Australian Demonstrates Backbone; Annan & Gore Two Has-Beens

John Howard should run for office in the USA. Along with Tony Blair, Howard demonstrates that he won't succumb to the International Left's Mighty Wurlitzer of specious science exclaiming that the Sky is Falling. Oops, that splat was Tony starting to fall for Lord Stern's new pronunciamento as another one bites the dust.

A recent Scientific American has the serial scam artist Jeffrey Sachs, whom my brother-in-law worked with at the IIDD at Harvard, claiming that anyone who isn't a climate scientist should not talk about the subject. A classic end-game for discussion-ended, except for the risible fact that Sachs is, of course, not a climate scientist himself. Indeed, this Jack-of-all-Trades has a resume that appears to make him the travelling snake-oil salesman, one of those "notables" or B-List celebrities who pop up like the Whacka-mole all over the place. Sachs saved Eastern Europe and Russia from themselves, and is now graduating to save the planet!

The disappearance of the Middle Age Warming Period is explained by the famous screed of Michael Mann, whose wrecking crew expunged the MAWP to the "memory hole," as Prof Deming in Oklahoma recalls, because it was an inconvenient fact. So all proponents of a warming period from 900AD-1300AD are airbrushed from the argument in order to form a "hockey stick." And we must believe this because a collective of wisemen, feverishly awaiting a cornucopia of grants from the UN and other spurious NGOs have decreed ex cathedra that the science is correct. Richard Feynmann called quacks like Michael Mann "cargo cult scientists," and you know you are on the right side of the argument when Kofi Annan and Inventor-of-the-Internet-&-Lockbox Al Gore inveigh against global warming skeptics. Kyoto is Rube Goldberg UN chicanery that even the signatories make no effort to enforce. And without China on board, it is irrelevant. But that doesn't stop the UN's worst-ever [except for Boutros B-G] SecGen from sounding even dumber than usual. And Al Gore has adopted yarmulkes, then earth-tones, and now a scientific gown to advance his has-been political career.

By the way, last night the History Channel had an hour-long presentation on how the thermohalene effect on the ocean currents will cause a new Ice Age very shortly. And these scientists attribute the Little Ice Age that succeeded the Middle Age Warming Period to sunspots that may still be causing global warming.

Why can't these guys get their stories straight!

Schumer Talks as if he is President

The Mouth From the North has never been accused of being self-effacing. Indeed, it is pols like Chuck who give the Dems their mascot-icon of a braying ass.

The headline and sub-line of the adoring NYObserver is:

"Exultant Chuck Says He’ll Veto the Next Alito
New King of Washington Promises Moderate Court; Rove-like, Plans Permanent Democratic Majority; More N.Y. Homeland Money, Iraqi Federalism"

I believe that constitutional scholars will have a field day if they ever bother to fisk such blather.

Schumer's grandiosity knows no bounds. Back in the day, he told me when he was still a lowly congressman that he was the first Jewish boy to make it onto Harvard's basketball team. But that was a Long Island garden party and he had had a coupla drinks.

Editor & Publisher Needs an Editor

The Left-wing media site Editor and Publisher prints this paragraph THREE TIMES in the piece linked above:

It is the most important change that I will lead as executive editor. It reminds me of my early days in the newsroom, when Ben Bradlee began boldly transforming the paper during the 1960s and 1970s. The newsroom was well less than half the size it is now, and we were underdogs. But we found our edge, produced original journalism and had fun creating The Washington Post all of you joined. Now, we're taking the next step.

Somebody at E&P needs to go back to journalism school.

French Lab Gives False Blood Test Results

The French got caught again being incompetent dishonest fools. Is this news? The race of craven cowards that will lie, cheat, and steal----and then rewrite history [like that of World War II] to make themselves appear heroic will never admit that they are, as Arthur C. Clarke said in "Childhood's End," the world's greatest second-raters.

Read how they mucked up the Tour De France blood-doping tests they used to take away Landis's victory. Nugget quote:

... the lab referred questions to the French anti-doping agency. The agency's secretary general, Philippe Dautry, declined to comment on the report.

Landis' lawyer, Howard Jacobs, has already alleged that the French lab made repeated errors in its analyses, including mismatched sample code numbers.

In a letter sent to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in September, Jacobs said the positive finding on the "B" sample came from a sample number not assigned to Landis.

"It's incredibly sloppy," Jacobs said at the time. "It has to make you wonder about the accuracy of the work."

On Sunday, Landis said in a French television interview that the lab made crucial errors in his tests.

"Even the best people make mistakes," he said. "I can't say that the lab is always a bad lab, but I can say that in this case it made some mistakes .?.?. I did not take testosterone."

Count on Le Monde, a factitious rag more fact-challenged than the NYT, to continue to wave the tricolor while the French disgrace themselves yet again.

John Murtha a Poster Boy for Corruption

The MSM will swallow
lumps of coal for the Democrats, who regard the New York Times and its pilot fish in the electronic media as its public relations lackeys.

But the colossal fraud named John Murtha might be too much even for the compliant easy marks in the national media. Besides the ambiguous results of the Abscam farce, where Tip O'Neill maneuovered and manipulated to get Murtha off the hook, his ferocious pork-barreling and earmarking make him exactly the wrong person to be on the top of the heap. Here's Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, starting with Abscam:

Two other congressmen in on the deal "do expect to be taken care of," the lawmaker says. But for the time being -- and he says repeatedly that he might change his mind and take money down the road -- he'd rather trade his help for investment in his district, maybe a hefty deposit in the bank of a political supporter who's done him favors.

"I'm not interested -- at this point," he says of the dangled bribe. "You know, we do business for a while, maybe I'll be interested, maybe I won't, you know." Indeed, he acknowledges, even though he needs to be careful -- "I expect to be in the [expletive] leadership of the House," he notes -- the money's awfully tempting. "It's hard for me to say, just the hell with it."

This is John Murtha, incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi's choice to be her majority leader, snared but not charged in the Abscam probe in 1980. "The Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history," Pelosi pledged on election night. Five days later she wrote Murtha a letter endorsing his bid to become her No. 2.

Not the most promising start.

For years Murtha has relied on the Abscam bottom line to argue that the case is not a problem for him: He wasn't indicted. But he was named a co-conspirator in the bribery scheme. The feckless House ethics committee didn't take action against him, though the outside investigator it hired quit in disgust after the panel rejected his recommendation to file misconduct charges.

"I am the guy that didn't take the money," Murtha said this summer when his opponent raised the issue.

Yes, but: He's the guy who, brought into the deal by two other House members -- Frank Thompson (D-N.J.) and John Murphy (D-N.Y.) -- agreed to meet with men offering money in return for official action. He's the guy who knew these two colleagues expected a payoff and even vouched for them with the would-be bribers ("Both of them are solid.").

He's the guy who, when offered a bribe, still wanted to do a deal. "I'm delighted to do business with him and do every goddamn thing I can within bounds, you know, so I don't get myself in jail, in order to get him into the country and whatever needs to be done," he says on the video, unearthed by the conservative American Spectator. (You can watch at http://www.spectator.org/.) He's the guy who -- as a member of the House ethics committee-- did nothing to stop the scheme.

Sorry, but I'm not buying Murtha's argument that he's the victim of a "Swift-boating attack" over "unfounded allegations that occurred 26 years ago." On its own, Murtha's Abscam conduct is disqualifying.

Even if it weren't, though, everything in Murtha's post-Abscam life is of a piece with the back-scratching, dealmaking style on display in the video. In a story last month, the New York Times described how Murtha has operated "a political trading post" in a back corner -- the Murtha corner, it's called -- of the House floor, where Democrats and Republicans alike come to get Murtha's blessing for earmarks or his help on close votes. As Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski told the Times, "nobody ever leaves completely disappointed."

Murtha is one of 12 Democrats who voted against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. He's one of four who killed a strong Democratic ethics package earlier this year. He is a one-man earmarking factory whose beneficiaries have included a lobbying firm that employed his brother and another founded by a former top aide.

Conscientious Democrats realize this and hopefully, Steny Hoyer, whose politics are more liberal and thus less attractive to me, will still ride out the Pelosi/Hastings/Murtha/Jefferson crime wave about to take over the House Leadership. Thank goodness, the balloting for the Hoyer/Murtha post is secret, so Pelosi won't have horse-heads [or in New Jersey, hog's-heads] thrown on the beds of defectors.

Kidnappings Underscore Iraqi PM Weakness

PM al-Maliki appears trapped by his Shi'ite militia allies, whose influence is buttressed by the presence of 30 members of the Sadr Group in al-Maliki's ruling coalition. A week ago, al-Maliki ordered US troops to cease their efforts in the Karrada neighborhood to find a kidnapped US soldier. The Washington Post article continues:

Still, it was unclear Tuesday night whether the gunmen were members of the police or impostors. Militias associated with religious groups have been widely seen as fomenting the sectarian violence gripping the country, and Shiite militias are believed to have infiltrated the Shiite-dominated police force, which Sunnis have long accused of conducting mass abductions.

