New Treasury Chief Former Offensive Tackle, Still Birdwatcher

GWB has scored a phenomenal coup by persuading Goldman Sachs Chief Hank Poulson as the new Secretary of the Treasury. The much-maligned departing John Snow was a clubfoot at promoting the fantastic growth of the US economy, over 5% the last quarter, and even though the US economy was growing at an equal rate to Bob Rubin's pace during the Clinton boom during Snow's tenure, the former CSX chief never caught on with the Wall Street crowd, nor very much with his own corporate crowd, for that matter. Plus his hectoring of China and other countries won him few fans abroad.

The Financial Times has a good overview of his career, including his lowly origins as an Illinois farmboy near Burlington, his farm career after he made his millions, his presidency of The Nature Conservancy, which buys properties for wildlife to flourish on, and his big spread in this May's Vanity Fair green issue as an Enviro-Don on Wall Street. Plus his legendary exploits as a Dartmouth offensive lineman [my own former position] and subsequent climb to the top of the biggest brownshoe operation on the Street. [BTW, another Illinois farmboy genius is WStreet whiz and NYSE prez John Thaines{who appears to have Abe Lincoln's Marfan configuration}, still a third is Gore-recount chief lawyer John Boies at Wood Crutcher from Marengo, where we bought our amazing Himalayan cat with an IQ of close to 50!]

But I digress.

NYT Op-Ed Chief Fraud Paul Krugboy, who hated Rubin in the '80s and Laura Dyson in the '90s [along with Robert Reich an object of the Krugman BS-spew machine], must be rotated at several thousand RPM as he sees himself eclipsed again [he regards himself as a planetary object] by truly competent people tempermentally adapted to life in the BIG TIME and FAST LANE, unlike his own marginal carping whingeing self.

Sorry for another digression, but blogs must move on.

The amazing performance of the American economy whose growth has surpassed the highest even during the Dot-Com Bubble of the nineties has got to be cooled with those rods they use in nuclear plants, but not by higher taxes, says Greg Mankiw. However, the US real estate market is beginning to soften, according to this Sunday's Barron's, so the awesome US consumption patterns often spurred by refinancing in a bonkers real estate upswing is bound to plateau, if not begin to crater.

Lots of Goldman Sachs types are rubbing their heads wondering why he did it, but Poulson may have finally been tipped by Josh Bolten, new White House Chief of Staff and former GSachs VP. They must have promised Old Hank a Rose Garden to get into the dead-in-the-water administration in the Doldrums except for a booming economy.

Can the US continue to grow and spend its way toward a Republican re-election in '08? Poulson may be the ticket, if it can be done.

Left Looney Gorebot Blasts Bush---Overseas, Natch!

Al Gore tells the Guardian that Bush leads

"a renegade band of rightwing extremists".

In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a "recovering politician", but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming.

Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: "If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the whole thing goes to the right."

Yep, this dog won't hunt, but it sure does bark a lot.

Link the article and find out how much Gore has matured, now that he is fully committing himself to averting "the end of civilization!"

Yes, he is wearing earth tones all the time now, because he is saving the planet!

Mexico's Rotten Banana Republic with Attitude

Gigi Guyer gives El Presidente Fox a real hard rap on the knuckles for his failed presidency:

President Fox makes $236,693 a year, more than the leaders of France, the United Kingdom and Canada; Mexican congressional deputies, who serve only a few months a year, take home at least $148,000 a year, plus a $28,000 “leaving-office bonus” at the end of the term. Meanwhile, Mexico collects taxes equivalent to 9.7 percent of GDP, a figure on a par with Haiti; there is painfully little to spend on education and health care, which means there is no social mobility and little job opportunity.

U.S. leaders and the American public have every right to insist that Mexican officials act responsibly, rather than expecting that their neighbor to the north will shoulder burdens that they themselves should assume.

In short, Mexico is so corrupt, so oligopolistic, so rotting inside with the privilege of the rich that it has to send its poor and its potential political activists to another country. And on top of that, it tries to blame the United States for its own failures.

But Guyer notes there is hope that the feckless kleptocracy on our southern border has begun to demonstrate glimmers of a dawn of awareness that reform has to come sooner or later to the failed state to the south.

When I was in Mexico last fall, after dozens of visits over the years, people on every political and social level confirmed these accusations, complaining to me of Fox's failures. Forty families still own 60 percent of Mexico. There are no voluntary organizations, no civic involvement, no family foundations – and thus, no accountability, allowing corruption to flourish. Mexico gains $28 billion from oil revenue and $20 billion from immigrant remittances. There is virtually no industrialization, no small business, no real chance at individual entrepreneurship. Under Fox, it has created only one-tenth of the 1 million jobs needed.

Guyer goes on:

The same week of the Fox visit, for instance, The New York Times ran a stunning article headlined "Some in Mexico See Border Wall as Opportunity." It quotes men such as Jorge Santibanez, president of the College of the Northern Border, saying: "For too long, Mexico has boasted about immigrants leaving, calling them national heroes, instead of describing them as actors in a national tragedy; and it has boasted about the growth in remittances as an indicator of success, when it is really an indicator of failure."

Other prominent Mexicans were quoted as saying, for instance, the formerly unthinkable: that a wall would be the "best thing that could happen for Mexico"; the "porous border" allowed "elected officials to avoid creating jobs." And former Foreign Minister Jorge G. Casta?eda, who always took a tough line toward the United States, writes in the Mexican newspaper Reforma that Mexico needed "a series of incentives" to keep Mexicans from migrating, including welfare benefits to mothers whose husbands remained in Mexico, scholarships, and the loss of land rights for people who were absent too long from their property.

For once the chronic losers in the Banana Republic which tortures and rapes Guatemalans and other Central Americans who dare to sneak through the jungle on their southern frontier are beginning to think of themselves as citizens of an actual functioning modern state rather than an immense barrio enclosing all but a few chosen families of the oligarchical nomenklatura

This is European social democracy, this is American New Deal, this is real development talk, in place of the tiresome historical Mexican attitude that everything is the gringos' fault and they should pay for it. This is a real revolution of the mind! It also may indicate that, while President Fox failed in carrying through such basic modern reforms, he did lay the basis for them.

Two important points here. The fact that the free enterprise candidate for July's presidential election, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN), is suddenly and unexpectedly surging ahead on his slogan of "My job will be to make sure you have a job" may show that the Mexican people are fed up. In addition, the fact that only 50,000 of the 400,000 Mexicans in the United States who were available to vote in the July Mexican elections have bothered to register can only indicate a generalized disgust with Mexican corruption and hopelessness, and perhaps even a turn toward American ways.

Guyer ends on an upbeat note:

Surely the fact that America has awakened to the insult of its "neighbor" cynically exporting its problems, while doing nada at home, can only help Mexico and jar it to some modern sense. Ironically, the debate and the anger in the U.S. about this mammoth illegal immigration has already helped Mexico to begin to shed its dependency on America – and to turn its energies toward its own real predators, all home-grown.

NYT Neglects Pentagon Role in Forming Internet

Adam Cohen writes an NYT story about the Internet and paying for content which does not credit DARPA and the Pentagon for the foundation of the Internet, while of course lavishing attention on Tim Berners-Lee and Pierre Omyidar, inventors of the Web and eBay respectively.

Why do the editors of this relentlessly leftish tabloid leave out the Pentagon's role? Are they that ideological and militantly anti-military that even the spin-off benefits of military spending require an Orwellian memory-hole?

On the other hand, the ante-diluvian reptile Ed Whitacre wants to get his grasping greedy hands on another communications vehicle and dumb it down while he grabs the cash. This AT&T empire-builder has just acquired the feckless dolts at BellSouth, who have problems maintaining my e-mail.

Whitacre should have been in the oil game, where the prehistoric search for fossil fuels. Thank goodness Sensenbrenner and Conyers can agree on something as basic as keeping this robber baron's hands off the Internet.

Vargas Departure Excites the Feminist Left

The National Organization of Women Chief Kim Gandy asks the self-absorbed affirmative-action questions:

"It seems unlikely to me, having survived and thrived through her first pregnancy, that she would logically give up the top job in TV a few months out, anticipating she couldn't handle it," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. "It just doesn't strike me as a logical explanation. I don't think there are too many men who would be happy to be removed from the anchor chair."

Gandy added that ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Co., "doesn't look like a very woman-friendly or family-friendly workplace."

"If she can't have it all," [Gandy] said, "who among us could?"

Gandy uses the pronoun "me" far more often than necessary, if one parses her self-referential nagging above.

I learned to love Elizabeth Vargas's slightly self-effacing charm and terrific competence when she was local anchor on a Chicago network [CBS] outlet in the early '90s. Although she has spectacular looks, she seems grounded in her origins, including respect for Catholic religious beliefs, and this may particularly upset the crone corps whose solipsistic, autistic, self-obsessive focus on their own personal goals can make them appear ridiculous to the nine-to-five regular people they are trying to recruit.

Respect for others' beliefs and priorities is missing in NOW's strident shrill set of accusations against ABC---Anne Sweeney at Disney may be their targeted guilt-trippee whom they wish to fold on future demands for their radical agenda to be given ABC display.

Of course, Vargas's own wishes and ABC's marketplace management could actually trump the agenda of an ultra-left cabal of unnatural nags and shrews.

