Encrypted Flipola

Are you being Shinola'ed? The Kerry-Edwards campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

But luckily, we have John Ashcroft to steel -- yes, that's with two e's -- our encryption against Flipola... (UPDATE: I suspect this is one of the places where JNK squandered those 8 out of 100 points the ADA chose not to award him for his voting record, no?)

The Greatest Intelligence Failure In History

Most liberals would confidently identify that as the failure to find stockpiles of WMD in Iraq.

A large subset of those libs would immediately second guess themselves and suggest based on their immersion in the liberal echo chamber that W himself is the great intelligence failure. He's wickedly stupid and never listens to anyone don't you know?

Everything he does is based on faith and we all know how stupid religious hicks are, don't we? Or is he just an unscrupulous liar who's the mouthpiece for college drop-out Karl Rove who's so smart he manipulates us all like marionettes?

Sorry, I seem to get confused easily -- back to the history lesson...

First let's look at a description of one of the universally acclaimed great Presidents. We'll call him X:

X was also an outstanding example of a leader who, although not in any full sense an intellectual (he was a book collector rather than a book reader, and his Harvard grades were of a mediocrity that suggest that today he might have had difficulty in gaining entry to that august institution), ...

Sounds a lot like W's story at Yale, no? So he was easily duped by someone of clearly superior intelligence -- call him Y -- into spending massively to counter a threat that turned out to be nearly non-existant. X was duped so badly that he spent somewhere north of $25 billion on the fiasco.

Folks, this is easy for anyone who has even basic Google skills and understands the rudiments of inflation adjustment.

Can you tell me who X and Y were?

Can you tell me what he (and his successor) did that was the direct result of what was actually the greatest intelligence failure of all time?

And for another hint as well as extra bonus points: Was there a genzai bakudan? Or not? Was that an intelligence failure too? Do you think we'll ever know for sure?

Why are you so sure you know so much about the subtleties of war? Don't you think the answers to this should have required less than a moment's reflection -- rather than panicked Google usage -- if you were capable of decisive and authoritative judgements on intelligence successes and failures? How much have you really studied military history?

Could your accusations of incompetence and stupidity be fueled by projection?

I'm patiently waiting for your answers...

Outing the gay gestapo's ally.

Cycles Recycled

NOTE: This post can be originally found here. I thought it deserved more prominence on the blog.

I can just imagine exactly this kind of debate going on in Rome right up to the point that the Huns kicked in the gates. It strikes me that any society that has to start asking itself if it is committing “professional suicide” by ignoring the threat posed by barbarians with a completely alien world view and bent on their destruction is already beyond help. Geopolitical navel-gazing must be the last stage in the evolution of a society before it is too morally ambivalent to defend its own sovereignty. (Or, maybe it results from the unwillingness to do so?)
Let me lay it out for you…

Stage 1: We need a revolution to set us free from tyranny!

Stage 2: Hey, what happened to our colonies?

Stage 3: Oh, yeah. Uh. Colonialism is bad. Yeah. That’s it. So, that must mean any use of military force against anyone anywhere is bad. Right?

Stage 4: Oh gosh, we just need to all be more tolerant of other people. And hey, at least all those imigrants always vote our way. Besides, aren't we all really just immigrants on this big old space ship we call Earth anyway?

Stage 5: Didn't we used to have elections this time of year? Hey, where’d all the Barbies go?

Stage 6: Now repeat after the nice man with the machine gun… “There is one God and Mohamed is his prophet.”

Stage 7: GoTo Stage: 1, repeat as necessary.

Or, the alternative evolution...

Stage 5: Hey, didn't there used to be a couple of big buildings right about here?

Stage 6: Jihad? I've got your Jihad right here baby!

Stage 7: Okay, so we got a litte rough there, but they deserved it.

Stage 8: GoTo Stage 3: repeat as necessary.
So you see, all the terrorists would have had to do to take America out of the equation was leave us alone for another 50 years or so and we would have evolved into sophisticated pro-globalization pacifists all by ourselves. But, nothing sets back political entropy like a good old Pearl Harbor style sucker-punch, eh?

Posted by: Dacotti on September 25, 2003 01:07 PM [NOTE FROM BOB: The address is Dacotti -at- hot mail dot com]

I Approve This Message Without The Darned Change Tracking

I approve this message now that I think I finally turned off that %@#&^! change tracking!

