Flit

OLD STALKERS NEVER DIE...

The Howard Dean camp is having fun today with UPI "columnist" Rachel "Swimfan" Marsden, who wrote a somewhat silly piece about him. They've pretty much managed to take the American right's latest Coulteresque darling's personal website (rachelmarsden.com) off the internet due to bandwidth overload.

At this point every Canadian 20 years of age or older is thinking, "Jesus Christ, won't this disgusting woman ever just crawl back under some rock somewhere and die?" Marsden's bisexual campus stalking shenanigans were the closest thing we had to a royal scandal in this country at one point, and this particular Oleanna's 15 minutes of fame would seem to have long since expired.

But the Republicans love her, it seems... even though according to their own panting writeup she's still never managed to achieve more than a B.Sc. in life. (The rest of her credentials are largely the rewards of her national notoriety, although I had to laugh to the reference to the "Governor General's Medal" for "academic accomplishments." Note to American readers: we ALL get that one up here. It's the Canadian version of a high school honour roll. I can't imagine anyone else post-university putting it on their resume.)

I'm sure the slavering Republican fandom would be a little less impressed, however, if they had spent much time at Rachel's site back in 2001, where she had considerable fun comparing the current American president to a chimpanzee, evidently not being as much of a diehard GOPer at the time as she is now. Fortunately for the future of Rachel's latest lease on life, one suspects they probably didn't visit her site much at the time.

They can now.

A FAITH-BASED PRESIDENCY?

SdB points out that support for the Iraq policy among Americans is still strong. He attributes this, remarkably, to an ongoing Sept. 11-based fear... which is basically what Michael Moore has been saying, all along, too, in fact.

What's even more remarkable is that he portrays this as some kind of American strength... when from another perspective it could look only like the refusal to change one's mind in the light of changed circumstances, or put rational calculus ahead of one's emotional responses. (We also saw this in the odd angry yawping in response to the Howard Dean comment that the Hussein capture hadn't made Americans any safer... a statement that, from any kind of dispassionate perspective, was at least a plausible thesis.)

One can't help but feel that many Americans are like Lileks, still waiting for the WMD's to show up, despite all evidence to the contrary. In undergraduate anthropology, students today wonder at the gullibility of the cargo cults. They probably shouldn't.