the studio, or that i can discern, in the clubs i go to. After all, by dancing in public, don’t you invite the lecherous stares of sexual harrassers?
Hiphop is deeply and profoundly about sex. I can’t imagine a single one of you feminists that i’ve met abandoning yourself to the bassline in public. You’re all far too uptight.
I can’t imagine you chugging, doin’ the harlem shake or the six step slide. Tricks and stunts would be out of the question. and i bet there isn’t a single article of clothing with the baby phat logo in your wardrobe. Or four inch heels, for that matter.
Betcha you don’t buy Fitty or the Yin Yang Twins. And if some guy called you “shorty” you’d slap him with a lawsuit.
Hiphop culture kinda glories in the differences between the men and the women.
what i get from you is what Paglia said–
You feminists want to make us all the same. I ain’t havin’ none.
If there is any servin’ to be done, i be doin’ it.
You dismissed.
damn, now i blew my new alternic!
well, i guess that was evil enough.
Honey, you clearly don’t know me.
Served, my ass.
Nope.
Should i want to? don’t think so.
1. you’re a “feminist”.
2. you deleted my comments, just like althouse.
3. the first (and only) post i ever read of yours was the incredibly sophomoric and stupid “empowering hijab” piece, where you rapturously gushed over the hateful symbol of ownership that millions of women-not-lucky-enough-to-live-in-America are forced to wear everyday.
4. i’m a b-girl. b-girls hate feminists and emo-fans. it’s our nature.
Me:
Mike S.:
Oh, it’s real, alright. As for nutty, hey; I’m not the one who voted for the guy with the magically delicious lucky CIA hat. But I’ll go through just so you can’t say you’ve never heard it when The Trials convene.
In 1998, when, coincidentally, President Bill desperately needed CINC-cred to stave off impeachment, Plame helped write a National Intelligence Estimate which said Hussein was a threat with WMDs. A few years later, she’s saying the opposite. The only thing that changed was that President “B” was a “D.”, and President “W.” is an “R.”–talk about your ‘politicized intell’.
Sending her husband to Niger was a political stunt. How do we know? The only report he ever filed was with the New York Times editorial board. Unelected mid-level bureaucrats do not have authority to run their own foreign policy. If they can’t support the elected (read: accountable) executive’s policy, they should resign and run for office themselves. Which, come to think of it, Joe Plame did; he was already sizing curtains for the Sec. of State’s office in a Kerry administration.
And in no circumstances should they leak what are essentially battle plans to the NY Times, as in the CIA flights, “secret prisons” and NAS cases.
What is “nutty” to me is that liberals can take identical presidential statements on Hussein–and on the executive’s NAS power, for that matter–and logically conclude that those statements make one president the font of all wisdom and the other a power-mad dictator. That’s not ‘nuance’–it’s political schizophrenia.
That is, “NSA”–my acronymphobia is flaring up.