House of Eratosthenes

Archive for the ‘Iraq and WoT Stuff’ Category

NBC Lawyer Who Nixed Troop Ad Gave to Democrats

Monday, December 10th, 2007

The NBC lawyer who refused to allow a non-profit group to air an advertisement thanking American troops for their service has donated at least $45,000 to a host of Congressional Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, New York Senator Hillary Clinton and the campaign committees of House and Senate Democrats, research by the Majority Accountability Project (www.majorityap.com) has found.

According to a Fox News report, Richard Cotton, the general counsel for NBC/Universal, was one of two network officials who decided not to sell ad time to Freedom’s Watch, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan movement dedicated to preserving, protecting, and defending conservative principles and promoting a conservative agenda.”

For those who don’t know what the hoo-hah is about, it concerns ads by Freedom’s Watch. Ooh, oh so nitty-gritty, inflammatory, highly politicized ads, like these…

Controversial? Unfit for prime time? Form your own opinion. I’ve formed mine.

I’d sure like an explanation from someone about the times in which we live. Supposedly “everybody supports the troops,” but it’s clear to me this isn’t true, because supporting the troops is indeed controversial and political. Or it at least becomes that, once the rubber meets the road. People are decidedly against it, and when you’re in the public eye you’re supposed to respect their wishes — at risk of the now-ritually-monotonous career suicide, I would have to presume — without explicitly acknowledging that opposing the troops, or at least opposing those who support the troops, is precisely what their wishes entail.

Thing I Know #97. There is always someone who believes what I’ve been told “nobody believes,” and there is always someone who contests what I’ve been told “everybody agrees.” Quite a few of both, actually.

Welcome to the pitfalls of the culturally prevailing viewpoint. It can embrace, support and promote — with gusto — ideas that are so repugnant, so out-of-step with reality, and so malicious, that no voice-box belonging to an individual with a name would dare give such ideas utterance.

H/T: Malkin.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Noble Warriors | 1 Comment »

Caboose

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

Our War on Terror has become a “caboose.”

Caboose You know what a caboose is, don’t you? It’s a railroad car that has a front hitch but not a back one. It’s supposed to come last behind everything; what is in all those other cars, and however many other cars there are, matters not one bit. The caboose takes precedent over nothing; it is physically impossible for it to come before anything.

The word “caboose” is also slang for your ass. It is the part of the body upon which we are designed to do our sitting, because it is designed to withstand abuses that other bits of us cannot. Like pressure upon a jagged surface, or the cold. A good kickin’ when we may perhaps deserve it. If your caboose exudes something, it is something of which you will want to get rid, in a hasty sanitary fashion. This post-digestive matter is something for which you will have no use at all, safe as a fertilizing compound, and not very often as that. On our bodies as well as in the train, the caboose must come last for it is physically impossible for it to take any other place. It demands priority over, precisely, nothing.

Why I use such a vulgar analogy to describe where the War on Terror, today, is something upon which I cannot expound without delving into a wonderful thing I did once. I was thirty-eight. I had no wise decisions in life to my credit…or very, very few. I was newly single and shopping for a woman. I’d spent my life in relationships that were unsatisfactory to me…although how, exactly, I was not really in a good position to say. I knew my life was in tatters because of a long succession of such relationships that didn’t quite work, and much of this had to do with finances. We do have this rule in our society that when you’re a man, and you enter into a relationship and leave it again, it should hit your billfold very hard. I’ve noticed we don’t seem to be quite so intent on the objective of seeing to it debts are settled and obligations are met, as we are on this other objective of seeing to it the man is left with nothing. People are dealt with fairly and man walks way with money — not good. People are left in the lurch but the man’s been properly cleaned out — aw, well, that’s okay.

So I was determined to make sure the next one would pan out okay. But how? My dating prospects showed little contrast to my past experiences.

Well, the first step to solving any problem is — definition. That was undeniably the first step…although, equally undeniably, not the last. I had to define what I was trying to avoid. That seems easy at first; I wanted to avoid women who were needy & greedy. I wanted to avoid mean women. Well, who doesn’t? But more definition was needed. “Greed,” after all, is a word that has no definition. No, really it’s true. There’s no way to define greedy. It’s in the eye of the beholder. A woman thinks she’s got something comin’ to ‘er — well, maybe she does. Who’s to say otherwise? And mean. What’s mean? Everybody gets cross and cranky here and there. What’s over the line?

But one by one, without this definition I still managed to walk away from candidates. They had that hard edge to them…that “man-bashing” screechy undertone. Something told me from the back of my head that a life with them would be a life lacking the happiness I was seeking. So I acted on instinct.

In short, I became very woman-like in the way I screened out my dates. I declared someone was incompatible with me, without really being able to explain why.

Maybe women are comfortable doing that. I wasn’t. So the definition chore beckoned.

And eventually, I found the perfect question to ask my dates. I ended up with someone who is a dream come true, so there must be something to this.

It is exactly what is wrong with women today. Available women, in America, anyway…

…and it is exactly what is wrong with all the people seeking election to President of the United States, minus one or two of them.

The question I began to ask, was this:

What, in your life, do you have going on that is less important than your man?

You only have to date women for a little while, as a single, available man, to see what a great question it is. Strike up a conversation with a bachelorette sometime and talk about what she wants to talk about…in America. Let her drone on and listen to the crap that comes out. My man must learn to live with my parents…with my friends…my kids…my ex-spouse…my doggy, my shopping habits, my solid-purple room decorating scheme, my Cabbage-Patch doll collection. What is more important than the stud, is a list to which she seems to live for the purpose of lengthening.

I came to realize women were more interested in me, when I had interests that were definite. And this was it. What takes priority over your man…you just keep babbling away sister, and I have to visit the li’l boy’s room. Maybe I’ll be back. But what I really want to know is — what takes a back seat to your man?

It was the perfect definition. I wasn’t demanding single mothers hike to the top of a mountain, and like Abraham slaughter their younglings to show their reverence for the Morgan God. I wasn’t even demanding that I come first, nor was I dictating how many or how few things might take precedence. I wasn’t calling out what, exactly, must be neglected for my sake. But I was dictating that something should — or else, let’s call the whole thing off. We’re not a match. Just show a car goes in the train behind me, and that therefore I’m not a caboose.

Unfair? Let’s agree to disagree if that’s the case. It should be noted, should anybody be so dense as to have a need for it to be noted…a woman’s “train” is several orders of magnitude longer than a man’s. Take it from a former caboose. Bringing up the rear on a woman’s train is a raw deal. Men are simple. An outdoor adventure here and there, good hot food, cold beverages, the making of happy memories with our families and a sexual favor now and then — we are DONE. We’re happy campers. Women…geez louise. That train stretches out forever. To be at the back of that train, is virtual suicide. It is to authorize, if not implement, your own slow destruction. A zillion and one women may demand this — that doesn’t obligate all men to consent to it.

And to say “I shouldn’t come last” is only reasonable. It’s simply what self-respecting people do.

It’s breathtaking how many heartless brittle sadistic shrews this weeded out. Ninety-nine percent or so…the right 99%.

I ended up with a real gem. I treasure the day I met her. And now I look back and I think — well, Whisky Tango Foxtrot. That was easy.

But this goes well beyond the dating world. Too many among us are intent on killing things slowly, without admitting we want to kill them…like some of our more acidic man-bashing bitches want to destroy men. Without admitting this is what they want to do.

By prioritizing the desired target behind everything. Like a caboose. Where, surely, it will be denied the nourishment that will give it life, until it dies.

This is what we’re doing with the War on Terror. To admit anyone is against it would be a disgraceful thing — and yet, surely, from what we’ve seen for the last six years, many among us are viscerally against it. Some of us with the best of intentions, worried about civil liberties. Some of us are hippy peaceniks who think it was a wonderful thing back in the 1960’s, when crooks gained so many (previously undiscovered) constitutional protections against cops, that the crook-over-cop triumph become commonplace and the law became useless. They want to see the terrorists elevated to that status, just so they can relive the Age of Aquarius, nostalgically. Some are worried about being caught by the Patriot Act with a doobie in hand; they figure laws against drugs are okay, as long as those laws are not actually enforced.

Some are antisemitic. Obviously, they can’t admit that is what they are, so they couch their antisemitism in vague but incendiary terms…something to do with America helping Israel drop bombs on defenseless Palestinian babies. Call this the “Helen Thomas Brigade,” I guess.

Some worry, perhaps with some justification, about pumping money into the military-industrial complex. More…vastly more, from where I sit…simply don’t like to see government money going into anything that is “paramilitary” friendly. These are the hateful loons that call the Boy Scouts a “hate group.”

And some simply have some more social programs to sell us. An expansion of Social Security here, a brand new childhood learning disability, freshly discovered, there. All demanding money. And gosh darn it, it’s just so much harder to sell to us when there are still body bags coming in to Dover. When we learn of a noble warrior who lost his legs to an IED and wants to re-enlist when he doesn’t have to, because he believes in the cause…it’s just tough to get worked up about the “lock box” issue and all those related issues.

And we have the people who have crossed the second milestone toward insanity, using their feelings to solve problems instead of their thoughts. Surely you’ve noticed this about people by now — when they use feelings over thoughts, they don’t want anybody, anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances, to use thoughts over feelings. Seeing this take place makes them unhappy, upset, and very, very nasty.

So about 85 or 90 percent of our presidential candidates, are behaving the same way as 99% of the available dating women. Their goal is to kill something, but they want to do it without admitting this is what they want to do. So they “caboosify” the War on Terror. They acknowledge piously that, oh yes, we need to bring justice to the perpetrators of 9/11. But sacrifice nothing — absolutely nothing — for this. It is the caboose. It is to come last.

We shouldn’t let them get away with it. We should be asking them the same question I asked those nasty battleaxes three years ago, the last time I was available for my next match-up.

What, if anything, takes a back seat to this thing you claim is important to you? The War on Terror has importance superior to, and demanding the sacrifice of…what?

If that’s an empty list, you’re perfectly entitled to your opinion. Just come on out and admit it, that’s all I ask. Let’s not waste our time with each other. Not under false pretenses, anyway.

Posted in Iraq and WoT Stuff | 5 Comments »

Fruit Ripe fer Pickin’

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Well, I’ve been soundly beaten up, and perhaps rightfully so, for my willingness to come out and admit I didn’t know something before this week…which a lot of other folks have known for awhile. I’m a living representation of how susceptible we all are to the “Everybody’s Doin’ It” excuse. I got bit by the political correctness bug. Showed a shortage of skepticism to some things, and an excess of it to others.

Thought I should jot down some things that, for exactly the same reasons, a lot of other people might not know…even though they should.

1. These people we call “radical Islamists”…if one faction among them thinks some stuff and another faction thinks some other stuff…it is possible for the rift to be healed. Even across the Sunni/Shi’ite divde — they can often work together just fine and dandy in spite of that.

2. They really, really do want to kill us.

3. Many amongst them support a goal of replacing the United States government with an Islamic one operating under Shari’a law.

4. They have authorized themselves to lie in order to spread their religion.

5. In some parts of the Western world…in fact, pretty much every part except America…they have a “human right” not to have anything bad said about them.

These are not cynical personal opinions, these are matters of verifiable fact.

And here we sit, on soil underneath which our ancestors buried three or four of their infants at once while battling rattlesnakes and frostbite and wolves and famine to try to settle the land…to survive…bitching about how we didn’t get enough cinnamon in our candified Starbucks drinks this morning. A nation of fatted veal calves if ever there was one. Fruit ripe for the pickin’.

Concerned? Alarmed? To what extent would be appropriate?

Posted in The Muslim Question | No Comments »

The Second Most Important Issue IV

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

As I’ve stated repeatedly, the most important issue of the elections next year, by far, is which candidate is going to bring me the biggest pile of crispy fried dirty dead terrorists each month of their administration if elected. There really is no more important issue than that. However you feel about — for example — abortion…if you think the candidate who agrees with you about that, will bring us 500 dead terrorists each month, and the candidate that disagrees with you on that issue will bring a thousand, you really do have a moral obligation to drop your favorite pet peeve in favor of killing more terrorists.

Because we’re talking about bringing the fight to people who want to destroy us. How much is your peeve really worth?

And the second most important issue is a question…it is made important because of the fact that, although a lot of people won’t admit it, many of us are wondering if democrats are simply ignorant & easily fooled…or full blown knock-down drag-out wombat-rabies bollywonkers crazy. I think even the voters who sympathize with the silly donks — even if the silly donks don’t carry away the White House when it’s all said and done — would like to know this. To whom did their votes go? An imbecile, or a freakin’ whack-job?

All of us who have the means to do so, really should be gathering whatever evidence can be gathered in order to figure this out. This is a long-lived issue. Regardless of how the elections go next year, it is relevant to the future of our country to get an answer to that question. Unless we can send the donk party the way of the Whig party…which, although hope springs eternal, may not happen for a decade or two.

The latest exhibit, courtesy of Hot Air, is here. This has profound implications upon the first issue as well as the second one: None of these guys sound ready to bring us any crispy fried dirty dead terrorist bodies anytime soon.

