A personal and political blog with portions of Instapundit, Betsy's Page, and Possumblog as Role Models. Proud member of the Axis of Weevil.
................What happened to the rest of the answer? NBC must have decided to cut it off, but its excision appears to make NBC look complicit in an attempt to cover up an embarrassing admission -- that despite months of assertions to the contrary, John Kerry knows full well that he has not released his full service records. Unfortunately for NBC, they haven't realized yet that the original transcript still exists on their servers.
NBC needs to explain to their viewers why they felt the need to edit John Kerry's response, and who made the decision to do so. In an electoral cycle that has seen the mainstream media burn its credibility time and again, it looks like NBC is the next in line to self-immolate.
Sullivan's big idea is that the best way to force the Democrats to get serious about the war is to put them in charge of it. That's a helluva leap of faith -- and, in John Kerry's case, it's at odds with a 30-year track record of not being serious on the Cold War, Grenada, Central America, the first Gulf War, etc. As Dr. Laura would advise, you should never marry a man in hopes of reforming him.
Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!
- Osama Bin Laden, from his latest videoOK, in reality he's saying things about goats. (I'm sure few people in the world know more intimate details about goats than Osama.) Just in time for Halloween he's come out swinging, one would assume with his best stuff, and lo and behold it's Michael Moore quotes. Ironically following on the heels of Kerry's own desperate plea , this should be a wake up call to the slumbering Left. Jim Geraghty is right, look in the mirror. I'd like to think they'll follow his advice, but the trouble is every time I've thought they would look into that mirror they haven't. When the real wake up call comes they choose to snooze, preferring to delay the inevitable confrontation with the not joking, real-world nightmare.
Will this time be different?
Unfortunately I think not. Because the American Left has never failed to disappoint me. It follows that I think Mr Geraghty is wrong in this statement: "A Bush landslide is now exponentially more likely..." though he chose his words carefully so as not to actually predict said landslide, I'm convinced that the Left that wants to believe that the President of the United States was acting with Saudi royals and Osama Bin Laden on 911 will certainly not stay home or change their votes just because Osama made a campaign video quoting Mike Moore supporting Kerry.
Likewise it doesn't matter whether Cronkite was joking or not when he told Larry King "I'm a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing." Plenty of Americans believe it.
The debate was lively, but I must credit Richard Littlejohn with the best line of the afternoon. Littlejohn is an amazing life force: Probably Britain’s best-read political columnist, absolutely savagely fearless in debate, and a passionate supporter of George W. Bush and the Anglo-American relationship. Anyway, he got off the best line of the evening: He called Michael Moore the “Lord Haw-Haw of the war on terror.”
The stupendously unedifying display of a U.S. presidential election is now coming down to its last whoop-whoop, its last gross deceit, its last idiotic accusation. Naturally, once again a black cat news story has, of a sudden, leaped across the path of the Republican candidate, hexing his chances at the polls and sending him into eternal ignominy. That, at least, is the hope of the Democrats and their loyal secretarial staff in the media, both of whom gin up these black cat stories. The stories themselves are always highly exaggerated scandals heavily larded with the irrational and intended to stir up the moron vote. This story claims that vast amounts of explosives were left unguarded after being discovered by the Bush administration in Iraq and are now under the control of hostile forces that only John Kerry can thwart. ...................
Once again, the senator's position has evolved, to borrow The New York Times' delicate term for Kerry's many about-faces.This election comes down to a choice between one man's evolution and the other man's resolution. With his endlessly repeated Tora Bora charges, Kerry has made Afghanistan a major campaign issue. So be it. Who do you want as president? The man who conceived the Afghan campaign, carried it through without flinching when it was being called a ``quagmire'' during its second week, and has seen it through to Afghanistan's transition to democracy? Or the retroactive genius, who always knows what needs to be done after it has already happened -- who would have done ``everything'' differently in Iraq, yet in Afghanistan would have replicated Bush's every correct, courageous, radical and risky decision -- except one. Which, of course, he would have done differently. He says. Now.
...........In lively elections such as this the media usually run endless features on ‘angry white men’, a demographic to which they’re not notably partial. After ‘angry white men’ threw out the Democrats’ congressional leadership in the 1994 elections, Peter Jennings, the exquisitely condescending Canadian who anchors ABC News, sniffed that ‘the voters had a temper tantrum’. But this time round the angry white men are all on the Democrat side, and the media seem to think it’s perfectly normal...........
.......My sense is that the 2002 model is still operative, and that the Democrats and the media, talking to each other in their mutually self-deluding cocoon, have overplayed the Bush-bashing. Next Tuesday the President will win the states he won last time, plus Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Maine’s Second Congressional District to put him up to 301 electoral votes. Minnesota? Why not? Nudge him up to 311 electoral votes. Oh, and what the hell, give him Hawaii: that’s 315. The Republicans will make a net gain of two seats in the Senate, one of which will bring with it the scalp of the Democrats’ leader, Tom Daschle. Despite distancing himself from Kerry and running ads showing him and Bush embracing, Daschle’s floundering in South Dakota, and his lugubrious mien will be even more lugubriouser within the week. Look for a handful of Republican House gains, too. And Democrats tearing their hair out — or John Kerry’s and John Edwards’s hair, if they can penetrate the styling gel.....
Dear Sirs,
I have the solution for the prevention of hijackings, and at the same time getting our airline industry back on its feet. Since men of the Muslim religion are not allowed to look at naked women we should replace our female flight attendants with strippers.
Muslims would be afraid to get on the planes for fear of seeing a naked woman, and of course, every businessman in this country would start flying again in hope of seeing a naked woman. Hijackings would end and the airline industry would have record sales.
