Batting a 1.000 Now Playing:Nutroots?: now with fifty percent more squirrel shit
Via Mr. Maguire, have a look at Mark Coffey's very efficient evisceration of some of the top Leftist bloggers, most especially Markos Moulitsas. From his "Nutroots? Manifesto":
1. It’s All About the Winning
“They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I’m not ideological at all,” Moulitsas told me, “I’m just all about winning.” - Washington Monthly, January/February ‘06
Combined record of political wins by Netroots candidates - 0 for 19
That's no lie. It's a documented fact that any candidate that Markos Moulitsas endorses is a shit magnet and a guaranteed loser.
But how can these even be moral victories? You know: considering their claimant.
"More interesting"
Let's see how many days pass before this finally gets onto the evening news. Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard reports on some of the newly-declassified documents we captured in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddamite Iraq:
SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group.
The fax comes from the vast collection of documents recovered in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. Up to this point, those materials have been kept from the American public. Now the proverbial dam has broken. On March 16, the U.S. government posted on the web 9 documents captured in Iraq, as well as 28 al Qaeda documents that had been released in February. Earlier last week, Foreign Affairs magazine published a lengthy article based on a review of 700 Iraqi documents by analysts with the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. Plans for the release of many more documents have been announced. And if the contents of the recently released materials and other documents obtained by The Weekly Standard are any indication, the discussion of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is about to get more interesting.
Things haven't really happened until the major networks and papers have signed off on them. For now, though, let us realize for ourselves that Saddam Hussein was, in fact, a terrorist sponsor. Many of us knew this already, but the evidence will have to sink in a little longer with the rest of the public. Maybe they can put two and two together and, in between their fixes of the latest Attractive White Couple Murder Mystery, acknowledge that the War for Iraq was a necessary endeavor.
Even if the poll numbers that they contribute to do not agree.
Corporate Shill Now Playing:some of that free hippie love, man.
Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz":
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends. I worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends, So oh! Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV? "Dialing for Dollars" is trying to find me, I wait for delivery each day until three, So oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV?
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town? I'm counting on you, lord, please don't let me down. Prove that you love me and buy the next round, Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town?
Everybody!
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends, I worked all my lifetime, no help from my friends, So oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
Bracketology Mood: vegas lucky
I've managed a pretty decent record thus far in the NCAA tournament, predicting 24 of the 32 first-round winners. That includes acing the entire Minneapolis regional bracket.
My Longhorns were underwhelming tonight, shall we say? They don't get past Duke. Hell, they'll be lucky to get past NC State.
I want to end my self-imposed quarantine tomorrow, though. Maybe go watch some basketball with other human beings.
Sleeping Around
A correspondent in New York writes with a link to a story in yesterday's paper about the death threats Ruth Bader Ginsburg and even Sandra Day O'Connor have received from certain people on the "irrational fringe" of political society. Apparently, my recent post about Ginsburg sleeping through arguments before the Supreme Court makes me part of that fringe. Hmmm...
Says the Associated Press:
Ginsburg revealed in a speech in South Africa last month that she and O'Connor were threatened a year ago by someone who called on the Internet for the immediate "patriotic" killing of the justices.
I don't advocate the assassination of any Supreme Court Justice and it's irresponsible of my correspondent to suggest that I am somehow responsible for death threats made anonymously on the Internet.
I stand behind everything I write with my own name, see.
In fact, if you Google up my name and John Cornyn's, the first match you see is me criticizing the Senator for his ignorant remarks about the threats against judges during the Schiavo Embarrassment last April.
Anyway, what's most interesting about Ginsburg's claim is where she made it: during a speech in South Africa. And what was the speech about? About how important it is that American courts incorporate the rulings of other nations' courts in their decisions.
She and Breyer are very big on this for some reason. Scalia is definitely opposed.
