I know, I know. It sounds like liberal blasphemy to say I like any conservative personality and not mean it in some kind of backhanded “I love Howard Dean because he helps my cause” kind of way. I actually and genuinely like Michael Savage. Why? He’s batshit crazy and that’s funny as hell.

The most recent example of such is his jihad (no other word for it) against the good people at Media Matters. He flipped out against the fact that they would have the audacity to reproduce what he’s saying, and went so far as to send them an email. Take a look.

From: ****************@aol.com
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 5:55 PM
To: *******@mediamatters.org
Cc: *****@****.com
Subject: Re: Savage continued attacks on Etheridge & Hollywood

If you ever harass me again I will have you prosecuted under California’s anti-stalking legislation. This indicates malice and intent to harm on the part of media matters.

Apparently Savage got sent an email with a MediaMatters item on him attached. I can only imagine how awful it would be if someone sent me an email with my own words printed in it. Oh, and MM says his email address is available at bacons.com, but I’d avoid that. It’s this: paulreveresociety@aol.com (his old one was @yahoo.com, I’m just going with @aol.com due to MM’s listing, so try both!)

I don’t really need to go into details on the guy, most of it’s obvious. If you don’t know, just peruse his Wikipedia entry. The man’s out of his gourd. He’s a guy named Michael Alan Weiner with a degree in botany that wrote a book called Plant a Tree and now spends all of his time talking about liberals. Well, not ALL of his time, he does knock the occasional “Bushbot” (his term). But listeners of his program? They ain’t on the left.

And the things he says? They’re just beautiful. Imagine if you took your average conservative windbag, got him completely hammered, and sat him in a room all by himself except for another guy who periodically mentioned news stories just to get him rambling. That’s Savage. A guy who says things so off the wall you can neither get truly offended by them nor thing he actually believes them. I mean, c’mon.

On civil rights:

“It’s a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males’ birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn’t qualify for it.”

On Wolf Blitzer:

“That’s why the department store dummy named Wolf Blitzer, a Jew who was born in Israel, will do the astonishing act of being the type that would stick Jewish children into a gas chamber to stay alive another day. He’s probably the most despicable man in the media next to Larry King, who takes a close runner-up by the hair of a nose. The two of them together look like the type that would have pushed Jewish children into the oven to stay alive one more day to entertain the Nazis.”

On Muslims:

“They say, “Oh, there’s a billion of them.” I said, “So, kill 100 million of them, then there’ll be 900 million of them.” I mean, would you rather die — would you rather us die than them?”

This isn’t like Beck or Coulter, people who seem to really believe what they say. This is a comedy act by an environmentalist with perhaps a slight Jewish bias (hence the prior 2 comments, I believe). And to be honest, it’s damn hilarious. The only people I get mad at are the ones stupid enough to tank a single thing that comes out of his man’s mouth seriously.

I mean, the guy CAN’T be for real, can he?

Links appear to be working again. If I’ve dropped yours, let me know.

While the Libby trial rockets around in the political sphere here in the United States, Iraq is seeing some of the worst violence it’s had since the war began. Today, roughly 150 died in attacks, including 115 in a single suicide bombing attack.

Two suicide bombers strapped with explosives detonated themselves almost simultaneously in a busy street lined with tents in the city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, killing 115 people, local hospital officials said.

The tents had been set up to offer food, drink and resting areas for pilgrims. At least 200 people were wounded in that attack, the hospital officials said.

Someone suggested to me that it’s possible for the attacker to have been a Shia himself. After all, such an attack would drum up unbelievable unifying hatred against the Sunnis and further along the war between the two factions. Is that better? Worse? Honestly I’d say it’s hardly either.

What things like this illustrate, more than anything, is that the fighting inside Iraq is not about hating freedom or disrupting democracy. It has nothing to do with breaking America’s will. It’s about two factions within Iraq that so despise each other that they’ll blow themselves up to kill more of their enemies, or perhaps blow up themselves and their own to inspire more to join in the fight.

The verdict is in, it’s official. The fall guy for the administration, ol’ Scooter Libby, has been found guilty in four of the five charges against him.

Libby was convicted of one count of obstruction, two counts of perjury and one count of lying to the FBI about how he learned Plame’s identity and whom he told. Prosecutors said he learned about Plame from Cheney and others, discussed her name with reporters and, fearing prosecution, made up a story to make those discussions seem innocuous.

The thing is, I don’t think any of us lefties are going to get a heck of a lot of satisfaction out of this result. Most of us only paid attention to the trial to see who else in the upper tier of the administration was going to get fingered. And, most importantly, none of the charges here actually involve the leaking of Plame’s identity. It’s like if someone got convicted of perjury after the OJ trial but OJ stays out of prison.

Of course, I’m not alone in this.

[Denis] Collins, a former Washington Post reporter, said jurors wanted to hear from others involved in the case, including Bush political adviser Karl Rove, who was one of two sources for the original leak. Defense attorneys originally said both Libby and Cheney would be witnesses, and Rove was on the potential witness list.

“I will say there was a tremendous amount of sympathy for Mr. Libby on the jury. It was said a number of times, ‘What are we doing with this guy here? Where’s Rove? Where are these other guys?”’ Collins said. “I’m not saying we didn’t think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of. It seemed like he was — as Mr. Wells put it, he was the fall guy.”

And that’s the core of the issue. Libby was guilty, to be sure, but the whole trial is reminiscent of the Moussaoui business. It’s a distraction, misdirection from the main issue. A White House official leaks the name of a CIA official, yet the guy he told takes the fall. The inherent idiocy of this situation should be apparent.

Well, as Fitzgerald said, it’s over now. Truthfully, I don’t want to see Libby get run up the river. I think he should get the deserved sentence, but this is not a case of burning Libby in effigy for all of the other officials we couldn’t get. Ah well.

You’ll notice things are a lot different here. I’m doing a bit of an overhaul, aiming for functionality. Let me know what you think.