Profiles in Surbage: Hypocrisy Edition

I would like to draw attention to the hypocrisy Don Surber demonstrates when he chides Angelina Jolie for banning Fox News from the premier of her movie A Mighty Heart when Don himself has banned nearly all negative commenters from his glorified myspace page blog.

Also according to Don, by demanding that reporters not ask her about her personal life, Angelina was, and I quote, "Desecrating Daniel Pearl." Yeah. Because Don obviously knows that if Daniel Pearl hadn't been murdered, he would have really wanted to ask Angelina about her & Brad's smokin' sex life. How dare she desecrate Danny like that.

No Fucking Shit.

Valerie Plame was indeed a covert agent at the time her name was leaked.

You were wrong again, Don. As always, I won't be holding my breath for a correction.

Not that this is big news, or news at all to anyone who is connected to reality. It's a dead horse, and it actually pains me to write about it again.

However, this is a really good example of how conservative windbags like Don will consistently ignore established FACTS about all kinds of things if it doesn't support their little pea-brained view of the world -- and then go peddle their lies and misinformation on the opinion pages of newspapers.

I know he was just a "crazy lib," but I think Daniel Patrick Moynihan might have been onto something when he said, "everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."

Why I Find it Difficult to Read Don Surber's Blog on a Regular Basis

He reads a news report about a man who pleaded not guilty at his arraignment immediately after confessing under oath that he abducted a seven-year-old girl from her bed, then took her outside the apartment building where he also lived and proceeded to rape her, and The Surb's outraged that the reporter didn't mention the man's immigration status until the sixth paragraph of the article.

Priorities, Don.

Don, Why Do You Hate Venezuela?

Today, Don Surber opens his Saturday column by announcing that he "followed the French presidential election with all the passion [he] give[s] watching Japanese baseball, which is to say none." And yet he can look into the minds of the voters in France and determine why Segolene Royal lost the election.

The reason French voters declined the chance to elect Royal was not because she is a woman, but because she is a socialist.

And an anti-American socialist to boot.

I'm sure you can guess what Don's evidence is for Royal's anti-Americanism. Yes, it's because she criticized President Bush. As we all know, in the wingnut world, criticizing Bush = hating America.

Of course, in the same column The Surb criticizes Hugo Chavez, which, by Don's own logic, means he's anti-Venezuelan. Some two-bit columnist for El Nacional should really write an editorial about it.

The Surb Celebrates the Four Year Anniversary of "Mission Accomplished"

Shorter Don Surber:

This is the war that never ends,
Yes, it goes on and on, my friend
Some people started fighting it not knowing what it was,
And they'll continue fighting it forever just because --
This is the war that never ends . . .

Profiles in Surbage

I followed a link left by commenter "Andy Vance" at Surb's place and found this, the Thumb Puppet of Civility:



How the hell did this slip past me? It seems that Don took The Editors to task a while back for driving tens of millions of potential readers away from blogs because of a post they wrote about Tony Snow's gigantic head. It's true, that type of juvenile humor has no place on the internets, and it certainly doesn't meet the high standards set by Don Surber:



Those images were collected from Surber's blog as part of a little research project I conducted a while back. So, if you're following along at home, according to the Surb Standard:

gigantic heads = internet dreck
gigantic boobs = well-reasoned commentary

(Sadly, the T & A blogging had to stop when he moved his blog to the Daily Mail's site.)

Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, Don's point wasn't that his blog was better than The Editors', but that their blog is crap compared to what you find on the editorial pages of your average newspaper. So let's see what Don thinks is worthy of Charleston's afternoon fishwrap.

He once devoted an entire column to Fark.com. [Link is to the blog where he "cross-posts" all of his print columns, since the DM makes you pay for its archives.] In that column, he quoted such well-respected sources as Programmer Cat and Zeppo Nightshade. Journalism at its finest. And I guess the latest happenings at Fark are of such concern to the residents of Charleston, West Virginia that he devoted a second column to Fark last month.

The Farkers returned the favor by linking to Don's column and having a little Photoshop battle. (Unfortunately, I didn't save the Beaker ones.) There's just something about Surb's photo that invites this sort of thing.

Thanks Andy Vance!

The Daily Mail Pays Don Surber to Make Shit Up

I don't know how much money Don Surber makes, but it's astonishing that he can make a living writing two short columns a week and maintaining a blog. How does that fill up 40 hours a week? He certainly isn't spending any time on research.

Today, Don blogs about a New York Times article that discusses the disproportionate impact of global warming on poorer nations, when it's the wealthier nations who contribute far more to the problem. A research fellow from the Hoover Institution analogized the situation to the sinking of the Titanic:

“Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic,” said Henry I. Miller, a fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We’ll see the same phenomenon with global warming.”

Don, in his infinite wisdom, responds:

Actually most of the rich men aboard the Titanic went down with the ship. The reason more people died in steerage is that, well, there were more people in steerage.

D'oh! Either Don can't grasp such simple mathematical concepts as fractions and percentages, or he can't read for shit. Either way, he's getting paid for this crap.

Yes, there were more lower class passengers on the Titanic than 1st class passengers, so in raw numbers, more of them died. But, a disproportionate percentage of the lower class passengers died compared to the 1st class passengers. 70.6% of the 2nd & 3rd class passengers died, but only 39.5% of the 1st class passengers died. Put another way, most of the 1st class passengers survived, while most of the lower class passengers perished. This was the research fellow's point: "A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost."

Did "most of the rich men" go down with the ship as Don says, in a failed attempt to contradict Miller's point? Well, yeah, but most of the poor men went down with the ship too. However, a larger fraction of them died. 68.8% of the men in 1st class were lost, while 88.3% of the men from the cheaper decks were lost.

Among the women and children passengers, the class differential was even more striking. Only 7.1% of the women and children in 1st class died, while 40.6% of the women and children from the cheaper decks died.

All of these and more fun facts can be found in the U.S. Senate Inquiry into the Titanic disaster, which is available online. (Pssst, Don -- this is what's known as a "source.")