Antiquing

HAMLET To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

HORATIO 'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

HAMLET No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!

After a pleasant lunch yesterday with my Momma, I decided to stop by and check out some of the antique shops on South Congress Avenue. There's a whole row of them there where fashionable people go to waste money and be kitschy.

The last one I went into was a huge warehouse full of everything from 50's-era ashtrays, radios, and blenders to vintage clothing, funky lamps, and John F. Kennedy memorial busts. I don't know who runs the place, but they have a real sense of decor in how they've arranged all those tens of thousands of items into some sort of thematic flow. It is a very interesting place to spend a half-hour or so.

But what sent me away with a profound sadness that had overcome even my fascination was the sense that I had just walked through a house of death. What thing in there hadn't been a part of someone's life that had survived them? Every particle of that detritus ---now sporting price tags and fancily arrayed across every available surface--- had been made or bought or received with some, maybe nobler, purpose in mind than to what it was reduced to now, which was nothing but to be a commodity to decorate some systems analyst's condo.

It was depressing. Especially the baskets and buckets full of many hundreds, maybe thousands, of black and white photos. There were even some tintypes laid out. How could these things have ever come to such a sorry state? I went through some of them, looking into the eyes of anonymous people who lived in those captured moments 50, 60, 70 years before me now. And I turned them over: no names, no clues. Why were those images now a part of some mouldering, unidentifiable pile? How could they have been let go? Did no one think enough to save them?

We cannot keep the past intact forever, that's true. But the truth of that has never made what we do to forget it any less painful.

Six Hundred Barrels of Plaster
Here's Richard Byrne's new profile and review of Stephen Greenblatt and his new biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Although my ardor for things Shakespearean has cooled lately, it's always interesting to see how full of shit the orthodoxy is about the Bard. To wit:

Literary sleuths have proposed a number of eminent Elizabethans -- including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, and Queen Elizabeth I herself -- as the true author of the plays and verse. To this day, news media stoke this controversy, in spite of a virtually unanimous chorus of literary scholars who dismiss the so-called "authorship question" as nonsense.

"No serious person who is engaged in the historical record can have any doubt" that William Shakespeare wrote the works published under his name, says Mr. Greenblatt. "He was famous in his lifetime for writing them. It would have required a literally unbelievable conspiracy to pass these plays off as his when they were someone else's."

And, yet, "serious people" (i.e., know-it-all shills employed by major universities and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, among others) are always having to answer Those Pesky Questions. That wouldn't be because they're valid questions, of course.

And, in the course of this review, Byrne manages to mention several of the problems with how Shakespeare is understood by the mainstream academics, but without little sense of irony or circumspection:

In Will in the World, Mr. Greenblatt's creative suppositions about Shakespeare's life often win out over certainty. Anecdote and coincidence mix easily into his narrative, which also draws heavily on a close reading of the works for clues about the writer.

Well, we're often told that "close readings" (i.e., looking for autobiographical clues in the works themselves) are to be avoided, lest subjectivism creep too far into our cold interpretations. Yet, stylometry (which I hold is a form of autobiographical revelation) is at once defended by these orthodox Stratfordians if they think it will make the case for their latest lost (and found) work by Shakespeare.

Thus far, it's been a flop.

Just remember what Mark Twain once said of Shakespeare: "He is a brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster."

A Bone for the Craphounds to Gnaw On
Now Playing: "Two of Us" by the Beatles
Think that the Patriot Act is the Gestapo bible? Well, then you may just be stupid enough to be a Kerry supporter. But if you want to know the truth of the matter, read what Deroy Murdock has to say about it.

Civil-libertarian purists [...] see the Patriot Act as the birth certificate of an American police state. But the Justice Department's inspector general found only 17 Patriot Act-related complaints through December 2003 that merited investigation and substantial review. That's a rather low error rate, given millions of contacts over two years between Justice employees and average citizens.