Why didn't Bush think of this? Why do I still have to do everything myself? Well, I just got out of the hospital.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
Hasn't anyone considered that Kerry would need a draft a lot more than Bush? Bush is very popular among current military personnel (he stands to get 75% to 80% of the military vote), and the various branches are currently meeting recruitment goals. In contrast, Kerry is reviled by about 95% of those who served directly with him because he pissed all over them with false accusations of atrocities merely to promote his own political ambitions. Who the hell would volunteer to serve under such a commander in chief?
.......By the weekend, the Guardian had thought through the implications of Brooker's comments, and decided that it would be rather embarrassing to be flying in the lucky winners of the big Clark County competition for their US vacation only to discover, as the plane was diverted to Guantanamo, that the entire editorial staff had been placed on a Justice Department watch list. So in re Charlie Wilkes Harvey Brooker, they issued a clarification: "Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action - an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind."..........Perhaps if the Telegraph and the British Government had paid attention to his points, a person cold have been saved from the tender mercies of the SAVAGES.
........The ersatz emotions that gripped Britain in the run-up to Kenneth Bigley's decapitation were also the product of a passive culture unwilling to come to grips with the real challenges it faces. A week ago, I wrote: "In the last three weeks of Mr Bigley's life, the actions of various parties made it more likely that more Britons and other infidels will be kidnapped and beheaded." When I say I wrote it "a week ago", I actually wrote it two weeks ago, but that first Bigley column got spiked by the Editor. Which I regret more and more, because the above point needs to be hammered home.
The kidnapping of Margaret Hassan is, very obviously and tragically, a direct response to the mass Bigley wallow...........
.........Name one policy proposal they advocate that is either supported by a majority of Americans or is likely to be in the near future. The Nation's version of the "good society" is one that most Americans no longer share, if they ever did. Yet it's inconceivable to them that their ideas no longer hold sway over a majority of this country, so they desperately invent reasons why they are losing. It's coup plotters. It's those corporate moguls. It's those damn maniacal wide-eyed true-believing Christians. If we could just defeat this vast right-wing conspiracy, then Americans would vote their true interests and the left-wing nirvana would be upon us.And from his Blog the statement about "bombshells":
The fact of the matter is that America is changing in ways that a far-left magazine can no longer stomach. It increasingly rejects government solutions, wants an aggressive foreign policy against terrorism, and admires individualism. President Bush's reelection will only accelerate these trends.
No wonder The Nation is on the verge of losing it.
For it to be a bombshell, it would have to be either, (1) a story showing that Kerry is lying about an issue position that has become synonymous with his campaign, or (2) Kerry on tape saying that America was to blame for the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Technological change has always had profound social consequences, but few inventions in history have caused more political and cultural change than movable type printing. Before Gutenberg, "truth" and "history" were largely properties of the Christian Church (and there was only one Christian Church, then).This "counter" provides hope for the future that may yet rescue at least the USA from the morass of hate and vitriol found in almost one-half of the population (the Democratic Party) according the the probably fictionalized "polls" which are spun to create "self-fulfilling ends".Movable type printing took away control over "the truth" from the Church and placed it in the hands of a secular elite.
Now the Internet is taking away that secular elite's control over "the truth" and giving it to the broad populus.
That's the connection. Everything you listed is a side effect of that fundamental change.
And speaking of animals, the kind that we need to make sure are extinct, we see this story from CNN: "'Bodies of 51 Iraqi soldiers found; Reports say young graduates were forced to lie down, then shot in head." What type of animal does that? Probably the same type that would slash the throats of airline stewardesses and crash planes filled with innocent men, women and children.
Democrats believe that we are stupid because we don't understand shitty people. We're not. THEY ARE. But they believe that behaving like a religious cult, forgiving shitty people for being shitty, and gazing at your own navel to understand why some people are shitty is a GOOD thing, for everybody. I don't.
Those mindless zealots scare the shit out of me.
Maybe I'm getting old. I've been covering politics for 53 years, and that's just since John Kerry's convention speech. I'm sick of this election, even before the Democratic Party's chad-diviners have managed to extend it to mid-December. These are serious times and the senator is not a serious man. And so we have a campaign that has a sharper position on Mary Cheney's lesbianism and the deficiencies of Laura Bush's curriculum vitae than on the central question of the age...............
........Yet, the rationalization reveals the true source of Bush-loathing -- hatred of the religious and core philosophical underpinnings of western civilization (represented in the leftist parable by the ancient Greeks). But if you hate these things, what remains worth defending about the west? The only thing I can think of is its hedonism. That's how the Islamofascists see it too. And they have figured out that, if that's all the west is fighting for, the west will lose..................
............Their envy was directed at Karl Rove, the President's longtime adviser or (to quote the title of a biography of him) "Bush's Brain". The slightest misstep by Senator Kerry and the more paranoid Democratic websites are quick to detect the fingerprints of Rove - even though, like most evil geniuses, he doesn't leave any.............
Since John Kerry announced the existence of his secret plan for victory over terrorism, public and media interest in its secret details has been intense Some of the details are finally surfacing based on perhaps inadvertent comments by the senator and his chief foreign policy adviser, Richard Holbrooke, Predictably the revealed details are stirring up multiple controversies. The controversies have, in turn, prompted various critical revisions of the secret plan.
The center-piece of the plan is the aggressive distribution here and abroad of millions of bumper stickers denouncing terrorism. These stickers will be in bright day-glow lettering with luminescent highlights for better visibility at night. The plan originally envisioned them being in green, red, yellow and black colors. That has now been revised to using neutral colors because of objections that use of an Islamic-Arab color scheme might be offensive to terrorists.
