The PM Has Spoken
The Prime Minister of Great Britain has written a beautiful defense of the Coalition's liberation of Iraq.

How very fortunate we are to have a man of Churchillian courage on our side.

Clinton's Inaction towards the Bombing of the USS Cole
Mood:  special
If you think that Bill Clinton's White House was, as Dick Clarke suggests, tougher on terrorism than George W. Bush, then you're an asshole. But you're an asshole who should still read Thomas Galvin's fantastic article on the whole sorry episode.

All hail the power of the blogosphere!

$atan $ays: "Apologie$ Fir$t"
Mood:  don't ask
And to think I called Richard Clarke a whore! Maybe they can get Michael Moore to direct this shit.

Damn Straight
Here's a beautiful essay by Dave Kopel on the importance of the Battle of the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto.

I dare you not to get a little misty-eyed.

Here It Is
As provided by FOX News, here's the full text of the 6 August 2001 PDB:

Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997' has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [deleted text] service. An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [deleted text] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Ladin has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qa'ida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar' Abd aI-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

Portrait of the Memo as a Young Scan

The 411 on the PDB
Mood:  on fire
The White House apparently released that very mysterious and damaging Presidential Daily Briefing of 6 August 2001 about an hour ago ---and guess what? None of the news organizations have it up yet! Huh! What do you know about that? I mean, from what I've been told, these newsrooms are equipped with them newfangled computers and such, so what the fuck?

Reuters even has a photograph up of a computer screen in their offices with the memo on it, like a portrait of the memo as a very young e-mail attachment. What?! Are they fucking kidding?

No, what we're getting, instead of the text of a one and a half page memo, is these newspapers' paraphrasing and spinning it first. HEY! I can read it for myself, Mr. Pincus! Now print the goddamned memo and get out of the way!

UPDATE: Here's the Reuters story.

Absolutely Still
Mood:  quizzical
1800 CST: It's raining pretty hard here in Austin, Texas right now, and I just watched something very weird. My building abuts a large pasture where I can see about a dozen head of cattle. They are all basically grouped together, but they are standing absolutely still. I stood and waited for about five minutes for one of them to make some sort of movement at all, but nope. They are completely frozen in place. What the hell? Is that what they do when it rains? What a hoot.

Optical Illusion
Here's a really cool link to an optical illusion test.

Thanks to Jonah Goldberg at NRO.

The FBI Is Following Skilling
The thieving bastard Jeffrey Skilling (of Enron infamy) is losing his mind, running around drunk and accosting people in the street, insisting that they are FBI agents who are following him. Hmmm.

Am I the only one who thinks that this rectal probe is trying to lay down some sort of preemptive defense of mental illness? Not that he's not going to be going to Club Fed, anyway, but maybe he's trying to think of some way to excuse his fraudulent behavior. Oh, well. Just wanted to add to his humiliation. Thanks.

Apotheosis of the Victim
The ongoing prostitution of some of the survivors of the people killed in the atrocities of 11 September 2001 is nauseating. Hearing them applaud the rude and chickenshit provocations of the Dhimmicratic hacks on the Commission fills me with contempt. Do they think they're in the audience at the goddamned Jerry Springer Show?

The thing to remember is that many of these survivor-whores are being willfully exploited by Leftists and liberal media personalities, like the egotistical human pie-hole Chris Matthews. These people may wish to be pundits, but they are climbing over the bodies of their dead family members to do so, and all they are really doing is aiding and abetting the undermining of this President in a time of war.

Shame on them. And shame on Big Media for whoring out a bunch of emotionally-scarred people. They obviously lost more than I have ---on a personal level--- but the atrocities committed against our country on that awful day do not endow them with some proprietary claim on its memory.

A Cynical Desire
I'm pretty well in touch with my racial prejudices, so I don't think it's too patronizing or cynical to note that, as I watched Condoleezza Rice testify yesterday, I was hoping that there were a lot of young black women in this country who could look to her as an example worthy of their inspiration. Okay, so she's a conservative, but it's high time that Dr. du Bois' notion of a "talented tenth" move beyond the 90/10 split that the black community always makes between the Democratic and Republican parties. With great gains in their wealth and home ownership, as well as high-profile role models in every facet of America's public and commercial life, more of the black community should begin to shift towards support of the conservative ideology.

