This Hour's Installment of No Billionaire Populists!
Check out David Frum's thumping of Kerry the Common Man:

Together, John Kerry and John Edwards possess family fortunes totaling probably in the vicinity of $1 billion. If elected, John Kerry would be the richest president in American history, richer even than his hero John F. Kennedy. And unlike other rich men to seek the presidency--Ross Perot, Herbert Hoover, and so on--Kerry is the very opposite of a self-made man: He came by his money by marrying a woman who inherited it from her husband who in turn inherited it from his great-grandfather.

Yet the Kerry-Edwards campaign is audaciously presenting itself as a crusade against unearned wealth and privilege. As the saying goes: Only in America!

Perhaps conscious of the absurdity of the situation, Kerry has left the populist heavy lifting to his running mate, a man whose fortune is estimated in the mere double-digit millions.

Do try to keep this in mind the next time you hear either of these dopes spouting off about their concern for people living paycheck to paycheck. It's an embarrassment to reason. What the hell does Kerry know about such things?

The problem, of course, is that it doesn't matter to their supporters what these men are worth. They are graced by the one quality that money can't buy: neither man is George W. Bush. And that's all their supporters care about, which makes them a bunch of losers, too.

Cynthia McKinney Is a Jew-Hater
One of my favorite pi?atas at The Left Coaster has taken it upon himself to defend Cynthia McKinney against the charge of Judenhass. I guess that's a worthwhile goal if you are already somewhat suspect in your support of America, Israel, and the basic right of people to be free from the tyranny and disease of extremist Islam.

But I stand behind my characterization of this woman, who is very likely to regain the House seat she lost in 2002, because there is very little in her record that would suggest that she's not a Jew-hater.

See this article in the Atlanta Jewish Times or this post in the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. This article by John Fund in the OpinionJournal site of the Wall Street Journal is another good place to go to verify McKinney's hatred. Fund writes:

Ms. McKinney provided...proof of her lack of judgement by accepting campaign contributions from at least 18 donors who, in the words of the Washington Post, were "either officers of Muslim foundations under investigation by the FBI, have voiced support for Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist organizations or have made inflammatory statements about Jews."

On 28 November 2001, a letter written by a member of McKinney's staff, Raeed Tayeh, was published in The Hill. Tayeh, whose reputation as a piece of shit is certain, said:

"What is more disturbing to me is that many of these pro-Israeli lawmakers sit on the House International Relations Committee despite the obvious conflict of interest that their emotional attachments to Israel cause. The Israeli occupation of all territories must end, including Congress."

Yep. It's that old ZOG magic.

In April 2002, McKinney demonstrated her stupidity and Jew-hatred once again by denouncing Jewish terrorism carried out against Jenin. Along with the rest of the anti-Jewish Leftist press, McKinney had bought into the lie of a massacre at Jenin. Why? Because it's all the fashion to run down a Jewish government trying to defend itself. Never mind that there was no massacre at Jenin. Never mind the sovereign right of free people to defend themselves against subhuman garbage.

As we have seen, McKinney is not only a Jew-hater ---and the daughter of one--- but a friend of Islamist terrorism. Check out her list of current campaign contributors. Many of them are strongly aligned with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and CAIR. As Freerepublic.com notes:

McKinney has also accepted substantial donations from individuals linked to the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Benevolence International Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation -- three Muslim "charitable" organizations now labeled Specially Designated Global Terrorist entities by the U.S. Treasury Department.

It's not a mystery as to why these Mohammedan fascists would support a thorn in the side of the friends of Israel and the Jewish people.

Add to all of this McKinney's close ties to Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson, and it's easy to draw the conclusion that Cynthia McKinney is an enemy of Jews everywhere.

No Billionaire Populists!
Wanna get your blood boiling? Read this Weekly Standard article by Noemie Emery on the incredible wealth of John Forbes Kerry. The guy's been riding high for decades and doesn't deserve what he's got. I find his wealth especially obnoxious because he presumes to know what problems and concerns low-wage workers like me have ---and it's a crock of shit.

