Nevermind HRC’s arrogance in badgering the DoD about planning for a withdrawal that, as yet, has not been forced on them by the shrillers in the legislature. What I want to know is, when did people start talking like this, and why are they still?

Clinton has privately and publicly pushed Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace two months ago to begin drafting the plans for what she said will be a complicated withdrawal of troops, trucks and equipment.

“If we’re not planning for it, it will be difficult to execute it in a safe and efficacious way,” she said then.

Emphasis mine. I see this usage all the time, from writers and speakers on all topics. Why? They’re called adverbs, and they are stronger, more efficient words than “do this in such-and-such a way” (or worse yet, “such-and-such a manner”).

“…execute it safely and efficiently,” are the words you’re looking for, Senator. Or “efficaciously” if you must.

So pretentious and annoying.

Oh, speaking of arrogant, how much chutzpah does it take to accuse the DoD of a political response to a serious inquiry when your whole motivation in asking was A) throwing your weight around and B) political grandstanding? Let’s see how “political” DoD’s response was:

“We are always evaluating and planning for possible contingencies. As you know, it is longstanding departmental policy that operational plans, including contingency plans, are not released outside of the department.”

Ouch. Yawn.

Isaiah Washington’s version of what happened on the set of Grey’s Anatomy–that he used the word in the course of a fight with Patrick Dempsey–is far more credible than T.R. Knight’s, that he used it directed personally at Knight. Unless Washington is difficult to work with in general, that show booted one of its best characters for very shabby reasons. Word to the wise, Grey’s–Drs. Burke, Yang, Bailey, Karev, Webber, and Torres are a hell of a lot more likeable than the titular Dr. Grey or Drs. Shepherd, O’Malley, or Stevens. Hope you’ve got some stellar stuff lined up for next season with no more unfortunate cast depletion.

It’s supposed to be reporting news, right?

Headline: Libby move helps seal Bush’s Iraq legacy.

If by “seal” you mean “add meaningless fuel to the already high fire of Democrats’ hatred for Geo. W. Bush.” If by “helps” you mean “ends up as a footnote in the larger picture of the Iraq war,” which even somebody quoted in the article admits:

[Presidential historian] Hess said Bush’s move will eventually be seen as a footnote to a legacy that will feature Iraq prominently.

So this major villainous move, supposed to “seal” Bush’s evil legacy, is really only a footnote that happens to be angering Democrats. Reuters wrote the headline for this piece of opinion–theirs–and then couldn’t even find a historian who would back it?

Reuters: even their not-so-disguised opinions are fake.

Ridiculous:

“That’s pretty sick,” said Norm Whipple, 59, of Los Angeles, offering a wry grin about the presidential prospects of Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, Republican Rudy Giuliani and unaffiliated New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Someone has to keep an eye on those New Yorkers.”

As if Hillary Clinton counts as “a New Yorker.” And Michael Bloomberg’s not much closer to it than she is, born and raised as he was in Massachussetts.

“I think basically they are the same candidate,” said Bob House, a Republican from Des Moines, Iowa. “We all love New York. But when our options are New York, New York, New York, I think people want to see a different life experience.”

You want lifetime politicians to have differentiated life experiences? Good look with that, buddy, no matter where they live or were raised.

The article acknowledges near the end the widely disparate geographical backgrounds of the candidates. So what’s this about? Their place of residence, or their “life experience” of being fairly well off?

Angeles Perry, 65, feeding the slot machines in Las Vegas, saw more similarities than differences among the New York triumvirate.

“They have the money,” said the retiree from California’s Silicon Valley. “And they all have big egos.”

She’s right.

Billionaire Bloomberg spent more than $155 million for his two mayoral campaigns, and reports indicated he could drop $500 million on a presidential campaign — despite his repeated and coy refusals to announce a candidacy.

Giuliani and Clinton have millions of dollars on hand. None shrinks from the national spotlight, although it’s shone a little brighter on some than others.

As far as I know, Bloomberg is the only one of the three who’s independently wealthy. “Millions of dollars on hand” had to come from campaign donations, right? You know, like every other lifetime politician campaigning for high office.

