Here are the reasons (besides the obvious ones) that we think it was a good idea for Jeremy Paul Olson to throw food at Sarah Palin today during her Minnesota reading, for which he is currently incarcerated:

Throwing food at people has a long, messy history

The first recorded incident of throwing food at a public figure in history, according to our ten minutes of Googling, was in 60-something AD when Roman emperor Vespasianus Ceaser Augustus was "pelted with turnips" at a riot, most likely by people sick of having nothing to eat but turnips. In the 1770s, preacher John Crook was similarly assaulted when he tried to convert the heathens of the Isle of Man to Methodism.

Later, an 1883 Times article titled "AN ACTOR DEMORALIZED BY TOMATOES" recounts the fierce pillorying of the actor John Ritchie

He had a crowded house, and was warmly received, in fact, it was altogether hot for him, there being distributed among the audience a bushel or two of rotten tomatoes. The first act opened with Mr. Ritchie trying to turn a somersault. He probably would have succeeded had not a great many tomatoes struck him, throwing him off his balance and demoralizing him... a large tomato thrown from the gallery struck him square between the eyes, and he fell to the stage floor just as several bad eggs dropped upon his head. Then the tomatoes flew thick and fast, and Ritchie fled for the stage door.

Come on, haters: That is awesome!

More recently, Nixon was pelted with eggs and tomatoes during a 1958 trip to South America, but cleverly blamed it on the fact he was riding in one of the notoriously shitty Edsel convertibles. You guys just got a face-full of history there, which proves that throwing food is basically the "Mad Men" of political protest.

A violent action without all that violence

Violence is wrong. But sometimes you just want to fuck shit up. Throwing food is a good compromise, with much of the spectacle and newsworthiness of violence but none of the stupid "hurting people" part. (Incidentally, we should mention that we endorse that tomato-throwing guy if and only if he was chucking very soft, overripe tomatoes which would splatter readily and harmlessly all over Ms. Palin and drip down into her clothes while she was trying to sign books. Also, the tomatoes should have been organic and fair trade!)

It's democratic

Did we mention that, after signing her books today at the Mall of America, Palin headed off to a $5000 per head fundraiser for The Freedom Club PAC? The people who can pay $5000 for this kind of thing are the people who run our country. It's only fair that we allow Joe the disenfranchised Plumber the right to hurl at members of the power-elite the tomatoes which their own unfair trade policies have made so affordable and delicious.

Usually, the victim deserves it

Consider this partial list of people who have had food thrown at them, according to Google:

• Roman Emperor Vespasianus Caesar Augustus
• Shitty 19th century actor John Ritchie
• Nixon
• Nick Griffin (British right-wing politician and notorious Holocaust denier)
• Thomas Friedman
• Bill Gates
• Ann Coulter
• David Horowitz
• William F. Buckley
• Phyllis Schlafly
• Sarah Palin

If a group of people who more needed a pie in the face exists, then someone should pie those people, too. Chances are, if people are angry enough to risk incarceration simply to throw food at you, you have done something to deserve it—and then some.

It's hilarious

Politics is so boring. Those people who complain about how childish or unproductive throwing food at politicians is forget that the political process is by nature childish and unproductive. At least throwing food lends some real and hilarious slapstick to a system which too often resembles Wile E. Coyote trying to blow up Road Runner with a stick of dynamite made out of stupid, boring legislation.

"The tree of liberty is watered by the pies of patriots."
-Thomas Jefferson (American revolutionary and inventor of the pie)

Ahead of the conference, Americans generally support some sort of agreement on emissions, with a plurality hoping congress ratifies a binding treaty. Ahead of the health care debate, Americans broadly supported health care reform, too.

The wheels of disinformation are already spinning. Lou Dobbs went fucking nuts on his radio show today while talking with complete loon Jim Inhofe. The idea of the President attempting to win support for international emissions reductions by promising that the US will attempt to meet similar targets drove Dobbs over the edge.

DOBBS: Who the hell does this president think he is?

INHOFE: I don't know, because you can't do that. And I think it's certainly disingenuous to mislead countries into thinking that a president … You know, this is not a kingdom. He's not able to do that.

DOBBS: Not yet!

If there's one thing repressive, autocratic monarchs are known for, it's attempting to cede their nation's sovereignty to a world government, or something.

Inhofe, of course, believes that global warming is a great big hoax. And here he is commenting on Obama's trip:

"I suspect President Obama is making the trip to Copenhagen in order to ‘save' the climate conference," Sen. Inhofe said. "Yet no amount of lofty rhetoric or promises of future commitments can save it. This is due in large part to the fact cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate is dying on the vine, and, as important, recent revelations of leading climate scientists who appear to have manufactured the climate ‘consensus'-revelations that cast doubt over the entire global warming enterprise.