I don't see why we ought to internationalize our jurisprudence system. It may be that the global economy and the increasingly borderless world is taking us to that point, but I think it should be resisted. For Ginsburg and Breyer, the introduction of foreign law into our own courts' decisions is another means of undermining certain of our sentencing practices by the example of effete, quasi-socialist Old Europe; viz., capital punishment.
Never trust someone who can't see the moral right in executing evil criminals.
Fuck Tobacco
I have bronchitis. It makes me mad because not only do I not like being sick, but I have a hard time not disliking others who are always sick. It makes me very anxious. Like having to hang out with people of weak character: something bad is going to happen to us.
The bottom line is this: tobacco is the work of the Devil. Now, with the exception of a socially-puffed cigarette on Mardi Gras evening, I haven't smoked since mid-January. That's two months free of the addiction. In fact, if it weren't for my contemptuous lapse into that fucking habit back in November, I'd be working on something like a nine or ten-month span of freedom.
And I really do feel like I am free now. I don't know why I should ever light up a cigarette again.
My usual doctor ---a very pretty lady of South Asian extraction--- was not in yesterday, so an elderly gentleman doctor saw to me. I proudly claimed my cold turkey to him and he very dryly remarked that, although he was glad to know that I have given up smoking, it does not protect me against everything. Which is a wise way of telling me that I'll get no credit for that if I do not otherwise work for my own health.
"Russ Feingold is a traitor"
Should Howard Dean have sent me an e-mail tonight with that for a subject line?
Not very smart. Neither is this:
Agree or disagree with Russ Feingold's censure resolution, it is completely out of bounds to suggest that anyone demanding accountability is siding with terrorists. It is simply un-American to question the patriotism and loyalty of a Senator who wants the Congress to live up to its responsibility.
Sounds to me like Dean is dogged with unconscious conflicts over the wisdom of Feingold's resolution.
But as to the "responsibility" that the Senate has, Dean doesn't seem to be in as much doubt. He takes it for granted that censuring this President is what the Senate ought to be doing.
Basic Math
Russ Feingold's censure resolution against Bush was, in the words of the Senator himself, occasioned by the President's "low" poll numbers.
Whose poll numbers are these? CBS News'? I don't know. I don't know the methodology, either. But we all hear the numbers. Thirty-five percent? Maybe. Thirty-nine percent approval rating? Okay.
What do these numbers translate to? If they are an accurate reflection of the mood of the American People, then they are a landslide of electoral rejection. They are poisonous to the party and, if real, would be routinely driving the party to distance itself from him.
So how many United States Senators does this equal?
I mean...those numbers, you know. They're so low. So tantalizingly, synergistically, meretriciously, conspiratorially low.
And all you can scrape up off the Senate floor is Tom Harkin? That's one.
It's time for asshole liars to admit that those poll numbers are meaningless. They're the contrivance of Big Media and their asshole partisan friends who would like to see this President attacked more often by more kinds of people.
Catfight
Dissent-crusher and boring partisan whiner Duncan Black links to this post from John Aravosis on a recent New York Times article about Russ Feingold's call for censure of Bush the Younger.
Black doesn't really say anything, having become a macro-hack, so I'm not sure whether he stands with Aravosis' observation that the article
is simply absurd. As an election ploy, the Republicans want to declare all out the-sky-is-falling war against a straw-man, a going-nowhere-fast resolution offered by one single Senator, with barely any other Democratic support. It's all bull, but the GOP want to rally their base, and lying isn't past them, it's their standard operating procedure.
In fact, it's a lie to say that your average Democrat doesn't hate this President and would mind seeing him censured, at the very least.
Come to think of it, John Conyers has a lot of people signed up to impeach this President as soon as they get the chance. And Tom Harkin looks like he's a supporter of the censure resolution, so this stuff isn't without its proponents, you know.
Even if they are motivated more by poll numbers than by what is in the best interests of the American People.
Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make College Basketball Fans
I've never been accused of being an athlete, but I always take a great interest in the major sports playoffs, so long as they're the three natural American sports: football being chief among them, followed by basketball and baseball. I also love the high-end tennis tournaments, but that's mostly for the chicks.
