Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, June 2, 2008

What Cheney wants

By Libby



Cheney gets. Well, thanks to all the positive energy sent my way cherished friends and readers, I'm enjoying a remarkably rapid recovery from the surgery and went back to work this afternoon. I had connectivity problems this morning so I haven't scanned much of the news today but Dan Froomkin's column is well worth a read in full. He has extensive excerpts from McLellan's new book and this one is the most singularly frightening of the lot.

Later, he writes: "[L]urking behind it all remained the magic man, Vice President Cheney. No one knew better how to orchestrate what was happening from behind the curtain while the grand production was playing out on stage. Quietly slipping in and out of internal deliberations, his influence and wand waving barely discernible to the outside world, Cheney rarely showed all his cards and never disclosed how he made things happen. Yet somehow, in every policy area he cared about, from the invasion of Iraq to expansion of presidential power to the treatment of detainees and the use of surveillance against terror suspects, Cheney always seemed to get his way."

What Cheney wants is to bomb Iran before he leaves office and the media smoke generated by the horserace gives him a lot of cover under which to brew his evil plots. I always feel uneasy when he hasn't crawled out from hiding in a long time. He's up to something and I doubt it's good.



Update: Speak of the devil. I no sooner posted this than I noticed the story the Memeo trailer. "Cheney was at the Press Club to congratulate this year's winners of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency." At the Q&A afterward he made an offhand incest joke about West Virginia.



This does nothing to assuage my uneasiness. It sounds like a guy who's intoxicated on his own power and no longer gives a flying leap about what anyone else thinks.



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4 comments:

  1. DanJune 3, 2008 at 1:56 AM

    Glad you're back and feeling better Libby!

    ReplyDelete
  2. LibbyJune 3, 2008 at 2:47 AM

    Thanks Dan.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thomas JacksonJune 3, 2008 at 5:58 PM

    I watched that whole press conference. The press really did us a disservice by reporting his incest joke. Much more revealing was the part where he explained that he won't ever tell anyone what he does as vice president, because he gives advice to the president, and he won't tell anyone what he tells the president.
    When I heard that, I thought to myself "Hmmm! So he doesn't think that anyone should know what the vice president is doing, or what he tells the president."
    I really wish the press had focussed on those remarks, because it really exemplifies what a crepy, secretive nutcase Cheney is. So much more revealing than his offensive remarks about West Virginia.
    But since they did report his views about West Virginia, I'm disappointed that no one opined that the Republicans aren't worried about winning the election there in November. "Go F--- Yourself, West Virginia!"

    ReplyDelete
  4. emptyJune 3, 2008 at 6:02 PM

    Welcome back!

    ReplyDelete

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