In 2003, Kerry's main source of personal income was the sale for $1,350,000 of a painting, part of which he "bought" seven years ago from his wife. (Nice work if you can get it.)

No billionaire populists in the White House!

Creepy
Mood:  smelly
I don't mean to be a jerk, probably, but Teresa Heinz is a creepy broad. I just get the worst possible vibe off of her. She's like Hillary Rodham Clinton without the charm ---and with many hundreds of times more money. You can just hear the cogs and wheels spinning in Heinz's head. She wants to change something somewhere and all the time.

Just say no to William and Mary.

A Broken Link to Restorehonesty.com?!
I don't know how this could have happened, but Ambassador Joe Wilson, who is a liar, has seen his restorehonesty.com page, bought and promoted by the Kerry campaign, pulled down.

See for yourself.

Insensitivity
It frustrates me deeply that Big Media has found yet another case of a missing ---presumably murdered--- expectant young mother to force down America's throat. Our culture of "news"-watchers gets swept up in irrelevance like the Laci Peterson Case and the Kobe Bryant Case and at least a half-dozen more at any given time ---and I cannot say why. It's obvious why Corporate News does it: because people take to it like they take to soap operas. It sells. And you know it must because, if it didn't, they wouldn't be running it.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is jack-off TV.

I would guess ---and that's all I'm going to do because I'd rather blow off some steam than go be Mr. Media Scholar right now--- that there isn't much more than 40 minutes out of every hour that is actual programming on any of the major cable news channels. And, of that, the ratio of actual factual reporting to fluff and puff can't be more than 1:5.

America could be better informed, but there's no money in it.

Let us, instead, watch the emotional carnage of people and families we will never personally know be strewn across our TVs. Let us ask the parents of a dead child what they are thinking or feeling. Let us speculate about the motivations of some sociopath and liar who has murdered his wife and unborn son and dumped them in the ocean. There is no relevance in any of this! You did not know them. You cannot help them. What they have done and are having done to them has no effect on you or anyone you know. So why do you insist on "sharing" in their grief and bringing it upon yourselves? What, are you fucking empaths?!

If I had known Lori Hacking, her death would be affecting me greatly. She appears to be a beautiful young woman whose future of motherhood and personal fulfillment now seems hopeless. But there is nothing I can do for her except to believe, in general, that she is entitled to dignity. As are her family and friends. The vultures who descend upon those people in their unimaginable grief and anxiety infuriate me. They are shit everlasting.

I refuse to watch garbage in my home. Insist upon as much for yourself. If Big Media wants to show its respect for you by providing some relevant news coverage and thoughtful analyses, that's great. That should be the ideal. But there is no surer way to get me to flip the channel than to show me goddamned Scott Peterson's mug and that creepy motif music that precedes his intrusion every time. It sickens me and I cannot wait for it to be done.

President Bush Speaks to the Urban League
President Bush gave a very solid and even provocative speech to the Urban League today in Detroit. He asked some excellent questions of Black America, most notably whether they think they have any political and social leverage when they allow their interests to be monopolized by one party.

The lies of his critics and enemies notwithstanding, George W. Bush knows the truth about race and culture in America. He's not a bigot or reformed racist like the old Southern Democrats who came into the desegregated world kicking and screaming, but is, instead, a man who has seen that the great mutual assimilator is economic prosperity. And with rising home ownership, a growing trend in small black-owned businesses, and the benefits of a more dignified approach to families working their way from welfare to independence finally being realized, Bush is every bit as "qualified" as the super-wealthy Kerrys to stand for continued black opportunity in America.

But what will the Democrats want to talk about when it comes to Bush? That he is against affirmative action. That he and his brother and the Florida State Police and the Ku Klux Klan disenfranchised a "million" black voters in the 2000 Elections. That he won't stand and take it off of Julian Bond and Kweisi Mfume. And I don't know what all else.

