Ohio Isn't Florida
David Limbaugh writes about the Green and Libertarian parties' manuevers for a recount of the vote in Ohio ---with John Kerry's support:
On election night, Kerry apparently saw Ohio 2004 as a potential Florida 2000 -- a state whose electoral votes could reverse his defeat -- and so delayed conceding the election until the next day when a challenge seemed farfetched. Nevertheless, his decision to spare America the uncertainty of another protracted series of contests was wise and decent.
When the Green and Libertarian candidates sought a recount, Kerry continued in that posture, saying he wouldn't get involved. But this week, he appears to have changed his mind -- by trying to intervene in their suit to include Delaware County in the recount -- yet says he hasn't. Kerry campaign attorney Daniel Hoffheimer denied Kerry was trying to overturn the Ohio outcome, but said Kerry just wanted the recount to proceed in all counties to ensure that all votes were counted. Is that a vintage Kerry flipflop or merely sophisticated Kerry nuance that is beyond the ability of ordinary mortals to fully understand?
Just for the record, all the votes have been counted. Hoffheimer must mean he wants all the votes recounted. That seems to be the new standard for Republicans these days: They have to win twice.
You know, folks, even the traitor Michael Moore has admitted that the Republicans won fair and square. Time for certain others of you to wise up and come to the same conclusion.
Always on the Job Mood: caffeinated
This story is unbelievable:
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) Police followed a trail of doughnuts to find a stolen Krispy Kreme delivery truck.
"It has a happy ending," Swatara Township Sgt. Robert Simmonds said. "The evidence was brought back to the police station, and the cops are eating the doughnuts."
[...]
Although Simmonds had been joking about police taking the contents of the truck, he acknowledged seeing Krispy Kreme doughnuts in a station conference room Thursday.
A Concoction? NRO's Jim Geraghty has a nice little rant on the traitor Michael Moore's influence on the Democratic Party this past election, including this summation of Moore's belief that "there is no terrorist threat":
[...] Moore admits that more terrorist attacks are inevitable, but that his point is that the chances of any individual being killed by a terrorist is small. He audaciously points out that no Americans were killed in terrorist attacks in the United States in 2000, 2002 (Hey, how about the D.C. sniper? Or the LAX shooter?) or 2003. And that the chances of an American dying of a terrorist attack in 2001 were 1 in 100,000.
Moore is trying to mitigate the reality of Islamofascist terrorism by arguing that the number of people who have been murdered is too small for such a great nation as ours to get too exercised about it. Now, despite the utter irresponsibility of this view, let us consider our nation's reaction to the atrocities of 11 September 2001: it shut down our airspace, shut down our stock markets, gravely taxed and wounded one of the world's great cities, and dealt a serious economic blow to many important domestic industries, such as transportation and tourism. There is no question that it exacerbated the recession of that year and that there are still reverberations from that loss of confidence.
My point, obviously, is that the damage done to our society by the murderers of 11 September 2001 went well beyond those "few" thousand dead. And it was inflicted, in the immediate sense, by nothing more than four airplanes and a small group of fanatics.
Next time out, it could be several train or truckloads of fertilizer on a bridge or near a school or a mall. Five hundred dead.
It could be a couple of cropdusters loaded down with nerve agents, passing over a football stadium. Five thousand dead.
It could be a small nuclear bomb, detonated in the middle of a major city. Fifty thousand dead.
This is not a movie or a nightmare, Moore-on; we all saw what can happen with our own eyes and felt it in our own hearts on that awful day three years ago. War was made upon us by psychopaths who believe in the dominanace of Islam. It will happen again ---and not because terrorism is a tool of fear to be used against America by a class of plutocrats who want to keep us down, but because Islamofascists are determined to kill us. You think that's a concoction of the Bushitler War Machine, Inc.? Do you have the [courage], all you paranoiac Leftists, to say that Islamofascist terrorism is being used as a pretext by the minions of Halliburton and the super oil conglomerates to steal our civil rights and break us down? Do you have the nerve to say what number of innocent Americans would be an acceptable number to see murdered in the next attack?