Right. Those emails. Those fucking emails. You can argue that the emails reveal improper behavior (if you suspect a casual reference to "throwing out the peer-review process" is actual proof of any sort of wrong-doing) but there's actually not anything in any of the emails that suggests that anyone manufactured any data, at all.

But it doesn't matter. The "story," in its easy-to-digest form, is that secret emails prove climate scientists made up global warming.

Naomi Klein's recent Harper's story on the 2001 UN conference on racism was, you know, typical Naomi Klein-in-Harper's stuff (long), but it did brilliantly illustrate how these lies endure: they start with a modicum of truth and then, through enough repetition and distortion, they become ingrained "knowledge" that is wholly wrong.

That conference, popularly referred to as Durban, was supposed to be about Africa. But ahead of the conference, a few Islamic countries asked to include anti-Israel language that also downplayed the Holocaust. That language never had a chance of making it into a final UN document, but it gave the Bush administration a convenient excuse to avoid a conference that they didn't want to participate in in the first place. Then the offending language was removed, a nice little document about how bad racism is was produced, and everyone was happy.

Moreover, Southwick was quite right: after he left, all of the offending language was excised in the final round of negotiations. Which is why, in a detail conveniently excluded by Durban's critics, Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres praised the Durban Declaration at the time as "an accomplishment of the fi rst order for Israel" and "a painful comedown for the Arab League."

Then, in the post-9/11 recollection of Jewish politicians in America and the right-wing press in Israel, the conference suddenly became an Israel-bashing antisemitic festival of hatred. The genuine anti-semitism on display by some protesters and the legimitate criticisms of Israel's security and citizenship policies were conflated, and "Durban" became both a dirty word and a rousing reminder that threats to the Jewish people were real and pervasive. The story of what happened at Durban spun out of control, with right-wing academics and journalists publishing dozens of stories repeating and exaggerating the myths.

But the worst distortions were in Bayefsky's bellowing full-page ads, which appeared in the Washington Times, the New York Sun, and other papers, and were signed by a long list of notables including Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, orientalist Bernard Lewis, former New York mayor Ed Koch, and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. In big bold letters the ads claimed that the final Durban Declaration stated "That ISRAEL, and ONLY ISRAEL, is guilty of racism." Never mind that nowhere in the document was Israel accused, let alone convicted, of racism.

Yes, right. It all got so ridiculous that a spokesman for Israel's foreign minister said the conference's final report called Israel "the most racist state on Earth. When a BBC interviewer read him the actual Durban Declaration, which, of course, did not say any such thing, he was baffled: "even though I don't have the text in front of me, I remember quite precisely some quotes that were completely contrary to those that you've just quoted. So we must be speaking about two different documents." Indeed!

Obama avoided Durban 2, because it was already too poisoned. Here's hoping he can bring a truthful version of what happens at Copenhagen home with him, but we're not holding our breath.

The historic scene that would lead to the heartwarming act of jurisprudence went down like this: Dave Hackbart was just trying to fucking parallel park in Pittsburgh one day in 2006. Then some other asshole drive pulled up and blocked him from parking. So Dave flicks the guy off, obviously. Then some other asshole driver "objected to the gesture," so Dave flicked him off, too.

Dave don't take shit from nobody.

Turns out the second asshole driver was a fucking cop. So of course cause cops think they're big shit, the pig gives Dave a citation for "disorderly conduct." And of course he's found guilty and fined, cause the courts and the cops are all in the shit together.

But Dave's not just your average sucker ready to bow down and get fucked by the cops like that. No sir. He sued the whole god damn city of Pittsburgh, and, god damn it, wouldn't you know, he fucking won $50,000. Let this be a lesson to every fucking cop everywhere, courtesy of Dave: Fuck you, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Dave will now get fucked by lawyers.

Of the $50,000 settlement, he will get $10,000; the rest goes to his lawyers.

You know, Ed Meese III, it is nice that you have come around, in some fashion, to the idea that we maybe shouldn't have the largest prison population in the world. Seriously, good for you.

But also, and more importantly: fuck you, Ed Meese.

It was actually Reagan's Attorney General, Mr. Ed Meese, who attempted to criminalize pornography and abortion, and who packed the federal judiciary with reactionary "tough-on-crime" assholes.

Ed Meese, once again as Attorney General, chaired the National Drug Policy Board. And during his tenure, federal spending on drug "enforcement" (arrests and seizures) increased by $700 million while drug prevention and education programs decreased. Ed Meese decided every worker in America should be drug tested all the time.

Oh, Bush-appointed former judge who is now concerned about overzealous prosecution, what is your complaint?

"A joint on a yacht, and the whole thing is forfeited," said Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush.

