I Escaped from Gaza and Hamas "Escapes" to Egypt!

The Breakout of the Gaza Strip reminds me that it was almost 10 years ago that I was short-listed to run UNRWWA in the Gaza Strip---a thankless task my health couldn't put up with.

At that time, there was a glimmer of hope, though the Oslo Accords had not panned out, the Barak government in Israel and the Clinton Administration appeared serious about some sort of long-term reconciliation, if Arafat could be brought on board. Of course, that little terrorist lost any chance of some sort of compromise by walking away from Camp David and starting the Second Intifada, so I was finally happy that I'd never received the appointment.

Condi Rice made the cardinal mistake of including parties in an election who were not willing to look for peace with Israel. She naively believed that Hamas had no chance of electoral success, not realizing just how balkanized the Palestinian political system had become.

Now a full-fledged terrorist movement controls the Gaza Strip and there is no short-term solution. The EU and UN bleed openly for the terrorists, but no one gives them much clout in the Road Map.

So as long as the rockets fly out of Gaza and the Egyptians keep the roaches in their motel [the Hamas leadership, not the sad victims of their leadership, who nevertheless voted for a terrorist government] until some new step is devised to get everyone off the dime.

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

David Brooks voiced some of my own thoughts. I am still a Fred-head, but am now thinking of voting for McCain or Romney in the FL primary, simply because McCain could WIN against Hillary/Obama. As Brooks notes, he's everybody's second choice[except the die-hard dead-enders like Rush & the NRO Corner crowd]. I usually ride with their posse, but nowadays, I'm thinking of what monstrosity Hillary would appoint to the SCOTUS. Perhaps another ACLU leftist like Ginsberg? Or her girl friend Jamie Gorelick, who single-handedly gave Al Qaeda a free pass to destroy the WTC?

...a funny thing has happened this primary season. Conservative voters have not followed their conservative leaders. Conservative voters are much more diverse than the image you’d get from conservative officialdom.....The lesson is not that the conservative establishment is headed for the ash heap. The lesson is that the Republican Party, even in its shrunken state, is diverse. Regular Republican voters don’t seem to mind independent thinking. There’s room for moderates as well as orthodox conservatives. Limbaugh, Grover Norquist and James Dobson have influence, but they are not arbiters of conservative doctrine.

Brooks then quotes McCain's impressive victory speech in S.C.:

McCain defined a more inclusive conservatism: “We want government to do its job, not your job; to do it better and to do it with less of your money; to defend our nation’s security wisely and effectively, because the cost of our defense is so dear to us; to respect our values because they are the true source of our strength; to enforce the rule of law that is the first defense of freedom; to keep the promises it makes to us and not make promises it will not keep.”

Purists will cavil that McCain's record on Amnesty and campaign contributions sully his record as even a Republican, let alone a conservative.

But I keep thinking about Hillary's SCOTUS appointments and remember the French maxim "le meilleur est l'ennemi du bien."

The Permanent Fifth Column

John McCain is ascending again in the national presidential polls around 40 years after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

There are two narratives about Tet, which began on the night of Jan. 30, 1968. In the liberal version, the sheer scale of the North's offensive exposed America's politicians and generals as dupes or liars when they claimed that progress in the war was being made and that victory was within reach. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," said CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite in his broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968, adding that "we are mired in a stalemate" that could only be ended by negotiation, not victory. The comments reportedly prompted Lyndon Johnson to remark that "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

But that was the psychological war.

Conservatives tell a different story. While the U.S. might have been caught off guard by the offensive, the result was nonetheless a rout for the North, which lost every significant tactical engagement and suffered tens of thousands of casualties. Contrary to Johnson's grim political assessment, public support for the war effort actually rose in the wake of Tet: A Gallup poll showed that the percentage of Americans who considered themselves "hawks" on the war went to 61% from 56% following the offensive, while the number of self-declared "doves" dropped to 23% from 27%.

