bizarre

Plug it in, fire it up, Mr. President

Image courtesy Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford’s hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank. “I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front,” Mulally said. “I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen.

Surely, ODL would not have done that, C’mon!

You may remember Michael Crichton (yes, his wikipedia link is possibly controversial, but it’s his controversy that’s being talked about here!) for his thrillers, or for being the Emperor’s chief consultant on climate change issues, but this story is bizarre and shines some insight into his very petty and screwy mind.

TPMmuckraker December 14, 2006 11:45 AM

Global Warming Denier Michael Crichton Fictionalizes Critic as Child Rapist By Paul Kiel – December 14, 2006, 11:45 AM The battle between anti-global warming activists their critics is frequently uncivil. Name calling, put downs, you name it, they fling them. But this marks a new threshold, I think.

This March, Michael Crowley wrote a cover story (sub. req.) in The New Republic hitting blockbuster novelist Michael Crichton’s very public denials that global warming was a proved phenomenon.

That was the last he’d heard from Crichton until he picked his latest novel, Next. Here’s what he found:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a r**e case involving the se**al assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have a**l s*x with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. …

It turned out Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s p***s was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s re***m.)

The emperor sure has some wise counsel.