Send this guy to Eckvelt

There is a new blog on The New Republic's website by Gregg Easterbrook. It's quite a piece of work. Roger Ailes has been doing Trojan work keeping track of the outrages so far; check out this post which discusses Gregg's reliance on Rush Limbaugh's favourite British newspaper, WorldNet Daily, as his source for a disparaging story about the police chief who led the hunt for the Washington snipers last year. But something else on the Easterbrook blog intersected with something we posted about a few months ago.

The jumping off (the cliff?) point for Gregg is the observation that Ben and Jerry's has a pro-Howard Dean flavour of ice cream. This leads to hilarious speculation about what flavours for other Presidential candidates would be:

John Kerry: Very Kerry Irish-Jewish-Czech Melting Pot. Flavors from all over the world, blended together until indistinguishable.

Joe Lieberman: Joe's Kosher Swirl. Corned beef flavored ice cream with real chunks of rye bread and ribbons of mustard.

How idiotic is this? The contempt for Kerry (and by extension the contempt for assimilation) springs from the Boston Globe's misconception that Kerry said he was Irish-American, when in fact his ancestry is Central European Jewish. As we pointed out before, no-one with a proper knowledge of Ireland would assume that someone named Kerry is Irish, because that's an Irish county, not an Irish surname. It's like assuming that Gregg Easterbrook is Christian because he has the word "Easter" in his name. Come on Gregg, tell us, was your greatgrandfather a Mr Pesachbrook from Vilnius and you've been hiding it all these years?

At least if that were true, it might provide us with a good Psych 101 explanation for his swipe at Joe Lieberman, and the distinctly non-kosher meat-dairy concoction he suggests for him.

Towards the end of the post, he drops the ethnic mockery and goes for the straight partisan slams:

Al Gore's Dade County Surprise. Bittersweet chocolate with a sour grape swirl.

And looking ahead to 2008:
Hillary's Endless Fudge.

First of all, the big Florida problems were in Broward and Palm Beach, not Dade. And of course, according to Gregg, Gore and sour grapes are synonymous. All that stuff about a Supreme Court decision so dubious that even its architects had to give themselves the pass of not setting a precedent -- it's all just in Gore's mind. And then he goes after Hillary, who we are supposed to think never takes a position on anything. Kind of makes us wonder then why so many people, including Gregg, hate her. Perhaps Gregg would benefit from Hillary's long-standing position in favour of expanded mental health benefits.