The Knights Of Prosperity

"Okay, Gomer, you see if Amir Taheri's got a rumor we can run with. Then Malkin and her crew will smear the AP as terrorist appeasers and source fakers, and we'll see if we can find a phunny photo of Kerry appearing to eat alone. That's our cockslap de resistance! Die Dolchstosslegende lebt an! -- Dan Riehl plots strategery at the Hot Air conference.

This has been quite a week for our diligent little pud-pounders on the right. First the resolution of the heated Jamil Hussein question: does he exist, or is the Associated Press so craven, so engulfed in a conspiracy of silence, so besotted with its overt hatred of the troops and Mom and apple pie, that they take a break from urinating on their burning flag to invent a source?

Er, maybe not. But, you know, they're "checking into it" and "moving forward". Also, they're volunteering to serve in a capacity befitting their dedication to The Cause. Not only that, but I have a 15" cock and a billion dollars in the bank. Chase me, ladies!

Ahem. So, we have already established that Hussein does indeed exist, at least for the time being. Expecting an admission of error, or an apology if Hussein turns up in a dumpster, is like expecting a blowjob after a lunch date -- pretty unlikely, as good of an idea as it sounds.

One of their other recent fictional hobby-horses is the Lonely Kerry meme, that on Kerry's recent visit to Iraq, he was ostracized by soldiers because of the "joke" he told right before the election, which was imaginatively recast by the usual armchair Pattons.

Turns out that the infamous photo was taken during an off-the-record interview, which has been corroborated by the two actual journalists who were actually there, as opposed to sitting in Mom's basement armpit-deep in Funyuns and beef jerky, pretending to be Jimmy Olsen on the hunt for the greatest scoop Perry White has ever seen.

The two reporters who met with Kerry that morning are Marc Santora of The New York Times and Mark Danner of The New York Review, The New Yorker and other publications. Both Santora and Danner confimed to me that they met with Kerry -- on the morning of Dec. 17, according to Kerry's office and to Danner. (The person who posted the photo also confirmed that it was taken that morning.)

Danner confirmed to me that he's the guy with his back to the camera, saying his jacket and the back of his head looked the same as in the photo. He added that his position in relation to Kerry was the same as the photo showed. And here's what Danner had to say to me about the empty seats: "If there were empty seats it's because we sought them out. We wanted an empty table so we could talk. It's that simple."

....

Told that the Kerry people had confirmed that the meeting was an off-the-record talk with reporters, Danner replied: "The discussion was off the record, but given the fact that the Kerry people have confirmed it, I suppose it's all right if I confirm it."

"Santora was to my right," Danner also said. "It was very early in the morning at about 8:30, in the green zone. The reason that people weren't sitting directly around us was that we were having a private conversation." Asked if the troops showed animosity to Kerry, Danner said: "Not in any way that I noticed. A number of soldiers came up and asked to have their photograph taken with him."

Gosh, Jimmy, you're never gonna cock-block Clark Kent and get into Lois Lane's panties with that kinda journamalism.

This is pretty standard stuff for them, and certainly not near the most egregious floaters I've seen from time to time over the past decade. But it's all of a piece. Their elected leaders could fuck up a shit sandwich; why should they be any more competent?



Gun Counter Gomer ponders whether Drudge or World Nut Daily is more likely to have the better scoop. Successmanship, like victory, is just around the corner.

[Update: Glenn Greenwald categorically iterates the point that he (and I, and many others across the internets) keep making -- the problem with the Knights is not that they're "conservative". They're not conservative at all. It's one of those "I don't think that word means what you think it means" deals. They're authoritarians through and through, and what needs to happen is for the media who enable these reptiles to propagate their nonsense on the chat shows to recognize them as such. None of them, from the top down, are conservative in the traditional sense of the word. They're merely caught up in this affected cult of personality, where they're never wrong, and everyone else always has nothing but the absolute worst intentions. Unfortunately for them, the real world is not Atlas Shrugged, and they are virtuous heroes battling orcish villains only in their fevered imaginations.]