Hitchens on Memorial Day

Christopher Hitchens elevates our National Day of Mourning, which has devolved into a Three-Day holiday, for those who "gave their lives," or as Christopher aptly notes, had their lives taken, in our country's wars into a memoriam on all victims of warfare.

Hitchens never does explain why the village of Lower Slaughter in the Cotswolds has no war memorial, nor why the two villages bear such gruesome names. But he does mention Ataturk's Gallipoli memorial was for the "Tommies and Johnnies along with the Alis and Mehmets." Then Chris nails a couple of recent demagogues:

Since all efforts at commemoration are bound to fall short, one must be on guard against any attempt at overstatement. In particular, one must resist efforts to ventriloquize the dead. To me, Cindy Sheehan's posthumous conscription of her son is as objectionable as Billy Graham's claim, at the National Cathedral, that all the dead of Sept. 11, 2001 were now in paradise. In the first instance, we have no reason to believe that young Casey Sheehan would ever have supported MoveOn.org, and in the second instance we cannot be expected to believe that almost 3,000 New Yorkers all died in a state of grace. Nothing is more tasteless, when set against the reality of death, than the hollow note of demagogy and false sentiment.

Then Hitchens goes on with a denoument worthy of a great orator:

"Always think of it: never speak of it." That was the stoic French injunction during the time when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost. This resolution might serve us well at the present time, when we are in midconflict with a hideous foe, and when it is too soon to be thinking of memorials to a war not yet won. This Memorial Day, one might think particularly of those of our fallen who also guarded polling-places, opened schools and clinics, and excavated mass graves. They represent the highest form of the citizen, and every man and woman among them was a volunteer. This plain statement requires no further rhetoric.

Amen!

Murtha Disgraces Self; Strip off this Guy's Epaulets!

Nothing worse than an over-the-hill Mick shooting off his mouth, especially when he is a Marine Corps veteran on a self-righteous know-it-all bender likeMurtha appears to be on. For some reason, this old fellow wants to get airtime long after his primetime. I'm sure he is certain he is doing the right thing, but a fellow marine who had been unjustly accused, had his case blown up in the media, and was then acquitted, begs to differ:

In the United States, we have a civil and military court system that relies on an investigatory and judicial process to make determinations based on evidence. The system is not served by such grand pronouncements of horror and guilt without the accuser even having read the investigative report.

Mr. Murtha's position is particularly suspect when he is quoted by news services as saying that the strain of deployment "has caused them [the Marines] to crack in situations like this." Not only is he certain of the Marines' guilt but he claims to know the cause, which he conveniently attributes to a policy he opposes.

Members of the U.S. military serving in Iraq need more than Mr. Murtha's pseudo-sympathy. They need leaders to stand with them even in the hardest of times. Let the courts decide if these Marines are guilty. They haven't even been charged with a crime yet, so it is premature to presume their guilt -- unless that presumption is tied to a political motive.

Ilario Pantano would be the darling of the MSM if he only didn't have that silly streak of PATRIOTISM and LOVE OF HIS COUNTRY!

Far Left Pin Hopes on Blogosphere

A certifiable Bush Derangement Syndrome Victim named Jonathon Alterman has found another angle to attack Hillary Clinton, which the Angry Left detests for her moderate tendencies and lack of slavish [i.e., Kerry/Gore] adulation to every demented twist of the mindless ultras over there in the MSM's Kool-Aid factory.

"Last time, Howard Dean and later John Kerry showed that the whole idea of "early money" is now obsolete in presidential politics. The Internet lets candidates who catch fire raise millions in small donations practically overnight. That's why all the talk of Hillary Clinton's "war chest" making her the front runner for 2008 is the most hackneyed punditry around."

Get the picture painted by this hackneyed pundit? Someone on the [Ultra] left is going to catch fire and leave Hillary and sane centrists like Lieberman in the dust!

Alterman [like his namesake Eric] is a certified agitprop asset to the mindless multitude [of maybe three million] certifiable cases of mass psychosis on the lunatic left's outermost fringe. Read the rest of the link to find out how Jonathan and Eric are going to influence the next election with a third party!

National Geographic Geography Bee: Subcontinental Sweep

The performance just hosted by Alex Trebeck on the PBS network of the National Geographic's quiz-down on geography was almost startling. Six of the ten finalists were from Subcontinental India with Hindu surnames. The final five, after three white Caucasian girls and one Caucasian Iowa boy were eliminated, along with one of the immigrants from India, were all subcontinentals.

The eventual winner was a 12-year old named Bonny Jain, who had finished fourth last year in last year's national finals. Young Bonny had taken all three SAT tests and got a 2310 combined score, including 800 in math and 790 in another category! All through the match, he also appeared emotionally more focussed and centered than his older opponents.

The final five from subcontinental origins were actually head and shoulders and upper torso above the other finalists, and their overall prowess staggered even the unflappable Trebeck, who commented that next year they will have to get more questions, as the finalists almost ran through the whole list of brain-teasers.

Actually, I got the first three of the final showdown of the contest between Bonny and his runner-up, whose polysyllabic name I could not begin to remember. [subduction, forget 2nd answer, and Azerbaijan]. My poor daughter got picked up by her boyfriend before the end of the contest, although she had not done badly during the 15 minutes she watched.

Why can't we give an extremely high priority to the subcontinent, as their IQs and English skills give them extreme value across our economy in the frontal lobe sectors? And strange that there were no Jewish kids among the final ten, and a couple were from Catholic schools.

New Yorker's Goldberg Spots Dem Opportunity

Jeffrey Goldberg has an excellent New Yorker article in the latest faceless-Uncle Sam issue [the New Yorker's latest insult to the Memorial Day dead soldier heroes, perhaps?] and it concerns the real Democratic Party out in the Heartland, where real people dwell and tabloid blogs [tablogs?!?] like Media Matters are regarded as absolutely foreign to anything affecting the lives of the normal Democrat living and working in a normal environment.

The New Yorker on-line has a Q & A session with Goldberg, in which he discusses realistically the chances of a Democratic takeover of the House and even as a long shot, the Senate, in 2006. Unlike Media Matters, which believes that the MSM can change voters' minds by a torrent of toxic spew against Bush and the GOP, Goldberg looks at the long term after spending a good long time in Missouri and Iowa and other exotic places between the Blue and Left Coasts:

It’s hard without a Roosevelt to rebuild a Roosevelt coalition, that’s for sure. By "Reagan Democrats," what I mean are the Catholic, working-class, white suburbanites who have gradually left the Democratic Party. Since the McGovern period, there has been a feeling among many people in this country, particularly in those states that are not situated in the northeast or along the Pacific Coast, that the Democrats have a family problem, a God problem, and a national-security problem.I talked to Democrats from red states, Democrats who are popularly elected officials in states that have been going Republican in the Presidential race. They all say the same thing: part of their problem is policy—they need the Democratic Party to convince the voters that they, too, will stand up for American national security.

After spending time in the real world outside the NYC and LA/SF MSM Go-Go Zones, Goldberg not surprisingly finds Dems scratching their heads over "netroots" excessive negativity that blurs their local messages to the moderate electorate:

"national security and so-called "values" issues like abortion and gay rights are only part of the problem for Democrats. The other part is stylistic. There’s a feeling among Democratic professionals in these red states that Democrats tend to condescend to voters in the heartland. The governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, who’s a very popular and populist Democrat, argues that sometimes the Democrats just don’t seem as likable as the other guys. And the problem with likability comes from a feeling that Democrats are lecturing voters about what’s best for them.

The questioner seems puzzled as she asks:

But Brian Schweitzer is, as you say, a Democrat who got elected in a very red state.

That’s because Brian Schweitzer is a Democrat who lives in a red state and has figured out how to talk to people in a way that doesn’t anger or annoy them. He’s doing some things that are very liberal, in our understanding of what the word “liberal” means—putting a lot of money in K-12 education, looking for alternative fuel sources. On certain issues, he is in the Montana mainstream: he’s opposed to gun control. But his success has much less to do with particular issues and more to do with his style of approach to voters, in which the voters don’t feel that they’re being talked down to, and that their values are not being mocked by the national Democratic Party.

Why are liberalism and condescension equated so easily?

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz says that Democrats are motivated by humanitarianism. Humanitarians want to make people better, and when you set out to try to make people better you often end up condescending to them. Adult Americans don’t want to have somebody who doesn’t know them telling them how to live their lives. Maybe this plays into a libertarian streak.

Maybe that Mike Dukakis/Al Gore "I know better" gene is hopelessly stuck in the Democrat's DNA, and their habitual overstatements on almost every conceivable issue don't help. For instance, Sean Wilentz just named President Bush the most awful Chief-of-State the US has ever had. But Wilentz has a subdued modulated tone compared with, say, the average gaseous emission on Huffington Post about Bush.

But the Elephant in the Living Room lies in one inescapable, inexorable fact:

Karl Rove didn’t have to get out as many moderates, because there are more conservatives in America than liberals. In the exit polls of the 2004 Presidential election, one out of every five voters identified himself to pollsters as a liberal, while one out of every three self-identified as conservative. The conservative base is simply bigger than the liberal base, and Rove is not wrong when he says that this is essentially a center-right country. So liberals must do more to reach the moderates. In many states, liberals need to win as much as seventy or seventy-five per cent of moderates in order to win.

