"I want to die in a vegan world..."
Mood:  hungry
As you may know, my ongoing online dating situation has been the stuff of [legends]. I've managed to squeeze a few dates out of it, but it's basically sucked ass.

Yet, I think I may have touched the nadir of my experience this morning when I opened the profile on one match and the first words of this woman's narrative were "I want to die in a vegan world..."

I thought it might have been a parody of some kind, but no. It continued on in this vein for the rest of the profile.

Let's be clear: veganism is unnatural. Which means it's the practice of freaks and perverts. Man only exists because he eats animals and uses their byproducts. People who don't understand this are condemned to die unsatisfied and hungry. Piss on 'em.

If God exists, he'll send me a full-bodied, raven-haired wench who likes to eat meat.

Veganism! Jesus....

Endurance

About Frank Meziere's Murderer
I don't have any news on the status of the piece of shit who killed my family's friend, but I just came across what I guess is the most recent decision handed down in this case by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which was in June of last year. (It's a .pdf file, if that makes any difference to you.) Read it to get a sense of just what straws these suits will grasp at in the defense of the indefensible.

I expect to see the decision on the piece of shit's latest appeal in the next few weeks. His argument this time is that he is too mentally retarded to be executed.

Strange. Frank was too good a man to be murdered.

I'm gonna be there in Huntsville, cuz. I'm gonna smile when I hear they've stuck you in the arm.

Gulp.
If you don't know it, one of the best blogs anywhere is the Belmont Club ---and here's the evidence to prove it:

One day Ted Koppel will read, in addition to the names of American soldiers who died in Iraq, the names of friends who will have died in another attack on New York. One day Nicholas de Genovea, the Columbia professor who called for a "million Mogadishus" will understand that it means a billion dead Muslims. And then for the first time, perhaps, they will understand the horror of Abu Ghraib while we all raise our glasses, sardonically like Robert Graves, "with affection, to the men we used to be".

"I Think They Had Enough Today"
According to the New York Times, our boys are killing "scores" of insurgents in and around Karbala, Najaf, and Kufa. Right now. As we sit here and relax.

Outstanding work, gentlemen.

"I think they had enough today," Captain Adcock said of the insurgents as he chewed on a cigar after the battle on Friday. "They may get ready and go back tonight. But right now they've had enough."

And, as you might have expected, the giant circle-jerk that Big Media and the Leftist dhimmis are engaged in right now over the prisoner abuse scandal is being echoed in the mosques where al-Sadr is hiding:

"What kind of peace could come from you or your agents when you feel pleasure at torturing prisoners?" the 31-year-old cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, said to cheering supporters at his mosque in Kufa. "How are you going to control the world when you can't control a few soldiers here and there? If anyone did this to one of your people, would you accept it?"

What this stupid fuck fails to acknowledge is that the only thing keeping him from getting shredded to pieces by American soldiers is the fact that he's a pussy who hides in holy shrines and sends his men around with women and children to shield them from getting their tickets to paradise punched with a hole in their heads. Get it? The only thing keeping him alive is the American military's respect for those mosques and the innocent people who live around them. Take that from the equation and you've got several thousand dead towelheads inside of an afternoon.

Parodic Genius
Mood:  silly
The world's reaction to Bush's apology for the Iraqi prison abuse scandal, according to the Iowahawk News Service.

A Word from a Correspondent
Deep Blade writes to say:

If they raze Abu Ghraib, as even Rumsfeld didn't disagree should be done in testimony today, I'll begin to see the US rising above its Iraqi mass-grave-era client, Saddam Hussein. Whose idea was it to take Saddam's gulag and use it as a prison, anyway?

It's pretty ridiculous to say that, if the United States will just raze Abu Ghraib, you'll begin to see us as being better than Saddam. Did you mean to write that? We are obviously on a higher moral plane than that psychopath, and what we are doing to liberate the Iraqi people is a beautiful demonstration of the superiority of our system. They are free to speak, worship, associate, and purchase as they please. A huge step forward in just a year.

It may be of symbolic interest to tear down Abu Ghraib, but so would renovating it into a top-notch school or museum. The Iraqis should consider transforming such buildings into working monuments to the future, as well as the past.

But you're only riding this because it is perceived as a slam on the President. I think it's time for the Left to take a breath and read the facts. Nobody cared about the abuses when they were first reported months ago; they only care now because there's [pretty] pictures to look at and swoon over.

Sounds Great
At the NRO's Corner, Peter Robinson says that his friend, Stanford professor John McCarthy, has a great idea: encourage the new Iraqi government to sue Kofi Annan and the United Nations for their theft of billions of dollars from the Oil-for-Food program.

Heh, heh. Sweet.

