Tim Blair

Truly, the deathless Quetzalcoatl of plastic birds.

I heard John McLaughlin repeat the plastic turkey lie on last Sunday's show. It was in relation to some "award" for Best Political Theater.

But Dean was obviously trying to make a point about the broader war on terror.

Yeah, and that broader point is also completely wrong. You really have to be a genuine idiot to believe that Saddam's removal doesn't make the planet safer for Americans in both the short and long terms.

What an amazing phenomenon this whole plastic turky thing is. I believe it's longevity and obsessive repetition in the leftist press is psycologically significant, it can't have seized the imaginations of the washed-up marxist dorks like it has without fulfilling some deep need.

Was it a viscerial reaction to Bush's courage in flying into a warzone for thanksgiving? A desperate need to refute the guesture by fixation on an irrelevant detail, a fixation that verges on lunacy?

It's often said that leftists don't think, they feel. What powerful revulsion or insecurity has made it so desperatly important for them that the turky be fake?

At any rate, the whole thing is inane. The original issue was whether the capture of Saddam would deflate terrorism in Iraq, not what effect it would have on existing al-Qaeda or other terrorist cells within two weeks!

Honestly, when leftists rage against straw men like this, it's hard to tell whether they think we're that stupid or if they genuinely believe their own stupidity. Kurtz' correspondent certainly seems sincere.

The leftists’ need for the turkey to be fake is itself a development of their need for the turkey-moment to have been scripted, manipulative, conceived by Karl Rove earlier & far away.

Another example:

Doubtless, Bush’s PR people like him to be photographed driving a pickup truck & cutting underbrush, & doing things like those which millions of Americans do. Bush does them & likes to. He talks like a Texan though not born there. Some act like that’s a crime. He’s taken to Texas like a fish to water. The left hates this really because it makes it harder for them to paint him as out of touch like they did to his father.

FIRST: the left whines & snivels about how Bush is behaving like a cowboy! We can’t escape it for a moment. THEN we look up from whatever we’re doing & say, hey, we like cowboys, that’s a compliment. Half of us have never really thought about Bush as cowboy before, but at length we’re all rootin’ & tootin’ & firing imaginary guns in the air, waHOO! Ride ’em cowboy! FINALLY the left switches tacks & goes into a snit of “whoah there!” saying though Bush wears denhim, works on his ranch, & talks colloquial Texas talk, still the image is insufficiently literal, it’s manipulative, since Bush is not really a cowboy after all, since he doesn’t make his living mainly while riding a horse.

What it’s about is the left’s continually trying to work up an interpretation, a lens, which—if you look through it juuust right & keep still & pretend nothing else exists—makes Bush look phoney. Such an interpretation typically proves at variance with fact, incoherent, &/or trivial, the moment one reflects critically or gets collateral information. So it takes obsessiveness to keep the interpretation. Its flimsiness drives the left crazy, almost as if it were their targets’ fault. The left rages partly because people will not join with them in the practice this crazy obsessive “art” of keeping resolutely focussed on these crazy & sometimes clashing interpretations, these optical effects, like one of those sculptures of an impossible triangle that works with angles lining up if you look at it from just the right distance & angle, with one eye shut, & keep perfectly still, like the “mother” at the end of Psycho. How’s that for an optical effect?

Speaking as another Knoxvillian, I can tell you this dolt is in the minority 'round these parts. Lefties in Tennessee are still apoplectic that Bush carried the state and with it the White House.

Regarding the "Fox News reporter calling his office", I recall him saying that during one of the first broadcasts that morning, and have always wondered whether I misheard him, because he didn't repeat it.

Maybe Kreskin will donate one of these to Howlin' Howie:

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