I will bet you will not find one Kossack or Puffington denizen who will admit that self-identified conservatives have a roughly 7/4 ascendancy over self-identified liberals. They are still in the pre-1968 liberal dominance mode before radicals drove Nixon into the White House and radical feminists alientated the Catholics from the Democrats, radical internationalist alienated the working class, Jimmy Carter alienated very much of the electorate with his hectoring condescension [and still does]. The "humanitarian, holier-and-smarter-than-thou" ultra-left persists in denying each and every catastrophe that eroded their base over the decades. The intellectuals and the blacks remain in their coalition, but they have employed the media, which leans to the left to continue to peddle quasi-socialist nostrums and propagate unionism, much like the TUC in Britain used to proclaim that, no matter how far the government had nationalized and demilitarized, the UK had to go further and further left to achieve what really would work well. The UK voters decided for Thatcher in the UK. She and Reagan in the US both advanced "Anglo-Saxon models" which successfully demolished the socialist option, but these Kossacks and Puffington denizens are in denial about that historical demolition.

Senator Chris Dodd has an interesting suggestion to make the Democrats a national force again. This actually reflects a reality, even though I believe Iraq was probably a correct move. I personally think L. Paul Bremer and Rumsfeld botched a good beginning:

Senator Chris Dodd has suggested that the Democrats can not only compete with the Republicans on national security but actually run to the right of them. President Bush, he argues, has hobbled the military and left us with very limited options against North Korea and Iran, because he has bogged us down in Iraq.

You have a great quote in your article from Dodd, comparing Iraq to the "missile gap," which Kennedy used against Nixon in 1960.

Dodd told me, "It’s a better opportunity than Jack Kennedy had when he ran on the phony missile gap. We have real issues." But this goes deeper than that. Democrats have to convince people, especially people in the moderate camp, that they believe two basic things (I’m borrowing here from Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations): one, that America is not the source of most of the world’s problems; and two, that although sometimes America messes up when it tries to fix those problems, that doesn’t mean America cannot use force to do good. That is the feeling of the overwhelming majority of America.

Senator Barack Obama and I were talking about Senator Russell Feingold and his desire to make issues like N.S.A. wiretapping and Guant?namo Bay a central part of the Democratic platform. Obama, who is pretty liberal, said, We have to go gently. Of course, we’re Democrats and we’ll do it differently when we get in power. But Americans feel good about their country and they don’t want to be told, over and over, that their country is a failure.

Bingo! I do fear that a Democratic Administration would reactivate the Energizer Bunny Jimmy Carter gene that led to fiascos in Korea in 1994, but the flaky wing of the Dems can be mitigated. However, the question remains. Will the Dems do enough, given a lot of hyperventilating about privacy and civil liberties [tell those to the IRS!], be able to restrain their lunatic fringe? And who could actually be strong and common-sensical enough to keep his/her bearings in the big tent/asylum that the Democratic Party can become [I worked in two Democratic National Presidential Campaigns on National Staff, and lots of local campaigns, and when you get west of left/center, here be dragons!] Goldberg is asked if there is anyone at the moment who could be called the leader of the Democratic Party:

The Democratic Party has leaders. But this is just the nature of being out of power—the Democrats control no branch of government. People who work for Nancy Pelosi, in the House, think she’s the pr?eminent leader; people who work for Harry Reid, in the Senate, think he’s the pr?eminent leader; and, of course, there are a lot of people around Hillary Clinton who expect her to be the pr?eminent leader. The same with Howard Dean. No—the Party is split by personality, and the Party is also split because there are people who are more liberal and people who are less liberal. It really doesn’t have one person you could point to and say, That person is somebody who embodies the Democratic Party, who speaks for it...This is the frustration of a lot of Democrats: people don’t fully understand that when you are out of power, you are really out of power.

.
Fortunately for the Republicans in 2008, a likely winner in 2006 has "smart and tough" problems of her own. Is she smart enough to avoid the trap?

Nancy Pelosi told you, “We win ’06, we get subpoena power.” You write that she appeared to be excited by that prospect.

It’s very exciting to the Democratic Party’s most loyal supporters and to the Net-roots people, the online Democrats who are quite vitriolic in their hatred of President Bush. The problem—and this is what a lot of Democrats say who are cautioning against this—is that by the time the Democrats take over the House, if they do, it’ll be 2007, and the Bush Administration will be on its last legs. The argument is that, if the House goes Democratic, the leadership should spend more time convincing the American people that this is the party you want in the White House in 2008. Imagine if the Democrats in the House voted to raise the minimum wage, or for college-tuition tax credits. That sort of legislation would be broadly attractive to millions of voters, and either the Republican Senate or President Bush would be put in a position of stopping it. Or let’s say that the Democrats take over the House and vote to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. That would probably be pretty popular. So they could work to make the country safer and to help the poor—or they could spend their time investigating the run-up to the Iraq war.

Will she be able to restrain Conyers and, to a lesser degree, Rangel from their agendas? I can't see GWB vetoing a minimum-wage hike as part of his long, slow departure from the White House if that will harm the GOP in 2008. And what about the fifty-state strategy of the hot-head at the top of the DNC?

There’s a quote in your article from Representative Rahm Emanuel, of Illinois: "If you think that Mississippi and Ohio are the same thing, you’re an idiot." That’s in regard to an interesting debate you discuss, between him and Howard Dean.

Howard Dean decided to put a lot of Democratic National Committee money into a program to build the state parties in all fifty states. But the congressional leadership is saying, We have a finite amount of money and we have the opportunity to take back the House in 2006, so give us that money and we’ll pour it into Ohio, or Florida—into congressional districts that we think we have a chance of turning. And what Rahm Emanuel said is that, as a long-term strategy, trying to make the party competitive in fifty states is a fine idea, but you can’t have a long-term strategy if you don’t have a short-term strategy. And if the Democrats continue to not control any branch of government they’re going to wither as a party. So what he’s arguing—and most Democrats seem to agree that his and Dean’s arguments both have merits—is to put all that money into winning the House in 2006, and from there build up to bigger wins.

So is 2006 really about 2008?

2006 is important in its own right, but of course 2008 is it. I don’t want to say “the whole enchilada,” but it’s extremely important. 2006 is when a lot of ideas are going to be road-tested, in policy and in strategy, for both parties.

If not Hillary Clinton in 2008, then who?

There are ten or twelve plausible candidates for the Democratic nomination for the President, some of whom we haven’t really thought about yet. It could be Mark Warner, from Virginia, or Evan Bayh, from Indiana. Each person has a reason that he—and they’re all men—would be a better alternative nationally to Hillary Clinton. What’s bubbling beneath the surface right now is a feeling that Hillary Clinton could certainly capture the nomination, but she is not the best person to run for the Presidency. This goes back to the paradox of Hillary Clinton: she is a moderate figure—she’s never actually been as liberal as people think. But by 2008 the country will have had sixteen or seventeen years of knowing Hillary, and people’s ideas about her are fairly fixed. If only because of the amount of money she’s raised, she’s formidable, and she’s in the way of all of these other guys.

James Webb, Memoriam, and Clear and Present Danger

James Webb and I had a two-minute talk about our experiences in Vietnam in a DC lavatory [!?] during a colloquium long ago where he was a speaker and I was attending to listen. Always of conservative bent, he is very much a maverick and I believe very outspoken on the Iraq War---chiefly about the Pentagon's monumental mess-up and the apparent lack of accountability going to the very top.

I can recall taking "Hell in a Very Small Place" by Bernard Fall out of a library, but nothing of the book. I believe he wrote a biography of Ho Chi Minh which I did read. I always reflect with sadness on the early days of Vietnam, and think of my Stanford grad predecessor, a young man named Fred Abramson, whose library I inherited when I got to the small district named Minh Duc in Vinh Long Province where we both had worked. I read and still somewhere may possess his copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I believe he is on the wall of the State Department KIA honor roll in the vast lobby. He was killed around the time Fall died, I believe, or a little later. What a waste!

However, upon reflection, the Vietnam American soldiers may not have died in vain. In the movie The Year of Living Dangerously, nowhere does one learn that 1974 was a time when the Communist Party in Indonesia may have been ready to mount a takeover from the Sukarno regime. The attempt, such as it was, was crushed with terrible bloodshed and perhaps half a million Indonesian Chinese immigrants who formed the backbone of the CPIndonesia were slaughtered. My thesis would be that if the USA had not been in Vietnam for years before that time, the coup attempt might have been supported and encouraged and enabled by a still expansionist Communist International, especially the segment controlled by Mao Tse-Tung.

Now the American ultra-left is preoccupied with aiding and abetting a vast illegal immigration INTO THE USA which could serve eventually as a base for the kind of political insanity which prevails as normalcy south of our Border. And both fuels reconquista dreams and facilitates the entry of terrorists into the USA.

But I wish to commemorate friends of mine like Lt. Alsever and my predecessor Abramson who died far away for a cause that continues to excite fear and envy around the world---American democracy.

