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What with Andrew Sullivan having announced his semi-retirement a little while back, we hadn’t headed over to andrewsullivan.com in a while. But we clicked over today, and, lo and behold, the posts were fresh and bountiful. What gives? Sully explains in a brief post entitled “A Self-intervention”:
It’s time to come clean. I tried to cut down on blogging, and I have indeed changed my hours and patterns. But my name is Andrew and I am a blogoholic.
Wonder if he has a sponsor? We’re thinking Ana.
Okay, hang with us here: We’re about to quote Kevin, quoting Michelle, quoting Frank. Kevin over at Catch plays off a Michelle Malkin column in which she approvingly quotes New York Times house liberal Frank Rich. (Yes, you read that right.) Malkin writes that “Rich is wrong about most things, but he’s painfully on target in noting the incongruous pandering now taking place by some in the cool-kids clique on the right. Conservatives criticize Hollywood relentlessly, but as Rich notes, ‘the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too.'”
Kevin then posts a picture of straight-laced South Park Republicans author Brian C. Anderson. “If you squint until blood pours out of your eye sockets,” he jokes, “he starts to look like the Fonz.”
Tim Lambert catches another example of John Lott giving a glowing review to his own book. On Amazon.com, Lott posted on a negative review of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s book Freakonomics, and signed the review at the bottom; at the top, the reviewer is listed as “Economist123.” If you click on Economist123’s “see all my reviews” link, you come across his review of Lott’s book — not surprisingly, a five-star rave. “If you use a pseudonym to post a five-star review of your book,” writes Lambert, “Don’t use the same Amazon account to post another review and sign your name to it.” Lambert claims that Lott has posted at least 18 five-star reviews of his own books.
Brendan Nyhan takes issue with a passage in a Washington Monthly book review by Jeff Greenfield in which Greenfield claims that Bill Clinton got a $200 haircut on Air Force One. “In fact, the $200 price for the haircut Clinton received on Air Force One is, like much of the story, undocumented or untrue,” writes Nyhan. “No one knows how much Clinton paid; the $200 figure — Christophe’s usual rate — became attached to the story as if it were fact. (And, contrary to widespread belief, the haircut did not tie up air traffic at LAX.)”
He adds: “Greenfield should know better. But then again, if media elites actually cared about the facts, many Clinton-era urban legends would not still be conventional wisdom.”
Yeah, but then nobody would read Snopes.
–Brian Montopoli
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