Catching up on so much I missed while enjoying my self-imposed media blackout over the past week.

While further delaying my return to battle this morning during a slow drive to the local Starbucks and listening to Rush, it occured to me how ironically hypocritical was the fact that those who continue to bash Fahrenheit 9/11 continue to be the ones who still haven't bothered to see it even two weeks after it's opened.

Folks like Rush and so many other Rightwing Sychophantic Jackasses in the Blogosphere remain "proud" of the fact they are clever enough to have no clue what the movie actually says even while they are all too happy to continue their foolishly fruitless and hollow efforts to discredit it. (To date, I've not heard a single discredited fact from F9/11 --- if you have one, please enlighten me.)

Then there is the Silent Minority of intellectually honest Republicans and/or Conservatives that we do our best to highlight here on The BRAD BLOG. As if to show that there is still hope for America.

Navarrette is on the opposite side of the political fence, but he refreshingly alludes to the hypocrisy of blind rightwing partisanship. Teddy is also across the aisle (though not on everything), but calls it like it is for the good of his now former party (the GOP) and his country. And Cobelt's interview demonstrates that there are still some in the Media with the ability to hold our Government Officials (Elected, Selected or Appointed) accountable for their actions. That's precisely what members of the Media should be doing whether I agree with them politically or not.

(Speaking of which, if you need further proof of that last thought on the Mainstream Media's pathetic failure to do their job, just ask some of the estimated 10,000 victims --- in 2003 alone --- of genocide, torture, massacre and rape in the Sudan. I realize that the United States of America has killed more innocent civilians in Iraq over that same period, but none the less, I'm still waiting for the outrage from all the Bush Brown-Nosers turned "Indignant Humanitarians". What about those "mass graves" in Sudan? The ones that were actually dug and filled on Bush's watch? Oh, well. At least we removed toothless tiger Saddam at the cost of only 1,000+ US deaths, 24,600+ US military medical evacuations and 17,300+ Iraqi civilian causalities. And still counting.)

We spend a lot of time here at the BRAD BLOG discussing the seemingly endless hypocrisy of (usually) the Right.

So it's only fair, on those rare occasions when someone on the Right displays a penchant - accidentally or otherwise - for Intellectual Honesty, that we make a point of giving credit where credit's due.

Doug McIntyre, usually the Far Right overnight talk radio host here on KABC was sitting in for Larry Elder on his syndicated show and --- as is the fashion these days --- the talk was of course Fahrenheit 9/11.

To McIntyre's credit however, and unlike most of his other brethren, he actually went to see the film yesterday and therefore was able to acknowledge some of the film's important issues without simply dismissing it, lying about it, and making "Moore is a pig" jokes like most of the voices you'll hear.

Though he had his wife pay, so that he could say he "didn't give a dime" to Moore, and he found the film to be in no small part "demagogic and agenda-driven" he was honest enough about it to hold a discussion on several of the "troubling issues that the film raised".

And as if that isn't good news enough, joining him was Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch (yes, that Larry Klayman! Of Paula Jones Mania fame!) Klayman again displayed the rare Republican trait of Intellectual Honesty recently as it was his Judicial Watch that brought Dick "Fucking" Cheney to the Supreme Court in order to get the Accountable-to-No-One Veep to disclose who was involved in his ultra-super-secret (and ultimately pointless) "Energy Task Force".

Their honest discussion of the real troubling issues that the film raises was a refreshing break from all the lying liars that have been documented frequently here (Rush, O'Reilly, Al Rantel - as Jaime mentioned yesterday in a comment, etc.).

On the "Bush family being in bed with the Saudi's", Klayman, who is running for a US Senate seat in Florida, confirmed that that was true, acknowledging as well that he finds it appalling that Saudi Arabia has still not been placed on our list of Terrorist Nations.

On allowing Bin Laden family members to escape the country scot-free without interview in the days following 9/11, and the FBI's claim that all necessary interviews were made, despite denying the existance of those very flights for years, Klayman added "If you believe the FBI about that, then you are in Alice in Wonderland."

McIntyre also took the time to point to Colin Powell and Condi Rice's statements prior to 9/11 (as seen in the film) that Iraq was no threat whatsoever, and no longer had the capacity to develop Chemical, Biological or Nuclear WMD's. They were notable comments that I'll try to get around to quoting specifically here later.

He also concurred with the movie's suggestion that we should never be sending our troops to war unless our country is in real danger or unless there is a verifiable urgent threat. Not the made up "danger" and "threat" that the Bushies sold us prior to going to war.

As mentioned in my F9/11 review (still not published here, but hopefully will be shortly), the issues of the film are much bigger than any single piece of disputed information that most of the Rightwing is wasting the bulk of their time trying --- but being unable --- to disprove. Most of them continue nattering about it in some sad attempt to save some part of their political asses somehow.

So hopefully as the unsupported and unsubstantiated cases of the chattering heads against Moore subside, the real issues of concern raised by F9/11 will begin to emerge and we can begin to discuss them. That would actually be good for America.

McIntyre and Klayman's discussion today was encouraging in that regard, and wins them the very rare Not Entirely Hypocritical Republican Windbags Award!

Hopefully we won't go so many weeks from here on out without awarding another...but I'm not yet all that hopeful.

It's nice occasionally to come across the intellectually honest Conservative. A rare breed these days. So it was nice to catch this blog item from Andrew Sullivan today. Of note...

Not sure if it's because he's British or gay, but it's certainly nice to see a bit of both "nuance" (overworked word of the year so far in 2004) and honesty from the Right.