If there’s one thing worse than Sarah Palin’s book…

…it’s a Maureen Dowd column finding out Sarah Palin’s book is all about Maureen Dowd.

Rush Limbaugh accuses President Obama of something close to treason

I missed this over the weekend, but today’s Maureen Dowd column — yes, I read it, damnit — dredges up this little nugget from Rush Limbaugh’s weekend interview on Fox News:

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace,” Limbaugh accused the president of trying to destroy the economy — yes, the same economy that W. came within a whisker of ruining.

“I have to think that it may be on purpose,” Limbaugh said, “because this is just outrageous, what is happening — a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.”

What the hell? One of the right’s leading political commentators is accusing the president on national television of deliberately bringing harm to his country in order to accrue power. That’s the kind of accusation that should only be made with a bushel of evidence in hand; airing it as a casual and unsupported political attack is vile hackery.

This is the point where lots of folks on the right, eager to have Rush in the corner but not always eager to have to defend his claims, pull the “Rush is just an entertainer” routine. Maybe. I certainly believe that much of what he says is an effort to maximize his audience. But the audience is largely made up of people who believe Rush’s crap. That is, verrrrry roughly, 20 million people a week. And while I don’t want to be alarmist, I do wonder how those millions of people will respond, over time, to being told not merely that the Democratic president is a bad presdient, but that he’s trying to ruin the country in order to take away their freedoms. I fear that can’t come to a good end.

More of Victor Davis Hanson’s highfalutin’ neener-neenerism (And yes: He’s still a conservative Maureen Dowd)

Some commenters were mad that I equated National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson with the execrable Maureen Dowd. Only problem is: He keeps making my case for me.

Here he is today, posting at The Corner:

Since January 2009, we have seen plenty of radical Islamists apprehended in the United States while planning mayhem on a massive scale, and even more violence committed by Islamic terrorists abroad in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been a) serially assuring the Muslim world (often literally amid explosions going off nearby) that we are atoning for and hitting the reset button on the insensitive and cowboyish Bush administration that fostered unnecessary tensions, b) making the case that a kinder and gentler United States is apologizing for 200 years of assorted sins, and c) assuring Americans that the days of unnecessary, Constitution-shredding anti-terrorism policies are over (albeit while quietly keeping intact the Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, renditions, tribunals, etc.). Why, then, are these darn terrorists, whether domestic or foreign, not getting the new “hope and change” message? (Or are they?)

I might not’ve noticed the post if Mike Potemra, another Corner poster, hadn’t commented:

Imagine if someone wrote in October of 2001, “The Republicans promised us that they would be better at keeping the nation safe. But we just lost 3,000 innocent lives to the terrorists — why are the terrorists not getting the ‘tough on national security’ message?” We conservatives would quite correctly have denounced this criticism as both simplistic and opportunistic – but at least it would have been criticism of an actual, you know, failure. The U.S. under Obama, in Victor’s own telling, has been busting the radical Islamists and breaking up the terrorist plots. I congratulate the president and all the federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials involved, and wish them continued success in doing so. There are legitimate questions to be raised about our current anti-terrorism policy; this approach, I think, is wrong-headed and counterproductive.

Right. Hanson has so committed himself to his arch satire of Obama that he’s satirizing success. At least he didn’t use Latin this time.

National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson is just Maureen Dowd with a better knowledge of Latin

If you’ve never heard of Hanson, here’s an excellent and representative example of his writing for National Review’s blog:

Morituri te salutant [Victor Davis Hanson]

The Victory Column and vero possumus megalomania of 2008 have now led to the deification of Obama as our new Caesar, man of letters (who, in the ancient tradition, enslaved a million in Gaul), and to his communications czar’s praising the embattled Mao (her favorite “political philosopher”) for leading China’s Communist legions to glorious victory over those running-dog Nationalists. Add in the classical-column props at the convention and the Moses-like talk about the seas’ receding and the planet’s cooling, and I think this administration assumes we have a Holy Man in the White House. And when you consider the depiction of Fox News as heresy, Rush as the anti-Christ, and the NEA as the medieval church, it all gets, well, sort of creepy.

