Friday, September 17, 2004
Mobius Tolerance
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Answer to Question
Another Shameless Steal
WILL VOTERS BE SWAYED BY SERVICE RECORDS? [09/16 12:06 AM]Uh, yeah. Spot on I'd say. Not to mention we have no idea what W would do under pressure now that he's not "young and irresponsible"...
Tonight on Hannity & Colmes, Democratic pollster/pundit Pat Caddell brought up an important point.
Why is there all this talk about Bush's National Guard days? Well, critics of Bush want to "expose" that he was a irresponsible, heavy-drinking young man in those days. And of course, this contrasts with Kerry's Vietnam years - er, months... Let's just say it contrasts with the reenactment of "Platoon" and "Apocolypse Now" that constituted the Democratic convention.
So do voters automatically prefer war heroes? Of course, just ask President Dole. Or ask George H.W. Bush how his war record carried him over the top in 1992.
Caddell tonight brought up another fascinating example of how utterly meaningless a distinguished service record is to the vast majority of the electorate. Think back to March 3, 1992. The Georgia Democratic primary is in full swing. Bill Clinton is dogged by accusations he dodged the draft. Even worse, one of his opponents is Bob Kerrey, former U.S. Navy SEAL, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart.
Bill Clinton recieves 259,907 votes, or 57.17 percent.
Bob Kerrey? 22,033. 4.85 percent.
In Georgia.
Service records are not going to determine the winner in this election either.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Sunday, September 12, 2004
TKO Declared
Dan Rather is history. Next question is how far the damage extends...
Saturday, September 11, 2004
What's The Frequency, A*shat?
CBS = Pravda. ANOTHER CASE CLOSED -- JUST ON THE TECHNICALITIES ALONE...
UPDATE: Only when you type the final period. Dali isn't even close...
ANOTHER UPDATE: UmmmHmmmm....
LAST UPDATE: And a closing belly laugh.
3rd Anniversary: A Quote on the "State of Remembrance"
There you have it; ours is a country still brimming full of Septenthians -- the Iranian freedom fighters know the depths of hell...
Friday, September 10, 2004
The KERNel of Truth And An Elephantine Retraction
You know, I'm making this sound like I take great pleasure in watching the spectacle. I'm not. This is really flippin sad to see Goldberg's "groupthink" right over a cliff.
There really are debates to be had by reasonable people in this election. (UPDATE: like this) And this variant of mental illness is near perfect tinder for the Tinfoil Apocalypse. Coming shortly to a blog near you...
Did I forget to mention that even WaPo's on the scent now?
UPDATE: And of course, there remains a Rove behind every Bush. But just don't call me paranoid. UmmHmmmmm...
Yup, we're rapidly headed for a Torricelli manuever. It's a lot like a Hiemlich manuever only in reverse...
And The Postscript
UPDATE: Not to mention that the Composer has been cross-examined -- and failed the laugh test. My, oh, my...
UPDATED AGAIN: And don't forget the $10,000 reward. Should be a piece of cake. UmmHmmmm....
Thursday, September 09, 2004
You Might Be A Liberal If (Appendix B)
C'mon -- you knew it was coming. I forshadowed it and everything ;)
UPDATE UPDATED: And you know there's a problem when you can't even fool the AP. Remember them? BUT OF COURSE! The old "I'm just a little moral degenerate -- look at them!" strategy!
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Even Peter Jennings stops carrying your water.
UPDATE n: The Donald piles on mercilessly. And I pick #1 of course!
Today's Word (Output)
I'm guessing this can't be topped -- except by???
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Round Em Up
Obscure linkages. Too difficult to find, really.
The anti-Christ files: Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony where somehow he forgot he was in Cambodia. At least he didn't forget he was in Vietnam.
Blowback reconsidered in light of Beslan.
UPDATE: And don't forget the concise ideological dimensions.