It would also be important to remember that John Kerry (and his running mate, whose name escapes me just now) voted for the Patriot Act. In fact, Kerry even wrote part of it. Did you know that? Keep that in mind the next time you hear Kerry talk about what an awful, rights-stealing instrument of our civic destruction that law is.

After all, you wouldn't support a man who voted for something and then spent all of his time acting as though he never had, would you?

Hayba
Read this important essay ("The Battle for Iraq") by Reuel Marc Gerecht in the latest Weekly Standard. It strikes me as a realistic, sometimes pessimistic, but ultimately affirmative view of what we have done in Iraq thus far.

Gerecht plainly states that Fallujah was a thorough defeat for us, but he is hopeful that we can retake the ground we've lost in the Sunni heartland. Indeed, this essay stresses, more than maybe any other I've read, the fundamentalist Sunni factor at work in the violence our men are faced with today.

But I liked this advice (emphasis added):

The president should transport all the Marines he can to Iraq, and then take and hold the centers of the Sunni insurrection, starting with Falluja. The administration shouldn't fear the Arabic satellite TV networks' broadcasting the horrors of the American offensive. Bin Ladenism grew by preaching the gospel of American weakness, not strength. The Ottoman empire, the greatest of Islam's holy-warrior states, attracted vastly more jihadists from its realms and beyond when it had Europe's Christian kingdoms on the run. If the Americans win--and win we will--these TV networks will not be able to camouflage defeat.

I certainly hope (and if I could pray, I'd do that, too) that Samarra will prove a success that we can build on. Iraq needs to have a sense of its own power ---and they need to come to see us more as the guarantor of that power, rather than some usurper.

Kerry Lied to You
John Kerry, during last week's debate with the President:

Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror before the president invaded it.

Ah. Another person, I see, who bought a copy of the 9/11 Report but never read it.

As a matter of fact, Saddam was himself a terrorist, as were his sons and the great bulk of his Ba'athist regime. Iraq was a safe haven for many of the world's most notorious terrorists, including Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abdul Yasin, the guy who mixed the chemicals used in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Read Debra Burlingame's column in today's Wall Street Journal:

The commission further reported that terrorist training camps, now eliminated by the coalition forces of Operation Iraqi Freedom, were set up in Northern Iraq with bin Laden's help. Al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was given safe haven by Saddam Hussein after he fled Afghanistan. It is Zarqawi, a chemical weapons expert, who is believed to be the leading force behind Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist organization bin Laden assisted in founding several years ago and which is carrying out beheadings and suicide bombings in Iraq today.

Got that? Iraq was full of terrorists before we ever invaded. They were there at the invitation or, at the very least, with the knowledge of Saddam and his secret state police and intelligence services.

Remember, kids: the Dhimmicrats have a vested interest in keeping the fact of terrorism and the War for Iraq separate. Because, as long as they can keep them apart, many people will continue to believe Kerry's and their lie that this war is a "grand diversion."

We can't afford to listen to these sell-outs.

Down with the Moo-lahs
Even as we enjoy this lazy Saturday, Iran is coming apart at the seams. The kids there are getting rounded up and hanged and the mullahs are facing down a democratic revolution. As Jonah Goldberg says:

The only way Iranian regime change will ever come about is if we - Americans, Europeans, the West - want it to. By ignoring the story, the press is in effect lending its support to the corrupt theocrats ruling Iran. One can't help but think this story is particularly inconvenient to those who think no good could ever come, even as a partial result, of the president's foreign policy.

Do you suppose we have something to do with what's happening in Iran? The mullahs have done a lot these past several months to piss us and the British off. And now they're pumping up the volume on this nuclear reactor stuff? The younger people in Iran don't want to pay the price if we or Israel have to come and blast their nuclear sites off the face of the Earth; they want music and computers and Hollywood. I'll bet they'd like to go to schools and learn from more than one book, too. Maybe even vote or speak their mind or not get down on their knees.

