The Money Quote and the Code
I have been to Paris. I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government and of all eight of Madam Binh's points it has been stated time and time again, and was stated by Senator Vance Hartke when he returned from Paris, and it has been stated by many other officials of this Government, if the United States were to set a date for withdrawal the prisoners of war would be returned.

I think this negates very clearly the argument of the President that we have to maintain a presence in Vietnam, to use as a negotiating block for the return of those prisoners. The setting of a date will accomplish that.

--- John Kerry, testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 22 April 1971

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Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

--- U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 45, Section 953: Private correspondence with foreign governments

(Thanks to WinterSoldier.com.)

There Can Be No Recovering from This
Mood:  special
Do you want to see the most devastating anti-Kerry video imaginable? Go to KerryonIraq.com right now and watch it. It's 12 minutes-plus of nothing but him being a lousy hypocrite and panderer.

Absolutely fucking devastating. There can be no recovering from this.

My night has been made.

(Thanks to Dean Esmay, whose open letter to Kerry is where I learned of this video. Incredible.)

The Twilight of the Shills
Read this important post by Thomas Lifson at The American Thinker. He is making the point that Big Media (i.e., the New York Times, Associated Press, NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, et al.) are watching their influence wane in a big way. They are sacrificing their credibility for the sake of propping up a Presidential candidate whose reason to run is shockingly slight.

The establishment press is coming across as every bit as pompous and conniving as the man who married two centi-millionaire heiresses.

They are, in fact, destroying themselves. Their industry is in serious trouble. Circulation scandals have hit major newspaper publishers, while the scandal-free press can take little comfort in their declining readership. Network TV news is a shadow of its former self, and its future is very limited. CNN's monopoly is shattered, and it boasts a poor fraction of the viewership of Fox News, the only cable news outlet fully covering Kerrygate with the same seriousness accorded Bush's National Guard service questions.

What's prompting such observations this time is the Big Media embargo on John Kerry's oft-repeated tale of his holiday in Cambodia ---and the fact that he is lying about it, as well as other aspects of his Viet Nam experience that he has made absolutely central to his candidacy. The blogosphere is reporting on it, but not the major dailies or turds like Katie Couric and Dan Rather. And why is that? As Newsweek's Evan Thomas remarked last week on Inside Washington (a PBS program in the Austin market):

"The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards -- I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox, but -- they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there's going to be this glow about them that some, is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points."

Whenever I visit a Leftist blogsite, I can scarcely believe that I am watching the same programs and reading the same papers as them when they complain --- without a hint of doubt--- that Big Media is in the tank ---for George W. Bush! I mean, you gotta be fucking kidding me! With horseshit like CNN's virtual rechristening as the Abu Ghraib Newtork and the constant stream of chickenshit from reporters like John Roberts and Terry Moran who want the President to apologize or feel bad about this or that and the outrageous apotheosizing of such craphounds as Richard Clarke and Joe Wilson, is it possible that the Bush-hating Left can believe that Big Media isn't on their side?

As I say, I am very anxious about this election because I know that one of the candidates is going to kill motherfuckers before they can kill us ---and the other is going to get down on his knees and service Jacques Chiraq and make nice with Arafat and Kim and the mullahs of Iran and anyone else he can find to appease.

I say it without shame: whatever it takes to ensure that John Kerry is defeated is just jake with me. If it means tearing him down over the details of his combat experience from 35 years ago, fine.

As Hugh Hewitt wonders, what will George Stephanopoulos be asking Kerry tomorrow morning on This Week? Is he going to pull his punches and be the fucking Democratic shill I know he is? Or will he ask Kerry to explain why he is lying about Cambodia? If he can't find the courage to ask the question, then to hell with him.

CORRECTION: Inside Washington is not on Austin's PBS channel (KLRU-TV). I was getting it confused with Gwen Ifill's Washington Week.