Funny! You are mad, as a conservative, that the government is seizing private property. Do you know who pioneered that approach to fighting drugs? Attorney General Ed Meese!

So, Ed Meese, we respectfully disagree with you, when you say that "liberal ideas of extending the power of the state" are to blame for an out-of-control criminal justice system. You are, after all, the Ed Meese who said once said this:

U.S News & World Report: You criticize the Miranda ruling, which gives suspects the right to have a lawyer present before police questioning. Shouldn't people, who may be innocent, have such protection?
Meese: Suspects who are innocent of a crime should. But the thing is, you don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.

But Ed Meese does not actually care about the massive and growing prison population. What he is mad about is that there are too many laws, in general.

"It's a violation of federal law to give a false weather report," Mr. Meese said. "People get put in jail for importing lobsters."

Maybe they do! Maybe there is a guy in jail, somewhere in America, for importing a lobster. But millions more get put in jail for smoking weed. And we think we should probably deal with that before we get to work fixing this "false weather report" zero tolerance policy that you are suddenly so concerned about.

Asshole.

George W. Bush's last Thanksgiving proclamation actually mentioned Pilgrims! But—no Indians.

In that proclamation, it was, indeed, the Author of Life (Almighty God) who was personally responsible for "granting" the Pilgrims "safe passage to this abundant land and protecting them through a bitter winter." Thanks, God, though our first Muslim Atheist Kenyan president remembers it a bit differently:

We also recognize the contributions of Native Americans, who helped the early colonists survive their first harsh winter and continue to strengthen our Nation.

There were no Indians, or Native Americans, or Indigenous People, in any of Bush's proclamations. There was some 9/11 in the 2001 proclamation, obviously.

Last year President Bush encouraged "all Americans to gather together in their homes and places of worship with family, friends, and loved ones...." President Obama encourages "all the people of the United States to come together, whether in our homes, places of worship, community centers, or any place where family, friends and neighbors may gather...." (Emphasis added—by ACORN!)

But! Obama was not the first to rep for being thankful in places other than home and church! Clinton also encouraged Americans to gather at home, at places of worship, or at community centers. And so did Bush! In 2001, 2002, and 2003. It was not until 2004 that Americans were no longer encouraged to gather in these community centers. This is presumably because of John Kerry. (Clinton also referenced those Natives who disappeared from Bush's proclamations.)

Clinton never made reference to Lincoln, and Washington only showed up once. Bush Sr. made one Lincoln reference. Reagan, plenty. On the whole, Bush I's proclamations were a little more ambitious, and a little less rote. They included primary sources and historical arcana!

Truthfully, this is an uninspiring first effort from our most literary president in a generation. Barely an improvement over Bush Jr. Let's hope he spends a little more time on it next year.

[Photo: AFP]

Thankfully Sarah Palin may now take her rightful place as America's "Commanderin' Chief" because Barack Obama is polling at 49% in the daily Gallup tracking poll. As Gallup notes, this is an unprecedentedly fast drop in presidential approval, not counting the three post-war presidents who dropped below 50% faster than him (Reagan, Ford, Clinton) and the one who also dropped below 50% after 11 months in office (Truman).

One of the fastest and most effective ways for any president to boost his approval rating (besides starting a war or botching his response to a terror attack) is to score a major legislative victory. So, with "centrist" and Blue Dog democrats spooked that Obama's low numbers will negatively affect their own reelection bids, look for them to attempt to obstruct and delay any legislation the president champions, in order to drag down everyone's numbers even further in the hopes that eventually elections will just be "called off."

The primary reason for the president's declining approval is, of course, the economy. Specifically jobs. Americans know an economic "recovery" without jobs is no recovery at all, so, once again, look for Blue Dogs and centrists to become incredibly terrified of the idea of spending any further government money on jobs programs of any kind, as we all know that's why FDR was a one-term president, because of his socialism, and how much it made Americans hate him. Jobless Americans are much, much more concerned with the abstract concept of "fiscal responsibility" than they are with material concerns like health care, regular employment, and "having enough money to feed themselves."

Robert Byrd, our US Senator from the great state of West Virginia, has been a Senator since January 3, 1959, making him the longest-serving member in congressional history. He is 91 years old (his 92nd birthday is on Friday!) and third in line for the presidency should something happen to Obama, Biden, and Pelosi.

He filibustered against the Civil Rights Act and opposed the Voting Rights Act but in the years since then, instead of jumping to the Republicans like most racist Democrats did, he's made a concerted effort to fit into the mainstream of the Democratic party.

So: probably still an old racist, but the sort of old racist who knows it is not acceptable to be racist anymore.

Oh, he is also a champion of the worst tendencies of the Senate: arcane parliamentary procedure in the service of obstructionism, and intense regionalism. When he dies his colleagues will present him one last earmark, officially renaming the state "West Byrdginia."

