From Podhoretz at NRO’s The Corner:
Kenneth Stein, a professor of history at Emory University, has been associated with Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center from its founding. He was its first executive director, and its first academic fellow. He has just terminated his association with the Center because of Carter’s shameful new book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. The guys at Powerline have the whole story, but here’s the money quote from Stein’s own account of his resignation:
President Carter’s book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook.
And now we know why he was happy to sit with Michael Moore at the Democratic Convention: he was getting cut and paste pointers.
Slough of Ewwwww
But for shite in its purest, most unadulterated form (pharmaceutical shite, by God), Podhoretz points us to this review of David Lynch’s Inland Empire by a shitemongress of unique talent, one Manohla Dargis. What a load of manohla! What dargistry! Podhoretz sighs in despair, whereas I guffaw, because my tastes are deplorably vitiated, and it feels squishy between my toes.
Carter has been a big worry to keen students of POTUS ever since the Killer Bunny thrashing incident.
Other than that short stint in government service, he’s been a very handy carpenter.
The Manohla says, the head of the David Lynch, it is the frightening and beautiful place, giving the soul moving images the most the Mahnola has ever witnessed. But the David Lynch’s shoes, he is not of the Magli, he is the untenable crisis. He is perhaps of the Tyrannosaurus Elton.
lol.
That is some funny sh*t, man.
Carter circles back and jumps the shark for the hundredth time… you’d think he would’ve run out of gas by now…
The points are frozen, the beast is dead. But where is the ambiguity?
I’m beginning to think Carter is heavily invested in chick peas.
James Joyce said it best in Finnegans Wake:
“The impovernment of the booble by the babble for the bubble.”
Carter’s epitaph will read … “When life gives you peanuts … salt ‘em”.
You’d think after that one canoe ride he’d shy away from water sports.
McGehee, you are as bad as Dan Collins. And that is rare praise.
I’ve gotten used to being praised rarely.
I’m looking forward to Dr. Stein’s promised point by point rebuttal to Jimmah’s book. I’m also looking forward to the MSM castigating Dr. Stein for his disloyalty to St. Jimmah.
Other than that, thanks for the laughs Dan, McGee, et al.
McGehee,
Clearly Carter still loves his water sports…he’s been peeing on the entire country since he was made president.
The points are frozen, the beast is dead. But where is the ambiguity?
Over there in a box.
Come, come! Podhoretz is off his rocker, in regards to that review. He must have led a very sheltered life, raised in a monastery by secular classical-scholar ninja-monks. (Who, by the way, would later turn up in a David Lynch movie.) He certainly can never have gone to a prestigious university, where you can find more self-importance in the want ads of the campus paper.
Dargis only describes Lynch’s surreal movie. She doesn’t attempt to unpack it for us, and makes no effort to identify the beast, the points, the ambiguity, or the electric elk named Simon. What pretence there is is pretty much confined to the movie. (Although I admit she has too much fun alluding to other movies and books, and I dock her five demerits for the phrase “caressing light”.)
Honestly, some people need to get out more. Anyone looking for pretentiousness should be reading Tim Blair (recent examples here and here) or the on-hiatus Daily Ablution.
(I should point out that Tim and Scott find these examples. They don’t perpetrate them.)
Oh, and also the Guardian. Manohla Dargis’s caressing light doesn’t stand a chance against Polly Toynbee’s silver-tongued gun.
Angie:
I mean, ferchrissakes, have mercy, woman.
DAN! DAN! DAN!
Uncle, I’m beggin’ ya uncle! Angie! “Reagan-era surrealism.”(?)
Must duct tape head…
What a bunch of pansies!
Yer all worthless and weak!
Now drop and give me twenty thousand words on the fascist symbolism in Fantasia, maggots!
You ladies wouldn’t last ten minutes in the academy. Alan Sokal would wipe the floor with your candy asses, and he’s only a physicist!
Angie:
It occures to me that there is some irony in the concept that I would whine about that prose. I am, of course, the guy who once coined the phrase “Frothing Insinuations®” when refering to a past Andrew Sullivan piece. It has since gone on to be franchised world wide!
It’s a pot and kettle moment for me.