The minister of higher education is a member of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni Muslim bloc in parliament. At the same time, Karrada is increasingly becoming a stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the militia linked to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. And the dominant Shiite religious party in government, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, also has an armed wing, the Badr Organization, that is known to have strong links within the police.

On Tuesday, in a televised meeting with President Jalal Talabani, Maliki appeared to imply that the kidnappings might be linked to militia rivalries. "What is happening is not terrorism, but the result of disagreements and conflict between militias belonging to this side or that," Maliki said.

If the kidnappings were militia-related, it would underscore Maliki's inability to disarm the groups and could erode his relationship with U.S. officials who have been pressuring Maliki to take tougher action against the militias.

Maliki appears to be using, or at least passively condoning, the takeover of a Sunni-dominated ministry by what many suspect are Interior Ministry police, or at least Shi'ite militiamen wearing IntMin uniforms. These twenty pick-up trucks were allowed free traverse of all the checkpoints in the Shi'a controlled neighborhood despite the fact that many of the vehicles were without license plates!

It appears that these kidnappings may be a tipping point in forcing the PM to confront his own coalition allies. Since the bombing of the Samarra Dome Mosque, the Shi'ites have begun to run amok.

Kidnappings Underscore Iraqi PM Weakness

If the kidnappings were militia-related, it would underscore Maliki's inability to disarm the groups and could erode his relationship with U.S. officials who have been pressuring Maliki to take tougher action against the militias.
Maliki appears to be using, or at least passively condoning, the takeover of a Sunni-dominated ministry by what many suspect are Interior Ministry police, or at least Shi'ite militiamen wearing IntMin uniforms. These twenty pick-up trucks were allowed free traverse of all the checkpoints in the Shi'a controlled neighborhood despite the fact that many of the vehicles were without license plates!

It appears that these kidnappings may be a tipping point in forcing the PM to confront his own coalition allies. Since the bombing of the Samarra Dome Mosque, the Shi'ites have begun to run amok.

DNC Quaking at Prospect of Giuliani Run

Rudy Giuliani draws large poll numbers across the country and across the board. John McCain and Giuliani would be a dream team, if one of these two egomaniacs could be persuaded to take the VP slot on the 2008 Republican ticket.

Despite his leftist takes on many social issues, I like his support of school vouchers as this product of parochial schools does the right thing to enable kids to escape dead-end public education, over-funded and under-delivering because of huge administrative costs and regressive union policies.

And this veteran of 9/11 will not flake out like the Democrats consistently do concerning national security. The only problem I have with Rudy is that Chris Mathews is so high on him! Probably that parochial school old-boy network!

Another Train Wreck Like Canada?

Hillary Clinton will have us wait for months to get into a hospital, if she has her way. I'm sure that's what this socialist-in-waiting has in mind when she blurted out the awful truth:

"Health care is coming back," Clinton warned, adding, "It may be a bad dream for some."

Of course, the irony is that the "bad dream" this political anachronism describes is for actual health patients when her socialized medicine makes the US a replication of the sorry mess north of our borders where doctors are accused of being unpatriotic if they migrate to the US and a sane health system. Who wants to wait for a week to deliver a baby, as some hospitals in Canada do, and then fly the mother to a neighboring province when she breaks water, because all the "beds are full."

The UK has a broken-down system too. Fix the Medicare prescription program, perhaps, and eliminate the doughnut [which may have cost Repubs votes among the elderly this recent election]. But don't try to Europeanize the world's best health system and drag it down to an antiquated model.

The hankering after Eurotopian socialist models that don't work shows this woman's age, and Hillary is fast becoming an old lady.

Cardinal at Vatican: Protection Money?

Some screwball cardinal brays about a Berlin Wall [remember that that wall was to keep people IN a slave-society, not OUT of a free society] between the US and the elitist kleptocracy to the south.

Wasn't a cardinal murdered by drug gangs in Guadalajara a few years back? Is this red-beanie talking protection to keep other clerics from being bumped off?

The UN and one-worlders want to drag down border barriers, feminize the USA, and make the majority of dictatorships of one sort or another [like the Mexican elitist oligarchical kleptocrats] in the UN paramount over free societies. And shuttle their malcontented poor into rich countries to remove a source of unrest.

Not very hard to figure out, is it?

Chief Justice Roberts Bush's Best Appointment

Chief Justice John Roberts was at the University of Miami yesterday. My daughter and my wife and I were at UM Sunday at the Communications School, which had a lot of its students interned out for the talk, in front of 3000 guests. Nugget quote:

"Not a single person has voted for me and if we don't like what the people in Congress do we can get rid of them, you know, if you don't like what I do, it's kind of too bad. And that is to me an important constraint," Roberts said. "It means that I'm not there to make a judgment based on my personal policy preferences or my political preferences."

Roberts is rapidly proving why he is the best person who possibly could have been selected for the position, showing every attribute of a judicial personality, including a welcome self-effacing role for judges in the face of rampant judicial activism.

As Roberts noted, nobody voted for him. Too bad the crazies on the 9th Circuit out in SF or the loonies in Massachusetts are self-referential egoists. Their lack of judicious temperment has led to pernicious social and moral turpitude becoming the order of the day.

Not to mention crime on the rise.

In many countries, the lack of an independent judiciary has led to widespread abuses in many areas, but the United States is an example of where the opposite extreme has also led to bad public policy.

"America Alone" Part One

Mark Steyn has writes money quotes in America Alone on what is going on under everyone's nose, but nobody wants to notice because it is themselves and their societal cultures swirling in a downward spiral:

The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population -- i.e. no growth, no decline, just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010 -- you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That's what American has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handouts, more UN peacekeepers, etc.) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38. Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries -- or, more precisely, these people -- are going out of business.-- P.2

But carpe diem is the motto motto for these geezers-in-the-making, because the secular progressives on the Progressive Left have left out the punchline in their cradle-to-grave schemes that remind you of a quack selling snake oil:

Big government depends on bigger population: Americans have a relatively smallish government compared to Canada and Europe, but the US Social Security system assumes a 30 percent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017. Now imagine you're Spain and you've got even bigger public pensions liabilities and a population that's going to be halving every thirty-five years. The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control, but not both. That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There's no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital -- and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems. -- P.3

But, of course, the cure for underpopulation is to import "guest workers," who will quietly toil away and then depart for their native lands grateful and wealthy by the standards of their poorly-run home countries, right? Wrong!

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering its voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under Sharia, but -- as have parts of Nigeria -- they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, thought without a significantly different ending. -- P.38
(T)he secondary impulses are so advanced that many of America's allies no longer share the same understanding of basic words like "power." In 2002 Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen gave a speech in London saying that "the EU must not develop unto a military superpower but must become a great power that will not up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests." No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, he means it: for many Europeans, the old rules no longer apply. They've been supplanted by new measures of power like how smoothly you fit in at the transnational yakfests (EU, UN, ICC, etc.). -- P.44
The Left, for its part, offers an appeal to moral virtue: it's better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens of a community. It's kinder, gentler, more compassionate, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. "Social democracy" is, it turns out, explicitly anti-social. -- P.45
The bullying, intimidating side of Muslim immigration in Europe seems to be largely absent in America, in part at least because the assertiveness of the individual American citizen makes it a riskier undertaking. -- P.46

Remember when that paragon of left-wing virtue said that he would take a rifle and fight for Israel back in 2002, [unlike what he did for the country he was born in]. Well now that's all changed. Billy Jeff checked the latest weather report and is now sorta backing off the pro-Israeli line, now that Hezbollah conned the ultra-left newsies into making their aggression against Israel a paean to their own martyrdom.