This clip is further proof of what we already know, although fewer and fewer of us have the plain old-fashioned balls to admit it. Real life presents us with one scenario after another, in which the willingness to wage war equals life — and a stubborn reluctance to do so equals death. And “peace” is a word often synonymous with oppression.

If this comes as a huge shock to you, the muse that is History is wondering if you’ve got peanut butter packed in your ears or something. Woodstock is over, hippy. Come home.

Posted in History, Justification for Invasion, Pinheads | 1 Comment »

Al-taqiyya

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Heard a comment on the radio that “the Koran gives you permission to lie to advance Islam.” This impressed me as something that I hadn’t heard before, and surely it could not be within the realm of the disputed since it seems to be a pretty clear encapsulation of something purported to exist within a defined body of work.

I’m blindsided by this one. Sidebar resource Linda SOG covered this years ago.

Al-taqiyya is a word used for the practice of Muslims blatantly lying to non-Muslims. Muslims consider the act of Al-taqiyya or lying to non-Muslims to be a good work. Especially if it helps support the war against the infidel. In case you’ve forgotten, you are the infidel, so am I, so is each and every American who is not muslim.

From “Islam’s Shell Game” by Johnn “Trike” Schroeder

Muslims say one thing and think another, because their holy book allows such action in the furtherance of their religion. They do not punish the insane killers in their communities who strike at Americans, because they do not see the terrorists as wrong, rather they see them as warriors, honorable and holy themselves.

Thus there is no conflict with their religion, and no real dichotomy exists between the terrorists and Islam as a whole. If one acts as a neutral (for no Muslim speaks out one way or the other as a rule on terrorists and their acts), to create a sort of wall behind which our enemies can move and strike at us, they act as our enemies as well!

We have a decision to make here, just how are we to protect ourselves, when we allow such a tactical and strategic screw up to exist in our very midst! Who is killing us and our allies, MUSLIMS, not the little old ladies the airport security strip searches to protect us from illegal knitting needles!

We need to start seriously applying common sense while we still have a few people not yet blown up or under threat of being so.

The terrorists want one thing, (just as the Koran calls for), a world united as Islam or nothing! This is about world conquest as a religious duty.

Let us begin to understand that we face an enemy who will happily kill you, your family and friends and celebrate their own death doing it. It matters not if you are on the right or the left, they want us DEAD! Nothing else will do for them.

And unless we get in gear, they will do just that to far too many of us. as we wring our hands and cringe, crying out “Can’t we just get along?” If we do not act, that will be our pathetic epitaph.

So. All of a sudden Muslims like America and Americans? Yeah. Sure they do.

Al-taqqiya is a war tactic, the sheep’s clothing worn by the wolves in our midst. and you can’t see the forest for the trees.

I’m troubled by the breezy conflation of “Muslim” with these psycho whackjobs who would be willing to off themselves just to take a few of us down with ’em. Not a fan of political correctness, but I like to use correct terms to describe things, and just as I’m reluctant to paint “Christians” with a broad brush, I should show similar reluctance here…

…but I’ll tell you what I find even more troubling: A religious cult that instructs people to lie, for the sake of advancing itself — existing within post-modern America, a place that just can’t get enough of people saying the right things, truth & facts be damned.

I’m really having trouble with the exercise of trying to envision anything more dangerous than that.

Update: Via Planck’s Constant, Exhibit A.

Posted in Glad I Learned About This, The Muslim Question | 6 Comments »

The Great Intelligence Scam

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

In what may very well be the most important story all week…and I really hope it isn’t…the National Intelligence Estimate has concluded that Iran is a big harmless fuzzy teddy bear. And a decent weighing of the available evidence yields the conclusion the NIE may be basing this on very little.

Yesterday’s big story was the Intelligence Community’s “Estimate,” according to which Iran unilaterally and secretly suspended its covert nuclear weapons program back in 2003, and hasn’t resumed it to date. We don’t know the sources and methods that underly this analysis, and it may well be that we have acquired some totally convincing evidence that justifies the astonishing conclusions of the IC’s assessment. But the “Estimate” itself is internally unconvincing–different agencies, notably the National Intelligence Council and the Department of Energy, are not convinced we have the full picture, and argue that we may not know whether the “halt” on which the IC hangs its analytical hat applies to Iran’s “entire nuclear weapons program.”

In other words, we seem to know that something was halted, but we don’t know if that’s the whole story. In Rumsfeld’s famous words, we don’t know what we don’t know.

A couple years ago, The Left started to stir up a public relations assault on the Bush administration, since the administration took action against Iraq and the discoveries of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) over there were disappointing to some. This public relations assault has only recently begun to subside. The response by defenders of the administration, has been that intelligence is an inexact science, dealing very little with what is known and dealing much more with what is supposed. Tellingly, The Left never cooked up a witty rejoinder to that one — because there is no witty rejoinder available, or because they perceived the payoff to be underwhelming.

Intelligence supposed there was somethin’ when there was nuthin’. Intelligence has been characterized as inexact, and this characterization has gone undisputed, in an America as divided as ever, an America that likes to argue about freakin’ everything. Also uncontested, is the assertion that if intelligence supposes there is nuthin’ when there is somethin’, the results would be catastrophic. And now this “perhaps better than random chance” intelligence is telling us there is nuthin’.

Maybe this conclusion is well-researched, maybe it isn’t. It does not appear to have been well-researched…

Huh. How concerned should we be?

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Phony Crime Solutions | 1 Comment »

Surber Peels Matthews Like an Ape Peeling a Banana

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

As Perino puts Thomas her in place, so too does blogger Don Surber take care of Chris Matthews.

Consider this quote from Chris Matthews on his show last night while he was interviewing David Ignatius:

MATTHEWS: Lots of publicity lately, and maybe it‘s fair, maybe it‘s not, that things may have calmed down over there, less Americans killed in action in the last several of months but before. But my definition of a defeat is you can‘t leave. If we can‘t leave that country in the foreseeable future, we are losing….
:
Because if we can‘t ever come home, we can‘t ever say we won.

Interesting way of redefining victory. For thousands of years, you take over a country, you’re the winner. Matthews wants to change that, saying, “As long as we‘re stuck over there, it seems we‘re losing.”

Let’s see. We still have troops in Kuwait, so we must have lost the Gulf War.

But we pulled our troops out of Mogadishu so we beat Somalia.

No American troops in Vietnam. Yeah, we won.

It goes on the same direction from there. I’m just teasing the essence of it, you’ll have to click on the link above to get the full effect. What…you’re still here?

Posted in Vision for Victory | 2 Comments »

Why We Need Women

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Woman The day our President started using the actual phrase “World War III” in his public speaking, the Number One story on the insipid “Morning News” program in my hotel had to do with a couple of yorkies wearing their adorable Halloween costumes. That’s one of the best pieces of evidence someone could use, to my knowledge, to argue that the best days of the womens’ movement are officially histoire. Nevermind whether we should elect one President, they’d say; get them out of the voting booth. And off the streets. And for heaven’s sake, will someone get them to STOP WATCHING TELEVISION before they screw things up any further.

Of course I’d never endorse such a primitive, backwards position. I’m just saying the argument is out there if someone wants to use it…and I didn’t make it that way. Personally, I think WWIII trumps dog costumes. That’s just me.

If those who wish to repeal Womens’ Suffrage wished to cite historical precedent, they could use this chronicling of politically-incorrect advertisements which I’ll have to confess…in the spirit of plain old being-truthful…I personally find to be hilarious. And not the least bit sinister, since I think it’s safe to say we’ll not be seeing anything like these used anytime soon.

And, of course, if they want to show the actual damage women can do, they can always rely on Helen Thomas (H/T Van der Leun, via Rick).

It should be noted that in citing Helen Thomas as a representative of general female participation and the effect it has on things, I’m committing a sin against political correctness. It should also be noted that I’m entirely aware of this. It should be further noted that I’m entirely unable to explain, in a logical fashion, why this is…nor do I think anybody else would be able to explain it either. Helen Thomas is a woman. Helen Thomas is dangerous. She reflects poorly on women as a whole. She makes a great argument, just by being herself, why we should barricade them in the kitchen and look back with profound regret on whatever occasion hosted the first musings that it might be a good idea to let ’em out.

Dana Perino, on the other hand, demonstrates why we should keep the women exactly where they are. A man would never have been able to take care of Ms. Thomas quite so deftly. Even the most socially-gifted and diplomatic male. We simply exist on a shorter leash than the ladies — in some ways. They can say things we cannot.

And every once in awhile, that happens to be good for the continuing survival of our country.

Thank you Dana Perino for arousing the latest debate on “why do we keep this old battleaxe around?” It’s a good debate to have. We’ve had it before, but somehow the idea never quite seems to get the attention it deserves…you know, just because Helen Thomas is a poor representative of women, doesn’t mean her fate has to be the same as that of all other women. It is possible to keep all the others involved, and just jettison this one ugly specimen, whose contribution is questionable at best in the first place. I mean, think about it. The purpose of the assembly is to extract information that would otherwise be un-extracted; discuss that which otherwise would remain undiscussed. What has this pretentious, grandstanding, blustering, pontificating toad done to bring that about lately?

This debate has seen the light of day many times. It’s turned into something of a merry-go-round. Hopefully this lap will be the last one; the effect upon Ms. Thomas’ career, will be terminal. That is my hope. For the good of the nation. And if things go that way, that would be iron-clad proof that women deserve to keep all the power and privileges they have today.

It would certainly make up for that Prohibition thing. And maybe Bill Clinton’s presidency, too.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Is It Really a Man's World? | 2 Comments »

Hey Peaceniks, Can You Be Thankful For This?

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

Aw man, you voters had better not let the the peacenik crowd skate past this one…

As violence declines in Baghdad, the leading Democratic presidential candidates are undertaking a new and challenging balancing act on Iraq: acknowledging that success, trying to shift the focus to the lack of political progress there, and highlighting more domestic concerns like health care and the economy.
:
“The politics of Iraq are going to change dramatically in the general election, assuming Iraq continues to show some hopefulness,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is a supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s and a proponent of the military buildup. “If Iraq looks at least partly salvageable, it will be important to explain as a candidate how you would salvage it — how you would get our troops out and not lose the war. The Democrats need to be very careful with what they say and not hem themselves in.”
:
Lately, as the killing in Baghdad and other areas has declined, the Democratic candidates have been dwelling less on the results of the troop escalation than on the lack of new government accords in Iraq — a tonal shift from last summer and fall when American military commanders were preparing to testify before Congress asking for more time to allow the surge to show results.

This is a delicate matter. By saying the effects of the troop escalation have not led to a healthier political environment, the candidates are tacitly acknowledging that the additional troops have, in fact, made a difference on the ground — a viewpoint many Democratic voters might not embrace.

What have I been telling you. This country, like any free nation, lacks the ability to withstand the existence of a party such as this one. It has gambled on our defeat. It seems to have lost, but it is foolish to think the lesson has been learned. The “hurry up and surrender or we just might win” party is deeply invested in the vision that America should be defeated and humiliated any time she tries to do…anything. Bring down a tyrant, make a profit, defend herself, express an opinion, negotiate a treaty — do anything except give money away.

This has been an amazing feat accomplished by our military. And for the last four and a half years, it has been made unnecessarily difficult for them, and deliberately so, by our flying-toaster-screensaver people and all our limp-wristed politicians and journalists pandering to them.

Those thousands of soldiers who came back home in coffins, weren’t suckered into becoming cannon fodder. They gave their lives toward a noble purpose, and were ultimately successful. Their memories, and their families, are owed a huge apology by everybody who so much as lifted a finger to give this seemingly-unstoppable “give peace a chance” juggernaut a little extra momentum.

That’s millions of people. I’ll be surprised if I see so much as one single apology from anyone. I don’t expect to see it at all. This political faction has made a point of refusing to admit it is ever wrong, while accusing the other side of exactly that. It’s truly a national disgrace.

I just hope during Thanksgiving, whatever peoples’ political biases might be, they managed to spare a thankful thought for these people who did the actual work to get our country’s efforts this far.

Posted in Vision for Victory | No Comments »

Yup, It’s a Quagmire Alright

Friday, November 16th, 2007

H/T: Bullwinkle.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

Words Fail

Friday, November 16th, 2007

H/T: Gerard.

Posted in Vision for Victory | No Comments »

There’s Still Time

Monday, November 12th, 2007

Regarding the fundraiser for Valour-IT I mentioned Friday night, please know the deadline has been extended through today.

This program buys voice-activated laptops for wounded service members who find themselves needing them. To write to Mom, get a job…maybe put some useful information into blogs like this one, to help balance out the relatively ignorant civilian ranting.

You may interpret that last sentence however you choose, since this post is non-political. But since the laptops run at eight hundred a pop, and the inventory on hand is practically empty, no snarking allowed if you haven’t hit the widget and chipped in some dough. The situation is much improved from Friday night, but it’s not nearly where we want it to be. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem…

Posted in Noble Warriors | No Comments »

Learn What You Can While You Can

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Well, here we go again. Sen. Hillary Clinton, considered a frontrunner on the donk side in the race for the White House next year, got caught in some skullduggery. (Fellow Webloggin contributor Big Dog has a decent write-up about it here.) I’d write something about it, but it occurs to me that’s wasteful. Nobody ever wants to know too much about these things for too long, and while it’s still too recent for anyone to avoid it completely there’s no hunger for details at all. Even among her opponents.

