None Too Swift
The Kerrion do not realize it yet, but their man's war record has been dealt some serious blows. Actually, I think they may know it's true, but are not yet ready to confess.

It wouldn't matter but for the fact that Kerry has made his experience in Viet Nam the core of his qualification to be Commander-in-Chief. (Is that not so?) But he has pursued this line because it is what his party expected. They purposefully sought out a candidate whose military experience could be favorably compared to George W. Bush's more modest record. (How else can Wesley Clark's ridiculous bid be understood?) So the party exploited Kerry and Kerry was willing to exploit the party.

Now, the price of Kerry's nomination ---the kickback to the anti-war Dean crowd--- was to reverse himself on the issue of the War for Iraq. It is this that infuriates me more than any lies about his military experience. (These lies are of interest to me only because they damage the credibility of his predicate qualification.) But the absurd and hypocritical positions Kerry has taken on the strategic importance of a Saddam-free Iraq ---clearly contradicting those he had embraced for the past six or seven years--- are what should concern every one now. That is, he has much to explain from his early political career, but the utter stupidity of his position on Iraq now ---with its tortured objections of "processes" not observed and failures to gain "consensus"--- is intolerable. It is only willful ignorance of his rhetorical support ---often eloquent and far-reaching--- for regime change in Iraq because of the dangers posed by Saddam and his weapons of mass murder that will keep the anti-war Left happy with their nominee.

But I cannot forget the most basic guiding principle of the Democratic Party in 2004. It is the only thing that matters ---and it trumps any and all other ideological concerns: Anybody But Bush. We will see again, as we did in the days of Clinton's impeachment, the Democratic Party bury its ethical misgivings and make its bid for the preservation of the power they need. No holds are barred, no prick of conscience remains unblunted.

Another Lying [War Hero]
Did anyone catch that lying sack of commie shit Tom Harkin call the Vice President a coward? I thought it was extreme. But not to worry. Bitches get slapped when they get out of line.



(Bitch-slapping and graphic courtesy of the InstaPundit.)

Oh, and get some more:

When it comes to lying about his service, Kerry's whoppers about infiltrating Special Ops guys into Cambodia don't hold a candle to what Harkin said, though. Harkin himself claimed to have battled Mig fighters over North Vietnam while a Navy pilot. He was a pilot, but never went to Vietnam.

How did a political party that last held the White House with a man who admitted he dodged the draft and said he loathed the military, who demonstrated against his own country while living overseas, come to be the party that now trumpets more militarism than any other?

A Lie? No, Just Incompetence
As the helpful bloggers at GOP.com noted:

The John Kerry campaign, in an effort to burnish the nominee's image on intelligence matters and spin their way out of his lousy committee attendance record, claimed on its website Monday, "John Kerry served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for 8 years and is the former Vice Chairman of the Committee." Fact is John Kerry has never - ever! - served as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Turns out, there was a senator named Bob Kerrey from Nebraska who was vice chairman for a while. Kerry's website later pulled the plug on the page, which might be construed as a metaphor for the whole campaign.

It's true. I clicked on the link and all I got told was that I had no rights to visit that page. Sounds suspicious. Like clicking on Joe Wilson's Kerry-funded restorehonesty.com. You get nothing either way.

You know, all Kerry has to do is authorize the intelligence committee to release his attendance records from the executive sessions ---and then we'll know how much of a bum he is on the whole issue of intelligence. As you can see for yourself, Bob Kerrey ---the actual former vice chairman of the SSCI--- had an excellent record of involvement, whereas the Frenchman was probably off somewhere not reading important intelligence reports ---although he's perfectly comfortable accusing others of not doing so, either.

This guy is a hypocrite and a phoney.

Rock Stars
The Cassini orbiter has found two new moons around Saturn. For now, they're just calling them S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2, but they'll probably find something more romantic later.

However, I do question the timing of this discovery.

Krugman, Pre-Emptor
Although I have misgivings about computer-based voting, it wouldn't occur to me to lay a predicate foundation for a charge of malfeasance by Republicans in Florida and elsewhere in this upcoming election. But that is what Paul Krugman has done in his latest outburst of insinuations. He, like the Democratic Party as a whole, is almost wanting there to be another chance at declaring fraud in Florida. That way, they can feel vindicated in the event that they lose the state again. But Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics has got Krugman's number, demonstrating that all Krugman is doing is

Sowing seeds of fear, doubt and illegitimacy in advance of a possible Bush victory in Florida.