Michael Moore, the Treasonous Jar of Rancid Smegma, Lied
The communist cocksuckers who enjoy his work will not care that Michael Moore lied about Disney refusing to distribute his upcoming [documentary]; in fact, it was all a stunt to generate some pre-Cannes publicity. But to make such an allegation should tell you something about the man's integrity and the sort of paranoiac horseshit he trades in (e.g., Disney didn't want to run afoul of the President's brother, the Governor of Florida, for fear of losing tax breaks on the Disney real estate down there). It's all lies meant to pollute the public trust. But his fans just love him for it. Especially the French.

Moore is a fucking liar and commie toad. Piss on him.

Interesting Priorities
Want a sense of just how weird the mentality of some people can be? Here's what Delaware's Senator Joe Biden said today, regarding the reaction of the Arab world to the prisoner abuse scandal:

"We probably would have done less damage to our image and our legitimacy and our motive had Iraqi prisoners been shot."

And you know what? That's probably true. There would probably be less fall-out had our guards actually murdered those men instead of sexually humiliating them.

Now, I'm a big believer in human dignity and I know I wouldn't want to be treated as those prisoners were. But I also believe that life is worth living and that you can overcome shame. Human beings are resilient. We all go through hell on Earth many times in our lives and, if we are mentally and emotionally strong enough, we can survive a lot of things we may think before we never could.

But murdering a defenseless man is less of a crime than stripping him of his clothes and sexually degrading him before strangers? I think that's weird. Of course, it's no weirder than this whole scandal, whereby a system of incredibly violent and widespread torture and murder practiced for decades by the former government is mitigated by an outburst of stupidity and criminality from a handful of prison guards. Go figure.

My Aunt Opal
While it's still her birthday, I want to remember to you my beloved Aunt Opal. Today would have been her 104th. She wanted to see her 100th, but she passed away after "only" 99 and a half years of life.

Opal Omino Jackson was the last of the six children born to Samuel Parker Jackson (1856-1941) and Mary Frances "Molly" Chapman (1861-1903). She was a native of Lawn, which is near Buffalo Gap, Texas (if it's even more than a memory now).

Opal was my Great-Grandmother Lula's baby sister. She and Uncle Dewey never had children of their own, but all of her nieces and nephews were accounted as such.

Opal had a low threshold for nonsense, but she was very playful and quick-witted. She loved all the usual old-fashioned card games and dominoes. And she observed the dignities of her age even down through a time that no longer stood on ceremony.

When I was younger, I was religiously devoted to my genealogy and I examined and cross-examined her many times for anything useful she might know. I am glad I did because much of what she told me about our family's past would undoubtedly have been lost to History had I not.

But, in the last many years of her life, I basically stopped asking her about the past. I did so because I knew that she didn't care to talk about it and that it was even somewhat painful. After all, she had outlived the great majority of the people closest to her. It was nothing she wanted to consider.

But it was easy enough to stop probing her for information because the best part of her was her. She was a hoot. You couldn't open a door for her that she wouldn't rather have opened for herself. And she was sly and hip in her sense of humor. Really. I genuinely enjoyed her company even more than what she could tell me.

Still, I loved her, too, because talking to her was making a connection with my deepest roots. Here was a woman who knew her own paternal grandmother very well ---until the age of 27. When she talked about Cornelia Gilbert (Coleman) Jackson, Opal was talking to me about the personality of my great-great-great-grandmother, a woman born in Mississippi in 1839. Can the beauty of such a thing be overstated?

Anyway, I just wanted you to know a few things about my Aunt Opal. She was a doll, as you can see.

Kerry on Israel
It doesn't really matter what Kerry's position on Israel is; he's got no chance of getting to the right of the President on Israel's security. I think the Jewish leadership in America knows full well who their best choice is for continuing the strong support we have for Israel. And it ain't Senator Waffles.

How to Scrape It off Your Shoes
This entire thing with the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the reactions to it is literally beyond my understanding.

But, first, we must say how horrified and disappointed we are with our people there. This is the Age of the Great Preface where no assertion or word of rhetoric may be ventured without those initial qualifications, lest we leave ourselves open to other serious charges.

So, I am angry with our military men and women at Abu Ghraib for abusing and humiliating those prisoners. I don't know whether those prisoners "had it coming to them," but it makes no difference. Our people should be above that. They should be professionals and conduct themselves honorably, efficiently, and with a more refined sense of political decorum than what was practiced there.

Our people at Abu Ghraib very obviously violated some important articles of the Geneva Conventions, which we profess to observe. And this will be used against us time after time in ways that we would rather not consider. We will be held out as hypocrites and as the lawless, heedless bullies our enemies and former allies have been saying we are.

But that is all the rope you get, motherfuckers.

It is an absolute perversion, both of intellect and morality, to even compare what a handful of stupid and sadistic US Army prison guards did to humiliate the prisoners under their charge with the countless crimes of torture and genocide perpetrated by Saddam, his sons, and their whole regime of psychopaths. But that is what's happening, anyway.