Kerry Won't Commit to Legalization of Marihuana
Why won't John Kerry explicitly advocate the decriminalization and full legalization of marihuana? He himself has smoked it, suggests he knows people who still do, and says he benignly neglected to go after personal users when he was a prosecutor. So why won't he step up and make a promise to push for decriminalization as President?

You know we're never going to see Bush do so, but Kerry could help himself immensely by showing some leadership on this issue and making the argument that we are wasting billions of dollars annually on stupid interdiction programs, the irredeemably destructive incarceration of America's youth, outrageous violations of our privacy and property, and the foolish misallocation of funds that could be used to stop the traffic in cocaine and heroin.

There are many dozens of sound arguments to be made for stopping the war on marihuana and LEGALIZING IT, not the least of which is that doing so will lead to increases in tax revenues, add jobs to the economy for people who like to take it easy, and start us down the road to real options on alternative fuels.

Pull your head out, Sen. Waffles, and campaign on a PRO-HEMP policy for America!

The Tao of Threat Assessments and Warnings
I've never really understood why Andy Warhol was so important, but he may have been on to something when he said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. And what I take from that is the principle that an excess of distinction inevitably leads to an indistinguishable mass. That is to say, if everyone is famous then no one is famous. Same goes for things like beauty and wealth: if everyone were equally beautiful (a dream of the national-socialists, or Nazis) or equally wealthy (a dream of the international-socialists, or the Democratic Party), then everyone would be reduced to a baseline of zero. The inherent quality of the distinction would be incoherent in itself.

In another context, consider the area of threat assessments and intelligence warnings. The various intelligence-gathering organs of our government and military generate these things around the clock, based on countless bits of information gleaned from countless different sources. Any one of these reports might be a dead-on prediction of some event yet to unfold. But how do you know which one that will be? The hardest job an administrator has, as Lee Hamilton suggested yesterday before the Kean Commission, is to know in what order of importance these assessments should be handled. They can't all be equally important, can they? You could, as has famous TV personality Richard Clarke, assert that any one of these assessments is "urgent" (rather than merely "important"), but that's in the way of semantics, really. You know: if everything were urgent, then maybe everything simply becomes important, which, Clarke would have us believe, is a euphemism for unimportant.

So what's the chief to do? Since it's not feasible or even possible to investigate every single scenario and know in advance the essential details of each, the person running the show must decide upon an agenda. Maybe this is arbitrary, but it is a necessity. The President and his advisers must focus on a given set of priorities because it is a first step. They must put certain things before others, for if they didn't, no plan would ever be executed.

For example, in the first months of 2001 (and surely before), the President was big on missile defense systems. He was thinking about China's and North Korea's ability to mess with us and our friends in South Korea and Taiwan. Almost sounds quaint now, doesn't it? Practically irrelevant. But not then (and, I would guess, it will lose its quaintness again someday). For, in fact, both China and North Korea were flexing their muscles and taking the new President's measure. Don't you remember Kim's blustering? Remember the big stand-off when the Chinese took down one of our spy planes? Big stuff then, but not so much now.

None of this, of course, means that the Bush Administration was ignorant of the threat of al-Qaeda. They knew that Osama was slowly pecking away at us and had been for years. But in the transition between Clinton and Bush, just how "urgently" was the threat communicated? And, even more "importantly," what had the Clinton White House done about the many terrorist attacks against us and our friends? Jack shit, basically. Some ill-timed and ill-directed cruise missiles is all. And Clinton had had years to get it all together when Bush had only about seven months. The inability or unwillingness of Democratic partisans to see the depth of their hypocrisy in condemning the one man while praising the other is all the reason I need to disrespect them as an organization. They are a disgrace to logic and fairness. And this is beyond dispute.

So, in the end, people need to remember that there are far more ways to screw something up than to get it right. Those who provide for our national security, as Dr. Rice said yesterday, have to be right all the time when a terrorist only has to be "right" once. The standard and the stakes are different. And they are orders of magnitude stricter and higher than anything us average joes will ever know.

You did a beautiful job yesterday, Dr. Rice. I am proud of you and, no matter what, History will exonerate you and this Administration for having the courage to do what must be done.

