You Know How the Left Has This Bad Habit of Oversimplifying Stories?

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Yeah, they claim to be all nuanced and everything, but progressives love nothing so much as to boil down complex situations into tidy “just so” morality plays. And, as pointed out here earlier this week, that’s what the Left did with a 5th Circuit of Appeals ruling in a First Amendment case, which got twisted into a “Republicans are pro-rape” narrative.

Common sense suggested there had to be a lot more to the story of the Texas high school cheerleader rape case than what the San Francisco Chronicle and liberal bloggers were telling us, but I didn’t spend much time wondering what was being omitted. However, Tom Maguire at Just One Minute got curious:

Excerpting from the victims appeal we see how “To Kill A Mockingbird” has been updated in Texas:

In fact, Plaintiffs alleged, “[District Attorney] Sheffield said that although the evidence against Rountree and Bolton was strong and exceeded the requisite requirement for probable cause, the Grand Jury was racially divided and that the black grand jurors would not vote to return an indictment against Rountree and Bolton because of the race factor.”

Ouch. We must note that this is merely an allegation by the plaintiff, that this incident  occurred at a party where alcohol was being consumed, and “witness credibility and meaningful consent seem to have been at issue,” as Maguire says. (Please read the whole thing.)

It’s “Send the Body to Glenn Beck” all over again, you see? Based on a superficial reading of a complex tale, the Left has decided that a story validates some particular political point they wish to make and . . . uh, it doesn’t.

Prediction: Melissa McEwan and her progressive friends will forget all about this story, now that Maguire’s research has shown the case of Rakheem Bolton and “H.S.” to be something far more nuanced than the simplistic “Republicans are pro-rape” morality play they tried to present to their gullible readers.

Bleg: Shakespeare On Kindle

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by Smitty

Since the election is over, and the toothpaste is out of the frying pan and into the metaphorical blender concerning my non-approach to vacationing, I need some help.
I’ve purchased a Kindle 3G to support the deployment to A-stan, and I want to load it to the gills with Good Stuff.
In particular, I’d like to know if there is a preferred Shakespeare collection with all the Bard’s works AND really good dictionary/annotation support.
Looking through the bazillions of Shakespeare entries at the Kindle store, it was unclear what was worth purchasing. Hence the bleg.
Any other “don’t leave home without it” recommendations graciously accepted.

Shocking: Gangs of Minnesota Lutherans Charged in Child Sex-Trafficking Ring

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Because you know how those Minnesota Lutherans are:

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Twenty-nine people have been indicted in a sex trafficking ring in which Somali Lutheran gangs in Minneapolis and St. Paul allegedly forced girls under age 14 into prostitution in Minnesota, Tennessee and Ohio, according to an indictment unsealed Monday. . . .
The indictment details several instances in which young Somali or African American Lutheran girls were taken from place to place and forced to engage in sex acts with multiple people. One girl was under 13 when she was first prostituted. Another girl was 18 when she was raped by multiple men in a hotel room, the indictment said. . . .
The indictment claims the ring involved three Minneapolis-based gangs — the Somali Lutheran Outlaws, the Somali Lutheran Mafia and the Lady Outlaws Lutherans — and that all three gangs are connected. The men and women charged were either gang members or associates of the gangs, the indictment said. They range in age from 19 to 38. . . .

Damned Lutherans! Meanwhile, in Virginia, they’re getting ready for trials of Lutheran pirates.

What the Left Thinks of You

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Verum Serum gives some tasty excerpts of these deep thoughts from a leading “progressive” thinker:

Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party. . . .
The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. . . .
The millions of partisans who follow Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing televangelists . . . will act to stop teenage sluts from getting abortions, teach n—–s a lesson, and slaughter those spics, dots, and everyone else who doesn’t fit into their vision of what and who is right.

You — the millions of people who listen to Limbaugh and vote Republican — are bloodthirsty totalitarians who endorse the genocidal “slaughter” of everyone who disagrees with you. So says Ted Rall, providing a handy guide to how he sees the two sides in the political Armageddon that looms:

Us: Hard-working, underpaid, put upon, thoughtful, freedom-loving, disenfranchised, ordinary people.
Them: Reactionary, stupid, overpaid, greedy, shortsighted, exploitative, power-mad, abusive politicians and corporate executives

See? That’s who the Left thinks you are, and how they think of their “thoughtful” selves. Only they are “hard-working.” Only they are “underpaid.” You? You’re stupid, overpaid and greedy. (Elsewhere, he calls you “parasites, vampires, hideous monsters.”) And who is promoting Ted Rall’s insightful analysis? Who else, but MSNBC?

MSNBC — where Keith Olbermann is paid $7 million a year.

MSNBC — part of the NBC/Universal division of gigantic global conglomerate General Electric, which is trying to sell it to another behemoth corporation, Comcast, for $30 billion.

Yes, MSNBC — the network that gives voice to the “thoughtful, freedom-loving, disenfranchised, ordinary people” like Ivy League-educated Ted Rall, who matriculated at Columbia University, alma mater of the President of the United States and other members of the downtrodden toiling masses.

Ted Rall: He’s being kept down by The Man.

UPDATE: Watching that video of Ted Rall being interviewed by Dylan Ratigan, I’m wondering why Columbia University (where the tuition is $40,000 a year) can’t teach basic economics. Rall speaks of “1% of the country owning 24% of the income” and “people getting thrown out of their homes, over 10 million of them.”

