Happy Birthday

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Fast Exit

Two things, quickly; I had a little computer glitch and it's getting late. The "fast exit" is mine. One, how did the "Joe Lieberman for Def Sec" thing become chatter fodder? It's another wingnut wet dream. Remember "Cheney will step down and Condimelda will run/ be appointed in his place?" Or substitute McCain. Or substitute Rudy. They're either convinced that at some point they'll find a label for New Coke that'll suddenly make people drink it, or they've become an army of John Deloreans looking to score enough nose candy to refloat the franchise. Okay, that's what they do, even in the best of times, but why is Keith Olbermann devoting time to it?

Lieberman has nothing in his resumé to suggest he's the man for the job, beyond his toadying for Bush, getting deferments in his own day, and his willingness to sacrifice American lives for Israel. Haven't we had enough disaster yet?

On a related note, I've enjoyed the "rumors" that "we might withdraw some troops" after the election. The CBO said two years ago that after December 2005 we'd have 64,000 troops available for Iraq. We haven't changed anything since then. We shuffled some deployments--40,000 is the number that sticks in my head--but that was mostly to keep domestic requirements up. At best I think we can assume that come January anything over 105,000 is running on bald tires, spavined shocks, and bankrupt brakes, and hasn't slept in 37 hours.

That's the sort of reality that's very likely behind John Murtha going public, and the sort of reality that disappeared from public view when the personal attacks followed. We're out of gas. Bush's hot-button vocabulary can't change it. Rumsfeld trying to re-float the "there are more auto accident deaths in Colorado than combat deaths in Iraq" bullshit won't change it. And Cheney is...Cheney.

Reasons To Go On Living

A. The Grammys

Nominees were announced Thursday. I couldn't care less about them, but I sure do love the categories, though not all 108 of them equally, of course. My favorites, in no particular order:

Best Classical Crossover Album

Best Classical Contemporary Composition

Best Surround Sound Album

Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical

Best Recording Package

Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package

Best Polka Album

Best Hawaiian Music Album

All 8 Gospel Categories

All 7 Country Categories, but especially Instrumental

Dance Recording

Electronic/Dance Album

Hard Rock Performance

Metal Performance

And the Collaboration Trio:

Best Rap/Sung Collaboration

Best Country Collaboration With Vocals

Pop Collaboration With Vocals

Notes:

1. Unfortunately, there's no real way to use the Grammys as a sort of negative indicator and make money off them, the way you could have, say, sold short any business George W. Bush was ever involved in and you'd now be living on your own island. Or archipelago, even. The most you can be assured of is whoever wins Best New Artist is doomed.

2. I have never seen a Grammy telecast. Not one minute. I'm guessing it's a lot like the Tonys, except that the phony pasted-on smiles are obtained without a prescription.

B. Rachael Ray

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Dec. 5 /PRNewswire/ King World Productions, Inc., announced this week it has given a "firm go" to the new, daily, one-hour series featuring dynamic television personality and best-selling author Rachael Ray, already having sold the series to stations representing more than 70% of the country, according to Roger King, Chief Executive Officer, CBS Enterprises and King World.

My first impression: Awesome!
Second thoughts: I really wish they'd given her a sitcom, like Emeril.

Okay, here's the deal: I wouldn't really give Rachael Ray a second thought, except that 1) she bubbles. Nobody who bubbles should really be trusted with anything remotely resembling an art. Capital-A Art is the model here, but it's true of any creative act. James Joyce did not bubble. Paul Klee was not a bubbler. Nor Segovia. Christopher Wren, Giotto, Stravinsky, none of those guys so much as bubbed. Bubbling is possible only when one just doesn't get it. People who bubble have houses decorated with that sky-blue-on-white-and-lots-of-dried-garland "country" look, and they put cement geese in the front yard and dress them in bonnets, and they generally wear enough fragrance to make you wonder if they've got gangrene but have bravely vowed to remain cheerful regardless. Bubbling, aka dynamic television personality, is no doubt a huge selling point when it comes to hosting a daily, one-hour, soul-stealing chat show, and I wish her well. I'm not even personally opposed to that 30-minute meal schtick, but someone at the Food Network should have known enough not to give her a show where she had to demonstrate that she had no idea how to hold a wineglass, let alone what to say about wine. Leave that stuff to the terminally embittered. Embitterment is part of the initiation into genuine culture. There's a limited supply of that sort of thing, but we'll never run out of chronic enthusers. 2) When she's not saying "Awesome!!" or "Yummy!!" (her normal tone of voice is two-exclamation-points) she's jargonizing some perfectly good English word or phrase and liberally seasoning with Sta-Kute™, the C-student's lowfat substitute for reading comprehension. "Veggies". Yuck. Do you eat "Chickies"? "Rack of Lamies"? Perhaps a nice "hor-dervie" to begin the meal? Some proscuitties with mellies? No wonder babies barf so much. And Extra-Virgin Olive Oil should not be used indiscriminately, any more than you'd use classed-growth Bordeaux to make salad dressing, but if you must, call it "Extra-Virgin Olive Oil", not "EVO". "EVO" was that English band that was part chamber orchestra. Are you in such a hurry that saving five syllables means something? Life is short, but it's not that short. You'd realize that if you'd stop bubbling.