Here he is accidentally becoming a '70s Randy Newman song:

And here he is reading a poem:

They found a "high-ranking official" from "a previous Democratic administration" who thinks Bob is a bad choice, which allowed them to write that "even some Democrats" have "privately questioned" the appointment.

This is a photo caption: "Questions arise whether incoming White House counsel Bob Bauer's experience as a partisan warrior is appropriate for the position." The questions did not "arise" from the earth, unbidden. Nor were they torn from the thigh of Zeus. Politico reporters asked these questions, themselves.

But what's even better is who these questions arose to: the anonymous "high-ranking official" and Peter Wallison, the lawyer who most famously instructed Ronald Reagan to claim ignorance while testifying on Iran-Contra.*

Everyone else is like "well maybe he has done some stuff on campaign finance that I find personally distasteful but yes he is qualified." That's not gonna win the afternoon, guys.

The real tragedy here is that Politico went with "Bob Bauer Unqualified" instead of what will be the real scandal: he is an agent of ACORN!

*And then this happened:

The question, of course, came up...After a preliminary question about presidents and their NSC staffs, Tower asked Reagan about the discrepancy between his statement and Regan's on the question of whether he had given prior approval to the Israeli arms shipment. Reagan rose from his chair, walked around the desk and said to Wallison, "Peter, where is that piece of paper you had that you gave me this morning?" Then he picked up the paper and began to read, "If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."

HAH. A highly qualified quote-giver, this one.

Previously in "Politico Inventing And Then Reporting On Invented News" News:

Politico Reports on Story Politico Invented
Politico Begins Posting Fox News Slashfic
Scandal: Bill Before Congress Is Long, Complicated

[Photo: AP]

You know those idiots who don't know anything about politics but think it sounds smart to say "I am a social liberal and an economic conservative?" Bloomberg is the candidate for them, if they love a liberal nanny state and a conservative religious fervor for the eternal goodness of private enterprise.

For all the talk of Bloomberg the power-player who at least gets things done without worrying about the unions and special interests, he's been unable to win any political battle with anyone he couldn't literally buy off. Like Sheldon Silver, who (thankfully) killed the West Side Stadium and (annoyingly) ended all that "Congestion Pricing" talk. And those unions and special interests were just bought off, which worked fine back when the boom whose end Bloomberg never saw coming was in full swing.

And about that stadium: what the fuck was that? And the Olympics thing? After bitching about Giuliani's disgraceful subsidizing of the fucking Yankees, Bloomberg both turns around completely on that particular issue and attempts to build the fucking Jets a stadium, so that New York could get an Olympics that it did not want. And that failed, and everyone forgot about it. Meanwhile: 40,000 people in shelters! Bloomberg could personally buy every single one of those people an apartment in a vacant Williamsburg luxury condo building and still have enough left over to bribe a City Council member into supporting his fifth term.

And those luxury Williamsbug condo buildings, by the way, that stand vacant? Yes, well, that was part of this brilliant plan to utilize rezoning to spur the free market (which always allocates resources more efficiently than anything else in the history of civilization but sometimes it needs government help, like with tax breaks and stuff) to create affordable housing all over the waterfront. This did not work, as developers decided to just not bother to build all those affordable housing units they were supposed to build. More than 2,200 promised new affordable apartments in Williamsburg and Greenpoint have turned out to be 768, 20 percent of which are renovations of apartments that were already affordable. There are lots more of these stories.

His record on housing, like his record on nearly everything having to do with the outer boroughs and poverty and human beings who make less than $100,000 a year, has been a ridiculous disgrace. His entire philosophy of development solving everything turned out to be precisely, 100% wrong, and suddenly the city itself was driving the real estate boom, driving up land prices to absurd levels across the boroughs and tearing down neighborhoods only to replace them with vacant lots and half-filled cheaply built hideous high-rises once the bottom fell out of the City Hall-inflated market. But hey, we got the High Line and 311! So you can sleep in that fancy park while you call 311 asking if there is room in a shelter because you can no longer afford your home.

Eight years into the Bloomberg administration, Ground Zero is a still a hole that everyone continues fighting about.

The MTA has raised fares while cutting service (without actually cutting service, officially—it's just that whatever line you happen to ride is suddenly experiencing a whole lot of track work every single goddamn weekend).

The Gays: still not married! And also a lot of them are getting beaten up on the streets these days for some reason?

Bloomberg is also the beneficiary of the most friendly news coverage of any big city mayor in the nation. Easily. It helps that, you know, he is a media mogul, himself, and he is good, close, personal friends with the three publishers who run the newspapers that went after each one of his predecessors for shit they've let slide under this mayor, because they know he's a good, decent guy, at heart, and the only one who can Fix New York, because of his Money.