Everybody knows we’re going to be pressured to stop talking about this soon, everybody knows that before too long if you even so much as bring it up you’ll be considered a kook. Everybody knows she’s going to get away with it — again.

It’s gotten a little silly to even feign uncertainty about it, for ritual’s sake.

In fact, it occurs to me with a little bit of utility-grade artwork, I could summarize this to the extent anybody cares to find out about it, to the extent anybody’s ever going to tell anyone about it, and keep it in the realm of one hundred percent what we software developers from the early 1990’s used to call “reusable code.”

So I sat down with Microsoft Windows Paint and did exactly that.

Sen. Clinton got caught Now I have something I fully expect to be able to re-use again and again and again, well into next year. And God knows how many “carbon tons” I’ve saved the planet, over the long haul. There are certain details it doesn’t address…but as has been explained above, it’s really useless to go into those. Nobody cares, nobody ever will care.

Go ahead, borrow it, use it, give it away. The image has it all…every little thing you’re going to be allowed to talk about, and it’s all true, and will continue to be true, scandal after scandal after scandal.

Meanwhile, it looks like the Sacramento Bee got caught behind the news cycle on this one. They chose to reprint, today, this story from the New York Times. I expect this will end up being a little awkward for them.

Late one night last year, while her husband was an Army scout in Iraq, Melissa Storey sat in the quiet of her bedroom to write President Bush a letter. She wanted him to know “we believed in him.” And after Staff Sgt. Clint Storey, 30, was killed by a roadside bomb, his widow put pen to paper again.

“I felt like I needed to let him know I don’t hate him because my husband is dead,” Mrs. Storey said, “that I don’t blame him for Clint dying over there.”

The correspondence did not go unnoticed. In May, Mrs. Storey received a surprise telephone call from the White House inviting her to a Memorial Day reception there. As she mingled at the elegant gathering, too nervous to eat, her 5-year-old daughter clutching her dress, her infant son cradled in her arms, a military aide appeared. The president wanted to see her in the Oval Office.

The Storeys, of Palmer, Mass., joined a growing list of bereaved families granted a private audience with the commander in chief. As Mr. Bush forges ahead with the war in Iraq, these “families of the fallen,” as the White House calls them, are one constituency he can still count on, a powerful reminder to an unpopular president that even in the face of heartbreaking loss, some still believe he is doing the right thing.

Since the war in Afghanistan began six years ago, Mr. Bush has met quietly with more than 450 such families, and is likely to meet more on Sunday, Veterans Day, in Waco, Tex., near his Crawford ranch. Mr. Bush often says he hears their voices — “don’t let my son die in vain,” he quotes them as saying — when making decisions about the war. The White House says families are not asked their political views. Yet war critics wonder just whose voices the president is hearing.

Like Melissa Storey, Bill Adams, who has been leading war protests in Lancaster, Pa., wrote Mr. Bush a letter — not to praise the president, but to question the military’s account of the death of his son, Brent. When Mr. Bush held a town-hall-style meeting in Lancaster last month, Mr. Adams asked a friend with a ticket to deliver his missive to the president. It worked, and a top aide to Mr. Bush later called Mr. Adams.

But when the president met families of the fallen that day in Lancaster, it did not escape Mr. Adams’s notice that he was not among them.

“I can’t help but be left with the suspicion that possibly his advance team screened those families for people who would be sympathetic,” Mr. Adams said. Given the chance, he said, he would have told Mr. Bush “that my son’s life was squandered.”

Mr. Adams’ case is pure conjecture, and it’s a little hollow. He thinks President Bush is doing the same thing Hillary Clinton just got caught doing — pre-screening the audience.

Except.

The comparison I’m making here is unworkable for a lot of reasons. Mr. Adams thinks President Bush is filtering his audience. Sen. Clinton, if you click at the first link in this post, you’ll see has been accused of putting plants into hers.

President Bush is meeting with hurting families in a confidential, private forum. Sen. Clinton is putting on a show.

Most importantly, we have a first-hand account of someone who says she was given a question to ask by a Clinton staffer. Bill Adams has a hunch, and not at all an incriminating one at that. I’m awfully sorry this man lost his son, but to be frank about it, if I were the President I wouldn’t invite him either…even if we did not have that episode with the “absolute moral authority” mom…which we did. It’s simply ridiculous to think Bill Adams wouldn’t take over the session in some way, for however brief a time. There are supposed to be other families there, in similar straights. It simply wouldn’t be appropriate.

Now, in reproducing this story on the front page today, the Sacramento Bee jumped onto Page A14 right after the words “near his Crawford ranch.” So they weren’t quite able to work Bill Adams into the front page. But that’s okay, they re-wrote the headline as…

Many ‘families of the fallen’ still back Bush

…and the sub-headline is cobbled together as

But war critics suspect that president’s private meetings are screened.

Hey, good going Sacramento Bee. You’ve just accused the President, based on one war activist’s extravagant speculation, of doing exactly the same thing we know Sen. Clinton’s campaign is doing. Even worse, by implying there’s something wrong with screening, you’ve pretty much dis-invited yourselves from any pre-Thanksgiving cocktail parties or emergency strategy sessions with any high-fallutin’ blue-blood Clinton fans, who might want to spin the tale that, y’know what, screening and planting is all just wonderful stuff. You better leave the black-tie wardrobe in mothballs unless you can come up with a good explanation for this.

But it can only get so embarrassing for you. Worst-case scenario is, someone is going to connect the dots, and write a letter to the Editor questioning — how come you’re accusing the President of doing something we don’t really know he’s doing, which would actually be appropriate if he was doing it, and letting Sen. Clinton get off scot-free for doing exactly the same thing only worse?

In which case you’ll just use the standard remedy: Print that letter just above, or below, a letter from someone in Davis or West Sacramento accusing you of being too friendly with the “neocons.” This always works. It isn’t even necessary to write an editorial crying “boo hoo, poor us, no matter what we do someone somewhere is always unhappy.” That isn’t necessary. The message is implied, and comes through loud and clear.

Meanwhile, I await that hard-hitting expose in the Sacramento Bee — and the New York Times — about Sen. Clinton and the plants in her audience. Obviously, I’m not holding my breath.

Posted in Challenger Scandals, Elections, Iraq and WoT Stuff | 1 Comment »

Another Happy Birthday to the Marines

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Marines Happy birthday, to the noble warriors who would be utterly useless to us in an imaginary world where nobody ever wishes harm on anybody else.

Since that world has been, is now, and always will be a work of pure fiction — even though a lot of citizens fail to realize this, to the embarrassment of all the rest of us — we’re glad you’re here. Oo-rah!

It seems appropriate to mark the occasion now with a story you can download from just about anywhere, and keeps getting better every time it is retold:

A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included admirals from the US, British, Canadian, Australian, and French Navies.

At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a group of half dozen or so officers that included personnel from most of the countries.

Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks, but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked: “Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences, rather than speaking French?”

Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied:

“Maybe it’s because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and Americans arranged it so you wouldn’t have to speak German.”

It got so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop.

On this 232nd, let us remember: Those who are opposed to freedom, always come marching in under a banner of “peace.” Ever since human sensibilities have “matured” to the height of realizing that war is a horrible thing, there have been no exceptions to this. The tyrant doesn’t say “submit to my will or I will hurt you and kill you” — he says “I have a plan, and my plan is a sure path to peace.”

Looking back over the years from my deathbed, I’m sure it will be all the clearer to me that this has been the big disadvantage to being alive in these times. Our ever-unslaked thirst for more and more “peace” has left freedom, already won and enjoyed by countless peoples, in danger at every turn of being lost forever. Get this guy out of office so we can have peace. Put that guy in charge so we can have peace.

It’s the campaign slogan of despots. Freedom means fighting. It always has and it always will. Your service, in particular, is invaluable and irreplaceable.

Posted in Noble Warriors | 1 Comment »

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XII

Friday, November 9th, 2007

…but something wonderful has happened, along with with something terrible. I care a great deal about what went wrong, and about what went right, well, I’m just not that much into it. So I’ll try to keep my bad humor out of this. And I really should be doing that, because I owe a lot of people big-time and I don’t want to be urinating all over the fine china and furniture while I’m supposed to be expressing gratitude to them, they deserve better.

On with it.

We have real important stuff down in the meat of the article, so if you’re pressed for time and can’t abide any foolish nonsense please click here. Your assistance is desperately needed. Thank you.

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, has been going through high-cotton lately. That means, for something nobody’s supposed to be reading, there’s a whole lot of nobodies. In blogging parlance that means we got a lot of “hits.” By “lately” I mean over the last week or two. It is pretty much sheer coincidence that this happened. We are not a “traffic magnet.” We don’t try to attract readers. We like to make new friends…a lot. We lean somewhat in the direction of making people feel good, but just barely. We just barely go that way. We prefer making people feel good to making them feel bad, and that’s only because we don’t like to try to make people feel bad. Part of that whole “don’t be an asshole” rule. The one thing this blog is absolutely, positively against, is shaping the content of it’s pages in anticipation of attracting a broader audience. Which is done quite a bit in other places, we notice.

Girl in bikini We don’t do that. We put up pictures of girls in bikinis, which attracts traffic…like you wouldn’t believe…when we want to look at girls in bikinis. But anything that goes up, has to please us before it pleases the audience. We aren’t in a Nielsen ratings race, and are not going to be in anything resembling one. We talk about what we want to talk about. Period. If we get a zillion hits, that’s great. If we get zero, that’s just as good.

There’s an important reason for this. You can’t prostitute yourself a little tiny bit, we think. Can’t go halfway on that. Stray outside the girls in bikinis and other things we personally find interesting, just because we think our readers are interested in something else — before you know it, we’d be saying some pretty outlandish stuff. This, we think, is why there are people out there dribbling a bunch of crap. Like for example, “our own government might have been directly responsible for the (September 11) attacks themselves.” That is exactly what I’m talking about. Selling out your opinion to get extra attention, is an all-or-nothing proposition. We prefer not to even start down that path.

This blog is based on the fundamental principle that only through this determined apathy, can a “blog,” or any other informational resource, remain faithful to truth and logic over time. Let me put it this way. Now and then, an older relative or other acquaintance will ask me how to start a blog, and my first words of advice are always these: You need to figure out the purpose of your new blog, before you put it up — is it a glossy magazine or is it a scrapbook? In other words, is there some mission that has been failed if you one day find out no one reads your blog? This blog…the one you’re reading now…is decidedly a scrapbook. We’re plumb pleased you’re here, of course, but overall we really don’t care if “nobody” reads it and we’re not going to care.

Well, care or not, we have a lot of new readers. And of course we’re plumb pleased to have you too. How many new readers? Well, over on The Truth Laid Bear which is like the Who’s Who of blogs, we’ve been a “slithering reptile” since last year sometime. Over the last several months — we hadn’t been peeking, remember? We’re “The Blog That Nobody Reads” — somewhere we got demoted to the next lower status of “crawly amphibian,” which meant we had been representing ourselves falsely because we had this goofy-looking snake in the sidebar to show off our slimy reptile status.

Well, we’ve been talkin’ smack about Hillary Clinton, and pointing to really cool photographs taken by other people, and giggling over fashions in the 1970’s, and you know what happened today? Remember the wonderful thing that we don’t really care about that much? Well…we pole-vaulted over the reptile, over the flappy birds, over the adorable rodents, and plunged headlong into the ranking of marauding marsupial. This is a little unexpected, even if the nature of the scrapbook “Blog That Nobody Reads” makes it trivial in some ways. Like going from butterbars-2nd-Lieutenant to full-bird-Colonel. Or trading in your ’82 Datsun on a new BMW Z4.

And it’s been a slow burn, too, so that implies a little bit of permanence this time. I guess when the nobodies come around to not read the blog nobody else is reading, they like what they see and keep coming back. Or not.

But could that have a purpose? None that I can see…until…later that same day, something awful happened which is far more meaningful to us. Something’s heap-big busted, folks, and very wrong. We have an opportunity to fix it and make it right. But the key word is “we”; I can’t do it without your help.

Project Valour-IT of Soldiers’ Angels, is going to miss it’s goal.

Soldier's Angel Valour-IT is a wonderful program that provides laptop computers to soldiers who have been wounded. I’m going to let the project’s “About” page do the talking here…

Every cent raised for Project Valour-IT goes directly to the purchase and shipment of laptops for severely wounded service members. As of October 2007, Valour-IT has distributed over 1500 laptops to severely wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines across the country.

Valour-IT accepts donations in any amount to support the purchase and distribution of laptops, but also offers a sponsorship option. An individual or organization may sponsor a wounded soldier by completely funding the cost of a laptop and continuing to provide that soldier with personal support and encouragement throughout recovery. This has proved to be an excellent project for churches, groups of coworkers or friends, and members of community organizations such Boy Scouts.
Originally Valour-IT provided the voice-controlled software, but now works closely with the Department of Defense Computer/electronic Accommodations Program (CAP): CAP supplies the adaptive software and Valour-IT provides the laptop. In addition, DoD caseworkers serve as Valour-IT’s “eyes and ears” at several medical centers, identifying possible laptop recipients.