There have also been objections to some proposals for the bumper stickers' wording. Initially the idea was just one version of the sticker with the wording being "Defeat Terrorism." But that wording has been discarded as too belligerent and macho. Next the plan was revised to involve distributing different bumper sticker wordings calculated to appeal to different segments of the population. One wording would be used for East Coast people, another for West Coasters, another for Southerners, yet others for (respectively): intellectuals and Democrats; urban, suburban, and rural residents and yet another for the so-called NASCAR-types Unfortunately it turns out that all suggestions for wording that might appeal to Southerners or the NASCAR crowd seemed unacceptably aggressive to many or most of Kerry's staff and advisers. (Other objections have also been made, for instance the wording "Terrorism Sucks" was rejected as potentially offensive to women and gays.)
Finally the bumper sticker plan has gone back to the idea of a one-wording-suits-all bumper sticker. At this point the Kerry staff seems virtually agreed on the wording "Terrorism May Be Inappropriate."
This hyper-aggressive bumper sticker campaign will be supplemented by the display on all federal buildings of banners reading TERRORISM IS WRONG – but with the subtitle "Of Course, One Man's Terrorist is Another Man'; Freedom Fighter." In response to objections that this phraseology might make women feel excluded or diminished, there is a lot of sentiment to instead usng the subtitle "Of Course, One Person's Terrorist is Another Person's; Freedom Fighter."
A third part of the Kerry Plan which has leaked involves the use of B1 and B52 bombers equipped with a new form of "Daisy Cutter" bomb. Instead of explosives these bombs will be filled with leaflets and pamphlets deploring terrorism. The Kerry staff emphasizes that these materials will be very emphatically written.
A major official on the Kerry staff has stressed that not all of its elements will be so negative, however. Some elements of the Kerry Plan will seek to produce greater understanding between Americans and the peoples of the Middle East, For instance, recognizing that for decades various Middle Eastern and Islamic governments have been reprinting and distributing Arabic language versions of Hitler's autobiography MEIN KAMPF, the Kerry plan calls for mass distribution in the U.S. of English language copies of MEIN KAMPF. While everyone in the Kerry camp deplores the book's sentiments, they also recognize that terrorism can only be dispelled by promoting greater sensitivity to Islamic concerns among Americans.
I think - IMHO - that the Democratic leadership is facing a genuine turning point in their history, just as the rest of the nation is, but for them it’s a whole lot more dangerous. As a nation, we’re resilient - we could probably survive four years of President Kerry, because the system is set up so that no one man - or party - can do terminal damage. The problem here is that from everything I can see, the DNC seems to be actively trying to wreck the system - the lawyer SWAT teams, the plans to scream fraud even when none is suspected, the threats of litigation that could hold up a decision for weeks again. All of it seems to me to be intended to destroy our confidence in the system and in our own influence on it. Why would they be doing this?
Because they fear what could happen if they lose. For the first time, there is serious discussion about taking care of Social Security. There is serious discussion about changing the income tax to a sales tax. A Bush victory - especially a solid, unquestionable one - will bring these discussions into the forefront, and that makes them a threat to Democratic power. They can survive being out of office, but they cannot survive losing their hold on taxes and Social Security. To do that means they lose their influence. To lose influence is to lose. Period.
John Hawkins: How about dashing off a quick sentence or even just a word or two about the following individuals...
- George Bush: A 21st century Churchill.
- Dick Cheney: Takes a licking, keeps on ticking.
- Jonah Goldberg: Who?
- Andrew Sullivan: Every inch a lady.
- Tucker Carlson: See what happens when you try to be mainstream?
- John Kerry: 30 years later he's still shooting himself in the foot.
- Teresa Heinz Kerry: To be first lady, first you have to be a lady.
- John Edwards: Jury's still out - expect a huge settlement.
- Max Cleland: At least he earned his medals.
- Dan Rather: A space alien -- and I have the Microsoft documents from the fifties. that prove it!
................But there's a huge difference between the two sides' tactics. The Republicans' lawyers aren't preemptively declaring the election is fraud if they don't win. Simply put, they aren't trying to undermine the legitimacy of the American political system. The Democrats - who constantly decry Bush's "politics of fear" even as they warn of a draft and tell blacks they'll be disenfranchised - have taken the position that a Bush victory is by its very nature proof of voter fraud. That is the Holder Doctrine. If all the votes are counted, Kerry wins. Period. If Bush wins, the votes must not have been counted............................It's frightening to watch our internal enemies trying to overthrow a democracy by lies, trickery, and deceit. Their rage and hateful vitriol is of course ratified and supported by their brothers in the MSM, which unfortunately magnifies their sickness.
...............Judged on these two criteria, it's hard to see how the Democrats can call themselves democrats.
A reader who is teaching in China: "One of the things I find particularly distressing is how the careless and hateful rhetoric of Democrats and the media have been swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the Chinese, who receive it via (God help us!) the BBC. Bush evil. Bush stupid. That's what my students believe; the dismissive tone of their voices, when they mention President Bush's name, speaks more than any words can. Democrats and the media are so insular, that they do not begin to conceive of the impact of their propaganda and how that shapes the way the rest of the world views us. What has poisoned the perception of the U.S. abroad is not the actions of GWB, but that of the Democrats and the media who noised abroad their disdain and lack of support for Dubya, all for political gain. Had the Democrats and media done what was right, the U.S. would be in different odor around the globe."We are unlikely to get any improvement or diminishment of hatred and vitriol from the disloyal opposition (new designation for the Democratic Party)(there's a reason their symbol is a Jackass) during the next four years either. They just can't abide "not them" being in power and working to destroy the US with doctrinal socialism and the replacement of capitalism with "command economics". The only good thing about Bill Clinton is that he was so self-centered and immoral that he wouldn't take the time and effort to really hurt his country, and therefore did less harm than his followers and the current Kerry syncophants wished.