Too bad for Krugman the facts don't support such lunacy. A recently completed study of the 2002 Florida elections showed that while touch-screen machines produce a higher rate of undervotes than optical-scanning machines, both are dramatically more accurate than the punch card ballots used in 2000 - with paper trail and all:

The report is required of the division following every general election as a result of the 2001 elections reform law passed after the contentious 2000 presidential election.

It concluded that the use of both systems helped reduce the error rate from the 2000 election.

"Overall, the percentage of uncounted ballots decreased from 2.93 percent in the 2000 election presidential election to 0.86 in the 2002 gubernatorial election," the report stated, adding that the error for the now-infamous punch-card machines in 2000 was 3.93 percent.

Well, if the Dhimms can't blame touch-screen voting machines, maybe they can go back to such bullshit charges as black disenfranchisement through police checkpoints.

Chris Matthews: Self-Righteous Defender of Flippers
Chris Matthews, who would probably interrupt a dying man's last words, "interviewed" the spokesmen from the Bush and Kerry campaigns last night on Hardball ---and made a very big deal of a supposed distortion made in a Bush campaign web ad of a response he elicited from John Kerry on 6 January 2004. The original exchange went thusly:

MATTHEWS: Do you think you belong to that category of candidates who more or less are unhappy with this war, the way it's been fought...Are you one of the anti-war candidates?

KERRY: I am -- Yes, in the sense that I don't believe the president took us to war as he should have, yes, absolutely.

Matthews' self-righteous objection to Bush's man, Matt Dowd, was that, in the web ad, only the first three words out of Kerry's pie hole were used ---before it cuts away to the very gay-sounding theme song from the 1960s TV show Flipper.

I noticed this, too, when I watched the ad the other night. But if that's all they got, then they got nothing.

Matthews asked Kerry if he was an anti-war candidate ---and Kerry said YES. That is the operative word, comrades: YES. Now, Kerry can leave all of the lawyerly wiggle room in that enunciation he wants and backfill it with "in the sense that" and blah, blah, blah ---but he answered in the affirmative and what he added to it in qualification does not negate what the answer is in its essence.

So what's the consequence? John Kerry voted to authorize the President's use of our military to enforce the UN resolutions and to provide for our defense against Saddamite Iraq. That's the bottom line.

Never mind the fact that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, does not actually require such an authorization except on political grounds. Never mind that Kerry's vote, as he himself knew when he cast it, was not subject to revision or extension, except rhetorically (which he has certainly since demonstrated). And never mind that in the sequel to that vote, Kerry decided against the $87 billion supplemental as a protest. Seems to me that the time to have lodged a protest would have been on the first vote. Of course, at that point, Kerry was not staring down the barrel of Howard Dean's pop-gun.

In the clearest, most damning way possible ---to a nation of TV-watchers and movie-goers--- this video I'm talking about is unanswerable. Kerry hangs himself over and over in a thoroughly documented slew of TV and print appearances that can leave no doubt that his position on Saddam has changed fundamentally in a very short period of time. And it was prompted by his own political opportunism.

Again, I strongly encourage you to go to KerryOnIraq.com and look at the video yourself.

Another Nail
Thomas Lipscomb, writing in The American Spectator, pretty much hammers another nail into Kerry's coffin of lies with his latest essay. Check it out. Not only is the Cambodian story not going away but, if Lipscomb has anything to say about it, neither is the 1971 Viet Nam Veterans Against the War meeting in Kansas City at which there was a secret vote on a proposed assassination of six pro-war United States Senators. Why hasn't more been asked about this story in Big Media? Because they are carrying the guy's water, that's why.

As the story developed, and was widely ignored by the major media, several things emerged that reflected favorably on Kerry's conduct at the meeting. He had argued strongly against the assassinations and prevailed in the final vote. But Kerry still denied the accounts. He stuck to the resignation story as well, even though there was clear evidence in the New York Times and other papers that Kerry had continued as a spokesman for the VVAW, making media and speaking appearances for a year and a half after his supposed resignation.

When FBI files emerged establishing Kerry's presence in Kansas City, the campaign conceded that Kerry somehow must have forgotten his involvement in the plot to assassinate U.S. senators while still on the executive committee of the VVAW. What might have been an unforgettable experience for a man who was now a Senator himself turned out to be just one of those little memory lapses we all have.

See, if John Kerry would just come out and own up to his own bravery in voting down a plan to murder people who disagreed with him and his organization, it would help Americans understand that he really does have some principles. For instance, he would never have murdered William Fulbright. Doesn't he get some points for his self-restraint?

Must've Missed the Segue
I was just watching a story on CNN about how Iran is backing al-Sadr in Iraq and rattling the sabre of its own missile technology. After it ended, instead of going into any sort of analysis or other obviously relevant follow-up, Wolf Blitzer immediately segued into an in-studio interview with the liar Joe Wilson about whether reporters should give up their sources in the so-called Plame Scandal.