Insane Disloyal Senate Betrays America

Mark Steyn on behalf of legal immigrants just what is going on as the U.S. Senate and a dissolving little prezboy allow U.S. citizenship to be diluted into an actual liability vis-a-vis the privileges of illegal status, which White House spokesman Tony Snow dismisses as having gotten a "traffic ticket:"

But how about some of you natives piling on? I assumed NR's transplanted British Empire wallahs were steamed about this because we were foolish enough to check the wrong box and come here as legal immigrants - which, believe me, is a mistake I wouldn't make again. But this bill moves not just legal immigrants but U.S. citizens to the back of the bus.

The undocumented guys only have to pay taxes for any three out of the last five years? How come Americans can't get a deal like that? Meanwhile, any attempt to enforce the border requires "consultation" with Mexico. Vicente Fox has just got his own permanent Security Council veto in the Department of Homeland Security.

I think it's very hard for conservatives to support a Congress that would pass such a bill. Aside from the entitlement explosion and the national security issues, this bill is a cynical corruption of the integrity of US sovereignty and citizenship.

My wife and the kids had their Green Cards stolen the other day. Cost of replacement of legal permanent resident cards: $1,040. Fine for 20 years of law-breaking within the United States: $2,000, less Social Security and EITC entitlements. Hmm.

I told the missus to hold off filling in the form for the replacement card. Having been rendered inadvertently undocumented, she may at last be in the winning category.

Yeah, that's the ticket!

What a completely farcical joke the U.S. Senate is turning into. I guess these wannabe-celebrity Chucklehead Shumers all are feminized delusional welcome-wagoneers!

Byron Dorgan, Sen Byrd, Ben Nelson, and another Dem have to get re-elected this year and hence cast a sane vote against the unconstitutional gibberish contained in the illiterate, innumerate cobbled-together gobbledegook bill the Senate has foisted on a snoozing electorate.

A bunch of elitists that make French Enarque-eunuchs look responsible and accountable!

Kruggles on Enron

The Amazingly Wrong-All-The-Time World's Worst Economist aka Paul Krugboy [oops, Krugman!] who has predicted ten out of the last zero recessions on a tri-monthly basis, now is a movie critic.

Although he was a former Enron consultant, or perhaps because of this, he had NO comment on Lay and Skilling in his column today, which some Leftie-cocoon NYT readers actually pay for on-line, maybe it was about The Da Vinci Code? Here is an excerpt:

Since 2000, we've seen what happens when people who aren't interested in the facts, who believe what they want to believe, sit in the White House. Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is a mess, New Orleans is a wreck. And, of course, we've done nothing about global warming.

Yep, it must be about the DaVinci movie. Krugboy wouldn't be so stupid as to predict about science and meteorology after failing so badly on economic predictions, would he?

But maybe, now that he brought up Katrina, Paul Krugman is "STUCK ON STUPID!"

Stupid Shameful Vicente Fox

El Presidente Fox calls a fence between the US and his failed-state kleptocracy based on corruption "shameful" and "stupid."

Actually, he is projecting his own personal qualities onto US policy. He, his countreymen, and his entire culture should be prevented from intruding into an advanced First World economic environment.

Right now on PBS, a public television interviewer is asking a resident of Washington since 1986 whether he is getting enough benefits. No, he wants more benefits of all kinds, including welfare. But a translator is required, because, you see, this low- IQ specimen of illegal immigrant hasn't bothered to or been smart enough to learn English.

He should be deported forthwith.

Top Fifty Conservative Pop Tunes

The NYT has the top 50, but where is "Desperado" by the Eagles, which describes the state of mind of an addict, any addict on any thing/person/substance/behavior, as well as anything in the pop pantheon?

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
You been out ridin' fences for so long now
Oh, you're a hard one
I know that you got your reasons
These things that are pleasin' you
Can hurt you somehow

Don't you draw the queen of diamonds, boy
She'll beat you if she's able
You know the queen of hearts is always your best bet

Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones that you can't get

Desperado, oh, you ain't gettin' no younger
Your pain and your hunger, they're drivin' you home
And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

Don't your feet get cold in the winter time?
The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine
It's hard to tell the night time from the day
You're losin' all your highs and lows
Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
Come down from your fences, open the gate
It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you
You better let somebody love you, before it's too late

Kinda says it all.

Mass Hysteria Rules HuffNPuff

Every once in a while, I take a peek at the ultra-left claptrappery on Puffington Host and reflect on the sad sacks who comment on the pitiful blogs posted there. Today, there is an effort by a Rolling Stone writer named Boehlert whose "book is coming out in May [hmmm..., 26 days and counting] according to his bio. Judging from his defense of Al Gore, I think it might be a while before this fellow's tome hits the best-seller list, like maybe never....

But the Chicken Little Squad writing comments to this second-rater's effort are worth perusing just in case you might want to dip your toe into the mind pollution on the left.

And do it also because a common-sensical comment from a fellow named DerekC will break the monotony of delusional whining about how unfairly the MSM treats the whinging winos on the Angry Left.

Invertebrate WaPo DemFlack Slams Sen. Sessions

Nasty clown Dana Milbank is becoming a darling of the unwatched evening CNN-MSNBC cable/commentary leftism-made-funny dorks. This inevitably ensues when an MSM "reporter" trashes a common-sense inventory of the amnesty-lite travesty that the Senate is trying to sneak by the snoozing American public[with GOP enablers like Martinez, Hagel and GWB].

Steve Sailer blows the whistle on Mountebank Milbank in the link above, which makes personal slurs on Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama for supposed regionalisms disdained by the chattering-nitwittery crowd infesting the NorthEast Coast and Corridor, where all wisdom resides. Sailer gives Milbank [who probably enjoys it] a good spanking!

he said last week of those who opposed the 370 miles of fencing. "But good fences make good neighbors. Fences don't make bad neighbors."

The senator evidently hadn't consulted the residents of Korea, Berlin or the West Bank.

Killer line, Dana! Obviously, the residents of Korea or the West Bank would have lived in perfect harmony without those horrible fences keeping them separate. But why hold back, Dana? Point out that there was a fence around Auschwitz!

Touche, Bravo, and the androgynous Danas [Priest or Milbank] at WaPo do deserve serial pins in their numerous gaseous thought-balloons!

Sailer is now getting quoted often, and justifiably, by newbies on the MOR block like Kaus and Tierney, and dissed by cranks like that faux-economist Freakonomics author.

In a recent American Conservative article, Sailer pointed out the sort of inverse class-war being waged by the topmost percentile on Middle America:

A 2002 poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that 60 percent of Americans consider the present level of entry to be a “critical threat to the vital interests of the United States,” compared with only 14 percent of prominent Americans. Immigration provides corporations with cheap workers, the upper middle class with off-the-books servants, Democratic political machines with votes, and ethnic activists with careers.

How do they keep winning? The articulate and affluent who profit from illegal immigration look down their noses at anyone who wants to reduce it. They don’t debate dissenters; they dismiss them. Their most effective ploy has been to insinuate that only shallow people think deeply about immigration. The more profound sort of intellect, the fashionable imply, displays an insouciant heedlessness about the long-term impact of immigration.

Yet the well-educated and well-to-do aren’t expected to subject their own children to the realities of living among the diverse. They search out homes removed by distance or doormen from concentrations of illegal aliens—although not so far that the immigrants can’t come and clean their houses tax-free. As our Ascendancy of the Sensitive sees it, that their views are utterly contradicted by how they order their daily lives is proof not of their hypocrisy but of how elevated their thinking is.

This doesn’t mean that the white elites view minorities as their equals. Far from it. Instead, they can’t conceive of them as competition. Nobody from Chiapas is going to take my job. Status competition in the upper reaches of American life still largely consists of whites trying to claw their way to the top over other whites, who, as an example, make up 99 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs.

Who read the Wall Street Journal as well as the New York Times!

Socialism as a Government Sponsored Enterprise

If you are still in doubt as to whether a "mixed economy" is the way for a capitalist country to manage its economy, take a gander at the standard bearer of GSE's in the US economy--FANNIE MAE---and you will note that---as France is finding out BIG-TIME in their massively messed-up melange-economie---that government-sponsored enterprises are subject to political meddling and massive corruption. Again, a hat tip to Mickey Kaus!

The Affordable Housing Institute has a long line-up of links for the Franklin Raines era of pilferage, peculation, and pillaging at Fannie Mae, with a background cast of big-business Democrats lurking about---a couple of Target board members, e.g.---who find GSE's the equivalent of 527s in foisting their mixed economy balderdash onto gullible Dems and unwitting Repubs. Check out the whole roster at this site and discover something the MSM doesn't want you to know, or at least under-reports in a scandalous fashion.

I myself blogged on the immense octopus-like scam back in January and linked it to the MSM assault on Wal-Mart, among other attempts to undermine the consumer in favor of the employee-unions in thrall to the Dems as a sort of captive satellite.

Oh well. More to come, I'm sure, in the annals of socialist mission-creep.

Repubs Repudiate GWB on Immigration?

A lot of Republicans are no longer willing to follow GWB's leadership as he tries to foist an amnesty-lite immigration package on people actually up for re-election this year. Unlike the Lamer-and-Lamer Duck GWB, the Repubs have to keep their conservative base engaged. Otherwise, who wants to vote between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber on an issue combining law and order in general, enforcement of laws already on the books, linguistic issues, and reconqista-wack-jobs, and a general squeeze on the Middle Class?