Can you imagine the incredible disappointment among Iran's younger generation if Kerry gets into the White House? The fucking guy actually wants to give the mullahs the materials to use in a light-water reactor and hope they don't try to reprocess the fuel for use in a bomb. What a maroon. What a fucking maroon. Right, John. Give these nutjobs the means by which they can keep their hold on power even more firmly. Idiot.

Pale Ridden
Now Playing: "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M.
Citizen Smash at the IndePundit has an opinion about Kerry's chickenshit observation last night that President Bush let Osama get away when we had him "cornered" in Tora Bora because we "outsourced" the job to the locals.

The only military alternative to this plan would have been a massive invasion of Afghanistan with several heavy divisions. Of course, these divisions would have had to get to Afghanistan by coming ashore in Pakistan and driving through the ungoverned (and largely hostile) Tribal Areas, where the Pakistani army wouldn't even go. In any event, it would have taken several more months for these forces to arrive in theater - plenty of time for the terrorists to dig in and prepare for the fight.

Does anyone see any problems with this plan? It seems to me that the Russians tried this approach a while back, and the British before them. Both got their asses handed to them. Nevertheless, I'm sure that the Pentagon presented this option to Bush, with all of the caveats above. In my judgement, Bush was right to reject this plan, and go instead with the "outsourcing" approach.

Besides which, we still don't know that we didn't kill Osama back in Tora Bora. I am in a small minority of people who thinks we did. There have been prime opportunities for him to make an unmistakable reappearance ---and he has not. Not on any anniversary of the atrocities of 11 September 2001, not after Zapatero's victory in Spain, not once in the year and a half we've been in Iraq, not ever.

If Osama bin Laden is alive, he will make his reappearance at some point this month. If not, he is dead. Period. Because, no matter how offended the fucking Democrats are at the suggestion that the al-Qaedists want their man to win, they do. And if poking his head up now is a poke in the eye of the foremost representative of the Great Satan, then that's what will happen.

Samarra
Mood:  special
Early this morning, while we slept, our fighting men were exterminating a hundred or more cockroaches in Samarra. And, with a big tip of my Stetson to The Commissar, I recommend you to his post, with a title taken from Somerset Maugham: "Appointment in Samarra."

Do read it.

Covered in Glory
Below is what Hugh Hewitt had to say in response to Kerry's nuclear-freeze talk from last night (no specific hyperlink available):

KERRY: "Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense.

You talk about mixed messages. We're telling other people, "You can't have nuclear weapons," but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using.

Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down, and we're going to make it clear to the world we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation."

Hewitt says:

This [...] may be the most astonishing part of Kerry's presentation last night, an authentic moment for the nuclear-freeze favoring, weapons-system hating Senator with 20 years of anti-military votes in the Congress. Kerry's voice actually rose with outrage when he said "[t]he United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons." "It doesn't make sense," he exclaimed.

How I wish Jim Lehrer had asked him why not. Then the authentic Kerry would have responded on the dangers of American power and American unilateralism. Notice Kerry's dismissiveness of the prospect of even using nuclear bunker busters. Does he prefer that a president of the future not have that option when confronted with a rogue nation threatening us or an ally but whose command and control facilities are buried deep in mountains or below a mile of concrete? Kerry states simply that seriousness about containing nuclear prolfieration begins with "shutting down" American weapons development. This is profoundly at odds with mainstream American defense thinking. It is a radical position, and Kerry is a radical candidate. Kerry expresses amazement that anyone can believe that America can say nukes for us but not for others, but America has been saying that since the dawn of the nuclear era, and must continue to say so. Follow Kerry's logic, and it is the iron logic of unilateral disarmament.

Who is Kerry trying to appeal to with this? The hard, anti-nuke Left? He's fluent in their tongue ---as I am not--- but is it still enough these days to simply mouth one's opposition to new nuclear weapons development here at home? Is that even a thing anymore? I thought that band broke up years ago.

