Thursday, August 3, 2006

Check your CQ [Conspiracy Quotient]

As Fox Mulder used to say, the question isn't whether you're paranoid; it's whether you're paranoid enough. Which of these is true?
  1. Joe Lieberman, desperate not to lose the Connecticut Democratic primary next week, has hired the College Republicans to do field work for him.

  2. Pennsylvania conservatives, desperate to protect Rick "Man-on-Dog-Love" Santorum's Senate seat, are the sole funders of a Green Party candidate, in the hopes that it will split the Democratic vote.

  3. Ballot initiatives across the country (including in Oregon) for the so-called Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR), term limits, and eminent domain changes are primarily the work of a tiny cabal of wealthy libertarians.
Answers in Comments, below.

2 comments:

Nothstine said...

Answers:

1. TRUE. The pod farm for GOP extremists is going to help Bush's favorite Democrat during the next six days. Expect to see some exuberantly vile things to be done in Holy Joe's name.

2. TRUE. Every penny--every penny!--for the Green Party's candidate came from Santorum supporters. I'm not sure who this makes look worse: The Republicans (who, at least, can be said to have the virtue of understanding their own self-interest and acting to advance it), or the Green Party (who are thus managing to perpetuate their reputation, well-earned in 2000, of being clueless tools, but don't seem to have accomplished much else)?

3. TRUE. Hat tip to Becky at PK, who gears up for this kind of story.


bn

Nothstine said...

Sigh.

The Movie Guy is, of course, technically correct. The syntactically correct sentence would have been: "Every penny--every penny!--except for the $30 the dope gave himself--for the Green Party's candidate came from Santorum supporters."

Honestly--no, no, really--vain stylist that I am, I lingered over that problem [since TPM's article I cited mentioned that the guy did donate to his own campaign], but in the end I decided to leave the sentence as-is, because I thought the scrupulously correct version was clunkier.

It's a little thing we like to call cadence.

As Keats pointed out, "beauty is truth, truth beauty," therefore the two versions of the sentence--The Movie Guy's factually more accurate one and my more aesthetically pleasing one--are equivalent.

bn