Chris Matthews, Handicapped
Jesus, Chris Matthews is annoying! This loudmouth doesn't even feign interest in his guests' attempted answers to his bullying questions. Clearly, human beings who are placed around him at his desk are there to serve as props for his "dialogues" and to deaden the acoustic feedback of his barking horseshit.

MSNBC sucks. I just watch it for the chicks.

Enough with the Prostitutes!
Dorothy Rabinowitz, in a thoroughly enjoyable Wall Street Journal Media Blog posting, captures my feelings about these 9-11 survivor-victim-hero-goddesses perfectly. Their 15 minutes should have elapsed by now, but the major media keeps pimping them out.

As the President reminded John Roberts ---or, whoever the tool was last night who asked whether he was going to apologize for the atrocities of 11 September--- the person who ordered those deaths was Osama bin Laden. In other words, if you victimophiles want an apology so fucking much, go dig up the original towelhead-terrorist and beat it out of him. But you're not going to get an apology out of the President because he's not the one who committed those 3,000 murders.

Why is that not understood? What's wrong with people who think an apology is in order from those who did not do the crime and who could not have stopped it? The word is perversion. Go look it up.

Roemering Reno
Very interesting. The partisan buttplug Timothy Roemer is actually making Janet Reno look as irresponsible as she actually was in dealing with al-Qaeda. Tune in, folks: she's one of the biggest reasons why terrorists came and committed atrocities against us on our own soil. Almost eight years of this touchy-feely horseshit? Well, I'm too harsh: we could have had eight years of Lani Guinier, who I'm sure would have ordered the Justice Department to have a big teach-in had 11 September 2001 happened on her watch.

The Left Coaster: Fallujah as My Lai
To give you a sense of the desperate depths to which the Leftists will sink in order to slander our military, have a look at this ridiculous "analogy."

Comparing Fallujah to the My Lai Massacre of 1968 is, as I told these Bush-haters, "inapt and offensive."

Our men haven't gone into Fallujah to unload their weapons into the heads of woman and children; they have gone there looking to bring a lot of very obviously guilty savages to justice. Now, when these lovely people decide to use the putatively sacred precincts of their own mosques to fire RPGs from, then all bets are off and in comes a 500-pounder. Deservedly. It's absolutely laughable to suggest that there were innocent "worshippers" killed at that mosque. Only a heathen psychopath would profane his own "place of worship" by using it as a shield behind which he brandishes and uses guns and other weapons.

The important thing to remember is that Leftist activists depend upon the ignorance of their followers to make such extremely foolish and inappropriate historical analogies. No surprises, though: these are the same liars who spread the myth of the evil Zionists' massacre of the innocents at Jenin.

Kerry's Fascination with the [UN]
It's pretty frightening to be reading a piece of John Kerry's prose and actually start hearing his soporific drone replace the voice of your own interior narrator. But there's nothing you can do, holmes: the call is coming from inside the house.

As to the substance of Kerry's piece in this morning's Washington Post, it's his usual shit: we're all united against the extremists and for the troops (unless it serves his political interests to criticize the Commander-in-Chief); we all want a stable Iraq (unless an unstable Iraq can help to him to win the election); and the United Nations should be leading the political and humanitarian efforts there, while the US keeps its finger on the trigger.

I do hope that Kerry keeps up his praise for the UN as the great moral and political arbiter in the world because I want those two facets of the anti-American international socialist movement to catch all the light they can in the weeks and months to come. That's because, no matter how hard most of the major media wish to ignore it, the utter corruption of the UN's oil-for-food kickback and bribery scandals is going to continue to get people's attention. Maybe even some will stop and ask, "This is the organization that John Kerry thinks is worthy of his respect and support? These are the crooked bastards who hung the Iraqi people out to dry with sanctions while they took bribes from the Saddamites?"

Kerry doesn't get it yet. The UN is a debased and worthless organization. Its most important governing body (the permanent seats on the Security Council) is a woefully imbalanced anachronism. What the fuck is France doing in a position that neither India nor Japan nor Pakistan nor Brazil can attain? This is no longer the aftermath of the Second World War; this is a new world with far different socioeconomic and political realities than what existed almost 60 years ago.

The UN exists for few other legitimate reasons than to dole out aid to Third World losers, less and less of which actually reaches its intended destination. These countries are in the conditions they are because they are corrupt basketcases, full of regressive Muslims and anti-Semites, genocidal maniacs and tribal-based savagery. Are these the nations that Kerry speaks and thinks so highly of when he talks about that phantsmagorical alliance of broad-based consensus?

Of course not: Kerry means France. If France were amenable to our goals for Iraq and the Middle East, then Germany and maybe even Russia would be, too. So, when Kerry talks about what a valuable ally the UN is, he really just means that he wishes the French were more in love with us.

Something Funny from Scrappleface
Satire though it is, this bit of Scrappleface humor pretty much sums up the anti-Bush crowd's level of logic and fairness.

Clinton will always get a pass from the liberal turds running the big media outlets. I have yet to hear Katie Fucking Couric or Comrade Jennings question Clinton or any of his minions as to why he did jack shit about al-Qaeda when he knew about the threat they posed. It is truly shameful. Instead, the major media want to string Bush up by his nads because he isn't an omniscient seer of all events and alternative dimensions.

Take it up with Clinton and the Gorebot. Those two did nothing about terrorism, except blow up some tents and destroy an aspirin factory. Fucking jokes.

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

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

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

All hail the power of the blogosphere!

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

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

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

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

Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait of the Memo as a Young Scan

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

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

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

UPDATE: Here's the Reuters story.

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

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

Thanks to Jonah Goldberg at NRO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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