Anyway, best of luck, Ms Ray, and to all the fine folks at King World, and I've got seven months in the "How long before an old boyfriend sells nude pics to an internet porn site" in the pool.

Friday Shuffle

A.C. Newman, Drink To Me Babe, Then
Ian Dury, Quiet
Pierre Bensusan, Jigs: Merrily Kissed the Quaker/ Cunla
The Lovin' Spoonful, Coconut Grove
Ike and Tina Turner, Rock Me Baby
Jane's Addiction, Been Caught Stealing
Richard Buckner, Straight
Flaco Jimenez with Dwight Yoakam, Carmelita
Kings of Leon, Molly's Chambers
John Renbourn, My Johnny Was A Shoemaker

Happy Birthday

James Grover Thurber
December 8, 1894--November 2, 1961

I stumbled upon My Life and Hard Times in the junior high library when I was fourteen, and I've been laughing at it ever since. Should you have the dubious distinction of meeting me, the words "Briggs Beall", "Zenas died of the chestnut blight in '66", or "My mother thought--or rather knew,--that it was dangerous to drive a car without gasoline" will immediately incapacitate me long enough for you to escape. Most of the cartoon captions will work just as well; "What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?" or "Do you ever have fears that you will cease to be before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain?", just to list a couple of suggestions.

Thurber, Borges, Pynchon, and Raymond Chandler are the four writers whose every published word I think I've read. Still working on the Proust thing.

Pearl of Wisdom

Tammy Bruce, "We Will Never Forget: Pearl Harbor Day"

The first question is, does it really count as "not forgetting" when you make about half of it up?

In my youth you couldn't swing a cat without hitting someone who was in the middle of telling everyone unlucky enough to be within earshot that the reason Rome fell was moral decay. This seems, mercifully, to have disappeared. I don't know if that's because nobody gives a shit about Rome unless Hollywood figures out a way to make Gladiator II, or because a generation discovered, courtesy of I, Claudius, that even at the height of Empire the Romans didn't exactly have the same moral code as Ozzy and Harriet. I think it's safe to to rule out the sort of person who says such things suddenly becoming historically savvy enough to realize the last two centuries of the West's decline coincided with Christianity as the state religion.

Tammy Bruce may provide an answer, namely, that it's easier, more relevant, and a lot more fun to simply make up moral lessons from sixty years ago. Maybe the final ascension of modern advertising has hipped our public moralists to the fact that the average attention span is now so short you can make up shit about stuff that happened in some people's living memory:

I've noted a number of times how we owe Europeans, and especially the English,...

Wait a minute. Why especially the English? Because your knowledge of WWII comes from watching Richard Burton flicks?

...a deep apology for not intervening sooner in World War II. Until the strike on Pearl Harbor, we allowed so-called Pacifists and isolationists to determine this nation's (non)reaction to genocide and naked aggression.

Wait a minute. Why so-called Pacifists? A Pacifist is a Pacifist, and though I wouldn't consign everyone so-called to a refusal to fight under any and all circumstances, I think it's safe to say that many so-called Pacifists between the wars were, in fact, genuine Pacifists. This sort of devolution of language is contemptible. It happens on the teevee news all the time--you're supposed to supply the argument for the speaker after she gives you a hint about her opinion in the matter.

It is, in fact, the "isolationists" who deserve that so-called, because the term was and is meant to be derogatory. The majority of Americans in the 20s and 30s opposed being drawn into another European war. You can look this sort of thing up. There was strong sentiment, particularly in the agrarian Midwest and West, that banking interests and armaments manufacturers had greatly influenced the decision to enter the war for their own profit. The Senate investigated the munitions industry from 1934-36, and passed Neutrality Acts in '35, '36, and '37. And many of the loudest voices for what came to be denigrated as "isolationism" came from the business community, which feared that Roosevelt would use foreign entanglement to tighten the grip of the New Deal. You can look that up, too. The suggestion that "isolationists" were starry-eyed proto-hippie peaceniks is completely unwarranted, except that Tammy doesn't like them either.