Sour Krauts and Kimchi Pots
Looks like it's time for Uncle Sam to move on:

President George Bush will announce tomorrow that the US military will pull up to 100,000 troops out of Europe and Asia in the biggest redeployment since the end of the Cold War.

The plan will see a number of US bases in Germany closed down, and troops returned home or redeployed to Eastern Europe.

Well, Hans and Fritz, looks like the Nazi-killers are going home. Now that America's billions are going to Prague and Budapest, maybe you can get jobs as sandwich artistes at Subway, beeyotches.

And as for you, my presently non-glowing young Korean friends, you really should pay more attention to the old folks when they talk to you about how many Americans gave their lives for your country and kept you from living under communism. Better enjoy waddling around the mall and badmouthing your benefactors now ---because they won't be around for your Big Light Show from the North.

Scrappleface Is Such a Genius
If you're not reading Scrappleface, which is something very like a conservative's answer to the increasingly partisan and chickenshit Onion, do yourself the favor and go. Here's a recent favorite:

Clinton Claims Bush Plagiarized '98 Speech

"If you read the text of my speech, you'll see that President Bush lifted practically all of my reasons for attacking Iraq and used them as his own," said Mr. Clinton. "I was the one who said Saddam Hussein must be stopped before he used chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. If you read the papers today, you might think that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld just made that up out of whole cloth."

Heh, heh. Scott Ott is the shit.

Peacock Thrown
The reigning world champion in judo, Arash Miresmaeili, withdrew from his Olympic bout with an Israeli athlete because

according to the Islamic Republic News Agency, Miresmaeili said that he "refused to play against an Israeli rival to sympathize with the oppressed Palestinian people."

But we know the real reason: Miresmaeili didn't want some Jewish kid beating him up in front of the whole world. Sorry turd.

If, on the other hand, the Iranian government instructed this guy to withdraw out of political pique, I hope it gets the kids back home mad at the mullahs for depriving them of a shot at the gold.

All Over the Place
Who knows what Eleanor Clift is going on about in her latest online Newsweek column? Although she acknowledges the cynical truth that "most Democrats are willing to cut Kerry whatever slack he needs just so he dislodges Bush from office," she's still shilling for him under the guise of criticism:

John Kerry disappointed a lot of Democrats when he said that he would have voted for the resolution that gave George W. Bush the authority to invade Iraq even had Kerry known then what he knows now--that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no ties to Al Qaeda. What then would be the grounds for war? That Saddam Hussein was a despicable human being?

Kerry tried to explain. He stood by his vote, but he would have handled the warmaking authority differently. Bush, on a five-state campaign swing, taunted Kerry for "finally clearing that up."

It was classic Kerry, full of subtleties that get lost in translation. Kerry's position is actually quite responsible, but he's getting no help from the national press corps in conveying it to the voters.

"Quite responsible" is a joke of an opinion. So is Clift's fantasy that Big Media isn't doing enough to propagate the Kerrion's message. What else do they do? No, the problem, madame, is that Kerry's "subtleties" are so vacuous and inane in their substance that not even the fabled powers of Katie Couric or Peter Jennings can elevate them to the level of serious consideration. It is not enough for Middle America to hear that Kerry would have handled the authority ---that he himself voted to give the President--- in some "different" or "better" way because there are no reasons to believe that he even could have! There is no reason to believe that the French or the Germans or whoever the fuck Kerry imagines would have constituted a "real" Coalition were ever willing to send troops to help in the liberation of Iraq. There is no reason to believe that our Turkish "allies" weren't intent on extorting us from the start because of their own political problems in liberating the Kurds. On the other hand, we did have reason to believe that Saddam had weapons of mass murder and we did have reason to believe that the Blixites were just stalling for time and helping their UN masters string us along for the benefit of those on the take from Saddam himself! After all, the only reason why the inspectors even got back in was because Saddam had us breathing down his neck. We were in theater and waiting for their fucking show to stop. Were we supposed to wait a while longer so that we could process more of their lies? Gibberish!