The Tet Offensive in reality gave the illuminati who man the elite forecastle of the ship of state their opportunity to seize the wheel and steer the country in the direction of defeat and subsequent revolution that many of them advocated in their heart of hearts.

In fact, what Johnson had lost was the support of the media elite, who (conservatives say) used their privileged positions to skew perceptions of what was actually happening in the war. "In all honesty, we didn't achieve our main objective [in the offensive]," admitted North Vietnamese general Tran Do, who in later life became a pro-democracy dissident. "As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention -- but it turned out to be a fortunate result."

It is this second narrative that largely explains why Mr. McCain is succeeding among Republicans in 2008 in a way he did not eight years ago. Last time, he ran and lost as an anti-establishment, "moderate" Republican. This time, although he continues to depend heavily on the votes of independents, his fundamental appeal is to American honor, which is also the trait he uniquely embodies among the GOP contenders. He seeks to turn his personal code of honor -- the "No Surrender" slogan -- into a national code. He rails against a news media that only begrudgingly recognizes American military gains, repeatedly citing as Exhibit A Time magazine's refusal to name Gen. David Petraeus as its Person of the Year for 2007. Above all, he not only warns against the policy consequences of a failure in Iraq, but also stands against a philosophy, or psychology, that seeks to make a virtue of failure.

Indeed, the elites wished to turn the American tradition of victory into defeat, optimism into pessimism, and in the transition seize more control of the country. This was not done consciously or by some sort of plot, but as a reflex following the ascendancy of the mainstream media in the new age of TV.

This is another Vietnam legacy. Beyond the purely pragmatic argument that the war in Southeast Asia was unwinnable, there was also a sense among opponents of the war that defeat would, in some deep way, be balm for America's soul. "For all the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted?" asked antiwar writer James Carroll in 2006, explicitly making the connection between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. On the subject of honor, Mr. Carroll added that "the goal of 'peace with honor' assumes the nation's honor has not already been squandered."

Mr. Carroll penned those lines when American fortunes in Iraq were approaching their nadir. Since then, the military balance has shifted dramatically in America's favor, just as it did following Tet with the appointment of a new commander (Creighton Abrams) and the implementation of a new strategy (focused on providing security at the local level). In Vietnam neither of those changes proved sufficient for victory, partly because the moral and strategic case for involvement had become so muddled, partly because the consequences of withdrawal were dimly perceived, and partly because the constellation of political circumstances -- Watergate above all -- conspired against sustaining the gains that had been achieved.

Carroll is a defrocked priest whose hatred for the Catholic Church is only matched by his hatred for his own colonel father and of course, his surrogate father of the USA. This man is a traitor, pure and simple, and his preposterous gibberish about "moral redemption typifies the mush-minded twaddle emitted from the left.

Yet there is no cosmic rule that says that all that will again come to pass with Iraq, and the essence of Mr. McCain's message is that it must not. His case is easier to make because this time Americans do have the benefit of hindsight about the consequences of defeat, and they are not the redemptive ones imagined by Mr. Carroll. Among them: the mass murder of the people who stood with us; the enslavement of entire nations by fanatical and confident ideologues; the blow to U.S. interests and the stain on American prestige.

These are some of the practical and ethical arguments for seeing the Iraq war through to a decent conclusion. But honor is a different, deeper matter. For the Democratic candidates in this race, it has only a conditional and tenuous relation to the word "victory" in its usual sense. If it means anything at all to them, it seems to be mainly in the sense of the good opinion of America's traditional friends, many of whom opposed the Iraq venture from the start. This kind of honor, also known as ingratiation, is gained by improving America's poll numbers in global opinion surveys.

Honor is not a word in the vocabulary of the poll-chasers on the left, so eager to be liked and elected rather than to be respected. They are shallow and in the case of the Clintons, actually criminal, in their pursuit of the bitch-goddess: failure.