Beyond the recasting of the historical record to fit the demands of her morality tale, Tammy's got her facts wrong. The high-water mark of isolationism was passed in the late 30s. By the time the real nature of Nazi aggression was clear, the majority of Americans had switched sides. Wendell Wilke, the Republican, was the isolationist candidate in 1940 ("I shall never send an American boy to fight in a European war!"). He lost to FDR. You can look that up. The Lend-Lease Act, which kept Britain afloat and which assuredly would have led to our involvement in Europe within a short time, was passed in the spring of 1941. The country's first pre-war conscription began with the fall of France in 1940.

Suggesting, by the way, that the American people were aware of, but indifferent to, the Holocaust before the war began is simply repugnant and a smear of the very people you're pretending to celebrate. Yes, the world knew the Nazis were anti-Semites, but it's a vast leap to imagining the unthinkable, that they were actually trying to exterminate every Jew in Europe. People's attention was focused mainly on the military actions of the war. My father tells me that he first heard anything about the death camps was when we overran them in '45. He also says, difficult as it is to believe for someone who hasn't a clue what went on at the time, that no one realized that FDR was confined to a wheelchair until after his death. It's one thing to mistake hindsight for insight. It's quite another to demand to know why people didn't get it before it happened.

Because we waited and did nothing as the Axis powers raped the world, millions died. Of all the things we learned during World War II, from its beginnings in 1933 when Japan invaded China, it is to never mistake not being at war for peace.

Horseshit. You people haven't quite learned that even as the world's only military superpower we can't dictate everything that happens on the face of the globe. We weren't anything close to a superpower in the 30s. We had no army to send to Europe in September 1939. If you wish to argue that now, as a superpower, we ought to do what we can to prevent those sorts of horrors, do so. But "we did nothing as the Axis raped the world" is just another of your repulsive fairy tales.

Today is the 64th anniversary of that tragic day when the disease of fascism attacked us at home. Eventually it always does and on December 7, 1941 our looking away emboldened the enemy as they struck without warning. That, like September 11th, was a day of murder forcing our reluctant nation into war.

Sigh. I suppose the good news is that sixty years hence there won't be many people left with this particular hatchet of an historical analogy to grind. Compare an attack on a military installation with a murderous terrorist act all you wish, but let's stay clear on the history. The attack on Pearl Harbor came without warning, but the Japanese intended to inform us that a state of war existed before the attack, but their envoys were an hour and a half late in delivering the message. We had been in tense negotiations with them for some time, and by September had informed our commanders in the Pacific that war was imminent. Roosevelt had specifically rejected the suggestion that we attack first, saying that "democracies do not do that."

Make of either situation what you will, but 9/11 is not a repeat of Pearl Harbor.

And to the families of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, at Pearl Harbor and throughout that horrific war and the wars that followed, thank you for your gift to this nation, and a free world.

I guess I'll just wait for the follow-up column that explains how the "wars that followed" have brought the gift of freedom to the nation.

Happy Birthday

Tom Waits: born December 7, 1949

"I wasn't thrilled by Blue Cheer, so I found an
alternative, even if it was Bing Crosby."

Wow. Tough Room.

Michael Musto on Countdown last night, accessing Kevin Federline's future prospects:

"Oh, there are plenty of available women in Hollywood. Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Simpson, Clay Aiken..."

War on Christmas: Red State Recon Report

Last evening, after cleverly disguising myself as a bald, middle-aged suburbanite, I took a tour of churches within a couple miles of my home. Sixteen churches. Not one single solitary creche.

"Ha!" I thought. "Ha ha!" How can they expect me to honor the most sacred season on the Christian calendar when they so obviously don't?

But then it occurred to me--maybe some other Anti-Christmas guerilla cell had stolen them all. Note to self: figure out how to contact the Underground.

Either way, it seems like encouraging news. Just for the record, I did spot one primary-colored plastic Nativity on a private lawn. Also numerous Santas, some quadruped ruminants, possibly of the order Artiodactyla, numerous snowmen, none made of snow, and an assortment of very large candies. Plus two neglected U.S. flags and a Notre Dame Fighting Irish banner, which must count for something.

