Whiskey Fire, on the scathing but elder-rabid sounding email from Bob Dole to Scott McClellan:

At least McClellan hasn’t taken to the national airwaves to inform us of what medication he swallows to unshrivel his penis. Advantage, Scottie!

Wingnut Blogger Steven Gilbert goes kamikaze on Obama’s uncle, and misses everything but the resulting self-immolation.

Or as Roger puts it, “The Greatest Generation Meets The Fighting Keyboarders”

From the Rightwing “Newsbusters”:

McClellan’s Publisher a Liberal: Advances Soros & Slams Limbaugh

Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he “worked very closely” with Scott McClellan on McClellan’s new book published by PublicAffairs which Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures, including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros.

George Soros being the nuclear bogeyman of the Right, of course, a commie-jihadist-nazi-leftwing pinko with teeth the size of a T Rex’s.

The author, Brent Baker, also points out that Osnos “hailed the late left-wing columnist Molly Ivins.”

Yes, that’s right: he said nice things about a deceased columnist. Inconceivable!

From Nizkor’s “Logical Fallacies“:

Translated from Latin to English, “Ad Hominem” means “against the man” or “against the person.”

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting). This type of “argument” has the following form:

1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B makes an attack on person A.
3. Therefore A’s claim is false.

The reason why an Ad Hominem (of any kind) is a fallacy is that the character, circumstances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases) have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the quality of the argument being made).

Example of Ad Hominem:

1. Scot McClellan’s book states that the White House mislead the American people about the threat posed by Iraq, and the involvement of high level staffers in the Plame leak case. The book is published by a liberal, whose publishing house is affiliated with other liberals, including Soros; therefore the book is false.

From Stephen’s guide to logical fallacies, Proof for Ad Hominem:

Identify the attack and show that the character or circumstances of the person has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the proposition being defended.

What George Soros or Molly Ivins has to do with the facts laid out in McClellan’s self-serving expose is clear only to hyperbolically small-minded ideologues like Brent Baker.

Too busy to blog on Scotty’s decision to rat out his former boss, but John Cole does a nice job of pointing out the sort of completely clueless or disingenuous turd-buckets inhabit Right Blogostan.

More elements of the “fringe try to rehabilitate McClellan”.

Poor Man:

The “CYA-Oriented Perfunctory Recounting of Shit You Already Know” aisle at Barnes & Noble will squeeze out the 8 million remaindered copies of Left Behind For Dummies and moldy stacks of John Mayer CDs in no time. And every time another ex-Bush apparatchik clasps their bloodied hands in front of them to mewl and whimper for sympathy because it just wasn’t their fault, expect the press to be Shocked! by the Stunning! Revelations! in their Surprisingly Harsh! note from Mom (signed, shakily, in crayon) that requests, in sum, that little Scottie (or little Paul or little Condi or others to be named later) be excused from prison today because that mean little Rove boy beat him up in the briefing room again. Pathetic.

from today’s LA Times Pantload-spoor.

“If conservatives swiftboat Michelle Obama, it’s all Hillary Clinton’s fault.”

Unbe-fucking-lievable.

God only knows what Ms. 3AM was thinking about. Even super-Hillaryite Marsh Taylor is at a loss:

Is this thing over yet? That’s what many are feeling today, as everyone is as close to the breaking point with fatigue as it comes. We need a long weekend. Clinton’s statement today reveals our collective fatigue and was unbelievably unfortunate. Looking at her make her statement of regret you can see her pain and that she is devastated by what she said, which is clear in the statement below from the Clinton camp.

~~~

Take the lady at her word. She made a horrible mistake that she regrets. We could all use a day off, which I hope this long weekend will supply.

At least Taylor has the sense to recognize a Clinton foot-in-a-Clinton mouth when she sees it. And on Talk Left, another Clintonista hotbed, Armando recognizes an “unfortunate, inappropriate statement by Senator Clinton” was “simply is an indefensible remark, and in very poor taste.”

Reason usually prevails where reasonable people are involved.

In contrast, the batshit crazy continues over at No Quarter, where a batshit crazy post about Clintion’s appalling statement by the inaptly named “truthteller” is titled like one of Kim il Jong’s batshit crazy slogans: “Typical Obama Supporters Willfully Misinterpret Clinton Open Thread” begins “Obama supporters are sexist and violent,” blaming anyone-other-than-Hillary for what is, seen in the best possible light, an “indefensible remark,” a “horrible mistake” which was “unbelievably unfortunate,” before it spirals into a lame pissing match with an anonymous commentator on one of NQ’s increasingly banal and insane threads.

At this point, it seems obvious to me that Hillary is only hurting Hillary. I don’t think she intended her comment maliciously, it was just an incredibly stupid thing to say, the kind of thing which is a natural by product of grasping at straws and twisting logic at every turn to justify staying in the race and seeking to overturn the results of the caucuses and primaries as measured by the once agreed-upon metric of delegate counts. Trying to justify staying in the race because Bobby got whacked probably seemed logical for the nanosecond it took to shoot out of her brain and come out of her mouth.

The perception her statement creates doesn’t require any “willful misinterpretation,” even if her remark was not as ill-intended as it was perceived. But it underscores why it is time for Hillary to end her campaign and surrender the limelight, before she kills (her own image and goodwill) again.

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - A Missouri car dealer said on Thursday sales have soared at his auto and truck business since launching a promotion this week that promises buyers a free handgun or a $250 gas card with every purchase.

Well, duh – you can hold up gas stations and get a lot more than $250 worth of free gas, as well as the register contents, should you be an actual thief and not just a car owner.

Marc Cooper’s Dissonance:

DURING THIS SAME WEEK that Barack Obama clinched the majority of pledged Democratic Party delegates, the presidential mash-up was more frenzied than ever. But not between Obama and Hillary Clinton. No. It was a knockdown, blood-on-the-floor, caged grudge match between Clinton and McCain to see who could more brutally beat the American process into utter stupidity.

~~~

WHICH BRINGS ME to the second half of this week’s political equation. While McCain was skimming the moral low ground, guess who he bumped into down there on the bottom? Why, it was Comrade Clinton! Hillary, Glorious Protector of the Oppressed Territories of Florida and Michigan! Stalwart Defender of Waitresses, Janitors, Coal Miners and, presumably, the Kronstadt Sailors! I swear, I almost drove off the side of Topanga Canyon the day of the Kentucky and Oregon primaries as I was listening to the political coverage on XM radio and heard one of her surrogates make the preposterous claim that Hillary was being cheated out of the nomination because she had actually won the popular vote (which is true only if you count the nonelection in Michigan, where there was no one else on the ballot, if you don’t count the tens of thousands of Democrats who voted with their feet in myriad caucus states and if you subtract your IQ and body mass index). I got so angry I punched the station button to C-SPAN radio and ran right into Chairwoman Clinton herself, claiming — are you ready? — that because of the geography of her victory, she had won more “electoral votes” than Obama.

Whaaatt? There’s no crying in baseball, and there are no electoral votes in party primaries.

Michelle Malkin, she of the “so-called Japanese internment,” is still batshit crazy:

Well, actually, it’s not even a fix. Black’s a competent manager and he’s been scrupulously ethical in his representation of blood-soaked autocrats.

WTF⁴??? How can a lobbyist be “scrupulously ethical in his representation of blood-soaked autocrats?”

It will be interesting, of course, to hear these Democrats explain why exactly Black’s ties with evil dictators are so bad, when their presumptive candidate is proposing to go work with them face to face and legitimize relations with a whole assortment of repressive thugs.

Um, maybe because it’s very common to negotiate against another party, which is a stark contrast to representing that party and being paid to represent its interests to the exclusions of others. Example: A district attorney negotiates against a criminal in plea bargain negotiations, trying to extract the strongest possible punishment, while the defense attorney who is paid to represent the criminal istrying to get him off with the lightest possible penalty.

But unlike the paid lobbyist, the defense attorney is fulfilling a constitutional role in our criminal justice system. The Lobbyist who represents the “blood-soaked autocrat” is just a moral whore.

Via Sadly, No!