At the root of Moore's understanding of terrorism is a diseased sort of pacifism caused by self-loathing and moral cowardice. He and people who think like him lack the courage to stand for American exceptionalism or to accept our power in the world. They would rather be perceived as tolerant, post-modern ironists too cool to be bothered with such sentiments as patriotism and idealism than to genuinely support for others what they never had to earn for themselves. Democracy for Iraq? "But they were just fine as they were!" Justice for Saddam? "But he was never a threat to us!" Blah, blah, blah.
In many ways, America is an heroic culture. It is certainly a great nation ---the greatest of our time. And it is thus that heroes and great nations require their antipodes. They seek them out to define themselves by the standards of History: what will be their contribution to the advancement of the human race? We are fortunate that, in this time, we may be at least a witness to what our President and our military can do to move the world against the tyranny of militant Islam. It is an enormous and courageous undertaking ---and we have the power to transform whole nations. Do America and her friends choose to do this out of idleness or because of some irrational desire to conquer? No. I think History will show that we have done these bold and dynamic things for the most basic reasons of all: the peace and security of our own people.
Kookology Now Playing: "Toys in the Attic" by Aerosmith
You know, when I first heard about this story, I thought it was a joke. But no:
Twenty John Kerry supporters met for their first group therapy session in South Florida Thursday, screaming epithets at President Bush as they shared their emotions with licensed mental health counselors.
The first of several free noontime therapy sessions at the American Health Association in Boca Raton was designed to treat what mental health counselors have dubbed Post Election Selection Trauma (PEST).
"If I had a cardboard cutout of President Bush, and these people wanted to throw darts at it, I would let them do it," Robert J. Gordon, AHA executive director, told the Boca News after the session. "It's no joke. People with PEST were traumatized by the election. If you even mention religion, their faces turn blister-red as they shout at Bush."
I was thrilled to see David Brooks' column criticizing "Meet the Press" for having the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jerry Falwell on, as representatives for the religious left and right, respectively. Sharpton is a "reverend" in the same sense that Col. Sanders was a military officer.
I actually had a mouthful of soda pop when I read that ---and almost didn't get it down.
Former American fugitive Marc Rich was a middleman for several of Iraq's suspect oil deals in February 2001, just one month after his pardon from President Clinton, according to oil industry shipping records obtained by ABC News.
And a U.S. criminal investigation is looking into whether Rich, as well as several other prominent oil traders, made illegal payments to Iraq in order to obtain the lucrative oil contracts.
Why did this sleazy crook get a Presidential pardon again? Oh, because his wife gave $400,000 to the Clinton Double-Wide Library fund.
Rich
CNN's been running a story the past couple days about how they feel they got lied to by the military on what they thought was the eve of the invasion of Fallujah. Turns out, the Marines' spokesman they had on camera was sending out signals to see how the nutjobs in Fallujah would react to the impression of an imminent attack.
But as Glenn Reynolds, quoting Austin Bay (no link provided), puts it:
"The thing is, when CNN gripes about the Pentagon using them, it's a pretty hollow gripe. . . . Didn't CNN dupe us, after a fashion? As I recall, Saddam let CNN keep its Baghdad bureau open in exchange for 'suppressing' or 'sugar-coating' stories that would have exposed the depravity and evil of his regime. Didn't a CNN executive admit this (though not so bluntly) in a NY Times op-ed?"
Yup. That's about as devastating a retort as you'll ever see. The Commie News Network needs to shut up and take it.
Posted by Toby Petzold
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Updated: Thursday, 2 December 2004 6:07 PM CST
Meretricious Atrocity Now Playing: "Strange Way " by Firefall
You know something? I don't care what Kristen Breitweiser thinks about anything. Did her husband's death in the atrocities of 11 September 2001 somehow endow her with the moral authority that makes her bald partisanship acceptable and immune to criticism? That's what she and her Democratic puppetmasters want from her when she gets up in front of the cameras and imparts her wisdom, but I'm not interested in that crap.
