How long before Charles Johnson denounces the Easter Bunny?

Picture totally stolen from Glenn Reynolds:

True or False?

• The Easter Bunny has been used as an anti-Muslim symbol by Belgian ultra-nationalists.
• Rush Limbaugh once made a racist joke about Al Sharpton and the Easter Bunny.
• Charles Johnson's credibility was banned by Sharmuta last night on LGF.

Answers: False. False. True.

Psssst!

Not only does Glenn Reynolds like gloom and doom, he likes A Conservative Shemale, too. NTTAWWT. At least she's not 7 feet tall and depressed.

Hey, who can blame TrogloPundit for being depressed? Ever since Sean Hackbarth moved to D.C., Trog's no longer the second-ugliest Republican blogger in Wisconsin.

Mary Jo Kopechne couldnot be reached for comment

Having suggested that Jenny Sanford should ventilate her cheating SOB husband with .38 slugs, I think I cannot be accused of making excuses for Republicans with zipper problems.

Well, what about David Shuster of NBC News? A friend was following Shuster's Twitter feed yesterday:

Does Spitzer deserve more "credit" (wrong word choice, I know) because he resigned as opposed to Sanford who is staying in office?

To quote Andrew Sullivan, words fail. My opinion is that Sanford's next office should be under a tombstone, and comparing the Last Tango in Buenos Aires to the sordid saga of Spitzer -- the anti-prostitution crusader who found himself entangled in an FBI investigation of an interstate call-girl ring -- tends to obscure, rather than enlighten.

What kind of perverse mind tries to use Sanford's shame to rehabilitate the scoundrel Spitzer? Absurd.

Meanwhile, speaking of Twitter and Sanford, Dave Weigel just Twittered a quote from his story about the Sanford scandal:

"It proves men who oppose federal spending are irresistible to women."
-- Grover Norquist

Heh. No wonder Dr. Helen keeps such a close eye on Glenn Reynolds. Keep that .38 handy, Dr. Helen!

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin is definitely not a member of the Grover Norquist Fan Club:

Just what we need: Beltway conservatives showing how tone-deaf and insensitive they are for the sake of a self-aggrandizing soundbite.

Note Malkin's mother-bear reaction:

I don’t find anything funny about the Sanford affair. It’s the mom in me thinking about four handsome boys on Father’s Day weekend abandoned by their stupid, selfish father, who was busy tanning with his mistress in Argentina. Heart-breaking. Yes. Nauseating. Yes. Maddening. Yes. Funny? No.

Sarcasm is my natural metier, and spending two decades in the newroom tends to put a keen edge on one's cynical indifference to the foibles of the famous and powerful. In some circles, a big-shot politician is like a rock star, so when a politician behaves like he's on tour with Aerosmith, it brings out my inner Mencken. (He once remarked that the only way a journalist should ever look at a politician is down.)

My cynicism is bipartisan. Sanford's Argentine escapade is, to me, as ludicrous and deserving of scornful laughter as any shenanigans of Gary Hart, Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton.

I was on the phone a few minutes ago with a Texas Republican, a Christian conservative gentleman with extensive experience in the blogosphere. As I explained to my friend, for 20 years I've had a saying: My wife has a kitchen drawer full of knives, and I've got to sleep sometime.

Humor can expresss truth. In an act of divine irony, God blessed an ugly old hound like me with a beautiful wife, a blessing deserving of eternal gratitude. If I ever cheated on Mrs. Other McCain, no jury would ever convict her. My well-deserved death (or grievous mutilation) would be the subject of a thousand jokes, and appropriately so.

UPDATE II: Weigel's story is now on Memeorandum and if you're offended by humor, let's look at a couple of serious reactions to l'affaire Sanford. Erick Erickson:

What Mark Sanford did was wrong. He needs to go in a dark hole somewhere where no one can see him or hear him and rehabilitate himself. . . . The left is going to spend the next week making Sanford into the second coming of James Dobson to smear real marriage advocates and social conservatives — positions Sanford was rarely vocal on.