What a dumb, misleading article. It took six AP writers to cover that, presumably to garner the uninformed quotes from different geographical areas. What a waste of their time. Did they get into journalism to shovel dirt on molehills?

Gerard Van der Leun discusses the absence of fact checking in publishing. I’m shocked, shocked, that there are copy editors out there less rigorous and stringent about fact checking than I am.

No I’m not. What I am surprised at is the existence of a group called “Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America” and its status as a CBS shareholder. This group is about to get all demanding and shirty with Jimmy Carter about little things like “errors” about the Middle East in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Van der Leun notes:

The Carter book is chock-a-block full of lies and distortions and weasel phrases that are the hallmark of the sad and irritating career of the worst President the United States has had and the worst it is likely to have. But lies are as much a part of Carter’s post-Whitehouse career as the phrase “I’ll never lie to you” was part of his initial appeal. That numerous associates of the risible “Carter Center” have resigned because this time the lies were too thick to be swallowed smoothly in exchange for a check is well documented.

But to think that Simon & Schuster are going to spend one penny on a “fact-checking” system or a “code of ethics” is simply foolish. Book publishers don’t do that and not because, as was stated in the same article:

“It’s not realistic,” the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, Sara Nelson, said. The call for publishers to have “full-on fact checking” does not make economic sense, she said, as they publish a lot of books.

Publishers won’t do it because they not only don’t have to (it would be costly, but not nearly as much as the millions they lavish on their pet authors), but because fact-checking our many fanciful and forthrightly lying authors would not be in the publishers’ interests.

It’s not totally economic. Many facts can be checked in 30 seconds of web searching and probably wouldn’t add that much to the money being paid a freelance copy editor, and as Van der Leun points out, even at maximum expense it couldn’t compete with millions paid to celebrity authors. The non-economic problem is twofold: even for the “attack dog” copy editors Van der Leun mentions, it’s not realistic to expect us to expend the mental energy to question every fact in the book, which leaves us checking only the ones we know or sense to be wrong. Which leads us to the second part of the problem. Van der Leun:

Publishers know when authors are lying but, as long as the lies map to the publishing industry’s internal view of itself, that’s just fine with them. It’s not about being “true,” but being “true to your school.”

I disagree. It’s worse than that: in a book with ideological slant that caters to the editors’ worldview, they can no longer tell fact from opinion or even from fiction, because if lies fit in nicely in with their worldview then, looping back to the first part of the problem, it does not occur to the editor to question the “fact,” much less check it. Something has to seem wrong before it gets checked; “if it sounds good, print it” becomes the de facto rule.

Celebrity authors are all well and good; the author as luminary in the editors’ worldview just makes it that much more unlikely that they will question his facts. Fact checking exists, but a fact needs to seem like it should be checked before it will be. Simple as that. If the distortions and lies are simply part of the worldview a particular editor has been listening to for years, they pass as part of the wallpaper, never noticed or remarked.

When you care enough to make the “larger point,” even when the “larger point” has squat-all to do with the atrocity at hand. Obama in a talk that began with Virginia Tech but somehow managed to wander back to his pet themes:

“There’s also another kind of violence that we’re going to have to think about. It’s not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways,” he said, and goes on to catalogue other forms of “violence.”

There’s the “verbal violence” of Imus.

Whether it’s deliberate or just thoughtless, I hope he finds out shortly that trying to divert attention and emotion from the cold-blooded brutal murder of 32 people back to an already-punished verbal insult, however racially charged, backfires. And there was more:

There’s “the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country.”

As Ben Smith at Politico says:

Many politicians would avoid, I think, suggesting that outsourcing and mass-murder belong in the same category.

Via Ace.

O’Reilly and Geraldo lose it, big time, over the illegal alien drunk driver who killed Alison Kunhardt, 17, and Tessa Tranchant, 16, last week in Virginia. The red-faced loss of control was startling enough. But in all the yelling, O’Reilly somehow failed to use the words that would get his point across–not to Geraldo, he was deaf to reason–but to any viewers who may have been wavering towards Geraldo’s side:

If the law had been followed, that man, Ramos, would not have been where he was at the time he was, drunk, sober, or in any other condition. And those two girls would still be alive. Geraldo can scream all he wants about the thousands of fatalities from drunk driving. How would he like to stop them? Seems to me about the most effective way, if you can manage it, is to prevent the presence of the drunk driver altogether. Seems to me that the government, not being able to foresee all ends, might want to consider that as a general policy, following the law will probably lead to better ends than not. Seems to me that Geraldo’s “17,000” don’t matter a whit right now to the parents of those two girls. Stats don’t, when it’s your kid.

