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I’m looking for a good Latin term for “media whore”. How does Adlatus Prostostarus strike you? Got any better suggestions? I spoke to the publisher, by the way, and they agreed that “Media Whores” was much more marketable than “History’s Lies”, although they say that their publicist would probably, and I quote, “have kittens.”

I pointed out that I’m the perfect man to write this book, since I have absolutely no desire to go on TV promoting it and I could not care less if Eric Alterman or Brave Sir William don’t want to be my best friend and invite me over for slumber parties. So, we’ll see. I’m already having a good time writing the first chapter, though.

This second generation brought to the forefront men with chiseled jaws and names like porn stars, and bleached blondes with journalism-free backgrounds consisting of acting school diplomas and tasteful nude photographs. This model quickly became de riguer for the local news format, which is now such a matter of rote that one cannot easily distinguish between the ABC affiliate’s newscast in Minneapolis and the CBS affiliate’s newscast in Albequrque.

Who was it that first hired Deborah Norville, by the way? Anyone remember? Was it CNN or CBS? I’m also wondering when the media whore phenomenon really kicked off… sure, Barbara Walters was a precursor, but I’m thinking it really exploded with Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal, since you had all kinds of people going off and having to fill the void of an almost complete lack of information.

The Washington Post reported that the citation for a Bronze Star awarded to Mr. Thurlow for heroism in the incident refers to “enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire,” contradicting his account and bearing out Mr. Kerry’s. The Kerry campaign posted the article from The Post on its Web site, and sent an e-mail to supporters saying the article “completely discredited” Mr. Thurlow and “marks the end of the dishonest and disgusting smear campaign against John Kerry and his crew mates from Vietnam.”

Now that’s funny! As I posted yesterday, the article not only doesn’t “complete discredit” Thurlow, it only highlights that Thurlow and Kerry contradict each other, which we already knew. Thurlow is not his citation, and since he did not apply for a medal or write an AAR, there is no self-contradiction there. Furthermore, the vast majority of men who were there on the river support Thurlow’s version.

Kerry, by his own admission, ran away – as one of his own crewmen says was his wont – so he was not there for Thurlow’s most dangerous action, trying to board an out-of-control boat. This action, suspiciously enough, is not described in Thurlow’s citation. Logic suggests that is because Kerry wrote the AAR that supported his application for a medal.

The fact that the Kerry campaign is desperately clutching at this wholly inadequate straw demonstrates how weak they know John Kerry’s case is.

From “Unfit For Command”, via the Washington Times:

None of these Swiftees recognized the incident as described by Kerry in his report, by Brinkley in “Tour of Duty” [in which, after the mine exploded under PCF 3 on his port side, Kerry recalls his right arm being “smashed” against a bulkhead when “another explosion went off right beside us”] or on Kerry’s Web site. They were furious when they realized Kerry’s fraudulent account.

In reality, Kerry’s boat, PCF 94, was on the right side of the river when a mine went off on the opposite side under PCF 3. The boat’s crewmen were thrown into the water. The officers suffered concussions. A Viet Cong sympathizer in an adjoining bunker had touched off the mine. There was no other hostile fire and no other mines, according to Chenoweth, Odell, Pease and Thurlow. The boats had begun firing after the mine exploded, but ceased after a short time because of the lack of hostile fire.

Kerry’s PCF 94 fled the scene. The remaining three PCFs, in accord with standard doctrine, stood to defend the disabled PCF 3 and its crewmen in the water. Kerry and PCF 94 disappeared several hundred yards away, returning only when it was clear there was no return fire. Chenoweth (who received no medal) picked up the PCF 3 crewmen from the water. PCF 3’s engines were knocked out on one side and frozen on 500 rpm on the other side. The boat weaved dangerously, hitting sandbars, dazed or unconscious crew members aboard.

Thurlow, commanding his own boat, sought a secure hold so he could jump across and board PCF 3. However, he was thrown into the water in his first attempt to board, and the boat hit the sandbars. Later, Thurlow brought PCF 3 to a stop, and the boat slowly began to sink. Rassmann had fallen or been knocked off either Kerry’s boat or the fifth boat, PCF 35. When Rassmann was spotted in the water, Chenoweth’s PCF 23, with the PCF 3 crew aboard, went to pick him up.