There are things from which a politician can "rehabilitate himself." Flying off to Argentina to screw a "glorious" woman named Maria Belen Shapur? Nope. I caught a minute of yesterday's press conference while at the American Spectator office. When Sanford used the word "forgiveness," I shouted at the TV a two-word response. (Hint: The second word was "you.")

Welcome to the private sector, sir. Resign now. Meanwhile, Sanford's downfall contributes to the disillusionment of a young Washingtonian:

Forget shaking my faith in the Republican Party, after a while it just starts to shake your faith in men. I mean, are all men incapable of remaining faithful?
I've been following this story with fingers crossed, "Please, don't be another Republican having an affair!" I guess that was too much to ask for. What a chump. It just leaves me shaking my head with a look of disgust across my face. It's just so disappointing.

Question: What about the Marias of the world, who seem to have no compunction about affairs with other women's husbands? Do such women bear no responsibility? Whatever sort of two-faced scumbag horndog Mark Sanford may be, even in Buenos Aires it still takes two to tango. Sanford is 100% responsible for keeping his own vows, but his responsibility does not exempt Maria from blame.

Amid all these serious considerations, I still defend my right to sarcasm. If Bill Clinton is a punchline, Mark Sanford is a Monty Python routine.

Instapundit does . . . show tunes?

In linking to a story about Larry Summers allegedly screwing up the Harvard endowment, we find Professor Glenn Reynolds employing the phrase, "The country's in the very best of hands."

Having starred, at age 14, as Pappy Yokum in the Douglas County (Ga.) High School production of the Broadway musical "Li'l Abner," I recognize this as the title of a song (by Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul) from that show:

The Treasury says the national debt
Is climbing to the sky
And govermnent expenditures
Have never been so high.
It makes a feller get
A gleam of pride within his eye,
To see how our economy expands,
The country's in the very best of hands.

Now, it is a matter of fact that I majored in drama, so I've got an excuse for knowing lots of Broadway lyrics. But Professor Reynolds is a law grad. What's up with that, Dr. Helen? I mean:

• When you started dating him, did you notice any Judy Garland posters at his apartment?
• Does he download Streisand on his iPod?
• If you happen to be in a department store when the Muzak plays a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune, do you hear him muttering under his breath, ". . . and 6, 7, 8 -- kick -- 2, 3, 4"?
• When guests arrive at your house, does the professor greet them by saying, "Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome?"

NTTAWWT. I'm so unmistakably macho that I don't mind bursting into an occasional a capella rendition of "Til There Was You." And I believe John Podhoretz has been known to cite "The Street Where You Live." But if the professor is A Guy Who Likes Show Tunes, he needs to come out of the closet about it, don't you think?

". . . our favorite American group, Sophie Tucker."

UPDATE: Welcome, Insty readers! Yes, the armchair psychologists like to accuse us Guys Who Like Show Tunes of overcompensating by swaggering displays of heterosexuality. Insty married Dr. Helen to quell those whispers in the faculty lounge, and I'm a happily married father of six kids who feels compelled to follow up his Chorus Boy camp routine by gratuitous babe-blogging. (Click that link, you sissies -- I dare you!)

UPDATE II: In the comments, the irrepressible Kathy Shaidle -- who's working her diminuitive self to exhaustion trying to get deported from Canada as a one-woman human rights violation -- informs us that Mark Steyn is all about the show tunes. Which may explain why he didn't appreciate the irony of this lame gag. Or worse yet, maybe he did appreciate it. (Foghorn Leghorn: "That's a joke, son! A joke, ah say!")

UPDATE III: Moe Lane manages to work in a sly Ghostbusters allusion. Yeah, he's thinking it's Oscar night, and Bill Murray got ripped that year -- not even nominated!