The laptops, should the injuries demand it, are capable of speech recognition. You know, think about it…think about I.E.D.s, think about what an explosive does to human flesh, think about burns. Think about a young guy or lady away from home for the very first time, hands in bandages, wanting more than anything to let Mom and Dad know that they’re whole, or relatively whole, but unable to type. This is as good a cause as you’re likely to find anytime soon.

About this time every year, the project holds a fundraiser and puts the various branches of our defense against each other to buy these laptops. It’s a pretty sophisticated operation filled with fun stuff like gas-gauge controls comparing how each branch is doing, the good-natured inter-service joshing among real vets that goes along with that, clicky-buttons that patch directly over to secure donation sites…and you know what…

…it’s just not getting done. The report on fundraising, is not good. The report on inventory-on-hand, is even worse. I’m kind of unhappy about it. Actually, I have some negativity to put in, and maybe I should keep it out, but I gotta get this one off my chest. I’ll try to keep it in measured doses.

I keep hearing around the web and on the news, “of course, we can disagree about this war but we all agree on one thing, we support the troops.” Well, I don’t believe it. What’s the nicest thing you could say about one of those “troops” if you oppose the war effort? Remember, this is 2007. We don’t have people who “oppose the war” and just leave it at that. You’re supposed to throw in inflammatory buzzwords like “illegal” and “unjust”…what the hell does that say about these troops you support? That they’re a bunch of stupid patsies? Okay you’re entitled to your opinion. But you’re probably not going to skip too many fancy iced coffee drinks to buy a laptop for a disabled stupid patsy, are you.

Another thing I keep hearing about is how scandalous it is that we “all” aren’t being called upon to “sacrifice more.” I think this is a crock. I think the country’s been slipping for awhile, and it’s being taken over by socialists…or whatever you call socialists nowadays. I know that makes me sound like the crazy old man in the plaid shirt with the drool stains. Pardon me, I’ve just spent half a lifetime listening to people babble on about the glory of “sacrifice,” people who, once you inspect their thoughts more deeply to the extent you’re able, don’t appear to recognize any goal higher than that sacrifice. In short, they seem to think it’s noble when people throw themselves away. I don’t believe that’s what America is about. America is about accomplishing wonderful things that may demand sacrifice…it is about offering profound and heartfelt respect to individuals who have proven themselves willing to endure that sacrifice…we don’t worship the sacrifice itself. This is a surgical-precise distinction to muck around with, but I think it is an all-important one in this nation and it’s culture. We worship the objective. We don’t worship our own self-destruction, even though in desperate times it may be necessary for reaching that objective. As George Patton said, no damn fool won a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other damn fool die for his.

So you like to bitch about not enough people sacrificing, do you? Or being called-upon to so sacrifice? I call bullshit. Why is Valour-IT having a tough time of it, then. People who wail about this, don’t care about achieving what the sacrifice is supposed to win for us…they care about the sacrifice itself, which is a completely different kettle o’fish, and doesn’t fit my definition of “American” at all. I think these people just complain about whatever they think will win them the most favorable attention in that long line at Starbuck’s, blame a few tidbits of nonsense on George Bush, cuss out the poor lady who has to take their money and serve them their sissy frothy foo-foo drink about how long the line took this morning…and move on. Living the rest of that day for their own sake. Next day, they’ll be back again to spend another $6.50 on another fancy drink, bitching up a storm about gas prices and health insurance and what a lean Christmas they’re going to have to endure because of this expensive war. With nary a thought about how to share this unshared “sacrifice.”

As skewed a sense of perspective as there ever was.

You want a sense of respect for sacrifice? Here, I’ll explain it to you in terms of what it means to me.

Three years ago the war in Iraq was just a year old. I had some business to take care of at Walter Reed AMC, as well as a few other places, and this involved a lot of travel over a very short period of time. Well, parking at Walter Reed fills up pretty quick. I had ambitions of taking care of everything before eight in the morning, and because of some delays with some stupid thing or another it just didn’t happen. I barely reached the place by nine, which turned the parking situation upside-down for me.

So I showed my credentials to the guards, found a parking spot as best I was able…which wasn’t fun…and slithered into the lobby with my fancy suit on and a zillion other places to go after this one, feeling all abused and put-upon.

I reached the elevator just ahead of a little toe-head tyke barely half my age, and politely stepped aside to let him board first. I was glad I did, when I got a better look at him. See, he was young. He still had acne scars, and a couple of fresh zits just like what I had in my junior year of high school.

And he’d never pick any zits again.

He politely addressed me as “sir” and insisted — INSISTED — on pressing the buttons on the elevator with his own hooks.

There’s a paradigm shift for you. Three years on, I see lots of talk about an illegal and unjust war, oh but we all “support the troops” though…I hear a lot of complaining about the sacrifices some people have to make, with the knowledge that not enough other people are being called upon to do any sacrificing…people love love LOVE their foo-foo coffee drinks, their pizza deliveries, their movie rentals, their tattoos, their tabloids bursting at the seams with stories about Britney and what-not…

…and Project Valour-IT is sailing into it’s Veteran’s Day deadline reaching not even twenty-five percent of it’s goal.

What can I say, folks? My rant is done here. On the positive side, I feel truly blessed that The Blog That Nobody Reads, has for the first time an audience that is far-flung and wide-spread and (somewhat) voluminous…and loyal. We’ve had more readers-per-day before, but those were flash-in-the-pan things. Now we’re a Marsupial, and the stats and incoming-link counts say we’re somewhat deserving of this…for now…and here’s a situation where we can take that traffic and do some good with it. Make a world of difference to a lot of people who desperately need it, and richly deserve it.

Today’s payday Friday. You’re probably reading this on a Saturday morning. We’ve tried to post fun things on Saturday mornings for our Saturday morning audiences…we’ll probably be skipping that this weekend. You probably got paid yesterday. Midnight has come and gone. The funds are available. Your help is needed.

If you’re finding out about Buck’s place for the first time from this plea, do consider bookmarking him. All he’s really doing is keeping a running diary of his retirement, and it’s ended up being one of the more interesting places on the web. But if you can spare a few bucks today, do hit that Valour-IT jar. See if you can close that gap, will you?

And if you can spare more than that, fer chrissakes if the phrase “give until it hurts” ever had practical meaning, it is now. The young men and women you’re helping, have done exactly that for you.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Noble Warriors | 4 Comments »

The Second Most Important Issue III

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

From an unlikely source, a ray of hope:

Democrats and Waterboarding
The party will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.
BY ALAN DERSHOWITZ

I recently had occasion to discuss the Bush administration’s war on terrorism with one of the highest ranking former officials responsible for planning that war. He asked me what I thought the administration’s biggest mistake was.

I told him that it was not immediately going bipartisan following the attacks of 9/11. President Roosevelt had invited Republicans to join his cabinet as the U.S. prepared to fight the Germans and the Japanese, and President Lincoln had included political opponents in his efforts to preserve the union. Creating a united political front against an external enemy may blunt the partisan advantage expected from a successful military effort, but it helps to keep the country together at a time when partisan bickering can undercut the effort. The former Bush official agreed, regretting that the war against terrorism had become essentially a Republican project.

Now the Democrats appear to be making the same mistake as they move toward what seems to be an inevitable retaking of the White House. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates are seeking partisan advantage from what many Americans see as the Bush failures in the war against terrorism and especially its extension to Iraq and possibly, in the future, to Iran.

This pacifistic stance appeals to the left wing of the democratic electorate, which may have some influence on the outcome of democratic primaries, but which is far less likely to determine the outcome of the general election. Most Americans–Democrats, Republicans, independents or undecided–want a president who will be strong, as well as smart, on national security, and who will do everything in his or her lawful power to prevent further acts of terrorism.

As I’ve stated repeatedly, there are two issues with next year’s election that are far more important than any other, and just about everybody understands this even though few will admit outwardly that it’s true. The second most important issue is close on the heels of the first. The top spot is occupied by: Which of the candidates, from either party, will bring us the biggest pile of crispy dead terrorists? If one administration would haul in 500 terrorist carcasses a month and the other one would bring in 499, there really isn’t any other factor that would justify letting that 1 terrorist continue walking around. He could very well be responsible for some real damage. This is a pestilence that has gone unexterminated for far too long, and we need to poison, burn, and stamp out all we can. We’ve already tried ignoring them. For a good long time. It didn’t work. Now we need to kill them off.

And the second most important issue, just behind the first, is internal. It, too, is a question left too long unaddressed: What do we get when we put liberal democrats in charge of things? Do we get someone simply ignorant of history, or do we get certifiably insane people? Is their connection to reality just strained, or has it snapped altogether?

What makes the second most important issue so close in importance to the first, is this overwhelming crush of people who call themselves “moderates.” They think when you put Republicans in half the time, and donks in the other half of the time, you’ve achieved moderation. That’s true, assuming one ideology is cleanly left and the other is cleanly right, and there’s some path of decency and righteousness halfway between them. And that’s a great way to go if you subscribe to the “highest point of a mountain is the center” theory, concluding that when those two halves are forced to work together, the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts.

The problem comes in when we review facts that do, or do not, support this. The problem is that we have no reason to believe in any of the theories of “moderation” above.

What we do have reason to believe, is that the people we call liberals and leftists are wombat-rabies bollywonkers insane. And I would hope it’s obvious — when you alternate between letting sane people and insane people run things, maybe, just maybe, that’s not the right way to go.

This ties in with Derschowitz’s closing uppercut, and it’s a killer:

Perhaps political campaigns and confirmation hearings are not the appropriate fora in which to conduct subtle and difficult debates about tragic choices that a president or attorney general may face. But nor are they the appropriate settings for hypocritical public posturing by political figures who, in private, would almost certainly opt for torture if they believed it was necessary to save numerous American lives. What is needed is a recognition that government officials must strike an appropriate balance between the security of America and the rights of our enemies.

Unless the Democratic Party–and particularly their eventual candidate for president–is perceived as strong and smart on national defense and prevention of terrorism, the Bush White House may be proved to have made a clever partisan decision by refusing to make the war against terrorism a bipartisan issue. The Democrats may lose the presidency if they are seen as the party of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Dennis Kucinich and those senators who voted against Judge Mukasey because he refused to posture on a difficult issue relating to national security. They will win if they are seen as just as tough but a lot smarter on how to deal with real threats to our national interests.

And that’s why I see this as a ray of hope. In politics, Derschowitz’s points are all sound. But — I think I can almost guarantee that the donkey party will not, anytime soon, present themselves as “just as tough but a lot smarter on how to deal with real threats to our national interests.” Kerry tried it three years ago. Whenever it came time to address details, he waffled.

Because what Derschowitz can’t admit, or won’t, is that there is money coming in to support the donks. And that money comes from people who, for one reason or another, don’t want a War on Terror to be fought. It’s not all about votes, a lot of it has to do with sponsors.

There’s no real challenge involved in proving this to be true. Just look at the donks address the War on Terror sometime; just watch ’em. Blah blah blah Bush’s Fault War For Oil Illegal Unjust War blah blah blah…but meanwhile, the country does have a problem with international terrorism, and it doesn’t quite fill-the-bill to say we have a problem because of George W. Bush. The terrorists are out there. They pre-date the George W. Bush administration. They’ll get to us again if they can. What should we do about them? ………..SILENCE.

The donks are all too eager to pump out hatred at their political enemies. Why, if we could bottle up just a quarter of it and aim it at the terrorists, that might solve the problem right then & there. But what about the PROBLEM? What is to be DONE? All these years gone by, the donks have had nothing to say there. That’s the way people behave when they’re on the take. When they get money for doing a job, and the job is to distract. That is how people in general act when someone is giving them money under the table.

So yes, Prof. Derschowitz, if the donks start presenting a mantle of toughness — and filling in details about it better than John Kerry did, to show they’re serious about it — they might win. And if a frog had wings he might not have to bump his ass on the ground all the time. See, it won’t happen. The donks are as beholden to their donors as they are to their voters…as much as Republicans are beholden to their donors…probably even moreso. The strategy of the donks, whether the donks themselves like it or not, is to put a George Soros puppet in the White House.

And the rest of us should be very concerned about that, even if some of us want to call ourselves “moderates.” Because that would service the first-most-important issue very poorly. You could take the terrorists off the endangered-species list then.

Posted in Elections, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not | 3 Comments »

We’re Paranoid

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

This guy’s a nut, but no nuttier than our liberals. If the September 11 attacks hadn’t happened, his response would make perfect sense. But they did, and so he’s a nut.

A Swedish man accused of falsely telling U.S. authorities that his son-in-law had links to al-Qaida has been charged with defamation, a newspaper reported Friday.

The false warning spoiled a business trip to the U.S. for the man’s son-in-law, who was stopped at a Florida airport and questioned for 11 hours before being sent back on a plane to Sweden, the Sydsvenska Dagbladet daily reported.