There is another kind of honor, however, which is uniquely bestowed by one's adversaries and enemies. It is the honor one acquires by defying temptations of popularity, by the acceptance of long odds, by suffering, by what is called the nobility of the last-ditch defense. It is the honor many Americans feel they lost in Vietnam, and which, through Mr. McCain's not-so-improbable resurgence, they now seek to regain and make their own.

McCain understands that kind of honor, a concept utterly beyond Dem candidates jockeying for who gets to sell out the US in the international arena.

Corrupt Cretins Rule US Campuses

Marxist supremacy on East Coast campuses is no surprise. Here's a yawner from the Daily Princetonian:

Princeton employees' overwhelmingly high support for Democratic candidates — 90 percent of donors who listed the University as their employer gave to a Democrat, and no professors donated to the GOP — outpaces its peers. The Harvard Crimson reported that 86 percent of Harvard professors' contributions went to Democrats, while according to Georgetown's student newspaper, The Hoya, 75 percent of the donations made by the school's employees went to Democratic candidates.

The Mainstream Media mirror the stupidity of tenured morons, though the percentage of Dumbo-rats in Hollyweird is probably higher.

Stuck on Stupid, just like Mafia bloodsuckers looking for a handout.

Bhutto Killer Identified

Bhutoo's killer hails from Waziristan, which implicates Al Qaeda & its allies in the murder---though loon sites like Newshoggers get it wrong again.

Lawrence of Arabia spent some time at a Brit airbase in Waziristan as "Airman Shaw," his new moniker after he left the corrupt corridors of power. The only totally stupid statement Obama has made so far [though there have been some near-misses] has been concerning a US invasion of Waziristan, which would make Iraq look like a Sunday School picnic!

I'm under the weather with a monster cold/cough/virus & still mourning Brett Favre's ignominious overtime interception.

Go Pats!

More Evidence Edwards is a Complete Fraud---From Feingold

Russ Feingold has a problem. He sees John Edwards, hedge fund gazillionaire on sub-prime mortgage evictions of Katrina victims & putative daddy of Rielle Hunter's gestating fetal-unit, as campaigning exactly opposite from positions John-boy voted on in the Senate:

The one that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.

When you had the opportunity to vote a certain way in the Senate and you didn't, and obviously there are times when you make a mistake, the notion that you sort of vote one way when you're playing the game in Washington and another way when you're running for president, there's some of that going on.

Wonder what "that" means...? I'm guessing ugly political corruption based on hypocritical phony BS, but I could be wrong.

Bubba Clinton Bubbles Over More Often

The New York Times has now legitimized one of those dirty little secrets the reporters who are not certified Clinton Inc. satellites have been itching to write about.

After weeks of complaining publicly about Barack Obama’s record, the news media’s coverage of the Democratic presidential race, or both, Mr. Clinton on Wednesday ripped into a television reporter who had asked him about a Nevada lawsuit concerning participation in the state’s caucuses this Saturday. Mr. Clinton believed the question had seemed sympathetic to Mr. Obama’s stakes in the suit, Clinton campaign officials said.

Seen in the light of a Clinton Inc. reporter's public accusation of Mitt Romney in S.C., the tepid and tentative question elicited a volcanic response, allowing a glimpse into the mental instability chronic liar Bubba has faced all his lifetime. As the ACOA and chronic sex addict that he is, despite Clinton Inc. outliers like David Gergen and George Stephanopoulos to the contrary, the press are beginning to look like they'd like to goad him into headline-making fury.

His so-called “purple fits” and “earthquakes” have been a constant to those who have worked with him. Some have dealt with it by avoiding him, others by simply responding with silence. One senior White House aide, George Stephanopoulos, who was often a target of Mr. Clinton’s fury, has written of taking an antidepressant because the vicissitudes of the job were so intense.

Mr. Clinton has reflected on his temper over the years, perhaps most revealingly in his autobiography. At one point in it, he recalls a day in junior high school when he hit a boy who had been taunting him. It was a moment from which he came to draw lessons.