/snip/.....Coincidentally, the very day of the vice presidential debate, a gun was fired into a Bush-Cheney campaign office in Bearden, Tenn. – one of a series of violent attacks on Republican offices around the country. (You can tell it was Democrats firing those guns because none of the shots ever hit anything.)/snip/........UPDATE:
.............If only we could get Democrats to show a little of that manly anger toward the terrorists, maybe Americans would be able to trust them with national security.
........Kerry knows these charges are untrue -- but still he makes them and encourages his supporters to do likewise. And his run for the presidency is not the first time in which John Kerry has been willing to spread lies to accomplish his aims.........
.........Lynne Cheney was right. This is not a good man -...................
What a JERK candidate for Commander-in-Chief!!!!!!!!!!!!!WHO WOULD HAVE EXPECTED the Washington Post to inflict real damage on John Kerry's faltering presidential campaign? Yet they have.
Here is the third paragraph from today's front-page article by Helen Dewar and Tom Ricks on Kerry's foreign policy record:
Kerry's belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."
CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we’ve fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.
Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial’s really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.
Re my post on Carter’s claim that the revolution was an “Unnecessary war,” I received this e-mail:Dear Mr. Owens
General Joseph Wheeler, who was in a position to know, counted the losses in all the battles of the seven years of the Revolution as 2,200 killed, 6,500 wounded; of 1812, 1,877 killed, 3,737 wounded; of the Mexican War 1,049 killed, 7,929 wounded; for a total of 19,227 men killed or wounded in all American wars before 1860 (The Causes of the War, speech delivered in the House of Representatives, Friday, July 13th, 1894, published in the Richmond Dispatch, July 31, 1894).
Gen. Wheeler noted that the total of 19,227 men killed or wounded in all wars before 1860 added up to less than half of Gen. Grant’s losses at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania (May 5 to May 12, 1864), "which should really be called one battle". Losses on the Union side alone from that one battle totalled 9,774 killed, 41,150 wounded, and 13,254 missing and never identified.
That's General "Fightin’ Joe" Wheeler (1836-1906) of the Confederate States of America (16 horses shot out from under him), Brigadier General in the Army during the Spanish-American War, Alabama Congressman for 18 years. There’s a statue of him in Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, too.
Sincerely yours,
Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D.
.......That's comforting, because the Fear Room at Kerry campaign headquarters is on a hair trigger to turn any breaking news into a personal threat..........
.......Future President Kerry has a plan for every aspect of American life, including...
* rolling back tax cuts to ease the guilt of small business people by allowing them to cover more of the federal government's expenses,
* getting back President Clinton's $5.6 trillion budget surplus by reinstituting the 1990s-era irrational exuberance,
* removing the last stains of market forces from the health care system to prevent patients from being rushed into surgical procedures without the months of contemplation enjoyed by our Canadian and European friends,
* bringing home our backdoor-drafted National Guard and Reserve troops and replacing them with French and German soldiers eager to experience the glory of fighting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,
* bypassing the six-nation talks on North Korean nuclear weapons which have done nothing but isolate Kim Jong Il from his neighbors and allies, and launching bilateral talks between President Kerry and the "Dear Leader," in a fashion reminiscent of Madeleine Albright, thereby winning Mr. Kim's trust.
"For all these crises and more, Mr. Kerry has a plan. We know that it's a great plan, because he can't tell us what it is until he sits in the Oval Office. It's a very presidential plan. It's not a mere legislative plan, otherwise Mr. Kerry would have introduced it as a bill during his 19 years in the senate. No, this plan is something grand, something majestic, something unexpected, mysterious and special. Frankly, we sit on the edge of our seats, eager to hear the details of the plan from the architect himself during his first televised address from behind the big desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."
"This is perhaps the ultimate reason why Mr. Kerry must be elected. If America fails him at the ballot box and sends him back to finish his final term as senator, we will never get to hear the plan. It's just not the kind of plan you can talk about in the senate."...........
........Like so many a President before him, John Kerry found himself at the mercy of events. All the pretty plans of his election campaign -- the diplomacy, the conferences with our allies -- were forgotten. Suddenly he was a commander-in-chief trying to rescue a stranded army.
Events didn't wait. Now convinced that America was abandoning the Middle East and no longer content to watch Iran develop a nuclear weapon that in two years would be able to hit Jerusalem, the Israelis sent a fleet of F-16s to drop bunker-busting weapons on three nuclear complexes at Bushehr, Natanz, and Arak. Rioting broke out in every Middle Eastern capital. Terrorists streamed into Baghdad from every direction. Syrian and Egyptian armies prepared for a retaliatory attack against Israel.
That's when I woke up.
I've been walking around in a cold sweat all day thinking about these things. But that's silly, I suppose. After all, it was only a dream. The American people couldn't possibly elect John Kerry President, could they?
What The Guardian editors wanted was to show what louts and lowlifes Americans are... and so they baited the trap with someone like Lady Antonia Fraser lecturing us about our politics.
..........Then The Guardian got all these wild letters from wild Americans. And I think that was their point, really: To show Brits that Americans are still loutish frontiersmen wearing animal skins and scratching and spitting and cursing.
The Guardian's point in all of this was to show the world that the American voter is not qualified to select the leader of the free world. And the letters they got from us will confirm that opinion among many around the world.
Well, here's a news flash to all those people wherever they are: We don't care.........
..........So, for all that Bush is accused of being ''stubborn,'' it's Kerry who refuses to change. He reckons that Americans are worn out by the wild ride of the Bush years and really do long to ''get back to where they were'' -- back to Sept. 10, to the summer of shark attacks and missing congressional interns. All that going back to Sept. 10 means is that you'll have to learn the lessons of the morning after all over again: I do believe that, if clueless, complacent Kerry won, more Americans -- and Britons and Canadians and Australians and Europeans -- will die in terrorist ''nuisances.''
