A Churl Replies

Condoleeza Rice is a non-metaphorical warmonger. She hawked the own-goal invasion of Iraq concocted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. She was part of the full-court PR for US invasion, the tragic world-historical blunder that unleashed the current generations-worth of warfare in the Middle East. She is odious in that respect.

Why should any university grant the platform of a commencement address, its one last gesture of guidance to its assembled graduating class, whatever that might be worth, to a person who, when it came to the crucial self-defining passage of her life, did the wrong thing, the utterly, reprehensibly wrong thing?

Triumph of the Will

What it takes to have a good time these days in State College, Pennsylvania.

Recently Sighted

Here's a caricature of Glenn Reynolds, writer of the well known (among people who know about these things) blog Instapundit. I photoshopped Reynold's head on the body of a robot stacking colored blocks (even though I suck at Photoshop), in response to a contest proposed by Brad Reed last year at Sadly, No!, who asked his readers, for his own sarcastic reasons, to submit images of a robotized Reynolds.

I'm pleased to see Brad's chosen to use my caricature a few times since then when revisiting yet another of Instapundit's pronouncements.

On his blog Reynolds is known for going on succinctly enough about the business of being wrong in public, frequently approaching the limit of what might be described as the greatest lower bound of words in any realized rhetoric needed to issue wrongness into the world, with the use of his trademark phrase Heh. Indeed. — words which by virtue of being unleashed on the internet have the power to incorporate a cleverly coded reference to some other more lengthily propounded wrong devised by someone else out there on the web, thereby economically encapsulating the greater amount of wrong in the smaller container of his famous phrase. I imagine on a good day, Heh. by itself is rhetoric enough for Reynolds, an elemental monad of wrong excreted on his blog along with its linked nonsense for the nourishment of his large and avid flock of readers.

Reading Glenn Reynolds and his asociates risks exposure to a debilitating dosage of wrong over time, and it's the chosen task of the folks at S,N! to fashion a palliative out of ridicule, contumely and if necessary, relevant information in an effort to helpfully disabuse readers of the sort of notions that regularly ingesting such wrong produces. Brad's contest to robotize Reynolds was, I suppose, in support of such efforts. Good times, good times.

UPDATE April 15, 2009: Blue Dog Texan, over at Firedoglake, resuscitated my Reynolds caricature today. Good to see its getting wider circulation. Take that, Sadly, No! Contest Winner Person! HA!!