I'm sure that some very well-informed black liberal could rattle off a few dozen reasons why George W. Bush is bad for black America. And I don't know that I could refute many of them because I am not tuned into racial identity politics as much as I "should" be. But, for the life of me, I don't know how Bill Clinton can be so widely regarded by blacks as the "first black President" in any personal respect that doesn't invoke the very problems that black America has faced for so long: fatherlessness, domestic violence, childhood poverty, extramarital sex, the worship of instant gratification, etc. How does any of that make for a worthy model? In many ways, Bill Clinton turned his back on the Leftist solutions that Democrats had been force-feeding to Black America since the Great Society. But Black America overwhelmingly supports the man even now for reasons I think are sad and self-denigrating.

I'll say this much, anyway: Black America, in whatever segments of that mythically monolithic entity there may be, really should consider what value there is in remaining with a political party that banks on their loyalty without so much as a doubt. Cycle after cycle. The DNC knows they've got a 90-10 split practically every time out. Bush was right to ask them what advantage they think they have in persisting with that arrangement. Self-made men and women in the black community certainly have economic reasons to realign themselves. It's something worth thinking over, anyhow.

Giuliani for DCI
Here's a great argument for making America's Mayor our next Director of Central Intelligence. Wouldn't that be a shot heard round the world? I recommend announcing his nomination the day after the Democrats wrap up in Boston. Absolute deflation of a shit zeppelin.

Steyn Kicks the UN's Ass over Darfur
Mark Steyn is one of the best writers out there. Check out his ass-kicking of the UN and their celebritoid apologists in the matter of the genocide in the Sudan.

If we were serious about the plight of Sudan, we'd stop using that dully evasive word "humanitarian". It's fine for a hurricane or a drought, but not a genocide.

The death and dislocation in Sudan is a political crisis every step up the chain - from the blood-drenched militia to their patrons in Khartoum to their buddies in the African Union to the schemers and cynics at the UN. It's "multilateralism" that magnifies some nickel 'n' dime murder gangs into a global player.

Read the whole thing.

Fisking the New York Times
Greg Djerejian at the Belgravia Dispatch fisks today's New York Times story on Sandy Berger's outright thievery with, well, dispatch.

If the Times were your only news source for this huge story, you might believe that the biggest crime of all was not that Berger is a thief and a liar, but that the White House knew about it and said nothing. Harrumph! Imagine that. See, they should have had the common courtesy to leak it much earlier for the benefit of, uh, well, someone, certainly.

I don't care who leaked this thing. It is a huge scandal for several reasons. One, it speaks volumes about Berger's character and his arrogant disregard for the rules and laws governing Top Secret documents. Two, it strongly suggests that Berger pulled a major caper to somehow erase the past and help to exonerate the Clinton Administration. Three, it shows what lying idiots the would-be President Kerry has surrounded himself with to advise him on foreign policy. And four, it may even be that Berger was passing along information to the Kerrion. They need to be asked that question point-blank.

Fuck the New York Times for pretending that the real story is what and when the White House found out about berger's criminality. It's just incredibly dishonest.

By his own admission and on multiple occasions ---making nonsense of the inadvertence argument--- Sandy Berger stole highly-classified documents and dozens of pages of notes he made of those documents ---and then "accidentally" destroyed at least one of the drafts of the document he stole. And what was that document that he was so fucking interested in? The after-action review of his and his colleagues' response to the al-Qaeda threats and attempted bombings made on his watch. Are we really being asked to believe that his multiple thefts of documents and notes, multiple and serious abuses of the National Archives' rules, and destruction of those documents was mere "sloppiness"?

Absolute bullshit.

Dictator?
According to the New York Daily News:

Former national security adviser Sandy Berger repeatedly persuaded monitors assigned to watch him review top-secret documents to break the rules and leave him alone, sources said Wednesday.
Berger, accused of smuggling some of the secret files out of the National Archives, got the monitors out of the high-security room by telling them he had to make sensitive phone calls.

We needn't doubt it, either. Why not, in addition to stealing and destroying Top Secret documents, simply dictate their contents to an awaiting secretary or a voice mail box over your cell phone?

"He was supposed to be monitored at all times but kept asking the monitor to leave so he could make private calls," a senior law enforcement source told the Daily News.

Berger also took "lots of bathroom breaks" that aroused some suspicion, the source added. It is standard procedure to constantly monitor anyone with a security clearance who examines the type of code-word classified files stored in the underground archives vault.