But he won't win. Because enough Americans understand that going back to where we were means a return to polite fictions and dangerous illusions. That world is broken and you can't put that world back together.
............Finally, if you are still reading - how do I know the lesbian remark wasn't on purpose? Just listen to the tape. His voice lowers, he's embarrassed, that wouldn't happen to the Yale debate champion with a pre-planned or rehearsed line. It just wouldn't. What you saw was a man who has great difficulty connecting emotionally with the outside world in a time and place where he knew he had to do it. His mind remembered back to when Edwards used the line, it was something he thought human to say because his interpersonal instincts, weak at best, simply betrayed him. It was one of the few times he went off script that entire night. And, as usual with Kerry, whenever he does that - he's toast. He doesn't have the type of emotional maturity to speak spontaneously in an emotional context. Believe me, if he had run that line past any of his advisors they would have told him no and he never would have said it. He had too much to lose and nothing to gain and Kerry is not a risk taker. He's a compromiser, an appeaser and timid in how he approaches such things - particularly with so much at stake.
Many of us at this justifiably famous newspaper are sorely vexed by assertions that we are somehow guilty of tilting the news to fit our editorial views. We can assure you that here at the New York Liberal Cocoon, admittedly the finest paper in the world, we don't operate that way. It is simply untrue that we recently ran a story under the headline "Hurricanes Increase Under Bush Regime." Yes, severe tropical storms were more rare during the Carter and Clinton years, but evidence conclusively linking Bush and Cheney to disastrous hurricane activity and Mount St. Helens eruptions has not yet turned up. We do, however, have several reporters working on it....../snip/.......
..........Part of our job here at the Cocoon is explaining how good and fair we are. Yes, it's a great burden, but we believe we are more than up to the task.
...........I say you shouldn't pick and choose, but I understand that sometimes you have to — but in completely the opposite way John Kerry picks and chooses. Kerry invokes God's guidance on the little stuff, the easy stuff, the boilerplate. He turns his back to God on the big issue, abortion (and, with a wink, gay marriage).
It seems to me this is exactly backwards. God doesn't have a position on the minimum wage or Superfund, so politicians shouldn't feel the need to consult Him about that stuff. It's only on the grave fundamental questions in politics that God should speak to one's conscience. Thomas More didn't put his life on the line about how Henry VIII handled crop rotation.
And that's what I find a little galling about all of Kerry's God talk. Beyond the naked pandering of it, it's morally and religiously empty. He may talk about deeds backing up faith, but where his faith is unambiguous he wants no part of it. When it comes to the tough issues, what he really seems to want is grace on the cheap. It's as More said: "If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable."
The overwhelming message of the Globe book is that Sen. Kerry's foreign policy ideas can best be summed up as "opportunistic oppositionism." It's a tactic well suited for a man trying to make his way by mobilizing angry out-of-power constituencies. But the conclusion I take away is that if Sen. Kerry should ever find himself in a position where he has to make the decisions - rather than react to decisions made by others - he would have absolutely no idea of what to do ... and would very likely do nothing at all while blaming others for everything that went wrong as a result of his own inaction.
I have discovered the solution to liberal media bias. What mainstream journalism needs are more stupid people.
Conservative critics of the journo-industrial complex might dismiss this advice as merely adding more jelly-beans to the jar. Liberal journalists would regard it as absurd, because surely it is their genius that makes them special. Why would the temple want any - much less, more - stupid priests?
Well, it turns out that having a few stupid people in the group makes the group smarter. I've long suspected this, but I found confirmation in James Surowiecki's new book, "The Wisdom of Crowds."
It works like this. Groups of experts tend to reinforce their own views, particularly because experts believe in the authority of experts, causing them to defer to the super-expert in the group. Stupid people are, to put it bluntly, too stupid to defer to smart people. Remember the story about the truck that got jammed in the tunnel because it was too tall? All the experts were stumped. But some kid yelled, "Let the air out of the tires," saving the day. This is essentially the moral of the fable of "The Emperor's New Clothes." Substitute kids with morons and you get the same thing.............
Betsy's Page says:“With all due respect, I’m not sure it’s credible to quote leading ‘news’ organizations about… oh, never mind.”
– President Bush, responding to Kerry’s claims that “two leading national news networks” had endorsed his plans for HillaryCare.
Is Bob Shieffer going to ask any question that doesn't come from a liberal perspective?Captain Ed, in a room full of Northern Alliance fans says:
Now, another setup for Kerry on how polarized we are. Watch Kerry to blame this on Bush. I've lost count of how many softballs Shieffer has tossed Kerry's way.
This debate will wind up being recognized as a disaster for the Kerry campaign within the next 48 hours, and within 96 hours the polls will demonstrate it.Matt provides one of the more detailed accounts and closes with:
Bush: Optimism, reform, education, health, compassion, resolve, freedom, prosperity. All up, no attacks.Poliblog was also channel hopping:
I’m too tired to be overly eloquent or verbose this evening. My basic snap judgment: Bush won tonight.
Part of the question is how many people watched tonight versus the first night, especially with the baseball games going (and man, the Cards have opened up on the ‘Stros).
SURFING THE CHANNELS, the talking-heads seem to be giving this one to Bush, and Candy Crowley notes that Kerry felt he had to stress, again, that he could be trusted to defend America. Mary Beth Cahill tries to respond, but she doesn't sound like she means it -- in fact, she sounds like she's been crying. Laryngitis? Who put her on camera?And as we close tonight, both ballgames are still playing, and we still got a good picture of the "Debate".