He does this kind of thing regularly. He’s supposedly an intellectual because he’s written a book about military history (which was hilariously and devastatingly debunked by an actual military historian) but this stuff is really more his stock in trade these days: Every few days, he writes 200 words or so mocking Obama as a “messiah” — and ask yourself when, despite the missteps, anybody in Obama’s crew has ever referred to Fox News, Limbaugh or the NEA in anything approaching religious terms — collects his National Review paycheck and returns a few days later to do the same thing.

It’s all rather Dowdian, his obsession with issues of personality and symbology instead of using his classics education to actually illuminate his readers on the issues of the day. It makes for rather flamboyant reading experience, but I don’t come away feeling like I’ve learned something or heard an argument that I have to carefully consider or respond to. It’s highfalutin’ neener-neenerism masquerading as something deeper.

Brendan really is calling: Tracking down the facts on “pork”

Brendan Skwire is performing an invaluable public service today: The Philly blogger is fact-checking Maureen Dowd — and, by extension, Sen. John McCain — on her characterization of a number of “pork” earmarks in a new spending bill before Congress. Dowd writes:

Before the Senate resoundingly defeated a McCain amendment on Tuesday that would have shorn 9,000 earmarks worth $7.7 billion from the $410 billion spending bill, the Arizona senator twittered lists of offensive bipartisan pork, including:

• $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. “quick peel me a grape,” McCain twittered.

• $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Weslaco, Tex.

• $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa.

• $1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted.

• $819,000 for catfish genetics research in Alabama.

• $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi.

• $951,500 for Sustainable Las Vegas. (McCain, a devotee of Vegas and gambling, must really be against earmarks if he doesn’t want to “sustain” Vegas.)

• $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.”

• $167,000 for the Autry National Center for the American West in Los Angeles. “Hopefully for a Back in the Saddle Again exhibit,” McCain tweeted sarcastically.

• $238,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii. “During these tough economic times with Americans out of work,” McCain twittered.

• $200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

• $209,000 to improve blueberry production and efficiency in Georgia.

“When do we turn off the spigots?” Senator McCain said in his cri de coeur on the Senate floor. “Haven’t we learned anything? Bills like this jeopardize our future.”

Rather than snicker at the punchlines, Brendan is doing something important: Research. He’s finding out the stories behind those earmarks, through a series of calls and web surfing.

On grape genetic research: “According to Associate Director Mark Smith, the reason for the money is to do research on grapes, a $3.5 billion chunk of NY’s economy. Grape cultivation is located upstate in the Finger Lakes region, an area of HIGH unemployment. The research helps identify disease and pest resistant traits, traits that increase production, and consumer research. when asked, Smith told me that this money will help put people to work and shore up an important industry to upstaters.”

On honeybees: “It took a few calls, since the office was closed, but I spoke to Mr. Kevin Hackett, a USDA researcher. he told me that the $1.7 million that Dowd objects to is to study colony collapse disorder, a looming threat to our food supply. Hackett confirmed that 1 in every three bites of food, 33%, is produced through the work of bees. No bees? Then no squash, no apples, no almonds, and no beef either, since the alfalfa and clover cows eat is pollinated by bees.”

On beaver management: “Flooding caused by beaver dams can also destroy agricultural crops. The flat areas throughout many of the important agricultural regions of Mississippi allow just a few beaver dams to flood significant acreage of cropland. This flooding often makes parts of the field inaccessible to farm equipment. Sometimes beaver enter crop fields, cut the plants, and use them for food or dam building material.”

There’s other posts, and more to come, apparently, in Brendan’s series. I won’t make the case that every earmark is a worthy thing, nor that all 9,000 earmarks in this particular bill are wise and just. But I think Brendan is doing a smart thing to push back against politics by punchline — the same scenario that had Bobby Jindal mocking volcano monitoring that could well save lives. The fact that he’s doing it on his own time just makes it a little more amazing.