Whatever Geraldo thinks, Bill was the farthest possible from making a political point. He was making a personal one, though he was too angry to use the right words. For those girls, for their parents, if Ramos had been deported for his illegal status, two dead girls would be alive and their parents spared the worst kind of grief. Yes, 17,000 other Americans may have lost their lives to 17,000 drunken American drivers in whatever fiscal period Geraldo was babbling about. It’s entirely irrelevant to the point that these two deaths need never have happened, had that man, Ramos, not been there. Liberals love individual life so much, as long as it’s in the body of somebody “disadvantaged.” It doesn’t get more disadvantaged than death for those two Viriginia girls.

Update: Patterico with the analogy that makes my point. Two extra “drinks” that would have been unspilled, had this criminal been removed from this country.

I’m off for the weekend, so just a few thoughts until I return next week.

1) Dear Dr. Dobson, don’t you realize this kind of thing annoys even Christians? It’s not your business to pronounce on whether any other man is a Christian or not, and it’s far worse than arrogant for you to redefine “Christian” to mean “public figure who speaks openly about his faith.” If you want to see an outspoken Christian in the White House, say that. And then say whom you endorse. Say whom you won’t endorse because they’re not outspoken enough, but when you say they’re not Christian enough, you’ve crossed the line. Please get over yourself. Or, rather, pay attention to your own Christianity and let Mr. Fred Thompson take care of his, both public and private. Love, A Christian

2) Speaking of Mr. Fred Thompson, I think I love him.

3) In an internet whirlwind of headline-skimming and soundbite-grabbing, you may not have 45 minutes to watch this. If you don’t have 45, trust me: watch 20 or so. A taste:

The modern liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. … They’re convinced that … the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found, can only be found, in the attempt to be right. See, if nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn’t disagree, surely we wouldn’t fight. If we didn’t fight, of course we wouldn’t go to war. Without war there’d be no poverty, without poverty there’d be no crime, without crime there’d be no injustice. It’s a utopian vision, and all that’s required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality and decency.

Speaking truth to flower power.

4) Your Dancing with the Stars prediction: It’ll come down to Laila Ali and–yeah, I’m as surprised as you are–Joey Fatone, formerly of N’Sync. The girl can groove, and the boy can move. The rest of the top five will be John Ratzenburger, Ian Ziering (did his mother really name him Aye-in, or is that just a conceit he plastered over Ee-in?), and Apolo Anton Ohno. The women are always at a disadvantage on this show, because if a man gets the steps right and has a little charm, he’s good to go, but if a woman doesn’t have the fiery persona of the ballroom dancer, it’s instantly all too obvious. And this season the women just aren’t feeling it so far, so it’ll be all men in the final weeks–except, of course, Laila, who could win it all if she keeps going like she has been. Football hero can mambo; boxer can mambo.

5) Last but not least, thoughts and prayers for Tony Snow.

Alan Sullivan with Best Word Use of the Day: Numinous. One of Lewis’s most-used words and the most concise and beautiful for meaning “supernatural, of the spiritual realm.” And probably associated in his mind with Tolkien’s Numenor, although Tolkien was at pains (and sometimes borderline uncharitable to Lewis) to set inquiring readers straight on the fact that “Numenor” in no way derived from “numinous” and was unrelated to Lewis’s unwelcome use of “Numinor.”

Also, in which I learn about sheer boundaries and what causes turbulence in clear air:

Such clouds may form low in the atmosphere, like these off California, or much higher, at cirrus levels. They are the visible form of eddies at a sheer boundary. Such phenomena are common in clear air, and they make for a bumpy ride when aircraft encounter them. If there is just enough moisture, clouds may provide a signature for the process.

Eddies in the air, just like in water. Fascinating, Captain. And good for an aspiring pilot to know. And yes, numinous.