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2. Keep it fairly Civil.
3. No loony conspiracy theories.
Five score and multiple naked Paris Hilton’s ago . . .
Even the MSM were impressed by GOP Presidential Mike Huckabee’s speech at the FRC Values Voters Summit 2007. Video of his speech is compiled in three parts here. See for yourself what all the buzz is about.
Part One: “Wait til old, retiring hippies find out they can get free drugs from the government…”
Part Two: “Not even duct tape and WD40 can fix it…”
Part Three: “It’s important that the language of Zion is a Mother Tongue and not a recently acquired second language.”
Poor old Dan Rather is in his dotage. It’s time to take away the matches and the keys. It is no longer safe to allow him out on his own. He has lurched publicly into the “I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up” twilight of advanced age. He has officially become an Old Fart. How do we know this?
The Hairy Beast’s father, The Senior Beast, often said he was able to pinpoint the exact moment his dad turned into an Old Fart.
“I was driving down route eleven towards Lake Winnipesaukee with my dad in the passenger seat and he suddenly turned to me and said ‘Y’know, just because the speed limit sign says fifty five, that don’t mean you have to go fifty five!’.”
“So I dropped down to fifty and soon enough I had a line of about thirty cars backed up behind us. Some passed, others blew their horn. I was mortified but your Grandfather just sat there smiling and bitching about Roosevelt. After a few minutes I couldn’t stand the embarrassment anymore and I sped back up. He turned to complain and I said “Pop, give me a break, these people all hate us now!” He smiled and said ‘We’re doing them a favor - we’re making them slow down!’.”
The Grandpa Beast was lucky, in a way. He had his Old Fart (pronounced “Old Fahht” in New Hampshire Dialect) Moment in front of only a few dozen people. And it was anonymous. Poor old Dan Rather’s is happening in front of the entire world. Yes, Ol’ Dan is now officially an Old Fart.
Let’s look at what makes an Old Fart an Old Fart.
1. Still Angry After All These Years.
For Old Farts, the outrage they felt over the Smoot-Hawley Tariff is just as fresh today as it was Way Back When. This ire is like a well-aged Gumbo simmering away for decades in their mental pot. It is prone to boil over at any moment and often does, particularly at the most inappropriate times. Who has not been treated to the spectacle of an Old Fart suddenly shrieking with purple-faced choler over Truman’s firing of MacArthur halfway through a wedding?
Compare this to Old Man Rather, who bitches bitterly about his forced early retirement from CBS at the unripe age of 73 and has filed a $70 million lawsuit against his former employer over it. The rest of us had all but forgotten about his role in Memogate, or filed it away in a corner of our mind reserved for specially fond memories, but not Ol’ Dan. He’s plenty hot over it still. And of course he has to embarrass his friends by pitching a huge public fit, prompting them to whisper to each other the time-honored question; “Why hasn’t his family been making him take his medication?”.
2. “I don’t care what you say he did - Stalin saved us all!”
your typical Old Fart is constitutionally unable to recognize anybody elses’ point of view. The advance of the ages has warped their memory and their perspective. They no longer recall their own mistakes or arguments to the contrary, and they don’t care to hear it anyway. Everybody else will have to cater to them and their whims. If they don’t like it they can just pass or blow their horn. Ol’ Dan doesn’t seem to care that he smeared the President with a story predicated on forged documents just weeks before a national election. He appears to have never considered that he and his producers jettisoned the most basic principles of journalism. He’s right and the rest of Planet Earth is wrong.
3. Outbursts.
Old Farts say irrational stuff like “The documents may be fake but the story’s accurate.” without a shred of embarrassment.
4. Whoops - There Goes That Hip Again!
Old Farts have accidents. They pee themselves in church and set fire to the kitchen trying to heat up a can of beans. They file meritless $70 million dollar lawsuits against their former employers.
5. Everything Old Was Better, Especially If It Was Worse.
Your typical Old Fart will exclaim “When I was a kid back in the Devonian Period we had twenty one percent less oxygen in our atmosphere but we didn’t mind! We made do with what we had!” Ol’ Dan constantly points to his glory days at CBS as a triumph wherein he took over a first place news show and brought it firmly down to third, but it was better.
Well, compared to Katie Couric, maybe we can give him this one.
They Refuse To Give Up Their Precious Defeat
Democrats and their liberal brethren are facing a very big problem this week. Having staked a large portion of their political capital on U.S. defeat in Iraq they must now come to grips with the possibility that we might actually win this war. This would be - if not actual disaster, at least a serious setback to their future plans. They rode anti-war sentiment into the Congress with real hopes that the Republicans would continue their losing streak right up to the White House next year. However, Bush and the G.O.P. unexpectedly doubled down and began to win a few. The house odds (never bet against the US Military) reasserted themselves.
With most of their chips set firmly on black it would not be surprising if the Democrats prudently sought to scatter a few out to red, just to hedge their bets. Unfortunately, they can’t. Their base will not let them. The Netroots and Moveon.org hold too many party markers to be ignored. Primaries are won by the base, and the Democrat base wants to lose this war pronto. Unfortunately, General Elections are won in the political middle. If the Dems force a loss in a war that the electorate eventually comes to see as winnable, they will pay a hefty political price in an area of political weakness where they can ill-afford to lose any more ground; National Security.