We -- the befuddled infidels -- talk airily about "reforming" Islam. But what if the reform has already taken place and jihadism is it? What if the long percolation through Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolution, and contemporary Western-promoted whinging over grievances such as "colonialism" is the reform. -- P.82
When they want to, Islamists can assimilate at impressive speed. So we have fire-breathing Imams milking Euro-welfare and litigious lobby groups with high-rent legal teams. Neither of these are features of Arab life. Rather, they illustrate how adept Islam is at picking and choosing what aspects of Westernization are useful to it. Whatever the arguments are for and against "gay marriage," there are never going to be many takers for it. But the justifications for same-sex marriage are already being used to advance the cause of polygamy, and there are far more takers for that. It's already practiced de factor if not de jure in France, Ontario, and many other Western jurisdictions, and government agencies, such as the United Kingdom's pensions ministry, have already begun according polygamy piecemeal recognition for the purposes of inheritance law. Neither feminists nor homosexuals seem obvious allies for Islam, but lobby groups have effortlessly mastered the lingo, techniques, and pseudo-grievances of each. -- P.84

But one thing is certain. Belgian immigrant Steyn nails the craven cowardly cowering Eurotopians right where it hurts---their colossal urbane insolence. This is a continent that 100 years ago considered the era of wars behind them and a Jugendwanderung of young Europeans hiked across the continent spreading all sorts of idealistic good will---read Hermann Hesse for an afterglow of that era in Siddharta or Steppenwolf. But a couple of summers after the Jugendwanderung, the young men of Europe were literally entrenched across half the continent lobbing shells and grenades and hoping to get a chance to bayonet one another. After two world wars, the continent has been bled white and is ready to succumb to its own indolent devil-may-care character defects. Steyn is right on:

The transatlantic "split" has nothing to do with disagreements over Iraq, and can't be repaired by a more Europhile president in Washington: you can't "mend bridges" when the opposite bank is sinking into the river. If Americans think that the post-bombing 2004 Spanish election result was a disgrace, look down the road to the next election cycle, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond. In the United States, psephologists speculate on the impact of Ralph Nader's 2 or 3 percent in swing states. Think about an election in which 20 percent of the voters are a self-segregating Muslim bloc. If Washington had a hard time getting any useful contribution to the war from Europe in 2001 or 2002, you do the math ten or fifteen years hence. -- P.107
About six months after September 11, I went on a grand tour of the Continent's Muslim ghettos and then flew on to the Middle East. The Muslims I met in Europe were, almost to a man, more alienated and angrier than the ones back in Araby. -- P.118
The theoretical virtue of "multiculturalism" is that it's a form of mellifluous cultural cross-pollination: the best of all worlds. But just as often it gives "the worst of all worlds" the worst attributes of Muslim culture -- the subjugation of women -- combined with the worst attributes of Western culture -- license and self-gratification. Tattooed, pierced, Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of northern England are as much of a product of multiculturalism as the turban wearing Sikh Mountie in the royal escort. Islamofascism itself is what it says: a fusion of Islamic identity with old school European totalitarianism. But, whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today's Identity of choice for the world's disaffected. -- P.120
The jihadists understand that the Continent is up for grabs in a way that America isn't. And as their numbers grow, it seems likely that wily Islamic leaders in the Middle-East will embrace the cause of the rights of European Muslims in the same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians. -- P.121
Four years after September 11 it turned out there really is an explosive "Arab Street," but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois. Since the beginning of the century, French Muslims have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They're losing that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness. -- P.122, 123
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But Europe is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to re-run the Battle of Poitiers. P.123, 124
As President Reagan liked to say, "status quo" is Latin for "the mess we're in." -- P.132

I could go on, but Steyn had the good luck to have Saudi Ambassador to the USA Turki al-Faisal, who those with a memory will recall was fired from his job as Head of Saudi Intelligence two or three days before 9/11, call Mark Steyn "incredibly arrogant," and the Ambassador's words are emblazoned on the cover of America Alone.

To be called "arrogant" by a fellow who ostensibly was fired for having tried to cut a deal with a much more clever Osama bin Laden, and getting bilked out of hundreds of millions by trusting the world's greatest terrorist, that is an encomium Mark Steyn could only have hoped for, and it fell into his lap.

Oedipus Rules: Boston Globe Writer Wants Defeat

James Carroll was a dominating figure in his life, and according to Carroll's autobiography, a great influence in his decision to become a priest. Carroll's father was a Colonel in the U.S. Army.

Now Carroll is a defrocked anti-clerical opponent of the Catholic Church, the U.S. Army, and the U.S.A., which he writes above should accept its "defeat" because of the hubris of its mistakes.

Carroll could be a poster-child of the self-referential narcissist liberal tendency to project one's personal failures onto a parent, a mentor, and one's country. Carroll should do some serious couch time with a therapist to analyze just how his life went terribly wrong and how he refused to be accountable.

Overthrowing a terrible dictator we believed on the brink of manufacturing nuclear weapons was not a terrible loss of honor, as Carroll contends. It may have been a terrible mistake, but Saddam Hussein vies with Kim Jung-Il and Fidel Castro as being one of the worst people in the world.

This is never mentioned by the so-called "moral" author of the piece linked above, because it would put context and reality into the discussion, and that is where "moralists" like Carroll fall on their faces.

In truth, Daddy Dearest is the reason Carroll hates his family, church, and country.

Will Lieberman Switch Parties?

The Boston Globe notes that the Democrats are quaking in their Senatorial boots over Iraq, as Joe Lieberman's re-election on strong support for President Bush's war policies may keep Sens. Biden and Levin from drastic action. The Globe notes:

Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" if he might follow the example of Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who left the Republicans in 2001 and became an independent, ending Republican control of the U.S. Senate, Lieberman refused to discount the possibility.

Because if Lieberman is left out of the Dem Iraqi policy development, he could do what Vermont Sen. Jeffords did in 2001 and declare himself a member of the opposite party. If the Repubs were or are smart enough to offer him seniority as the Dems did Jeffords, Joe might just throw the Senate back into the hands of the Repubs.

And the MSM and academicide claque could hardly object, since the Dems pulled the same trick only a few years ago.

Nancy Pelosi is rapidly reverting to her socialist roots in the House, supporting Murtha on the House Majority Leader internal Dem vote to be held this Thursday. And Pelosi is supporting convicted felon Alcee Hastings, who took bribes while a Federal Judge, for head of the House Intelligence Committee, due to a hissy-fit biyotch set of issues with the very competent Jane Harman. Wonder how much Hastings, a total farce as a congressman, will charge for turning over US intelligence secrets to the enemies of our country? Seniority and skin color is everything with the Dems, and the leftish MSM will probably defend Hastings, with the exception of the NYT, in one of its uncharacteristic fits of civic responsibility, which asked Pelosi to nix the Hastings appointment.

If Pelosi lurches leftward and the Senate follows her lead, the Senate could fall back into Repub hands, as Lieberman is one of those uncharacteristic Dems, a man with a conscience.

Dearbornistan Rising

John Conyers is ready to take over the Chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee. But he has another distinction.

[he] is one of the top recipients of donations from the Arab-American Leadership PAC. And not surprisingly, he has a long history of pandering to Arab and Muslim voters.

During the first Gulf War, for instance, Conyers fought FBI outreach efforts in the Arab and Muslim community in Detroit that were designed to gather intelligence on potential cells and protect the home front. Conyers and other Detroit-area Democrats at the time, David Bonior and John Dingell, threatened to hold hearings unless the FBI stopped counterterrorism interviews.

The FBI met with them privately to explain the national security benefits of outreach, but could not allay their concerns. In the end, the FBI backed off. Today, Hamas, Hezbollah and the al-Qaida-tied Muslim Brotherhood are all active in the area.

So the area around Detroit is going to continue to be a nest of Muslim spies and perhaps terrorist cells developing under the protection of Conyers and Pelosi? The Investors' Daily article continues.

Expect Conyers and Pelosi to kick open the doors of Congress to Islamists from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other militant groups. They will have unfettered access, even though many of their leaders have been tied to terrorism (some CAIR officials have landed in the big house).

In 2003, Conyers hosted the first dinner on the Hill that celebrated the end of Ramadan for such Muslim leaders. It's now a tradition. Incoming Democrat freshman Keith Ellison, a Louis Farrakhan disciple and first Muslim member of Congress, will no doubt expand the invitation list.

Conyers has also sponsored one of the Islamists' favorite bills in Congress. HR 635, which has 40 co-signers, would create a select committee to investigate President Bush for allegedly manipulating prewar intelligence and torturing al-Qaida detainees. The goal of his bill is to build grounds for impeachment.

Luckily, the vast majority of the new House is sane, and the conservative complexion of many of the Democrats newly-elected means that whack-job Conyers and his CAIR buddies will not have the sway they may imagine. But the article ends on an ominous note.

Conyers led the defense of Bill Clinton in last decade's impeachment hearings and is clearly out for blood. So are many of the constituents he serves.

And given the sanguinary nature of Muslims, the blood might not be metaphorical.

Blankley Coins an Immortal Line; Vargas Revealed

Monday Afternoon Recap:

Best Line of the Friday Night Follies:

Tony Blankley on McLaughlin Group when he said: "The Republicans have gone from the party of Goldwater, Reagan, and Gingrich to the party of GWB, Frist, and Hastert. That is not evolution, that is called devolution.

Here is one of the reasons Vargas should be co-anchoring with Charlie Gibson and Bob Woodruff on ABC-Evening News. She's smarter and cuter than Couric, but Katie is a die-hard leftie, so she got the job at CBS.

GWB and Immigration

Someone on a talking head show yesterday compared the sitting President with his brother Jeb and remarked that "Jeb is a deeply-principled conservative" while his brother is more of a politician.

GWB appears to believe that he can get amnesty through Congress now that the Dems, thanks to his feckless ham-handed political touch, have taken over the House and Senate. To give a free ride to people who break the law is a Democrat trope. That's what judicial activists are for, not Republican presidents.