Can you imagine how the Post would've blown up if David Dinkins lied about taking the Subway to work every day? The Daily News response to discovering that John Lindsay flew to Bermuda every weekend?

Let's talk about the cops, for a second: they are still operating under Giuliani levels of complete disregard for the law. They are getting drunk and running people over and shooting unarmed black people and sodomizing people in subway stations. The Civilian Complaint Review Board has become a joke, unless your case gets a lot of publicity. There's obviously no accountability, whatsoever, and no attempt to recruit and train more cops from the communities they actually police. The NYPD remains, primarily, the home of roided-out white people from outside the city with a great deal of contempt for civil liberties. The Mayor always sounds properly upset when some of them rape someone, but he's never done a damn thing to rein them in or change the culture.

What he has done is Keep Us Safe by never once giving a shit about Civil Liberties. The cops stop and frisk thousands more people every year, your 4th Amendment rights do not apply in the Subway system, and expensive and completely ineffective new rings of cameras are going up across Manhattan.

Bloomberg deserves to be run out of town on an inadequately funded public rail line for the 2004 GOP convention alone. Remember that ridiculous farce? No, of course not, no one does, besides the thousands of people improperly spied on, arrested, harassed, and detained by the NYPD. All of this was completely illegal. No heads rolled.

One more special bonus factoid: New York leads the world in marijuana arrests! Specifically, marijuana arrests of black people!

And he is personally a jerk. He is a thin-skinned, unpleasant, sanctimonious asshole. His company is being sued for a culture of sexual discrimination that plaintiffs say Bloomberg himself contributed to. He is a tremendous dick to reporters whenever he gets cranky. He is fucking race-baiting with Rudy Giuliani again, because why not?

He has been a shitty mayor and he does not deserve the support of anyone who claims to be a liberal. Though what all of his most destructive missteps as mayor have in common is that they do not in any way upset or inconvenience the well-off self-professed liberals who support him. Besides maybe a couple Critical Mass riders arrested in illegal sweeps. (Though he sure does like bike lanes, so it's a wash, right?)

We cannot encourage you to vote for the Democrat in the race, because even we still aren't sure if we'll go for him or the much more delightful Billy Talen. Just don't fucking vote for Michael Bloomberg.

This "pretending to be George Washington on Twitter" game is actually one of the least embarrassing things about Newt Gingrich, of course. He was also the first Speaker of the House to be forced to pay a $300,000 penalty for ethics violations, he shut down the federal government because the president was rude to him during a plane ride, he left his first wife as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from cancer, and he left his second wife for one of the women he was sleeping with during his impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton. Never in his political career have his favorable ratings outweighed his unfavorables. And he keeps accidentally giving awards to porn producers and strippers.

But he is a dreamer! And we will hear about how he is considering this run for president for years, and no one will bring up all the terrible things about him, besides scumbag bloggers.

Forward men, forward!

[Illustration: Weekly World News]

Erickson, a lawyer and "consultant," is the editor of RedState.com. He has repeatedly disavowed the Birthers and wants to create a more credible, mainstream Republican movement.

And, you know, he also thinks Barack Obama is the same as Hitler. Not, like, for serious or anything! He just thinks that health insurers are The Jews of 2009, and to call their little report "a self-serving analysis" is basically the same thing as inciting Kristallnacht.

(He also thinks Hitler was awarded the Berlin Olympics two years before he was even sworn in as Chancellor.)

So, you know, he will certainly look foolish if Herr Obama allows the Republicans to pick up an seats next year! Not that he will know about it, because there is no internet in Insurance Industry Concentration Camps.

The big news in the Times piece is that Michelle Obama's great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Shields—a slave girl in South Carolina and later Georgia who survived to see freedom after the Civil War—bore three children, including Obama's great-great-grandfather, by a white man. It's not clear who, but the Times suggests that the father could have been Melvinia's owner, Henry Shields. And at least one child listed in a census as "mulatto" was born to Melvinia after emancipation, suggesting that their liason (whether coerced or consensual) outlasted her enslavement.

But Michelle Obama's ancestry isn't really the point: It's that the distant monumental evil that lives in history books can be tangibly connected to her, and to see the actual lives of her ancestors who lived with slavery and its consequences recounted with texture and detail is all the more moving because it is so rarely done. It's of course obvious that most African-Americans have similar genealogical trails, and there is no shortage of historical narratives about slavery and the Jim Crow South. But as Henry Louis Gates has pointed out with his genealogical research, one of slavery's many subsidiary crimes is the extent to which is has denied its inheritors a detailed sense of family history and mythology. It stands as a roadblock to the past. Family trees are fuzzy and uncertain; deeds of sale, when they can be found, don't contain as much information as birth certificates. Even with the resources of the Times and a genealogist it consulted, we still don't know for sure who the father of Melvinia Shields' children was.

