Spoons

Benjamin Franklin Butler, the Union political general who was appointed military governor of New Orleans in 1862, was given the soubriquet "Spoons" to suggest that even the family silver wasn't safe from his occupying forces. I've always admired the style of the thing. Not as much as I admire Butler's neat solution to his officers being harassed by the good women of Nawlins--the infamous General Order 28, which declared any female showing contempt for Union soldiers would henceforth be treated as a woman of the streets plying her trade--but still, it has an undeniable élan. I'd love to revive it, but the problem is there are two many candidates these days.

Two of the best were in action yesterday, as Michelle Malkin and the Powerline boys were outraged! (imagine that) by the following comment from Ana Marie Cox in the WSJ online:

"[Political blogs] are cliqueish, they're arrogant, they get things wrong." As an example, she cited the Power Line blog (www.powerlineblog.com), whose investigations helped debunk the now-notorious CBS memo about President Bush's National Guard service, but which then got "memo-happy" in the case of the Republican strategy memo on Terri Schiavo, decrying it as a fake. GOP Sen. Mel Martinez later said an aide had written the Schiavo talking points.

"They wouldn't back down -- just like CBS," she said.

Spoons #1 roars back:

The claim that Power Line failed to acknowledge the provenance of the Schiavo "GOP Talking Points" memo continues to be made even though it is demonstrably false .

Designated Spooner #2 Scott Johnson shows his good breeding:

Thank you, Michelle

Michelle Malkin takes issue with a couple of errors in today's free online Wall Street Journal feature .

Before you ask, the other error was an incorrect URL for Powerline in the original edition. But then, I guess no mistake is too small to get worked up over if you're the sort of blogger who sics a stray appostrophe in the possessive form of "it" when you print some "lefty's" email.

The defense? Why, once Sen. Martinez' office admitted it was the source of the memo, the Power Trio acknowledged it! Take that, Wonkette!

Johnson goes one better, pointing out that his regular readers would have learned this before their print edition of the morning paper had arrived! As though the story wasn't all over the internet the previous afternoon.

Say it again: if you had a similar dealing with the local hardware store you'd never trade with them again. No one will ever convince me that Michelle Malkin can't understand the distinction between "wouldn't back down" and "never backed down". I'm fairly confident that, despite their frequent cognitive lapses, Time's Greatest Blog Ever is aware that CBS also "backed down" once the evidence against it was public and incontrovertible. Though I note that neither Spoon was too worked up about Ana Marie's egregious slandering of The Liberal Network.