Tag: fight

Just finished Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House.

I do not score Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House as a political book, any more than I currently score Charlie Stross’s Laundry novels as being horror. I know what genres their respective authors think their books are in, but I couldn’t help but treat Fight as one of the funniest books I’ll be reading this year. The horrified bafflement! The nigh-tangible sense of DOOM that flooded This Town! The inability to decide just which rodent-fornicator was the most rodent-fornicating of all! And the uncritical willingness of the authors to let each of their interviewees – on both sides – have at least one poisoned knife each, to use on a target of their choice!

Heart. Of. Stone.

#commissionearned

Tweet of the Day, @presjpolk Did Not Oversell This edition.

The soundtrack is almost perfect in its timing. Seriously, it’s the kind of soundtrack where you go Omigod omigod this is perfect music and then you make people listen to it and then you go See? SEE? and then the other person goes Wow and then you go I know, right? Or something like that.

Frankly, I would have run at about thirty seconds in. But then, I’m an apex predator and felis catus is not.

Michael Totten on the Chris Hitchens Syrian Nazi story.

(Via Protein Wisdom)

There are two things about Michael Totten that make his account of Chris Hitchens versus the Syrian Nazis of interest:

  1. He’s an on-site reporter for that region for several years now, with a well-deserved reputation of being a straight shooter who reports what he sees as well as what he’s told;
  2. He was actually there.

So read the whole thing. It will be unsurprising to anyone reading this that Totten’s account is nothing like the rather fevered speculation that Ace referenced here, and that Dan Collins reaction-lampooned here: it has all the messiness that one associates with a true account. Hitchens got offended by a fascist symbol enough to deface; the fascists got offended by his defacing it, and showed up in enough numbers to let them attack a few middle-aged men until one of their targets could get a taxi to take them away. No Hollywood heroics, just a confrontation where the good guys were in a bad tactical position, and they took some lumps because of it. The good news? Totten learned the right lesson from this: don’t waste time reasoning with fascists. Have your own backup on speed dial, instead.

Yes, that advice scales up.

Moe Lane

Crossposted at RedState.