Or maybe Kerry's not as attuned to that segment as he thinks. If you were a nuclear-freeze or plain old anti-nuclear activist 20 years ago, then you are probably just a garden variety anti-Iraq War critic today. Does Kerry suppose that it's enough to emphatically oppose bunker-buster nukes so that the old activists will not notice that he's still committed to winning the war in Iraq?

Oh, who cares? He looks so Presidential!

Kerry on the Bomb
One of the most emphatic points Kerry made in the debate last night was on his opposition to our own "bunker-buster" nuclear bomb development. But why is that so important? Why stand there and denounce a weapon that we may need some day?

Kerry's reasoning tells you something: he doesn't believe in American exceptionalism. He would rather be perceived as fair on the question of which countries should own the Bomb than acknowledge that there are fundamental differences between those that hold them as a constant deterrent ---and a last resort--- and those that seek them as offensive weapons to destroy the Judeo-Christian West. That is an intellectual conceit and not a reaffirmation of our special place in the world.

Even such rotten and amoral bodies as the United Nations and the IAEA have somehow come to the conclusion that certain countries, if it can be helped, should not own nuclear weapons. That is why they go in for sanctions and resolutions and inspection regimes: because even they know that a nutjob of a country like Iran shouldn't have the ability to vaporize Tel Aviv.

The underlying assumption that this is right is so unquestionable that it passes by unnoticed. Some countries and cultures can be trusted to deploy the Bomb only under the most dire of circumstances; others cannot.

Therefore, Kerry's strange insistence on this point last night strikes me as a little too "international." Once again, it is the opinion of the European elites he cherishes most ---not that of the average American. The average American knows that our military strength and our drive to keep the Soviets in check throughout the Cold War finally resulted in our triumph. The Soviets hated the idea that we were working on SDI and that we had deployed missiles in Western Europe and that our technology was far outstripping theirs. But if someone like John Kerry had been in charge, there would have been freezes and slashed budgets and very few points of leverage to help us take command.

It wasn't the nuclear freeze crowd that won the Cold War. John Kerry was a part of that and his old ways flared up again last night like a bad case of herpes.

Preliminary Verdict?
Sounds like Kerry did better than expected. Sounds like Bush continues to be an unscintillating public speaker. Also sounds like Kerry keeps saying the same stupid shit over and over. Not that Bush was any better during his time at the Department of Redundancy Department, but at least he didn't suggest that we should submit our sovereignty to the UN or the International Court.

And how is it that Kerry can be for American "unilateralism" in North Korea but be opposed to what he mistakenly believes is unilateralism elsewhere? Kerry's position is the same as Kim's, for Christ's sake! Kim and Kerry both want us to engage North Korea alone. Now, if that's a misstatement of Kerry's actual position, then he must concede that George W. Bush is, in fact, engaging in multilateral talks with North Korea. It's called sexpartite diplomacy and it necessarily involves other allies and neighbors next door the the Kimchi Pot. It's smart to hold out for it, as Bush has done, and defeatist to demand that we pull another Albright out of our ass, as Kerry would like to see, just for the sake of appearing to make progress.

Listening to the Debate
I'm listening to the debate online and it sounds like they're both kinda nervous. God knows I'd be nervous, knowing that tens of millions of people are inspecting my every word and expression.

But Kerry is simply unable to come off the "allies" bullshit. What is he thinking of? Why won't people call him on this nonsense?

Overdraft
Courtesy of the Power Line, please check this page at FactCheck.org concerning the anti-war Left's inflammatory hoax about a secret Bush Administration plan to reinstate the draft. Long story short: it's all bullshit. Every bit of it.

I'm tired of liars, man. It's really wearing on me.