OKRENT IS CHECKMATED New York Times "public editor" Dan Okrent really may have to resign over his horrible lapse of judgment in his Sunday column, revealing the name and city of a man who had written what was, in fact, a mildly heated email to a Times reporter, and portraying the man as a hate-mongering coward. Read the man's impassioned reply in this open letter to Okrent -- I defy anyone to find Okrent in the right on this one.When I questioned Okrent about it on Sunday, asking whether he had the man's permission to publish his letter, he said, "We called Schwenk only to confirm his authorship. He got furious, but in so doing confirmed. I neither asked for permission nor felt it necessary." If anyone at the Times was looking for an excuse to bag Okrent, he's found it.
Thanks to reader Bob Taylor for the link.
........According to the secretary of the Navy's document, the "authority of reference" this board was using in considering Mr. Kerry's record was "Title 10, U.S. Code Section 1162 and 1163. "This section refers to the grounds for involuntary separation from the service. What was being reviewed, then, was Mr. Kerry's involuntary separation from the service. And it couldn't have been an honorable discharge, or there would have been no point in any review at all. The review was likely held to improve Mr. Kerry's status of discharge from a less than honorable discharge to an honorable discharge......../snip/..
........There are a number of categories of discharges besides honorable. There are general discharges, medical discharges, bad conduct discharges, as well as other than honorable and dishonorable discharges. There is one odd coincidence that gives some weight to the possibility that Mr. Kerry was dishonorably discharged. Mr. Kerry has claimed that he lost his medal certificates and that is why he asked that they be reissued. But when a dishonorable discharge is issued, all pay benefits, and allowances, and all medals and honors are revoked as well. And five months after Mr. Kerry joined the U.S. Senate in 1985, on one single day, June 4, all of Mr. Kerry's medals were reissued.
Just spoke with reporter friend in DC. She is talking with former USN ONI types who worked on DOD/USN investigation that resulted in total loss of Kerry’s Navy security clearance.Kerry had been granted a Top Secret by the Navy on October 11, 1967 based on a routine background investigation by Office of Naval Intelligence. A top secret clearance was required for his work at that time.
Obtaining and holding a security clearance of any level, especially TS or above, requires certain terms, obligations, commitments and conditions from the holder. One of the most important is the holder of the clearance must promptly and fully any contacts with any foreign officials, agents, etc.
Lieutenant Kerry left active duty with the Navy on January 3, 1970, but he still carried those obligations as a commissioned officer of the Naval Reserve. Without telling anyone and without receiving permission from superiors,FBI or counter-intelligence officers, he traveled to Paris in the summer of 1970. He claimed the purpose of his trip was a honeymoon with his first wife, Julia Thorne, but there was another hidden purpose.
Numerous North Vietnamese and Viet Cong intelligence agents and officials were in Paris, having arrived a year earlier for the “Peace Talks.” While in Paris, Kerry met with agents on a number of occasions and had extensive discussions with them about U.S. plans, procedures and how to get the U.S. to essentially surrender in Vietnam.
These clandestine meetings were never reported to the Navy.
Almost a year later, in April 1091, speaking as the leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against The War, Lieutenant Kerry told a Senate hearing about his meetings with enemy agents. Senior DOD officials wanted to prosecute him as a Naval Reserve officer for violating a number of laws and regulations, but this was vetoed by the Nixon White House. They didn’t want to give the anti-war crowd any additional PR ammunition.
However, the Navy immediately pulled Kerry’s security clearance. He became a Naval Reserve officer who was known not to be trusted. He kept his commission, but lost all access to any classified information. In the words of one of the now-retired agents, “Lieutenant Kerry wasn’t cleared to know what time it was!”
I don't know if this is true, but it makes one heck of a lot of sense. Meeting with enemy officials is a sure way to lose one's security clearance.
This “unthinkable” topic has been under discussion in military circles for several weeks now. For those not in the military, at my rank as a Major, I “sit in the room, but not at the table, with Colonels and Generals, but I walk with Lieutenants, Captains and Sergeants.” If you can follow that expression, you will understand what I need to say. The military is going to become extremely “risk averse” under a Kerry administration. Those discussions, of “what we need to do” are taking place as I write. The GWOT is extremely successful solely because soldiers are doing things that are beyond military orders or a civilian’s comprehension. Soldiers will only continue to do this because we believe this is the right war, at the right time, at the right place. Many leaders, including myself, have often stated that “we would lead our men to hell for President Bush.” That is the definition of leadership. No Officer or President can “order” a soldier into harms way, you have to lead them.If this becomes the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, myself and other commissioned and non-commissioned officers, will not place our comrades in harm’s way. Lawful orders will always be obeyed, however, they will be obeyed exactly as given, nothing more and nothing less. John Kerry will lead the military with his example from thirty years ago, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? (April 22, 1971) . G-d save the United States.
.......John Kerry is out courting the black vote in a way that descends far below the level of simple pandering. Kerry swims through a cesspool of lies and propaganda, piloting himself as the Swift Boat of bullshit, and comes up grinning like that jackass Jimmy Carter in the end....../snip/
..........My third point is that Democrats don't WANT Blacks to get that chip off their shoulder. They want to keep the slaves on the plantation because the slaves vote 90% Democrat. Instead of preaching education and achievement, the Democrats give the Tarzan yell while they ignore the obvious......./snip/
"I reject the notion that Bush is inarticulate. He is more articulate than Clinton. When Bush says something, he's clear enough that you argue about whether you agree with him or not. When Clinton talks, you argue over what he really meant."I submit that the Clinton description certainly applies to the current standard-bearer of the Democratic Party as well. Flip-Flop indeed!
Wretchard goes on to summarize several other equally cowardly and self-serving opinions from both the British press and the savages of Islam residing in Britain. The conclusion shown below should be imprinted on the foreheads of all the cowards of the Left:Today, for the first time in all my years with the Telegraph Group, I had a column pulled. The editor expressed concerns about certain passages and we were unable to reach agreement, so on this Tuesday something else will be in my space.