As Clift points out:

In October 2002, when Bush asked Congress to give him war powers, the administration was in the midst of a diplomatic negotiation with Saddam. The threat of force passed by Congress pushed Saddam into allowing the weapons inspectors back into Iraq. Denying Bush the authority would have emasculated American diplomacy.

That's right, Eleanor! How is it possible to state the obvious and not recognize its significance? The French were actively working to stop us from going in. Not just protesting the actual enforcement of the very resolutions that they themselves had voted for ---but lacked the balls to work towards--- but actually intimidating other Security Council members into resisting us. Fucking ungrateful backstabbers. Bribe-happy obstructionist fucks!

I am sick of bullshit and I am sick of watching this slow-motion threat to America's foreign policy called the Kerry campaign. Kerry has nothing to say on the question of Iraq that can't be refuted through his own votes and words and the logic of pre-emptive war. All this talk about "subtleties" and "nuance" is usually an insult and a laugh ---but not when there are millions of shitforbrains out there who actually believe that these are qualities that qualify Kerry for anything. Jesus!

Poorer Quarters
Now Playing: "No Quarter" by Led Zeppelin
I don't know what the hell's going on up in this mug, but I still haven't gotten a Texas state quarter in my change. And it's not like I haven't been looking, neither. Grrrr....

In the Land of Kerry's Allies
What's old is new again, oui? Seems that Old Europe can't quite rid itself of its true sentiments. And this is the country that John Kerry says is the ally without which our Coalition in Iraq is illegitimate?

When is France going to pull what's left of its head out of its ass and realize that Jews are not their problem? They are being colonized and eaten alive by their Muslim friends. Indeed, it's probable that the pieces of shit that desecrated the Jewish cemetery you see in the picture were young Muslim men. But it could have just been some cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.

In any event, France needs to put its house in order before the Mohammedans destroy the whole fucking country.

"Wounded in Three Places"
The BBC is reporting that al-Sadr has been "wounded in three places." That's according to one of the Iranian stooge's aides. But that must also mean that the bearded turd wasn't holed up in the Imam Ali mosque, as was believed. He probably skedaddled to avoid having a stray round set off the ammo dump he's made of that particular [holy site].

Fucking chumps.

Kill 'em all.

Dies Irae
Be sure to follow what Hammorabi and the other Iraqi bloggers are saying right now.

Many Groups of Sadr Militia surrendered to the Iraqi Police and Coalition forces after they gave up their arms. Among them are children less than 12 years old given RPG 7 and Kalashnikovs? Bullshit instead of a book and a computer or a game.

We will get pictures of their surrender later.

There is an imminent attack with tear gas to those hide themselves inside Imam Ali shrine and among them MS who escaped earlier.

Iran frustrated by the news of thousands of the militia it trained started to surrender and among them many Iranians, and Arabs. This makes an Iranian top leader to announce that the US will soon face a similar defeat like Vietnam War! A clear sign indicating the involvement of Iran in what is going on in Najaf and the Iraq.

Yeah. It's a good thing that there aren't any terrorists or members of the Axis of Evil causing Iraq any trouble. See, not only is there no connection between the "War on Terror" and this War on Iraq being waged by Bushitler, but Iraq didn't even have terrorists until we forced them to come and fight us. Don't you get it yet?

Apropos of Something, I'm Sure
Now Playing: "Madame George" by Van Morrison
When I heard of the confessions to homosexuality of New Jersey's governor today, it reminded me of something from somewhere a long time ago, but I couldn't quite remember what it was until just now.

You knew, right, that New Jersey has had a long history of similarly interesting governors? One such governor was Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury (1661-1723):

Perhaps the most infamous characteristic of Edward Hyde is not his status as a corrupt politician, but rather that of a cross dresser. Numerous rumors have circulated that Viscount Cornbury liked to dress in women's clothes in order to have a likeness near to his cousin, Queen Anne. A painting hangs in the New York Historical Society whose description reads, "Viscount Cornbury, governor of New York and New Jersey (1702-1708)." The painting is a portrait of a man wearing a woman's clothes, and it was identified as being Cornbury in 1796, seventy-three years after his death. This painting is a piece of evidence that supports historians' uniform depiction of Hyde as a cross dresser.

