Re: It's Not Much Of A Cross-Out

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Dick Cheney's robot hands can't produce a note with that type of kerning. Examine the cross-out carefully. Dan Rather was clearly behind this.


Posted by: washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:17 AM
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Cheney and Bush hate each other b/c Cheney's a disdainful asshole, and Bush is a fuckup.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:17 AM
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Is it just my impression, or has White House-ology become the new Kremlinology?


Posted by: eb | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:46 AM
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Also: "stick his neck in the meat grinder"? Sounds awkward.


Posted by: mrh | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 6:14 AM
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Not off you cut his head off first.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 6:17 AM
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DeLong's been calling the White House the Topkapi Palace for over a year.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 6:22 AM
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5: Well, that's just adding insult to injury.


Posted by: mrh | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 6:34 AM
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Rumors about a rift between the Bush team and the Cheney team have been going on for a while. Wonkette was making jokes about it. I think it also plays a role in Woodward's book, although his main agenda is making Rumsfeld individually look bad.


Posted by: rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 7:25 AM
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4: Yeah, looks like an idiom-portmanteau of "stick one's neck out" and "stick one's X in the meat grinder."

Are there any interesting narratives of how Bush and Cheney got together? As in more detailed than all the hoo-ha about Cheney searching for a running mate, then getting it to be himself. Was Bush going to be a neocon-enabler before that, or was it a clever insinuation on Cheney's part?

3: I have no idea to what you could possibly be referring.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 7:51 AM
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7: Or assault to perjury or something.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 7:52 AM
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Cheney is a skilled manipulator of people and events (in the sense that a good thief is skilled), but if you've ever heard the guy speak, he is no politician. IIRC, started one speech by telling the cheering audience to shut up, because he was going to talk.

It's got to rub him the wrong way, having to deal with a pretty-boy frontman who isn't even a good public speaker.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:07 AM
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Man, I should be following this story -- I was fascinated when the Plame thing broke, way back when -- and I'm just out of interest. Yes, they're all a bunch of liars, who plotted to discredit a critic by destroying his wife's career. Tell me something I didn't know.

I know it's important to get it on the record, but I can't care hard any more.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:13 AM
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eb?


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:25 AM
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I am at least skimming the live-blogging over at FDL, as part of my weird obligation/compulsion to read all blogs everywhere.

Having been thru two before this one, the need to protect the President at all costs is one of the more interesting aspects of the Republican Party.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:36 AM
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Meanwhile, 3000 miles away, Tony Blair is interviewed by the police for the second time in an investigation of what I thought was simony until I looked it up and found that simony only applied to the sale of church offices.

Oh they'll all go together when they go...


Posted by: OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:41 AM
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3: eb!


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:48 AM
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14: I guess maybe they're still sore about 1865, 1881 and 1901.


Posted by: minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:49 AM
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6: the Topkapi palace has a "Baghdad pavilion" built to celebrate the conquest of Baghdad....I visited last summer & couldn't help but picture Cheney & Rumsfeld lounging inside.


Posted by: Katherine | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:51 AM
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Speaking of Guiteau, wouldn't "The Disappointed Office Seekers" be a great name for a band?


Posted by: minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:53 AM
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I know it's important to get it on the record, but I can't care hard any more

If you're like me, at each stage right up to the 10/2005 indictments and beyond, we were hoping for what my wife calls "the nickel to drop" for the revulsion we felt based on a hundred things to be crystallized, for some large and influential part of the people who were somehow, unaccountably, still giving this government the benefit of the doubt. We hoped that this case would be our "third rate burglary," or our "arms for hostages."

The revulsion does seem to have happened, but not with this, or perhaps anything, serving as the galvanizing, seemingly trivial wrong. We've been fighting the last war. Things have turned, the press is different, judging from a hostile report I heard from Mrs. Alan Greenspan about White House shenanigans, the investigations are underway. We've been watching the wrong hole.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 8:59 AM
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Yeah, this story went from irresponsible speculation to old news without ever breaking. I still want it pinned down so that it can be on the list for later conversations about what was really so bad about the GWB administration, but I don't think it's going to change anything in real time.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 9:02 AM
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Libby may even walk, but making Cheney and Russert look bad has already been worth it.

Mary Matalin is in the thick of it. How can anyone ever trust Carville? Everything he says you have to ask where that mouth has been.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 9:24 AM
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OT:Hey I just added some content to Wikipedia! It was very easy, but I screwed it up anyway. So proud of myself. Didn't attach my name, and my IP is dynamic, but it is a sort of immortality. Anyone else done it?

(The info was about the Loudest Whisper folk-rock version of the Irish legend of the Children of Lir)


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 10:38 AM
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I know it's important to get it on the record, but I can't care hard any more.

Me too--but of course, this is precisely why they've been operating with the stall, stall, tie it up in legalese method. Drag something out and it becomes boring and unimportant.

looks like an idiom-portmanteau

Thank you for this. I love that kind of mixed metaphor myself--e.g., "don't cross that bridge before it hatches"--and didn't have a real name for it.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 10:58 AM
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9: 3: I have no idea to what you could possibly be referring.

Just the way people have been forced to speculate based on even the smallest bits of information coming from the White House about what's really going on in there and what White House policy is or is going to be.


Posted by: eb | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:09 PM
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23 - Yeah, I wrote big chunks of the entries on James Wong Howe and Haskell Wexler. I feel like I did a decent job, although I failed to cite my source enough, so a lot of it is just "here's some dude on the Internet who read a book on cinematographers".


Posted by: snarkout | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:15 PM
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Cheney thinks someone in Bush's office screwed up

Does it make sense that the "one staffer" refers to Karl? That's how I read it.


Posted by: Michael | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:17 PM
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"The Disappointed Office Seekers" could be joined by
"Filthy Fingered Surgeon" and go on the Stalwart of Stalwarts tour.


Posted by: TJ | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:23 PM
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25: I'm trying to come up with something, but all I've got is "in Soviet Russia, the rumor mills you." It at least brushes up against the whole neck-in-the-grinder thing.

I am resisting the temptation to read too much into the cross-out in the note and see it as some physical manifestation of Cheney's whole perceived MO of acting based on one assumption and then aggressively revising that assumption after it proves false (viz, if I'm using it correctly, the whole "WMD, er, freedom" line of talking points). Like, if I gave into temptation I would be saying, "Well, see, he wrote that and then was like, 'nah, they'll use that to hang somebody, raaaaah, raaaaaaaaaaah!*' and then he crossed it out and changed it and even though the original was right there in front of him he saw it as gone forever because he willed it so." But I think, frankly, that would be extremely half-baked.

---
* This bit being in imitation of Jon Stewart's whole Cheney-as-The-Penguin act, which I find endlessly hilarious.


Posted by: Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:42 PM
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23: All the time.


Posted by: neil | Link to this comment | 02- 1-07 12:57 PM
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