Patterico is my bitch!: A report from deep right weirdness.

Let me tell you about a junior DA with the Los Angeles District Attorney named Patrick Frey. He runs an extreme right blog called patterico. I've been toying with this humourless, hair-triggered wingnut and his 'Lord of the Flies' posse off and on for a couple months now. Got so I could fine tune my posts so that nearly every one would send him/them into hilarious, sputtering paroxysms; on sanctimonious rages, or on web-scouring investigations into my real 'identity.'

Last few days he's been blogging obsessively about me, as if in a fever. Literally thousands of words but, oddly, not a single one about his original issues, the ones I'd originally written about. (Those were standard grade, far right delusions about liberals lurking in the halls and within the news and opinion columns of the LA Times.)

Of couse, I was beating his ass like a cheap carpet on every important topic or point. His final compulsion was triggered by my changing my screen name, from one that was way, way too close to my actual name (especially when it came to some of the nuts in his mob), to one that gave me much more anonymity. In fact, there is the matter of a handful of creepy email and phone messages that continue to trickle in -- but I'll save that for a later post.

Frey ended up banning me, but not before he and his minions devoted something like 150 posts to the subject.

So check out my few weeks from the far-out-there-right thoughtscape if you have the patience or stomach. Alternately hilarious and scary (I mean, "castration"?). In all, pretty interesting.

PS:
Here's where to find some of his early rancor (he even writes a long letter of complaint to Jamie Gold, LA Times Reader Rep, referring to luminaries like Michelle Malkin.) And this is (can't believe I'm writing these words) from a junior DA in the Office of the LA District Attorney! The tool even proudly signs it, Patrick Frey, Patterico's Pontifications

http://patterico.com/2006/05/23/4596/wondering-when-well-get-a-correction-about-the-ambivalent-activist/

Let me know if you want any more specific links to our 'dialectic.'

Great news. CBS poll shows Bush ratings at an all time low -- 34%.
To put this in context, Clinton was at 65% at the time he left office.
And, it's right around Nixon's approval rating during the Watergate Hearings. 32% (Washington Post).

More good stuff from the CBS Poll:

Approval of handling war on terror: 40%.

Approval of handling energy: 27%.

Approval of should UAE allowed to handle 21 ports? 21%

How are things going in Iraq: Badly, 62%

Iraq action was the right action: 41% (wrong, 54%).

Unfavorable view of Bush: 53% (27% favorable)

Unfavorable view of Cheney: 46% (18% favorable)

Thank you, American people. May the heartwarming trends continue.

"With apologies to the Cheney friend who received the pellet facial, the incident was funny." Brent Bozell the Third

The apologists, true believers and sycophants on the right have reached a point where a thundering defense of the Bush Administration has become automatic and involuntary. Truth is immaterial; facts are bothersome distractions, and basic decency is easily sacrificed.

To these people there's no problem if something untoward occurs. If, say, you're caught lying about weapons of mass destruction, or your top aid gets indicted for lying to a grand jury, or the Vice President shoots another person, or you bungle the response to a disaster that wipes a city from the map, no problem. You simply blame (in descending order of importance and frequency):

1. The press
2. The far left
3. Bill Clinton
4. The ACLU
5. Europe

Preceding any of these scapegoats with "Bush hating" also helps the cause.

THE POWER IN IRAQ

There has been quite a bit of furor lately on the issue of whether we're 'winning' the war in Iraq. (As opposed to in World War III, in which commentators like Hannity, O'Reilly and Limbaugh insist we are conducting).

The issue of power generation has become one of those hazy bones upon which the left and right are tugging. If it's up, then that suggests we're winning. If it's down, then we're losing.

So the media (speaking generally) is making the valid claim that power generation across the country is down. On average, Iraqis are getting 4 hours of power a day, whereas before the liberation they were getting 6-8.

This morning, a US Army general, a General McCoy, conceded that may be true, but there is now a new balance. Now the outlying territory is getting up to 12 hours of power per day. But Bagdad is now down to 4 hrs per day. (Before, according to McCoy, Bagdad was getting all kinds of hours of power). So, while the per-day average to Iraqis is down, in all the places outside of Bagdad it's up. So, we are winning the power battle. I guess that was his point.
(See here for the convoluted reasoning in full: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5205361).

DENNIS MILLER: HOW LONG CAN HE HANG ON?

His standup show "All In" is on right HBO now, and he's demonstrating why he's been fired by CNBC and ABC in the last few years. It's astonishingly bad. Sure, his politics are distasteful. But his humor is flat and incredibly unfunny.

Sample lines:

"I was performing in the Air & Space Museum. When I got there I was surprised that it wasn't empty."

"Even if didn't believe in this war in Iraq, I would lie in public and say I was for it until we got our kids home."

"Shouldn't be hard to replace the Bagdad museum, because all their new shit looks like their old shit."

CHENEY SHOOTS MAN. PRICELESS!

Dick Cheney shot a rich old lawyer Harry Whittington. Dark Prince sprayed the dude with shot on Saturday, 2/11, but word wasn't released of the assault until today, Sunday.

First Scooter, then Delay, then Abramoff -- I appreciate the dissolution of Bush's culture of corruption. But shooting your old cronies is a little extreme.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0839695/

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/eyes/equalizer.html

What's up with the conservative umbrage over the Coretta Scott King funeral service? As an expression of national mourning, it was filled with lots of the usual eulogizing, and was spiked with a few expressions of dissent. Which is consonant with Mrs. King's lifelong struggle for equal rights and freedom of expression.

Dissent, in our noble national tradition, rarely has been "appropriate." Dissent has caused discomfort to the powerful, and given voice to the impoverished or neglected. In the case of Mrs. King and her husband, their dissent was also an expression of truth.

Yet, here is how the conservative right characterized dissent in the name of Mrs. King (thanks to Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/items/200602110001)

National Review's vile Jonah Goldberg: "mildly ghoulish."

Michelle Malkin: "abslolutely ungodly."

Mike Gallagher:s "one of the most despicable displays of ugly political partisanship we have ever seen."

Tucker Carlson: "So why...would you use a furneral to needle the president about weapons of mass destruction?"

And on it goes. Little concern for perspective, or context. Or, most important, truth.

Because, in fact, as Reverend Joseph Lowery said, "there were no weapons of mass destruction over there (Iraq.)" A simple, pointed statement of fact. An expression of dissent; that Lowery declared the statement in the face of the POTUS (and his father) only added to its poignancy.

I think it should have been met with a sense of celebration; freedom of expression given full voice.

Casting the Rev. Lowery's remarks as "ungodly" is a sly rhetorical trick; it defers attention from the accuracy of his remarks. And redirects them toward shallow issues, and unprovalble accusations.

What do you think?

Welcome to Slippery Pebbles. Drummaster's official blog, and an area to discover and discuss, celebrate and excoriate, just about anything I find interesting.