Red Sky at Morning, newspapers take warning

Some years back, my parents brought home a novel, Red Sky at Morning -- a "coming-of-age" tale set during the years of WWII (I occasionally still confuse it, in my mind, with A Catcher in the Rye, and I may be doing it again, here, since it's been more than three decades since I read the latter), full of humor and strength and grace and wit... all of which I missed the first time I read it, since I was only a callow teen.

But the one section of the novel which stayed with me long after I reread the book and grasped the larger picture was the one particular scene in which the kids were playing a sort of game of "Dare". Across the lumpy ground of a field lay a dead horse. It had been lying there on the warming ground long enough to become badly bloated and extremely ripe. The kids' game was to get as close as they could to the corpse, then dash back away to safer ground. The protagonist decided he would run as fast as he could, then reach out to "tag" the remains before swinging around and returning, thereby upping the stakes of the game... and he stumbled badly on the last steps of the approach. If memory serves me correctly, the result impressed the other kids, but the memory and the stench remained with him for long years.

Well, that bloated horse is lying out there in the middle of the public eye. The kids dashing up to it are the moonbat left, and far too many members of the Democratic party. And they're being goaded into running faster and closer by the MSM.

Long months ago, I'd believed that bloggers like Ed Morrissey gave a proper burial to the so-called "domestic spying" stuff that the lefties complained Bush was perpetrating in violation of the Constitutional right for privacy while talking to terrorists calling from overseas (which Amendment was that, again?).

Unfortunately, the latter case has clawed its way from the dirt nap it was taking, and is looking once more for brains to consume horse's asses to play games with. Naturally, this happens because (a) the MSM thinks it can still get away with selling fiction as real news by saying "some say", and (b) Congress is getting a small change in partisan makeup, so the Democrats are feeling their oats:

Leahy and other Democrats have complained about Bush's tactics in the war on terror, particularly the Republican president's warrantless domestic spying program that Democrats and some Republicans say violates the law.

Dead horse, meet Patrick Leahy. Morrissey answered your complaint very well, 'way back in February:

the White House had kept key Democratic leaders abreast of the program since its 2001 inception. They then wanted to get the public irate over what they kept calling "domestic spying," but eventually realized that the public thought it reasonable to check on international calls from suspected al-Qaeda terrorists during a war against them.

Call me adolescent, but I can't wait to see the cool moment when Leahy repeats the action from the novel.


On the plus side, at least a few bloggers have beaten the MSM at what is supposedly the media's top game: John Hinderacker and his colleagues at Power Line have done the necessary virtual legwork to put another bit of horse-hockey to rest.

The poor lefties couldn't let a little bit of humor at the expense of one of their role models be forgotten (Swift Boat! Swift Boat! Liar liar hat's on fire!), and just couldn't MoveOn. John and some of his readers asked a few serious questions, ran a few leads back to their sources, and applied a spot of reason, andthe moonbats who believed they had an Aha! moment were shown the error of their ways... without the help of a single MSM stringer. (Who would have thought that a little blog like that could destroy all their beautiful wickedness?)

(My apologies for switching metaphors in midstream. I think the first horse was still dead.)

This nag is done.