Friday links! Naked villainy edition

Snidely

One of the most depressing features of the modern world is the difficulty in identifying villains. Awful scumbags are out there, obviously, but they tend to be “controversial” rather than openly evil. Deteriorating certainty in both morals and reportage has made any given villain debatable. Where once we might say with confidence that Glenn Beck was a fat liar who cried to get attention, now we can only disagree with him. Personally, I miss the old certainty. It may have cost us a few witches, but to definitively call other people villains is a satisfying atavism, like eating chicken with your hands. Today is Friday, and we still have a few unequivocal villains left. Won’t you point the finger with me?

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History takes one on the chin

They're going to remember us as heroes, dog.

We here at Combat! blog are big fans of Paul Begala, in large part because he once made Meghan McCain feel sad on TV. Like a lot of political strategists, Begala has an incisive mind. Unlike a lot of political strategists—especially certain childlike, doughy political strategists we could name—some portion of that mind seems devoted to discernment of the truth, as opposed to truth’s active obfuscation. I’m sure he’s only tricked me into believing this, but Paul Begala seems to be the anti-Karl Rove. When he responded to Me-Mac’s bitchy assertion that she wouldn’t know about the Carter-Reagan transition because she hadn’t been born yet by saying, “I wasn’t born during the French Revolution, but I know about it,” I felt like I was watching a man who succeeded in politics by attacking the flaws in arguments, not by exploiting them. He’s the debate team to Rove’s student council, and that makes him a great choice to review Karl Rove’s new memoir. Spoiler alert: he did not like it. Under the headline, “Karl Rove’s Book of Lies,” Begala describes the former Bush advisor’s memoir as “a brief and compelling personal narrative, followed by 500 pages of dishonesty and deception.” But on the plus side, it contains a great recipe for bean dip.

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