House of Eratosthenes

There are times I feel sorry for Democrats, at least, almost. Such in-your-face optimism we have seen! And yet, throughout all of this week, I haven’t read one single thing about the Foley “scandal” anywhere. Not one thing.

Except for this passage, in an article written by a famous, liberal Democrat with high name-recognition…

An article in The New York Times this week makes this same point, stating, “As word of Representative Mark Foley’s sexually explicit e-mail messages to former pages spread last week, Republican strategists worried — and Democrats hoped — that the sordid nature of the scandal would discourage conservative Christians from going to the polls. But in dozens of interviews here in southeastern Virginia, a conservative Christian stronghold that is a battleground in races for the House and Senate, many said the episode only reinforced their reasons to vote for their two Republican incumbents…[A]ll [interviewed] insisted the episode would have little impact on their intentions to vote.”
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The Democrats have a lot of work to do if they are to make serious gains in the upcoming elections. Sadly, the Democratic party has lost the white Southern voter who now overwhelmingly votes for Republican candidates.
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…[T]he Clinton years are long gone and the radical left has again taken control of the Democratic Party, as reflected in the election of Howard Dean to the chairmanship of the party. The most recent exhibition of the power of the radical left wing of the party was its ability to defeat Senator Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary. Most distressing was the Democrats’ abandonment of Lieberman after he chose to continue to run as an independent. Stalwart Democrats, people I support, like Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd and others, walked away from Lieberman. They believe that they and Lieberman were bound by the primary results. That is simply not true. There is no law, party rule or ethical principle that prohibits a candidate from attempting to win as an independent. What’s more, Lieberman is not only the incumbent, but he is also a recent Democratic Party candidate for vice president. He stated that should he win, he will be part of the Democratic Party Caucus in the U.S. Senate.

Interestingly, the people of Connecticut in a recent poll voiced support for Lieberman, who is now 10 points ahead. Last week, I campaigned with Lieberman at Grand Central Station. Hundreds of Connecticut-bound commuters stood in line to shake his hand before boarding their trains. Only two people yelled at me for supporting the Senator.

What happened? Well, late last week everybody forgot all about the Foley scandal. Nutcases with nuclear weapons can make that happen, believe it or not. Ann Coulter sums it up thusly:

At least with former Rep. Mark Foley, you could say the Democrats’ hypocritical grandstanding was just politics. But in the case of North Korea, Democrats are resorting to bald-faced lies.

Current New Mexico governor and former Clinton administration official Bill Richardson has been on tour, bragging about the groundbreaking Clinton administration negotiations with North Korea — keeping his fingers crossed that no one has access to news from 1994.

In 1994, the Clinton administration got a call from Jimmy Carter — probably collect — who was with the then-leader of North Korea, saying: “Hey, Kim Il Sung is a total stud, and I’ve worked out a terrific deal. I’ll give you the details later.”

Clinton promptly signed the deal, so he could forget about North Korea and get back to cheating on Hillary. Mission accomplished.

Under the terms of the “agreed framework,” we gave North Korea all sorts of bribes — more than $5 billion worth of oil, two nuclear reactors and lots of high technology. In return, they took the bribes and kept building nukes. This wasn’t difficult, inasmuch as the 1994 deal permitted the North Koreans to evade weapons inspectors for the next five years.

I tried to check up on this five-years-no-inspections thing. I really don’t know what Ann Coulter is talking about here. I dug into my pockets and pulled out my handkerchief, calculator, iPod, comb, spare buttons, old chewing gum, and — ah! — there it was, my copy of the 1994 Agreed Framework. Section IV seems to be the pertinent one. Couldn’t find anything about this. I dunno where she’s going with this.

Does it really matter?

Seems to me we got a situation here — once again! — where “prevailing viewpoint” goes off in one direction, and common sense, along with the conclusions of most people who’ve learned about the matter, runs off in the opposite direction. Democrats came up with cool idea about how to handle the psycho in NK (or his Dad, I suppose), they implemented it, they depended on the good faith of someone who hasn’t demonstrated good faith…and their cool idea failed. People understand this — most people would like it to be a little more complicated and “nuanced” than that — it simply isn’t. The foregoing is as complicated as it gets.

