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Speedo Fumento
Posted by Clif on 01/20/06 at 1:13 am
Category: Town Hall Watch, Wankers
Disgraced Hoo-hah Institute Fellow Michael Fumento, who lost his gig as a Scripps-Howard columnist for taking money from Monsanto and then writing favorable columns about the company, is over at Clown Hall providing an appropriately clownish defense of his misdeeds. And it’s a doozie of a defense.
Fumento apparently decided that his earlier defense — that he would have written nice things about Monsanto even without the payment — is, well, lame and silly. As we pointed out earlier, its like a hooker telling the judge that she would have screwed the john even if he hadn’t paid.
Sadly for Mike his new lines of argument are even more pitiful and ever so much more amusing.
For his first defense, Fumento whips out his Ken Lay School of Accounting degree and makes the time-worn indirect payment argument:
It was a $60,000 book grant to my employer, solicited back in 1999, which was applied to pre-established salary and benefits.
Which is like the hooker claiming that the john only paid the pimp and didn’t pay her.
Defense Number 2: Fumento says he actually wrote one column where he only had part of his nose up Monsanto’s butt:
Shortly after received [sic] the grant I ripped Monsanto for being “chicken-hearted” and caving into environmentalist demands.
Which is like the hooker saying that she didn’t do anything wrong because she faked one of her orgasms. Worse still Fumento isn’t telling the whole truth here. Although Fumento has plenty of links in his current column, he sort of forgets to link to the all-important “chicken-hearted” column. So we’ll link to the column for him and you can see for yourself how much he “ripped” Monsanto. For example, Fumento says in that column that Monsanto has the “best science” on biotech. Now that’s what I call really ripping into Monsanto.
Defense Number 3:
I’d have hoped that it would’ve meant something to the Scripps folks that they’d never paid me for the over 100 columns I wrote for them.
Which is like saying that the prostitute had every right to screw the john because the john’s wife never paid the hooker anything. This is even more ridiculous than the “I would have screwed him anway” argument.
Fumento saves his best defense for last:
I’d have hoped that it would’ve meant something to the Scripps folks . . . that I’d traveled to Iraq at my own expense to report events firsthand, rather than pontificate from an air-conditioned office, and that I came back permanently maimed as a result of hostile conditions and the rigors of war.
Which is like . . . no, wait, I’ll go so far as to say that if the hooker was wounded in battle, I’ll agree we ought to let her ply her trade. But, of course, the problem is that Fumento is, well, let’s be nice and say he’s exaggerating.
Here’s the real story of Mike’s excellent adventure in Iraq. Fumento left for Iraq on May 18, 2005, as the embedded EXIF data on this photograph on his site of his departure reveals. The last photograph he took in Iraq was taken, again according to the embedded EXIF data, six days later on May 24 at 9:06 a.m. So what happened to Fumento in the six whole days he was “embedded” in Iraq? He tells us in an article he wrote back stateside on June 13:
I’d love the bragging rights of saying I was hit by hostile fire, but actually it was hostile temperatures (117 degrees) in body armor and a lack of sleep that did me in. My colon constricted because it couldn’t relax or get enough water, then became impacted and burst thereby flooding my body with bacteria.
Does that sound like he was “permanently maimed as a result of hostile conditions and the rigors of war?” Not so much.
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