Karl Rove Behind Every Tree
Looks like the vets are all Republican Karl Rove stooges funded by Karl Rove. Did I mention Karl Rove? Am I obsessed?
The Left,
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
UPDATE: Let's face it, Karl Rove is everywhere -- even in Detroit 33 years ago...
Monday, September 06, 2004
You Might Be A Liberal If (Appendix A)
* You believe that criticizing "the process" as being “butchered” absolves you of needing to answer the question involved in a consistent manner.
* You believe that all Vietnam Vets are war criminals but that you're clearly the best candidate for President since you're a Vietnam Vet.
* You believe that a lifetime voting record rating by Americans for Democratic Action of 92 and near-perfectly symmetrical lifetime rating of 5 by the American Conservative Union makes you the "conservative candidate" in the election -- and is certainly "no evidence" that you're a liberal.
Europe Is Only Too Happy To See A Jew Smoke
Sunday, September 05, 2004
The Road to Discovering The Captive Mind
So I began too to see deeper flaws in those sureties I had so long accepted. I began to sense, or perhaps at last to admit to, inherent contradictions at work in the machine in which I had once placed so much faith. The leftist catechism denounced the United States government as inherently corrupted and beyond repair, and the solution had been to hand massive swaths of the American society and economy over to the control and regulation of the state; in other words, the United States government. It extolled civil liberties but proposed a collectivist creed which fundamentally negated the individual. It claimed to oppose concentrated, monopoly power but proposed to concentrate it to a degree unprecedented in American history. There seemed no connection whatever between these ambitions, and I began to suspect that the entire formulation was ultimately nothing more than an expression of the will to power; that the first had been concocted merely to enable the second.Now don't get me wrong -- the prose and sweep certainly can't touch The Captive Mind -- but it's an authentic and moving piece. What? You haven't read The Captive Mind? Click that link and order, giddy-yup! The only known antidote to the Pill of the Murti-Bing I tell you...
I Guess I Need To Lower My Praise ...
All The News That's Fit To Print ...
Feeling A Need For Some Offsetting Humor Today...
“At the end of the day, the cost savings will be quite significant” says HP board member, Executive Vice President, and CFO Rob Highwayman, who, with the aid of HP’s outsourcing arm, HP Services, has studied outsourcing extensively. “We simply can no longer afford this inefficiency and remain competitive in the world stage,” Highwayman said.The Hewlett-Packard board continues to explore other outsourcing possibilities including HP’s more than 1,200 vice presidents.
Sanji Gurvinder Singh, 23, of Indus Teleservices, Mumbai, India, will be assuming the Office of President, Chairman and CEO as of October 31. He will receive a salary of $320 USD a month with proportionate benefits. Mr Singh will maintain his office in India and will be working primarily at night, due to the time difference between the US and India.
“I am excited to serve in this position,” Mr. Singh stated in an exclusive interview. “I always knew that my career at the HP call center would lead to great things.” An HP spokesperson noted that Mr. Singh has extensive experience in public speaking and has been given Ms. Fiorina’s script tree to enable him to answer any question without having to understand the issue.
Ms. Fiorina, 49, has announced that she will join the faculty of the Stanford School of Business, specializing in medieval business and the related subject of employee motivation. No one at the Stanford School of Business was available for comment.
In an unrelated news item it was learned that HP was selling five corporate jets complete with passengers thought to be board members and HP executives. While the value of the content was not thought to be significant it is believed that their accumulated air-miles could be used to facilitate additional outsourcing initiatives.
[Found in my email from a little elf...]
NYeT! Don't Fight Hitler!
Did I forget to mention that Putin has already said that people who DON'T vote for Bush need their "heads examined". What? You didn't find that in the NYeT? Can't imagine why...
And on the "root cause" behind subhumans who shoot fleeing children in the back:
When your asymmetrical warfare strategy depends on gunning down schoolchildren, you're getting way more asymmetrical than you need to be. The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.NYeT, we refuse to name evil.