Quit using your way to the top, lady. Whatever purpose it is you think you're serving, it's already been discharged and disposed of. Now it's time to keep quiet.
One month since John Kerry didn't disgrace our country. Let us congratulate ourselves.
Believers in Nothing
John Podhoretz describes the mortal pessimism that now consumes the Bush-hating Left:
Right now, in Ukraine, we are witnessing a genuine democratic revolution against the post-Soviet status quo, with hundreds of thousands of ordinary people refusing to allow an election to be stolen by kleptocratic thugs.
And who is celebrating this spontaneous, powerful and entirely progressive uprising? The Right, and no one but the Right. The good news is being blasted out of Kiev by conservative bloggers (particularly the married couple "Tulipgirl" and "Discoshaman") and promoted by conservative bloggers stateside.
Bloggers on the Left largely greeted the uprising with skeptical distance and worry. Because the president offered his moral support to the uprising, obsessively anti-Bush commentators seem reflexively to be skeptical of it.
This democratic uprising follows by only a few months the democratic triumph in Afghanistan -- a world-historical event that seemed to disappoint the Left because it went well.
Could it be that the liberals and Leftists among us would be far more enthusiastic about these triumphs if only a Democrat were President? The very idea is revolting in its superficiality, but what else would account for the Left's resistance to the forces of democratization now at work? Do women's rights groups go out of their way to praise this President for making possible the enfranchisement of millions of Afghan women? Do civil rights advocates applaud the end of the Saddamite horrors and welcome the potential of a new and free Iraq? No. They're still too busy pulling their puds over scenes from Abu Ghraib.
To know that such people are sitting on their hands because it is a Republican President ---this Republican President--- who is bringing these things to fruition is to see the absolutely lowest sort of partisanship become the norm.
But, really, there's no need to wonder whether these same liberals and Leftists would be in favor of, say, a President Gore's nation-building because there's no reason to believe that Gore or Clinton or any other Democrat of the last 30 years or more would have seen the moral and historical imperative to act in such a way. That would be because such a Democratic President would have found a hundred different ways to defer and delay and deliberate, never daring to lead his party out of the wilderness of their contempt for the military and for the righteous causes of war. A Democratic President (of the current kind) would have chased his own tail as well as the tails of the UN and France and whoever else was in line to avoid the commitments that George W. Bush has made. That is to what such a leader would have been reduced by the moral cowardice of his own party.
The anti-war Democrats are a truly sorry and incoherent mess. They have no guiding principles but hatred and paranoia. Stand up for self-determination and civil and human rights? Not these clowns. They're too busy being better than the "Rethuglikkkans."
In Defense of Cheap
I'm picking up here on a complaint at one of my favorite Leftist blogs about Red State America and Wal-Mart shopping. The usual gripe, see, is that the mullet-wearing, mouth-breathing drones who frequent Wal-Mart are actually harming their own economic self-interests, as well as falling prey to the mass consumerism of cheap, homogenizing products.
On the latter point, I'm not going to defend what we do as a retail culture. It is truly disturbing to consider what crap our society depends on to keep people employed and/or entertained. To see how much we need fads, fashions, and gimmickry to keep this economy going is right up (or down) there on the ladder of repulsion with sausage-making and law-passing.
But, from the consumer's perspective, Wal-Mart is a great and welcome deal for working-class citizens ---and all the elitist sniffing and harrumphing to the contrary isn't going to change that. As a commenter over at The Left Coasterremarked, the fabled mom-and-pop grocery that Sam Walton supposedly ran out of every small town in America is a myth; in more cases than people might like to admit, the coming of Wal-Mart in many of these small rural communities was a long-overdue kick in the crotch to generations-old family monopolies at the local retail level. Poor choices, inflated prices, and lots of other parochial problems that big city and suburban types wouldn't know about finally had their day of reckoning. Niche or custom retailers can usually survive and should be supported whenever possible. But having just one horse in a one-horse town for your everyday needs is an invitation to abuse.
