The UN's Girlfriend
Mood:  don't ask
Courtesy of the BeldarBlog, who writes about it here, have a look at this article in today's Washington Post. (Emphasis taken from Beldar.)

Kerry's belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."

What the fuck does this even mean? As Beldar puts it:

The simplest reading of this weird statement is that the cause an American soldier fights and dies for is worthwhile if -- but only if -- it's been duly blessed by the United Nations.

I'll say it again, ladies: if the President can't hang this sort of shit around Kerry's neck and watch him go to the bottom, he deserves to lose.

John Kerry puts more value on the United Nations and assholes governments like Chiraq's than he does on his own. He is a sell-out and a danger. His election would unquestionably be a victory for Islamofascism.

Don't let it happen.

Thin Gruel
Remember how John Kerry's life was portrayed at the Democratic National Convention? It went from Viet Nam ---a whole lot of Viet Nam--- to some point a couple of weeks before the convention. There was like a quarter-century and more that just wound up on the cutting room floor. No Winter Soldiers, no Jane Fonda, no Michael Dukakis, no nothing.

And the 20 years in the US Senate? Not much to it, folks. An extremely undistinguished record. Go read it for yourself. It's embarrassing. Not only has Kerry accomplished jack shit in the Senate, but the only thing that can really be said for him is how wrong he's been on every important foreign policy issue you can think of. He was a pro-Sandinista, anti-Reagan, anti-Gulf War appeasenik. Against the defense spending that hastened the end of the Cold War and against the intelligence spending that would have made us safer before the atrocities of 11 September 2001.

There's no way he belongs in the White House.

Primper
Be sure to get a load of John Edwards getting pretty for the cameras.

Heh, heh.

Arafat Endorses Kerry
Enjoy this from the WorldNetDaily:

Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is hoping John Kerry wins the presidential election in November, several Palestinian leaders told WorldNetDaily.

Arafat deputy and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told WND in an exclusive interview that while "we do not involve ourselves in internal American politics," at the same time "our region has been sliding deeper and deeper into chaos because of certain policies over the past few years, and this needs to change."

Hmmm. What a surprise. So, the next time you hear a whining liberal Dhimmicrat get all indignant at the very idea that Kerry's election would be a disaster for us, remember this.

And remember that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for those who hate America.

Jon Stewart on Crossfire
I had heard a lot of buzz about Jon Stewart's appearance on CNN's Crossfire last Friday, in which he called Tucker Carlson a dick, but have only now found a reliable clip to it. Go to this blog, called A Whole Lotta Nothing, and there's a link to the whole thing. (It's a WindowsMedia file and the running time is about 14 minutes.)

I've always liked Stewart. My favorite stuff of his was from the classic and indispensible Larry Sanders Show on HBO. And I certainly like The Daily Show, despite his overwhelming anti-Bush attitude. But, as much as Carlson and Paul Begala deserved the ass-kicking they got for being the obnoxious hacks they are, Stewart is very obviously guilty of trying to have it both ways.

On the one hand, Stewart tries to pre-emptively exonerate himself from any responsibility for his own involvement in the media culture of this election by dismissing his show as simple comedy. That's his out. On the other hand, he is involved in this election by virtue of the partisan prejudices he brings to that forum. And we know from polls and anecdotal assessments that Stewart is an actual source of news for people of my generation. Is that absurd? Stewart would say so, but he's not shying away from that status. Among his guests from the past year or so are some of the biggest figures in our government and media. If he wants to make a point or sway some minds through his influence, he also has a responsibility. Carlson, who is a dick, was right to ridicule Stewart for the softballs he threw up when Kerry came on his show. Stewart blew a great chance to get something out of Kerry, but, in all probability, that was never in the cards, anyway. Why? Because, at that point, when John Kerry had imposed an almost complete blackout on interviews with the press, Stewart willingly played the part of a clown who was satisifed to simply roll over for the candidate. His candidate. I noticed it and so did everyone else. So, while Jon Stewart is a great wit and oh-so uber-cool, he is, in his own way, also a hack.