Steyn Rips Clarke a New One
We all know how Richard Clarke tried to save the world from the Cowboy from Crawford and lived to sell about it but, in a former life, he and Bill Clinton had their thumbs up each other's asses while the Hutu were slaughtering the Tutsi in Rwanda. Mark Steyn writes all about it. Enjoy.

And then ask yourself (with Haiti in mind, for instance) whether the CBC and other Dhimmis wouldn't be tearing down the house if the Tutsi genocide were happening now on Bush's watch. But, since it happened while Clinton and Clarke were in office, none of these worthless craphounds are going to remember that.

Music Sales Are Down and I Am Up
Is it true that music sales are down? Good. Are illegal internet downloads the reason? Probably, although there's some reason to believe that a lot of the music lifted off of P2P networks is either stuff that a person would never have bought in the first place if it hadn't been free, or makes for an introduction to little-known bands that can lead to ticket and merchandise sales later on.

The reason I don't care if file-swapping is cutting into record sales is the fact that most music these days is absolute fucking garbage. Labels that profit from and support the aural decay of degenerate black hoodlums who grunt and mumble about killin' bitches and hos and tappin' that ass and other such moogabble-jibble deserve to lose money on the deal. Both parties, as well as the shitlings who buy their product, are contributing to the decline of Western Civilization.

Something That Doesn't Get Mentioned Enough
Here's a worthwhile piece from that notorious turncoat Christopher Hitchens on the Iraqi links to al-Qaeda that Richard Clarke used to believe in before he had a book to sell.

But, in passing, he makes a remark that I don't think gets made often enough. We forget ---well, some of us do--- that one of the greatest shifts that occurred in American foreign policy in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 was our relationship with Pakistan. As Hitchens says:

An unnoticed benefit of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq is the extent to which both the Pakistani and Saudi oligarchies have been "turned" and their wings clipped.

It is true that our strange relationship to Saudi Arabia remains, by turns, inexplicable and unjustifiable, or obvious and pragmatic, but it is the dynamic we are in now with Pakistan that would have been nearly preposterous to consider before we were attacked. No contradiction with Saudi Arabia would surprise me, but it's a whole different level of weird being assisted as we are by Musharraf, who I say is a very brave man.

Events may again change that situation against us but, for now, the decisiveness of this President and the boldness of his vision in foreign policy has reshaped this world for the better.

Kerry in Milwaukee
Kerry's in Milwaukee right now, saying that, no matter what one may think about the war, we all have to support the troops. Yeah. But the very fact that he and other hypocrites like to take shelter in this sort of qualification only communicates their lack of support for the very purpose for which our men and women are there. How does that not undermine the support for the troops themselves? The two are inextricably linked, regardless of such gibbberish as what Kerry said.

No, Really...
Here's that quote from John Kerry to Bob Edwards on NPR yesterday:

Edwards: "President Bush says Sadr's defiance can't stand. What should the U.S. do?"

Kerry: "Well, ahh, huh, it's interesting to hear that, when they shut the newspaper that belongs to a legitimate voice in Iraq, and, well, let me change the term legitimate --when they shut a newspaper that belongs to a voice, because he has clearly taken on a far more radical tone in recent days, and aligned himself with both Hamas and Hezbollah, which is a sort of terrorist alignment, so it creates its own set of needs in order to deal with the possible future spread of terrorism. But at the same time, if it's unaccompanied by a broader set of moves to try and broaden our own base in Iraq, um, I just think it asks for great difficulties."

What a fucking dolt! Kerry's first instinct is to criticize the CPA for shutting down a newspaper that was explicitly instructing terrorists to go and kill Americans. He thinks that's a "legitimate voice"? Disgusting! His whole explanation is crap from start to finish.

And, now, this "legitimate voice" is riffing off of Turd Kennedy's analogy of Viet Nam to Iraq? Sympathizers. They're nothing but sympathizers. And the terrorists are listening to you, too, Senators. Maybe they're also talking to you. Hmmm. Was Muqtada al-Sadr one of the foreign leaders pulling for you in private, Senator Flip-Flop?

Cox and Forkum's "Mosquerade"