I’d written about Kenneth Bigley, seized with two American colleagues but unlike them not beheaded immediately. Instead, sensing that they could exploit potential differences within "the coalition of the willing", for three weeks the Islamists played a cat-and-mouse game with Mr Bigley’s life, in which Fleet Street, the British public, governments in London and Dublin and Islamic lobby groups in the United Kingdom were far too willing to participate. As I always say, in this war the point is not whether you’re sad about the dead people, but what you’re prepared to do about it. What "Britain" – from Ken Bigley’s brother to the Foreign Secretary – did was make it more likely that other infidels will meet his fate.
Radical Islam is self-evidently at war with the West because their efforts are limited only by their capability. And the West is just as clearly not yet at war with radical Islam because its actions are still limited by its intent. Zarqawi sawed off Bigley's head simply because he could; America spares Fallujah from choice. That inability to think of ourselves as being truly at war underlay the rejection of Mark Steyn's column. He had only stated the obvious.
But who knows if that's really true or not. At this point I just can't be bothered running down every unsubstantiated claim Senator von Munchausen makes. I've got more important things to do with my time, like trying to invent a carburetor that gets 200 miles to the gallon.
My ironclad policy is this: when, towards the end of the evening, the pompous drunk on the next barstool turns to you and claims to have dated Morgan Fairchild, as both Senator Kerry and Jon Lovitz's Saturday Night Live character Tommy Flanagan the Compulsive Liar have done, you just shrug your shoulders, say, "Yeah, that's the ticket," and turn away.
For the most part, what you fear from Bush cannot be implemented by the President alone. But what you fear from Kerry CAN be.
Do you see what I'm getting at? Everything you fear from a Bush II administration, I do too. But he won't be able to do it -- for the most part -- without significant help from Congress. Right-wing judges? They would have to be confirmed. The Dems aren't even in the majority and they're managing to block the judges they want to block. The gay marriage amendment Bush wanted? DOA in Congress. I don't expect that to change under Bush II. What Bush wants that I don't like isn't going to be completely under his control.
By contrast, there is no power on Earth that can force a Kerry administration to bypass the UN when it's necessary. There is no provision for Congress to sidestep the President and send troops. What you fear from a Kerry administration CAN be, and WILL be, implemented by the President alone. It will be solely up to John Kerry....
...... And yet, if you're as invested as the Democrats are in reconstructing the cardboard façade of Sept. 10, 2001, before the terrorist attacks, I can understand why you would think Pretty Boy did a grand job last Tuesday. That's what my tennis/football analogy boils down to: one team's playing by September 11 rules, the others are running a Sept. 10 campaign. I find it hard to believe 51 percent of folks in states totaling 270 electoral votes are willing to cast a delusional ballot to return to the fictions of Sept. 10. But, if they are, so be it. If a majority of Americans want to pretend that the United Nations isn't a sewer of corruption and that the French are America's allies, not Saddam's, well, we'll just have to live with the consequences. ........
My first thought upon learning that Christopher Reeve has died was to wonder how long it would take before someone accused President Bush of having killed him with stem cell policy.UPDATE 2: Here is an attack and collection of misinformation published on MSNBC: I told you so.......What a surprise that such crap gets MSM attention! Also note the name of the author.
That just isn't healthy.
UPDATE 3: Go to Treacher to read and enjoy the Superman cartoon and Reeves "tribute" titled:"As long as I'm going to burn in Hell anyway".By Patti DavisNewsweekUpdated: 11:56 a.m. ET Oct. 12, 2004Oct. 12 - I wonder if President Bush could look into the eyes of Christopher Reeve’s family and tell them that it’s because he values life so deeply that he is preserving clusters of cells in freezers—cells that resulted from in-vitro fertilization and could be used for embryonic stem cell treatment—despite the fact that more people will die as a result of his decision. I..............
.... So, French policy is to morally equate America's presence in Iraq to Hitler's Nazi occupation of France. This is the foundation of Mr. Kerry's plan to win the war in Iraq. A notional President Kerry would find himself seated at the summit table negotiating peace terms with the literal cutthroats of our fellow citizens. This, Mr. Kerry calls realism, while he characterizes President Bush's determination to defeat the cutthroats of the world as "fantasy.".. ....
....In France, in 1940, the men and women who dreamed of liberation and eventually formed "la resistance" were not being realistic. The realist was the austere, aristocrat Marshall Petain, who negotiated a collaborator's peace with Hitler and called it Vichy. Five years later, his followers were shot in the village squares by patriotic Frenchmen. There is a lot of Petain in Mr. Kerry.
John Kerry may have won the debate, but he would lose the war.
Update: Similar subject on Carnivorous Conservative.The article, a largely analytical cover story in the magazine, says the interviewer asked Kerry "what it would take for Americans to feel safe again."
''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' the article states as the Massachusetts senator's reply.
''As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''
....The world is a dangerous place, filled with deadly people. Not just people who are misunderstood. Not just people who are poor. Not just people who have different "values." After 3,000 of our fellow citizens were incinerated on September 11th by Islamist mass murderers, John Kerry can still tell the New York Times Magazine this week that "[w]e have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." How amazingly irresponsible and stunningly stupid. Deadly people with the means and commitment to inflict large casualties on U.S. citizens will never just be nuisances. President Bush knows this. The American people know it. American liberals don't......
....But what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, "escort services" are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages......
Kerry Releases Plan for GWOT
Sen. John Kerry's campaign today announced a sweeping and detailed plan of how a Kerry administration would shake up the Homeland Security Department, make the nation more secure by focusing new resources on defending the homeland and capture Osama Bin laden.