GWB has no principles, maybe a stubborn streak, but he's got that wobbly backbone of his Daddy.

Rangel Wouldn't Live in Mississippi

Charlie Rangel is a great guy, whom I've met personally in his office.

But what if a Republican would make such an insensitive comment?

Didn't Trent Lott from that poor state LOSE HIS JOB after endless handbagging by the hyper-nannies of the ultra-left MSM after a JOKE, for chrissakes?

Leftist hypocrisy and double standards and forgiveness for repeat offenders [Al Gore and John Kerry come to mind] appears endless.

Their compassion and concern for lazy homeless criminals appears to outweigh their concern for honest tax-paying citizens.

And God Help some Republican who makes a bad joke or slip of the tongue---the dead-tree eunuchate rails for weeks.

No wonder foreigners think so lowly of the USA. They just have to read our MSM and come away convinced that the US has lost its backbone and will to survive.

Abscam Escapee Murtha Tries to Oust Hoyer

Murtha was busted on tape in the Abscam debacle in the early '80s, but like Alcee Hastings on the Intelligence Committee, Murtha is trying to prove that a crime record, [or a record as an unindicted co-conspirator] is no hindrance to high position in the Democratic leadership.

Steny Hoyer is one of the few decent human beings in the upper reaches of the Democratic House, which puts him at odds with the Star Wars bar scene misfits like Hastings, Murtha, Rangel, Conyers, Dingel, Franks, and other near misses like Waxman and Pelosi. [Teddy is a crime wave all by himself---he beat a manslaughter rap thirty years ago during one of his party-hearty episodes]

No wonder the Democrats have to be soft on crime. Look at their top leadership!

Al-Qaeda Welcomes Dem Victory, Rumsfeld Departure

The Dems have a lot of admirers in the Middle East, not all of whom they should be proud of. The head of Al-Qaeda gloated over what he and his boss Osama consider a victory in the takeover of the Middle East and ultimately, Europe.

The profound political philosophy of UbL is based on America's Vietnam experience. Then and now, the Democrats oppose foreign involvements that involve America's military, which their Freudian-slip French fop Kerry reminded us is a despised component of US society among urbanized Europe-oriented Coastal Dems.

"I swear by God we shall not rest from jihad until we...blow up the filthiest house known as the White House," the voice on the recording said.

With Fifth Columns on both coasts, can a military collapse of the US be far ahead?

Michael Steele as Head of RNC?

As a former Maryland resident who married a legislative assistant to Senator Paul Sarbanes, I took special interest in the recent Senate race, in which a conservative black Republican named Michael Steele almost pulled off what would have been a colossal upset.

Maryland politics is cynical and dishonest to a degree that nearly reaches New Jersey mobbed-up human jokes like Sen. Menendez. The senior Senator is a four-ten Lesbian with a horrific temper who runs through staff at a rapid pace. Her mind is small as a thimble. Cardin beat a black NAACP director who should have been the candidate, but Maryland Dems treat their large black minority as plantation hands and many angry upper-class blacks detest the Dems and are now card-carrying Repubs, or independents judging the candidate as a person.

I hope Steele runs against Mikulski, as she is a disgrace to her gender, the state, and the Dem party---which is hard to say for such a shameless den of miscreants and second-raters.

John Bolton is another Marylander who is getting shafted for being right---Bobo Mikulski is far more a bully and ideologue than this talented public servant. His problem: He discerns the UN for what it is, a barely useful institution run by a mafia of quarter-wits, half-wits, and ideologues whose attitudes approach Hugo Chavez on the lunatic scale.

I would make Michael Steele the next UN Ambassador, if this broad-gauge individual feels up to the task of working with kleptocrats, socialists, and crime-states. Or else another job in the Bush cabinet. Steele is a comer and losing to Cardin may have been a good career move!

LAT Lies About Election Night News Ratings

Fox-News TV was the most-watched TV cable news except for the readers of the Los Angeles Times, which lied outright and straight from the shoulder that CNN outrated FOX News.

That statement fits right into the LAT editorial policy in that it is a sheer outright lie.

No wonder the LAT gets so many Pulitzers, as fake news is what the CSJ eunuchs love as long as it betrays US national secrets and advances the secular-progressive agenda.

Luckily, the circulation of the LAT is plummeting at a rate of about 8% every six months. At this rate, the Orange County Register, a much better newspaper, should surpass its circulation in a few short years.

Dean Baquet was kicked out and the Tribune is trying to offload this sorry specimen of a journalistic hoax. Won't be long now.....

Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis Receive Awards

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush hosted an Oval Office ceremony on Thursday to honor authors, historians and others with the National Humanities Medal.

I was fortunate enough during my short career as Middle East observer to get to know two of the honorees, Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis. Fouad was my houseguest when he first arrived in DC from Princeton back in late '79, early 1980. He was reading the famous Raj trilogy and Freud and a number of other books not directly related to the Middle East. We actually were going to invest in a couple of adjacent condos, but as Jimmy Carter's failed economic policies generated interest rates far into double digits, he peeled off from the purchase. I unfortunately bought into the deal, and after I married, Fouad became my renter as I decamped to my new spouse's more commodious household.

Fouad was one of the most challenging intellects I have ever encountered. At the time, he was making a slow transition from Nasserist pan-Arab socialism to a more balanced and mature understanding of political economics. This is a transition that less accomplished minds have failed to make. Fouad once told me that he was sending his son to the University of Michigan because he believed the Middle West was the only part of America that retained its traditional values [This was in the early '80s!]. I actually fixed Fouad up with an ABC-TV producer who was a former flame of mine after I became engaged to my wife! Fouad had a fund of anecdotes that were absolutely mesmerizing, and I believed them because I accompanied him to many of his presentations in DC and found that he was totally irresistable to tall Northern European drop-dead good-looking women. I hung around just to get the crumbs from his table, so to speak.

But on the flip side, I recall being in an elevator with Fouad as he and I were going to a meeting on K Street and hearing a loud American male in the crowded lift say in contemptuous tones something nasty about letting "foreigners" into the US. It was aimed at Fouad, who shrugged it off with his usual urbane equanimity afterwards, noting that people like that were everywhere in every country. That philosophical calm and deep understanding of the human predicament make, in my view, his being awarded the Medal for the Humanities especially appropriate.

Bernard Lewis had me over to his home in Princeton while his live-in housemate, a beautiful Ottoman princess, was in Arizona as I recall visiting one of her sons who was a student in Tucson. His incredible erudition was worn very lightly and, as the evening progressed and a bottle of Old Armagnac I had brought along diminished, he expatiated on the virtues of the Welsh and the Irish, for both of whom he had a great fondness. He made much of his Welsh blood and association with Irish military virtues during his years in the UK. It was around 4 AM before I bid a fond farewell to this most charming and learned host.

I think it is most interesting that these two recipients of the Humanities Medal come from very variegated backgrounds. Fouad told me much about his Shi'ite roots in South Lebanon from ancestors who migrated there from Iran in the 19th century ["Ajami" is Arabic for "Persian"]. Bernard Lewis is of English ancestry with a mixture of Jewish and Welsh ancestors.

Both of these scholars have a true appreciation of the real and growing threat that Islamic fascists pose to Western Civilization and to the United States. These two distinguished and truly learned men have given America much more than the US has given back, although they both have generous natures and, being fervent Americaphiles, would predictably quibble with that judgment.

Perspective

One of America's saner pundits notes some of the anomalies you're not reading about as the MSM frothes and thrashes about in its untrammelled ecstasy of bias and spin:

... according to the media, this week's election results are a mandate for pulling out of Iraq (except in Connecticut where pro-war Joe Lieberman walloped anti-war "Ned the Red" Lamont).

In fact, if the Democrats' pathetic gains in a sixth-year election are a statement about the war in Iraq, Americans must love the war! As Roll Call put it back when Clinton was president: "Simply put, the party controlling the White House nearly always loses House seats in midterm elections" — especially in the sixth year.

In Franklin D. Roosevelt's sixth year in 1938, Democrats lost 71 seats in the House and six in the Senate.

In Dwight Eisenhower's sixth year in 1958, Republicans lost 47 House seats, 13 in the Senate.

In John F. Kennedy/Lyndon Johnson's sixth year, Democrats lost 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate.

In Richard Nixon/Gerald Ford's sixth year in office in 1974, Republicans lost 43 House seats and three Senate seats.

Even America's greatest president, Ronald Reagan, lost five House seats and eight Senate seats in his sixth year in office.

But in the middle of what the media tell us is a massively unpopular war, the Democrats picked up about 30 House seats and five to six Senate seats in a sixth-year election, with lots of seats still too close to call. Only for half-brights with absolutely no concept of yesterday is this a "tsunami" — as MSNBC calls it — rather than the death throes of a dying party.