The same archives monitors told the FBI Berger was observed stuffing his socks with handwritten notes about files he reviewed that were going to the Sept. 11 panel. It is prohibited to make notes about the secret files and leave with them without special approval.

The commie rat bastages in the Democratic Party would like for you to forget these outrageous actions from a former National Security Advisor, but don't. Berger is guilty of multiple counts of mishandling Top Secret codeword-classified documents. It is entirely possible that he destroyed original drafts containing notations that would have embarrassed him and his old boss.

Don't let Big Media bury this like a cat does its turds. And don't forget that Berger and Joe Wilson are closely linked to John Kerry's foreign policy. It is a slam against their party's nominee and the quality of his judgement.

Multiplicity
Byron York over at the National Review Online has an interesting piece on the growing Berger Scandal. And he suggests something rather important: why would Berger have taken ---accidentally, of course--- the same 15-page document on multiple visits? What was different about each of them? There must have been some sort of difference between the drafts of this same after-action report, else why take more than one?

[...A]lthough Berger said he reviewed thousands of pages, he apparently homed in on a single document: the so-called "after-action report" on the Clinton administration's handling of the millennium plot of 1999/2000. Berger is said to have taken multiple copies of the same paper. He is also said to have taken those copies on at least two different days. There have been no reports that he took any other documents, which suggests that his choice of papers was quite specific, and not the result of simple carelessness.

Everyone knows the first drafts are the rawest: full of first blushes and unrefined crude. Maybe even riddled with inconvenient notations and directions. So was Berger sent on a mission by Bill Clinton to revise or conceal their thoughts and deeds and stave off the questions of their mutual disregard for the war that al-Qaeda had declared upon us? I wouldn't doubt it.

The Quality of Murderers
I really must protest the appalling decline in the quality of the murderers in Iraq. Today, these "insurgents" have taken captive a half-dozen foreign truck-drivers, threatening to behead them if their home countries of Kenya, India, and Egypt don't withdraw their troops from Iraq.

The only problem is that none of these countries have troops in Iraq.

Maybe once the "insurgents" figure this out, they'll just settle for a ransom payment like the one they squeezed out of the Filipinos.

Idiots. The "insurgents," too, that is.

UPDATE: Now we hear that the murderers want all citizens ---and not the non-existent troops--- of these three countries to withdraw from Iraq. Right. I have a better idea. Why don't we just slaughter motherfuckers wholesale? That way, Iraq can be free to be what it should be, and garbage can be thrown away.

27 February 2004: Kerry Delivers Major Anti-Terrorism Speech at UCLA
As CNN reported on 27 February 2004:

Kerry's major public event today is a speech on terrorism and national security at UCLA at 1 p.m. ET. Two hours before that, the three wise men who helped craft Kerry's speech -- former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger, former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Kerry's foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers -- will hold a conference call to brief reporters on the speech.

In that speech, before the UCLA International Institute, Kerry stressed homeland security, including sea and airport vulnerabilities, that he believed the Bush Administration had not done enough about.

Finally, if we are going to be serious about the War on Terror, we need to be much more serious about homeland security. Today, fire departments only have enough radios for half their firefighters and almost two-thirds of firehouses are short-staffed. We should not be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in New York City. We need to put 100,000 more firefighters on duty and we need to restore the 100,000 police on our streets which I fought for and won in 1994 but which the Bush Administration has cut in budget after budget.

We need to provide public health labs with the basic expertise they need but now lack to respond to chemical or biological attack. We need new safeguards for our chemical and nuclear facilities.

And our ports - like the Port of Los Angeles - need new technology to screen the 95 percent of containers that now enter this country without any inspection at all. And we should accelerate the action plans agreed to in US-Canada and US-Mexico "smart border" accords while implementing new security measures for cross border bridges. President Bush says we can't afford to fund homeland security. I say we can't afford not to.

There's nothing in these excerpted remarks themselves that strikes me as particularly insightful, but at about the same time they were made, Berger already knew that he was being investigated by the FBI for stealing Top Secret documents dealing with just these issues. And it's certainly true that one of the strongest themes of the Democratic Party in bashing this President has been the insistence that he has not done enough to strengthen homeland security. It is a real talking point.

