Things to do in Denver now that GWBWYPGN?! is dead

While GWBWYPGN?! decomposes beneath the rich earth of the blogosphere, waiting to emerge reborn, Phoenix-like, as something mercifully and completely different, here are some suggestions as to other blogs you could check out, ones that I read (more or less) every single day. I've already mentioned Atrios and Pandagon, and here are some more -- think of these as the blogs you should've been reading while you were wasting your time with this one, and now that you're not wasting your time with this one, you've got no excuse not to read them instead and atone:

First, TBOGG, a Platinum-Level Supporter of Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter (remember that?) and maybe the funniest political blog on the Web. GWBWYPGN?!, on its best day, was never as funny as TBOGG is when he's not even trying, and GWBWYPGN?!'s replacement (whatever it ends up being) probably won't be either. Just to give you fair warning.

I also have to give props to Mary at Naked Furniture, who was maybe the very first blogger to link to GWBWYPGN?!; I remember looking in my referral log way back in the fall of '03 or whenever it was, finding Naked Furniture in there and thinking, "Holy shit, some totally random person I've never even met thought this blog was worth linking to! Poor girl, she must be stuck in northern Saskatchewan or someplace where her only choices for entertainment are intramural curling or using an Internet connection on a computer that has frozen up on this blog and cannot be directed anyplace else!" As it turns out, that guess was wrong; at the time, Mary was a student at Notre Dame with a life and everything, and even though her Internet browser did go to other sites besides this one, she chose to come here on her own. She is now a law student at Indiana, and still does, in addition to still being very funny, very angry, and very potty-mouthed. All of which are, as Paris Hilton would say, hot.

I think it was also Mary who was responsible for cluing me in to Basket Full of Puppies, another milestone in my blogging "career." (Did everyone make finger quotes around that last word even as I said it? If you didn't I'll give you some time to catch up . . . ready? OK, good.) If you want to get a glimpse of what I'm kind of hoping my next blog will be more like, pay a visit to Matt Lavine; he comments on all kinds of stuff from politics to TV shows to chess and manages to make it funny without using epithets like "f$#!bag" or "ass gopher" every other word, a talent which, at the time of its passing, GWBWYPGN?! had still clearly not mastered. In other words, he's way smarter than me, and the fact that there is a blog anywhere in the world that doesn't link to his is a travesty. Know how every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings? Well, every time a blogger doesn't link to BFoP, an angel gets a cold sore. One of the highest compliments I can pay Matt is that he sounds like the kind of guy I wish my sister would end up with, instead of the ass gophers she currently gravitates toward. OK, see, dammit, I did it again!

Speaking of baby sis, if you haven't gone over and checked out her blog, Practically Harmless, you are not only missing out on (yet another) person who's smarter than me, you're also committing what I consider a personal affront against a member of my immediate family. And nobody f$#!s with the Gilletts, OK? Ann's politics are almost as liberal as mine, only she talks about it gooder than me does. And maybe if more people go over there on a regular basis the Catholic guilt will kick in and she'll be forced to post more.

Finally we have another frequent GWBWYPGN?! linkee, Sadly, No!. Sadly wades through more brain-dead right-wing commentary than any thinking human being should have to in order to cull from it the very best in (mostly unintentional) entertainment -- S,N! was the one who first turned me on to the wanting-so-badly-to-be-hip-but-falling-so-humiliatingly-short-of-the-mark fundie Christian musings of Doug Giles, for instance, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. S,N! is so funny that even its commenters could usually wipe the floor with this blog, humor-wise.

So go check those out, add them to your Favorites even, and I'll be back before you know it with a new blog, a new angle, and a new attitude . . . the last of which will last probably all of five minutes before I regress back into the same bilious, antisocial dillwad I've always been.

No no, I'll show myself out.

But, see, he was writing about the al-Qida network. He didn't say anything about the al-Qaeda network!

Don't call our new secretary of state a liar. Because she's African-American, that automatically makes you a racist. Instead, just say she's somewhat truth-impaired:

EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today.

"We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," ... Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.

Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign ... when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda's threats before September 11.

Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice ... had been warned of the threat.

So, just to review:

> Condoleezza Rice believed a briefing titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In U.S." wasn't actually a warning that a terrorist strike was soon to happen.

> Condoleezza Rice believed a memo containing the words "We urgently need such a Principals-level review on the al Qida network" did not count as "turn[ing] over to the new administration" the al-Qaeda threat.

But we've got her as our top diplomat anyway. Aren't we lucky!