So Michelle Obama had no idea who Dolphus Shields, her great-great-grandfather and Melvinia's son, was. Born into slavery in 1859, he settled in Birmingham, Alabama, became a co-founder of a Baptist church there, started a hardware store in the white part of town, owned his own home, and carried around candies to hand out to the children. "There was no smoking, no cursing, no gum chewing, no lipstick or trousers for ladies and absolutely no blues on the radio, which was reserved for hymns," in his house, the Times reports, and he went to church nearly every night of the week.

Dolphus died in 1950, just 14 years before the birth of his great-great-granddaughter. Yet she didn't know that he existed, and it took the efforts of a newspaper to inform her, via the front page, of such an intimate part of her own life and past. The historical blind spot may have been in part self-inflicted:

As for his ancestry, Dolphus Shields didn't talk about it.

"We got to the place where we didn't want anybody to know we knew slaves; people didn't want to talk about that," said Mrs. Heath, who said she assumed he had white relatives because his skin color and hair texture "told you he had to be near white."

Maybe that reticence carried forward to his subsequent generations, and maybe that explains how it can be that the First Lady of the United States never learned anything about Dolphus. (Maybe it also explains why she declined to comment for the Times story at all.) Which is why the Times' unraveling of that history is so moving—the lack of solid information, compounded by that sense of shame harbored by people of Dolphus' generation, has obscured that sense of rooted American-ness for so long. Reading it, we couldn't help but think of WASPs who trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower, and that Michelle Obama should be just as proud.

(Our night editor, you may have read, disagrees.)

[Photo via the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.]

McCaughey first began lying in 1994, because she was bored. While working at a conservative think tank and conferring on the regular with the tobacco industry, McCaughey wrote a lengthy and incredibly misleading story about Bill Clinton's health care reform bill that Andrew Sullivan's New Republic happily printed, despite the fact that it was just full of lies.

Michelle Cottle just wrote a piece for Franklin Foer's newer, less annoying New Republic all about McCaughey, and while it doesn't go into the gritty details of how incredibly irresponsible Sullivan was as an editor back in the '90s, when TNR printed all sorts of bullshit for attention and to be provocative, it is satisfyingly mean to McCaughey.

After her lying article of lies became a series of false talking points repeated endlessly by Republicans (like friendly old Bob Dole), everyone noticed that this cheerfully dishonest ideologue was also a nice-looking blonde lady! A veteran Republican pol selected her as a running mate! You can imagine what happened next.

Celebrated for both her brains and beauty, she was declared a brave new model of feminist pol. (A glam-shot photo spread in Vanity Fair set the GOP abuzz, while the New York Post cheered her for having "Henry Kissinger's brains and Jessica Rabbit's body.") Even some of her academic quirkiness—her love of raw data and obsession with pie charts—conveyed a not-politics-as-usual freshness. Admittedly, there were bumps of the sort former Governor Palin could sympathize with: Anonymous Pataki staffers dropped quotes about the newbie candidate being unusually self-absorbed, and her frequent clashes with the veteran Pataki aide assigned to help her adjust to campaign life were downright operatic. (During one battle, McCaughey had her campaign van pull over on the side of a highway as she shrieked at the aide to get out.)

That's right: TNR just straight-up called Betsy McCaughey Sarah Palin. Damn.

Of course her political "career" ended in disaster because she's impossible to work with or for, and she rightfully faded back into obscurity at another conservative think tank. Until, weirdly, she came back with columns and op-eds and radio appearances and TV interviews in which she shamelessly lied about Barack Obama's health care plans, just this year! It is weird how that happens, right? How no one is ever so wrong that they're not allowed back on TV to be wrong some more, as long as they're useful to people with lots of money at stake?

This also means, of course, that Sarah Palin will never completely go away.

Sorry.

As was just not reported anywhere in the US media really, but was reported quite a bit in the Guardian (and other UK news outlets), the US interfered with the trial of supposed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi so much that his conviction was in danger of being overturned way before his release to die at home in Libya. And in exchange for his mercy release, Megrahi agreed not to appeal his conviction and embarrass the hell out of everyone.

But Megrahi has released some embarrassing documents anyway, related to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's review of how the US paid off the only witness, who was maybe lying. Maybe!

The commission found police memos suggesting that Tony Gauci, the only witness to link the Libyan to the alleged plot, expressed an interest in being paid to give evidence. He also received payments from the US department of justice after the trial, the new documents claim to show.

The commission said the documents should have been disclosed to Megrahi's defence team, and that the failure to do so made Megrahi's conviction unsafe. The papers allege that Gauci was paid $2m (£1.2m) after Megrahi's conviction, and his brother Paul $1m.

