Sorry. Taking a unplanned breather.

The L&T Casey is in Hawaii and, with her gone,  mrs TBogg needs amusing (wink wink nudge nudge – say no more). I’m not sure what will happen when Casey leaves for grad school in NYC in August but I’m sure we’ll work out some kind of new routine.

Beyond that, the weather is beautiful and I find myself spending more time staring longingly out the window, making me feel like a kid still in school and summer is already here but summer vacation is not. The good news is that I’ve been getting a lot of reading done that doesn’t involve stupid internet people making absurd and unsupportable assertions that, not only prove that God is on their side, but also that victory is at hand if you just squint your eyes and pretend that reality will see it their way just this once. Finally. Anyway, there were a couple of books that people had sent to me for Kindle and, since since I don’t have one and the L&T isn’t using hers, I’ve been taking it out for a spin. I never thought I’d prefer a Kindle to a good old fashioned book … but, Tebow help me,  I do.

So…

In the meantime, please patronize the  other fine bloggers listed below and kind of to your right, because I’m fairly certain that someone is saying something dumb on the internet.

I’ll be back soon … which is more than Andrew Breitbart can say.

The Left Is Getting Clobbered on Twitter

We are in the early stages of the 2012 campaign season, with a lot of battlespace preparation going on. In the skirmishing so far, one perhaps surprising media advantage has become clear: the right is clobbering the left on Twitter.

Maybe it’s because Twitter puts a premium on brevity and cleverness. I don’t know. But for some reason, it seems to be a natural medium for conservatives. We saw it when the Hilary Rosen interview (“Ann Romney never worked a day in her life”) prompted a Twitterstorm. We saw it again when #ObamaEatsDogs exploded, and when #Julia blew up in the White House’s face like an exploding cigar.

[...]

If you haven’t yet started using Twitter, you should give it a try. You can follow, among countless others, Michelle Malkin, Jim Treacher, David Burge (Iowahawk), Jonah Goldberg, Melissa Clouthier, Big Government, Byron York, Ed Morrissey, Steve Hayward, and, as I said, countless more, including me.

I think it is wonderful that John Hinderaker and The Conservatives have landed on Twitter Beach, planted their flag, and claimed it as their own from which they can display their brilliance in 140 characters or less which will then go BOOM! like little words IED’s right in the libtards faces. After all, that is how elections (and wars!) will be won from this day forward. Of course, as Susan of Texas points out, to really get a feel for how conservatives have mastered the form (it’s their “natural medium”!), you need only turn to one of Hinderaker’s Recommended Twatters: author, noted conservative intellectual, 2-time Pulitzer nominee, 11-time Super Bowl participant (if by ‘participant’ you mean he watched it on TV) and founding member of the  Algonquin Children’s  Round Table at National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg to see how it is done:

This is why the editor and fact-checkers on Jonah’s new book were forced to surrender sharp objects as well as their belts and shoelaces when they came to work every day. For their own protection of course.

(Enthusiastic golf clap for Susan of Texas)

… even you, Ann Romney.

"A little off the sides, maybe touch up the neck"

It probably doesn’t mean anything that, when Romney lamprey Kerry Healey was called upon to defend Young Master Mitt “The Demon Barber Of Cranbrook*” Romney from accusations that he formed a wilding gang of preppies to go Full Metal Tonsorial on a presumably gay classmate, Healey elected to point out that Mitt has always been kind to Texas Gov. Rick “Governor Goodhair” Perry who has long been rumored to be gay:

An adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign defended the candidate’s “kind impulses” on Friday, pointing to his treatment of Texas Gov. Rick Perry during recent GOP debates as proof.

Kerry Healey, Romney’s former lieutenant governor in Massachusetts and now an adviser to the Romney campaign, defended the presumptive GOP nominee against charges that he bullied other students during his high school years.

[...]

In defending Romney as “deeply compassionate” and “unfailingly kind,” she pointed to moments during the GOP primary when Romney was “being attacked from every side.”

“His response was always professional, calm, civil,” she pointed out. “In fact, he even intervened on behalf [of] — to try to help — Gov. Perry when he was stumbling [in attempting to remember a talking point during a debate]. His impulses are very kind impulses and there should be no debate about whether or not Gov. Romney is a bully.”

Bonus points should be given to Healey for reminding people that Mitt is also kind to dumb animals.

*Demon Barber of Cranbrook is courtesy of something I saw on the twitter.

Sucker.

This will be the dogs looking anxiously out the window waiting for us to return.

Because they love us.