There have been many stories told throughout history of his escapades as a transvestite. One was told by Horace Walpole in a conversation with his friend George James Williams. Walpole recounted,

"He was a clever man. His great insanity was dressing himself as a woman. Lord Orford [Walpole] says that when Governor in America he opened the Assembly dressed in that fashion. When some of those about him remonstrated, his reply was, 'You are very stupid not to see the propriety of it. In this place and particularly on this occasion I represent a woman (Queen Anne) and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as I can.'"

Heh, heh. Of course, there's no correlation between being gay and being a transvestite unless, of course, you believe, as most Americans do, that there is.

As for Governor McGreevey, I couldn't care less whether he's gay. But he's obviously dipped himself in some deep derrieregy to have to resign his office.

Who knows? Maybe there's an upside for President Bush in all of this. He's only 20 points down in the Garden State.

A Solution
Now Playing: "A Means to an End" by Joy Division
Since we don't want to destroy the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, but do want to kill Sadr and his fellow murderers, why don't we just promise Saddam a few extra virgins in paradise if he'll just tell us where he hid his VX?

"Jumpin' Jack Flash ---it's a gas, gas, gas...yeah..."

The Gorebot Is Such a Joke
Mood:  irritated
In his latest demonstration to the American people that his loss in 2000 was a blessing from God, Al Gore, in a speech before a friendly crowd of high-profile music industry types today, spewed the usual on the President's choice of Porter Goss to head up the CIA.

Gore, in a speech to the Music Row Democrats, said that with the selection of Goss, an eight-term congressman from Florida, Bush "just thumbed his nose" at the bipartisan commission established to investigate the attacks.

That would be after years of Bush's support for George Tenet, a Clinton appointee, without so much as a word of blame, right? The Gorebot went on to piss and moan:

"But a president of the United States who is genuinely and deeply concerned with healing the wounds of the nation and bringing us together as a people and doing everything possible to learn the lessons of 9/11 and implement the recommendations of that commission and make sure that it would not happen again would not appoint a partisan director," Gore to said to loud applause.

Well! With such a run-on list of qualifications, it would seem that Gore has some particular person in mind. He certainly doesn't mean Bush, but he can't really mean Kerry, either. I think Gore is thinking of some Fantastic Composite President, made of gears and wires and all things sensitive and non-Republican.

"Bringing us together as a people" is a monumentally pussified phrase that signifies nothing. If people are apart ---ideologically or intellectually or otherwise--- that isn't something that a President can really be responsible for, is it? There's no line to toe here, is there? If Dhimmicrats want to go off on their pro-terrorist tangents and hate America in their very dreams, what is George W. Bush supposed to do to fix that? Appoint Bob Kerrey DCI? Get the fuck outta here!

Most real Americans would agree that having an ideologically-inclined DCI ---someone like Bill Casey was to President Reagan--- is a good thing. We need our top spook to have a focus and a mission. We need him to work well with our President and to do more to push the infiltrate the bad guys' networks. That's been our bane for a long time now: too much reliance on eyes in the sky at the expense of human intelligence.

And another thing, Mr. Winner of the Popular Vote: the Kean Commission isn't some sort of ad hoc Supreme Court. Remember what your opinion of non-elected bodies of arbitration usually is. Just because partisan hacks and grandstanders like Richard ben Veniste and Jamie Gorelick say that we should carry out their recommendations doesn't mean that this or any other President is obligated to. President Bush is doing plenty to fight the terrorists; he doesn't need your "advice" on how to protect America. In fact, if he took your advice, we probably would have already suffered another attack on our shores.

Gore, just crawl back under your rock and wait for your next call from Mr. Soros.