Deborah Orin argues that the left-tilted MSM is trying to activate the notorious wobbly gene GWB inherited from his ["read my lips,..."] spine-challenged Poppy. The problem is that Bush43 believes he is right, and his faith-activated stubbornness can be good [Iraq] or stuck-on-stupid, as in a naive kumbeyah configuration in his cheerleader frat-rat psyche.

Mickey Kaus notes that 36 Senators, many up for re-election, actually side with the tough enforcement bill the House of Reps appears unflaggingly to insist upon, and if there is a House/Senate Conference on this bill, fireworks and MSM imploring/guilt-tripping will ensue like July Fourth and MLK-family funerals. Mickey also links Jonathon Zasloff who believes that if Pelosi bucks up and uses previously underutilized backbone and brainpower, she could stand up to the Congressional Black Caucus which is trying to extort her to keep one of their members [whom even Kevin Drum thinks should quit] on the all-important House Ways and Means Cte after he was videotaped taking $100,000 in a briefcase and after $90K in frozen assets was found in this about-to-be-indicted Congressperson's freezer.

I don't think Nancy has the guts nor brains to have a Souljah moment. ConMeister Bill could pull off Welfare Reform and other dissing of extortion-minorities, but Pelosi is an old-time machine-pol in her DNA and Jesse Jackson need not rev up his engines just yet!

Left-Wingers Depict Govt 9/11 Conspiracy

The Angry Left loves conspiracies, because its faulty philosophy of the essential goodness of mankind derived from the Enlightenment cannot explain the essential original sin lying in the hearts of those suffering the human condition. Conspiracies allow the left to continue their Pollyannish daydreams of noble humans kept in bondage by their own governments.

A Web Doc
named "Loose Change 9/11" gives the Bush Administration and USG conspirators credit for 9/11, even hinting that Osama bin Laden was [and presumably still is], a CIA asset.

Of course, the bad apples on the left are never to blame. Ultra-left socialist/communists like Saddam/Milosevic/Kim Jung-Il/Cuban billionaire Castro, and others are victims of these rightist conspiracies.

Like George Galloway, whom Capt Ed says aptly represents a constituency with wrap-around arms living in padded cells, the left must portray America's real enemies [like gundamentalist Muslims] as paper tigers, and say the government itself is our enemy.

Wonder what Pelosi, Dean, and the Congressional Black Caucus would say about the nutty webdoc I linked above? Oliver Stone Redux?

Monkeyshines on the Hill

The world's least impressive legislative leader meekly deferred to a collection of extortionists and ultra-left nincompoops on Capitol Hill. The first line of the linked article is a real howler:

Pelosi’s one-sentence missive to Jefferson called on him to vacate his committee seat "in the interest of upholding the high ethical standard of the House Democratic Caucus."

Jefferson promptly refused, calling her request "discriminatory" and "unprecedented," and suggested that she was employing a double standard by failing to ask other lawmakers facing ethics questions to relinquish their committee assignments. Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) has come under fire for earmarks he secured through his seat on the Appropriations Committee.

"I will not give up a committee assignment that is so vital to New Orleans at this crucial time for any uncertain political strategy," Jefferson said.

The Jefferson scandal, which after more than a year of investigation blew open Saturday with an FBI raid at his congressional office, has brought into glaring public light long-standing resentments felt by black lawmakers toward the Democratic leadership in the House.

I guess they are proud of their reputation. I happened to work back in the day for a fellow named William Clay in St. Louis, in an eventually successful political career that established this fraud as one of the biggest crooks in Congress.

The ex-head of Fannie Mae, a bachelor buddy of Bill Clinton named Franklin Raines, peculated about $50 million in questionable bonuses during his tenure, most by manipulating numbers.

Two more examples of Democratic Corruption, the Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name, at least in the Mainstream Media! And it is discriminatory to prosecute Congresspeople, because they are above the laws they cobble together for the rest of us poor peons.

Democrats like Kennedy, McKinney, Mollohan, Jefferson come immediately to mind when Jay Leno brings down the House [I mean house] every night with gags about Kennedys in bars and McKinney's hairdos. "Cold Cash" and "Frozen Assets" are just the tip of the Big Lie the Dems are trying to make the centerpiece of their 2006 elections.

Break-In at Our Home Thwarted by Early Return!

The excitement is dying down after the six Boca police vehicles just pulled away.

I took my daughter out for a Peace of Pizze [trademark] after her English final exam this morning and returned to our house to find a strange 1990's era white Toyota Camry parked backwards in the middle of our driveway.

My wife had just left for the Doctor and when Niki and I got out of our car, I saw three black males [what a surprise!?!] going out the sliding door to our pool in the back of our living room.

My daughter called 911 and yelled to me not to go into the house. She read the Connecticut plate license number over the phone, just as our next door neighbor came out her front door on the line to 911. She had seen four or five black males jumping over her back fence.

I opened the door of the car to extract the ignition keys, which were not there. I noticed video control panels and CDs on the floor of the car. Just then a young black male about 22 years old came running down the street, yelling "Call the police, call the police," in a Haitian or as a remote possibility, very heavy Jamaican accent, though the extremely primitive cast of his facial features blared "HAITIAN."

I had been leaning against the open door of the car wondering whether I should break it off---the condition of this flivver was completely bad---and my lovable Niki yelled "Let him go, Daddy, don't interfere" or words to that effect!

The young man jumped in the car, left skid marks on the driveway as he went down the street at 60mph. Other neighbors and service-people told the police, who arrived less than five minutes later, that the badly-dressed blacks were running through their yards. The K-9 dog found our video camcorder outside the gates of the Colonnade on Jog Road.

We had interrupted the gang of five [or four, our neighbor is not certain and I myself only saw three] very early into their black mischief, to quote Evelyn Waugh. All that is missing is my daughter's iPod and some of my wife's jewelry and a very valuable commemorative silver coin.

The illegal aliens missed the opportunity to snatch my wedding ring, worth several hundred dollars, all our computers, an American Golden Eagle coin right next to the much less valuable silver coin was left in the drawer.

The police looked at the frightful mess, including a gigantic calling card of fecal material in our toilet tinged wino red, and our open wine cave door [with perhaps a couple of missing bottles?], and called this the work of a "bunch of animals."

The car was quickly traced to a residence in Pembroke Pines in south Broward County, and the same car had just left the scene of a house break-in in South Boca two hours before, the CSI female fingerprint duster told me. They used socks to cover their prints and a pair of socks was left next to my camcorder a quarter mile away.

My neighbor, my daughter and myself can ID the driver with the primitive features, hard to forget a caricature like that.

Strangely, I was just about to blog about Franklin Raines, the slightly less-black criminal who rifled Fannie Mae for more than fifty million dollars worth of bonuses, alaborately calibrated by auditors to supply this crook with loads of bucks.

Then I was going to blog about the Democratic Black Caucus, who are rallying around one of their gang chief, named Jefferson, and berating Nancy Pelosi for letting the FBI treat these tribal chiefs like ordinary citizens.

But I digress, and you catch my drift.Of course. The police may have a lead on a "spotter" who was repairing the roof on my neighbors' house overlooking our backyard where the criminals entered the residence. But the contractor who hired the black on the roof will predictably protect him.

The police sensibly asked me why the Colonnade doesn't put up gates like other comparably expensive communities in the general vicinity. This would stop low-life types like the animals who infested our personal premises from even entering the local neighborhood. But the city of Boca Raton owns a park in our environs and the Colonnade has to allow everyone access to the park. Try getting that changed without a lawsuit or three among the litigious busybodies in this neck of the woods.

My daughter has been excused from her French final tomorrow, which I was going to tutor her on this afternoon. And I should never have stayed at the restaurant for that second slice of pizza!

Chronicle of Illiteracy: Coulter Deconstructs Ultra-Leftist Maggot

Ann Coulter sometimes goes over the top, but I love her for the enemies she has made. Her latest target is a particularly loathesome speciment of the self-congratulatory left, whose delusional self-absorbtion elevates their childish peeves into high drama.

Notice that the maggot in question went to Smith, hence little chance of having a boy-friend, and studied in Cuba, hence little chance of understanding anything besides a particular dialect of Spanish. She should go to Miami, instead of BILLIONAIRE Fidel's personal slave state:

This week the world gasped in awe at the raw heroism of Jean Rohe, the student at the New School who gave a speech attacking the commencement speaker, Republican Sen. John McCain, at the commencement ceremony.

We mostly heard about Rohe's bravery from Rohe -- and, really, who is in a better position to judge? As Rohe herself put it: "If there's one thing that I know about myself, it is that I care for people, and in that sense I have a great deal of character."

According to her posted biography, Rohe "grew up singing and performing folk music with her family. Jean spent a year at Smith College followed by a summer at the Universidad de la Habana in Cuba on scholarship where she honed her Spanish skills, learned about Cuban history, culture and politics, and made some of her dearest friends" -- mostly while waiting in line for hours and hours each day to get toilet paper.

In other words, Rohe is just a typical all-American girl, right down to a stint in Castro's Cuba.

In an unintentionally ironic article about her brave decision to attack the commencement speaker, Rohe describes going around campus the day before her speech and discovering how overwhelmingly popular it would be to attack McCain. At two graduation ceremonies a day earlier, attacks on McCain brought wild cheers from the audience.