So I'm a long-time lover of the NCAA "March Madness" Basketball Tournament. No doubt! I won't even pay attention during the regular season, saving up all my energy and interest for the three-week season that ends with the crowning of the new National Champion. I've got my brackets filled out and am looking forward to the action, which starts tomorrow.
I think this Ian O'Connor essay captures my feelings on the whole issue:
The tournament's greatest appeal isn't the Final Four, a forum for the usual superpower suspects. The first two rounds are better than the last two. Nowhere else in sports — outside of a Yankees-Angels series — can you find such a disparity in resources and talent, and yet such a remarkably rich history of little guys taking out big guys.
Princeton back-doors the defending champ, UCLA, into oblivion. Mouse McFadden and Cleveland State run circles around Bobby Knight and his Red Army from Bloomington. Hampton closes down Iowa State, and Bryce Drew of Valparaiso Laettnerizes Ole Miss.
These are mere ripples in a tidal wave of upsets that have made the tournament a coast-to-coast obsession. People who stumble upon a Duke-North Carolina game in February, and watch no other college basketball games all season, suddenly paint their faces, frame their brackets, and dive head first into the three-week orgy of sudden-death passion and make-or-break stakes.
It's all war by proxy, of course. But, in this instance, I always root for the little guys.
Unless the University of Texas is involved, in which case I say, crush the puny pretenders. Crush them all.
Johnson Grew His Hair Out Now Playing: "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" by the Beatles
One of my pet theories of History ---or, perhaps it's only a casual suspicion--- is that the victor adopts something of the vanquished. Maybe a lot of things. But he ---Uncle Sam, let's say--- always embraces some part of his enemies, like the extremist Muslims who are making the world hell for millions. We're going to take a few souvenirs and display them on our mantle because there isn't much left of Islam that I would want to see survive too much further into the future.
Therefore, I say that when Mo finally takes captive his fierce conqueror that we should all just ditch the necktie. Just be done with the stupid thing. Same goes for bowties, ascots, and bolos. These sartorial annoyances are just affectatious relics of the bourgeois conceit of having a clean shirt under that dirty and removable bib. Yep. You heard it here first, jackson: that fucking tie you've got wrapped around your neck with the thirteen loops started off in life some centuries ago as a bib on some Tuscan banker who didn't want to look like he couldn't afford to screw you on some business deal without the stains all down his chest.
It has run its course.
You know, some of those Muslim politicians dress pretty damned nattily ---and they don't need a stupid necktie. Hamid Karzai? You kidding me? Get the hell out of here. That guy is straight pimpin'.
I don't mean to be Amish about this, but come on. You can forget about neckties.
Strung Along
Read this column by Ralph Peters on the situation in Iraq and about how asshole Big Media reporters are misrepresenting what's going on there.
But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.
The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines.
To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other "boys" might lie and steal, our house-boy's a faithful servant.
I think it's brave of any American to go to Iraq these days, be he soldier or journalist. But what's unacceptable is distorting the picture there and foisting it on the American People. Just as with the Tet Offensive in January 1968 ---which was, in reality, a military disaster for the North Vietnamese--- it is possible that this generation of would-be Uncle Walters and David Brinkleys can negatively impact how the American People see our progress in Iraq.
Indeed, with our own troop losses steadily declining over the past several months, who else would be responsible for our inaccurate view of what's happening there?
"If it bleeds, it leads," certainly. But, now, it's more like, "If it bleeds, let's see how we can make it Chimperor McHitlerburton's fault."
Feingold's Symphony of Crickets
If Russ Feingold's so damned interested in censuring the President, is it because the poll numbers say that's the thing to do or is it because that's really what Feingold thinks should be done?
Nobody else has signed up so far as I know.
Censure is not a Constitutional prerogative of the United States Senate. It wasn't when Bill Clinton was busted for perjury and obstruction and it isn't when you don't like how Bush the Younger is waging the war against the Islamofascists.
