It is the flaming wreck from which I cannot turn away. Yes, it's more Layne madness:

Bush supporters treated the news of Clinton's illness with the usual class, and as usual, Bush did nothing to suggest this was repulsive behavior.

You know Layne's descended to a whole new kind of sloppy when Oliver Willis--Oliver Willis, as partisan a man as you're likely to find on the internet; the Oliver Willis who claimed today that "The invasion of Afghanistan had as much universal support as any move by a government can have in the modern era," when a cursory check of news and weblog archives from October-November 2001 can easily disprove that notion (hell, I have a cousin quoted in the Guardian while attending a--guess what?--antiwar protest at Oberlin from about that time, not to mention I just dug up a bunch of crap on this yesterday; here's a favorite from that time)--

--anyway, you know it's bad when that Oliver Willis can fairly observe that the booing may not have occurred as originally reported (this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article certainly suggests it didn't), but Layne . . . look, what is Layne doing, exactly? He's certainly not acting much like the guy who said, "It's 2001, and we can fact-check your ass." That guy would've noticed that messages of support and well-wishes for Clinton, from righties, are all over his friend's blog, and maybe considered for a second the likelihood of the initial booing report. That guy might have done a little, uh, fact-checking.

I really try not to do that thing some bloggers do where they sort of adopt a pet from the other side of politics and poke it with sticks repeatedly. So before it gets to that level, I should just quit reading the guy . . . but damn. A change of opinion I can handle. A change of viewpoint I can handle. A change in the quality of work from better to worse, from cogent to crazy--no, not so much.

UPDATE 09/04/2004: See? It's not that hard to check around.

*Title reference. And mind you, that blog was pretty crazy.

Posted by Ilyka at September 4, 2004 04:20 AM in hell is other people