WOLCOTT: ATTACK POODLES and other media mutants

I finally got around to reading Wolcott's 2004 book and I recommend it to anyone who's interested in the wingnut Noise Machine. Wolcott has an easy reading style and a keen eye for the absurd and the bizarre. Here's one catch he made (from page 139, hardcover edition) on Frank Gaffney, Jr., writing in the 2/4/03 Jewish World Review:

The United States may have a human "smoking gun" in the person of a recent defector from the senior ranks of Saddam's praetorian guard, Abu Hamdi Mahmoud. According to the Australian paper The Herald Sun, Mahmoud was a member of the "Inner Circle" -- the small number of personal bodyguards allowed intimate proximity to the Iraqi despot -- and, perforce, knowledge of his most secret doings.

The Herald Sun reports that this security agent, known as the "Gatekeeper," is now in Israel where he has told debriefers that: Saddam has maintained an underground chemical weapons facility at the southern end of the Jadray Peninsula in Baghdad; an assembly area near Ramadi for SCUD missiles imported from North Korea; and two underground bunkers in Iraq's Western Desert that contain biological weapons; and other WMDs are concealed in a tunnel complex built by Chinese engineers beneath Baghdad's sewer system.

Wolcott also catches Coulter "making shit up" again, this time on Hardball in 2003, discussing the movie Patton:

COULTER: That is precisely my point, because it was made accurately.
But it was made, the people making it were intending to make Patton look bad.

MATTHEWS: Who did that?

COULTER: That is why George C. Scott turned down his Academy Award for playing Patton.

MATTHEWS: Who told you that? Who told you that?

COULTER: It’s well known.

MATTHEWS: It’s well known?

COULTER: Why do you think he didn’t accept the award?

[snip]

COULTER: Why do you think he turned down the award, Chris? You never looked that up? It never occurred to you? “I wonder why George C. Scott didn’t accept his award.”

MATTHEWS: Because he said he wasn’t going to a meat parade, because he didn’t believe in award ceremonies because they’re all about women wearing no clothes and showing off their bodies...

COULTER: By portraying Patton as negatively as possible, but by doing it accurately the American people loved it.

MATTHEWS: Facts mean nothing to you, Ann.


There are also plenty of tidbits that I wasn't aware of, such as the fact the John Podhoretz was a Bush Senior WH staffer and special assistant to drug czar Slots Bennett (page 51).