Corrections and Clarifications: January 31, 2011

I sometimes jokingly refer to this blog "The Maginnis Post" when discussing it with my friends, but unlike the Huffington Post, this blog is a one-man show. I'm my own copy writer, my own editor, my own managing editor, my own music critic - you name it. It's sort of like the Looney Tunes short where Bugs Bunny plays a baseball team entirely by himself. So mistakes and inaccuracies are bound to occur here, and I periodically have to issue a blog entry correcting and clarifying earlier posts - which is what I'm doing now.

In my post of January 12, 2011, I referred to Representative Ben Quayle (R-AZ) as being "Indiana-bred." While he was born in Indiana, and while his family does come from that state, he was no doubt raised in Maryland and/or Virginia (and was raised right!) until he was sixteen years old, as his father Dan Quayle was elected to the House of Representatives the same month Ben was born (November 1976) and would serve in Washington as a House member, then as a senator, and then as Vice President of the United States from 1977 to 1993, the Quayles moved to Arizona some time in the late nineties. My point in my earlier post was that, Ben's declaration of love for his adopted state of Arizona notwithstanding, he was raised right elsewhere. To be fair, though, his family does have roots in Arizona; his father Dan, ironically, lived there as a boy while James C. Quayle - Dan's father - was in Arizona running a branch of the family's publishing business.

In my post from January 28, 2011, I pointed out that Yemen had been two countries prior to 1990 - an Arab republic in the north and a communist republic in the south - but I originally did not stress that, when Yemen was unified, it was unified under the government in the north. I edited in that point shortly after the post was published, but some readers might have missed that.

I also noted in that same post that Egyptian Nobel laureate Mohammed El-Baradei had been arrested after returning to Egypt. Update: He has since been released. Some telecommunications in Egypt have also been restored intermittently, on a tenuous basis. The Egypt crisis, like so many other stories these days, is changing faster than I can comment on it.

I'll probably be back here early tomorrow, with more miscellaneous musings, but the 36 hours after that are dicey, given a potential ice storm that could literally hit where I live - and knock the electricity out. (I knew I should have done printed broadsides!) So it may be Thursday before I'm on full steam again. Stay tuned.

But When Quayle the Congressman Gets Here . . .

Sarah Palin has come out of her bunker for the first time since the Giffords shooting in Tucson, preferring to verbally reload rather than show any contrition for her incendiary rhetoric. She dismissed her critics as being guilty of "blood libel." But I'm not commenting on that. Not today, anyway.

No, I'm here today to focus attention on another Republican known for his asinine rhetoric, a congressman who shares the distinction with Gabrielle Giffords of being in Arizona's U.S. House delegation - Ben Quayle, son of the former Vice President. Elected to the House of Representatives in November just prior to his thirty-fourth birthday despite his connection to a porn site, the son of The Mighty Quayle (my ironic nickname for Dan Quayle, based on the Bob Dylan song "The Mighty Quinn [Quinn the Eskimo]") is best known for his incoherent anti-Obama campaign ad. In that ad, you will recall, Quayle made a few abstruse comments about his background and his qualifications for office. "I love Arizona. I was raised right," the Indiana-bred Quayle says to the camera, without explaining what these two declarative statements have to do with why voters should send him to Congress, or, for that matter, each other.

But that 's not why I bring up Ben Quayle. Blaming runaway spending on President Obama and the Democratic Congress in this ad, he labelled Obama the worst President of the United States in history and accused him of saddling the post-Boomer generation with massive debt. And then, after trashing and disrespecting his President, Quayle offered his rationale for running for Congress: "Someone should go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place."

No one who claims to be "raised right" (he was raised right, far right) would be so vicious and hateful toward President Obama, and no one of any decency would want to "knock the hell" out of anything. By using such nasty language and showing such childish behavior, Ben Quayle is as guilty of inciting anger and discord as Palin is. Maybe even more so in this case, because he's from Arizona, which Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik rightfully called a mecca of bigotry and intolerance.

And just how is knocking the hell out of Washington going to balance the budget or create jobs? Everybody in Washington may be in despair, every girl and boy (some are demonstrating at monuments, others are jotting down notes), but I doubt anyone jumped ecstatically when Quayle the congressman got there.

And guarding fumes and making haste is Ben Quayle's cup of red meat.