Garrison apologists. Remember them?
What I remember is that almost all of them were men. With just one or 2 exceptions, there wasn’t a single woman who had anything nice to say about Mike Garrison. And I’ve always been under the impression that many of commenters here were women, especially when the story was at its zenith.
Anyway. I think it really says something about Mike Garrison, that so many of the women who have worked around him over the years despise him.
There’s something about calling someone out for being a hypocrite that’s apparently just to complex for certain people to understand. So follow along.
The fact that John McCain owns 7 homes, wears 600 dollar shoes and flies around on his wife’s private jet really shouldn’t matter.
But it does become an issue when McCain devotes his campaign to painting his opponent as an elite, out of touch celebrity like Paris Hilton. If that’s what you hang your hat on, then the fact that you own so many houses that you can’t even keep track of them all is fair game. Why?
Read this carefully: the problem is not that McCain is wealthy. The problem is that McCain is a hypocrite. Got that? It’s about Hypocrisy. He accuses his opponent of being elite and out of touch, when in fact McCain himself enjoys a life that is far more extravagant than most Americans ever could comprehend — to the point where he literally does not know how many residences he and his wife have built on their many properties. Good luck explaining to America how that is not the very definition of out of touch.
People who live in 7 glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. My friends.
I have to admit that I’ve found this pretty amusing.
The Story is pretty simple: Shawn Thornton, leader of one of the largest and fastest growing churches in West Virginia has decided to take a $250K job at an even larger church near Malibu, California. Good for him, right?
Well, sort of. Thornton gave his 2,500 member flock all of a week’s notice that he was leaving, then closed on a house outside Malibu just a few days later — giving the impression that he’d been thinking about this for awhile. Which really wouldn’t be that big of a deal either, except that the Bible Center recently built a new 60 million dollar club house for Jesus near the Southridge Shopping center (how totally appropriate). They’re suddenly tens of million dollars in debt. And now THE man responsible for both the building project and the church’s baffling growth has announced that he’s taking job 2,000 miles away, effective immediately. Already got a house and everything. You can see why there might be some abandonment issues.
Which leads to the best part of the story. Thornton’s excuse for the bad timing is that “it’s what God called me to do.” God called. He answered. Who can argue with that? In his circle, it really is the golden excuse. God called me! Period. But as someone aptly pointed out in one of the hundred-and-some odd comments to the story in the Daily Mail, it’s funny how God so infrequently calls a preacher to take a lesser paying job at a smaller church. Mysterious Ways indeed.
If you really enjoy watching Christians fight with each other, there’s delicious bit of shardenfreude buried deep in the comments. “Bob” sayeth:
“Don’t be concerned about losing 1 man to a bigger church! What about the churches in this valley that have lost members to the “big” church at Southridge. Who is suffering?? God giveth and he taketh away.”
Bob’s right. A church in South Charleston doesn’t grow from 750 members to 2,500 members overnight by just bringing in the unwashed masses. They do it by pealing away members from older, smaller churches in the area. Churches where being a member involves a whole lot of volunteer work. Take your pick, brothers and sisters: a church that predates the Civil War where you’ll be expected to help out with the choir and fix the water main that breaks at 3 a.m. on a Thursday night — or a mega church with flashy TV commercials, a paid staff and multiple plasma screens. It’s a sore spot for a whole hell of a lot of people (pardon the pun).
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Notorious skankbanger Vic “I’ve abandoned my child! I’ve abandoned my boy!” Sprouse has come to Thornton’s defense in these 2 blog posts. You know you’ve arrived when Vic Sprouse feels the need to weigh in on your career decisions.
Nanya put a dog on the front page of the Daily Mail AGAIN. A1, above the fold.
Barely more than a week since the last dog on the front page of the Daily Mail.
I can’t help but think that if Karl Rove was running the McCain campaign, this kind of shit-show would have never happened. Rove would have made McCain transfer the houses out of his and Cindy’s name long ago (I’m sure Rove knows a way). But I’m not so sure Cindy would have went along with that. (I mean, what would she do with herself?) Which might be a small part of why Karl Rove wasn’t interested in running the McCain campaign.
Most people don’t realize George W. Bush’s Crawford “ranch” is little more than a movie set, constructed at the behest of his advisers just months before the 2000 election. (And I’ll bet you any amount of money that it will not be his primary place of residence after he leaves office.) But it was a brilliant move. The kind of move you have to make if you’re trying to appear “down home” when you’re really an aristocrat from Connecticut whose middle name is “Walker.” And it worked. The Amer’can public, and no doubt half the media thinks Bush and his famb’leh have been living and toiling at that ranch for generations, cutting brush and catching bass and what not.
I also don’t think most people realize that John McCain is the third wealthiest member of the Senate. I think most people know he was a Navy man and prisoner of war — an absolutely badass story, I must admit. But the part about how McCain, at 42, “aggressively courted” the 24-year-old beer heiress — that’s not badass. It’s creepy. And it was pretty much off-limits until today.
But of course, none that should matter in a presidential campaign. And it probably wouldn’t have, but for the fact that McCain’s primary attack against his opponent has been that he’s an elite, out of touch celebrity.
Good luck with that.
From the files of what I think actually happened…
I don’t know Jerry Lang. But many of the people I’ve spoken too describe him as “an asshole.” Still yet, there are others who disagree, and describe Jerry Lang as a “loud, obnoxious asshole.” Frankly, I’m not sure who to believe.
But there’s one other thing that I’ve heard mentioned again and again: That while Jerry Lang is a repugnant bully, there was something about how he handled Garrison, Heather and her fake degree that seemed out of character. There are people who flat-out don’t like Jerry Lang who nevertheless thought he had integrity, and that don’t think he would have gone along with something this brazen under normal circumstances.