I go to Wal-Mart maybe once or twice a month. They have good prices on many items and services that I wouldn't even consider buying elsewhere. For example, I always go there to get my oil changed. They do it quickly, cheaply, and they never try to pull the Jiffy Lube stunt of rooting around under your hood looking for shit that you "really ought to have replaced." They just do what you ask them to do and leave you coming back with the knowledge that they'll do the same the next time. Good on them. Because if you screw a customer, you don't see him again. Playing it straight is how you keep people satisifed.
I don't really get the complaints about Wal-Mart. They make about as much sense as Leftists ranting about the insidious influence of the Fox News Channel (as though CNN and MSNBC are paragons of journalistic integrity). Wal-Mart might be a disaster for many small retailers and they may be a bunch of chickenshits to the local labor force, but they are a huge economic player in this society and they are a boon to the low and middle-income family who are looking for reliable goods at decent prices. Keep their feet to the fire and point it out when their influence on manufacturers, growers, and entertainers steps over the line, but recognize that they are a major employer and an important resource to small-town America. And how bad is that?
Go See The Incredibles
In an effort to use up a batch of free passes with an expiration date on them, I've seen several movies this past weekend with my family, and the best of them is The Incredibles. It's just a lot of fun and beautiful to look at. A solid plot, great characters, and lots of humor. And as a demonstration of computer animation, it is probably the most intense thing I've ever seen.
I also see The Incredibles as being a serious post-9/11 message for the American family. That's a hokey take on things, I'm sure, but there's a lot in here about individual responsibility being the basis of a healthy family life and of society as a whole. We are obligated to use our powers for the greater good. We are obligated to keep evil from prospering.
Oh, and we're not supposed to develop a crush on cartoon characters, are we? Maybe it's just Holly Hunter's voice, but Elastigirl does it for me. My eldest brother used to have a crush on Betty Rubble, so what the hell? It's not like I'm into Japanese anime porno.
But They're Not French Mood: a-ok
Via the Belmont Club, here is a list from the always-excellent GlobalSecurity.org of 28 non-US military forces helping us in Iraq. It is an impressive list of true allies and friends of Iraq ---nations that Jean le Kerrie should never have insulted as he did.
I still think we need to invite some Gurkhas over to handle these Zarqawiites. And I'll bet there's plenty who'd like some revenge for the loss they suffered a few months ago at the hands of those savages. The Gurkhas would be fucking them up.
A Really Useful Idiot. No, Really.
This here is a useful article from Peter Dreier in Dissent magazine in which the professor explains, by the numbers, all the nuts and bolts of the 2004 Election and what liberals ---I mean "progressives"--- can do to gear up for the next time out.
Naturally, Dreier (who, equally naturally, is a director of the Urban and Environmental Policy program at Occidental College) is a pure spring of Leftist misinformation and the usual low-grade paranoia of the electorally unfortunate, but this is still a useful article. Maybe all the more because one can see how seamlessly the [progressive] community's mistaken beliefs have been internalized in their rhetoric. For example (pour example for my Democratic friends):
[...] the assault on Kerry's military record in VietNam, and his later anti-war activities, started with the right-wing news outlets, repeating the accusations of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) and similar groups close to the Bush campaign. Although the SBVT only spent about $500,000 to broadcast its TV ad attacking Kerry's war record, it received tens of millions of dollars in free publicity, first in the right-wing media and then in the mainstream media. This "echo chamber" effect helped cast doubt about Kerry despite the fact that in-depth stories in several papers challenged the credibility of the SBVT's allegations. This allowed SBVT to dominate the news, turning Kerry's war record into a liability rather than an advantage.
What part of this narrative is not slathered in crap? It was John Kerry's stories ---and not the Swift Boat Veterans'--- that were proven false. Christmas in Cambodia? Running CIA agents up the river? The circumstances of Kerry's Bronze Star? The first Purple Heart? John Kerry got taken to school on all of this stuff and personally copped to none of it. Dreier is simply lying or delusional if he thinks it's the Swifties who have the credibility problem.
