Pun Salad

Ron and Rudy surge to dump Hillary out of first place! And Fred Thompson shed 84,000 Google hits in five days to now challenge Kucinich for "least phony" honors!

It's an exciting time for phony watchers!

• Senator Christopher Dodd has never registered significant support in the polls, and lacks the comic relief of a Kucinich, so we've never tracked his phony hits. But Shawn Macomber went to Grinnell, Iowa to review Dodd's campaigning from a philosophical point of view:
  "For those of you who don't know me maybe only seen my picture on television or heard my voice, you've been asking two questions since the moment I walked into this room," Dodd said. "And they're very difficult questions to ask, so I'll ask them for you."

  No one can say the senior senator isn't bold or innovative. Usually politicians take questions from the audience and then shoehorn a preferred soundbite into the answer. Here was a man unafraid to streamline the process, to ask and answer his own questions.

  "The first question is 'Who am I?'" Dodd began. The room was silent save for some uncomfortable shuffling, a typical reaction to the threat of late afternoon existentialism.

  "Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see." Maybe I'll watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail tonight.

• Because there's nothin' on TV besides repeats and reality shows and—since I live in New Hampshire—wall-to-wall political commercials. I especially want to avoid seeing Hillary's latest Christmas-related ad again; you need to watch your blood pressure when you're my age.

  But if you haven't seen it, you probably should. It's illuminating, and not in a good way. Prof Althouse has the YouTubed version, with the perfect headline ("I want the government to give me more presents.") and the perfect comment. ("I would have thought this was a parody attacking Hillary Clinton, but she's Hillary Clinton, and she approved of this message.")

  Hillary, of course, is also responsible for the new popularity of a telling oxymoron: "charm offensive".

• Dean Barnett is a gifted writer and pretty good analyst, so it was especially jarring to see the opening of his Weekly Standard article on Mike Huckabee's "embarrassing and unintentionally comic" efforts to pontificate on foreign policy:
  SINCE MIKE HUCKABEE's meteoric rise in the polls, […]

  Arrrghh, Dean! Meteors don't rise; they fall. (This usage is common enough, however, to also irk the proprietor of the Bad Astronomy website.)

  Other than that, though, Dean's article is great. Check it out, just remember to skip the fourth word.

• But what's behind the meteoric rise dramatic increase of Ron's and Rudy's phony hit counts? In Ron's case, a quick scan through recent search results finds the p-word flung mostly by his supporters against other candidates, and (of course) the "phony polls" that fail to find much actual voter support for their guy.

• And in Rudy's case, we're seeing some heated rhetoric out of the continually-arrested anti-abortion protesters outside his campaign headquarters in Manchester. Semi-famous Randall Terry is quoted:
  Randall Terry stated, "The purpose of these protests and sit-ins is to highlight the fact that Giuliani is a hard core pro-abort, and is trying to pass himself off as a conservative Republican.

  "When it comes to moral issues that grip our political debates, there is no difference between Giuliani and Hillary. He must be stopped at all cost. The key is showing that Rudy is a phony — a wolf in sheep's clothing."

  I hadn't really noticed the sheep's clothing myself.

• But in my travels on the Intertubes, I found phoniness here:
  McCain... wants big government to take over even more of our decisions. Campaign finance reform is allegedly of great concern to McCain. Unfortunately, and this is especially sad for his younger supporters, it is pretty clear now that McCain is a phony on this issue. McCain wants it both ways. He campaigns as the golden knight who will "reform" political fundraising, even as he thumbs his nose at the voters by continuing to take big corporate money AND still doing favors for those companies by leaning on the government agencies that are supposed to regulate them.

  Tough words. Amusingly, they're from New Hampshire's own Union Leader newspaper—back in 2000. This year, the Union Leader is endorsing the "phony" McCain.

  [I should say: the quote is allegedly from the Union Leader. Apparently there are Democrat activists that like to pass around phony quotes from the paper. Tsk!]

"Wear red on Fridays," Pun Salad replies: yes, sir!.

For those of you needing quick access to Pun Salad content on the topic of your choice: (a) Why in the world would you need that? (b) I've added a Google^TM Custom Search box over there on the right.

No, your right.

The Googlers make this easy enough so that just about any idiot can do it. "And I'm living proof of that."

For no particular reason, I adapted a travesty program to output a few paragraphs in the Pun Salad style:

Overnight success" is a state environmental consultant, a surveyor, and a TV show called The Monkees, and Michael Nesmith. For you Wildcatters out there, without question, but it's a mere four days, most of the siren tempts the sailor, sometimes with the conservative movement, having discovered a fountain of youth. The Enterprise (in its shuffle mode) more often than I'd like to say: this movie is a small arch of the annual deficit, this is a multi-billion dollar market if governments can be enjoyed. The napkin attributes this to Secret Service Uniformed Division has existed in name since 1977.

It's not even very good straight man as all the costs of Social Security; expand savings incentives; and ensure pension fairness. Translation: Democrats have no restrictions of friendship when looking at it? That's the goal of U.S. life, with Muslims in this ongoing series, this is true with respect for the good fortune of being drawn into the mind of late: why the various entitlement and welfare programs run by "Dr. P", played by Adrien Brody, hired by an impressively long list of approved choices in a UNH group calling itself "Students for Academic Integrity" is circulating a petition signed by 1.028 kiloeconomists. At the same medicine we give Republicans." Then Satel and Klick misrepresent a fine movie overall.

Gene Hackman gives an unexpectedly large number of Tony's buddies come off sounding like a wisdom tooth, by the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division", to be far-fetched. In other words, … hm … well, check it out of 14 former members of the population or less. This view is seemingly fueled entirely by resentment of the world is flat? Would the "communists" not have been played by Will Smith, indisputably African-American, and Eva Mendes, … deadly octopi. An Australian species has venomous suckers that can debunk the EPists with alternative hypotheses, her argument is that a French rat has aspirations to become engaged to a couple guys are killing. This very arty Korean movie follows two timetracks: the first time I get this straight.

They don't mean to be united in their idyllic hippie commune. Unfortunately, the New Yorker, "I enjoy winning and making money." Keynes meant something similar when he examined the clientele at a relatively short timeframe, without acknowledging the earlier post in the Iron Man movie. Cool! Fans of intentionally bad writing—and we are just the boys you'd never go out and checked. She said she was just window dressing; he's about right. Via Prof Althouse.)