Kerry’s PCF 94, returning to the scene after its flight, reached Rassmann about 20 yards ahead of Chenoweth’s boat. Kerry did the decent thing by going to pick up Rassmann, justifiably earning his gratitude. However, the claim that Kerry returned to a hostile fire zone is a lie, according to Chenoweth, Thurlow and others. Meanwhile, the serious work of saving PCF 3 continued.

Kerry’s false after-action report, prepared to justify his Purple Heart and Bronze Star, reports “5,000 meters” of heavy fire — about 2½ miles, the same distance as a large Civil War battlefield. Not a shot of this fire was heard by Chenoweth, Thurlow, Odell or Pease. Kerry’s after-action report ignores Chenoweth’s heroic action in rescuing PCF 3 survivors and Thurlow’s action in saving PCF 3, while highlighting his own routine pickup of Rassmann and PCF 94’s minor role in saving PCF 3.

Make that Swift vets 4, Kerry 0. The Swift vets say that he wasn’t wounded on the river, and it turns out that one of the sources reporting that Kerry wounded himself earlier that day… is John Kerry. “On page 313 of “Tour of Duty,” and evidently in Kerry’s secret journal written on or about March 13, 1969, quoted in that book, Kerry relates his injury from the rice stock explosion.” So, if John Kerry is to be believed, he received two wounds in exactly the same place on the same day, one self-inflicted, one not.

Regardless of what the veterans motivations are – and the fact that so many of them think so little of John Kerry after all these years tends to support the truth of what they are saying, in my opinion – it is becoming more and more clear that John Kerry is a borderline whack job who is totally unfit for any sort of command.

Hank has his doubts about the Swift vets:

Of course it still doesn’t explain any of the contradictions with Thurlow’s story. I’d say it’s his excuse for having botched his story. Still not willing to explain Rassmann’s account or why all those other boats couldn’t pick him up when they were not under fire?

That’s a reasonable question. It seems Larry Thurlow has a rather cogent explanation.

I submitted no paperwork for a medal nor did I file an after action report describing the incident. [Thus, while his current version of the story contradicts his citation, it cannot be considered self-contradictory as some have tried to portray it.] To my knowledge, John Kerry was the only officer who filed a report describing his version of the incidents that occurred on the river that day. It was not until I had left the Navy—approximately three months after I left the service—that I was notified that I was to receive a citation for my actions on that day. I believed then as I believe now that I received my Bronze Star for my efforts to rescue the injured crewmen from swift boat number three and to conduct damage control to prevent that boat from sinking.

My boat and several other swift boats went to the aid of our fellow swift boat sailors whose craft was adrift and taking on water. We provided immediate rescue and damage control to prevent boat three from sinking and to offer immediate protection and comfort to the injured crew.

After the mine exploded, leaving swift boat three dead in the water, John Kerry’s boat, which was on the opposite side of the river, fled the scene. US Army Special Forces officer Jim Rassmann, who was on Kerry’s boat at the time, fell off the boat and into the water. Kerry’s boat returned several minutes later—under no hail of enemy gunfire—to retrieve Rassmann from the river only seconds before another boat was going to pick him up.

I believe that’s another round to the Swift Vets. So far, we have Swift Vets 3, Kerry 0.

Stow the lectures, I’m paraphrasing Helen Thomas. I was just thinking, who ARE the biggest media whores of Left, Right and squishy middle today? Hank, Pete and ihateShrub, go to town, gentlemen, I want to get your perspective on this too. Please note that media whore, as I define it, is a combination of a ravenous hunger for the camera and a certain lack of ideological principle. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I have it in for the individual, although that always adds a bit of zest to the endeavor.

On the Right, I’m thinking Brave Sir William, Me So Michelle and possibly Rx Limbaugh. I’m not quite as sure about Ann, but I’m certainly open to hearing the case for her. I quite like Jonah Goldberg, but I can see where one might be able to argue in favor of him.

On the Left, Maureen Dowd has to lead the way. I’d love to go after Paul Krugman, but he is such a defenseless little mouse and Donald Luskin and the Krugman Truth Squad have demolished him so completely that I don’t know if he’s got enough posterior left to peddle.

I’m a little handicapped in that I don’t watch enough Fox News or CNN to be up-to-date on who the most serious camera chasers are of late. So pity the poor blind cobra….