The Magnet for Jihadists
In an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley last Friday, Democratic Presidential nominee and incredible moron John Kerry described Iraq as an "extraordinary magnet for jihadists". And it's a fair cop. But Kerry means this as a complaint ---as though there were no advantage to our own domestic security in making Saddamite Iraq, rather than our own cities, the front line in the war against terrorists.

Did we have a right to so use Iraq? I don't see why not. Saddam was an Islamic fascist who had long used and supported terror as a weapon against us and our interests. His Ba'athist regime had been a threat in the Middle East for a generation. Saddam was a user of chemical weapons and a seeker of weapons worse than that. He had invaded three of his neighbors, committed genocide against various groups within his own country, financed the intifadists against the Jews of Israel, and had made the wretched United Nations into his personal bitch through bribery and manipulating the sanctions on Iraq that were meant to curb his excesses. His sons and associates were some of the worst psychopaths of the 20th Century and his secret police were involved in terror plots throughout the Middle East and Europe. And he was a harborer of terrorists. Don't forget that. Don't forget any of this.

The filthy animals who are murdering our servicemen and women are really the ones who have made Iraq into the battlefield of choice. Some of them are homegrown psychopaths and others are foreign terrorists. Reuters and the other dhimmi news agencies call them militants and rebels. And insurgents ---as though they are fighting for some legitimate political cause. But what these animals are doing is dying for nothing. And they're doing it there instead of here. President Bush said "bring 'em on." That is, if you want to fight Americans, try your hand against the best we got. And that's what's happening. Our men and women in uniform are making the greatest sacrifices possible to take these wretched bastards on in a place far from our own shores. And when we beat them, not only will we have killed and hauled off garbage like Abu Musab Zarqawi ---who has now pledged his allegiance to the mouldering corpse once known as Osama bin Laden--- but we will have planted the tree of democracy in the heart of their lands and used their filthy carcasses to fertilize it.

There is a method in the madness of this war. You may regard Iraq as an anode in the circuit of Islamofascist terror. It is a point meant to be sacrificed to the corrosion of these murderers' evil purposes. But in recompense for suffering through these dark days, Iraq will be rewarded with the gift of democracy and liberty. They and, eventually, that entire region will have this Administration to thank ---and the men and women of our Coalition to honor--- for making possible their liberation from the likes of Saddam Hussein.

Crackheads for Kerry
Mood:  suave
As Michael King at Ramblings' Journal says, just damn.

"Fair Game"
Regardless of what John Kerry has said in defense of his reference to Mary Cheney in the third debate, the bottom line is that Mary Beth Cahill said that raising the issue of Ms. Cheney's sexuality was "fair game." In other words, the reference was a deliberate choice of a target.

No, it is inaccurate to say that Kerry "outed" her, but his and the Edwardses' decision to raise such an irrelevant issue ---as well as breaking one of the few taboos left in electoral politics by singling out an opponent's child for any reason other than unmistakable praise--- was a foolish thing to have done.

Just watch a replay of Kerry's remarks. You can tell by the hesitancy in his delivery that he knew, even as it was coming out of his mouth, that he was making a mistake. And what he has said about it since then is complete bullshit. If he was merely trying to give an example of a gay person whose family is loving and supportive, Kerry could have come up with a generic example or made reference to Dick Gephardt's daughter or Rosie O' Donnell or Ellen DeGeneres or any number of people. But he specifically raised the issue of Mary Cheney for a reason: to introduce the element of division into the ranks of the Presidents' Christian Right supporters. Their bigotry is a problem, indeed, but what is worse is Kerry's cynicism in playing to it. That's the bottom line.

I Voted
Around noon today, all three of my brothers and I met up at the Travis County Courthouse at 10th and Guadalupe here in Austin, Texas and voted in the election of the President of the United States. It was very easy and enjoyable. I even ran into our state's Attorney General, Greg Abbott, who had apparently just wrapped up a photo op when I came in. We chatted for a minute while he waited for his wife to come from powdering her nose. Nice guy.

