Thoughts in a Haystack

James Wolcott of Vanity Fair has a delicious demolition of the Miss Congeniality in the Conservative Wet-Dreams Pageant, Laura Ingraham, and her recent exercise -- in book form, no less -- of puerile "satire" about the Obamas.

This part is cute ... in about the same way as a three year old trying to say "nuclear physics" is cute:

I think we live in the greatest country on the face of the earth. And of course America was going to elect a minority president. Why wouldn't we? I always hoped it would be a conservative that would be elected first, but we're America! Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant people in the face of the planet—a celebrated person around the world, also a disabled man. I mean, Oprah Winfrey is an African-American woman."

What's up with conservative "pundits" and Hawking? Wolcott reminds us:

During the health care debate the idiotic Investor's Business Daily ran an editorial claiming that Hawking were in the UK, he'd be targeted for the human scrap heap by the National Health Service. When it was pointed out to IBD with an accompaniment of of scorn and mocking that Hawking is in the UK, that he was born and raised and educated there, the paper issued a pissy little retraction, provoking Ezra Klein to observe:

Investor's Business Daily...has now deleted the offending line from their editorial and published a correction. "This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK," reads the addendum.

But that's not a correction at all. IBD never claimed that Hawking didn't live in the UK. It claimed that the NHS would judge him worthless and leave him to die. That was what was wrong. And that has not been corrected by the IBD -- which says a lot about how much trust readers should place in their work. Instead, it has been corrected by Hawking himself.

I suppose that they dimly know that Hawking is the most famous and, quite possibly, the greatest, theoretical physicist alive and, having had their lizard minds imprinted with the "American Exceptionalism" meme, they can't help in their ignorance but assume that he's American.

But Wolcott then goes on to pile another log on what's rapidly turning out to be the bonfire of Arianna Huffington's vanity:

I don't know if you noticed -- I didn't draw attention to it -- but I removed The Huffington Post from my peerless blogroll for running anti-Darwin/pro-"Intelligent Design" claptrap propaganda, and now I see they're publishing Ingraham's "Obama Diaries" as a daily blog, only reconfirming my original slash mark through their name.