But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.
So the particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, The New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words Muslim or Islamist, for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities.
Saturday, September 04, 2004
Lieutenant To ???
Well, after attempting to get a deferment to study in France and chose the Swift Boats because that seemed like a safe enough assignment to see what was going on -- until Zumwalt changed their mission...
Peters
But, but, but ... you don't understand the real roots of terror you fascist BusHitler thug! Oh? I don't?
UPDATE: And it was planned ahead of time, natch. Sound familiar?
Quote of the Day
As the fax machine contributed to the fall of the soviet Empire, the Internet will contribute to the fall of media monoliths.With the AP now whole-heartedly joining the NYeT in a wave of Orwellian corruption, the only question seems to be just how close to 1989 we are? I hope it's a lot closer than it feels like today...
Friday, September 03, 2004
Flip Flap Flubbergasted
The Bush Doctrine In Plain English
The Bush Doctrine:FDR would be proud. The libs couldn't identify FDR in a line-up of one. (Hat tip Glenn.)
1. We will fight for freedom. We reject moral relativism.
Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom -- the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time -- now depends on us. Our nation -- this generation -- will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.
2. The friends of our enemies are also our enemies.
Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
3. We reserve the right to hit our enemies before they strike us.
The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.
4. We will not negotiate with those who continue to support terrorism.
Every leader actually committed to peace will end incitement to violence in official media and publicly denounce homicide bombs. Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment, and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.
Could There Be A Reason?
When someone is 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal. --AN OLD JEW OF GALACIAVersus a Mohammad quote near the start of Bin Laden's "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders":
I have been sent with the sword between my hands to insure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.Could it be the result of residue contorted into a cruel Mobius strip?
Thursday, September 02, 2004
The Roots of Hate
UPDATE: With the Russian school hostage crisis and all I wouldn't post this if I wasn't such a fanatic about dead parrots. Just thought you might want a clarification. Oh, and the bandwidth to the site isn't so good so you may see some pauses -- and maybe a lot of them if this gets to be as popular as I think it will...
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Roundup
And some fire for the belly...
UPDATE: Ann weighs in on some "unsubstantiated charges".
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Kerry's Problem In A Pecan Shell
But he's a hero (and self-admitted war criminal) and supports the troops? As previously noted, you can't say stuff like this without being nuttier than a pecan plantation...
UPDATE: What Kerry ignores.
Cambodia Back On? Most Excellent!
I love this from an interview in the September issue of GQ:So fine, I'll go so far as to buy it. I repeat: It doesn't matter -- Kerry is toast even if he was in Cambodia... When I talk to my very, very liberal Mom who lived through WWII I am constantly amazed at how little she remembers of it. I'm also quite amazed how little the libs remember of the history around the Vietnam War. (Yes, follow that link!)
"[John Kerry]: I can't say. To me Vietnam is an old place, an old memory. It is old history, it's gone, it's past. The less I have to talk about it, frankly, the happier I am." [Yeah right -- ed.]
The interview took place on July 4th. That's before Kerry "reported for duty" at the Dem. convention.
On another issue, this morning I heard Del Sandusky interviewed on a radio program. He specifically said that they "touched ground" in Cambodia. Which means it had to be in February or March '69. I suspect that careful questioning of him would destroy that claim.
Sandusky also said a number of disingenuous things in the interview that make me think he's deliberately lying, not simply mistaken in his memories. He claimed not to even know most of the people who appear in the SBVFT ads, and that for Larry Thurlow to say he served with John Kerry is, "like me saying I served with Wm. Westmoreland".
Yet, John Kerry, in Tour of Duty, has Thurlow and his boats practically side by side. Since Sandusky was at the helm of Kerry's boat, that makes either Kerry or Sandusky a liar.
Crossing the Rubicon?
New Chapter for the Vagina MonologuesAnd remember the "male version" that Annie Jacobsen witnessed? Annie is already on the case...