So it's a done deal, friends. I have now made amends for my vote in 2000 and have cast my latest for our President.

I am nervous about this election as I have never been before. But it's looking good for George W. Bush. Just gotta maintain until it's all done.

And, then, I have some letters to write.

No Answer
One of the very few positions that John Kerry hasn't waffled on is his conviction that we should have brought our "allies" to the table when we invaded Iraq. He uses this generic term for two reasons: one, he is a liar who can't bring himself to acknowledge the fact that we do have allies in Iraq and, two, he doesn't want to explicitly define who those "allies" are because he is hypersensitive to being labeled a Francophile appeaser. "Allies" is just code for France and their lickspittles in Germany. Kerry believes that our Coalition is illegitimate because it wasn't blessed by Jacques Chiraq.

What I want to hear is just one sorry-assed reporter asking Jean le Kerrie what he thinks of the Duelfer Report's indictment of the French for taking bribes from Saddam in exchange for their influence against us on the UN Security Council. Why doesn't this happen? When is someone going to ask this guy why he thinks France is the moral and political exemplar in this situation when they obviously didn't oppose us on principle, but on greed?

A vote for John Kerry is a vote for those who are a bunch of goddamned ingrates.

Dying with a Silver Foot in Its Ass
Andrew Ferguson has written a very entertaining article in the latest Weekly Standard on Bush-hatred and the liberal political culture of Austin. He gets everything just about right, including this:

[...]the feeling that runs through Texas liberalism--the feeling of being besieged, outgunned, impotent if not hopeless--is well-founded. Even paranoids are sometimes on to something. For nearly a century, Texas liberals shared the majority party in Texas, the Democratic party, with conservatives. It was an uneasy alliance but it satisfied both factions with separate spheres of influence. No more. The good news for Texas progressives is that they've finally purged the Democratic party of right-wingers and now have it all to themselves. The bad news is that the party is roughly the size of a well-attended kegger. And it promises to stay that way for the next generation.

The change is notable not only for its comprehensiveness but for the rapidity with which it took place. In Texas, the first Republican since Reconstruction took statewide office in 1978. Within 20 years, all 22 statewide offices were held by Republicans. Unbudgeable, decades-old majorities in both houses of the Texas legislature vaporized just as quickly. You can't blame Texas liberals for being disoriented. "There's something about being so concentrated ideologically that makes them more strident than they'd be under other circumstances," Will Lutz, managing editor of a political newsletter called The Lone Star Report, told [Ferguson] earlier this month.

Be sure to read the whole thing, especially if, like me, you're stuck in this self-important, over-crowded, slacker-proud madhouse on the Colorado.

Too Rich for My Blood
Ter-AY-zuh has released a couple pages of her 2003 Federal income tax return. Turns out, she's very rich:

Teresa Heinz Kerry reported income of just over $5 million last year, slightly more than half of it from investments in tax-exempt municipal and state bonds, her 2003 income tax return shows, confirming her status as the wealthiest spouse of any major party nominee in United States history.

Ms. Heinz Kerry on Friday released a small part of her 2003 income tax return, unlike her husband, Senator John Kerry, and President Bush and his wife, Laura, who have made their full tax returns available for public inspection. The Kerrys file separate tax returns, a common arrangement when one spouse is wealthy.

Well, I say Caesar's wife must be seen to be above reproach. She needs to give us more than just two pages. And if you read allll the way to the bottom of this New York Times article, you'll see why (emphasis mine):

No information was provided about how much income was earned by trusts of which she is the beneficiary. If the trusts are as large as reported - and the Kerry campaign has not challenged the billion dollar estimate - then even a modest 5 percent return would have generated $50 million of income, 10 times what was on the two pages released by Ms. Heinz Kerry. A statement released by the Kerry campaign noted that income taxes are paid directly by the Heinz family trust, in addition to taxes that Ms. Heinz Kerry pays.

Yeah.

This woman is extremely rich and is a great backer of all sorts of Leftist bullshit and charities. We don't need her kind in a position of even greater power. Because the super-wealthy obey no law but their own conscience. Because she is a weird and narcissistic moonbat. And because her consort pronounces her name in a way that absolutely pisses me off.