I do live on the tonier side of town, so my sample may include a greater proportion of mainstream churches whose members are all going to Hell anyway, and the final count includes both a Seventh Day Adventist compound and a Quaker meeting hall, neither of whom could be expected to participate. For the sake of completeness I drove past two Synagogues, just to see if they'd gotten the message that tolerance means honoring the dominant culture. Not yet.

What A State To Be In

Anybody get the license number of that truck?

At the end of November the U.S. District Court for southern Indiana ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Hinrichs, et al. v. Bosma. "Bosma" is Brian Bosma, the (need I say it?) Republican Speaker of the Indiana House. At issue was sectarian prayer being read at the opening of House business. In the last session, of the 53 prayers offered at the beginning of business, twenty-nine were specifically offered in the name of Jesus or Our Savior, or God's Son. The tearing point was the performance of one Reverend Brown, whom Bosma reintroduced after his prayer (and the Plejullejunce) to favor the House with his rendition of "Just a Closer Walk With Jesus". Reportedly one Jewish member of the House walked out.

Bosma's reaction was suitable, of course, and a real lesson for all the children out there. He's trying to decide whether to get around the ruling or just ignore it altogether.

Not to miss a photo-op, Archbishop Governor Mitch "Stretch" Daniels called the ruling "regrettable". "Not everything that ought to be should be dictated by a court," Daniels said. Instead, he said, the dispute over overtly Christian prayers in the Indiana House would have been better resolved "by private and voluntary agreement." No word on whether the Guv swapped his Jes' Folks workshirt for a clerical collar for the occasion.

Okay, first, we have a free teeshirt for the tenth caller who can explain what "not everything that ought to be dictated should be" means in English. But beyond that, of course it should have been resolved by voluntary agreement. And could have been easily, by doing a better job of enforcing the guidelines which called for ecumenicism. It wasn't resolved because Bosma wanted to make a political issue of it. Sorta like Mitch:

"I just think it's regrettable," Daniels said. "It's in a long line now of, I think, confusing and sometimes clumsy attempts by the courts to insert themselves into this issue." Daniels, who said he has only read a summary of the 60-page decision, said he believes prayer is "very often appropriate in a country founded on religious principles."

Clumsy and confusing? Well, yes, if by that you mean clear and easily understood, even by the members of your party who want to use the people's house to trample on the rights of individuals for petty political gain. Read the decision, Guv. Hell, even the summary had to make you aware that prayer is still okey-dokey, it's the sectarian part which is illegal.

And frankly, anybody who paid even the slightest attention to the last legislative session has got to conclude that prayer just doesn't do any good. If you ask me we'd be better off opening sessions with some really good doo-wop.

The other big local news--well, it's all secondary to the Colts, of course...which reminds me, will all the professional jock sniffers who've ever pointed out that Peyton Manning "doesn't have a Ring" kindly shut up about the historical importance of an undefeated season?--has been the possible sale of Indianapolis-based regional supermarket operator Marsh Supermarkets, which reported a $3.4 million loss in the second quarter. You'd think from the uproar that people imagined there was about to be a food shortage. The loss was immediately chalked up to Wal-Mart's competitive advantages. There also was considerable teeth gnashing over all of Marsh's charitable works and community involvement.

Somebody enlighten me--does this sort of thing happen in the civilized world? It's been below freezing here for several days and the damn sidewalks are treacherous from the frozen tears. I'll dig a root cellar and can my own vegetables before I'll ever shop at Wal-Mart, but sheesh. Marsh has swallowed up or taken over any number of competitors over the past decade. Where were their front-page headlines?

Okay, full disclosure. One of the major benefactors of the Marsh family is the Republican party, but I'm sure they'll manage. That's not the axe I have to grind. I used to do 90% of my shopping at Marsh, which is the closest grocery to me, but now it's about 50%, because Marsh is in the business of selling eye-level shelf space and door-handle cooler positions to whomever comes up with the best kickbacks and free golf clubs. Shop there for a month and it's obvious. The list of name-brand items which have simply disappeared from their shelves at one point or another is an impressive one. If you ever see a manager in person in my local store (it has five), he or she is busy schmoozing a vendor, not making sure customers are being taken care of. Marsh is a textbook case of how large retailers are really in the business of selling you what they want you to buy instead of providing what you want, while chasing the hot trends they read about in trade mags.