But Dreier goes on:
For example, the New York Times' expose of the close ties between the Bush campaign and SBVT, and the widespread distortions in the SBVT attacks on Kerry, did little to repair the damage already done to the Kerry campaign. For one thing, the mainstream media outside the two coasts did not report the Times' expose. It did not "echo" through the radio talk show circuit. Liberals have no counterweight to the close-knit right-wing web of think tanks, talk shows, and columnists.
As I say, this guy is really interesting. I mean, you don't think it's possible that someone can believe such things until you see them presented in what is, in many other respects, a rational essay. For Dreier, there is the "right-wing media" and the "mainstream media." What would he even recognize a left-wing media?
Elsewhere, Dreier seems to make the point that the Democrats' loss was not for want of the proper message, but for the proper messenger. I suspect that this sentiment will become even more prevalent among the party faithful with the passage of time. How many Democrats today, for instance, have any problem dismissing someone like Michael Dukakis as a terrible nominee? What is there about John Kerry that would preclude the same fate? Nothing at all.
The Hippopotamus in the Room Now Playing: "Before They Make Me Run" by the Rolling Stones
Although there's no chance that the self-investigation launched by CBS News will hold Dan Rather culpable in any way for his pushing of the Killian Forgeries, the old man announced yesterday that he is leaving his anchor's chair next March.
It's a small punishment, though, as he will continue to contribute to the 60 Minutes franchise --- with his usual agenda affixed firmly to his sleeve.
Rather would rather not have you think that the scandal that he and producer Mary Mapes started with their bullshit lies is what's precipitating this departure, but I am pleased to have it so believed. Rather, contrary to what his apologists claim, knew full well that the documents he used in a story meant to bring discredit on President Bush's National Guard service were fakes ---and he went with them anyway.
Be sentimental all you want (I will; Dan Rather is a face and a voice I grew up listening to in some of our nation's most important hours), but don't forget: he disgraced his profession because of his own political biases. That is a fact.
CBS News will now probably give the anchor's spot to the nauseating John Roberts, who is every bit the Leftist tool that Rather is. Which means that CBS News' authority (and ratings) will continue to circle the bowl until the whole organization is disbanded in favor of even more of their network's stupid fucking "reality" shows.
Glade Plug-Ins? Are the Work of the Devil Mood: don't ask Now Playing: "Nature's Way" by Spirit
I work in a small office. When I came in last night, the office smelled like a combination of melting plastic and watermelons or maybe some other fruit or flower. Instant nausea. Instant fucking headache. Where the fuck was it coming from? Nobody knew. And every ten minutes or so, when I could no longer stand it, I would go sniffing everything in sight: phone books, desk drawers, trash cans, chair backs ---everything. But no luck.
So I come in again tonight and that same disgusting stench of synthetic fruit continued to poison the air. Goddammit! I was going to have to put up with it again. This time, though, the guy who was going off duty casually mentioned that the smell must be coming from a Glade Plug-In? that was beneath the counter.
Oh? Is that so?? Goddammit! I didn't even know there was a wall outlet down there, much less one of those disgusting electrified stink-dispensers plugged into it. Who the fuck did this terrible thing? No one knew. Or, better put, no one claimed to know.
And about sixty seconds later, the fucking thing was resting on the side of the road that runs past our building.
Now I'm not much of a hippie, but I know what's right about the natural world ---and goddamned Glade Plug-Ins? ain't it. Can you imagine plugging a plastic container full of fucking chemicals into an electrical socket so that it heats them up and pollutes the air you're breathing? And for what reason? To make the room smell better? Well, say, I've got a better idea: keep the room you're in clean so that it won't start stinking to begin with. Jesus! I wouldn't allow that shit in my home for money.
I also don't get fabric softeners, which not only smell unnatural, but leave your clothes feeling like they've been Scotchguarded?. Why do people do that? Why would you take a freshly-washed load of clothes and throw what is essentially a sponge full of chemicals into the dryer with them to bake in that greasy, Teflon?-like quality?