Ok, somebody finally said it in public:
Russian Planes Exploded From Toilets
Evidence Supports Prior Reports of Al Qaeda Women Smuggling Explosives Internally?
What makes this especially ominous is this report from six months ago, claiming that Al Qaeda was training female bombers to smuggle explosives inside their vaginas. The plan was to extract the explosives and then assemble the bomb in the toilet, of course.
I have no idea how this country will react to this, if this is the new tactic. As I mentioned when I first noted this story (CAUTION: contains very indelicate language), we’re either going to have to subject women to highly, HIGHLY intrusive body-searches or else we’re just going to have to allow Al Qaeda to blow up airplanes whenever they feel like it.
If this is the new tactic, it seems to me that this will be the Rubicon as regards racial profiling. Non-Muslim women are not going to put up with being told that they must subject themselves to unscheduled gynecological exams just to be "fair" to all women. And, as humiliating and intrusive as such searches might be, I don’t see how we can do anything else but subject only Muslim women (or primarily Muslim women) to this admitted indignity.
Perhaps there’s a technological solution. But that too has its problems; I don’t know if many women will gladly accept dangerous X-raying of their wombs just to board an airplane.
...
UPDATE: You really need to read Annie's most recent update. Here's how it ends:
In Part Five of this series, I interviewed fellow flight 327 passenger Billie Jo Rodriguez. Rodriguez gave me the startling news that one of the Syrian men spent about 10 minutes in the lavatory and then came out of the lavatory reeking of toilet chemicals. As I have previously stated, multiple government agencies (including FBI, JTTF, FAMS and LAPD) met the plane in Los Angeles to question the men. But because the men didn't immediately match up against names on the government's no-fly lists, they were let go.And you were wondering why defense isn't enough?
Here is another detail that I have only recently discovered. I now know that the 14 Syrians aboard my flight 327 were questioned by the FBI for between 20 and 30 minutes after landing. (Initially, I was told they were held and questioned for approximately two hours.) How can our agencies possibly gather intelligence on 14 men in only 20 minutes? Even if they had done some of the legwork before the plane landed, they couldn't possibly conduct a thorough investigation in such short time. And again, I'll ask why none of the other passengers were questioned? Had the FBI ascertained Billie Jo Rodriguez' information about one of the Syrian men emerging from a bathroom smelling like toilet chemicals (after nearly knocking another passenger over so as to get inside first) -- those men may not have been out the door and on their way to their musical gig after just 20 minutes.
As of press time, no one from the FBI, the JTTF or the DHL or any other government agency has contacted me, Billie Jo Rodriguez or any of the other passengers on flight 327. Maybe the Russians will. The war on terrorism is a global war. It knows no boundaries. Whether you're on a Russian TU-134 or a Boeing 757, the enemy is the same.
FRENCH FILE FLUFFING
UPDATE: Standing in the way of global Islamic theocracy...
MUST. READ. NOW. BOTH. LINKS.
Monday, August 30, 2004
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Marxist Cogitation
Yes, this gives one great hope -- hope that he loses big time.Senator, I will say this. I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in other it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.
But when you start to neglect those needs, people will start to demand a new structure, and that, to me, is the only threat that this country faces now, because we are not responding to the needs and we are not responding to them because we work on these old cold-war precepts and because we have not woken up to realizing what is happening in the United States of America.
Round-up Time
What the loyal opposition looks like. And Hitch too, of course.
Deconstructing hubris.
Life isn't fair for the Islamofascist allies. But then Vichy France was no cakewake either...
McCain finally swings the guns around in the right direction and ... fails to condemn the second Swift Boat ad and ... it's not going to be pretty...
He Voted For It Before He Voted Against It (Part 7,457)
As the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kerry was ready with the bravado appropriate for a challenger who knows that every answer carries magnified importance in the state that put President Bush into office by just 537 votes.And then the coup-de-grace:
''I'm pretty tough on Castro, because I think he's running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,'' Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.
Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: ``And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.''
It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote -- as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton's reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.
There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.
Asked Friday to explain the discrepancy, Kerry aides said the senator cast one of the 22 nays that day in 1996 because he disagreed with some of the final technical aspects. But, said spokesman David Wade, Kerry supported the legislation in its purer form -- and voted for it months earlier.
But there are also constant reminders that Kerry struggles with the complexities of Cuba. Asked in the Herald interview last year about sending Elián back to Cuba, Kerry was blunt: ``I didn't agree with that.''I would write more on this but only expletives come to mind.
But when he was asked to elaborate, Kerry acknowledged that he agreed the boy should have been with his father.
So what didn't he agree with?
''I didn't like the way they did it. I thought the process was butchered,'' he said.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Next Up: The Gates of Hell
Believe it or not, the Dems would still win the election if they pulled a Toricelli and replaced Kerry with Lieberman. That is if they themselves had the good judgment to vote for him themselves -- which they wouldn't of course...
----- Begin Shameless_Steal -----
Viet Commies Still Cite Kerry Testimony
One of the chief complaints of the Vietnam veterans who are opposing John Kerry is that he slandered them as war criminals in his famous 1971 Senate testimony. Kerry's supporters try to portray his claims then as a youthful indiscretion. Yet Kerry has never renounced them, and they still turn up in Vietnamese communist propaganda. In an article for the English-language Viet Nam News dated June 11, 2004, one Diem Quynh cites Kerry to bolster his argument that the communists treated American prisoners of war well:
John McCain might disagree. So might Jim Warner, a former POW who tells the conservative weekly Human Events that he "first learned about Lt. John Kerry in a North Vietnamese prison camp":Candidate in this year's American presidential elections, John Kerry, who fought in the war, went further in his criticism. In a statement to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971, he said the war crimes committed by US soldiers in Southeast Asia "were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
But despite these abuses, the Vietnamese did not reciprocate in kind; instead, they treated captured US troops humanely.
When his captors brought him out of solitary confinement in the infamous Skid Row punishment camp for an interrogation, they made him read the typewritten transcript of a statement by Kerry, speaking in the United States. His interrogator kept pointing at Kerry's words, saying, 'See? This officer from your Navy says you deserve to be punished.' "
"All I could think of was that this must be a really contemptible human being," said Warner, although We can't expect the rest of the country to share our disgust at Kerry for turning on us. A lot of people are too young to remember that." . . .
Tom Collins, another Vietnam POW whose plane was shot down in 1965, was made to listen to Kerry's testimony on tape during his captivity. He explained that the North Vietnamese were constantly trying to elicit confessions of war crimes from Americans, promising them better treatment."He knew he was putting us at risk," Warner says of Kerry. "And he was demanding unilateral withdrawal, which means our value as bargaining chips would be gone. And what do you think would have happened to us then?"
----- End Shameless Steal -----
Kerry also estimated that there would be oh, maybe 3000 or so Vietnamese that would need to be evacuated to save their lives when the Communists won. That would certainly explain the millions of "boat people" and Pol Pot's genocide. Did I mentioned that a recent poll says that 90% of Vietnamese-Americans will be voting for Bush in this election? But what do they know?
And LA LA Times Also Forgot To Mention
Friday, August 27, 2004
Cambodian Case Closed Conclusively
Remember my piece on the John Podhoretz article? Let me expand the argument so it can't be missed by even the most fragile minds.
Option #1: Kerry really did spend Christmas in Cambodia. Or even spent a picosecond there -- who knows, maybe hagiographer Brinkley will yet have a miraculous rehabilitation from his hidden foxhole and bring forth witnesses -- sometime before he high-tailed it back to the States a few months later to become the VVAW front man. In sum, secret briefcase compartment or no, Kerry is the proud owner of a magic hat that is real and that he forgot to throw over the fence.