Finally, the whole thing is a sham. Marsh has never competed with Wal-Mart. They advertise service and selection. They actually may have lost $3.4 large last quarter, and they may have actually contracted Wall Street to look for a buyer, but it's not gonna happen overnight, as they well know. It's just curious how our sacred trust in the capitalist system plays out. It's survival of the fittest when they're screwing employees out of wages and benefits, but if Don Marsh can't run his business at a profit suddenly the business section is vilifying the Big Boxes and there's a picture of a weeping statue of the Virgin on the front page. So, bye-bye, Don. Write if you and the twenty-seven little Marshes at company HQ find work. And try to sell to someone competent, okay?

Oh No, It's Bobo

Joining David this week are Toni Basil, Fred "Mr. Pinguin" Berry,
and the rest of the Multiple Reality Syndrome Dancers

David Brooks, "Multiple Reality Syndrome", Sunday Times

Here's the thing about Brooks: when I read the Sunday I know he's back there, like a deli container of bad tuna salad that's migrated to the back of the fridge and you know will go toxic at any moment. You'd like to ignore it for a day or two longer, like maybe somebody's gonna decide to eat it--yeah, right--and you won't have to dump the thing down the disposal followed by a baking soda and vinegar douche. You know it's gotta be done, and the longer you wait the worse it'll be, but there's always that tiny hope.

Sometimes the headline'll give you an out, but no such luck today. You just know that "Multiple Reality Syndrome" not only doesn't refer to the Bush administration's talent for brachiating through "Reality's" lush canopy like a lust-crazed gibbon, but that in fact the administration will be the one entity which doesn't suffer from the disease, and in fact will be valiantly trying the cure the rest of us. Sure enough, by the time it makes its entrance, in paragraph three:

It's been interesting to watch the Bush administration grapple with these ambiguities, contradictions and dissonances. When the war first began to deteriorate, the Bushies exuded what Packer calls a "theology of confidence." The president felt he had to display resolve or his team's morale would suffer. Public speeches were relentlessly positive, even to the point of fantasy.

So, "Multiple Reality Syndrome" is the condition that obtains when "reality" is complex, multi-faceted, obscured by shifting shadows, ambiguities, and half-truths; roughly the equivalent of what you or I encounter walking down the average street on the average morning, excepting it generally doesn't cause us to blurt out contradictory statements every few feet in the hopes that something we say might sound believable. It's interesting to watch as the Bush administration grapples for a handle on this wholly unexpected set of circumstances.

'Cause, you know, under the rules of "Ordinary Reality" we'd still be digging out from underneath all those garlands. When the expected "reality" didn't materialize, the administration was forced by circumstances to insist that everything was Hunky-Dory; otherwise, Bad Mojo could have taken over:

Administration officials felt compelled to assert a mastery of events they plainly did not possess. Sometimes I'd come away from off-the-record conversations and background briefings feeling my intelligence had been insulted, because even in private, officials would ignore realities that were on newspaper front pages....

There was a vast gap between the eighth-grade level of some public statements and the graduate-school level of private White House conversations. It was about this time that a bewildered newcomer to the Bush administration interrupted an interview to ask me why I thought there was such a big difference between the probing and realistic President Bush he would see in the Oval Office, and the pat and repetitive Bush he would see at press conferences and on TV.

Well, as you might expect with so much MRS going around and only enough vaccine for selected administration officials and their friends in the mass media, bewilderment is pretty rampant. For example, I just got a touch of it wondering how it is an opinion writer for the New York Times had an inside view of the conflict between the simple-minded-to-the-point-of-insult public pronouncements of the Bush administration and the gripping, highly nuanced, Hobbesian, even, discussions which were going on in the Very Nerve Center of the Free World, yet he never once seemed to write about it, or even mention the disconnect, let alone criticize the junior-high rhetoric as long as it seemed to be working.

I still wouldn't say deliberation is this administration's strong suit.

Just for the record, what is?

Nor is it really possible for anybody to fully understand reality in Iraq, where nothing is as it seems and the myriad of local conditions often don't cohere into one national picture.

Dave, here's a funny little story for ya. Back in the USENET alt days I was having one of those interminable arguments with one of the AOL idiots who'd just gained access to the internets. Part of the argument revolved around the tying of a knot. I'm a backpacker, and in my youth I did a little rock climbing and rappelling. You learn a thing or two about knots when you depend on them for your continued breathing. My opponent had no notion of the world of knot-tying beyond what you do to your shoelaces. I patiently tried to describe just what was what--it's not easy to convey the tying of a complex knot without pictures, so I was extra careful and serially redundant in my explanation. My opponent, now more like my tormentor, was unconvinced. She took herself off on an AOL-powered ride to the Web, where she found some knot-tying site and cut-and-pasted an explanation back to me. Not surprisingly, it was precisely what I'd told her two days earlier.