U.S. authorities apparently reacted to an e-mail sent to the FBI saying the man “likely has links to the Muslim terror organization al-Qaida’s network in Sweden,” the newspaper reported.

The 52-year-old father-in-law admitted to having sent the e-mail after it was traced to his home computer, the paper said. He reportedly told police he sent the e-mail in anger after a dispute with his son-in-law, who was divorcing his daughter.

The man said he did not expect such a “paranoid reaction” from U.S. authorities, Sydsvenska Dagbladet reported.

Honestly, where do all these people come from? Do they have incredibly short memories or did they just never give a rat’s ass?

There’s more to this worldwide phenomenon raising the hair in the back of my neck…other than it being horribly offensive. I’m just wondering about the future conversation with my grandkids…

“Grandpa, when did all that ‘global warming hysteria’ you were talking about take place?”

“Oh, I would say it peaked around aught six and petered out around aught eight or nine…got started in two or three.”

“And people were a lot more worried about that than anything else?”

“Yup. Kids of your generation were supposed to be peeved at grownups from my generation for daring to continue generating power, going to work, cooking meat outdoors, and generally living life. It was the biggest political issue of that decade by far.”

“Uh…I thought you said the September 11 attacks occurred in oh one. How did people go from that, in the space of a year or two, to worrying about something that never even killed anybody?”

“You know…you come up with an answer to that one, let me know.”

Really, some of the things my grandmother and uncles told me that made so little sense at the time, I’m seeing now in an entirely different light. That fool swede should be one isolated kookburger. But he represents the majority, from what I can figure. Worry about the gobular wormening ManBearPig, which has yet to hurt anyone, but pretend the September 11 attacks never took place. You exist in any other era, and not only will this perspective cease to make any sense, but you’ll be just incredulous at just how foolish we are overall in this generation. We’ve really lost all meaningful hold on reality.

Posted in Airport/Flight Safety, Everyday Dimwits, ManBearPig | 1 Comment »

Hop the Turnstyle, Punch a Ballot

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

What better way is there for us to apologize for our very existence as a nation, than to hunt down those who would kill themselves in order to take a few of us down with ’em…and give them the right to vote for or against our public officials.

Here’s the thing. An immigration investigation by the federal government found 4,000 probable illegal voters in that race. It was decided by less than 1,000 votes. Eight of the 9-11 hijackers, eight of the 19 hijackers, were registered to vote — because they’d gotten driver’s licenses.

This is a “Why We Have Blogs” moment if ever there was one. The Newsbusters pice excerpted above is a little on the long side, jam-packed with interesting tidbits you’re not going to hear on the alphabet-soup networks on the boob tube. Ever write a letter to your senator or congressman and wonder why they aren’t exactly slobbering with anticipation for your latest clear guidance about how they should be voting? Well, it almost seems sensible…they’re so busy, and you’re just one voter.

Well, in all likelihood you’re not even that. America, The Beautiful — where the voters elect leaders, and then the leaders get together and decide who’s going to vote. And then the voters wonder why it is they don’t have a say anymore, when the answer is right in front of our faces the whole time.

The donk party just barely managed to squeak out a congressional victory for the first time this century last year. They’ve managed to win 3 out of 10 presidential elections since 1968.

Overall, in spite of the enormous amounts of money they spend bullying us around and telling us what to think, we just don’t want them running anything. And so, we see through Hillary’s embarrassing performance in that debate earlier this week, and through that asinine Motor Voter law enacted in the first year of her husband’s presidency, they want to give the right to vote to people who enter the country illegally.

If the donks were forced to spend one twentieth as much time proving the above musings false, as Republicans are forced to prove they aren’t sexists and racists, we might have a chance as a country. Me, I’m braced for a full year of listening to Hillary and Co. endure hard-nosed, scrutinizing questions such as “how does campaigning make you feel?”

Speaking of which, I wanted to be sure and capture this (H/T: Duffy), which I expect to come in handy in the long months ahead…

Posted in Challenger Scandals, Elections, Illegal Immigration, The Muslim Question | No Comments »

On Sermon-on-Mount Liberals

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

I haven’t been reading Lydia Cornell lately. I should, because she has claimed to be a former Republican and I have all-but conclusively judged this statement to be full of crap, without really having too much foundational information. But of course I do have some…since it’s such a frequent occurrence gorgeous Lydia says a bunch of stupid bullcrap only a dedicated donk would say…

Democrats are stronger on terror because we know the value of human life. We will win the war on terror by gathering our forces and fortifying our homeland. By first bringing our troops home and strengthening our own borders, ports, airports and train stations and using our resources wisely. We can’t afford to lose a single human life. We’ve lost over 2,600 troops, and another 16,000 missing arms and legs, and we’ve spent over 300 billion dollars on a war that has DEFINITELY CREATED MORE HATRED AND TERRORISM throughout the whole world against us.

Democrats will go out and communicate with our enemies: we will bridge the gap and open diplomatic channels. Syria, who was helping us right after 911 will be helping us again. Everyone wants to be on the side of the Peacemaker who brings a higher vision to conflict. In the time that George Bush and the Three Stooges have been in power, they have created more enemies than ever before in America’s history. This is the most shameful time in our country. We must get these primitive self-serving oil barons and Neanderthals out of power before they destroy the world.

Sometime back when the war was a newer thing, Lydia had put up a post describing how she had once been a Republican but couldn’t abide the wild contradiction between the Republican platform and her interpretation of The Gospels, so she switched to the donks because they were the more biblically-pure party. She is, therefore, perhaps the most physically-appealing specimen of a large and growing sect tens of millions strong: The “Sermon on the Mount” liberals.

These are the kookburgers who insist the Lamb of God, voting today, would punch a straight-donk ticket because those Republicans have strayed from His word. The title of the post excerpted above shows you the depths to which this lunatic thinking ultimately drags an innocent mind: “We Will Win War on Terror by Getting Out of Iraq.”

Well I’ll have to agree that at times, George W. Bush has been a dangerous man. But he’s never been this dangerous.

This is “run with scissors in your hand and marbles all over the floor,” electric-fence-pissing dangerous. The “Sermon on the Mount” liberals are named for a passage from the Book of Matthew, Chapter 5, they themselves like to cite frequently; in some cases, the person so speaking is familiar with this passage of the Bible, and none other.

³⁸Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

³⁹But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

⁴⁰And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

⁴¹And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

⁴²Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

⁴³Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

⁴⁴But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you…

According to our “Sermon on the Mount” liberals, therefore, all violence is contrary to the will of God. There are no exceptions to this. If such an interpretation were sincere, of course, there would be ample occasion and motivation to translate this snotty lecturing into Arabic, since the Islamofascists that attacked us are also supposed to believe in a god who champions peace, and they also are supposed to have “hijacked” a “peaceful religion.”

I know of no such translation effort that has ever taken place.

Perhaps the prospective translator-lecturers are terrified of getting their empty little heads lopped off.

But uh…getting back to the “Sermon on the Mount” liberals. They are quite an interesting bunch. There is this book out there, millenia old, arguably the most influential book on the affairs of men out of any other book ever compiled, no close-seconds. It is a dauntingly thick book, chock full of instructions about how to achieve everlasting life. These “Sermon on Mount” liberals have picked up on the one passage that might, with sufficient effort, be interpreted as endorsing self-destruction, and this is the one passage that they parrot endlessly, avoiding and ignoring all others.

Well, I shouldn’t say that. Some of our peaceniks are pretty enthusiastic Bible-study people, who I’m sure could quote circles around me. But it is interesting — they get this frenzied frothy notion that The Lord wants us out of Iraq, and He is greviously offended at us for going in there in the first place. If you were to take the Bible, and drop from it Matthew 5:38-44, leaving all other passages intact, their argument would dissolve completely.

Is Matthew 5:38-44 subject to a singular interpretation? No! It may very well be the most ethereal and nebulous chronicling in those pages, since Noah built the ark.

It doesn’t pass the “If I were God” test. If I were God, would I build a species of people in my image and give them instructions to…embrace those among their brothers who wish to do them harm. Coddle venomous serpents close to their own bosoms. Expose their soft fleshy bellies to their snarling, slobbering countrymen, who are brandishing knives and swords and sharp farm implements, looking for a place to stick ’em. Why? Why would I want this people I had built, to do such a thing?

It crumbles under the weight of it’s inherent silliness when we consider third parties. Do we interpret the Sermon on the Mount literally when we come across two men, one bad and the other innocent, when the bad man wants to do harm to the innocent? “Sermon on the Mount” liberals can always be counted on to change the subject when confronted by this, because that innocent man could just as well be a woman. Or a child. Or a handicapped person. They, therefore, are forced by their own reasoning to endorce acts of violence on the innocent and weak, who cannot defend themselves — to condemn any efforts by stronger people to come to the aid of those who are innocent and weak. Not supposed to do it. It’s gotta make some sense down the road, after all it’s what Jesus said.

Well, it isn’t what Jesus said. And it gets much worse than that, when you start to consider a lot of our “Sermon on the Mount” liberals don’t even believe in God. Consider that for a second. You’ve got this passage from the Bible, subject to a variety of interpretations but, okay, one of those interpretations says you’re supposed to treat enemies as friends, even in situations where logic and reason tell you this is self-destructive. Somewhere down the line, possibly after your demise, this all makes sense. But the guy interpreting this for you doesn’t believe it himself.

Just think on that. You’re getting this snotty, condescending lecture about how you shouldn’t allow violence to take place, even if it is defensive violence…because Jesus said no…but you’re getting the lecture from someone who doesn’t practice this himself, and can’t practice it, because he doesn’t believe in Jesus. Which in all likelihood means, the guy doesn’t even believe what he is telling you — and what he’s telling you is there’s something virtuous in self-destruction.

Ergo — your snotty condescending lecturer wants you to destroy yourself. Through non-violence. Allow others to rape and pillage and burn you, even though he himself would never dream of doing the same thing.

It’s insulting on so many levels. It’s like going fishing by rowing out in the middle of the lake and expecting the fish to jump into your boat. And it presumes an inimicable relationship, which may or may not be justified by preceding events. And probably isn’t. But most of all, it is so intellectually insulting. It presumes that by babbling the correct gibberish at you, he can motivate you to do something both he, and you, logically understand makes no sense at all.

These people haven’t been reading the Bible. They’ve been watching old Star Trek episodes in which Kirk and Spock destroy ancient alien computers using that all-powerful Kirk-and-Spock secular humanist logic. They’ve seen the old trope played out so many times, they figure it’s easy and want to try it out themselves.

Now, these true-believer Bible-studier types, I’m gathering their minds have been wrapped into little pretzels by these Star Trek watching secular humanist types. Wherever violence takes place, they figure, the will of God has been thwarted and they must dispense their insulting lecturing…only to the side of the conflict that speaks English, though, so their heads won’t get lopped off. Their flaw is in presuming that peace is easy, that it’s simply an absence of war. They think peace is available when the right people are asked…like ordering a pizza.

Blogger friend Rick ran into a few of those types over at some place called Waving or Drowning. Usually I avoid these scraps in which Rick immerses himself, dealing with interpretations of scripture I find somewhat meandering and arcane. That gets into my own interpretation of the Bible, which is a little too complicated to go into here…but it’s also pretty thin. To bottom-line it, I think we got put here. At significant cost. We weren’t put here to play video games, guzzle Starbuck’s, and bitch about bad weather; we’re supposed to find something meaningful to do with our lives, get ‘er done, and encourage those around us to do the same. Once you proceed from that assumption, it’s been my general experience that all these squabbles about Sodom and Gomorrah and the Levitical Priesthood pretty much sort themselves out.

So for a few days of visiting his blog, I skimmed past this one post of his and jumped to his next post. I ended up sorry I ignored this for so long, because when I finally clicked my way into this skirmish I saw something pretty amazing…posted by Rick’s declared antagonist “Sonja”:

Ahhh … Rick, now you’re being disingenuous. You and I both know that if it were not for the fact of our troops being in Iraq and and the Commander In Chief having given direct orders which caused this war, those pictures would not have been taken. Whether or not our troops were directly responsible for them or not is hardly the point, now is it?

The “disingenuous” question Rick posed, had to do with some gruesome pictures posted by Sonja of injuries received by children local to the conflict in Iraq. Sonja had directly implied that the pictures were representative of “good” things “that the US military is doing.” Rick was inquiring — disingenuously, I suppose — as to whether or not Sonja knew, for an absolute fact, that it was the United States that had done these things.

Here’s Sonja declaring it to be a non-issue. The United States started the conflict, ergo, all ensuing violence was to be laid at the feet of the “US military,” and anyone with the temerity to suggest otherwise or even question it is being “disingenuous.”

So this started a big back-and-forth during which time, the “Sermon on the Mount” liberals threw in all kinds of red herrings about Rick’s involvement in Republican politics, and his employment status with a DoD contractor. Rick, meanwhile, persevered as best he could trying to get an answer to his question.

So after I waded in and picked out just three of the questions I was inspired to ask, Mike, the owner of the blog, shut off commenting. I honestly don’t know if I did that or not. I would have to assume so, since the back-and-forth continued for quite awhile before I showed up, I only said one thing and right after that the Jenga tower collapsed. I thought I was pretty polite and cordial. Maybe not cordial enough.