What the Hell Is He Saying?
I didn't see his appearance on ABC's Good Morning America today, but John Kerry sounds like an utter dolt. Is this just a bad transcript? (Emphasis mine)

Asked about a report in the Financial Times that the foreign minister of France said that they have no plan to send troops to Iraq in a Kerry administration, Kerry said, "Well, first of all I've never said that I expect France or Germany to put troops on the ground, but there are plenty of things that they can do & it depends on the relationships. Secondly, I'd never expect them to say that now while a sitting president is there. No diplomat in no country and no government's going to do that."

As I explained to you yesterday ---as if you didn't know it already--- Kerry is either lying his ass off or completely delusional on the issue of Franco-German involvement in Iraq. Those are your two choices. He says here that he never meant for Chiraq or Schroeder to supply troops, but what else has he meant that they should do? They are absolutely opposed to the war, so they're not about to give us money, right? And they aren't going to help train Iraqi police or soldiers in theirs or a neutral country because that would invite the jihadists to attack them as collaborators or ---gosh--- the allies to us they supposedly are. So, again, what the hell is Kerry saying? I think he's just lying, but he could be as crazy as his spouse.

As for the rest of the quote above, I literally don't understand what Kerry means. Is he suggesting that Chiraq and Schroeder are biding their time until Kerry gets elected, at which point they will reverse their policies? Who knows? It's all gibberish and always has been.

An Unmixed Message
Check out this article in the International Herald Tribune and tell me that Kerry isn't a totally deluded man (emphases added):

A participant on the sidelines of talks in Berlin between Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and Richard Holbrooke, a would-be secretary of state in a John Kerry presidency, told a story about the meeting and the theme of how a Kerry-friendly Europe would leap to America's aid in bringing stability to Iraq. (Or maybe hide under the bed.)

"Schroder," the American said, "asked Holbrooke what Kerry would do if he were elected. Holbrooke replied one of the first things would be to get on the phone and invite him and President Jacques Chirac to the White House. The chancellor laughed out loud. Then he said, 'That's what I was afraid of.'"

The participant recalled the moment as very jolly. Everybody in the chancellor's office, including Holbrooke, a former ambassador to Germany, joined in the chuckles.

And since Holbrooke happens to know Kerry, you'd think that he would have told him by now that Schroeder and Chiraq aren't interested in his [diplomacy]. Right? So that right there is prime facie evidence that Kerry is lying through his teeth. He knows he's not getting the Germans' or the French's help.

That was in June, when the subject was still handled elliptically. Early in September, a German official, asked privately by a visitor if Kerry's claim of good relations with Europe could get him a German military presence in Iraq, stifled a guffaw; an explicit response, but wordless, and difficult to transcribe.

But last week, just after Kerry's major speech on the war in which he insisted that the United States "must make Iraq the world's responsibility" and that others "should share the burden," Schroder's sense of courtesy collided with reality and he drove a spike into the notion. He told reporters, "We won't send any German soldiers to Iraq, and that's where it's going to remain."

Clear enough for you, Senator?

For many Europeans, the problem in making sense of Kerry's speech was not Schroder's rather predictable reply, but how much delusion or candor there was in the Democrat's campaign promise to enlist countries opposed to the war to bail out the United States militarily. Add to that the candidate's linked idea of leveraging a notional European military presence into a pullout by some American troops as early as next summer. It seemed enough to make Kerry's continental friends cringe.

There's no way President Bush is going to bring this up, but folks have got to know how delusional (or dishonest) Kerry is on this.

Turd Kennedy Floats Again
Ted Kennedy ---a man whose only two qualifications to be a United States Senator were his facial resemblance to his older brothers and the money his Nazi-sympathizer of a father made from breaking the law--- is on the campaign trail as a surrogate for the extremely, and equally, unlikeable John Kerry.

Yesterday, this loathsome turd of a boghopper surfaced to read a speech to an assembly at George Washington University in which he claimed that the President's War for Iraq has made our country more vulnerable to a nuclear attack from al-Qaeda. (Emphases mine throughout.)