As Podhoretz points out, the credibility of Kerry's Cambodian claim can't be taken seriously since he didn't use it at a time when it would have broken the incursion story wide open and first to market by a long shot. The positive impact to Kerry and the VVAW would have been absolutely huge and he would have been an incompetent moron to not use it to enhance his position. It's just impossible to emphasize enough the enormity of the Cambodia incursion story to the anti-war crowd in that timeframe.
And there you have it: If Kerry really was in Cambodia then we are being asked to forgive his being an incompetent moron leader for the VVAW and elect him President. Now there's a truly brilliant idea.
(Now the truly discerning among you may suggest that this makes him a Pentagon mole in the VVAW since he blunted them from achieving the full damage they could have -- so at least we conservatives should vote for him on that basis. Uh, never mind...)
Option #2: Kerry wasn't in Cambodia. Not ever during his entire tour. He made it all up after seeing Apocalypse Now and used it to falsely attack Reagan's policies on Nicaragua.
Suboption A: Kerry is a calculating liar who makes up whatever seems expedient to achieve his ends. He made up his visit to Cambodia and he knows full well it's a lie. His 1986 Senate pontifications on Nicaragua were created from the whole cloth to attack Reagan.
Outcome for suboption A: We know he lies on a scale much greater than Clinton -- it isn't just about sex after all -- and we're going to elect him President anyway??? Fool me twice...
Suboption B: He carries around his CIA hat in a secret briefcase compartment in the briefcase that he carries around all the time but somehow never gets photographed by the fawning press.
An argument can be made that he's a harmless Walter Mitty and why is that a handicap in a President? Have you been paying attention? He's carrying around his good luck CIA hat in a secret compartment and showing it to reporters! Oh, and didn't he recently mention that mine that blew up under his boat that didn't much injure himself or his crew but launched his dog "VC" clear over onto the next Swift Boat that didn't operate close enough for its crew to be able to render any judgment whatsoever on his performance?
And there you have the final alternative: He's nuttier than a pecan plantation and should be immediately recalled by his Massachusetts constituents -- not elected POTUS!
Case Closed. Ship sunk in all eventualities.
And stay tuned, we haven't even gotten into the absurdity of loving his "band of brothers" on only his boat alone while calling all the other soldiers baby killers.
UPDATE UPDATED MORE: Need better evidence for the Option #1 branch?
Kerry had about a year before the invasion of Cambodia really happened -- and that included his first run for Congress in Massachusetts -- to expose the secret invasion of Cambodia based on first hand knowledge. AND HE DIDN'T. PERIOD.
Here's Kerry's relevant testimony snippet from his 1971 bile to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. No smugness about being in Cambodia yet, eh?:
Suddenly we are faced with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.So let me get this straight. Following the logic of Option #1, Kerry really was in Cambodia dropping off special forces or CIA agents or whatever. Clearly people on the ground as opposed to his comments about Laos. And for years he has a golden opportunity to drop a huge bombshell of eyewitness evidence of troops in Cambodia that would reverbrate around the world and he didn't take it??? This would be incompetence in forwarding his cause on a truly mind-boggling scale. Someone this incompetent could not possibly be trusted with the Presidency -- never mind that he's on the other side!
But we are here as veterans to say we think we are in the midst of the greatest disaster of all times now because they are still dying over there, and not just Americans, Vietnamese, and we are rationalizing leaving that country so that those people can go on killing each other for years to come.
Americans seem to have accepted the idea that the war is winding down, at least for Americans, and they have also allowed the bodies which were once used by a president for statistics to prove that we were winning that war, to be used as evidence against a man who followed orders and who interpreted those orders no differently than hundreds of other men in Vietnam.
We veterans can only look with amazement on the fact that this country has been unable to see there is absolutely no difference between ground troops and a helicopter crew, and yet people have accepted a differentiation fed them by the administration.