I just sent a publisher an email withdrawing my proposed book on History’s Lies from consideration prior to submission. Why? Because a glance at the bestseller lists demonstrates that it’s the sort of thing that no one particularly wants to read, and it would harm the publisher to waste resources pushing something that is inadequately marketable.

Based on current non-fiction trends, it seems my two best options are as follows:

A) HEIL HILLARY: The secret life of a Nazi lesbian

B) MEDIA WHORES: Courtesans and Charlatans of the American Commentariat

Which one sounds like the more entertaining read to you? Anyhow, I’ll probably turn the chapters on the Spanish Inquisition and the Left-Wing Nazis into columns in the future. Researching the Inquisition was quite interesting, actually. I stole Robert Anton Wilson’s rather innovative footnoting approach, which allowed me to work in tangential material, such as Siegfried and Roy and other things that don’t actually have anything to do with the Spanish Inquisition, but make for a read that’s a little less dry.

It’s RAW who produced the funniest line in the history of literature, subsequent to a lengthy discussion of an infinty of Nietzsches contemplating an infinity of spiders in the moonlight: “Nietzsche masturbates too much.”

DNG unleashes a long rant in defense of Asian women:

…a lot of white American women here in Japan are very bitter. They’re really bitter in Taiwan as well. They look at the foreign men around them who have extremely beautiful Asian girlfriends and get mad. They say to themselves: ‘He’s pathetic! If we were back home, I wouldn’t give him the time of day! I can’t compete here because Asian women are submissive!!’ That’s the attitude: Japanese women spoil everything by being submissive slaves, they upstage the Great White Gaijin Chick who rightfully belongs at the center of the universe. It certainly isn’t because white American women are paunchy and sexist and act like bulldozers. And it’s not because they’re vain and hypocritical and they look like land-bound dugongs, no sir. A white chick could never look in the mirror and reach the most obvious conclusions, could she? No, western men want to oppress somebody and Asian women are easily-oppressed whores….

I’ve never thought that Asian women are naturally slutty or weak-minded or whatever. No damned way. It’s a slur! It’s a totally racist idea and it angers me to no end to hear it, but you will seriously find a huge number of white women who actually make accusations like that. In the U.S. I’ve met white women with PhDs who express disbelief when I say that most Asian women I’ve met are tough and independent-minded. I’m convinced that these stereotypes about Asians keep circulating because they reinforce the prejudices of white women. Seriously, in all my experience it’s been almost exclusively the white women who make these kinds of snide insults. Probably 95% of it comes from white chicks, I don’t think I’ve met any other group of people in the world who have such an extreme and perverse relish for bashing Asian women. It’s disgraceful.

I tend to find this oft-virulent racism more amusingly ironic, as men of every culture, European, Asian, African and Arabic, know very well that American women are the most sexually available on the planet. This should be obvious to anyone who considers the matter, as it is simply the logical result of the United States being Ground Zero for the Sexual Revolution. Even in notorious Thailand, you usually have to pay to play; only in America can one reasonably expect sex on the first date, assuming that one even bothers with a date in the first place. I understand that England has loosened up considerably in this regard in the last 15 years, but it is still playing catch-up.

Asian cultures may be more exotically erotic, as it wasn’t the Anglo-Saxons who came up with the Kama Sutra, after all, and one has difficulty imagining the concept of a young Thai wife having to be told to close her eyes and think of Thailand, but for the most part there is still an element of propriety that is now absent in America. When studying in Tokyo, I once committed the faux pas of inviting a Japanese girl over to my host-family’s place for dinner; both she and my host family were very amused and did not tell me until halfway through dinner that I had basically proposed, and in coming over, she had accepted.

Fortunately, they all simply saw it as a joke at the expense of the clueless gaijin. That would have been a tough one to explain to Mom and Dad.

Nate carries water for Axl Rose on his blog:

Say you don’t like them. Say you hate the music and what they stood for. But don’t call them posers. They don’t come more real than GnR.