The President's handling of the war has been a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance, and stubborn ideology. No amount of Presidential rhetoric or preposterous campaign spin can conceal the truth about the steady downward spiral in our national security since President Bush made the decision to go to war in Iraq. If this election is decided on the question of whether America is safer because of President George Bush, John Kerry will win in a landslide.

Enough time has now passed to make us sure of that verdict, beyond any reasonable doubt.

Right. Because in the space of three short years, George W. Bush has only begun an epoch-making transformation of the Muslim world by ridding it of two of its most brutal dictatorships; creating major realignments between us and Pakistan, Libya, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula; killing or capturing thousands of terrorists and terrorist-sympathizers; and starting 50 million people on a path to democratic government. The President has also agreed to many new and far-reaching domestic changes in transportation security, law enforcement, and intelligence-gathering.

And we are less safe? Has Chappaquiddick Ted heard of another al-Qaedist attack on our shores in the past three years?

We all know that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. We've known it for more than 20 years. We're proud, very proud, of our troops for their extraordinary and swift success in removing Saddam from power. But as we also now know beyond doubt, he did not pose the kind of immediate threat to our national security that could possibly justify a unilateral, preventive war without the broad support of the international community. There was no reason whatsoever to go to war when we did, in the way we did, and for the false reasons we were given.

Does this rummy ever not lie? I guess it's to show how respectful the Kerrion are of our allies (and how much more "competent" they'll be at diplomacy once they're in) that they persistently refer to the War for Iraq as a "unilateral" war. In case you're a Democrat, that means that Kerry and Kennedy think that we are in Iraq alone ---and not with such "bribed and coerced" lackeys as Great Britian, Poland, Australia, and Italy.

But get another load of what Kennedy's saying: he is absolutely certain that our intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass murder was wrong. But how does he know that? Did al-Jazeera tell him so? Does he happen to know that the men and material to make biotoxins and various poison gasses weren't smuggled into Syria? Even Lurch conceded back in April of this year that we "may yet find them."

Look, I want to make it clear: Who knows if a month from now, you find some weapons. You may. But you certainly didn't find them where they said they were, and you certainly didn't find them in the quantities that they said they were.

Blah, blah, blah, hedge, hedge, hedge... And, at any rate, when Kerry voted to authorize the war, what intelligence was he acting on? The same that the President was. That always manages to get forgotten, somehow.

Kerry and Kennedy have been wrong about Saddam and weapons of mass murder before. Remember during the Gulf War? They both voted against authorization ---and against a "real" coalition, too. Read it:

The Kennedy-Kerry position of waiting Saddam out did not prevail and soon after the Senate vote Saddam was ejected from Kuwait. But the war had also revealed something unexpected, a massive, clandestine, nuclear weapons program that had gone undetected by Western intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency until after inspectors had entered Iraq.

On August 11, 1991, the Washington Post reported that:

International inspectors . . . unearthed one of the most important--and disturbing--finds of the post-Cold War era: a huge assembly line for the covert manufacture of equipment to make an Iraqi bomb.

Really? No foolin'?

So why is it that anyone should trust the judgement of these two clowns? "No pair," as Zell Miller said in New York:

has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.

Together, Kennedy/Kerry have opposed the very weapons system that won the Cold War and that is now winning the War on Terror.

So, keep on sending this lush out to stump for you, Lurch. It only reminds people of how very far to the Left you really are.

Snail-Eating Islamofascist Sympathizers
Mood:  don't ask
It would be impossible to overstate my outrage at this news, but let's see what I can throw together:

France Monday, September 27, swiftly responded to a US proposal to hold an international conference on Iraq, insisting any such conference ought to discuss the question of whether the US-led forces should withdraw from the country, and should also include representatives of the Iraqi armed resistance.

Describing the situation in Iraq as a "black hole," French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, whose country opposed the US-led invasion, hinted that France could make discussion of the withdrawal of foreign forces a condition for agreeing to the conference, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Where do I begin?