What does that have to do with anything?

CNN is full of crap for giving this obvious liar a platform to wonder aloud about the legality and ethics of reporters' rights to protect their sources. Ordinarily, Leftists are big on such protections, but not when they think they have some points to score against Bushitler.

Wilson, who has the Caesarian habit of referring to himself in the third person, is hungry for vindication, but he's the one to blame for exposing his wife to questions about her connections. That's because he took it upon himself to write himself into Big Media's attack on this Administration by blabbing about his CIA-sponsored fact-finding trip to Niger. He wasn't qualified to do the job and Robert Novak wondered why. How did some washed-up former ambassador from the Clinton Administration without any intelligence experience get such an assignment? Was it nepotism? Did he know someone who got him the job? Sure enough, he did. Who would it have been? A natural question that was easily answered. But Wilson lied about it. He denied that his wife was responsible for getting him the assignment.

Remember: Wilson didn't have to say anything about his trip to Niger. But he and Plame are Bush-haters and Wilson wanted to get in on the action by writing a bunch of lies in the New York Times. Was that right? Did he betray his confidences? Sure he did. And it turns out that what he said was false. The recent report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said so and so did the Butler Inquiry.

No sympathy for you, Joe. You wanted to get your 15 minutes and now you're getting a whole lot more: an international reputation as a liar (at least among those who get their information from places besides Wolf Blitzer and 60 Minutes) and as an incompetent axe-grinder. Nice work. Maybe Jean le Kerry will give you another post once he lies his way into the White House with the help of anti-American shithooks like you.

No Proprietary Atrocities
New York Congressman Peter King has written a great op-ed on how Big Media is ignoring the so-called "9/11 families" who support our President in favor of exploiting a relative handful of loudmouths who think that a war profiteer like Richard Clarke is some sort of hero.

[...] Richard Clarke insinuated himself onto the national scene, becoming the overnight darling of the anti-Bush crowd, as he implied that Mr. Bush was to blame for September 11. Again the media cited the September 11 families who supported Mr. Clarke. All of this coincided with the release of Mr. Clarke's book.

I understand that these Bush-haters who lost family and friends on that awful morning have a right to their grief, as well as their politics. But they are not the owners of 11 September 2001. Not by a damn sight. We have all been changed as a consequence of that moment. So has been our foreign policy. The problem the Bush-hating Left has is that they do not have the fortitude to face the necessity of our new posture in the world. They want to turn back the clock and not face the task at hand, which is the annihilation of Muslim terrorists. But George W. Bush has not let them slink back into the warm beds of their aloof isolationism. That is why they resent him: because he is doing the right thing and they can't abide it. They want a leader who will negotiate and dither and appease. They want John Kerry. Christ save us all if they get him.

Release the Records
Since John Kerry has made his military record the primary qualification for his Presidential candidacy, why doesn't he just release all of his records from his time in Viet Nam? He promised Tim Russert months ago that he would, but his campaign only released some of them and pretended that they had kept the promise. If he released everything, the public would be able to determine for themselves whether his tales of secret excursions into Cambodia are true. And the details surrounding the issue of his medals.

Kerry should also authorize the release of the records of his attendance at the private meetings of the Senate Intelligence Committee. We know that during the time of his membership (1993-2000), he missed three-quarters of all the public meetings of that committee, but he himself has to okay the release of the private attendance records. Why does it matter? Because he has held himself out as someone who is on top of things with regard to Congressional oversight of our government's intelligence services. But we know that neither he nor John Edwards has given anything like the necessary time to intelligence. In fact, Kerry seems to have no clue about the importance of intelligence:

Not long after the first World Trade Center bombing, John Kerry proposed $7.5 billion in across the board intelligence cuts. Kerry's 1994 proposal to cut intelligence by $6 billion was criticized at the time by Democrats including then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dennis DeConcini and Sen. Daniel Inouye, who warned Kerry's cut "would severely hamper" intelligence efforts. Kerry's proposal was fortunately defeated by a vote of 20 to 75, with even Sen. Ted Kennedy voting against the measure. In 1995, Kerry proposed a bill to reduce the Intelligence budget by $1.5 billion. This bill had no co-sponsors and never reached the Senate floor for a vote.

The public has a right to know that Kerry preaches one things and practices another.

An Early Birthday Present
Mood:  celebratory
Liz Claman is back on CNBC this morning.

"The Kampuchean Candidate"
A reader at the Power Line suggests certain parallels between Kerry's holiday in Cambodia and The Manchurian Candidate.

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

----------

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....