Oaph

Contrary to what I thought before, Phred Thompson has ideas. But unfortunately, they're 18th- and 19th-century ideas.

He knows it's '07, but he doesn't know it's 2007.

At a Family Research Council conference today, Phred revealed that he's an admirer of the writings of Andrew Roberts, a pro-imperialist throwback to Eurocentrism, and an apologist for genocide. The website TPM Muckraker reports: "Thompson approvingly quoted the words of one Andrew Roberts, a right-wing British historian who has been hosted at the White House by President Bush and has dined with Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove — and whose writings are quite literally an apologia for 19th and early 20th-century imperialism, concentration camps, and massacres of indigenous peoples."

Roberts was described in a New Republic article six months ago as "a man with links to white supremacism, whose book is not a history but an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder that even blames the victims of concentration camps for their own deaths."

Nice going, Phred. How's life in the time warp?

And from my Netherlandish correspondent Charikleia, this wonderful unattribued quote: "'Only fools do those villains pity who are punished before they have done their mischief,' Kim quotes, as he shoves a horrid rednecked oaf out of the lifeboat. The sharks cut his his screams to a bearable pitch and period."