WHEN VOTING IN 2004, PLEASE CONSIDER MY EXPERIENCE

EDUCATION: I attended Yale and joined the same Skull and Crossbones society as George Bush. I wasn't smart enough to get into Yale or Harvard Law so I went to Boston College Law School. But I'm way smarter than George Bush who only got a Harvard MBA - that's why it takes me hours to answer simple yes and no questions.

MILITARY: After my request for a student deferment to study abroad in France was rejected, I joined the Navy since I thought that would be the safest most exciting service. In my first tour, I served on a ship safely far bravely off the coast of Vietnam. Looking over the situation, I determined that by joining the Swift Boats for my next tour I could still be safe a war hero by mostly patrolling off the coast while still being able to make good movie footage to play at the Viet Cong Sympathizers Reunion Democratic National Convention when I ran for President. When just as I arrived, Admiral "Baby Killer" Zumwalt changed the Swift Boat mission to include canal patrols, I began searching for anti-war military doctors to help me game the system journalists to approach in Saigon and explain to them what a quagmire Vietnam was. It was an impossible mission and my aluminum well-armored Swift Boat was under constant enemy fire -- luckily none of my pinpricks wounds even required hospitalization stopped me from rushing back to defend my war criminals fellow soldiers. I was also not in Cambodia at Christmas 1968 when Richard Nixon was not President and was lying about my not being there. This was "seared, seared" in my memory and I showed the Boston Globe I still carry my lucky CIA hat in a secret compartment in my briefcase to prove that I'm nuttier than a pecan plantation. My superior bravery was hardly indisputably proven by hugely exaggerating my actions in after action reports I wrote about myself. So I easily won three Purple Hearts in four months and abandoned departed from my crewmates to go back to the States and finish my service at a desk job as a hero. Luckily, since I was already bragging about being the President some day, I was able to remember to get most of my crew-mates reassigned to safer duty so they'd be are on my side in this campaign. The fact that nearly all my peers and superiors as well as the one crewman who had too much integrity to accept my bribes and coercion a tiny minority of my war criminals fellow soldiers dispute any details of my heroism just shows that the military is completely filled with war criminals and baby killers needs reform.

ANTI-WAR PROTESTER: I am unapologetic about calling the military except the crewmen on my Swift Boat (not including Gardner of course) war criminals. Jane Fonda has apologized but I will not apologize. To this day the Viet Cong people of Vietnam are grateful for my actions helping to install a brutal Communist dictatorship leading to widespread imprisonments in "re-education camps", forcing a million "boat people" to flee for their lives and leaving the way clear for Pol Pot to murder 20% of the Cambodian population. Viet Cong General Giap considered the actions of the anti-war protestors crucial to their victory since they lost nearly every battle they ever engaged in with the U.S. military. And Vietnamese Americans support me to this day for my brave actions - that's why 90% of them will vote against me this November. And somehow I forgot to mention my 1968 "Christmas in Cambodia" during my 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even though if provable it would have blown the roof right off the room.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE: I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I was an assistant DA and Leutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis where I fought against even having civil defense plans. Due to the mentorship of drunken socialist woman slaughterer conservative - compared to me anyway -- Senator Ted Kennedy, I was elected to the Senate from the people's republic of Massachusetts.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS SENATOR: I authored and passed the bill for the relief of Kil Joon Yu Callahan and four other bills that nobody has ever heard of before I am extremely proud of. The arguments that National Journal's ratings of my Senate votes make me the most liberal member of the Senate are completely bogus - that's proven by the near perfect symmetry of agreement of my Americans for Democratic Action rating of 92 and the Conservative Union's rating of 5 - I am the only true conservative in this election! And charges that I am weak on defense are complete lies - that's why I relentlessly attacked Ronald Reagan in every way including advocating a nuclear freeze and cutting virtually every weapons system, lied about "Christmas in Cambodia" to attack him, voted against U.S. participation in Gulf War I (which passed any "global test" imaginable since it was even supported by the U.N. including France, Germany and large numbers of Arab countries including Syria for heaven's sakes), voted to decrease intelligence funding after the first World Trade Center bombing and I was for invading Iraq as long as Bill Clinton was President and that is my completely consistent position other than calling it the "wrong war, at the wrong time in the wrong place".

I believe my accomplishments over the course of my lifetime of marrying money make me uniquely unfit qualified for command. My character is impeccable and Ghandi-like as demonstrated by constantly calling President Bush a liar and branding the military as war criminals.

Alaa has some words on the importance of W to Iraqi freedom.