Anyway, this person (writing as an all-knowing and wise Bristol Palin, so, like ‘science fiction’) wrote a thing about that Oblamer black fella who used his terrorist pals to deny Sarah Palin, Queen of the North, her rightful place on the Iron Throne, and how he is cool with non-opposite marriage now because his daughters have friends with gay baby-momma + other gay baby-momma for “parents”:

While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads.  In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage.  Or that – as great as her friends may be – we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home.  Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.

Yes. Marriage is a sacred union that is the sole province of a man and a woman that usually follows getting knocked up by doing it ‘Iditarod-style’ in the back seat of Camaro, and besides the gays can always try trial marriages because those are not illegal for gays. Yet.

Anyway, it’s too bad that Malia & Sasha Obama don’t have a “real” (white) father, like Todd Palin, with his stern rules about dating like “Be in by midnight”, “Don’t forget to bring me home some beer” and “Spitters are quitters”.

Word, to your baby-momma.

Alex Pareene has a few things to say about Nobel/Pulitzer/Publisher’s Clearing House Prize nominee Jonah Goldberg:

As he’s aged, and begun wearing his fancy “best-selling author” smoking jacket around the house, Goldberg has supplemented his “Battlestar Galactica” references with references to philosophers and scholars — Burke, Hume, etc. — in order to appear serious. The effect is similar to that of a chimp wearing a top hat and monocle. His need to be taken seriously is forever doomed by his addiction to lazy generalities. That tension was apparent in the reception that greeted his first book, and his reaction to that reception.

There is SO much more…

Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future,’” in which the reporter described how “young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline.” The “5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates” described in the piece’s sidebar “are rewriting the history of race.” While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.

Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm” blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap,” at worst.

For instance, the author of a dissertation on the history of black midwifery began her research, she told the Chronicle, because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature.” Another graduate student blamed the housing crisis in America on institutional racism. And a third argued that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWhorter have “played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.”

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic.

Whoa whoa whoa. Let’s back up here, little filly.

In Schaefer Riley’s sub-500 word post she mocked the African-American graduate student’s dissertations based solely on the titles as “obscure at best and a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap, at worst”.

But and the people who called her out on it were “puerile to vitriolic”.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Her defense:

Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren’t even available. Which didn’t seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.

Stacey Patton’s (since Schaefer Riley can’t bear to mention her name) CHE article was about the changing dynamic of African-American studies:

“Now with the development of more Ph.D. programs, it is very clear that scholars in African-American studies are at the forefront of producing valuable research that’s interdisciplinary and cuts across law, literature studies, social science, and other disciplines,” Ms. Biondi says. “Black studies is not a social-service agency aiming to ameliorate racial discontent. It is an area of rigorous intellectual inquiry that is here to stay.”

…whereas Schaefer Riley’s idea of academic discourse is to LOL! at specific students (even Ann Fucking Althouse figured that out) and their dissertations because they are dumb and the students are not Naomi Schaefer Riley who writes important stuff about academia, which she pointed out with a narcissistic appeal to her own authority when called to defend her post at Brainstorm:

Let me take the first two criticisms first. My qualifications to post on this blog consist of the fact that I have been a journalist writing about higher education for close to 15 years now. My work has been published in every major newspaper in the country and I have written two books on the subject as well. The editors at those papers and those publishers and at The Chronicle have all been aware that I hold no advanced degree. Black studies is now an academic discipline at most universities, which means I get to comment on that too. If the dissertations in question were written by white people, I’d call them irrelevant and partisan as well. Moreover, I have called other disciplines (having nothing to do with race) irrelevant and partisan.

Also, you people are stupid and Naomi Schaefer Riley knows what people really want:

Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them. I read some academic publications (as they relate to other research I do), but there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery. In fact, I’d venture to say that fewer than 20 people in the whole world will read it. And the same holds true for the others that are mentioned in the piece.

A simple “yes, I was probably being a bit too facile and unfair to the graduate students and maybe I shouldn’t have just posted whatever came out of my ass at that particular moment” probably would have sufficed, but: No. Now Naomi Schaefer Riley is a victim of the politically correct notion that a minimum of research (Next time, show work!) is expected of so-called experts.

God knows we already have enough Katie Roiphe’s, Caitlin Flanagan’s and Megan McArdle’s littering up the landscape…

Lindsay Beyerstein is much nicer about this than I am.

Nice.

I also knew from the races in 2010 that I was a likely target of Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and other Super Pacs dedicated to defeating at least one Republican as a purification exercise to enhance their influence over other Republican legislators.

Mitt Romney better watch his ass.