Our “turn the other cheek” people, it turns out, have some pretty thin skins; it’s not what you’d expect at all, is it?

So I think we have some lessons to learn from this. One, we’ve got a lot of people walking around thinking violence is an elective thing, ALL the time — there can be no exceptions. I would have to imagine most of those folks are virginal where violence is concerned. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a place where you have the right to own a gun, and you exercise this right — and then in the middle of the night someone breaks into your house, he’s got a knife, you’ve got a gun, he’s a lot more concerned about getting away un-caught than about your personal safety…you don’t have a lot of choices, do you? Or if a man attacks your wife right in front of you and you have the means to stop him. There’s only two speeds in that scenario, go and stop. So I guess these are people inflicting their impractical and untested fanciful notions of “peace” on all the rest of us. They can’t possibly know too much about what they’re talking about, if they honestly think that’s how it works…one guy wants to fight, the other one doesn’t, so the pacifist just drones on about a bunch of stuff until the bully doesn’t want to bully anymore.

It don’t work that way in real life. Sorry.

Two. Isn’t it interesting…Iraq is supposed to be the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. It is supposed to be an “illegal and unjust war.” But it seems everyone who is opposed to the violence we have supposedly caused over there, is opposed to any & all violence as well. This isn’t true of everyone who’s opposed to our operations in Iraq, of course. But very nearly everyone. Ninety-nine percent or more, I’d say, are “Sermon on the Mount” liberals who labor under this irrational, slobbering delusion that war can be brought to an end for all time, if enough people will it to be so. That says unflattering things about the remaining one percent.

Three. It occurs to me that if you hate people and want to destroy them, but you don’t believe in fighting, this is just a natural tactic to take isn’t it? Like I said above, just demand the fish hop into your rowboat. Or like I said over at Rick’s place, go hunting and simply talk the deer into committing suicide.

I think that’s what “Sermon on the Mount” liberals are really all about. They like fighting and destroying people who disagree with them, every bit as much as anybody else. Except they’re afraid to admit it, and the people and aparatus they have made a lifetime-dedication to hating, has a lot to do with fighting itself. So they’re using words as weapons, because that’s the only option they’ve left to themselves.

They say to their enemies, hug venomous vipers to your chests, because it’s what Jesus wants you to do. Expose your jugular to the nearest tarantula, it’s what you need to do for your salvation. Most of them don’t even believe in Jesus. Like Kirk facing off against an ancient alien computer, they figure if they say the right stuff their enemies will destroy themselves.

It’s the dream of a sissy.

Posted in Everyday Dimwits, Iraq and WoT Stuff | No Comments »

Best Sentence XIX

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

Time once again for a Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award. “I wish I’d been smart enough to say that,” says fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm…and no, that’s not the glorious Best Sentence. She is simply commenting on the article which I, too, think worthy of high honors.

But as I often point out to my kid, we live in a universe that has a great many other things on it’s mind beyond the supposedly sacred obligation of keeping us constantly entertained, so often there’s an education before the payoff. Let’s take a few paragraphs, being the grown-ups that we are, to get that done.

It starts with Blogger Friend Phil’s expose on Friday about Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and his forty compatriots who signed the “Hush Rush” letter. Actually, it starts a good deal before that…but I predict this is the point in the story where history will look back and find the eyes of “most” folks have glazed over.

Rush said something about “phony soldiers” on his radio show.

Reid & Co. put a fanciful spin on his remarks, re-invented them as saying something Rush did not, in fact, say; and then they wrote up a letter to try to get him silenced.

May I explore a bunny trail here? Since we’re adults and we have attention spans…let’s use ’em…we have got to find a word for this someday. This thing liberals do. Where you come up with this accusation out of thin air, and you know the facts aren’t on your side so of course there will be a discussion about whether the accusasion is true or not — which it isn’t. Then, you see to it that instead of being pursued…the discussion is instead prolonged…since, if the discussion were pursued, it would be a very short discussion indeed.

The casual observer will assume the accusation has some merit to it, but that’s a secondary payoff. The primary reward is that there is something you don’t want discussed, and now you’ve generated a distraction from it.

The classic Vaudeville version of this is “When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?” For the uninitiated, the trick is that if you aren’t a wife-beater, there’s no correct way to answer the question. This is a close cousin to that. You come up with an argument which, plainly, has an inimicable relationship to truth and common sense — like — “we need twice as much money so let’s raise the tax rate twice as high.” I offer the counter-argument that plainly puts the kibosh on yours: “If you raise the tax rate significantly, people will change what they do to pursue their individual interests, and you won’t raise the revenue you expect to; this is basic economics and has proven to be an accurate prediction of human behavior, time and time again.” And you say, “you want the government to run out of money and you want poor people to suffer!”

It is an unfounded inference, one that enjoys no genuine confidence. You would not bet your life, your liberty, your treasured possessions on the axiom that I want the government to run out of money, or that I want poor people to suffer. But it’s an effective counterattack in the political realm, because now we’re going to have a long drawn-out discussion about whether I want the government to run out of money and the poor people to suffer. The genesis of the discourse has to do with whether supply-side economics works. It’s about the Laffer Curve. But with enough energized emotions at work…we’re not talking about that, are we? We’re talking about a sadistic streak I’m supposed to have, that nobody’s really going to bet anything worth keeping that I actually have.

That’s what we need to name, some day.

That’s exactly what Harry Reid and his pals did. They knew Rush was not trying to say all soldiers serving now, who do not agree with The Great Rushbo, are “phony.” That was not the spirit of anything he said or did. I know. I’m a member of Rush 24/7, I’m entitled to have that entire show, I do, I’ve listened to it. He didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything like it.

But Rush is not a stranger to politics, at all. And so…he did zip, zero, nada, butkus of the stuff neophytes do when confronted by this. He did not stutter or stammer or “homina homina homina” or “I’m sorry if my words were interpreted” or any of that nonsense Don Imus did. Read Phil’s post to find out what Rush did, if you need to.

And then, as Phil pointed out, Harry Reid backpedaled. But you have to look close to see what happened. Harry Reid’s new spin on it, is an expression of enthusiasm for the help being extended to the Marines and their families, an effort started by Rush, which Reid did not aid in any way except unwittingly. Being a stranger to the whole situation — knowing how to read and to think, but having no background information at all — you’d think Reid cooked up the whole idea and Rush grudgingly lent his support.

What a crock.

Bookworm has, for now, the very best chronicling of the whole sorry affair. If you’ve read his far, you’ve got the attention span you need to handle it, so I recommend you go there now.

There. Now you know what’s going on. And I think I can promise you if you’ve only heard about it from CNN or MSNBC or Larry King or any of those big figureheads…it was a paradigm shift, wasn’t it.

On with the BSIHORL award, to Captain’s Quarters commenter PackerBronco. It’s not one sentence, it’s two…and they say all that needs to be said…

The conservative thinks of a free-market way of raising private funds to aid a worthwhile causes and backs his commitment with his own money.

The liberal asks other people to donate funds, doesn’t donate any of his own money, and tries to take credit for the generosity of others.

Zing!

Update: Just received this via e-mail, under the heading “office gossip.” It seemed very fitting to the subject at hand:

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Noble Warriors, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 4 Comments »

Cemetery Workers Starving

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

Four and a half years ago, a coalition led by the United States invaded Iraq. And then we had a bunch of stories about the damage we were doing, plainly being pushed in front of us by ambitious and energized persons and groups with agendas. In some cases, with well-funded agendas. Much of it concerned our soldiers — ahem, the ones “we all” support, cough *bullshit* cough — engaging in abuse, non-provoked hostilities, flushing the Koran. Some of it was true, some of it was not.

Back in the early days, if you had engaged in a joke about…the standard whimper-whine media boilerplate template about those poor cemetary workers not getting as much business as they need, now that the violence is falling off…that would have been bad satire.

Later on, as more people became accustomed to those media watchdogs sniffing around looking for suffering in Iraq they could throw to the EYE HAYT BOOSH crowd, ignoring more substantial things like those psycho terrorists we know are trying to kill us…that same thing would have been somewhat good satire.

Now 2007 is on it’s last legs. And lookee what we got here.

At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq .

“I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead,” said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. “People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don’t talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more.”

Dhurgham Majed al Malik, 48, whose family has arranged burial services for generations, said that this spring, private cars and taxis with caskets lashed to their roofs arrived at a rate of 6,500 a month. Now it’s 4,000 or less, he said.

The cemetary workers. Won’t someone please think of the cemetary workers. I guess those anti-war liberals and Ron Paul are quite right after all — things were much better under Saddam.

H/T: Rick.

Posted in Iraq and WoT Stuff | 1 Comment »

This Is Good XLIV

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Good satire is hard to find, being such a careful balance between things that are actually happening, and the absurd. If, by it’s very existence, it cannot whip the canvas off a “Big Reveal” that something is becoming silly, that ought not be, then the satire runs the risk of becoming silly itself. It is a demanding work of art, the soufflé of political humor.

This is what I call good satire.

Rush McFatso Limbaugh, for those of you who haven’t already been told what to think of him, is a right-wing, hate-mongering hater who uses The People’s Airwaves to spew his vile hate-speech into the primitive, insect brains of the dittohead masses. Anyone who listens to his hateful tirades risks becoming one of his mindless neo-con herd. Thank Goddess we have Democrat leaders like Harry Reid to listen to Limbaugh’s show for us and whittle his entire 3-hour program down to two words.
:
…it’s especially infuriating that Limbaugh should attack soldiers who openly criticize Bush’s illegal and immoral war, as those are the only kinds of troops who deserve and have the respect of progressives everywhere. So much so that we won’t humiliate them by checking their credentials before we wheel them out to denounce the U.S.’s imperialist acts of aggression.

I do not have what it takes to write satire; I’m more inclined toward the monotonous, bloated, puffy essay. But one of the points upon which this piece relies, is an arcane, abstract matter that’s been bugging me like a pebble in my shoe for a long time now, that I haven’t seen pointed out by anyone, anywhere. Maybe I spilled a few words about it in the recent past, and can’t find my own ramblings. It’s possible. Let me expound.

It has to do with this thing about “those are the only kinds of troops who deserve and have the respect of progressives everywhere.” This is where the piece is nudged away from the plane of reality, since a progressive is not supposed to be heard qualifying classes of people who receive the respect or alms or comfort or assistance of other progressives…as much as they’d like to, and as accurately as this would reflect their actions and true intent. No, you won’t hear the liberal donks say such a thing, because in the domain of gutteral sounds the correct word is “all.” All, and things related to all. Everybody. Everyone, universal, every.

Of course, I’m not speaking of respect for our troops…not just that. “We support higher educational opportunities for all.” “Everybody deserves a living wage.”

What makes me queasy, is these face-to-face debates I’ve had over the last handful of years, here & there. And the “respect for troops” thing is just the most unsettling example of a phenomenon that transcends many different issues. It takes a certain level of diplomatic skill to keep these conversations light, because our donks have apprently been given instructions that they should look for opportunities to accuse the opposition of questioning their patriotism, and having detecting such an opportunity, should lash out with as much childish emotion as can be managed. You see them doing this in those letters to the editor they’ve been instructed to write, and in their left-wing blogs that exist pretty much for the purpose of repetitively recycling instructions on what is to be adored and what is to be deplored. Questioning My Patriotism! Grrrr!

And always, in the Iraq situation, one which both sides acknowledge is generally sucky, and on which both sides acknowledge a solution is elusive, and which just about everyone acknowledges to be complicated…the subject is directed, without me or anyone else bringing it up, to how the liberal feels about the troops. I’ve come to see it as a “Doth Protest Too Much” kind of a thing. And like any other issue, the word “all” is stuck in there. The donk supports the troops. All the troops.

I ask…what about the troops who want to listen to Rush Limbaugh?

What about the troops who not only support other troops like you do, but the mission as well, as you don’t?

What about the troops who re-up when they don’t have to?

What about the troops who voted for George W. Bush? Twice?

Those — too? That “all”?

I never get back the emphatic “Yes!” that you might expect. Maybe if I participated in such exchanges more often, I’d have seen it by now, but I’m a little timid. If I’m to come to blows with someone and start losing some friends, I’d much rather the issue be something genuine and real. To become a pariah because I’ve fallen into the role of “bad guy” in some script that has been circulated by Dr. Howard Dean, a charming and intelligent charlatan I’ve never personally met, just isn’t my cuppa.

But by far the most typical reaction is a “homina homina” thing followed by a hasty change in subject. That freaks me out, a little.

And as I pointed out above, it has ramifications with many other issues. “Everybody deserves a living wage” has been exposed, many times, as a crock. Liberal donks don’t believe this, even if they say they do. What if, for example, an evil, crooked CEO of the Ken Lay variety lost all his income and assets, and couldn’t get a job that paid a living wage. Forced to sell pencils in the street, like it’s 1929 all over again. Would that represent a sub-standard situation which decent people would feel some moral compulsion to jump into & fix? Because, of course, however you define a “living wage” this guy probably wouldn’t be cranking it out.

