The Vast Right-wing Clipshow

It's July, and the VRC'ers flee north or east from the effect of Dubya's pro-global warming policies. But to keep the plebs entertained, James Taranto at OpinionJournal is doing summer reruns, condensing 5 years of ranting into 3 issues. For those not in da club, it's funny to see them feel vindicated by citing their critique of some wacky, way-out thing that someone said back in the day -- knowing that in fact the original statement has only gotten more valid over time.

Prime example: today's clip show takes us back to the Florida 2000 recount shambles:

Two writers--Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer and Alan Wolfe of Boston College in Salon--described Bush as a "postmodernist," one who disbelieves in objective reality, because his legal team took the position that it was impossible to discern the "intent of the voter" if a ballot was ambiguous because not properly marked.

Of course, they were right: election counters have been making decisions about ambiguous ballots for about as long as there've been elections. But Taranto is clearly delighted with his ludicrous critique (the only way to know intent is to ask the voter, and since it's a secret ballot, we can't). Consider though the original claim, that Dubya doesn't believe in objective reality. Remember that telling quote that Ron Suskind got from a high Bush official last year:

The [senior White House] aide said that guys like me [Ron Suskind, the NYT article's author] were "in what we White House] call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Or spin it for the Wall Street Journal. Another thing -- if you think there's any satire or hyperbole involved in terms like the "101st Fighting Keyboarders" or "Keyboard Kommandos," here's Taranto's closing thought for Clip Show #1:

We're still in the same office, still overlooking Ground Zero. And from time to time we still look out our window for a reminder of why America is fighting--and why we are writing.

To match their rerun, we'll do our own. As far as we can tell, it was Taranto who popularised the description of the 9/11 terrorist attack as an Epiphany. Since it revealed Dubya as the Messiah, why wouldn't it be?