During eight years of Clinton — the man Democrats tell us was the greatest campaigner ever, a political genius, a heartthrob, Elvis! — Republicans picked up a total of 49 House seats and nine Senate seats in two midterm elections. Also, when Clinton won the presidency in 1992, his party actually lost 10 seats in the House — only the second time in the 20th century that a party won the White House but lost seats in the House.

The dying dead-tree barons of bombastic BS will natter on about the magnitude of the Dem victory. And the cable news pilot fish will follow their Pravda on the Hudson Grey Lady Shark [although MSNBC closed a very bad election-night third to FOX-News and CNN due to Chris Mathews being KO'd by an obnoxious sidekick]. And it gave me personal pleasure last night to see a hot-flash hussie from Salon.com rail about Rush Limbaugh and Drudgereport and how unfair it was that nobody listens to or websites lefty news dumpsters.

Hilariously, the consensus now is that the Dems better behave themselves or, like John Kerry, they might foolishly Freudian-slip their chances in '08 down the toilet, as the French-fop fool from Teddyland did to his own the last week of the campaign.

Rove Amazes By Manipulating Weather

Karl Rove has done it again. KR has nearly drowned the western [liberal] half of Washington State and the Portland Oregon area with massive rainfall. Rove has also knocked out a large percentage of voters [read lazy Dems] in Tennessee by heavy rains in that state. The same may hold true in southern Virginia.

I guess the Dems will have to sue the Justice Dept for unfair manipulation of the elements. Those trial lawyers are just itching to file all sorts lawsuits asking for injunctions, extensions, punitive damages, and other legal concoctions and Rove's intervention with the Almighty---not recognized by Democrats to exist, let alone influence worldly concerns---should be cause for all sorts of litigation.

Kerry "Requires Constant Supervision"

The supercilious phony fop John Kerry has a lot of character defects and lapses of adult intelligence. It is only fair that we go back to the honorable officers and men who served with this three-month war hero and got the true measure of the man---Bob Forehead and Max Headroom with a wealthy wife. Here is a nugget from one of his own shipmates:

"My name is Steve Gardner. I served in 1966 and 1967 on my first tour of duty in Vietnam on Swift boats, and I did my second tour in '68 and '69, involved with John Kerry in the last 2 1/2 months of my tour. The John Kerry that I know is not the John Kerry that everybody else is portraying. I served alongside him and behind him, five feet away from him in a gun tub, and watched as he made indecisive moves with our boat, put our boats in jeopardy, put our crews in jeopardy... if a man like that can't handle that 6-man crew boat, how can you expect him to be our Commander-in-Chief?" — Steven Gardner

And this accurate assessment of the thimblewit narcissist:

"During Lt.(jg) Kerry's tour, he was under my command for two or three specific operations, before his rapid exit. Trust, loyalty and judgment are the key, operative words. His turncoat performance in 1971 in his grubby shirt and his medal-tossing escapade, coupled with his slanderous lines in the recent book portraying us that served, including all POWs and MIAs, as murderous war criminals, I believe, will have a lasting effect on all military veterans and their families.

Kerry would be described as devious, self-absorbing, manipulative, disdain for authority, disruptive, but the most common phrase that you'd hear is 'requires constant supervision.'" — Captain Charles Plumly, USN (retired)

Just good to remind ourselves of just what the alternative to the not-so-hot GWB would have been like.

Thank God for the Democrat Party's Death Wish!

Economist: Repubs Must Learn By Mistakes

The Economist has a short primer why the Repubs have not lived up to the task of maintaining their hold on government.

The Republicans' unpopularity is inextricably linked with that of Mr Bush. Voters who loathe him would obviously prefer a Democratic Congress to curb him. But more significantly, in electoral terms, many of those who voted for him in 2004 now wonder if unified Republican government is such a good thing. If these wavering Republicans either switch sides or stay at home on polling day, the party they once backed will get a thrashing.

There are many reasons why they have become disillusioned by Mr Bush's party, but two stand out. When the Republicans have stuck by their principles, they have done so incompetently. And in too many areas that matter to their natural supporters, such as fiscal prudence, they have not stuck by their principles at all. Add to this toxic cocktail repeated shots of scandal, from Abu Ghraib to Mark Foley, a Republican congressman who exchanged salacious e-mails with adolescent pages online, and the wonder is that their ratings are not even lower.

Iraq is the prime example of a principled policy, poorly executed. It is also the issue that will hurt the Republicans most at the polls, because they have steadily lost the confidence of those who, at first, supported the invasion.

This was a gradual process. Although no stockpiles of chemical weapons were found in Iraq, many Americans knew that Saddam Hussein had used them before, and believed he would have built them up again had sanctions been lifted. To many, replacing an odious tyranny with something resembling a democracy seemed a good enough reason for ousting him.

The last time Americans went to the polls, in 2004, 52% of them still thought that invading Iraq had been the right thing to do. Now only 40% do, and only one in five thinks America is winning the struggle there. Some doubtless assume this is because Iraqis are incapable of democratic self-government, but many blame bungling by their own side.

Better-informed American voters ask why Mr Bush's representatives in Iraq let looters gut Baghdad, why they sacked the civil servants who knew how to operate the electricity grid, and why they disbanded the army. The less well informed have a less detailed—but no less definite—impression of failure. They probably have not heard that the first name proposed for a reconstituted Iraqi army, the New Iraqi Corps, when abbreviated to NIC, means "fuck" in Arabic. But they do know that, three and a half years after apparent boasts of victory, there are still a lot of American troops in Iraq, and the place looks an utter mess on the evening news.

Iraq looks like a mess partly because the Evening News on the ultra-left Broadcast networks in the US and UK seek out every one of the unfortunately many mishaps occurring in Iraq. But it must also be said that the Iraqis have not had a good track record for self-government since Helagu demolished Baghdad in 1258 AD, and now corruption vies with religious and ethnic hatreds for breaking down whatever hopes for a normal life this country has. But the corrosive acids of the ultra-left media neglect what pockets of progress that do occur, and the ulcerous results are eating away the lining of political discourse in the USA. [metaphor alert!]

Although Iraq remains the signature poster-boy for this administration's failures to execute and administer its policies, the Economist article goes on at great length to pillory some of the large sins of omission, misplaced priorities, and general earmark madness the Republican "reformers" ushered in during the 1994 upset have inflicted upon US citizenry. Even the low unemployment rate and rapid economic growth has failed to trickle down to the average Joe, with high-net-worth individuals raking in the big bucks and hard-working illegal immigrants fighting the burger-flipping lower classes for a minimum-wage job.

My own personal view is that, while GWB may be charming and even politically astute, he is by no stretch of imagination an inspirational leader and certainly not well-rounded in either foreign policy or domestic areas that may generate an intangible aura of competence or trustworthiness. His garbled syntax may have a folksy charm, but he rarely expresses a thought that is not simply a cliche or standard right-wing groupthink.

Bush has been blessed by having opponents so incompetent and ridiculous that even a left-wing media can't avoid remarking on Pelosi's SF New Ageism, Dean's maniacal misteps, Gore's crack-brained imbecilities, and Kerry's unctuous self-absorbed inanities. If Bush were running against a fellow with Clinton's charisma and brains, minus his personal foibles, the Dems would have romped in '00 or '04. But Bush is lucky, and that counts for more than being smart---unless your eminences grises are Rumsfeld and Cheney, and then you are in danger of being manipulated into disasters. I believe GWB has to show Rumsfeld the door at the earliest opportunity to maintain any credibility. The serial, chronic, recidivist strategic and tactical bungling this arrogant desk jockey has inflicted on Iraq policy has been murderous. If Bush doesn't fire him, it isn't through GWB's stubbornness, but because of his wrong-headed stupidity.

The article ends by quoting George Will, who believes the Dems must win this election or "they're in the wrong business."

I'm putting this thought-piece, or rather rant, into my draft file until after the election when I'll dust it off and run it up the flagpole. Did I mention the botched Medicare meds legislation that disallows USG negotiating with Big Pharma?

CNN Toilet Bowl Poll

CNN and Newsweak come out with polls far exceeding others in the extent of the margin Dems will win.

Newsbusters note:

just like Newsweek, CNN didn’t reveal the specifics of the polling questions, or the Party affiliations of the respondents. Any guesses why these organizations are choosing to keep this information from their readers?

Probably because the figures are as bogus as the two news-perps putting out this agitprop drivel.

Luckily, the number of viewers this sorry excuse for a network keeps plummeting, all the while they pronounce FOX-News on its deathbed because Fox has dropped from double the CNN viewership to less than double, although both are hemorrhaging as the public tires of tendentious drivel.

Remember when Ted Turner said that CNN would "crush Fox like a bug?" As usual, Ted was excreting that from his most productive orifice, and I don't mean his out-sized under-brained mouth!

Terrorist Survey Unanimous: Dems Must Win

Middle East terrorists have no doubts about the upcoming US election.

They want the Democrats to win.