See, where I come from, sucking up to the audience is not called "courageous." It's called "toadying."

Every place Rohe went that day she ran into students and faculty fashioning armbands and preparing their protests. As she said: "The situation seemed pretty serious."

Literally every person Rohe talked to the day before the ceremony opposed the war in Iraq and hated McCain with blind fury. Her mother -- the one who tortured the children by making them sing folk songs -- wept when Rohe read her illiterate speech over the phone.

Rohe's resolve to tell the audience what it wanted to hear, guaranteeing wild standing ovations for herself, was only hardened when she was told there would be media at the event.

While some might say it was gutless to suck up to the audience by insulting an invited guest, they didn't understand the incredible risks Rohe was taking by attacking a Republican at the New School: You'll be a pariah in the West Village! You'll never sing in a jazz club on the Lower East Side again! And don't even think about setting foot on the Upper West Side!

As Rohe later said: "It was something I didn't want to do, but knew I had to out of an obligation to my own values" -- which happened to be the exact same values as the entire audience, the faculty, her fellow students, her boyfriend and her mother, each of whom shared the value of being rude to an invited guest who also happened to be a Republican, a U.S. senator and decorated war hero.

And so Rohe attacked McCain's speech before he delivered it, with such devastating ripostes as this:

"Sen. McCain will tell us that we, those of us who are Americans, 'have nothing to fear from each other.' I agree strongly with this, but I take it one step further. We have nothing to fear from anyone on this living planet."

Except all the people who want to kill us.

Such as, for example, Osama bin Laden -- and that's according to Rohe, who is furious with Bush for not having caught him yet. Isn't Osama a person "on this living planet"? Does she think we have something to fear from him?

I'm sorry to be a snob, but this trusting view of terrorists is hard enough to take from smart liberals. When I have to hear the New School version of it, my eyeballs have rolled not only out of their sockets but out of the building.

Maybe in her heart of hearts, Rohe does think Bush is an imbecile, McCain a lout, and the war is wrong. Maybe she would think so even if she had ever met someone who holds a different opinion.

But then she should just admit: "I know, I know. I'm an utterly conventional brown-noser, the very definition of going-with-the-flow, middle-of-the pack, finger-to-the-wind follower, who doesn't have the candlepower to resist conforming to the beliefs of everyone around me -- but that's what I think."

If you want to find the cool, anti-establishment rebels who don't answer to "The Man" on college campuses today, you have to go to a meeting of the College Republicans. They are rebelling against at least 99% of their professors. Even the original '60s anti-war protesters were rebelling against at least 5% of their professors. Today's college liberals ape the beliefs of 99% of their professors and then pretend they're on-the-edge radicals.

We've always had to endure goody two-shoes apple-polishers -- kids with their hands always up, who turn in talkers when the teacher leaves the classroom and volunteer for extra work after school. But not until today's college liberals have we ever had to suffer the effrontery of the ass-kissers telling us: "I'm bad -- I clean erasers for teachers after class because I'm baaad."

I don't care what liberals think. I don't care that they're spineless suck-ups. Just don't insult my intelligence by telling me they're brave.

The French have the patent on moral cowardice, but the New School is inventing new variations on preposterous imbecilities cloaked as "truth to power,"

Paula Abdul Puffington Raves About Gorebot

HuffNPuff histrionic hysteric-in-chief is at Cannes, and they're all raving [as a collection of lunatics do] about Al Gore in 2008!!

Arianna off her meds again! Read for more than a few chuckles.

Also, Drudge has the hot news from Cannes that some crazy Mexican [sorry for the tautology] director calls the US "obsessed" with power and xenophobia!

Remember back in the days when actors were regarded as worse than criminals and slightly more respectable than prostitutes [or journalists]? They still are worse than criminals, and only MSM journalists act as though they actually have minds and opinions worth recording!

Tawana Brawley Redux

Most newsies don't even remember Tawana Brawley, who after having disappeared, reappeared and was championed by a phony preacher named Al Sharpton, who turned her lies about being abducted by the KKK in upstate NY into a career in politics and journalism. The Alleged Rape Victim can't get her story straight, say the Defense attorneys for the accused LaCrosse players implicated by the stripper. Just read how many different versions of her own alleged violation, done when she was reportedly so drunk she could not talk [according to the cop who found her in the driver's seat of someone else's car], who had several citations for misdemeanors that should have been felonies, and who claims her fellow dancer was in the tiny bathroom with her when she was assaulted [which the other dancer says is a "crock..."

The Wages of Sin are cruel indeed, as the dumbest collection of LaCrosse players in the country are beginning to understand. What was going through their preppy brains when the party was being set up? Do they have any common sense? Invite a drunken stripper of another race who has bruises all over her? The fact is that North Carolina is a place full of the imbecilities of corrupt ambitious politicians [Mike Nifong, who parlayed this into being elected DA of Durham], a stupid and ugly TV reporter/"legal panelist" who tries to boost ratings among blacks by her vapid [it's CNN, so why not?] accusations of the la crosse players, and of course utterly incompetent police work worthy of a third-world jurisdiction like that part of the South.

Read the article to find how many holes in a story are possible, but still get swallowed by a gullible, debased TV audience and its ninnified broadcaster/hosts. The she-beast accuser claims the DNA from three different males found in her was from her boy friend and two different guys who drove her to two different dances. How long is this complete fiasco going to continue? If fellow she-beast on CNN has anything to say about it, as long as the ratings are good.

Trust Us With SSNs, said the Feds back in the Thirties

The latest preposterous cock-up perpetrated by the US Federal Government involves the theft of 26.5 million dataID packs of US Veterans by a dumb Vet Admin employee who took the info home with him and then had his laptop, presumably with the info in the computer and not on CDs, stolen.

The one lucky sort of break the Feds might have is that the average IQ of the DC area burglar is way down in the double-digit level---hopefully, the fence will erase all the info on the machine without bothering to check it out, or if the thief/handler does, will be too stupid to realize its potential value.

The article in the Washington Post elides over this common sense speculation, and goes on to enumerate other losses of SSNs, which could be used by identity thieves.

The WaPo does not recall, nor have I seen in the MSM, any reference to FDR's famous promise to the working man that Social Security information, and numbers, would never be used in public. Republicans, who are generally sharper than Dems and more aware of the pitfalls of big government, knew that something national like an SSN would probably be misused, and with the onset of WWII, promptly became the common denominator of ID throughout the land. This wasn't important until the SSN became its universality became involved with credit and identity theft through SSN use became pervasive.

Another cautionary tale that big government is often guilty of monstrous eff-ups and total prevarications, which I as a former Fed employee am aware of more than most. I actually had the privilege of being robbed twice inside the State Dept., when my car was robbed by one of the garage attendants [parking in the State basement meant one's door had to be unlocked], all of whom were black and one of whom took my gym shoes from my trunk. Another time, I had a puzzle ring made of gold stolen from my desk in State. You can guess the ethnic base of the State Dept. clean-up crew. Despite the usual precautions, my apartment and car were robbed a half-dozen times in DC outside the State Dept [the car with smashed windows each time]. I have never been robbed at all in the other locations I have lived in across the USA [except Chicago by a white woman helping us move down to Florida who worked for the moving company, which refused responsibility even though we were insured. The woman turned out to have several previous marks on her criminal record for such pilfering], so it is safe to call DC my personal robbery capital. [But I have been robbed three times in Italy, so actually there is a contest in the international arena between DC and Florence, Rome, and Bari]!

Oops, Well, a "Little" Fault on the Left! Or "blindspots," Anyway!

Just when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid unwrap their "culture of corruption" campaign to discredit the Republican lobby-juggernaut erected out of Tom Delay's patronage, up pops one of those inconvenient stumbling blocks called, the "real truth."

In a journalistic attempt to be a bit more even-handed that an august perpetrator of ideology like the NYT would never embark upon, the Washington Post has a long article on West Virginia solon Alan Mollohan who

set up a network of nonprofit organizations to administer the millions of dollars he directed to such public endeavors as high-tech research and historic preservation.

Over the same period, Mollohan's personal fortunes soared. From 2000 to 2004, his assets grew from no more than $565,000 to at least $6.3 million. The partners in his rapidly expanding real estate empire included the head of one of these nonprofit groups and the owner of a local company for which he arranged substantial federal aid.

Mollohan used his seat on the House Appropriations Committee to secure more than $150 million for five nonprofit groups. One of the groups is headed by a former aide with whom Mollohan bought $2 million worth of property on Bald Head Island, N.C.

Controversy over this blending of commerce and legislation has triggered a federal probe, cost Mollohan his position on the House ethics committee and undermined the Democrats' effort to portray the GOP as the party of corruption because of the Jack Abramoff scandal. As early as today, the 12-term congressman will admit that he misstated some transactions in his congressional filings, according to Mollohan staffers.

"Mollohan has earmarked tens of millions of dollars to groups associated with his own business partners. That immediately raises the question whether these funds were allocated to promote the public good or to promote his interests and the interests of his partners," said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group. "He also got very rich very quick, and that suggests a relationship that is suspect if not corrupt."

No, "corrupt" is reserved for Democrats in describing the vast right-wing conspiracy to defraud the taxpayer. Dems partake in petty peculation, at most, unless you are Ron Burkle and his bachelor buddy jetting all round the world setting up gigantic Ponzi operations [okay, I take that last sentence back and will let the LAT look into that particular operation].