No ground troops are in Laos, so it is all right to kill Laotians by remote control. But believe me the helicopter crews fill the same body bags and they wreak the same kind of damage on the Vietnamese and Laotian countryside as anybody else, and the president is talking about allowing that to go on for many years to come. One can only ask if we will really be satisfied only when the troops march into Hanoi.
AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's Kerry talking about how he tried to squeal to the press in Saigon about what a disaster the Swift Boat missions were and bemoaning that the press wouldn't bite:
Mr. Kerry: On that I could definitely comment. I think the press has been extremely negligent in reporting. At one point and at the same time they have not been able to report because the Government of this country has not allowed them to. I went to Saigon to try to report. We were running missions in the Mekong Delta. We were running raids through these rivers on an operation call Sealord and we thought it was absurd.So let me get this straight: He was a participant on secret missions to Cambodia and he was squealing to the press just that the Swift boats were "absurd" and that was his big bait? Not that he was participating in Cambodian incursions before they became public a year later? None of the press would have bitten on this?? The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that he would have been stunningly incompetent. Or, as Podhoretz notes, it's proof he was never there -- not to mention there is still no eyewitness corroboration...
We didn't have helicopter cover often. We seldom had jet aircraft cover. We were out of artillery range. We would go in with two quarter-inch aluminum hull boats and get shot at and never secure territory or anything except to quote Admiral Zumwalt to show the American flag and prove to the Vietcong they don't own the rivers. We found they did own them with 60 percent casualties and we thought this was absurd.
I went to Saigon and told this to a member of the news bureau there and I said, "Look, you have got to tell the American people this story." The response was, "Well, I can't write that kind of thing. I can't criticize that much because if I do I would lose my accreditation, and we have to be very careful about just how much we say and when."
I repeat: My verdict on Option #1 remains uncontested.
Waves of Magic Karma
Thursday, August 26, 2004
It's Almost Impossible
This spring, the U.S. pushed a resolution through the U.N. Security Council threatening sanctions on Sudan for their disgraceful conduct. The already weak resolution was watered down at the request of a number of countries, including the Europeans.Yep. When Howard Dean seems positively level-headed and balanced compared to John Kerry and his character assassination goons...
Europeans cannot criticize the United States for waging war in Iraq if they are unwilling to exhibit the moral fiber to stop genocide by acting collectively and with decisiveness. President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq unilaterally when Iraq posed no danger to the United States, but we were right to demand accountability from Saddam. We are also right to demand accountability in Sudan. Every day that goes by without meaningful sanctions and even military intervention in Sudan by African, European and if necessary U.N. forces is a day where hundreds of innocent civilians die and thousands are displaced from their land. Every day that goes by without action to stop the Sudan genocide is a day that the anti-Iraq war position so widely held in the rest of the world appears to be based less on principle and more on politics. And every day that goes by is a day in which George Bush's contempt for the international community, which I have denounced every day for two years, becomes more difficult to criticize.
Now is the time for the world community to act if they are serious about encouraging an enlightened leadership role for the United States. My challenge to the U.N. and Europe is simple: if you don't like American diplomacy under George Bush, then do something to show those of us in opposition here in the U.S. that you can behave in such a way that unilateralism is not necessary.
UPDATE: And some pretty damning evidence suggesting the Eurabians ain't riding to his rescue is at the end of this post.
UPDATE #2: And don't miss out on the last paragraph of this little gem. Wouldn't want anyone to know about something like that now would we?
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Fire, Ready, Aim
A Fair Cambodian History Lesson
The 250-plus men who make up the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth dislike, despise or hate John Kerry. And they have good reason to do so. What they have done in gathering to destroy John Kerry is throw everything they can come up at him — like the way a prosecutor will seek to indict someone on hundreds of charges and then with a judge's participation whittle them down to a potent few.So Kerry is either monumentally incompetent, lying or stark raving crazy. My guess is all of the above, with the latter as the root cause.