“I was a little disturbed by my anger, the currents of which would prove deeper and stronger in the years ahead,” Mr. Clinton wrote. “Because of the way Daddy behaved when he was angry and drunk, I associated anger with being out of control and I was determined not to lose control. Doing so could unleash the deeper, constant anger I kept locked away because I didn’t know where it came from.”

Despite his brilliance and achievement-filled life, Bubba knows that he doesn't know who his real daddy is---his promiscuous mother played around while her husband was still in Italy during WWII. David Maraniss, the author of First in His Class almost had a career-ending blackball for bringing up the sensitive subject of Bubba's bastardy. And Maraniss's wide-ranging brilliant biographical work earned him a PTS ["potential trouble source" in Scientology jargon] marker that he has spent years in the penalty box writing on sports and other relative trivia.

The Clinton Inc. "Politics of Personal Destruction" extends to journalists. Hence, hacks like the AP Johnson suck-up in South Carolina earn brownie-point gold stars for calling Hillary's reaction to a campaign office HQ in NH "spectacular," while earning additional merit badges for attacking Republican Romney in public for alleged mistruths.

America has been infected with Clinton Inc. machinery that matches Scientology in its take-no-prisoners approach---a vast center-left conspiracy that makes any close examination of the Clintons' past felonies and misdemeanors culpable and subject to early punishment if the dynamic duo returns to the White House.

Ask David Maraniss about his latest book on the Green Bay Packers. He ain't gonna get another big buck-advance for political books this lifetime.

Moral Vanity of Liberals

Arthur C. Brooks has an hilarious anecdote about the unreflective bigotry and even unreasoning hatred one encounters talking to people of the "left:"

A politically progressive friend of mine always seemed to root against baseball teams from the South. The Braves, the Rangers, the Astros -- he hated them all. I asked him why, to which he replied, "Southerners are prejudiced."

Brooks goes on to outline the emblematic irrationality that so-called "liberals" often reflexively demonstrate as they unconsciously display their own uninformed "views:"

The same logic is evident in the complaint the American political left has with conservative voters. According to the political analysis of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose perception of irony apparently does not extend to his own words, "The right wing, that is not where America's at . . . It's just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate . . . They are hate-triots."

Liberals, of course, have a fair different assessment of their own perspectives:

What about liberals? According to University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, "Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others." They also "believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference." Indeed, generations of academic scholars have assumed that the "natural personality" of political conservatives is characterized by hostile intolerance towards those with opposing viewpoints and lifestyles, while political liberals inherently embrace diversity.

It is simply amazing how liberals ape and mirror the unconscious self-righteousness I encountered while living overseas in France during the Gaullist era and in Saudi Arabia while talking to "devout" Muslims----the unreflective chauvinism in France and disdain for real diversity in Saudi were everywhere, and the victims simply projected their own insecurity about their particular fanaticism towards those who didn't believe or belong to the group of patriots/Muslims. Brooks adumbrates a bit about liberals in the USA and their attitude toward the "other" and "difference" as the French philosophers so much in vogue among them would put it:

As we are dragged through another election season, it is worth critically reviewing these stereotypes. Do the data support the claim that conservatives are haters, while liberals are tolerant of others? A handy way to answer this question is with what political analysts call "feeling thermometers," in which people are asked on a survey to rate others on a scale of 0-100. A zero is complete hatred, while 100 means adoration. In general, when presented with people or groups about which they have neutral feelings, respondents give temperatures of about 70. Forty is a cold temperature, and 20 is absolutely freezing.

In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.

My alma mater Michigan's statistical prowess is probably the best in the US. Just what, however, is the reason for the left's apparent intolerance, all while the liberal imagination believes itself to be above petty partisan bickering:

Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.