Nauseating
If you can stand to read it, there's an editorial in today's New York Times by Dahlia Lithwick concerning the daily disintegration of our Bill of Rights at the hands of Bushitler. It turns out that the right of the people to freely assemble and be anti-American assholes is being infringed (emphasis added):

It's easy to forget that as passionate and violent as opposition to the Iraq war may be, it pales in comparison with the often bloody dissent of the Vietnam era, when much of the city of Washington was nevertheless a free-speech zone.

It's tempting to say the difference this time lies in the perils of the post-9/11 world, but that argument assumes some meaningful link between domestic political protest and terrorism. There is no such link, except in the eyes of the Bush administration, which conflates the two both as a matter of law and of policy.

Lithwick's "argument" seems to be that people who hate Bush have a right to physically and proximately confront both him and the people who choose to support him in public venues such as speeches, rallies, and conventions. Bush-haters have a Constitutional right to disrupt the assemblies of those who support him and make any place where such events are held a "free speech zone."

This is garbage for two reasons. One, it is an infringement upon the rights of others to peaceably assemble and to advocate their own interests. Americans who support our President will have made considerable effort to come and be near him as he makes an appearance, and it is fundamentally unfair to expect them to subject themselves to some pack of hecklers or troublemakers whose clear purpose is to make a scene and get the attention that mommy never gave them as children. These oh-so principled "dissenters" have only one thing in mind, which is to gain the attention of Big Media. Nothing would give these French-loving degenerate flag-burners a bigger woody than to get ten seconds on Peter Jennings' evening apology. And that's a right? There's a right to sufficient media coverage for fifth-columnists to spew their bile? Try again, Ms. Lithwick.

Two, the physical imposition of violence-minded Bush-haters in concentrated areas introduces a high potential for chaos, confusion, and loss of control. Neither the President nor the Secret Service nor any other defender of this Administration is obligated to stand there and allow people who are obviously unstable and filled with hate to have the kind of "access" to the President that they would like. Apparently, Lithwick is unfamiliar with the logic of rope-lines, security perimeters, security sweeps and checks, metal-detectors, and dozens of other such measures. This is the President we're talking about, not a county commissioner. In the past 40 years, we have seen what apparently friendly crowds can wreak upon prominent American politicians. Is it really so unreasonable that, in a time of war and asymmetrical terrorism, our President should be afforded the highest physical protection? I didn't see the DNC refusing security perimeters in Boston, you know.

As for Lithwick's more scurrilous point ---that this Administration is busy making dissent into terrorism--- she is simply spreading the usual Leftist hysteria. These hippies and flakes would like us to believe that they are being repressed and censored, but that simply isn't happening. People are free to speak their minds in every conceivable public venue. They can assume false identities and rant all day long on the internet. They can assemble with like-minded people anywhere they wish. They can make a nuisance of themselves with placards, bullhorns, and their usual stench. They can make propaganda films and laugh all the way to the bank. If they're sufficiently well-connected, they can get a gig on a major network or a radio station. They can write books, letters, and Congressmen. So forget all this crushing-of-dissent gibberish: nobody's knocking on the doors of average people who hate Bush in the middle of the night. It's a lie to say they are.

The anti-war Left, being on the inherently more intelligent side of this argument of whether the President is the Anti-Christ, should believe in the primacy of ideas. But they do not. They believe in ideology as performance art. They believe in clustering together in their little claverns where no other opinion may intrude. But they are not entitled to intimidate others in places where those people are assembled to demonstrate their own beliefs. It may be laughable to think that the anti-war crowd poses a physical danger to people who believe in the Second Amendment, but as the stakes grow larger in this time of war, only irresponsible hacks like Lithwick would ignore the potential for domestic dissent to turn violent. And as the anti-war Left's beliefs and behavior come to resemble ever more closely the qualities of treason and sympathy for terrorists, real Americans would be wise to be on their guard.

Even against the Sandal-Wearing Patchouli People.