Sometimes we just want justice so much that we are forced to intervene when foreign, soveriegn nations attempt to have fair criminal trials, ok? That is the American way! And it also explains why we all got soooo mad when the Scots sent him back home to die in Libya. Don't you know how much that conviction cost us?

It is a wonderful piece of alternate universe American history, in which President Nixon had to explain to a nation that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were going to die on the moon.

She was born to middle-class alcoholics. She dropped out of school at 18, moved to San Francisco, and become a stripper. In the late-'60s, she met Manson, who renamed her Sadie Mae Glutz.

After the murders of Gary Hinman, Sharon Tate, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, Wojchiech Frtykowski, and Abigail Folger, most of the Manson family was picked up for auto theft charges. While in prison, Atkins supposedly bragged of killing Tate to cellmates, who promptly turned her in.

At the trial, a remorseless Atkins confessed to stabbing Tate over and over again. Prosecutors say Atkins is the one who wrote "PIG" on the front door of Sharon Tate 's home, in Tate's blood. (Tex Watson took credit for all the murders in his post-born again memoir.)

She died of brain cancer. She is perhaps survived by a son, Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz, whose whereabouts remain unknown.

Kristol, born in Brooklyn to Orthodox Jews, was a Trotskyite at City College and an infantryman in World War II. When he came home, he edited Commentary, founded The Public Interest, and in the 1970s became the world's first Neoconservative.

Neoconservatives were, basically, former leftist intellectuals who decided they hated liberals, radicals, and Goldwater conservatives, and loved American moral superiority and, uh, tax cuts. It was much "sunnier" and nicer than regular conservatism. And they liked FDR. And Israel.

The big idea of Neoconservatism was, per 2003-era Irving, "cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth." A revolutionary concept! Great for getting elected. And pretty good for getting reelected, until it stops working.

In fact, nearly every major tenet of his political philosophy, as he laid it out in 2003, informed the worst abuses of Bush administration. The entire section on foreign policy and American military might would be laughable if it weren't for the disastrous way in which his theories were tested on the ground.

He is survived by his son Bill Kristol—a remarkably embarrassing partisan party hack, which is at least not something Irving ever was—his wife Bea, and their daughter Elizabeth Nelson.

The people who chant "9/11 was an inside job," who babble about controlled demolitions, who seriously think an airplane did not hit the Pentagon (our faves!)... these people, they are crazies who are rightfully marginalized and mocked and who've never been taken seriously by anyone in any position of authority in the Democratic party. They are, in that sense, like the hardcore Birthers. In fact, Philip Berg and Alex Jones are both.

But the entire equivalence argument ignores some huge fucking differences between those nutty "left-wing" wackos and our current "right-wing" wackos.

Like, there have been a couple seemingly reasonable people who've said some variation on the following this week: If Barney Frank (it is always Barney Frank) had shouted "You Lie!" at President Bush, you stupid liberals would've applauded!

Well, here is the thing, and the problem with hypotheticals: Barney Frank would not have done that, because he's not a complete moron. And if he had done that, he would've shouted it after President Bush had actually lied about something, and not just because he's a racist moron who thinks there is a secret plot to save the lives of Mexicans.

Birtherism is tolerated by movement conservatives. (The attempt by some of them to boycott World Net Daily has been called "the elite" attacking "the grassroots" by various more established conservatives, even though actual "elite" conservatives are feeding complete garbage nonsense to the "grassroots") And Birtherism usually does not bother to hide its essential ridiculousness: Barack Obama was not born in the US, because we do not like him! No one could accidentally sign on to a Birther bill without knowing exactly what they're doing, despite the protestation of Congressmen who've done just that but claim not to believe Obama is ineligible to be president.

And, hey, it is not acceptable among actual elite liberals plotting in their liberal caves to say that "Dick Cheney plotted 9/11 himself because he wanted a Reichstag excuse to go to war against Iraq." What it is acceptable to say, because it is true, is that "George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ignored the intelligence that might've helped them stop 9/11, because they were more concerned with non-threats like Iraq, and once 9/11 happened they not only completely botched their response but they then cynically exploited that tragedy to move against Iraq, which they'd been planning to do beforehand anyway." And it is also acceptable to say, once again because it is true, that "George W. Bush and Dick Cheney stonewalled and undermined the official investigation into the events of that day as part of a cover-up—not of their part in the conspiracy itself but of their breathtaking cynicism and incompetence."

And it is the popularity of those (true!) beliefs among liberals that makes the more credulous ones targets for the actual fucking crazies. If you've ever walked by Lyndon LaRouche's college student cultists, you know that they masquerade as regular Democrats who hate Bush, just like you! (Or they used to; now they masquerade as dudes who hate Obama's socialized medicine, just like you!)