Look up the Clinton-apologist viewpoint on this. You’ll see a bunch of attempts to change the subject, subtly. Not to address it, but to change it. Carter had a hot idea, the Clinton administration implemented it, they all got snookered, and the idea turned out to be a dud. The cartoon at right sums it up perfectly. H/T: Bullwinkle Blog.

I’ve talked about this at length. No imminent danger, people think one way; imminent danger, people think an entirely different way. One week ago, Kim Jong-Il had not yet set off his device, whatever it is; now he has. Are we talking about the same things we talked about 168 hours ago? No, we are not. The human psyche simply isn’t up to supporting a consistent priority scheme, across several different scenarios where danger waxes and wanes. It simply isn’t possible for us. If we had that capacity, we wouldn’t be capable of surviving.

To put it more concisely, when a madman is running around with a weapon, you aren’t going to care about sex scandals. You haven’t got it in you. — And you aren’t going to elect the same leaders.

Kim Jong-Il, or whoever schedules the tests for nuclear weapons in NK, either has abysmally bad timing or else that guy really, really wants our country to have a Republican Congress next year. His country, in a stunningly brief stretch of time, has created a perfect environment for one.

I’ll help it along.

Stephen F. Hayes, of the Weekly Standard: On the “there is absolutely no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda” MYTH. Yeah, you’re God damned right that’s what I’m calling it: A myth. Connections, for those who have been paying attention, up the yin-yang. Read. Required reading, for everybody, even if it’s over a year old. Well, that’s the way it should be, anyway.

Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post, regularly chides the Bush administration for presenting what he calls fabricated or “fictive” links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The editor of the Los Angeles Times scolded the Bush administration for perpetuating the “myth” of such links. “Sixty Minutes” anchor Lesley Stahl put it bluntly: “There was no connection.”

Conveniently, such analyses ignore statements like this one from Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission. “There was no question in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.” Hard to believe reporters just missed it–he made the comments at the press conference held to release the commission’s final report. And that report detailed several “friendly contacts” between Iraq and al Qaeda, and concluded only that there was no proof of Iraqi involvement in al Qaeda terrorist attacks against American interests. Details, details.

Did you know about that? How many friends do you have with really outspoken opinions about this, who have no clue about what Hayes said?

A really cool blog I found out about when the author made an intelligent, insightful comment about a left-wing guy trying to censor someone. The fellow who was supposed to be censored, was an Iraqi national who took offense at the gathering of phony statistics to bolster the idea that dead Iraqis are all over the place, Iraq invasion is a disaster, blah blah blah. The Iraqi wrote a persuasive article on why he objected to this, made some good points about how the stats were being gathered…I lost the bookmark to that one, sorry. I’ll look later. Anyway, the very first commenter starts coercing him to yank the article down before someone has time to read it. Yeah. Right. So this guy put him in his place. Yay, guy! Followed his signature to his home page, and I like what I found there.

And now we got a brand new resurrected scandal! Yes, the timing is suspicious on this one too…but at least it’s relevant to national security.

A group of House Republicans called Wednesday for a congressional investigation into the improper handling of classified documents by President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger.

Berger admitted last year that he deliberately took classified documents out of the National Archives in 2003 and destroyed some of them at his office. He pleaded guilty in federal court to one charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material and was fined $50,000.

Ten lawmakers led by House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R- Calif., and Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., released a letter calling for the House Government Reform Committee to investigate.

They asked the committee to determine whether any documents were missing from Clinton administration terrorism records, to review security measures for classified documents and to seek testimony from Berger.

IT’S ABOUT GODDAMNED TIME!

Why has it taken this long? Tell me again how “Republicans run everything.” Tell me that one again. Sandy Berger should have been turning big rocks into little rocks a long time ago. I have to believe that, in his place, I certainly would be.

And now for something completely different: A list of really, really “good” movie villains.

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Summit IVFriday, October 13th, 2006

Summit IV
Friday, October 13th, 2006