Of course, the most obvious explanation is that Steve Goodwin told Lang he’d be shit-canned as provost if he didn’t get on board with Garrison’s agenda. So Lang was more than eager to bend over backwards to get Garrison the result he wanted. Simple, really.
I’m NOT defending Jerry Lang — he obviously had much less integrity than people thought. This is just one likely explanation of how it went down. And if there’s any truth to it, I’ll bet Jerry Lang is mad as hell, and blames absolutely everyone but himself for what happened, especially Garrison and Sears.
I’d also bet that if the faculty made a serious attempt to strip Lang of his tenure, he’d sing like a bird. He’s been around for a long time. He’s bound to where the bodies are buried.
There’s a long series of would-be posts I’ve never gotten around to writing about what I think really happened at WVU.
A lot of people want to blame Lang. And I don’t doubt that he’s a total jackass. But I think that much of the actual wrong that transpired after the decision was made to award Heather Bresch a bogus degree goes back to then business school Dean Stephen Sears. He did not reach the decision on his own — not hardly. But Sears is THE person who most eagerly worked to make Heather Bresch’s transcript say whatever the hell it needed to say. He was the point man. The literal quote that is so often attributed to Sears is “Let’s get this girl graduated.”
Whatever it takes.
Remember the statement University spokeswoman Amy Neil made about how Bresch really did earn the degree, and that all the confusion could be blamed on an unpaid $50 graduation fee? Well, even though most of you missed it, West Virginia Public Radio reported long ago that it was none other than Stephen Sears who told Amy Neil to say that. Stephen Sears fed a bald faced lie to the press, period.
Chances are, if you’re reading this and you work at WVU, Stephen Sears is still making at least TWICE what you make.
“Let’s get this girl graduated.”
Would you have done that? And if you did, would you still expect to be one of the highest paid professors at WVU?
There’s an article in Harper’s right now about Tim Russert called “Elegy for a Rubber Stamp” that has me thinking about, of all things, how Tom Searls was 10 times the journalist Russert was.
The article was written by Lewis Lapham, who earlier in the year had this to say about Russert:
“There was a time in America when the press and the government were on opposite sides of the field.The press was supposed to speak on behalf of the people. The new tradition is that the press speaks on behalf of the government.” An example? “Tim Russert was a spokesman for power, wealth, and privilege. That’s why 1,000 people came to his memorial service. Because essentially he was a shill for the government. It didn’t matter whether it was Democratic or Republican. It was for the status quo.”
Now as you may recall, there were a lot of things about Tim Russert I liked. He was a neat guy. But Lapham is absolutely spot on in his criticism. As he aptly said, Russert had “the on-air persona of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter” when interviewing powerful people. And that’s because at the end of the day, Russert deeply, truly like these politicians he interviewed. And he was desperately afraid of upsetting any one of them.
You’ll find no better proof of this than in the words of Cheney aide Mary Matalin. She gushed,
“He respected politicians. He knew that they got blamed for everything, got credit for nothing. He knew how much they meant. He never treated them with the cynicism that attends some of these interviews. So they had a place to be loved.“
I remind you that this quote is coming from the close adviser of the man who has literally done more to undermine America’s standing in the world than any other person in our nation’s history.
But Russert was always there, to make sure degenerate criminals like Cheney had “a place to be loved“
Think about that for a couple seconds. Then ask yourself: would anyone in 1000 years ever describe Tom Searls, or relationship with the people he covered in such a way?
Searls wore cynicism as a badge of honor. His very best friends described him as “irascible,” “argumentative,” and “curmudgeonly.” It goes to the heart of why he was such a goddamn great reporter. Kabler shares:
“He never lost certain Southern West Virginia traits, one of which was a healthy suspicion of the motives of out-of-staters. In fact, the most heated exchange I ever witnessed was with GOP operative Gary Abernathy, which concluded with Searls telling Abernathy to go the hell back to Ohio, and to take fellow Ohioans Brent Benjamin and Bob Kiss with him. (Although in somewhat harsher terms.)“
Kabler says they made up the next day. But I think it’s pretty clear after reading stuff like this that Tom Searls harbored no deep rooted desired to be loved by the people he covered, and I really don’t think Tom Searls felt much pity for politicians who felt like they were being “blamed for everything.” Yet by all accounts, this irascible curmudgeon turned in fair articles, day after day after day. It was enough, I imagine, to be respected.
Here’s some cynicism for you — even among the powerful people who were legitimately saddened to hear of Searls’ sudden death, you better believe that some are thanking their lucky stars right now that there is one less seasoned, bullshit-detector-on-a-hair-trigger they’ll have to deal with in this town. It’s just the way the world works.
I’m thinking of a joke about how you go to court with the client you have, not the client you want.
But man, this just sounds like a stinker: Insurer denies claim for dead Iraq vet
Now let me be the first to point out that someone has to defend AIG. And you know that self-righteous sense of fulfillment you get when you say “gawd, I’d never do that“? Well, that and 5 more dollars will buy you a tasty ice cream cone at Ellen’s.
But man, I’m willing to bet that Goodwin & Goodwin would like to make this go away quick.
I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of the members of the Stonebriar Home Owner’s Association in Frisco, Texas are Bush Republicans.
Yet they’re telling a man he can’t park his new Ford F-150 in his own driveway. But wait, I thought all do-gooders were lib’ruls?
Mr. Greenwood appealed, claiming his Ford F-150 isn’t much different from the Lincoln Mark LT. “The response was: ‘It’s our belief that Lincoln markets to a different class of people,’” he said.
A different class of people. That’s so awesome.