No. Of course not. It’s silly to think so even for a second. Well then…what about a CEO who wasn’t as wicked as Ken Lay? What if the same thing happened to an only-halfway crooked CEO. Or a CEO who wasn’t crooked at all? What if it was just some guy who had it good for awhile, and now, was taken down a few pegs to the point where he couldn’t even earn that “living wage”?

This is exactly the kind of dream our donks have before they get that twisted grin on their silly donk faces and that sick twinkle in their donkey eyeballs. I believe they call it “finding out what it’s like.” Is it an ethically compromised situation in which they feel compelled to run interference…get that guy the “living wage” he “deserves,” just as “everyone” does?

Again — anybody who’s been paying attention, understands that is just ridiculous. In short, they don’t mean “all.”

I’ve come to learn, slowly, that donks never seem to mean “all.” It’s the one word they can be counted-upon to start throwing around, when what they really mean is the exact opposite. There is always a filtering process in place when they use the word “all.”

Free speech is another great example. It’s pretty easy to produce or happen-upon a donk who claims it to be breathtakingly important, that “all viewpoints be heard” and that “freedom of speech” should be a right “enjoyed by all.” If they meant that for real, they would make a priority out of seeing to it the neo-Nazi skinheads could reach as big an audience as could be managed, so we could hear all about the “n-word” people don’t know their place, and the Jews made up the story about the holocaust right before they took over all the businesses. So I’m a little relieved that the donks don’t mean what they say. But if you took their words at face value, you’d have to infer this is exactly what they mean.

The donk has freedom of speech…the donk’s enjoyment of freedom of speech, is measured in his ability to reach an audience, voluntary if possible; captive, just as good. We “all” have a “right” to “freedom of speech”; therefore, the Nazi skinhead deserves a captive audience too. That would be robust, durable, simple logic. What spoils it is not that the brakes are slammed on before the Nazi is given a podium and a bullhorn, but it’s intrinsic insincerity. “All” doesn’t mean “all”; it never does.

It’s the solidarity. The living-in-tribes. The “my team is right about everything, the other team is never right about anything” stuff. It keeps getting in the way. In the last few years, I’ve developed this confusion about whether to laugh or cry when I come across this: The donks have this unwritten code, this “gang” doctrine. They are very much like sports fans who support a team, don’t know why they support the team, and adore each other all the more because nobody can offer a reason why the team should be supported. This puts them on a higher plane with each other. I guess if a well-justified reason for this team-adoration would or could be produced, this would introduce the possibility that perhaps the love is conditional.

And so no reason is produced. I don’t understand if this is a necessary ingredient to their group identity, but it certainly enhances the experience. I expect this lack-of-justification must be some kind of dessert to the feast. Or at least a garnish. The little boy who loses the ball game, by receiving the same ice cream sundae awarded to the other little boy who won it, at least knows that his Mom will always love him no matter what.

But Job Number One is the solidarity. Love the tribe with or without conditions, above all other things you must love it. Thou shalt not be caught saying or doing anything that might hurt the tribe. Nor shalt thou be caught saying or doing anything that might help the other one.

And this is why, I’m gathering, “all” never means “all” — as often as the gutteral sounds are trotted out and run through the lazy disconnected voice box. Every, everyone, each of us, all.

Hey, politics is inextricably intertwined with insincerity. But I would hope when a political ideology forms the habit of using a phrase, month in month out, year in and year out…and it can be counted on each time to indicate something logically opposite from what it’s supposed to mean…the rest of us would apply some pressure toward that phrase’s retirement. Otherwise, we’re all just chumps. It’s like a philanderer’s wife being told he’ll be home in time for dinner, and continuing to have that yummy pot roast and mashed potatoes ready at 5:30, fresh out of the oven, each and every single night even though it’s always wasted. There comes a point, to be frank about it, where the poor miserable woman ceases to be victimized and starts to be just plain stupid.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Phony Soldiers

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Well well well. The donks are trying to make some hay out of Rush Limbaugh’s Phony Soldiers remark. There’s an effort in the House of Representatives to get a resolution going condemning him for his remarks.

Obviously, this is all about equal-time, what with that stupid General Betray Us ad backfiring so impressively. You dare to make “Move On From Some Selected Things And Not Other Things Dot Org” regretful or embarrassed about their ad…which seemed like such a great idea to them at the time…why, they’ve got to be able to do the same thing to Limbaugh, right? They’re entitled to a “freebie,” right?

All in the name of equal time?

Well…let’s take a look at this. Rush Limbaugh is failing to appreciate the service of all the soldiers, is that it? The soldiers he calls “phony soldiers,” are soldiers who disagree with his personal opinions.

I guess the closest parallel I can find to this, is the liberal donk who claims to “support the troops but not their mission.” I specifically brought this issue up with one of them one time. He was trying to start a dialog…snicker…yeah, in that way donks start dialogs. You know. To finish them. He wanted to start a dialog on whether it was possible to support the troops while opposing the mission upon which those troops were sent. Obviously, to bully and intimidate and cudgel anyone within earshot toward believing in the affirmative.

Along came the sound bite — I support the troops, I just oppose what they’ve been sent to do.

I thought it appropriate to pose a simple inquiry. I really wanted to know. Do you support all of the troops? And he was like…well, what do you mean by that? I said, I mean, even the troops who don’t agree with you about the mission. Some of these troops about which I keep hearing — the ones who “re-up” when they don’t have to. The ones who believe so strongly in what they’re doing, that they volunteer. Maybe…the ones who voted for President Bush twice. Do you support those troops? Or when you say “the troops,” do you mean only the ones you happen to like?

He changed the subject.

A year later, here we are…being instructed to hold Rush Limbaugh in some kind of contempt for failing to support all the troops, even the ones who disagree with him.

Rush has often been heard to say he doesn’t need equal time, he is equal time. If that’s true anywhere, seems to me it’s especially true here. From what I’ve been able to figure out, our liberal donks have been selectively picking and choosing which troops to support, since the very first one among them stepped forward and said “I support the troops.”

And I’ve noticed this is true across the board. Anytime a donk says “I support free health care…affordable college tuition…a transparent government…clean air and water…for all” you get back such an interesting deer-in-headlights look when you pose the simple follow-up: “Even folks who vote Republican?”

It brings a smile to my face watching them scramble. But kind of a sad one. With liberals, everything depends on definitions. Even miniscule tidbits with supposedly ironclad non-negotiable meanings…like “all” and “everybody.” And “is.”

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff | 2 Comments »

A Quiet Triumph May Be Brewing

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

And now for something completely different: Reasonable opinions about the War on Terror, based on concretely established and objectively evaluated fact.

At this point, can you handle it?

You may remember a couple of months ago a report that al Qaeda and its’ affiliates had abandoned their training camps in Pakistan along the Afghan border. The initial report caused quite a blog storm but soon the mystery was forgotten. According to AI [Internet Anthropologist], which links to references for all of this, the US got fed up with not being able to reach al Qaeda inside Pakistan. Then a few months back the US government told the Pakistani government that we had the coordinates for twenty-nine terror training bases and in a week we will be destroying them (perhaps on Cheney’s visit this summer). The intent was to drive the terrorists from those camps so we could get to them.

It worked. That’s why those camps emptied out.

So the US left the terrorists an escape route into Tora Bora. Once they had detected a large group of al Qaeda at the fortress and the likelihood of High Value Targets as determined by large scale security detachments, the US dropped the curtain on the escape routes back into Pakistan. We have been pounding the hell out of them for weeks in near complete secrecy.

None of this is proof, but it’s worth watching, and certainly a lot more informative than talking points from Wolf Blitzer. Or John Stewart, of the White House press corps, or a bunch of phony forged papers from Dan-o.

Posted in Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Scooping Al Qaeda

Friday, September 21st, 2007

Hey anti-war leftists: She seems to believe in what she’s doing, maybe you should ask her why she isn’t there.

“I realized, oh my gosh, I’m sitting here, I’m a fat 50-year-old mom and I’ve managed to scoop al-Qaida,” said [Laura] Mansfield, who uses that name as a pseudonym because she receives death threats.

She sometimes spends 100 hours a week online, and she often finds items after word has begun spreading on the Arabic forums of an imminent release.

“It’s really important to understand what the jihadists think and how they’re planning on doing things,” she said. “They’re very vocal. They tell us what they’re going to do and then they go out and do it.”

Mansfield tips off her intelligence sources when she does find something new, part of an informal working relationship with the government.

“When I send them something, it’s welcome,” she said. “They thank me.”

There have been times when an impending video release has kept her from a planned shopping trip with her daughter.

“It gets really challenging when you’re trying to do that and cook spaghetti at the same time,” she said.

Posted in Noble Warriors | 1 Comment »

So You Build Keyboards, Do You

Friday, September 21st, 2007

I’ve been lurking in some of the fool-threads, watching fools from both sides go at it. And it has lately become clear to me that, contrary to my expectations, here in late 2007 the wildly unrealistic and irresponsible “Why Aren’t You There?” argument is still among us.

Back when I provided an answer to it, I had already started to see this repudiated by my most hardcore left-wing friends and I thought it was on the DailyKOS trash heap, or headed there. To the credit of The Left, that is what they do with some of their silliest arguments. They’re like…candy wrappers. Or condoms. Useful for a designated time, for a designated purpose, and once that purpose is fulfilled all you want to do is get rid of it.

Well if the “Why Aren’t You There?” argument is a candy wrapper, it has yet to be crumpled up; the yummy residue of what was inside has yet to be completely dumped out. Bad on them, because this shows the silliest arguments can be imbued with Yoda-like life-expectancies within the otherworldly, surreal existence of The Left. Or, at least, can be. That’s a shame. If the elections next year are about anything, they’re about whether the line tethering The Left to what’s reasonable and real has been badly frayed, or severed altogether.

And since the country needs to have that answered, we should inspect exactly what would be needed for “Why Aren’t You There?” argument to make some sense. Let’s start with the punchline itself, and what’s implied by it. You’re an anti-war lefty; you encounter, stateside, someone who thinks we should be fighting the war when you don’t think we should be. At this point, that could mean a lot of things. Many among us think it was a mistake to go into Iraq, but now that we’re there we shouldn’t leave yet. A dwindling minority of grown-ups among us resemble me, recognizing that our decision was to go in or not go in…and for a number of good reasons, not-going-in was just plain unacceptable. We say this was the right decision — the most ardent supporters, myself included, insist it was overdue — doing it over, we’d do things the same way.

Still others think we should leave Iraq, but it’s appropriate to leave the decision about when, up to the President and to Congress. That isn’t pro-war, but it’s not consistent with the “all anarchy, all the time” passion of the DailyKOS crowd. And so, of course, it goes without saying that the KOS kids hate it.

So the KOSsacks “win” the argument, in their own eyes at least, with four words: Why aren’t you there? Oh my, check my chest cavity, a pound of flesh is missing. For it has now been revealed: I don’t support the troops after all. Why, if I were, I’d be there.

Obviously, this is supposed to impress somebody — somebody who isn’t me. It doesn’t mesh with logic and common sense; not very well, and not at all. If I’m to be smeared as someone who only pretends to support the troops, but doesn’t really, it’s a bit like a wrestling match with the proverbial pig isn’t it? It’s a tad difficult to assert someone supports the troops when he’s running around stateside, grouchily making his peevish rhetorical inquiries into why so-and-so isn’t there, arguing that since so-and-so isn’t there nobody else should be. So I’ve always looked at people who say “why aren’t you there” as saying “I don’t support them, or what they’re doing, and neither should you.” I don’t see how that could mean anything else.

They tell me this is an insinuation I shouldn’t dare make. Well, okay…if I can’t say it out loud, I’ll just have to think it in silence, for I can think nothing else. It just doesn’t seem like a very supportive question to be asking, to me.

But let’s inspect the logic that goes into this. You ask “Why Aren’t You There?” and in response, I go homina-homina-homina…the conclusion to be drawn, is that I’m only pretending there’s a good reason for anybody to be there, by deep down I know there isn’t one because if there was, I’d be there myself.

Okay. So…when people recognize there’s even so much as a peripheral reason for something to be done, they do it themselves.

No exceptions. None.

This is incredible. Consider the ramifications. How many things are there that people do, that I personally don’t do and have not done. I’m not a schoolteacher, I’m not a fireman, I’m not a construction worker. I don’t pick coffee beans or roast them or package them or transport them or sell them; so I can’t drink coffee. Logically, my butt need not fit into the chair in which I’m sitting as I type this, since I don’t build chairs — and I shouldn’t have need to type this, since I don’t build keyboards.

A great rejoinder to this would be “Are you a gynecologist or a cop?” Very few would be able to answer to one of those; by their logic, if they’re gynecologists, we must not need the police, and if they’re police, we must not need gynecologists.

It’s been presumed by some that the typical KOSKid lives in his parents’ basement and doesn’t do anything. I’ve found the crudest and simplest stereotypes are the ones that are lacking in merit, and have settled into a habit of dismissing this one. But the “Why Aren’t You There?” argument tempts me to reconsider it. It seems to me to be an argument acceptable to someone who doesn’t do anything and hasn’t done anything. I’ve met, personally, some folks who have managed to channel vast amounts of energy into coming up with reasons not to do things, enough to convince me this is a modern epidemic — this might be the cause, or perhaps, the ultimate effect.

