Nowhere man

I can remember when the British political scandal was a thing of beauty, with fascinating salacious details. Headline from the Indy: “Lib Dem Leader Admits He Uses Wasteful Lightbulbs.”

This next paragraph is a bit of pedantry, and I write it really only for myself: this past Sunday NYT’s Week in Review section has a correction to an article on the history of hunger strikes in the previous Sunday’s Week in Review. 1) The correction is closer to the truth, but still wrong. 2) There were at least 3 other mistakes in the (short) article. 3) Don’t get me started on the quality of their delivery service lately.

So let’s move on to their story about Lamont’s victory, which says his “candidacy... soared from nowhere on a fierce antiwar message”. First, “soared from nowhere” is just crap writing. Second – and yes, I didn’t switch from my pedantic mode after the last paragraph; it’s never a good sign when I start numbering my points – the place where people are tired of the war or never approved of it in the first place or don’t trust George Bush’s handling of it, is not “nowhere,” it’s not the Twilight Zone, as spooky as the Times might find it, it’s America. If Lamont’s win seemed to you to come out of nowhere, you just weren’t paying attention.

Lieberman, in his post-defeat speech, henceforth to be known as the “Sore Loserman Speech,” called his side, the losing side, Team Connecticut, which is just kind of sad and pathetic, really. He accused Lamont of running a campaign of “partisan polarizing,” which is a telling phrase, because this was a primary election and so any polarizing was intra-partisan, unless Lieberman is admitting that he’s been a Republican all this time. (Update: Billmon caught that too.) Sez His Holy-Joe-ness, “For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot, I will not let this result stand.” Suggesting that the election results are a danger of some sort to the state, the country and his (former) party, implying that they are not legitimate, is just an insult to the citizens of Connecticut and to democracy itself.

A WaPo article on Tom DeLay’s difficulties getting off the ballot in Texas mentions something I hadn’t thought about: the new touch screen polling machines make write-in campaigns very difficult.

In May, the American ambassador to Armenia was fired, probably for the crime of referring to the Armenian genocide of 1915 as a genocide. Some senators are holding up, or will vote against, the next nominee, Richard Hoagland, because he refuses to use the word.