"These are bold and needed changes in areas where President Bush has failed," said a campaign spokesperson. "It will grow the coalition, make efficient use of existing technologies to protect our ports, water supply and intelligence information while assuring every citizen of their ability to survive any confrontation with a terrorist enemy. And it also contains a specific plan to capture Osama Bin laden and bring him to justice."
If elected, a Kerry administration would immediately appoint renowned French Inspector Jacques Clouseau as head of Homeland Security. Clouseau would likely be assisted by Israeli ex-patriot and Anti-Terrorism expert Golan Cipel. Cipel is credited with blowing New Jersey's Homeland Security Department up into the size of a formidable agency. Additional Kerry plans dove tail precisely with his latest campaign and debate rhetoric......./snip/.....
.....And, if you want to know the real difference, after 90 minutes of debate it came in the final exchange of the night: "The truth of that matter," said Bush, "is, if you listen carefully, Saddam would still be in power if he [Kerry] were the President of the United States."
Kerry replied: "Not necessarily."
That's John Kerry: the "not necessarily" candidate. ...........
We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides “equally” accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.Puggs at Random Nuclear Strikes provides a insightful translation of the whole memo:
Translation, kerry is losing, so step up the pressure on Bush. Rather’s selfinflicted wound didn’t teach the media anything about being rabidly partisan, they learned nothing. So much education, yet so little common sense.UPDATE: Carnivorous Conservative provides further insight into the outrageous hypocrisy and arrogance of ABC's wing of the MSM:
I wonder, is Mr. Halperin planning on moving into the Whitehouse so that when it comes time to make a serious decision that could impact millions of lives he can be there to help Kerry "grow" through that experience, too? If Mr. Halperin's sense of his journalistic duty isn't the hallmark of liberal thinking, nothing is. In Halperin's world he is, apparently, the commissioner of affirmative action.
He said, "One of the biggest changes in the last two years is that Republicans used correctly to believe that the press was liberally biased. Now, the Democrats believe the press is biased against them."If I read that correctly what Mr. Halperin is saying is that Republicans are right to feel the media is against them ... and that seems just fine with him.
I've proposed a plan that can capture it and contain it and clean it within four years.
I could do a better job. My plan does a better job.
You can pull it off of the Internet. And you'll find a tort reform plan.
I have a plan.
I have a plan to lower the cost of health care for you.
I have a plan to cover all children.
I have a plan to let you buy into the same health care senators and congressmen give themselves.
I have a plan that's going to allow people 55 to 64 to buy into Medicare early.
And I have a plan that will take the catastrophic cases out of the system....
What means something is: Do you have a plan?
And I want to talk about my plan some more...
Let me begin by saying that my health-care plan is not what the president described.
Choose your doctor, choose your plan. (Ed--Now even YOU have a plan!)
The only people affected by my plan are the top income earners of America.
Now, you didn't hear any plan from the president, because he doesn't have a plan to lower the cost of health care.
I have a plan to cover those folks. And it's a plan that lowers cost for everybody...
We've got to create the products of the future. That's why I have a plan for energy independence within 10 years.
The Wall Street Journal said 96 percent of small businesses are not affected at all by my plan.
The president rushed our nation to war without a plan to win the peace
I have a plan that will help us go out and kill and find the terrorists
But I'll also have a better plan of how we're going to deal with Iraq
I have a plan to provide health care to all Americans
I have a plan to provide for our schools...
I have a plan to protect the environment...:
..../snip/....Conservatism's 40-year climb to dominance receives an examination worthy of its complexity in "The Right Nation," the best political book in years. Its British authors, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of the Economist, demonstrate that conservative power derives from two sources -- its congruence with American values, especially the nation's anomalous religiosity, and the elaborate infrastructure of think tanks and other institutions that stresses that congruence.
Liberals, now tardily trying to replicate that infrastructure, thought they did not need it because they had academia and the major media. But the former marginalized itself with its silliness, and the latter have been marginalized by their insularity and by competitors born of new technologies....../snip/...
Maybe Kerry can't legislate personal morality, but why does he have a track record of voting to finance abortions and to make them more generally available? He won't legislate what he claims he believes, but he will legislate what NARAL believes. I don't get that. Meanwhile, Bush talks about the "Culture of Life." If there was one reason I would never support somebody like Kerry, it's precisely this issue.
Within the first 5 minutes of John Kerry’s nomination acceptance speech, I called it an “unmitigated disaster.”
Within the first 5 minutes of George W. Bush’s nomination acceptance speech, I called it a “success.”
Within the first 5 minutes of the first presidential debate, I declared Kerry the winner, and “not just in the high-school debate-coach sense of the word.”
And now, within the first 5 minutes of the second presidential debate, I’m saying Bush is cleaning Kerry’s clock.
Bush has the easier task. If he just showed up and didn’t scowl a lot, he’d beat expectations.
But the rout goes well beyond that. Kerry is rattling off numbers and sounding negative, not connecting with his questioner. Bush, on the other hand, is sure, at ease, and scoring hits on Kerry.
As far as make-up, look-and-feel, preparation, and likability go, this is convention-speech Kerry vs. convention-speech Bush. And it’s no contest.
UPDATE:
Victor Davis Hanson provides his always insightful opinion:
Pundits will harp that Kerry was adept at masking his liberalism, Bush missing key chances to remind the American public that Kerry had voted against the first Gulf War and was a virtual pacifist during a mediocre 20-year Senate career. Maybe, maybe not. But Bush held his own against an accomplished debater, and proved himself the more human and honest—and that will finally make all the difference in the world.
Retired Lt Col, US Army, retired Medical Lab Manager at UAB, internet addict, retired to the shores of Lake Guntersville in the Mountain Lakes of the Tennessee River. We maintain a southern annex on the beaches of the "Redneck Riviera".