Maybe the plague of the twenty-first century is not cancer, or AIDs, but sloth. A conviction that, if it is to be admitted that anything is important or worthwhile or beneficial to anyone, some boogeyman might come along and invite the person so admitting, to climb aboard and contribute in some way. I’m gathering that some folks find this horrifying, for the simple reason that a meaningful contribution would be antithetical to the way they’ve lived their lives up until now. It would be an unwelcome paradigm shift.

This is something I already know to be true, about some people. Thing I Know #92. Useful people have a fear of becoming useless that is exceeded in intensity only by the fear useless people have of someday being useful.

So I presume when people say “Why Aren’t You There?,” what they’re saying is they’ve managed to live out their lives without contributing anything whatsoever to anyone whatsoever, and don’t want to change.

That is their right. But it impresses me a lot — and by that, I mean down to the marrow of my bones. We have people serving in Iraq, losing parts of their bodies…coming back stateside, getting patched up, learning how to use their prosthetics, and then asking to go back there again. And then we have other people who have made a sort of religion out of not doing anything that might be helpful to someone, and calling into question whether anyone else should help someone, or even say kind things about those who do.

To put it more elegantly, some among us have a phobia about giving away some of their sweat, while others have no compunctions whatsoever about giving away their blood.

And the bulk of both groups reside in the same narrow age bracket. A five-year window somewhere around the half the age I am now.

I see times of deep, irreconcilable conflict in the years ahead. Something like what we’ve already had for the last forty years or so. But much, much deeper and darker.

As for my answer, it remains unchanged. To oppose YOU. Anyone who asks “Why Aren’t You There?” is, all the bullshit peeled aside, a nihilist. Nihilists are having a fairly good time of it right now; they’re injecting a nihilist marinade into everything we do in public policy lately; and, by nature, don’t support the troops or much of anything else. Someone with principle and brains has to be stateside, to make sure they are opposed.

They are trying to make a lot of decisions for everybody else, after all. Those decisions are not wise. They are not harmless.

They have to be opposed.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Justification for Invasion, Keyboard builders, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Steep Discount for Move On

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Terry Trippany, CEO and Chief Bottle Washer of Webloggin which currently hosts House of Eratosthenes, wrote up a revealing piece at Newsbusters about money changing hands between the New York Times and that advocacy group I like to call “Move On From Some Things, Dwell Obsessively On Other Things Dot Org.” Since, hey, let’s face it — that’s what it’s all about. democrat President lies under oath, move on…Florida is certified for President Bush in 2000, just keep picking at it like a little kid with his finger in his nose.

Betray Us? For the last handful of years, I’ve noticed being a good little leftist is all about telling others what to think. Move on from this…don’t move on from that…forget this…remember that. Never even think of allowing anybody to make up their own minds about things. Conservatives argue things, liberals chant things.

Really, since about the Great Depression our “progressives” have been hostile to the concept of the individual, so this is all to be expected.

What I really don’t get, though — and maybe this should make it on to the Things I Don’t Get list, because it really does baffle me — is the news monopoly. The dictatorship-ism of it all. I’ve encountered a lot of leftists, who don’t seem to even suspect they themselves are really leftists…bemoaning the dwindling number of corporate entities owning the news outlets. Much of this is inspired by the Murdoch acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, and on the surface it doesn’t seem to be a leftist argument. I personally find it pretty compelling. The theory is that our news drifts toward a railroad-baron-era monopoly, as the corporations that bring us our news, start to merge. Really, this just makes sense. The argument just boils down to this: Competition is healthy. What good American can argue with that?

Other than the speaker using the word “corporation” as a slur, like Ralph Nader, there isn’t much that’s even leftist about it.

But then I see our leftists going from that…to instructing me to believe, like Virginia’s daddy, if I see it in the New York Times it must be so. HELLO…big, leviathan, evil corporation? Monopoly? This was a concern just a minute ago?

Guess not.

So “Trip” finds out about this transaction and writes it up. Gets linked by Boortz, who for the moment has managed to screw up his archive page for September 12, so I can’t give Neal Boortz the customary hat tip with linky goodness like usual; I will when I can. Here’s the high level stuff. The notorious ad accuses General Petraeus of betraying his country, using a play on his last name. There is an argument used to support this accusation, and the argument is…well, the typical leftist bullcrap. He didn’t say what we leftists think he should have said, so that’s a betrayal.

See, when you’re a liberal-donk, you always start from the premise that someone owed you something. Must be a great way to go through life, in spite of the disappointments that must surface day after day.

The ad is freakin’ huge. The least you can expect to pay for a placement such as this is about $167 large. “Move on from some things, pick at other things like a skateboarding kid with a scab on his knee dot org” paid…drum roll, please…65.

Financially, so far as anybody knows, “Move on from some things dot org” is doing pretty well. The New York Times is NOT. Neither one of those is purely a private organization, so the public is entitled to know pretty much everything…and nothing has come to light to excuse this. In sum: If this isn’t an “in-kind contribution,” nothing is.

And there’s another angle to this as well, when one considers the laughable fantasy that the National Rifle Association or any other conservative-friendly group might get such a sweetheart deal. The “liberal press” angle. This is just one more piece of evidence to toss on the pile. It’s devastating, just like when the staffers at the Seattle Times erupted into applause upon hearing Karl Rove’s resignation. We are to presume when we read news out of a paper, it has been gathered with a sufficiently decent respect for truth and honesty, that we can make decisions based on what we read. This presumption depends on the supposition that there’s some objectivity at work here…some maturity. Maybe it’s impossible to be completely neutral when you’ve got a working brain and red blood in your veins, but if you do have some vicious slant and you’re a journalist, we the readers expect you to leave that at home.

Well…we’re running out of reasons to expect that.

It’s a “Why We Need Blogs” moment if ever there was one. Blogs are put together by loudmouths like me. We can lean right, we can lean left…whichever way we lean, we might as well ‘fess up about it because there isn’t much point trying to hide it. But newspapers on the other hand — they try to hide it. And it’s not like they can lean any ol’ way. They tend to slant left. They’re institutions. Institutions tend to harbor acrimony toward the individual, and when you’re hostile to the individual it just makes sense to lean left.

Which does wonders for the “move on from some things and stick to other things like krazy glue dot org” pocketbook.

Well — really, I think the public owes a thank you to the New York Times. Look what they let us know about for forty cents on the dollar: When you’re a left-wing activist group, you tend to define truth, honor and loyalty according to whether people say the things you like. This is a valuable chunk of information, and I know of some people who need to be told about it. Maybe if the Old Gray Lady gets in too much hot water, the feds should bail her out. And maybe, just maybe, that situation won’t be too long in coming.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Elections, Iraq and WoT Stuff, My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Let Us Remember…

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

…you can’t have civilization without justice.

Some folks are sympathetic to the prospect of putting democrats in charge because we haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet. Other folks are similarly sympathetic, because they don’t believe in justice. Or in fixing anything. Or in any military engagement, for any reason, whatsoever.

On this day, we can honor the memory of the fallen by doing everything we can to stop those two antithetical factions from ever lending strength to each other. They shouldn’t be able to. They believe in opposites. Such an alliance would be able to make no assurances or promises to anyone at all, except through deception.

And let us never elect anyone to an office involving public trust, who campaigns for such office by pretending this awful thing never took place, or by distracting us from remembering it properly. Such citizens are barely worthy of their citizenship, and entirely unworthy of honor. Unworthy of trust. Unworthy of esteem.

Altogether unworthy of attention. From anyone.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Deranged Leftists, Eulogies, Iraq and WoT Stuff | 1 Comment »

Simply Reprehensible

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

I will not be covering the specimens of democrat ugliness in the days ahead. There is no point. They’re going to be placing impressive quantities of energy on the objective of out-doing each other, seeing who can say the ugliest things about Gen. Petreaus, knowing full well that the second-place winner carries home no prize.

There are people out there blogging so that they have something to do; there are people out there blogging for a living. This ass-race is going to have to be closely tracked, so let them do it. My only contribution, should I choose to undertake such an effort, will be to find something that once-upon-a-time strikes me as particularly odious, highlight it, and then within a matter of hours see that specimen knocked out of the “Ass Hall of Fame” by something much worse.

I will take one lap around that track, though.

Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, D-California, hat tip to Hugh Hewitt…video behind the link…

Not to be outdone on the outrage scale by her South Florida colleague, Bob Wexler, Orange County, California’s Sanchez, the very last person in the House of Representatives that you would expect to be invited to a gathering of Mensa, concluded the Joint House hearing with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker.

Of all the things she could focus on, she asked a question about the facts on the ground versus an ABC News/BBC poll that better supports the Democrats’ view that there is nothing good to be found in Iraq as long as George Bush has anything to do with it.

Note that after she finally gets around to her question, she directs the poll question to Ambassador Crocker, who cites the statistics he knows. Sanchez interrupts and drops the insinuation that General Petraeus is manipulating the numbers in Iraq, essentially lying in his report, he numbers in his report, saying “and General Petraues will know what I mean by that.”

Later in her presentation, dripping with condescension, she slags the entire Iraqi population as saying we are the only good thing happening in their economy.

She is an idiot. And it is pretty well known even in the House of Representatives that she is an idiot. And idiots being able to prosper and rise to the level of being able to ask questions of four-star generals in time of war is one of the things that is truly remarkable about this country. But no one likes a condescending idiot. It may be fair to say that when compared to the 160,000 men and women under General Petraeus’ command, Congresswoman Sanchez may rank in the 2nd percentile in intelligence.

But make no mistake, Sanchez, like Bob Wexler, like MoveOn.org, like the Code Pink protestors, like the Democrats in the Senate who were silent today when they should have been renouncing the New York Times ad today, does not hold the military in anything but contempt.

So that’s your baseline. Just dis-gus-ting…and it’s going to get worse from there.

I’m not the first to say this and I won’t be the last. There are not enough hours in the week for me to fulfill my civic duty by providing all the scrutiny I should be providing, toward these legislative houses. From what I can see, I do not have what it takes to serve there, or to be in one of the chambers for five minutes. That is NOT a compliment.

Every time I see one of these clips, ever since the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, my confidence in government sags. House…Senate…it makes no difference. I wouldn’t be able to adapt to this in any way, and anybody who can, I don’t want them running so much as a hot dog stand. Let alone a country.

The democrats are supposed to represent the people. That is supposed to be their schtick. Demos…Greek…”people.” From what I can see, Congress is in this downward spiral because of opinions being advanced without fact — opinions manufactured to appeal to certain advocacy groups, and not to the people. Opinions woven together, not for the purpose of logically engaging other opinions, but to bully and intimidate and cudgel anyone who might advance a different opinion.

That is not representing The People. That is representing advocacy groups. When the democrats do this, they defeat the only deliverable they can promise to us when they try to win elections. They’re supposed to pull us out of military theaters prematurely and let Al Qaeda take the place over, tax the snot out of us and take away our guns — so that The People can get some representation in government. Yeah. Well try this. Be a “people” and write a letter to your democrat Congresswoman or Senator, telling him or her you really wish that representative’s position on an issue was different, and politely exploring the reasons why.

You get back a form letter.

Whoever disagrees with them about what should be done, doesn’t count. Whoever offers facts confounding theirs, is a liar. Period. End of story. Hellllooooooooo, Republican campaign organizers and ad designers. Your work is being done for you. Next year should be looking like 1994, or else you need to be finding a different line of work. There’s no reason to be losing against these people. None.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Lying Liars, TIK 52 | No Comments »

Instant Karma

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

Right now, the federal government hasn’t got anything more important to do than to deliver us the bodies of dead terrorists, the more the better. Maybe some inside don’t realize it, and some outside don’t realize it…and it doesn’t sound very pleasant when you say it out loud…but it’s true. More dead terrorists. More every month, than you brought in the month before. Drop ’em at our feet like a cat with a dead mouse, then run off and go get another. All other endeavors are trivial by comparison.

It’s nice to see the bad guys helping out in that enterprise.

Posted in Glad I Learned About This, Iraq and WoT Stuff | No Comments »

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NBC Lawyer Who Nixed Troop Ad Gave to Democrats

Caboose

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The Second Most Important Issue IV

Al-taqiyya

The Great Intelligence Scam

Surber Peels Matthews Like an Ape Peeling a Banana

Why We Need Women

Hey Peaceniks, Can You Be Thankful For This?

Yup, It’s a Quagmire Alright

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There’s Still Time

Learn What You Can While You Can

Another Happy Birthday to the Marines

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XII

The Second Most Important Issue III

We’re Paranoid

Hop the Turnstyle, Punch a Ballot

On Sermon-on-Mount Liberals

Best Sentence XIX

Cemetery Workers Starving

This Is Good XLIV

Phony Soldiers

A Quiet Triumph May Be Brewing

Scooping Al Qaeda

So You Build Keyboards, Do You

Steep Discount for Move On

Let Us Remember…

Simply Reprehensible

Instant Karma