Link courtesy of katy at Hot Air:

This video is a horrible way to treat a real victim. Luckily, it appears Ms. Fluke is no such thing.

[Posted by Karl]

It seems like people care about this even less than Michigan and Arizona, although it’s the last stop before Super Tuesday.  RCP’s Scott Conroy notes the result is anyone’s guess.  The state’s GOP chairman predicts a win for either Mitt Romney or Ron Paul.  In a primary campaign marked by low turnout, there are reports of standing-room-only crowds at many locations.  In fact, about 1,500 people were turned away from pooled Benton County caucuses in Kennewick by event organizers after rooms at the Three Rivers Convention Center reached capacity this morning.  The rules are not unlike those for Iowa, with a straw poll followed by votes that actually select the delegates.  Inasmuch as people need not stick around past the straw poll, Ron Paul could make trouble for Mitt Romney on the actual delegate selection.

Here’s your map.

Update: Romney wins.  Paul and Santorum very close to each other for second.

–Karl

Andrew Breitbart’s Twitter feed was hacked tonight. The post went up less than an hour ago. It has since been removed but can still be seen on the timeline:

It’s obviously a spammer and not David Frum. So why do I mention David Frum in the headline?

The principle is this: a man is dead, but there is a buck to be made. So, we take the fact that there are a lot of eyeballs on this issue, and we put up something that has zero content, but that might make us some money. And so we attempt to cynically profit from a man’s death.

In a similar manner, David Frum tried to profit, financially but also in terms of his self-image, from Andrew Breitbart’s recent death. Frum tried (and miserably failed) to elevate himself at the expense of a man who had not been dead for 24 hours, with distortions that are patently at odds with the actual man himself.

I’m not going to link Frum’s piece, and I’m not going to quote it. It’s linked and quoted in Mickey Kaus’s piece yesterday and in Michael Walsh’s post at The Corner.

Like many others, Frum foisted upon his eager audience of leftists and losers a phony picture of Andrew — one that sharply contrasted with the far more accurate picture of him painted by people like Kaus, Walsh, and myself — who actually knew him. Mickey said of Andrew: “I would go so far as to say that Breitbart had an instinctive honesty–pretty much the opposite of what Frum charges.” That is exactly right. And as Michael observes: “As for the implicit charge of racism — these days, the last refuge of a scoundrel — that is prima facie absurd.” Also quite true.

Frum’s claim that Andrew was a dishonest racist, published the day we learned Andrew had died, was little different than a spammer who tries to make money by posting his crap product on a dead man’s Twitter feed. Frum is simply spamming the Internet with the vision of himself as Reasonable Conservative, and the occasion of Andrew’s death was simply a convenient moment for Frum to advance that pointless and stupid (but self-serving) message. Frum’s piece is an example of psychopathy — an utter lack of empathy in the cause of advancing one’s personal interests. I have chosen that word carefully and it is exactly what I mean.

In fact, I believe Frum is actually worse than the spammer. The spammer says: buy my product, it will help you lose weight, and I will make money. Frum says: buy my vision of myself as the One True Reasonable Conservative, it will help you feel good about myself . . . and I will make money. And I will feel good about myself.

But a spammer just irritates. Frum, by criticizing Andrew thoughtlessly and unfairly hours after his death, acts as a ghoulish predator who feasts on the remains of a fresh body for personal gain.

What must go through Frum’s mind, or the mind of Matt Yglesias, when they write things like this? “Somewhere, a widow and her children may stumble across my post, and see a distorted view of a man they loved, who was at the center of my life. But didn’t you hear what I said? I will feel good about myself!”

Over the years, as I have met more and more people in person about whom I had previously read things, I have come to realize that often the things you read are just flatly wrong.

And during my life I have watched other people try to rewrite my life story in front of my eyes, and even in life it’s a difficult thing to fight. It’s tremendously depressing to know that it will happen again when I die, and I won’t even have the ability to fight it.

I hope I still have friends who will.