And why's this? Because the anti-war left and their idols who are fighting against a new Iraq and killing our boys in the process have found a perfect tool with which to bash us on the head. They can all join in and feel unified and vindicated against their common enemy, which is this Administration and our military. It doesn't matter that these same goddamned cowards couldn't have cared less about the brutality that Saddam visited upon his own people and his neighbors: what really matters in this fucked up and perverted world we live in is that the bodily humiliation of a handful of prisoners now trumps decades of Ba'athist horrors. Real horrors, you fucking perverts. The ones where whole villages are gassed and the families of troublemakers are rounded up and butchered. The ones where brides are snatched up from their own wedding ceremonies, raped, have their throats slit, and get dumped on the ground before their families.

I mean, is it really possible that a morally sane person would compare the sodomizing of a prisoner to the dozens of mass graves we have uncovered throughout Iraq? I sincerely do not understand this degree of perversion of sense and reason, unless it is caused by either or both of the following:

Those who would even think to compare the American military's abuses at Abu Ghraib with the atrocities of the Saddamite regime are either morally insane or Democrats.

It is also intellectually perverted to believe ---actually believe--- that Don Rumsfeld or Dick Myers or Ricardo Sanchez are somehow responsible for those guards' behavior. Sure, people can believe what they want about the chain of responsibility in bureaucratic hierarchies, but you don't sack the entire Pentagon in the middle of a war just to get a nice jump in the polls on the mythical-magical-unicornical "Arab street." Who gives a good goddamn what Mo thinks about anything? All I want from him is the promise to get a job, buy some American goods and services, and shut the fuck up. He can get mad about some guy being made to wear women's panties some other time. But, right now, we're trying to get that fucking place under control ---and what he likes or dislikes doesn't make a damn to me.

Abu Ghraib will go down as one of the most perverted episodes in the history of common sense. It is a scandal being driven entirely by the need of anti-war/anti-Bush Leftists and Buchananite isolationists to find some wedge to pound into this Administration and its war effort. There is no sane or just way to put what has been done to those prisoners above the enormity of the crimes of the regime we have now replaced. There simply isn't. Therefore, to suppose such a case can be made is to confirm to me that you are a degenerate hypocrite.

No Sleep Til November
Well, when even the Beastie Boys aren't down with you, what hope do you really have, Mr. President?

An Open (and Shut) Letter
Dear General Karpinski:---

Please shut the fuck up.

Love,

Toby

The Latest from the Cox & Forkum Gang

Unfit?
Some sort of a press conference has been scheduled today to publicize a letter signed by many of John Kerry's former commanders and shipmates in Viet Nam who all claim that he is unfit to be the Commander-in-Chief.

I am somewhat concerned because it's entirely possible that this will turn out to be an egregious overreach by a bunch of embittered old men. I, too, believe that Kerry's defeat is essential to our country's fight against the terrorists. But what we can't have is for this media event to fuel the old Bush-Cheney desertion/draft-dodging bullshit of the past few months.

It is a mistake ---both politically and morally--- for anyone to question Kerry's bravery and valor in battle.

I can only hope that the beef these men have with Kerry is with his efforts after the war. I maintain that Kerry is singularly qualified to speak his mind on any aspect of the Viet Nam War he wishes (as he was 35 years ago), but he must also answer to his contemporaries and to History. If he misrepresented the character of our military then to aggrandize himself politically, then he ought to stand tall. If he did and said things that were used against our country in Viet Nam, then he should step up and own them outright without equivocations.

John O'Neill is said to be one of the signatories to this letter to be introduced. He is the guy whom Kerry famously debated on The Dick Cavett Show back in 1970, I believe it was. This should be very interesting.

Who knew that wars never end?

The Spanish Tragedy Continues
Courtesy of Little Green Footballs, here's a story about the removal of a statue of St. James the Moor-Slayer from a church in Compostela de Santiago, Spain.

Why?

Among the reasons for the move is to avoid upsetting the "sensitivities of other ethnic groups".

The statue of St James "the Moor-slayer" is expected to be replaced by one depicting the calmer image of St James "the Pilgrim", by the same 18th century artist, Jose Gambino.

Dhimmis. The Spaniards are turning into a bunch of dhimmis.

If It Was So Damned Important...
Remember how important it was for the Kean Commission to talk to the President? Well, apparently, it wasn't too important for Bob Kerrey to listen. What a joke.

Moon River
Mood:  suave
The national media's been using this weekend's party barge mishap out at Hippie Hollow on Lake Travis to entertain us all ---and it's pretty funny. You heard what happened, right? The going theory is that too many of the [sight-seers] on board massed on one side of the boat, sinking it. Pathetic. I hope their camcorders are resting in Davy Jones' locker, the dumb wankers.