The Senate minority leader comes not to bury Kos but to pander to him. Plus: Mark Warner forgets who he’s talking to and Arianna supports the troops as only she can. All this and more as the mole does it up quick-take-style.
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Big news is Harry Reid said he’s introducing a bill next week that will require the CIA to monitor everything the White House says regarding Iran so that they won’t politicize intelligence.
Obviously, it’s unconstitutional. Congress couldn’t put that kind of limitation on the Executive Branch. But I like the sound of it because it seems like Reid thinks Bush is serious about Iran.
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Lee Camp was a reasonably good stand-up comedian who warmed up for Reid. I laughed at this line: “Native Americans are now allowing abortion on their reservations. Frankly, if I were Native American, I’d be doing all I could do to reduce the population of the white man—abortion, doctor–assisted suicide, designated hunting areas for Dick Cheney…”
Actually, abortion has a huge impact on minority communities, and Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger had roots in the eugenics movement and said some awfully un-PC things about birth control and minorities.
Hmm. Camp’s joke sounded funny at the time.
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Mark Warner’s speech this afternoon was well received except for one misstep. He said America needs to connect the dots between our energy policy and tyranny abroad (note—tyranny is a paraphrase, but that’s the gist. Bad things abroad.). It wasn’t only in the Middle East that this occurred, he noted, but also Hugo Chavez in Venezuela!
Silence. Mumbles. Someone said “oopsie!” (Okay, that was me.)
It was certainly not the applause line he was expecting.
Here’s a link to some Kos discussion on the Warner coziness courtesy of this dude.
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Also warming up for Harry was a video produced and edited by a 15-year-old girl. It was just basic propaganda—images and text over some remix of “We Will Rock You”—but it was a great piece for firing up the base.
I think the Right is trailing in this particular arms race. Hot Air is a great start in countering the Left’s command of the creative culture—the quick response on the Zarqawi video was great—but I hope that this becomes a technology that’s widely adopted.
The cool thing about blogging is that anybody can do it. Video production is harder to do, but technology has changed enough that creative people ought to be able to start doing video on their own as well. At least with Hot Air and Powerline Video there’s now an incentive to do so, since they can now distribute conservative videos to a wide conservative audience. But the incentive is worthless if we don’t have our own creative people begin to learn and make video as well. I think one lesson to take away from this is that we need to think about ways to make the know-how and knowledge to do the basics of what Bryan does every day available to a bunch of smart grassroots conservatives. I like to think in a few years Hot Air will be like an Instapundit to a vast mob of videobloggers.
Sorry, that was boring and preachy and faux oracular. This place has affected my brain.
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You know what I didn’t hear nearly as much as I expected? Israel and Palestine. I think one woman on the foreign policy panel mentioned the need for a peace process there despite countless slams at Neocons, but otherwise Palestine didn’t really show up on the Yearly Kos radar screen.
Oh, that reminds me. Also from that foreign policy panel: Arianna Huffington said that more Hadithas were “inevitable.”
But she supports the troops, those psycho hair-trigger My-Lai cutthroat killbot bastards.
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To the commenter who offered the Lagavulin to wash out the taste of last night’s Kostini, I salute your taste and wish I could take you up on that. To the commenter who pointed out that the Riviera is, well, not the Bellagio, I’ll point out that all the Kos events (as opposed to the PAC events which were hella swank) were done on a shoe string. Actually, the standard registration fee is at a financial loss for them and they ask you to voluntarily contribute more than the regular registration—which is an interesting business model—but when you run an organic goat-yogurt creamery it’s sometimes hard to shell out for plane fare out here.
Oops, I just got made, for the second time today. I tell everybody who asks me who I’m writing for, and usually they ask more about the site or just nod and say “cool name”. But twice now I got the stink-eye. At least we’ve got some name recognition over among the nutroots, too.
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Update: They didn’t give him much time to talk, but HA’s own Bryan Preston still managed to express his fondest well wishes to the Kossacks this morning on Good Morning America opposite a giggly Ana Marie Cox.
Here’s the video. Why is it that our people are always being paired off in these things against cute redheads?
Tune in to tomorrow to Larry King Live, where I’ll be debating Lindsay Lohan, Marcia Cross, and Alyson Hannigan on the Zarqawi killing and what it means for the war on terror.
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Update: Our affiliate, Expose the Left, has video of Kos’s appearance opposite Byron York this morning on Meet the Press. The NY Times has a report on YK this morning, too. Vilsack shows some spine while Dean-o tells the nutroots he’s set up a special “Internet department” at the DNC whose job, god help them, is to read lefty bloggers all day long.
More on YK from WaPo. Say this much for Hillary: she’s one of the left’s few all-stars who’s not out there kowtowing to these creeps. And then there’s this from the Washington Times:
The line that earned him the most enthusiastic applause with hoots and hollers was his call for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to be fired.
But seconds later, Mr. Warner said that “we are all glad to see the end of” terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi. That line was followed by silence.
Previously: Infiltrating Yearly Kos: Tinfoil hats spotted; Infiltrating Yearly Kos: “Heh, indeed” edition; Infiltrating Yearly Kos: The taunting of Byron York; Infiltrating Yearly Kos: Now with photos!; Infiltrating Yearly Kos: “No, no, no, don’t call them a Nazi”; Infiltrating Yearly Kos: Post 1