But ultimately the work and the man have to speak for themselves. And Andrew and his work did. If someone chooses to distort him and his life’s work — to rewrite another’s story to elevate their own — that is, I have to believe, a losing strategy.

Which is why Ace says:

David Frum exceeded Andrew Breitbart in one measure only, span of life.

But not in life.

David Frum will die as he lived, gray, timid, small, spiteful, cramped in thought and bent in spirit, slender of talent and obese in self-regard, unloved, unnoticed, unremembered and unread.

. . . .

As I type this, Breitbart is more alive than David Frum has ever been.

I doubt very much that will change as the years march on.

It is the nature of the rat to envy the lion.

We should not fault the rat overly for this. For what else can the rat do?

But we should say that there are lions, and there are rats. And they are easily distinguishable.

And they are as different from each other as the sun is from the mirror that reflects it.

Scavengers have their place. They serve a function.

But scavengers know their place.

And scavengers only challenge the lion when it lies, safely, dead.

Take a look again the screenshot of the message from the spammer who hopped onto Andrew Breitbart’s Twitter feed to make a buck from Andrew’s death.

David Frum has less honor than that.

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for the link. New readers, please bookmark the site! If you missed my post with my personal memories of Breitbart, please read it here. Trust me, my post is far more accurate a portrait than the crap spewed by Frum.

[Posted by Karl]

It seems like most of the mediasphere cannot stop talking about Rush Limbaugh’s insult of political operative Sandra Fluke.  I cannot stop thinking of Up‘s Dug the Dog:

While I like Up, I have seen this version of the movie before:

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit think they have a disagreement over the point of the anti-Rush Limbaugh campaign being waged by Obama Administration, labor unions and the establishment media.  Morrissey calls it a deliberate strategy to cover up the Democrats’ economic incompetence and massively ineffective spending programs.  Allahpundit that “the Democrats are really trying to do is rebrand the GOP.”  Morrissey thinks any rebranding is ”secondary.”

The reality is that the focus on Limbaugh is all of those things.  The GOP is a minority party with no single titular leader at the moment.  Obama’s Alinskyite politics require that the Left “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”  The folks running this effort thus go to the influential – yet polarizing — figure of Rush Limbaugh.  Doing so necessarily promotes him, with the hope of forcing Republicans to either downplay Limbaugh (driving a wedge between them and their conservative base) or defend him (thereby making a polarizing figure more the face of the GOP).  It is no surprise to learn that James Carville and Paul Begala are part of this effort, as it is a variation of the Clinton Administration’s effort to make Newt Gingrich Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996.  The people behind this campaign do not see it as an “either-or” proposition; they see it as a “win-win” proposition.

Morrissey is also correct in asserting that it keeps the GOP on defense, though this is largely because GOP functionaries are only now figuring out that the attack on Limbaugh can be used to paint the Democrats as not keeping their eye on the economy, or trying to distract from the poor reception the Democrats’ agenda is getting in the financial markets.  The GOP might eventually figure out that they could have used the media’s uncritical parroting of the Left’s campaign against the media, which would quickly stop them from pursuing GOP functionaries about it.

Here we are again, with the WaPo proclaiming Republicans can no longer avoid their “Rush Limbaugh problem,” paired with the obligatory “question raising” coverage in its news coverage.  And tiresome concern troll Conor Friedersdorf again demands that the folks at National Review denounce Rush.  Meanwhile, Friedersdorf will politely disagree with his mentor Andrew Sullivan on Trig Trutherism and Sullivan’s baseless, ghoulish attempt to blame Sarah Palin for the Gabrielle Giffords shooting without indignantly admitting that Sullivan’s unhinged bile corrodes the public discourse in the same way Friedersdorf believes Rush does.   It is all very transparent, but the GOP and its supposed leaders bite anyway.  Then again, no one ever accused the GOP of being the Smart Party.

Barack Obama’s campaign to convince voters that “America is back” is a dud, so they want everyone to look at the squirrel.  When the media comes asking about Limbaugh, the Republican politician’s response ought to be: “I want to discuss the issues Americans actually care about — don’t you?”

–Karl