These are the billion-dollar industries that keep our society humming right along: weird chemical solutions to problems you don't really have. Don't look into it too closely. Just keep walking and whistling.
Kevin Sites' Open Letter to the Devil Dogs
I don't know what the status is on the young Marine who killed the rat in that Fallujah mosque earlier this month, but this is an open letter from Kevin Sites, the reporter who filmed the incident, to the Marines with whom he was traveling. There are few a facts there that will make it worth your while to read.
I can't attack Sites for being an uninformed Big Media craphound because he is most definitely there and in the shit.
Basically, I think Sites did the right thing. He's not a rat bastard just because he's not Ernie Pyle. But I'm not going to shake his hand and buy him a steak dinner, either.
I just wish our military could know now what History will prove later: that they are doing important, world-changing work and that all the uses the propagandists make of their darkest moments will matter for nothing in the end.
Seething
Bill Clinton was enjoying the canonization that came with the dedication of his Presidential library last week until he sat down for an interview with Peter Jennings, who accused the former President of caring what the history books will say about his tainted legacy. Clinton rejected the very idea, visibly seething at Comrade Jennings' impertinence.
And, being the first black President (which, remember, was never an epithet his admirers meant to be condescending), Clinton told Jennings that he really didn't "want to go there." Heh, heh. That's good stuff. Very colloquial.
Bill Clinton may have been a political genius and a brilliant man, in general, but let's be clear about this:
If cheating on your wife with an employee in your place of employment is not a big deal, then why even bother to lie about it or obstruct its legal discovery? Does everybody get that? Clinton's defenders said it was just about sex and was nobody's business. Okay. So why lie about it? If Starr's witch hunt was unjustified, how much more justified was it to subject this country to that scandal for months on end? Clinton endangered his own Presidency over what he and his partisans said was irrelevant. Is that supposed to make sense?
Getting a blowjob from an intern while taking a call from a Congressman about troop deployments in the Balkans is not behavior worthy of the President of the United States. Getting your staff and cabinet to whore themselves out to the media and the public for your personal benefit is unacceptable. Clinton moved them all to lie for him so that he could keep his fucking job. But if he had been a one-star general in the Army or a dean at some college or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, what he did would have ended his career in any of those fields and brought on a large civil lawsuit. And why's that? Because the same liberal women's rights activists and opponents of the patriarchal society who apologized for him were the same ones who routinely call for the heads of such sexist pigs. They are the ones who (rightly, I believe) instituted such agencies as the EEOC and the laws against sexual harrassment in the workplace.
As I've said before, the liberals and the women's rights activists lost a lot of their credibility the very day they sucked it up and stuck it out for Bill Clinton. Only they're too stupid to realize how completely he used them. And what did they get in return for their loyalty? Nothing.
(Oh, and one more thing: the Clintonistas say that Bill Clinton will be remembered for having "created" 22 million jobs. Is that so? What, is he the fucking General Secretary of the Politburo? A college student 50 years from now isn't going to give a damn about the economy of the 1990s; all he's going to know is that Clinton was the second President to be impeached and that the country was on an eight-year vacation from the realities of the post-Cold War world.)
Dropped Mood: cool
I've been blogging now for about 18 months, although maybe the first six of those consisted of little more than posting the occasional equivalent of a teenaged girl's diary entry. I'm not in any sense a popular success at this, but writing and opining are a few of my life's small affirmations, so the traffic end of this endeavor is not as important as it might be to others.
Which is to say that some blogs are important in the broadcast or popular sense and have acquired a wide readership of usually very well-informed people. Look at the blogroll to your left: I read these people as regularly ---and depend on them as certainly--- as most people do the daily rag or watch the evening news. And it's these same sites that have shown their mettle in this past election. That shouldn't be doubted for a moment. The blogosphere is ---and I don't hesitate to say this--- a revolutionary communications phenomenon, and its influence will only continue to grow. Because it is purely democratic and unfiltered and immediate. Because it is a thriving, throbbing, real-time rebuke to every corporate-run media shitmill and every incompetent editor, copywriter, and proofreader who ever worked on any paper or at any station anywhere.