The only cavil they have is with Nancy Pelosi:

Many Democratic politicians and some from the Republican Party have stated a withdrawal from Iraq would end the insurgency there.

In a recent interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, stated, "The jihadists (are) in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we stay there. They'll stay there as long as we're there."

Pelosi would become House speaker if the Democrats win the majority of seats in next week's elections.

WND read Pelosi's remarks to the terror leaders, who unanimously rejected her contention an American withdrawal would end the insurgency.

Islamic Jihad's Saadi, laughing, stated, "There is no chance that the resistance will stop."

He said an American withdrawal from Iraq would "prove the resistance is the most important tool and that this tool works. The victory of the Iraqi revolution will mark an important step in the history of the region and in the attitude regarding the United States."

Jihad Jaara said an American withdrawal would "mark the beginning of the collapse of this tyrant empire (America)."

"Therefore, a victory in Iraq would be a greater defeat for America than in Vietnam."

Jaara said vacating Iraq would also "reinforce Palestinian resistance organizations, especially from the moral point of view. But we also learn from these (insurgency) movements militarily. We look and learn from them."

Hamas' Abu Abdullah argued a withdrawal from Iraq would "convince those among the Palestinians who still have doubts in the efficiency of the resistance."

"The victory of the resistance in Iraq would prove once more that when the will and the faith are applied victory is not only a slogan. We saw that in Lebanon (during Israel's confrontation against Hezbollah there in July and August); we saw it in Gaza (after Israel withdrew from the territory last summer) and we will see it everywhere there is occupation," Abdullah said.

While the terror leaders each independently urged American citizens to vote for Democratic candidates, not all believed the Democrats would actually carry out a withdrawal from Iraq.

Saadi stated, "Unfortunately I think those who are speaking about a withdrawal will not do so when they are in power and these promises will remain electoral slogans. It is not enough to withdraw from Iraq. They must withdraw from Afghanistan and from every Arab and Muslim land they occupy or have bases."

He called both Democrats and Republicans "agents of the Zionist lobby in the U.S."

Abu Abdullah commented once Democrats are in power "the question is whether such a courageous leadership can [withdraw]. I am afraid that even after the American people will elect those who promise to leave Iraq, the U.S. will not do so. I tell the American people vote for withdrawal. Abandon Israel if you want to save America. Now will this Happen? I do not believe it."

Still Jihad Jaara said the alternative is better than Bush's party.

"Bush is a sick person, an alcoholic person that has no control of what is going on around him. He calls to send more troops but will very soon get to the conviction that the violence and terror that his war machine is using in Iraq will never impose policies and political regimes in the Arab world."

Maybe Howard Dean should see if these guys could help him tap some of Osama's vast funding in return for pulling out of Iraq.

Senator Kennedy and Ex-Prez Jimmy Carter approached the Soviet leadership in 1983 for help in the '84 elections against Ronald Reagan, according to KGB documents.

Why shouldn't the Dems tap into their overseas "Hate America" allies?

Dems Start to Choke

The Dem intelligentsia begins to wring their hands as the polls tighten up. The dervishes on the Lamestream Media twirl and spin and whirl their huckster Dem snake oil cures. All for naught?

In the end, it's the voter who counts and is counted.

Just for laughs, The New Republic has this nugget on the polling:

But, to my mind, the most plausible explanation is that more conservative people tend to stay home on Saturday nights, while more liberal people tend to go out, which would give the poll a slight conservative bias.

Yeah, that's the ticket! But then again, aren't Republicans in bed so early that the phone remains unanswered!

BWAHAHAHAHA!

By the same token, might not "more liberal people" be strung out on drugs and alcohol this Tuesday and forget or neglect to go to the polls?

GOP Close In With "Likely Voters"

The Republicans are blessed with having mature responsible hard-working adults as the majority of their base of support, as opposed to the trendy, fashionable grasshopper/locust Democrats. The Republicans are the sensible types who pay their taxes and stay out of trouble, and do not go to trial lawyers whenever they perceive a real or imagined injury to their mental well-being.

As a result, Republicans turn out to vote in a disciplined fashion, motivated by a sense of responsibiltiy. The Dems are motivated often by perceived injustices or sheer hatred---witness the crazed fever-swamp bloggers and shrill gender-based whack-jobs often shrieking far-out theories of persecution and psychological duress, often feverish projections of their own fermented minds.

So hopefully, the Pew and WaPo polls showing a significant narrowing of the gap show more than just a reaction to the inane imbecility of John Kerry last week---old news to those citizens of Massachusetts who still have to be represented in the Senate by a lecher and a fool.

And, as the Dems begin to choke, they already have fall-back positions of voter fraud and voting-machine chicanery to howl about---can't wait to see Barbara Boxer strut her irate nitwittery just one more time on the Senate floor.

UK Scientist Debunks Global Warming Hoax

The Telegraph has a distinguished scientist named Christopher Monckton who effectively depants and spanks the author of the Stern Report which has the Brits agog with panic, even to the ridiculous extent of hiring ubiquitous oaf Al Gore to lecture on how the global warming trend is ruining the planet. I believe that it's about time that British pundits brush up on Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay, a good look at what they and their American leftist-loony pals are exhibiting in full-blown delirious froth-mouthed hue and cry. The herd of independent minds has rarely been more unanimous and mis-informed.

But Monckton delivers the goods in a straightforward fashion, catching the UN and its Canadian puppet in full delusionary falsification [Canada should pray that its frozen wastes warm up a bit!]:

This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".


The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

Making the Canadian government and the UN look like fools doesn't require a triple-digit IQ, but evidence that there is a deliberate attempt to falsify data harks back to what Richard Feynmann called "cargo cult science."
Feynmann correctly foresaw that the urge for big bucks to underwrite Big Science would bring hucksters like Gore and Stern out of the woodwork to gain political, financial, or Nobel-nitwittery gain.

Feynmann had the integrity that is lacking in much of Big Science nowadays, particularly in various embedded lobbies in the US Government such as NOAA and NASA which have advance the warming hypothesis for their own appropriations agendas. Leftist campuses also pursue Chicken Little agendas to popularize their particular deformed agitpreppie snipe hunts.

Monckton's entire article is available at the top link in pdf. It should make interesting reading for the unconverted.

Thanks to Redstate for the following link: Global Warming: The Chilling Effect on Free Speech.

LAT, WaPo Have Doubts About Saddam's Trial

The factitious MSM ultra-left agitpreppie rags
called the Los Angeles Times [losing circulation at hemorrhaging rates] and the Washington Post are calling into question the verdict that Saddam should hang.

Of course, they employ anonymous "sources" and "legal experts" who wouldn't want their names associated with sympathy for this particular devil.

That's the modus operandi of the drive-by dinosaur media that is slipping into dead-tree obsolescence so quickly that five years from now, we may be saying "remember when the LAT used to publish and deliver door-to-door?

The Orange County Register will surpass the LAT in circulation the way LAT readership is plummeting.

And articles like "Sympathy for Saddam" are one of the reasons why....

I can't wait to see how the NYT and Boston Globe try to sidle over to Saddam's POV on his trial. I'm sure there are US trial lawyers, like the aggressively senile Ramsey Clark, who are at this moment trying to fashion an appeal for the mass murderer.

Wash Post Twin Liars: Balz and Broder

The GOP has narrowed the gap between themselves and Dems from 14% to 6% in the last two weeks. The headline: Dems likely to take House and Senate.

Can you imagine the headline if it were the other way around? DEMS POISED TO TAKE OVER HOUSE AND SENATE, AS THEY NARROW GAP!

The mainstream media in the USA is bigoted, biased and in the tank for the statist Eurotepian-style big-government socialism that the family-hating, military-hating Democrats want to impose on the Republican job-holders and tax-payers.

That about sums it up. The crime-loving, baby-killing, illegal immigrant-enabling trial-lawyer leftists will owe this election victory to the Mainstream Media, if the election goes to the Dems. Another step downward on the decline of the West.

American Men Lose Testoserone, Eurotopians Losing Heritage

This link popped up as I am in the middle of Mark Steyn's "America Alone" which I heartily recommend. Steyn spends a lot of time on demography and how the EU countries in Europe have seen birthrates plunge dramatically in the last two decades. In countries like Spain [1.11] and Italy [1.21] the rates of birth make impossible the number of taxpaying citizens in the coming generations who must be born to pay for these layabouts' elaborate social models, including social security systems that kick in at age 50.

Here is the Newsmax article:

A study finds that men in the United States have lower levels of testosterone than they did just one generation ago.

Average total testosterone levels in men aged 65 to 69 fell from 503 nanograms/decileter (ng/dL) in 1988 to 423 ng/dL in 2003, the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Mass. Reports.

Researchers cannot pinpoint the drop, noting that aging, smoking and obesity can’t fully explain what’s happening.

Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone and plays an important role in maintaining bone and muscle mass. Low testosterone levels have been linked to health problems, including lowered libido and diabetes, reports HealthDay.

Normally, testosterone levels reach their heights while a man is in his 20s, and then they gradually fall, but this study found that overall testosterone levels are lower than they were 20 years ago.

"In 1988, men who were 50 years and older had higher serum testosterone concentrations than did comparable 50-year-old men in 1996. This suggests that some factor other than age may be contributing to the observed declines in testosterone over time," study lead author Thomas G. Travison said.

He and his colleagues analyzed blood samples — along with health and other information — from about 1,500 men in the greater Boston area who took part in the Massachusetts Male Aging Study. That study collected data in 1987-89, 1995-97, and 2002-04.

The findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Okay, the study took place in Massachusetts, where legal gay marriage was factitiously created by judicial fiat and a compliant [half-male] citizenry.

But more important, the most rabid of the man-hating femininazis out there on the non-procreating left speak of "testoserone poisoning" as the primal illness of western civilization, meaning that the primacy of male values leads to warfare, capitalism, and all sorts of social conditions which these sports of nature consider pathological.

However, putting the looking glass backward, perhaps the feminizing of males due to incessant browbeating and being hand-bagged by feminized wusses [like GHWB and Billy Jeff Clinton] and cultural harridans like Gloria Steinem have all combined to create a cultural contact-vibe. The result: degenerate drug-addled boomers' finding yet another way to avoid adulthood and lose their gender-bearings. They are becoming neutered.

In this view, the masculine virtues required by the wartime "Greatest Generation" were passed on to my war baby generation in time for soldiers to fight the Korean and Vietnam wars, which led to the eventual fall of Communism.

But already there were girlie-men infiltrating, most from the baby boomers, but some prophets like the hermaphroditic Jimmy Carter, who promoted multicultural and perspectivist viewpoints that essentially tell the world, like the fiasco State Dept. magazine about metrosexuals, that American males are whipped, cowardly, craven and simpering much like Carter and the complaisant Clinton, who at least acted out the "lust in his heart."

Actually, America's leaders have recently reflected the majority three or four percent of US voters who are women, and many of these don't like strong masculine men, for reasons both social and pathological. The Naomi Wolf-influenced Gorebot and the French-fop Kerry are examples of mimesis of the female mindset of the Democrat Party.

Steyn's reflections on the declining birth rates around the world are sobering. Read the chapter dealing with Japan, where robots are created to fill the void of children who were not born. Or Russia, whose social and medical pathologies are creating a birthrate so low [1.14] that they might as well sell Eastern Siberia to the billion-plus Chinese, before the PRC decides to just step in and take those resource-rich frozen tundras. Or the eternal childhood sought by Eurotopia on its way to becoming Eurabia, because as the EU birthrates fall beneath levels of sustainability, the rates of the Arab and Paki and Turkish immigrants are triple the anemic EU feminized societies in which the Muslim immigrants live and into which they refuse to assimilate.

The overall US rate is 2.11 per couple, and Steyn assures us that the "native" US citizens are procreating at a healthy 1.85 clip [we all know who the "natives" are], so the Christian/Catholic believers among America are keeping the cradles full; while the Eurotopian cathedrals may eventually become mosques like Hagia Sophia in downtown Istanbul. On the journey to Eurabia, where the feminized men will have to adjust to seeing their women wear burkas and walk several steps behind them in public. But, of course, they can always remember that two or three wives are better than one!

Compensations like that may be worth waiting for! And meantime, keep that Vitamin E and goat-testicle syrup handy, as there could be a comeback in the offing. As the renowned philosopher Berra said, "It ain't over til it's over!"

American Men Lose Testoserone, Become Feminized

This link popped up as I am in the middle of Mark Steyn's "America Alone" which I heartily recommend. Steyn spends a lot of time on demography and how the EU countries in Europe have seen birthrates plunge dramatically in the last two decades. In countries like Spain [1.11] and Italy [1.21] the rates of birth make impossible the number of taxpaying citizens in the coming generations who must be born to pay for these layabouts' elaborate social security systems, some of which kick in at age 50.

Here is the Newsmax article:

A study finds that men in the United States have lower levels of testosterone than they did just one generation ago.

Average total testosterone levels in men aged 65 to 69 fell from 503 nanograms/decileter (ng/dL) in 1988 to 423 ng/dL in 2003, the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Mass. Reports.

Researchers cannot pinpoint the drop, noting that aging, smoking and obesity can’t fully explain what’s happening.

Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone and plays an important role in maintaining bone and muscle mass. Low testosterone levels have been linked to health problems, including lowered libido and diabetes, reports HealthDay.

Normally, testosterone levels reach their heights while a man is in his 20s, and then they gradually fall, but this study found that overall testosterone levels are lower than they were 20 years ago.

"In 1988, men who were 50 years and older had higher serum testosterone concentrations than did comparable 50-year-old men in 1996. This suggests that some factor other than age may be contributing to the observed declines in testosterone over time," study lead author Thomas G. Travison said.

He and his colleagues analyzed blood samples — along with health and other information — from about 1,500 men in the greater Boston area who took part in the Massachusetts Male Aging Study. That study collected data in 1987-89, 1995-97, and 2002-04.

The findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

The most rabid of the man-hating femininazis out there on the non-procreating left speak of "testoserone poisoning" as the primal illness of western civilization, meaning the primacy of male values leads to warfare, capitalism, and all sorts of social conditions which these sports of nature consider pathological.

However, putting the looking glass backward, perhaps the feminizing of males due to incessant browbeating and being led by feminized wusses like GHWB and Billy Jeff Clinton have created a cultural contact vibe of the degenerate boomers finding yet another way to drop the ball, metaphorically speaking.

In this view, the masculine virtues required by the wartime "Greatest Generation" were passed on to my war baby generation in time for soldiers to fight the Korean and Vietnam wars, which led to the eventual fall of Communism.

But already there were girlie-men infiltrating, most from the baby boomers, but some prophetic like the hermaphroditic Jimmy Carter, who promoted multicultural and perspectivist viewpoints that essentially tell the world, like the fiasco State Dept. magazine about metrosexuals, that American males are whipped, cowardly, craven and simpering much like Carter and the complaisant Clinton, who at least acted out the "lust in his heart."

Actually, America's leaders have recently reflected the majority three or four percent of US voters who are women, and many of these don't like strong masculine men, for reasons both social and pathological. The Naomi Wolf Gorebot and the French fop Kerry are examples of mimesis of the female mindset of the Democrat Party.

Steyn's reflections on the declining birth rates around the world are sobering. Read the chapter dealing with Japan, and the robots created to fill the void of children who were not born. Or Russia, whose social and medical pathologies are creating a birthrate so low that they might as well sell Eastern Siberia to the billion-plus Chinese, before the PRC decides to just step in and take those resource-rich frozen tundras. Or the eternal childhood sought by Eurotopia on its way to becoming Eurabia, because as the EU birthrates fall beneath levels of sustainability, the rates of the Arab and Paki and Turkish immigrants are triple the anemic EU feminized societies in which the Muslim immigrants live and into which they refuse to assimilate.

The overall US rate is 2.11 per couple, and Steyn assures us that the "native" US citizens are procreating at a healthy 1.85 clip [we all know who the "natives" are], so the Christian/Catholic believers among America are keeping the cradles full; while the Eurotopian cathedrals may eventually become mosques like Hagia Sophia in downtown Istanbul. On the journey to Eurabia, where the feminized men will have to adjust to seeing their women wear burkas and walk several steps behind them in public. But, of course, they can always remember that two or three are better than one.

Compensations that may be worth waiting for! And meantime, keep that Vitamin E and goat-testicle syrup handy, as there could be a comeback in the offing. Nothing is over til it's over!

NYT Uncharacteristically Worries About US National Security

James Taranto does the perfect frisk of the monotonously irresponsible NYT today:
"The New York Times reports that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had a nuclear weapons program after all:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to "leverage the Internet" to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. . . .

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein's scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

Our argument for liberating Iraq did not rest heavily on the question of weapons of mass destruction, but if yours did, you can now claim vindication. (Let's hope you didn't change your mind!)

What's even more astounding about this is that the Times is encouraging the removal from public view of material that might threaten American national security. How uncharacteristically responsible. Usually the paper itself publishes such material, heedless of the consequences. Is someone at the Times on vacation or something?

Dems Howl As ACORN Fraud Spurs Repub Poll Challenges

The Washington Post
has an article on how Repub instructions on how to challenge suspicious looking voters in Maryland are an attempt at "vote suppression."

Nationwide, the national Democrat effort to register voters is facing court challenges in a dozen states, as the Democrat fraud machine gets into high gear.

I know, I used to hand out five-dollar bills at polling places in St. Louis, run by and for the Democratic Party Machine, which is coincidentally being hauled into court on the ACORN mega-scam.