Ted, they’re not getting thrown out of their homes. They’re getting thrown out of the mortgage company’s homes. It’s not your home until you pay for it. If you’re living in a $300,000 house and you don’t make the payments, that $300,000 house isn’t yours anymore. And it never really was.

Ted Rall and Barack Obama: Columbia University graduates who can’t grasp basic concepts like property ownership.

UPDATE II: “MSNBC totally owes Keith Olbermann an apology.”

5,000,000 Hits!

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About 9 a.m. today, we passed the 5-million mark, riding the wave of last night’s Instalanche.

Our joy at this achievement is tempered by the knowledge that loyal sidekick Smitty will soon be deployed to an Undisclosed Location, where Uncle Sam has decided that his astonishing powers of IT geekery are required to intimidate the Taliban into surrender.

When I expressed concerns for Smitty’s safety in the Undisclosed Location — some place on the other side of the world, in a country ending with “-stan” — he told me not to worry and used one of those super-secret military acronyms to explain.

It seems that Smitty will be deployed as a “REMF.”

While the duties of a REMF are highly classified — I get the idea they’re kind of a combination of Green Berets and ninjas — Smitty assured me that being a REMF is actually quite safe.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “If they ever get to me, the situation has gone so completely sideways, we’re all screwed anyway.”

This was strangely reassuring, as we’ve come to rely heavily on Smitty’s abilities. This blog went full-time in March 2008 and notched its first million hits in February 2009. Smitty joined up shortly thereafter, assuming responsibility for compiling FMJRA Saturday and Rule 5 Sunday. We crossed the 2-million mark in July 2009, reached 3 million in November 2009, and recorded the 4 millionth visit in June this year.

The weirdest thing about this astonishing success — the triumph of our Underpants Gnome Business Plan — is not merely that we have never been asked to explain it at any gathering of conservative New Media activists. For a long time, I blamed AFP’s Erik Telford for us being blackballed this way, but when Tabitha Hale left us off the agenda for BlogCon, I finally realized we are far more universally loathed than I had hitherto suspected.

OK, that’s weird — why does Tabitha Hale hate me? — but it’s not the weirdest part of our wild ride to 5 megahits.

No, the truly weird thing is that we haven’t had a single offer to sell out.

Despite our well-nigh notorious status as greedy capitalist bloggers, and despite creditable rumors that Our Plutocratic Republican Overlords are sitting atop a king’s ransom of ill-gotten billions, no emissary of the GOP Establishment has yet come forward to offer us the relatively modest sum it would take to persuade us to knock it off.

And the price isn’t going to decrease. I figure we’d start negotiations at a rate of $1 per hit to date. You see that, a mere 18 months ago, I could have been bribed to cease-and-desist for a piddling million bucks and our asking price was still under $2 million in May 2009. Our Plutocratic Republican Overlords took no notice, however, and instead wasted more than $10 million on the doomed Charlie Crist campaign.

Yeah, sorry that didn’t work out for you, Mr. Cornyn.

Principles? Yeah, we’ve got principles, but we are not unreasonable men, and we’re still willing to entertain offers.

Instead, these idiots keep trying to get the blogosphere on their side by handing out fat consulting contracts to their buddies who send us press releases telling us what a wonderful job they’re doing there at GOP HQ. Yeah, and paying useless dingbats like Mike Murphy $90,000 a month to run campaigns — how’s that working out for you, guys?

Anyway, we’re still here, with help from our tip-jar hitters, busting the Establishment’s balls every day. Whenever I mention that we haven’t yet achieved worldwide accolades and untold wealth in the process, someone will inevitably accuse me of “whining.” What I’m actually trying to emulate, however, is the description of the ancient Athenians, provided by the Corinthians in a speech recorded in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War:

“And what they have planned but not carried out, they think that in this they lose something already their own; what they have attempted and gained, that in this they have achieved but little in comparison with what they mean to do.”

No partial success can satisfy our fierce determination to achieve Maximum Blogospheric Hegmony. Let us quote one eminent authority on effective New Media strategies:

Indeed. Not “a great writer” like Kinsey Schofield perhaps, but most certainly tenacious.

UPDATE: Chris Wysocki hasn’t yet been Tweeted by Alyssa Milano, yet seems to have lots of Rule 5 action, while Troglopundit’s primitive paleolithic blog also extends congratulations.

Gonzo, Vindicated

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Maetenloch at AOSHQ linked this list of the Best Magazine Articles Ever, and I noticed that Hunter S. Thompson was named twice in the top 10, for “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” (where Thompson first displayed his famous “Gonzo” style) and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (originally syndicated in Rolling Stone).

Actually, we ought to demand a recount because (a) they omitted Thompson’s article “The Motorcycle Gangs” in The Nation, which formed the basis for Hell’s Angels, and (b) no Tom Wolfe? “Radical Chic” (New York, 1970) certainly deserves inclusion on any such list, as does “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson” (Esquire, 1965).

For good measure, I’d nominate Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s “Dan Quayle Was Right” (Atlantic, 1993), and Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships & Double Standards” (Commentary, 1979). These were certainly consquential articles, as “Dan Quayle Was Right” was crucial in building support for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, and Kirkpatrick’s article provided a key element of the intellectual framework for Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy that won the Cold War.