But because of the blogosphere's fitful growth and immaturity, it is especially susceptible to a lot of crashes and burnings. Bloggers that we come to depend on for our fixes sometimes drop out. After all, they are often one-man shows with no real overhead, no brick-and-mortar existence beyond their own offices or living rooms, and occupy no more than a relative handful of pages in a cyberspace of many billions of pages. But these people will usually give their readers a heads-up and explain why they are dropping out. Usually.
But one of the best and most interesting blogs of this past year has obviously seized up and dropped out. No warnings that I know of. Maybe the guy behind it just freaked. I'm not going to say who he is, but he was certainly an influence on me. And he was certainly a major player in one of the scandals of the election season.
I am disappointed in him. He should have put a 30 at the end of his story. When he did this same thing earlier this year, I wrote him and told him to buck up. He gave a good explanation for why he had burned out ---and was soon back in the game with a vengeance. But not this time. Maybe I just don't know what happened; maybe now he's writing under his own name or another assumed name or he's in a group blog or something else.
Dumbassery Everlasting
I caught a few minutes of New York Democratic Congressman Gary Ackerman talking to CNN's Paula Zahn last night and he said something that every dumbass anti-war politician says: if we meant to go after the Axis of Evil, we picked the wrong country because Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
Well, no one really believes that Iraq was free of WMD ---it's just that we couldn't pin the charge on them with sufficient quantities of such weapons to satisfy the hyperlegalistic assholes who didn't want to attack the Saddamites, anyway. That would be because we wasted months dancing around with Chiraq and his asshole accomplices before doing what we should have done earlier. This gave the Saddamites the time to move their stockpiles and their scientists to places where we haven't gone yet. (Think "road to Damascus.")
But none of that is my point. My point is that Ackerman doesn't think deeply or far enough ahead to acknowledge the corollary to his own statement, which would be, if attacking a non-nuclearized Iraq was a mistake, would attacking a nuclearized North Korea or a near-nuclearized Iran have been correct? I don't recall how Ackerman weaseled out of this problem, but it must not have been especially memorable. Nevertheless, it is an entirely typical assertion for these rat bastards to make, but without any sense.
Yes, North Korea has nuclear weapons, but it is for that reason that we didn't plow across the DMZ and set off a conflagration. Why don't these numbnuts Democrats understand that? Kim is isolated like no one has ever been isolated. He wanted bilateral talks to screw the Bush Administration like he succeeded in screwing the Clintonites back in the 90s; Bush told him to sod off and try again when he was willing to hold sexpartite talks. And guess what? That's what's going to happen. Because it's right that the other players in that region be on board to keep this nutjob's feet to the fire. John Kerry didn't want that. He wanted to give in to Kim's demands. And Kerry would have gone all the way, too, using the same stupid logic that Clinton and Albright and Richardson and the other tools used, which got us what? A nuclearized North Korea! Goddammit!
Could it be that the Bush Administration isn't going to make the same mistakes? Could it be that the way to a peaceful situation on the Korean Peninsula isn't through giving the Kimchi Pot the means to enrich uranium? Hmmm. May be.
And as for Iran, we have every interest in integrating that society into the community of peaceful nations. But we don't need to attack them if we can move them from within. We have many millions of allies inside that country. They're called the Iranian people. Lots of young, pro-Western, democracy-craving young men and women who don't want to be ruled by the mullahs, but who want true civil and human rights and democratic reforms. They will have that soon enough, I am sure. But we Americans have so many cards to play there that it is stupid to suppose, as Ackerman ostensibly does, that we should have attacked Iran or North Korea first.
Iran is a special case. Aren't they all? But I hope you Democrats don't cry too much if History records as one of the greatest achievements of the Bush Administration the bloodless Iranian Revolution, circa 2005.
caffeinated
loud
a-ok
don't ask
cool