And if you've ever been approached by Truthers collecting signatures you know that what they always say is "do you think there should be a complete investigation into the events of 9/11?" To which the answer is "yes, of fucking course, I want to know exactly what Dick Cheney said and did on that day, I want him and Rumsfeld under oath and on tape, and it is universally acknowledged that the Pentagon and CIA and NSA refused to cooperate with the 9/11 commission." You can want a more independent commission with more authority to compel testimony and declassify documents and not believe that BUSH DID 9/11. And multiple signatories of the famous Van Jones petition claim the wording changed between when they signed it and when it was published, with calls for an investigation suddenly supplemented with language arguing that "people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen." Which does sound like a classic Truther move.

Maybe these people who claim the conspiratorial bullshit was added after the fact are covering their own asses. But we're inclined to believe them. (You are free not to!) And in talking to Salon some of them are still saying dumb things, some of them are obviously actual truthers, some of them just still don't really understand who they're getting in bed with, and some of them have grown up, a little bit.

But skepticism of the American government based on the Gulf of Tonkin, COINTELPRO, and Iran-Contra, and skepticism of the Bush administration based on Ahmed Chalabi, faked intelligence, and warrantless wiretapping is a hell of a lot more sympathetic than skepticism of the legitimacy of the current president born entirely of racial fear.

Trutherism is particularly alluring conspiratorial nonsense because of an actual history of the government doing secret, evil things in the name of national security. But there is, as far as we can tell, no history of Foreign Nationals attempting to seize control of the nation through fraud in order to send white people to concentration camps and throw our elderly to the Death Panels. (There is, obviously, no history of the government murdering 3,000 citizens in order to justify a war, especially since governments have been justifying unnecessary wars without all that fuss and bother for some time, and that is why it is batshit insanity. But "government lies to get us into war" is not exactly as much of a stretch as "man pretends to be American in order to trick everyone into electing him president.")

That said: 9/11 was not an inside job, you morons. And you've successfully made it impossible for anyone to raise responsible and serious questions regarding the response of the government, so nice work.

Have you finished composing your "where I was" blog post or, god save us, your #whereiwas Tweet? Have you muted MSNBC's deplorable annual encore performance of the televised deaths of thousands? Have you remembered to never forget? Good. Fine.

Shortly after (or maybe during) that day, our president at the time, a little fuckhead no one liked, handed over the reins to the most psychotic elements of his administration. In the vast national wave of jingoism, paranoia, dread, and fear that followed, he and his friends led us into an unrelated war they'd been planning beforehand, allowed the CIA to wiretap and torture anyone they liked (and encouraged the CIA to wiretap and torture even more than they were comfortable with!), and regularly insisted that our memory of that day should not be sullied with critical thinking or expressions of anything other than still-palpable fear. This played better in the sorts of places that had nothing to fear from international terrorism, but plenty of formerly reasonable-acting people in the major targets did play along, both out of personal conviction and partisan duty.

In fact an entire cottage industry of dudes who were Changed Forever On That Day thrived on the internet. Bloggers, all of whom were self-professed Former Liberal Democrats, were suddenly freed to be racist, bloodthirsty warmongers. They were rewarded with traffic and mainstream legitimacy (even as they ritually attacked the MSM as terrorist-loving fifth columnists). Most are still treated as Serious People, even though their defining characteristic was a hysterical response to a crisis.

But we don't even need to feel bad about the Joe Kleins, Chris Hitchens, Andrew Sullivans, Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnsons, and Peter Beinarts of the media world. Because, whatever, they are as responsible in their own ways as Wolfowitz for the Iraq tragedy, but their magical ride on the patriotism express has ended.

Barack Obama is the president now. Regardless of what you think of him as a politician or a man, he admirably refuses to engage in 9/11 rhetoric. He does not operate from the cynical assumption that his audience believes that America Can Do No Wrong, that to criticize a war is to be a literal traitor, that to not worship the president is to spit on the graves of soldiers, that the correct response to a tragedy is to create a thousand more. He doesn't talk like that. And so, fucking finally, the anniversary belongs to the latte-sipping out-of-touch coastal elites who witnessed it.

On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as "great" as Glenn Beck. They just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed. Many of them were drunk. And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it was 9/12/01. And eight years later, normal people, with brains and souls, have decided that some emotional distance from that disaster is healthier and wiser than trying to recapture the dread.

So thank fucking christ that the Commander in Chief is no longer subjecting the nation to death porn.

No, this year it's limited to a nutty little cult leader on basic cable who is encouraging his radicalized band of fanatical followers to invade the cities where the tragedy actually happened in order to shock the populace back into fear.

Glenn Beck is an actual terrorist, and the people attending his rally in DC tomorrow are al-Qaeda in America.