Mollohan was questioned at length by a radio interviewer from Weirton about his business connections. But everywhere else, Mollohan -- the son of a longtime congressman and a cousin of a former senator -- was welcomed as a patron of the state. At a huge police training event in Moundsville, a federal employee thanked him for providing the money for "everything you see today." In Morgantown, at a meeting about a missing-child alert system that his legislation had underwritten, he received a standing ovation.

In an interview, Mollohan said he is unapologetic and proud of the thousands of jobs he has brought to West Virginia and that, legally speaking, everything he has done to secure them is "squeaky clean." But he acknowledged that his actions might look incriminating and that he may have had an ethical "blind spot" that prevented him from questioning whether he, as a government official and vice chairman of the ethics panel, should have invested with such close associates.

After Senator Byrd invested a quarter century in his edifice complex encompassing much of W.Va as federally-built drone hives for desk jockeys, bureaucrats, and other walking drains on the taxpayer, one would have thought that there was little room left for padding the folks back home in The Mountain State with more Fed handouts.

And those tricky "ethical blind spots" are especially hard to discern if one is Vice Chairman of the House Ethics Committee! Yup, his ethical tasks on the Ethics Panel probably blinded him to the pitfalls of investing with "such close" associates!

And that $90.000 in cold cash was deposited in Rep. Jefferson's home freezer by someone else in order to freeze his assets, without his knowing it!

And Cynthia McKinney was right to punch out a Capitol Police officer because he didn't recognize the exploding Brillo-pad hairdo as befitting a Congressperson!

And Patrick Kennedy never went near a bar [that was a false spotting at the Hawk and Dove by a bartender who thought he saw regular patron Kennedy boozing just before the 3AM drunken [oops, Ambien] driving incident on his way to vote on a pre-dawn bill a day after Congress had adjourned] and certainly should have been driven home without a DUI. His father got off with manslaughter, why shouldn't he get off with a stint at the Mayo Clinic?

Well, if the Repubs are a culture of "corruption," could we call the Dems a culture of "ethical, moral, and legal blindspots?"

Clinton and his "Bachelor Buddy"

If you want to know just how weird the LA scene is and how pliable California politicians can be, link up to Mickey Kaus, to whom I owe a hat tip for this story in the New York Times which describes high-roller Ron Burkle, late of Page Six fame on the NY Post's Most Active List, as Bill Clinton's 'bachelor buddy' in LA. If you have been following the story in Mickey's blog, that's not the only place that Burkle and buddy Bill have been "baching it."

Recently Burkle said that Bill had spent "500 hours in the air" with Bill all around the world in RB's private jets. That's a lot of airtime even by the bovine fecal math RB is probably employing.

What is more interesting are the tips that the California State Legislature is allowing RB to help make their governance more opaque and less sunshiny than the happy lefties want to admit, all to protect the seamy details of his busted marriage litigation---probably the reason he also wanted immunity from Rupert Murdoch's sleuths on Page Six.

Then there's the little matter of the amounts of money CALIFORS pension plans have invested in RB's little investment vehicles, a cool $500 million, according to one source, which I saw in Mickey's blog.

Yes, the naughty Republican House is rife with corruption, but Bill and his bachelor buddy might be up to their eyebrows in questionable---corrupt by other standards---dealings on the state level, where the NYT, WaPo, WSJ and most certainly not the complete MSM pablum factory, the Los Angeles Times. To investigate Burkle and the State Legislature would be way outside their ethical, moral, and journalistic codes, which are NO FAULT ON THE LEFT! [From my SDS days, before I got a job and grew up.]

And what if Bill Clinton were somehow implicated?!? That would be NEWS, something the LAT doesn't deal in, unless under strict agitprop control.

DaVinciCode gets an "F" on History

Okay, ninety-one percent of the "Cream of the Crop" reviewers at RottenTomatoes.com believe that DVC is a rotten tomato, although Roger Ebert gives it a thumbs up with a sort of faint apology. That makes it a pretty lousy movie. But, more importantly, does the DVC book by Dan Brown represent an historically plausible explanation of how the early Church chose the Gospels and regarded the Divinity of Christ?

A very well-written piece in Slate by an Edinburgh University New Testament scholar completely debunks this very successful and superficially deceptive hoax of a book. Read on:
"In a climactic scene in the movie The Da Vinci Code, the supposed Holy Grail expert, Sir Leigh Teabing, lays out the conspiracy theory at the heart of the movie and the novel: "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false," he declares. Actually, just about everything author Dan Brown puts in the mouth of Teabing is ludicrously false history. Catholics have responded to gratuitous accusations against the church. And other Christians have taken on Brown's utterly unsupported claim that Jesus married Mary Magdalene. My scholarly concern is the Da Vinci Code's errors regarding historical beliefs about the divinity of Jesus and the creation of the New Testament.

"The belief that Jesus is somehow divine was not invented by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, as Brown and movie director Ron Howard have Teabing say. Instead, this belief is attested in first-century Christian texts, such as the Gospel of John, and dates back even earlier to the letters of the apostle Paul, whose New Testament writings between A.D. 50 and 60 are the earliest Christian texts we have. Faith in the divine glory of the resurrected Jesus appears to have emerged amazingly soon after his execution, most likely among circles of his Jewish followers. Scholars commonly regard particular passages in Paul's letters as preserving early hymns about Jesus, in which he is praised as the one through whom the world was created, and as sharing in God's nature and glory.

"In fact, in pretty much the entire body of early Christian writings from the first three centuries, Jesus' divinity is taken for granted. Christians differed not over that basic assumption but rather over how to understand his divine nature. At the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, the crucial question was how to reconcile Jesus' divinity with Christian monotheism.

"Curiously, The Da Vinci Code presents the so-called Gnostics, who regarded other Christians as lesser beings than they and were in turn treated as heretics, as the heroic defenders of a thoroughly human Jesus. But actually the historic Gnostics and the gospels often linked with their circles did not emphasize Jesus' human nature at all—quite the opposite. Typically, Gnostic Christians portrayed Christ as a heavenly being who came down to earth to awaken them from their spiritual slumber by disclosing their own divine inner nature. Regarding the physical world as a source of delusion and place of confinement, Gnostics were deeply negative about bodily existence, including their own. So, they tended to treat Jesus' body as simply the temporary vehicle for his revelatory mission, believing that he discarded it before returning to his heavenly status in the realm of pure light. It was actually the Orthodox Christians who made much of Jesus' full human nature and the reality of his death as the essential redemptive act.

"In Brown's scheme, the Gnostics are also the suppressed source of the true account of Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene. In reality, the Gnostics' negativity about the body includes a dim view of procreation and the sexual activity that went with it. Usually in their writings Jesus is the ideal ascetic who models for his followers a disdain for bodily appetites. So, the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene isn't just antithetical to Orthodox accounts. It goes against the Gnostic grain, too—if anything more so.

"To clear up another piece of history on which The Da Vinci Code is completely unreliable, the New Testament was not created at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. The question wasn't even on the council's agenda. The formation of the New Testament had begun much earlier and continued on later than Nicaea. The familiar four Gospels, which scholars commonly regard as the earliest such texts, were treated as a completed set at least by A.D. 150 in many or likely most Christian circles. Still earlier, Paul's letters were collected and circulated as scripture. In the early third century, the Christian scholar Origen listed the writings regarded by most Christians of his time as scripture, other writings that had largely been rejected, and others still under consideration. Among the texts regarded as scriptural, he included most of those that became part of the New Testament.

"It's also important to emphasize that this question of which writings to treat as scripture, which to treat merely as edifying reading, and which to regard as heretical, was not decided at a single point by a church council, a pope, or a Roman emperor. Once again, in service of its conspiracy theory, The Da Vinci Code gets it wrong. The canonizing of scripture involved circles of believers spread across the many lands of the Roman Empire and beyond. The result wasn't a fiat foisted upon the Christian world. Essentially, the writings that commended themselves earliest and to the largest number of Christians came more quickly and securely to be part of the emergent New Testament. Some other writings, such as Revelation and the second book of Peter, were accepted later. A few writings, such as Didache or Shepherd of Hermas, were contenders that lost out in the end. They enjoyed favor in some circles but just didn't have sufficiently wide endorsement.

"In the book and the movie, Teabing asserts that other texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary, were cast out of the New Testament because Constantine and those mean old Nicaean bishops wanted to impose their beliefs on the rest of Christendom. These texts, however, reflect an elitist attitude disdainful of ordinary Christians and their beliefs. It is unlikely that their authors ever sought to have them included with the writings of the emergent New Testament. In any case, they weren't chucked from the canon in an act of suppression. They just never won the confidence of a sufficient number of Christians to make the grade in the first place.

"Oh, and one more matter on which The Da Vinci Code is bonkers. There were no two-way wars between Christians and pagans in the decades before Constantine. Instead, beginning with Nero's cruel pogrom against Roman Christians in the first century, there were occasional persecutions mounted by the Roman state, the most vigorous ones under Caracalla (A.D. 215), Decius (A.D. 249-51), Valerian (A.D. 253), and perhaps the most violent of all, Diocletian (A.D. 303-05). There is no record of Christians taking up arms against pagans in this period. They fought back by fervently articulating their beliefs and backing their professions to the point of martyrdom. So, Constantine's decision to legitimate Christianity (in A.D. 312, not 325, as Brown asserts) was not prompted by his desire to end pagan-Christian battles.