So the lesson here, Dave, is this: It took you two-and-a-half years to admit that the situation in Iraq was not, in fact, cheery and rosy and gosh-darned just about bringing democracy to brown people. So kindly do not try to tell the rest of us now that the whole thing is just too complex for coherence. It's one of the finer points of rhetoric, I know, but it's never too late to learn.

Ooopsie

Ruth Holladay, Indianapolis Star Metro section columnist, June 26, 2005:

Professor enmeshed in flap over collegiality

William C. Bradford is a patriot, a veteran and an Apache Indian.
But is he "collegial"?
More on that in a bit. He fought in Desert Storm and Bosnia-Herzegovina, served as a major in the U.S. Army Special Forces and received the Silver Star.
Now the 39-year-old legal scholar is engaged in a battle on the home front -- political correctness in academia.
In 2001, Bradford was hired as an associate professor at Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis. His expertise is international law, federal Indian law and national security/foreign relations law. He has four degrees, including one from Harvard Law.
But he's under fire, he said, because his ideas about the war on terror do not conform to views held by Professors Mary Harter Mitchell, 52, and Florence Wagman Roisman, 66.
They are tenured, a status Bradford is seeking. Bradford said the two women have voted consistently to deny him tenure, despite good academic ratings.
In March 2004, he said, he was told during a review that someone described him as "uncollegial."
That's the new kiss-of-death buzzword. "Faculty seeking to get rid of others claim they are not collegial," Bradford said.
Bradford wrote a defense of the flag after 9/11 -- one that hung in the school lobby until some faculty objected.
He refused to sign a letter sent by Roisman defending Ward Churchill. He's the Colorado professor who called victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns."
Roisman would not comment specifically on Bradford's collegiality or lack thereof. She denied his politics was the issue.

Ruth Holladay, Indianapolis Star Metro section columnist, December 4, 2005:

Truth comes out about professor's background

William C. Bradford has resigned as an associate professor at Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, effective Jan. 1.
He was featured in this space June 26, when he claimed that a faculty committee had voted against him for tenure.
Bradford, 39, maintained that two left-leaning professors were leading the charge for political reasons. They disliked him because he was an Army veteran who supported the war, he said.
One of Bradford's allies, Professor Henry C. Karlson, pointed out that Bradford was the real deal -- awarded the Silver Star and a major in the Special Forces. Bradford said he was in the infantry and military intelligence. He fought in Desert Storm and Bosnia, he said.
On the law school's Web site and its Viewbook, Bradford was profiled as being in the Army infantry from 1990 to 2001. He wore a Silver Star lapel pin around campus. He had a major's gold-leaf insignia plate on his vehicle.
After my column ran portraying Bradford as a victim of a politically correct agenda, I was contacted by retired Army Lt. Col. Keith R. Donnelly, a recent law school graduate, West Point graduate and Gulf War veteran.
Donnelly had long been suspicious of Bradford's background, he said. What really piqued his attention was the Silver Star claim -- "it is a pretty high award for valor, and not many were awarded in Desert Storm."
Independently, Donnelly and I requested Bradford's service record from the Army. It showed he was in the Army Reserve from Sept. 30, 1995, to Oct 23, 2001. He was discharged as a second lieutenant. He had no active duty. He was in military intelligence, not infantry. He received no awards.
Meanwhile, Bradford promoted himself. He blogged on the law school's student Web site. He did radio interviews. He went national on "The O'Reilly Factor." David Horowitz, a champion for conservatives, took up his cause.
When I asked Bradford in late summer about the discrepancy between his record and his claims, he responded with a story that he said could not be made public.
In September, Bradford admitted on the law school blog that he had been assuming names and posting comments in support of himself.

Ruth Holladay was, for many years, the Star's religion writer. The religion column, generally home to fluffy pieces about church outreach and such, became pretty aggressively political and evangelical in outlook under her byline. Her local politics column, by contrast, has become reasonably balanced, especially since Gannett bought the paper from the Pulliam family. The use of evangelical buzzwords like "unchurched" has fallen off dramatically.

Still, reading that first story you see the old "it fits into my worldview so odds are it's true" approach that brings you so many entries at Snopes with a right-wing/religious theme. It's called being credulous. It's excused in this case because it's her byline, and she's the one who got burned. But not just because a source lied to her. It's also because she believed that attributing one side of an internecine squabble was justified if left-wing academics were on the other side.

Then again, she owned up, which I'm betting is more than Horowitz or O'Reilly will do.