But why is that? With the possible exception of the big anthrax scare a couple years back, we have not had a terrorist attack on our own shores since the atrocities of 11 September 2001. Is this really because the Bush Administration has been chasing Old Shep and doing nothing ---or is it because we have been doing our job? It is a reasonable and responsible position to take that we could and should do even more to protect our infrastructure, but to hear it from the Democrats, we have been goofing off for almost three years. Not so. And the Chicken Littles are only leveling their criticisms in the hopes that they may be proven right. Is that, in itself, chickenshit?

All's fair in love and war, jackson.

As Good As It Gets
I will just state up front that this Berger case is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I could not be more pleased. It is an absolute bombshell.

According to ABC News (emphases mine):

The documents involved have been a key point of contention between the Clinton and Bush administrations on the question of who responded more forcefully to the threat of al-Qaida terrorism. Written by former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke, they discuss the 1999 plot to attack U.S. millennium celebrations and offer more than two dozen recommendations for improving the response to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

In his April 13 testimony to the Sept. 11 commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the review "warns the prior administration of a substantial al-Qaida network" in the United States. Ashcroft said it also recommends such things as using tougher visa and border controls and prosecutions of immigration violations and minor criminal charges to disrupt terror cells.

"These are the same aggressive, often-criticized law enforcement tactics that we have unleashed for 31 months to stop another al-Qaida attack," Ashcroft told the panel. He added that he never saw the documents before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The New York Times has this to add:

The report on the plot, according to a final version that was summarized in a staff report from the Sept. 11 commission earlier this year, concluded that American-led counterterrorism efforts "had not put too much of a dent" in Osama bin Laden's overseas network and that "sleeper cells" might have taken root in the United States.

Mr. Breuer [Berger's] lawyer, said Mr. Berger inadvertently put three or four versions of the report on the plots in a leather portfolio he had with him. "He had lots of papers, and the memos got caught up in the portfolio," he said. "It was an accident."

Mr. Berger also put in his jacket and pants pockets handwritten notes that he had made during his review of the documents, Mr. Breuer said.

And then the Houston Chronicle adds this:

Berger's handling of the documents -- stamped "codeword," the highest classification -- first came into question in October 2003 after he spent a series of eight- to 10-hour sessions poring over Clinton-era documents in the National Archives.

One Berger confidant said the former national security adviser took home both his own written notes from the sessions as well as copies of three of the highly classified documents -- against both archive regulations and secrecy laws. Berger quickly returned two of the documents last fall when staff at the National Archives questioned him about missing documents, they said.

A third document remains unaccounted for. After a search of Berger's home earlier this year, the FBI could not locate it and Berger contends that he inadvertently destroyed it.

Wait. It gets better.

Have Legs, Will Travel
The fun has only just begun with Bergergate or Pantsgate or whatever they're calling it. Too much, too rich. The Democrats are upset about the timing of this leak, but when is a good time to have revealed the fact that a former National Security Advisor stole Top Secret documents from the National Archives by stuffing them into his trousers?

Bill Clinton told the Denver Post, I think it was, that he knew about the investigation into Berger's theft months ago. Months ago?! Does that mean that Kerry, whom Berger was serving as an "informal" advisor, didn't know about it ---or did know about it and didn't care?

"Hello, Neil and Buzz..."
Have you ever watched tape of the original network broadcasts of the Moon Landing? I recall seeing quite a bit on the 30th anniversary and it just looked like it was from a different world. And it was. So primitive. So optimistic and full of awe. And Uncle Walter was not yet decrepit.

Of course, I hadn't yet made my world premiere 35 years ago this evening, so my memories necessarily come from seeing the Apollo XI Mission through documentaries and such. But it was interesting to see how television of the time saw it. And it seems like the whole world was watching and feeling unified ---for at least a moment.

Anyway, I remember the descent that Armstrong made from the LEM and how very frightened and anxious he seemed to me. Maybe I was just reading something into his behavior that was simply not there. But he went through quite a while of chattering and huffing and talking himself through it. That's my recollection. You won't see that in any news item today or in any documentary I can think of, but if you ever see the raw footage, it is some very human behavior.