"In the novel, in the scene in which Teabing lays out all the crazy assertions, the Harvard professor character, Robert Langdon, nods sagely in support of the whole scheme. At the same point in the movie, by contrast, Langdon strongly objects. The word is that Ron Howard made this change, as well as a few others, in hopes of placating historians. Nice try. By the end of the movie Langdon has undergone a conversion of sorts and acclaims Sophie as Jesus' last living descendant. Never mind that Teabing is revealed as a maniacal villain, his ideas carry the day. The movie can't escape the charge that it promotes the mischievous fictions that masquerade in the book as the revelation of historical secrets. Instead, of course, the film widens Brown's reach.

Not if word of mouth is as bad as it seems. Oh well, Angels and Demons was another pile of bovine fecal material that will probably shortly make it to the screen. What does Dan Brown have against the Vatican, or is it all about the money?

Fourth Estate is US Fifth Column, Aided by Dem Pols.

Just in case you have not got your fill of the misleading statements and outright prevarications of the MainStreamMedia, here is a handy refutation of their mistakes and deliberately deceptive misstatements on the Iraq War, as put forward by theOpinion Journal.

Iraqis can participate in three historic elections, pass the most liberal constitution in the Arab world, and form a unity government despite terrorist attacks and provocations. Yet for some critics of the president, these are minor matters. Like swallows to Capistrano, they keep returning to the same allegations--the president misled the country in order to justify the Iraq war; his administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments; Saddam Hussein turned out to be no threat since he didn't possess weapons of mass destruction; and helping democracy take root in the Middle East was a postwar rationalization. The problem with these charges is that they are false and can be shown to be so--and yet people continue to believe, and spread, them.

Study after study has shown time and again that the MSM leans to the left, and almost always spins a story to make Republicans look wrong-footed, flummoxed, and outright dishonest, even if the facts do not warrant such descriptions or conclusions. Author Peter Wehner examines each allegation in turn:

The president misled Americans to convince them to go to war. "There is no question [the Bush administration] misled the nation and led us into a quagmire in Iraq," according to Ted Kennedy. Jimmy Carter charged that on Iraq, "President Bush has not been honest with the American people." And Al Gore has said that an "abuse of the truth" characterized the administration's "march to war." These charges are themselves misleading, which explains why no independent body has found them credible. Most of the world was operating from essentially the same set of assumptions regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities. Important assumptions turned out wrong; but mistakenly relying on faulty intelligence is a world apart from lying about it.

Let's review what we know. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is the intelligence community's authoritative written judgment on specific national-security issues. The 2002 NIE provided a key judgment: "Iraq has continued its [WMD] programs in defiance of U.N. resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

Thanks to the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission, which investigated the causes of intelligence failures in the run-up to the war, we now know that the President's Daily Brief (PDB) and the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief "were, if anything, more alarmist and less nuanced than the NIE" (my emphasis). We also know that the intelligence in the PDB was not "markedly different" from that given to Congress. This helps explains why John Kerry, in voting to give the president the authority to use force, said, "I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security." It's why Sen. Kennedy said, "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." And it's why Hillary Clinton said in 2002, "In the four years since the inspectors, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program."

Beyond that, intelligence agencies from around the globe believed Saddam had WMD. Even foreign governments that opposed his removal from power believed Iraq had WMD: Just a few weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom, Wolfgang Ischinger, German ambassador to the U.S., said, "I think all of our governments believe that Iraq has produced weapons of mass destruction and that we have to assume that they continue to have weapons of mass destruction."

In addition, no serious person would justify a war based on information he knows to be false and which would be shown to be false within months after the war concluded. It is not as if the WMD stockpile question was one that wasn't going to be answered for a century to come.

So everybody on both sides of the aisle basically agreed along with almost every intelligence agency on the planet, that Saddam had these weapons. Even Saddam's leading military advisors believed he had them! Two versions of how he spirited them out of the country in a clandestine secret police operation have appeared in the media. They are either in Syria or somewhere in Lebanon, according to these versions. And there is even evidence that Iraq went to Niger in 1999 to talk over buying yellowcake for a nuke, although Valerie Plame's House Dick named Joe Wilson clubfootedly failed to figure that out, for which services he was made a hero by the paraplegic MSM and quadraplegic ultra-left. Wehner goes on:

The Bush administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments. Earlier this year, Mr. Gore charged that "CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House . . . found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases." Sen. Kennedy charged that the administration "put pressure on intelligence officers to produce the desired intelligence and analysis."

This myth is shattered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's bipartisan Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. Among the findings: "The committee did not find any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so." Silberman-Robb concluded the same, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments." What the report did find is that intelligence assessments on Iraq were "riddled with errors"; "most of the fundamental errors were made and communicated to policy makers well before the now-infamous NIE of October 2002, and were not corrected in the months between the NIE and the start of the war."

Because weapons of mass destruction stockpiles weren't found, Saddam posed no threat. Howard Dean declared Iraq "was not a danger to the United States." John Murtha asserted, "There was no threat to our national security." Max Cleland put it this way: "Iraq was no threat. We now know that. There are no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons programs." Yet while we did not find stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, what we did find was enough to alarm any sober-minded individual.

Upon his return from Iraq, weapons inspector David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), told the Senate: "I actually think this may be one of those cases where [Iraq under Saddam Hussein] was even more dangerous than we thought." His statement when issuing the ISG progress report said: "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities" that were part of "deliberate concealment efforts" that should have been declared to the U.N. And, he concluded, "Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

Among the key findings of the September 2004 report by Charles Duelfer, who succeeded Mr. Kay as ISG head, are that Saddam was pursuing an aggressive strategy to subvert the Oil for Food Program and to bring down U.N. sanctions through illicit finance and procurement schemes; and that Saddam intended to resume WMD efforts once U.N. sanctions were eliminated. According to Mr. Duelfer, "the guiding theme for WMD was to sustain the intellectual capacity achieved over so many years at such a great cost and to be in a position to produce again with as short a lead time as possible. . . . Virtually no senior Iraqi believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever. Evidence suggests that, as resources became available and the constraints of sanctions decayed, there was a direct expansion of activity that would have the effect of supporting future WMD reconstitution."

Beyond this, Saddam's regime was one of the most sadistic and aggressive in modern history. It started a war against Iran and used mustard gas and nerve gas. A decade later Iraq invaded Kuwait. Iraq was a massively destabilizing force in the Middle East; so long as Saddam was in power, rivers of blood were sure to follow.

Of course, no one takes Gore or Kennedy seriously unless their assertions are accompanied by a negative pronoun. But there is a third assertion, that democracy was an afterthought, which has a bit more plausibility as some sort of an add-on to dress up and put lipstick on an otherwise unpretty forceful entry. Here Wehner strains a little:

Promoting democracy in the Middle East is a postwar rationalization. "The president now says that the war is really about the spread of democracy in the Middle East. This effort at after-the-fact justification was only made necessary because the primary rationale was so sadly lacking in fact," according to Nancy Pelosi.

In fact, President Bush argued for democracy taking root in Iraq before the war began. To take just one example, he said in a speech on Feb. 26, 2003: "A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America's interests in security, and America's belief in liberty, both lead in the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq. . . . The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life. And there are hopeful signs of a desire for freedom in the Middle East. . . . A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region."

On second thought, if it comes to a choice between agreeing with Nancy Pelosi and the New York Times, I reluctantly choose the latter:

The following day the New York Times editorialized: "President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. . . . The idea of turning Iraq into a model democracy in the Arab world is one some members of the administration have been discussing for a long time."

Since then, the political commissars on the NYT editorial board have turned to chasing what Wehner calls "urban legends:"

These, then, are the urban legends we must counter, else falsehoods become conventional wisdom. And what a strange world it is: For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage. The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred. It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out.

Despite the fall of the USSR and the isolation of out-and-out Communism to reclusive police-states like N. Korea and Cuba, the twisted Marxism editorial board members and journalism school grads were indoctrinated with early in life live on in their one-sided view that America, the most successful economic and military champion of democracy the planet has ever experienced in three millenia, sadly violates all sorts of legalistic and ideological boundaries set up by mandarins of political correctness representing nothing but a failed political philosophy.

And I didn't even mention the UN by name! The Third World lives in the hearts and twisted minds of the LA and NYC nomenklatura.

JUST CITIZENS. Not your Father's Political Party.: Nimrod of the Week

JUST CITIZENS. Not your Father's Political Party.: Nimrod of the Week

Lying Liars on the Left: Any Surprise?

There is a veritable blogstorm about the latest bit of fakery from the ultra-left, a purported interview from an "Army Ranger" who looks like an HIV-positive, sarcoma-wasted traitor in his YouTube pictures.

This just goes to show, as a letter to a blog condemning this traitor suggests how desperate the anti-war left is becoming.

Not to mention how discredited the screaming screechers on the Angry Left are becoming, as though they care. Their exhalations and exaggerations appear to be for therapeutic reasons and totally unrelated to reality!