Just a Tourist
This is why we don't need any more "tourists" in our country:

A Pakistani man held in North Carolina, who had videotaped buildings in Houston and five other Southern cities, remains an enigma to federal investigators who have not linked him to any terrorist groups, officials said Wednesday.

But a spokesman for the Houston FBI office called the 40-minute video of Houston landmarks shot by Kamran Akhtar obvious surveillance footage.

Among the locales this craphound videotaped was Mansfield Dam, a major piece in the puzzle to the Lower Colorado River here in the Austin area. Above it is Lake Travis, below it is Lake Austin.

I had the privilege a few years ago of working out in Lakeway and I always enjoyed the scenery that way. It pisses me off that some Mohammedan nutjob would even think to do something that would cause my city harm.

No more foreigners. Round them up and send them back home on leaky boats.

Ojo de Dios
This is greatnews, if true:

NASA may spend as much as $1.6 billion to save the Hubble Space Telescope, and scientists have been told to begin planning a robotic mission to save the orbiting observatory, the Baltimore Sun reported.

An audience of about 200 engineers, astronomers and technicians at the U.S. space agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which controls the operations of the telescope, cheered when Administrator Sean O'Keefe told them to find a way to repair the telescope, the paper said.

The Hubble Space Telescope is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'm very pleased to hear that we're gonna do what we must to keep it going.

Just don't tell Sherwood Boehlert. Prick.

A Message I Sent to the Anti-war Left
Now Playing: "Fresh Air" by the Quicksilver Messenger Service
I hate the idea that we're having to bomb the cemetery at Najaf and that we may even wind up damaging the mosques there. As much contempt as I have for Islam, I have at least as much for the ruination of History's great places. But the Sadrites have brought this on themselves and their holy of holies. They, as well as everyone else in Iraq, know that this "insurgency" is nothing of the kind; it is murder for murder's sake; it is their psychotic fantasy of reliving the martyrdom of Ali; it is suicide by cop. No matter how wrong you are in believing that the War for Iraq is a mistake, surely you people must concede that these "insurgents" have no legitimate political aspirations. They have no hope of making some place for themselves in a civil Iraq. They have become the vector for Iranian, Syrian, and al-Qaedist intrigue in Iraq, and they have caused thousands of deaths because of it.

I hope the next few days will bring us news of Sadr's death and the total collapse of his stupid Mahdi militias. I sincerely wonder whether any of you shares that hope.

Airbrushes
Here's a great post at a blog called Dislogue about how the Kerrion are being "disappeared" from the Internet. From the gleeful hatred of Markos Zuniga (a prominent online Kerry fundraiser better known as the proprietor of The Daily Kos) towards the American contractors murdered and desecrated at Fallujah to the now-dead link to Kerry's foreign policy advisor Joe Wilson's restorehonesty.com, these rotten bastages are trying to hide their tracks. But it doesn't work.

Purging links may not on the surface appear to be the same as airbrushing people out of photographs. But each is an attempt to hide the fact that there were links between people, links that matter historically. The campaign did issue a statement about Kos, but admitted no error in associating with entities so extreme.

There's plenty of anti-American hatred out there among the anti-war online Left. Kos and the Democratic Underground are particularly egregious examples of this, but the worst offender that hasn't yet gotten its comeuppance is the ultra-Left Eschaton. There, you can threaten to physically harm people who disagree with you ---and the worthless hack who runs that site, Duncan Black, permits these threats to stand. Why is that? Because Black has no character. By virtue of allowing threats of physical violence against dissenters to be published at his site, Black is tacitly encouraging this behavior.

(Hat tip to the Power Line.)

Level It
CNN is saying that the final push in the Battle for Najaf is underway. If it weren't hypocritical for an atheist to wish our men and women godspeed, well...I'll risk it, anyway: May God watch over us and our friends and be done with this lousy Iranian stooge and his fucking gangs. God bless our armed forces and reward them with Sadr's mangled corpse. Iraq will be free and these murderers will be punished. God's will be done.