Thanks to the two Glenns

Y'know, I'm starting to wonder if maybe Glenn Greenwald is actually a sockpuppet created by Glenn Reynolds for the purpose of ginning up fantastic traffic with pass-the-popcorn flame-wars.

This suspicion was inspired by reflecting on my January traffic figures when, after three months of declining readership -- "Sarah Palin bikini pics" Google traffic began fading in October -- the SiteMeter bounced up to a respectable 117K visitors for January. The spike was largely due to the Gaza war between Reynolds and Greenwald.

You think the Gaza war was between the IDF and Hamas? That's what they want you to think.

In fact, Israel invaded Gaza merely to give Greenwald an excuse to scream "war crimes!" And let's face it: He doesn't need much excuse. He allegedly once demanded that the Hague investigate a particularly spirited field-hockey game between St. Elizabeth's Academy and Westfield Prep.

Some sources say "Glenn Greenwald" is actually a 52-year-old Republican housewife/real-estate broker in Connecticut named Janice Smythe whose hobby is over-the-top parodies of the sort of ACLU/Greenpeace twerp who still sports the faded remains of a Dukakis-Bentsen bumper sticker on his one-owner '87 Volvo. Smythe, an anti-Semitic homophobe, reportedly created "Greenwald" as a vicious satire of self-hating gay progressive Jews.

Or at least, so "sources say." My hunch is that these sources are lying, and that in fact Glenn Reynolds created "Greenwald" as a sort of strawman doppelganger, a convenient punching bag for his rhetorical jabs, who also functions as a clandestine pseudonym through which he collects a check from the putzes who run Salon.com. (How did I arrive at this startling conclusion? It was when Reynolds explained that he is actually Mycroft.)

So what you might be tempted to think is a brutal blood feud between Reynolds and Greenwald may be no more genuine than the 1980 Shea Stadium match between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant.

Layers . . .

Glenn Reynolds, notorious hater

You've got to love the spectacle of sockpuppeteer Glenn Greenwald laying a ridiculous guilt-by-association smear on Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, especially because of Insty's brutal comeback:

I know it's hard to get your mind around the idea that multiple pseudonymous writers might actually be different people, but . . . .

Ouch. If nothing else, the Obama candidacy seems guaranteed to generate a lot of absurd fingerpointing about racism.

Greenwald's baseless accusation against Reynolds appears to reflect the current consensus among liberals: Because Obama's association with Rev. Wright exposes him to accusations of racism, we must deflect attention from that issue by accusing his accusers of (racist) bad faith.

This "accuse the accusers" mode of defense will be familiar to anyone who followed the Lewinsky scandal saga: Paula Jones was a lying slut, Monica Lewinsky was a crazy slut, Ken Starr was a puritanical fanatic, the whole thing was a vast right-wing conspiracy, et cetera. All of Clinton's accusers were, in some way, alleged to have unworthy motives -- and the malign motives of Clinton's accusers, it was implied, were worse than perjury and obstruction of justice.

Of course, if Hillary somehow manages a miracle comeback to steal win the Democratic nomination, liberal fingerpointing over alleged racism will be replaced by liberal fingerpointing over alleged sexism. And no one in the MSM will even notice the tactical shift.

Whatever sins Instapundit has committed, at least he has not crucified Obama. Not yet, anyway.

UPDATE: Linked by Don Surber. Thanks, Don.

UPDATE II: Meanwhile, Obama won't stop digging:

Understand this, something else that has not been reported on enough is despite these very offensive views, [Rev. Jeremiah Wright] has built one of the finest churches in Chicago. This is not a crackpot church. Witness the fact that Bill Clinton invited him to the White House when he was having his personal crises.

At this point, if I were Obama's advisors, I'd tell him to avoid discussing the Rev. Wright controversy, and certainly he shouldn't be trying to justify or defend him. Continued discussion of the issue only brings it more attention and keeps the controversy alive.