A Second Hand Conjecture

Who jumped first in South Ossetia has become a bit of a information war between Georgia and Russia. Today, the Georgian government went a ways toward resolving it by releasing recordings of intercepted radio traffic preceding the Russian invasion. The tapes seem to demonstrate that elements of the Russian invasion force had entered Georgian territory twenty hours before the Georgian army responded.

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When all else fails, just start making stuff up. You really have to feel for Barack Obama, who is at heart an enormously classy guy. The DailyKos diarists do him few favors in his efforts to elevate political discourse in this country. (via: Insta)

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Obama might be giving McCain more ammunition for the contention he is a condescending elitist. Denouncing Republican attacks on his energy plan as lies, he countered that “these guys take pride in being ignorant.”

Huffington Post and the leftblogs are naturally eating it up (boom, boom, boom, boom). But it probably won’t play as well with Middle America, where partisan conceit of this sort is typically unwelcome.

Or perhaps anywhere where the allegations of ‘Paris Hilton celebrity’ –which could be described as a combination of vanity and vacuity in itself– have done real damage to Obama. Obama’s suggestion might have a certain flavor of irony there.

At any rate, behold a nastier campaign of a very old sort. Credit goes to both men.

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(Listening notes: Magnetic Fields, Husker Du, Queen, Soft Cell, Indigo Girls, The Smith’s, REM, Pet Shop Boys, B-52’s, Scissor Sisters. A homage to Andrew Sullivan of sorts.)

I am here to step into the breach and defend Glenn Reynolds from two people I admire a lot. This week I visited Belgravia Dispatch and came upon this:

I don’t think of Reynolds as a political animal. He has independent integrity. But when push came to shove, Reynolds never challenged in any serious way the abuses of power in this administration nor the extremism of the Malkinesque blogosphere. When a libertarian finds any excuses to ignore or minimize government-sponsored illegality and torture, then he has truly ceased to be a libertarian in any profound sense. If my opinion weren’t so high of his abilities, my disappointment wouldn’t be so deep.

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