France is not our ally; it is our enemy.

France has acted against us with overt hostility for almost two years now. They went out of their way to block our efforts at diplomacy and coalition-building in the United Nations during the run-up to the War for Iraq. The nauseating narcissist de Villepin actually went around to the member states of the Security Council and moved them to oppose our actions against Saddam. And while we tolerated his and Chiraq's machinations, the Ba'athists in Iraq were free to smuggle their weapons of mass murder to other Ba'athists in Syria. That is what happened, friend ---even if we don't have videotape and logbooks to show it.

Among the Bush-hating elites and Francophile defeatists on the Left, it was clear that France was opposing us on principle; diplomacy was not yet exhausted; the Great Hegemon had to be resisted. Golden Palms for treasonous wads of shit. Condescension for Eastern Europe, which had forgotten its place.

But France was not opposing us out of principle, but out of greed and cowardice. Once those vulgar Americans were inside Iraq, what would they find? Evidence that France and other sacks of UN shit had been on the take from the Saddamites? Yep. Oil vouchers and weapons contracts. Chiraq's cronies and Saddam could make a lot of money swindling the Oil for Food program; why would either of them want to see that come to an end?

And while our boys are paying the price of Iraqi liberty every day, these filthy and degenerate Gallic swine dare to make our boys' fate and fortune a condition of France's participation in some peace conference circle-jerk? What kind of fucking vermin are they to even suggest such a thing? Barnier and Chiraq are a fucking disgrace to humanity.

But the goddamned French aren't done yet: they want to invite the "insurgents" (the "armed resistance") to participate, too. You know, give these murdering jackals the legitimacy they so obviously deserve. But sure! Invite them all. Zarqawi and his Tawhid henchmen. Sadr and the Mahdi retards. The jihadists from around the world who behead defenseless middle-aged men on video and detonate bombs along the roads and in queues of job-seeking men. Invite them all, you filthy fucks! Let's see their faces. Let's see where they come from to get to your table. Get 'em all grouped together for the big photo finish where, if I could, I would personally blow their brains out. Pile 'em to the sky, like Charlie Manson used to say.

John Kerry says we left our allies behind when we went into Iraq. We didn't play their games as he would have preferred. But when he makes that charge against the President these days (as often as he reminds us of his days in Viet Nam), he never does say France. But John Kerry means France when he says we have "disappointed" our allies or whatever nonsense it is that dribbles from his boring hole. So, why doesn't John Kerry have the courage to simply say that he believes more in France's opinion of what we do to make the world safer than in his own country's? That is the case, whether you acknowledge it or not.

The answer is that real Americans don't want to hear about goddamned France and their treachery. And they don't want to admit to themselves that the Democratic nominee for the Presidency is a suck-up to these degenerate snail-eaters. But I'm hoping ---hoping real hard--- that, this Thursday, President Bush asks this droning cuckold of a kept bitch what he thinks about France's "conditions." Does he agree with our "allies"? Should we promise to pull our men and women out of Iraq and dishonor their sacrifices to placate a nation of defeatist backstabbers?

If this issue comes up and Kerry answers like you know he's gonna answer, you can wait four more years before you get another chance to get it right. There's no doubt in my mind. Americans want an American President ---not France's fucking girlfriend.

My Grandfather
Today, my maternal grandfather would have celebrated his 108th birthday. Jake Shapiro was a nice Jewish boy who was born in Lithuania, but grew up in Pittsburgh. He was a doughboy who arrived in France on the very day that the Armistice was signed. Jake loved baseball more than shul and politics a lot more than religion, but he was better educated than most college boys and at least as morally engaged as any rabbi. He was a radio operator, a compulsive walker, a voracious reader, and, as you may see below, a notorious writer of letters to the editor.