And while I'm at it, let me say this, too, to all of the other creepy broads from hers and my mother's generation who were in some position of influence over me in my formative years: you like her, don't you? You like that degenerate, cosmopolitan view of the world, don't you, where it's all Gloria Steinem balls and Diane Keaton hats? A world of Bela Abzugs and Helen Thomases, Jane Fondas and Valerie Harpers. Strident pro-choice nutjobs, duking it out with Mr. Grant in the newsroom and then looking for Mr. Goodbar later on that night. What a filthy fucking time in our nation's cultural evolution. Whatever there may be to my own feminist sympathies, they remain despite the nauseating memory of those days.

Tough
Enjoy this report at NewsMax.com which features the text of the letter sent today by John Kerry's shyster to the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Evidently, the Kerrion are mad because Sinclair is going to broadcast a documentary called Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, which is said to be an attack on Kerry's anti-war activities in the early 1970s. Kerry wants equal time.

But Sinclair has already offered Kerry a chance to participate in the airing of this documentary. He has refused. And the Federal Communications Commission has also refused to keep Sinclair from exercising its First Amendment rights in showing it.

If Stolen Honor were a piece of libelous agitprop without any redeeming value, why would Sinclair consent to its broadcast? That would be bad for business. As it is, they are reaping a huge publicity windfall for an excellent purpose besides their own bottom line: they are helping to defeat a man who should not be the next President.

Not incidentally, you can visit the website for Stolen Honor here.

"A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country..."
Be sure to read Paul Kengor's essay at National Review Online on the importance of what George W. Bush has begun in bringing the hope of democracy to the tyrannical Islamic regimes of Iraq and Afghanistan.

If such countries become 21st-century democracies, historians will struggle to explain how impossible democracy's prospects once seemed in these nations, and thus how boundless and rare was Bush's optimism. His assessment may have been more farfetched than Ronald Reagan's predictions on the end of Communism in the early 1980s, which Bush referred to in this speech. Speaking specifically of Reagan's June 1982 Westminister Address, as well as Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, Bush concluded: "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country.... We [Americans] believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history.... [T]his is, above all, the age of liberty."

Kengor also writes (after John Lewis Gaddis) ---as I, too, often remind my so-called liberal friends (who are nothing but isolationists now) that

by seeking to spread democracy everywhere, Bush aimed to finish the job Woodrow Wilson started a century earlier. "The world," writes Gaddis, "quite literally, must be made safe for democracy, even those parts of it, like the Middle East, that have so far resisted that tendency." (This was the kind of thing that liberals once championed, before blind rage at Bush precluded their better angels.)

Please remember what is at stake, folks. Remember that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for those who hate America.

What a Kerry State Department Would Look Like
Via NRO, here's part of a response to blogger Daniel Drezner's offer to change his mind from voting for Kerry. It's from "a former US diplomat who served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations."

You also have to ask yourself, who is going to carry out Kerry's multilateral approach? And on that score, things simply get worse. A Kerry White House would mean the Madeleine Albright B Team moving into senior foreign policy positions. And, with the notable exception of Richard Holbrooke (his hair may be on fire, but he gets things done), this would be disastrous. These are the same folks who fiddled for 8 years on counter terror, negotiated a terrifyingly naive nuke deal with North Korea, and generally treat foreign policy as a rhetorical exercise. This is a team who has demonstrated, in past position of influence, an alarming propensity to get rolled by their foreign counterparts. Let's pick just two: Susan Rice? Jamie Rubin?! Are you serious?? During her sojourn as assistant secretary for Africa in Albright's State Department, Rice had to be consistently bailed out of trouble by career diplomats. As for Rubin, he is anti-gravitas. He's Edwards-lite.

Heh, heh.