Because censure is not necessarily a collective judgement, there's no particular reason why the President could not himself pass censure on some other branch of the Government, is there?
If you want to try impeachment, Russ, make your case. Impeachment begins ---and ends--- as a political movement. Is the utter lack of concurrence you've had the past few days some indication of where the public stands on this President? My guess is yes.
Claiming an Immoral Victory
Islamofascist murderers destroyed the Golden Mosque. You can call them that or call them al-Qaedists, but it doesn't matter, anyway, because they are Sunni fundamentalists ---like most Muslim psychopaths are--- and they destroyed a sacred Shiite shrine. And they did it because they want to see internecine strife in Iraq. They want to start a civil war.
It wasn't Iraqi Sunnis who did this thing, though; it was foreign al-Qaedists who are there in Iraq to do murder and sow mayhem. These monsters have no real loyalty to anything but their own perversions, so it's nothing to them to work to destroy Iraqi society and to violently reject the American ideology of democracy and free societies.
But I keep wondering why the Bush-haters want to see civil war in Iraq. Is that all a civil war means to them? A rebuke to the policies of this President? That's pretty cold. But it rings true.
Weisenheimer
My junior United States Senator ---who isn't a degenerate alcoholic who never had to work a day in his life--- has a smart-assed three-part counter going at his site, tracking for us the real consequences of Russ Feingold's stupid censure motion against the President.
Stupid, Sorry Bastards Mood: don't ask Now Playing:feeling slightly ill, more than a little pissed off
I understand that this is the least discreet thing I've done in several days, but I really want to say, as a citizen and as a person who has had personal dealings with the Transporation Security Administration, that the imbecilic lawyer they got on the Moussaoui case is a fucking idiot and that their whole stupid agency should go fuck itself. Got that down?
They say that Moussaoui laughed as he left the courtroom yesterday, quipping that the "show must go on."
Goddammit!
These medieval-minded, violently anti-democratic and anti-women Islamofascist murderers are watching this fucking nonsense and are laughing at us. Such fucking dhimmis to hang themelves like that at the moment of truth, they must be thinking.
Tell me, Mr. Necktie: did you hire Carla Martin because of some quota? I hear that's how y'all operate. Maybe if you hired attorneys and "department heads" based on their merits rather than their genitalia, you wouldn't hire ones that don't know how to follow a judge's instructions, you stupid bureaucratic shitbags.
Harbingers of Doom Now Playing:toutatis, strike!
Since our Big Media organs are such goddamned experts on civil war in Iraq, one would expect them to be able to explain what constitutes a civil war there. So what is it? An increase in the murder rate? Pitched battles? A declaration of war or a vote of secession?
Maybe civil war in Iraq ---for us as consumers of commercial news--- is as real as the insistence that it is. And who benefits from that? The enemies of this country. The detractors of our leadership. The profiteers.
Where is the civil war? Who do I have to see about this?
Bravery, Thy Name Is Woman Mood: special Now Playing:the 96th thesis
I listened to a clip of this woman a couple weeks ago and am pleased to see that her profile is rising in the world. From the New York Times:
LOS ANGELES, March 10 — Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.
Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.
In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.
She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.
This woman is a true heroine. The kind that all right-thinking American liberals of either party should be able to stand together in unity to applaud.
As Dr. Sultan feels betrayed by the practice of her native religion, I must confess that I feel something similar for those of my fellow Americans who cannot get past their disapproval of the war for Iraq and against Islamofascism to unambiguously and explicitly recognize the importance of this woman's moment of Lutheran defiance.
Avail yourself of this story, as well as the links to be found at All Things Beautiful, where this story, according to Tom Maguire, really took off in the blogosphere.
(Accompanying photo by J. Emilio Flores for the New York Times. Thanks also to Tom Maguire.)
vegas lucky
don't ask
special
This woman is a true heroine. The kind that all right-thinking American liberals of either party should be able to stand together in unity to applaud.