Oh, and another thing: Jake Shapiro was a Democrat. I wonder what he would think of his "little monkey's" politics. No doubt he'd wring my neck!

Anyhow, I found this letter a while back and thought I'd share with you the proof that being full of shit is a heritable trait. Enjoy.

Carter mystique

29 July 1976

El Paso Herald Post

EDITOR: What is this mystique about Jimmy Carter that has captivated the American people, North and South? Here we have a Southerner from rural Georgia, who, when Governor of his state, administered its laws from the City of Atlanta, the city which General Sherman and his Union Army burned to the ground in his march to the sea during the Civil War! "How come? How come?" people ask.

How did he brush aside conventional presidential politics and the leaders of the Democratic party like a giant ocean liner brushes aside the waves as it cuts through the sea? Well, your guess is as good as mine but it is one man's opinion that, from the cold and windy snows of New Hampshire to the steaming podium in Madison Square Garden, he did it on sheer personality and the refreshing grace with which he projected it.

We have been hearing that Carter's support is soft and spotty in many areas, but what those who say that overlook is his great strength that has fired the imagination of millions of Americans with a strong sense of history, who visualize that the election of Jimmy Carter will unite this greatest and most powerful country on Earth as it has not been united for more than 100 years and vindicate the Pledge of Allegiance, in truth as well as in words, that this is one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Heh, heh.

This Is Why You Don't Let Them Go
What a surprise:

A senior Taliban commander who had been released from the American detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was killed Saturday in Uruzgan Province, Afghan officials reported Sunday.

The commander, Maulavi Ghaffar, had spent eight months in the Guantanamo prison, said the Interior Minister, Ali Jalali. He had been captured after fighting for the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, Mr. Jalali said.

Next time we release these sacks of shit and send them home, it needs to be from about 35,000 feet with their hands tied behind their backs.

Portrait of a Dinosaur
Want to get a sense of the cluelessness of Big Media? Be sure to read David Broder's piece in this morning's Washington Post. Ostensibly, it is a piece of self-criticism, but get a load:

When the Internet opened the door to scores of "journalists" who had no allegiance at all to the skeptical and self-disciplined ethic of professional news gathering, the bars were already down in many old-line media organizations. That is how it happened that old pros such as Dan Rather and former New York Times editor Howell Raines got caught up in this fevered atmosphere and let their standards slip.

This is just more of the same excuse-making that "pros" like Tina Brown made this past week; that you can't blame the Big Media shills for letting their standards "slip" because of the commercial competition involved. I'm not such a polyanna that I don't know that mainstream news isn't driven by money, but neither am I so jaded that I would deny, as Broder seems to, the potential of non-commercial news to provide me with a guide to the truth. Therefore, the blogosphere.

But how is the blogosphere able to compete with Big Media? It isn't because it's displacing it, really, because much of what the blogs do is react to the official line from the major networks and papers. In that sense, Big Media still enjoys its primacy ---if by no other virtue than its scale and scope. But where Big Media is losing its place is as a conscience or guide to the public's politics. That's because more and more people are coming to regard institutions like CBS and the New York Times as fallible and biased to the point of propagandism. It is at that point that the blogosphere comes along and declares itself openly as what it is: partisan, relatively non-commercial, and vastly more self-critical and self-correcting. The blogs literally represent individual voices ---unfiltered and uncompromised by editors and sponsors. How such a democratic movement in the dissemination of information can be dismissed by the old dinosaurs ---especially liberal ones--- in Big Media is not a mystery, but even more of a reason to continue to turn away from their brand of wisdom. They don't want you to stop listening to their spin because they see themselves as entitled to their power as opinion-makers. After all, they're journalists without the quotation marks.

Smash it all. Get your information where you want. Online, you can actually read legislation, transcripts, court decisions, expert findings, and anything else for yourself. If you have to, you can dress up in a coat and tie and sit in front of a camera while you're at it.

(See Tim Graham and Michelle Malkin for more on this.)