And can you imagine being the very first human being who has ever walked on the face of another world?

I sometimes kid myself that the Moon Landings were such an important period in World History that we cannot yet see just how important or momentous it was. But now? I fear that humanity doesn't give a damn about the Next Big Thing. I fear we are condemned to being the small furry animals we are, but could be more than.

I never fail to remember what happened on this day because I hope it will someday be seen as a true birthday for celestial man.

O
Have I mentioned lately that the woman from the Overstock.com ads is The Most Incredible Woman Who Has Ever Lived?

Tenet Statement of 11 July 2003
Courtesy of Global Security, this is a link to the text of a statement issued by Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet last July. Below are some excerpts.

There was fragmentary intelligence gathered in late 2001 and early 2002 on the allegations of Saddam's efforts to obtain additional raw uranium from Africa, beyond the 550 metric tons already in Iraq.

[...]

[...]in the fall of 2002, our British colleagues told us they were planning to publish an unclassified dossier that mentioned reports of Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa. Because we viewed the reporting on such acquisition attempts to be inconclusive, we expressed reservations about its inclusion but our colleagues said they were confident in their reports and left it in their document.

[...]

In October [2002], the Intelligence Community (IC) produced a classified, 90 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's WMD programs. There is a lengthy section in which most agencies of the Intelligence Community judged that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Let me emphasize, the NIE's Key Judgments cited six reasons for this assessment; the African uranium issue was not one of them.

This is the statement in which Tenet said that the inclusion of the infamous "sixteen words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address regarding Great Britain's intelligence that Iraq had, in fact, attempted to purchase uranium from Niger, was a mistake. But it was only a mistake because it did not meet the CIA's standard of certainty, not because it was factually untrue to say that the British had evidence of such Iraqi activity.

We now know that the British were right. We now know that what the President said could have been said even more strongly. And we also know that the people who are trying to defend Joe Wilson are defending a liar with an axe to grind.

Iraq was trying to keep its nuclear weapons program alive. Remember that when you think it was a mistake for us to have invaded Iraq and removed Saddam.

Kerry's War against Intelligence
If you're not regularly reading the Kerry Spot at National Review Online, you really should. This is a post from yesterday (emphases mine):

More Kerry intelligence hijinks from AP:

Kerry said the intelligence needs to be improved so that the word of a U.S. president "is good enough for people across the world again."

The four-term Massachusetts senator said that nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, "this president has not taken action sufficient to fix the intelligence problems that have plagued us."

This from a candidate who proposed and voted to cut $1 billion from intelligence in 1994, one year after the first World Trade Center attack. Specifically, he proposed cutting that $1 billion from the budgets of the National Foreign Intelligence Program and from Tactical Intelligence, while freezing their budgets. (The amendment was soundly defeated.) Kerry sponsored a 1995 bill to trim intelligence spending by $1.5 billion over five years. A candidate who, back in his first unsuccessful run for Congress in 1970, promised to "almost eliminate CIA activity" if elected. Who asked, in 1997, "Now that [Cold War] struggle is over, why is it that our vast intelligence apparatus continues to grow?"

Republicans also recall that in 1995, Kerry voted to slash FBI funding by $80 million. "Kohl, D-Wis., amendment to add $80 million for social crime prevention programs and offset the cost by cutting FBI funding by an equal amount." (H.R. 2076, CQ Vote #480: Adopted 49-41: R 9-40; D 40-1, 9/29/95, Kerry Voted Yea)

Kerry's record is in dire need of being better explored by the electorate. People simply don't realize that this guy is a disaster waiting to happen to America's intelligence community. And why would that be? Because the only thing that most people know about him ---and stop me if you've heard of this rumor--- is that he served in Viet Nam. The Democrats figure, as they figured wrongly with the inexplicable candidacy of Wesley Clark, that a military record will trump all suspicions of softness on defense and intelligence spending.

Man. If people just knew what Kerry's racket was, they'd dump him like a cold potato.