Righteous Indignation
Check out this post at Patterico's Pontifications about why Kerry and the Edwardses think it's okay to have gratuitously used Mary Cheney as an example in their recent debates of their [greater sensitivity] to gay rights. Here's Patterico's conclusion:

So what was the purpose? You know damn well what it was. John Kerry and John Edwards have calculated that there are Christian conservatives out there who are not aware that Dick Cheney has a gay daughter. They know that Karl Rove considers the mobilization of the Christian conservative vote to be the single most important factor in this election. So they have cynically decided to exploit what they believe to be the homophobia of some of those Christian conservatives. There is no other possible explanation.

President Bush may owe a lot to the Christian Right ---and some of that debt is undoubtedly a low-grade hostility to the full recognition of gay rights (viz., gay marriage). I think that sucks. I also think that Kerry's belief that homosexuality is not a choice is correct. But he gets no points from me for that. He is, instead, a chickenshit for making Mary Cheney a part of his argument. That crosses a line.

Mary Cheney loves her parents and they love her. They aren't ashamed of her. Rather, they have respect for her dignity and privacy as all good parents do. The Democrats think it's fun to make something of out of the gay rights agenda when it touches on a Republican. But guess what, jackasses: that doesn't affect Dick Cheney as a father or as a man; you only hope it has some effect on him politically.

Let's see who gets affected next.

Keeping an Eye on Voter Fraud
Please be sure to have a look at Bill Hobbs' post/archive on voter fraud. Turns out, contrary to what CNN and Comrade Jennings and the rest would have you believe, most of the fraud is attributable to Democrats, as is the almost brownshirt-like pre-election violence and vandalism that's going on all across the country against Bush-Cheney campaign offices.

Pejmanesque on "The Wisdom of Paul Begala"
This is to laugh.

Paul Begala: yet another person to add to my List of People Whose Faces Must Be Rubbed In It When Bush Wins Re-Election.

Thus far, the List includes:

Terry McAuliffe
Hanoi John
Michael Moore, who is a traitor
Jimmy Carter
James Carville
Ted Rall
Jamie Rubin
Dan Rather
Mary Mapes
Joe Wilson
Richard Clarke
Wesley Clark
Ter-AY-zuh Heinz
Jacques Chiraq
Gerhard Schroeder
Chris Matthews
John Roberts
Keith Olbermann
The Gorebot

Feel free to add some of your own.

He Shoots Prisoners in the Head, Doesn't He?
Iraq's Prime Minister Allawi is just about done with Fallujah. According to a story in the Washington Times,

Iraq's prime minister yesterday threatened military action against the rebel stronghold of Fallujah if residents don't hand over Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi.

"If they do not turn in al-Zarqawi and his group, we will carry out operations in Fallujah," Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told a meeting of the 100-member National Council. "We will not be lenient."

Time to find a new hero to worship, Fallujah. These ain't the 1930s and that sorry fuck sure ain't John Dillinger.

Aaron's Rock n' Roll Sucks
I've been in the market for a while now for a particular Jimi Hendrix poster that a friend of mine used to have up in his room. It's an enlarged version of a playbill for a show Hendrix did in Germany. It's got German writing on it and is mostly just a giant portrait of Hendrix with wires and cables emanating from his fro. It's a real favorite.

No one seems to have it, but a guy at a Planet K off Riverside said that Aaron's Rock n' Roll has a good selection of posters, so I made my way down there this morning. Great parking there on Neches at Sixth Street at eleven in the morning, so it was looking smooth.

But when I get to the door, the clerk-slacker-thing is desperately trying to get the door shut and locked so that he can go do something. What the fuck? It's eleven, man. Says the store opens at eleven right there on the sign.

"Dude, I'm sorry. I've got to go take care of this. I'll be back in five minutes."

There's a well-used "Back in Five Minutes" sign taped up.

"Can you wait?"

Yeah, I'll wait. It's a really pretty morning and there's nothing going on.

But after waiting around for at least ten minutes, I pack it in and take off.

See what happens when you hire irresponsible, 20-something pot-head slackers to run your store? You lose business. So, nice going, Aaron's Rock n' Roll of Austin, Texas. I'm gonna find that poster online and have it delivered to my door. And no sales tax, either, assholes.

Enjoy keepin' it real.