It depends which GnR you’re talking about. I happened to spend two evenings partying with the original five in Tokyo not long after the release of Appetite for Destruction. I got along quite well with Steve, the drummer, and Duff, the bassist. They were both good guys, friendly and pretty much up for anything. We killed more than a few beers together that weekend. Snake was a complete bore, as he sat in the corner, hid behind his hair and didn’t talk to anyone or do anything for two solid evenings. I don’t remember what was going on with Axl – but I nearly got in a fight with Izzy Stradlin the second night, as he was trying to physically drag a girl with whom I’d had dinner that night out of the bar with him. She didn’t want to go, but he wouldn’t release her, so I had to grab her arm and cuss him out before he finally let her alone.

I remember thinking at the time that I was probably going to have to pop him one in the face and wondered a) what Japanese jails were like, and b) if the altercation would make MTV News. But when she started screaming, Stradlin let her go before I decided to risk it and let loose on him. A few months later, Axl started dating another friend of mine from my Tokyo dayz; she’s in the Patience video, if I recall correctly.

GnR were real rockers, sure enough, but the band was a complete fraud in at least one sense. Their “independent” label was a fake; there never was any Uzi Suicide label. It was just a packaging deal dreamed up by their record label to give them more “cred”. Apparently that seems to have worked in Nate’s case.

I’ll take Metallica, Soundgarden or Nirvana over them any day. I was more of an industrial guy, though, and although they weren’t really rockers, for my money, there was no band that brought the Apocalypse better than Ministry.

So, John Kerry spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia on the orders of President Nixon. Except Nixon wasn’t President in 1968. John Kerry’s Silver Star citation from 1969 is signed by Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, who was the Secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987. Mmm-kay….

While his media defenders embarrass themselves with their ignorance of East Asian geography, (no the Mekong Delta isn’t in Cambodia), his befuddled defenders in blogworld base their arguments on the “fact” that no one on Kerry’s boat agrees with the 250+ Swift Boat veterans who think John Kerry is a total fraud. Unfortunately for them, this “fact” is an incorrect assertion which doesn’t hold up any better than those haunting and fictional memories that are seared – seared – into John Kerry’s imaginative mind.

Steve Gardner is the sole crewman not swayed by Kerry during his many post-Vietnam years of solicitation aimed at gaining the support of his own crew. Today, Gardner asks: “How can Kerry possibly be commander in chief when he couldn’t competently command a six-man crew?” Gardner, a two-tour Swift Boat sailor who sat five feet behind Kerry in Vietnam and who saw many officers during his two years, judges Kerry to be by far the worst.

“Kerry was erratic,” Gardner said in an interview June 19. “He hardly ever did what he was supposed to do. His command decisions put us in more peril then he should have. But mostly he just ran. When John Kerry looked out the bow of the boat and he saw tracer fire coming after him, he’d turn and run.” Gardner added: “When he should have been fighting, calling in air support, he was hightailing it. That’s always been my bone of contention with Kerry — his decision-making capabilities. That’s what takes him out of contention as far as I’m concerned.”

My question is this: where’s Limahl when you need him?

The Libertarian slate includes nearly two dozen legislative candidates, including former gubernatorial candidate Tom Cox, who won almost 5 percent of the vote when Democrat Ted Kulongoski defeated Republican Kevin Mannix in 2002. This time, Cox hopes to defeat Rep. Mary Gallegos, R-Cornelius, one of 11 House Republicans who voted for the tax increase that voters ultimately rejected…..

Libertarians also could play a role in several other House races that have no incumbent, such as House District 54, which Rep. Tim Knopp, R-Bend, will exit. Libertarian Tristan Reisfar is taking on Democrat Judy Stiegler and Republican Chuck Burley, both of whom he says support tax and fees increases.

Mannix, the Oregon Republican Party chairman, said he’s telling members to “stop paying any attention” to Libertarian candidates, who he says have little in common with Republicans.

But the tax issue is important enough that some Republicans wouldn’t mind seeing a Democrat defeat a Republican. Tax activist Don McIntire said that the Executive Club, a decades-old conservative group to which he belongs, voted to back Cox against Gallegos. “There’s a chance his entry into the race could deliver the votes for the Democrat, but on balance, we’ve decided that’s better than continuing with somebody who’s a lousy Republican,” McIntire said.

“Stop paying any attention!” That’s the most that the Republican leadership can say about the Libertarian Party. Why? Because when Republicans do pay attention and honestly weigh it as an alternative, the Libertarians easily prove to be the superior choice for most republicans, conservatives, and even small-d democrats.