The Dems used to be the Party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion. Now it is the Party of Drugs, Atheism and Perversion/Corruption.

NYT Documents Show Osama and Saddam in Touch

The New York Times has become so dumbed-down that the venerable tabloid of fools tries an October/November surprise that backfires stupendously.

Gateway Pundit has a whole cartload of documents from the hoard which the NYT has selectively plucked a few anti-Bush leaflets, and demonstrated that the whole MSM agitprop campaign about Saddam having nothing to do with Al Qaeda is a raft of lies.

Indeed, things are going badly in Iraq, but the overall MSM take on Iraq is also a tendentious factitious pile of balderdash---one-sided and dishonest to its core.

The appeaser Dems are about ready to hijack the USS Free World and turn it into a multi-culti globalist welcome-wagon for terrorists.

Maybe there's still time for turning the big ship around, but I doubt it.

Soda-Plot Planes Were To Explode Over US Cities

While the mindless MSM howls at the moon over Global Warming and Iraqi nuke memos, it is strangely silent about the fact that the foiled "soft drink plot" a couple of months ago is being unravelled despite the efforts of the Mainstream Media to 1] deny a terrorist threat exists 2] blame Bush for preventing terrorist attacks [since they don't exist] and 3] claim that the Iraq War made the terrorists do what point #1 denies they are attempting to do!

Surely the Pulitzer Committee is going to give Kate Zernike a prize for spinning the Kerry "botched" attack on American troops into something else.

But will they have another category for ignoring a "botched" attack on US cities that might have killed tens of thousands of people?

NYT Lies About Kerry, "Joke" and buries lede in 18th Para

The gullible collection of fools living on either side of Central Park, especially the West Side, sticks its collective muzzle in the trough of agitprop called the NYT. Patterico fisks, frisks and defenestrates the clumsy cover-up attempted by one of the Grey tabloid's lackluster B-List doucherinas. As Patterico pontificates:

on balance, ...it probably was a botched joke. But John McCain disagrees. Tony Snow disagrees. A lot of our troops disagree.

But the journalist-wannabe at NYT isn't ready for prime time, probably never will be, and John Kerry has scotched his chances for 2008.

It couldn't have happened to a more sonorous, sententious, dishonest, insincere, phony shell-of-a-man, so that is the good news that the '06 elections have already brought us.

The New York Post just raced past the Daily News and now the downwardly-spiraling NYT will soon be ready to become the NYT numero due news-rag of choice, unless you count the national WSJ as an NYC paper. Then the second-rate NYT is already in second place.

WSJ Depants and Spanks Kerry, Who is Praised by Kossacks

The WSJ is not a fan of John Kerry. Here is the latest spanking that James Taranto administers to the low-IQ, high self-esteem Junior Senator from Taxachusetts.

"Pardon our morbid fascination with this story, but in a way it makes us feel vindicated. We first noted that something wasn't quite right with John Kerry way back in December 2002, but even we didn't realize how not quite right he was until this week. At a news conference yesterday, Kerry offered the latest "explanation" for his statement suggesting that the troops in Iraq are stupid and uneducated:

My statement [Monday]--and the White House knows this full well--was a botched joke about the president and the president's people, not about the troops. The White House's attempt to distort my true statement is a remarkable testament to their abject failure in making America safe.

Well, here is what Kerry actually said:

You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.

"The White House's attempt to distort my true statement" consists in taking what Kerry actually said at face value.

Even if the statement was a "botched joke," what on earth would possess Kerry to think that this excuses what he said? George Allen and Trent Lott didn't get passes for "botched jokes"; indeed, here is what Kerry himself said about Lott, according to Salon:

Sen. John Kerry, a [haughty, French-looking] Massachusetts Democrat [who by the way served in Vietnam] and 2004 presidential contender, became the first member of the Senate to suggest Lott was now unfit to lead the upper chamber.

"It saddens me greatly to suggest this, but in the interests of the Senate, his party, and the nation, I believe Trent Lott should step aside as majority leader," Kerry said. "I simply do not believe the country can today afford to have someone who has made these statements again and again be the leader of the United States Senate."

And let's not forget Kerry's outrage at President Bush's successful joke about missing weapons of mass destruction back in March 2004.

Anyway, what joke did Kerry intend to make? A Kerry aide tells CNN:

Kerry was supposed to say, "I can't overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."

Ain't that a riot? Go ahead, wipe the coffee off your keyboard. We'll wait.

If we believe the Kerry aide's claim, Kerry apparently meant to disparage the president's intelligence and studiousness, to suggest that somehow the liberation of Iraq is the product of Bush's lack of education. But this makes no sense. Bush has both bachelor's and master's degrees from Ivy League universities. How can that be if he is both stupid and lazy?

In any case, Kerry's refusal to apologize for what he actually said is quite astonishing. (The closest he's come, according to Reuters: "Of course, I'm sorry about a botched joke.") As blogger Edward Morrissey notes:

He's left with the argument that he misquoted himself while trying to show off his supposed intellectual superiority over George Bush, and that it's all Bush's fault despite being Kerry's intellectual inferior. Really, no one could have scripted a more hilarious scenario, and the longer Kerry continues this line of defense/offense, the more ridiculous a figure he becomes.

It must also be said that there's good reason to question the "botched joke" explanation. It's certainly plausible that Kerry would misspeak, as he's done many times before. But when erstwhile Kerry aide Rand Beers tells Time that "no one who has ever been in combat would intentionally impugn our brave troops," he is speaking a falsehood, and Exhibit A is John Kerry, 1971:

They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Anyway, how is that Kerry is so un-self-aware that he portrays himself as the indignant victim for a problem of his own making? In this attitude he has a lot of enablers, in both the mainstream media and the Angry Left. Here's how the Washington Post reported the story today:

President Bush last night accused Sen. John F. Kerry of disparaging U.S. troops in Iraq, echoing the 2004 strategy of ridiculing the Massachusetts senator to raise anew questions about Democratic leaders and their commitment to the troops. The highly coordinated White House effort came as Republicans sought to shift the focus away from an unpopular war and GOP scandals that are putting their congressional majorities at risk.

So Republicans "sought to shift the focus away from an unpopular war" by calling attention to Kerry's comments on that same war? Whatever, dude. Here's the New York Times:

For at least a few hours on Tuesday, President Bush had a chance to relive his victorious campaign of 2004, taking a break from a bleak Republican campaign season as he attacked Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts over the war in Iraq.

Mr. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who was Mr. Bush's opponent in 2004, is not running for any office this year. But the president seized on what he said were Mr. Kerry's disparaging remarks about the troops at a rally in California--and what Mr. Kerry insisted was little more than a botched joke--as he sought to make Mr. Kerry the face of the Democratic Party this fall.

The New York Sun quotes the boy wonder of the Angry Left:

The angry counterattack from Mr. Kerry, who was the Democratic nominee in 2004 and is considering another presidential run in 2008, seemed likely to endear him to the liberal bloggers who could be influential in selecting the next Democratic nominee.

"Kerry responded perfectly," a leading Democratic blogger, Markos Moulitsas, wrote yesterday.

When we disparage the Angry Left, we invariably get a few emails from people saying that the Angry Left has every reason to be angry, because the Bush administration has been so evil, incompetent or both. For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that that's true. The Angry Left is still guilty of unseriousness. A serious political opposition would respond to an administration's misrule by advancing arguments and alternatives, not by indulging in incoherent rage.

Serial Big-Mouth

Hugh Hewitt has
Mark Halperin admitting leftist media bias by the journalist herd of independent minds.

Last nite, Paula Zahn was told by a CNN Halloween creature named Suzanne Malveaux that "we think and we hope that this will all blow over soon," talking about Lurch Kerry's imbecilic remarks on the military. Zahn is smarter than the CNN cretinette Suzanne and opines that Paula doesn't think it will blow over that fast.

Suzanne is like the rest of her CNN colleagues, in the tank for the Democrats, and just now [1430 ET]the autistic blonde on CNN just gave Lurch Kerry's latest explanation of his dodo remarks sympathetic follow-up. But we have to get Wolfman and his Schneider/Greenfield cheering section to give us the "deep" perspective on why this is going to "blow over" so the MSM can get back to the job of trashing Repubs and touting Dem nostrums [Oh wait, the Dems haven't got any nostrum policies and are just counting on bashing Bush to win].

The lil Irish elf Russert was on Matt Lauer's Bush-bash Today Show and said that at the most, the Dems have "lost a couple of news cycles" before they can get back to their MSM Drive-By media Dead-Tree and Broadcast attacks on the Repubs. Suddenly, I think that Timmy boy has lost his cerebral cortex functions.

Lost-cause Chris Mathews spent much of his Hardline hour trying to resuscitate the Bush-bash life-form, just in time for Trick or Treat! But then Lurch Kerry lurched back on the air with another attack on the "Republican Hate Machine" and proved himself to the Repubs to be the gift that keeps on giving.