Is that fair? Well, one of the charges hurled by the Swift Boat Veterans has thrown Kerry for a loop. They unearthed Kerry's claim to have driven his boat into Cambodia at Christmastime 1968, ferrying a CIA operative on an illegal mission and getting a mysterious hat from that operative as a keepsake in the process.
He wasn't in Cambodia during Christmas 1968, and he almost certainly wasn't there at any other time. How can I be sure? Consider the history. In 1973, Kerry was a leader of the anti-war movement. That same year, the American Left went nuts when the Nixon administration admitted it had secretly invaded Cambodia in 1969 and 1970 to roust out Communist fighters.
It's hard to overstate just how big an issue this was in 1973. Cambodia was officially a neutral country, and it was the contention of the anti-war movement that any movement across Cambodia's borders constituted a violation of international law.
If Kerry is to be believed, then this leader of the anti-war movement remained silent in 1973 when he could have spoken out about how he was ordered to violate Cambodian neutrality as early as 1968. Which is why Kerry is not to be believed on this matter.
Is it worth knowing that Kerry lied about his one-man invasion of Cambodia? I think most people would say it is worth knowing, even if it won't affect their vote. If life were fair, we probably wouldn't know about it.
So maybe it's good life isn't fair.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
If Patrick Brady Wrote a Book...
It's quite amusing to me that Michael Moore steals Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" -- who's none too happy with the big, fat white man about stealing the title of his book about book burning -- and now the Dems are all excited to have "Unfit For Command" retracted by the publisher. First Amendment, schmirst amendment as they say...
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
The New Face of Mental Illness
Did I mention this person is a nationally syndicated cartoonist for his day job? Now you know...
Oh, and did I mention that European unemployment averaged about a point higher than NYC? Never fear though -- they are our betters. Whatever you do, don't confuse your feelings by considering facts.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
The Long and Short of Mandatory
Therefore it is necessary, but not enough, to win another victory against oppressors in other countries; it also past the time for the West to triumph against the dark recesses of its own soul.
Mr. Warren
Nor is the anti-Americanism in Europe some natural expression of the continent's war-bloodied historical experience. Some of it can be explained by envy -- the passing over the Atlantic of that sense of importance that Europe once enjoyed, in its Imperial heyday. But power politics are more calculating and cynical than that. The whole project of building a united Europe depends on replacing the old intra-European national antipathies with a new common antipathy. The public demonization of America thus serves the interests of Europe's new bureaucratic order, as George Jonas and others have argued.Read it all, for it is good...
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Monday, August 09, 2004
Quote of the Day
Yeeeeouch!
UPDATE: Steyn is on the case...
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Fiddling on Sudan
News from Sudan's Darfur region gets more horrifying every day: The Guardian reports that Arab women who accompany the militias as they rape and slaughter their way around the region "sang for joy" as they watched their brothers torture their victims. Women as young as eight have been targeted by the militia in a campaign of rape designed to drive the black Sudanese from their homelands.No, I don't think Bush is Hitler -- but I think I have a pretty good idea who Hitler's intellectual heirs are...
Human Rights Watch claims to have obtained proof that Sudan's government backed the Janjaweed militias responsible for the massacre - Khartoum denies supporting the militia. The United Nations estimates at least 30,000 have died and a million have fled their homes since the attacks began.
Monday, July 26, 2004
Overdue List -- No Loitering Allowed
"In particular, the official said, the commission found the FBI was not set up to collect intelligence domestically, in part because of civil liberties concerns." Scat. Move on!
"And he's so nuanced he's running not only as America's most famous war hero but also as America's most famous anti-war protester." Hike it! Now!
And a little test.
Today's Round-up
Fair and balanced BEEB? (With a bonus hat tip to Roger for the following Taheri link.)
Taheri and Ledeen. Must. Read. Now. A taste from Amir:
"Our struggle is not about land or water," the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini said in 1980. "It is about bringing, by force if necessary, the whole of mankind onto the right path."