POWERLINE style:

"POWERLINE (Hindrocket)

Dean Smackdown Update
We posted yesterday on the debate in Portland last night between Richard Perle and Howard Dean, which we predicted would be the most one-sided affair since the Little Big Horn. Reader John Arcari has a report:

I just read an account of the debate held last night between Richard Perle and Howard Dean wrritten[sic] by a left winger who attended the debate. The highlight of the report is when some 52 year old Democrat threw a shoe at Richard Perle while screaming "mother f****** liar" numerous times as the police dragged him out of the debate hall. He missed Mr. Perle, who took the incident in light fashion. I believe there were local TV stations there, so I would think the whole episode would be on tape. Ah, the Democrat Party at work!!!

There is simply no plumbing the depth to which the American left has fallen. We understand that the "debate" will be televised on Cspan a week from tomorrow.

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I googled the h*** out of "John Arcari", "52 year old democrat," "Richard Perle", "Howard Dean", "debate","shoe", "shoe-throwing in Oregon", "Portland", even "screaming mother f******liar" (both with 5 astrices and with six, just in case our shoe-thrower had sloppy diction and dropped the g when pronouncin the mystery word(I'm making a guess, which is very wrong. Even wronger than poor grammer or spellin.)

But I found nothin. I thought this was curious, because the POWERLINE blog was much ballyhooed this past fall when they ruthlessly exposed that wantonly scurrilous Dan Rather for not realizin that those Killian memos were fakes, created on a computer, and not a 70s era typewriter. All the upstanding journalists at CNN and MSNBC and ABC , et al immediately accepted this mantra, and it rapidly became the received wisdom. (Even though if you really wanted to create fake memos from the 1970s all you'd have to do is go to a Goodwill or Salvation Army thrift store in any major city and pick up an old IBM from that era for ten bucks or so. They were pretty robust and nobody wants them so finding one that's cheap and still functioning is easy. And even though Cory Pein of the Columbia Journalism Review effectively demolished the technical "proofs" offered up by POWERLINE and others in the fall, the august editors of CJR waited until the Jan/Feb '05 issue to print the piece, at which point the upstanding journalists at CNN, MSNBC, et al were no longer interested and probably didn't want to risk not gettin an invite to the inauguration. But I digress.)

So I was a bit taken aback when I saw this post at the newly-Salonized Daou Report, which seemed to have no documented attribution. I checked the actual post at POWERLINE, and sure enough, no attribution.(What left wing blogger? If you are loath to link to her, just write the name of the site; that's better than nothin. And how did Mr. Arcari know the guy was 52 years old? Was it his Uncle Larry? Or did someone say "look at that one-shoed 52 year old man being dragged out by the police. Isn't that disgraceful?" Pretty fishy, if you ask me. Sounds like the calculated making-uppedness of veristic detail by which to lull the casual dummy republican blog reader into believing an account is real when it isn't. Yes, I know I'm makin a shockin allegation without any documentation. And unlike Mr. Hindrocket, I post under the name Hugo Zoom, which probably isn't a real name. Well, I'm going to post the Zoom family coat of arms as my url faviconicon some time next week, so that'll show you, you skeptical types.)

Anyway, back to the incredibly germane points I wanted to make:

(1)I get the impression that either the POWERLINE blog people are just making stuff up, or
(2)even if they're not, if there really WAS a cursing 52 year old shoe-throwing radical at the event , it's a sloppy and grotesquely disingenuous rhetorical device* to suggest that he is somehow representative of the American left as a whole, even if throwing a shoe at Richard Perle does sound like fun. I knew the right was mistrustful of science, but even statistics?

So,I have come to an epiphany: from now on, I'm going to adopt the POWERLINE style of posting. It also looks like a lot of fun, and I was getting tired of looking stuff up and fiddling with that pesky html and imbedding all those bothersome hyperlinks. I think it'll save me a lot of time, even more than not capitalizin and droppin g's.

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According to a right wing website I don't frequent, Hindrocket is really ex-child actor Fred Savage. Reporters swarmed around his Mercedes at a certain posh eatery in Chevy Chase, Maryland, asking him to comment. "You guys make me sick. What do you wanna do, ruin my career in Hollywood? I guess this is what the right has sunk to in this country.. These allegations aren't worth my time. I refuse to comment on them." He got in and angrily sped off.

* * *

I tracked down John Arcari. He's a chiropodist right here in Denton, Texas. It would be wrong to post his address or e-mail like Bill O'Reilly might, so I' ll just post his business phone: 940-387-0212. Office hours are 9:30am to 3:30 pm. Must be a sweet gig, being a chiropodist and getting to leave early all the time like that. Anyway, don't call him collect, cause he'll get mad.

* * *

Epiphany number two: It doesn't work. I'm having difficulty coming up with overblown, distorted, and obviously ridiculous stalking horses that the right wouldn't actually use. I can't even resist the occasional hyperlink. Man, no wonder the POWERLINE blog is so popular. Making crazy sh*t up about the Depths the Right Will Sink To is hard work, to paraphrase what's-his-name.

* I think I'll denounce any statement I don't care for by saying that from now on.

[addendum, Dec 2005: Ok, so Hindraker no longer publishes under a pseudonym, and may have, in fact, stopped before me. But as of 12/26/2005 he still hasn't corrected the typo.]