Combat! - Page 257 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Friday links! Possible causes edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized August 3, 2012 1 Comment

I hear you, brother.

Evidently one of the eight drinks I drank with Ben al-Fowlkes last night had food poisoning in it, because I feel sick. Combat! blog operates from bed today, in a version of work that would make Thomas Jefferson shake his head bitterly. America has changed so much. Our world has changed so much; we navigate images projected on a skein covering shadows on the wall of a cave. Yet the light shines through, if you look for it. My point is that A) Ben al-Fowlkes is unclean, and B) sometimes, in this vale of illusions, what’s going on is pretty obvious. Won’t you pierce the veil with me?

Quoting Palin verbatim

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media August 2, 2012 3 Comments

Sarah Palin fires up her word emitter.

Since we were talking about old-timey principles of journalism, I thought we’d take a moment to remember that it used to be rude to quote someone verbatim. People talk bad. Even the most eloquent speaker salts his remarks with likes and ums, and a small-town mayor or GAO clerk cannot be expected to spit out paper-ready sentences on command. As a courtesy to their sources, reporters clean up quotes. Sometimes, though, a particular person will abuse this practice. Maybe this person has made no secret of her distaste for reporters, and maybe she mistreats the language in ways that a professional writer would find galling. That person is likely to wind up in print exactly as she speaks, for example like this:

Seeing as how Dick – excuse me, Vice President Cheney – never misfires, then evidently he’s quite convinced that what he had evidently read about me by the lamestream media, having been written, what I believe is a false narrative over the last four years, evidently Dick Cheney believed that stuff and that’s a shame.

That’s Sarah Palin defending herself, sort of, against Dick Cheney. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link.

Harry Reid heard Romney didn’t pay taxes for like 10 years

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media August 1, 2012 5 Comments

Harry Reid meets with a reporter from the Huffington Post.

The Senate Majority Leader noticed a hole in our politico-media system yesterday, and he exploited the hell out of it. In an interview with the Huffington post, Harry Reid said he had spoken to a former Bain investor who said Mitt Romney “didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years.” Of course, Reid couldn’t say who the investor was or how said investor ran across a decade’s worth of Romney’s tax returns, just as he couldn’t say that the allegation was true. But he could say some other stuff:

He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain. But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look? You guys have said his wealth is $250 million. Not a chance in the world. It’s a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don’t pay taxes for 10 years when you’re making millions and millions of dollars.

In keeping with its code of ethics, The Huffington Post published that stuff immediately.

Romney continues tour of radness

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates July 31, 2012 2 Comments

Dorks from around the world

I’ll admit it: I did not think Mitt Romney was going to be a funny candidate for president. In a primary season that gave us Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, it was hard to see Romney as anything but the wealthy dowager who hires the Stooges to move her piano. How wrong I was. Fresh from his passive-aggressive tour of London, Romney went to Israel to praise the beautiful per capita income—so much nicer than what you get in Palestine. He attributed this discrepancy to “the power of culture and at least a few other things,” presumably making a praying-exploding gesture with his hands, before adding that it might also be “providence.” He was a hit in Poland.

A strange writ from the Daily Caller

By Dan Brooks in Being Cool July 30, 2012 1 Comment

You don’t need to point at it, sir.

I put little stock in the interpretation of dreams. I also reject the notion that people say what they really think when they’re drunk, that Freudian slips are bursts of honesty, and that the true mind of the Republican Party is expressed at its fringes. The Tea Party and Infowars.com do not tell us what conservatism has been thinking all along. They tell us what we have been thinking of conservatism all along. Like dreams, the communications of America’s resurgent right are notable for their disconnection from reality, not their insight into it. If you would like to glimpse a veritable Neverland, check out Mark Judge’s call for conservatives to embrace rock and roll. It is two years old and utterly irrelevant, like your recurring nightmare about getting an erection during swim lessons, but it is affecting nonetheless, like same. Insane quote after the jump.