Hence the dilemma: Democratic candidates need to play to their the antiwar base to get the nod to run nationally, but they do at peril of making themselves unelectable. The millions of Americans who initially supported the invasion of Iraq, presumably because they thought we could win (a reasonable assumption at the time), and who changed their minds when they decided we were not, could well change their minds back again if they see that we now are. Nutroot-pandering candidates will get a hundred percent of the Moveon.org vote, but (as private citizen Ned Lamont can attest) how far will that get them, really?
Of course the Dems could get lucky and America could still lose in Iraq. But after watching General Petraeus’ performance in front of Congress this week thats seems less and less likely. Efforts to paint this man as an administration shill not only failed, but boomeranged as it became apparent that the Dems and their Moveon.org succubi were desperately trying to hang on to their precious defeat by slandering a capable and honorable man. The Dems were not helped when Moveon.org hermeneutically displayed their political tin ear on a heavily discounted full page of the New York Times. One has to wonder who the “us” in “Betray-us” really turned out to be?
So the chips are placed and the wheel spins. Sometimes the ball bounces into black, sometimes red. Lately its been more red than black. Democrats chose (willingly and unwillingly) black, for defeat. Frankly, it was a sucker bet from the beginning.
The Beast is in Minneapolis for a week so he’s a bit behind the curve (no sharks in Minnesota) - however he came across this (buried) story today:
Shark sighting? Mysterious fish raises great white worries
By Stephen Tait
THE DAILY NEWS (NEWBURYPORT, Mass.)
NEWBURYPORT, Mass. —Chris Santarelli thinks he knows why the bluefish weren’t biting Wednesday.
Fishing about a mile outside the mouth of Merrimack River — near the large red buoy designated MR — Santarelli said he saw the biggest fish in his three decades of fishing, a marine creature he said reminded him of the movie “Jaws.”
“It was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It was as big as my boat. I am almost sure it was a great white.
“There is a ton of bluefish around, and I’m sure that is why it is around. It was right where we’ve been catching blue fish for days, and there were none there.”
Santarelli, of Rowley, said the shark was at least 15 feet long and “the diameter of a 50-gallon drum.”
When it swam past the boat, “I saw the fin; it was 2 feet out of the water,” he said.
He said the shark was dark on top and light-colored underneath.
“I fish almost every other day, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “It was like right out of ‘Jaws,’ it was that big. It was so big, I just wanted to get out of there.
“This thing was humongous. It looked just like the one hanging at Hudson’s (marine shop in Salisbury).”
The local report comes after officials on Cape Cod issued shark warnings in recent days following the discovery of two seal carcasses that washed up on the beaches there, likely the result of great white shark attacks.
Newburyport is right on the border of Salisbury Mass and the New Hampshire beaches. The Merrimack is a very large river and we all know that river mouths are favorite hunting spots for Whites and other sharks. Fishing is excellent in the Merrimack, too; the Beast wades out onto the sandbars there every year for Stripers and Bluefish. Lots to eat there.
Fishing buddies are reporting lots of dead seals all along the coast, with chomps taken out of them like corn on the cob. It’s white shark central around here. Fortunately the swimming season will be over in just a few weeks, so hopefully nobody gets bitten.
Check out this Boston Globe article.
Seal death is blamed on a great white shark
Officials say case has trademarks of attack
The animal that was spotted eating a seal last weekend off North Beach in Chatham was probably a great white shark, state officials said yesterday
Lisa Capone, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, said that a shark specialist for the state had examined photos of the seal’s carcass and interviewed witnesses and that the case “has the look of great white shark predation.”
She said great whites are lone animals that travel 30 to 50 miles a day and have a slow metabolism, so that they can go several weeks or even up to a couple of months between feedings.
“It’s likely far away, not going to eat again, and it was alone,” she said.
Note all the mealy passive prose in this article - “The animal that was spotted eating a seal last weekend off North Beach in Chatham was probably a great white…” oh - and according to the title it was not a Shark Attack it was a “Seal Death”.
According to eyewitnesses this shark was not just “spotted eating a seal”, this fish breached fully out of the water in a spray of froth and blood. It was a full-bore attack right out of the Discovery Channel. We don’t get that information until the very end of the article.
Skomal said what witnesses described was a textbook attack, with a sudden violent “commotion in the water that resulted in a cloud of blood spray,” followed by a period in which the shark circled before returning to eat its prey. Only the head and the fins of the seal washed ashore, which, Skomal said, was also indicative of an attack by a great white.
Consider, also, the strangely selective view of history . The article points out quite clearly (and correctly) that “The last shark-related death in New England was in 1936.” Yet more recent history - the fact this is the second seal attack by a Great White Shark in a bathing area off of that stretch of beach in two years has been forgotten already. Or at least not mentioned.
Add to this the stunning incuriosity as to why it was there in the first place. No mention of seal overpopulation problems in the area at all. Nope, nothing to see here, folks. Get your butts back into the water.
For a more thorough look at the issue, Cape Cod Times has a good piece here: Great white sharks in Cape waters?
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