To put this into perspective, note that even Saddam Hussein (when he was still among the living) got an average score of eight from Americans. The data tell us that, for six in ten on the hard left in America today, literally nobody in the entire world can be worse than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

This doesn't sound very tolerant to me -- nor especially rational, for that matter. To be fair, though, let's roll back to a time when the far right was accused of temporary insanity: the late Clinton years, when right-wing pundits practically proclaimed the end of Western civilization each night on cable television because President Clinton had been exposed as a perjurious adulterer.

I can remember back then that the media were in full hue and cry about how irrational the right was to claim that a felony committed by a sitting president was fit reason for impeachment. Didn't one have the sophistication to realize that sex crimes weren't covered by the U.S. Constitution when Articles of Impeachment were considered? How narrow an interpretation of the law did conservatives have, that exposure to consistent perjury for political benefit could be considered as moral turpitude and unfitness for high office? How pre-modern, or at best, merely modern!

In 1998, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.

Which brings us to the conundrum of current American politics, that the most partisan unreflective hatemongers in American politics reside on the left, where bigotry is second-nature:

Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.

The spirit of the Salem Witch Trials and "McCarthyism" and "smear politics" and "the politics of personal destruction" are the serene empty-headed possession of the ultra-left, whose obscenities and screechings are the daily bread of blog sites like Kos & C&L & vapid moronic screeds on foreign policy who shall remain unnamed.

In the end, we have to face the fact that political intolerance in America -- ugly and unfortunate on either side of the political aisle -- is to be found more on the left than it is on the right. This may not square with the moral vanity of progressive political stereotypes, but it's true.

This has been noted so often by so-called "centrist" blogs, Ann Althouse comes to mind, that it is accepted as part of the on-line community---the fact that any thoughtful commentary not containing the latest liberal buzz mantras of the last 24 hours is automatically dismissed with snarky dismissive disdainful put-downs by youngsters with a good education. The hoi-polloi are the riff-raff Kossack crowd are the street mobs of the left.

Their venomous hatred of any but their own kind will eventually poison their hearts and probably ruin their mental health---if it hasn't already.

A Couple of Observations on Hillary

John Cole and Andrew Sullivan had a few comments on the Nevada debate Tuesday evening that moved me a bit to express my own comments:

I am fascinated by her because she has become the loathesome Doppleganger of her odious spouse. She herself is slowly morphing into a Manichaen daemon of pure evil, a sort of Darth Mutter [or Mudder?] of the dark side of the Force.

Hillary and her husband have turned the bald-faced public spectacular lie into an art form. She hasn’t a scintilla of shame or an ounce of compunction when she concocts or repeats whatever might advance her interests or destroy her opponents, regardless of the truth or accuracy of what she’s saying.

Pandering is where she excels the most in the fine gradations of saying what will get her votes. She probably picked up this particular skill-set on promising to do what she perceives the particular interest group or ethnic/gender/sex-orientation subset she is wooing from her husband/spouse/collaborator-in-chief. He never hesitates to change the record or lie openly about his own record & achievements & felony/misdemeanors. It’s what he does.

And going to the videotape or soundtrack doesn’t make him miss a beat, as he will explain how his mental reservations or jesuitical special exemptions from law & morality [he learned well from the Jesuits at Georgetown during his undergrad years] make him immune from the normal constraints that limit politicians or public figures.

He is the world’s best and biggest liar and she seems an avid student who may well surpass him someday if she is elected POTUS.

Her high negatives among those polled are probably because I may reflect the feelings of a large plurality of American voters. If the Democrats nominate her for the '08 campaign on the top of their ticket, I have a hunch she might drag the ticket into the losing column.

Just a hunch.

Identity Traps Mire HRC & Obama

David Brooks has an unusually perceptive piece in today's NYT Op-Ed demonstrating the uncharted waters both candidates are treading:

The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

In the immortal words of Pogo, we have met the enemy and they are us.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Isn't it interesting that the collision between two of the 'Revolution of 1968' mantra movements are now nearing head-on kill-or-be-killed momentum?

Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals.

But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender. It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”

Brooks is having none of it. Clinton has turned BS into a high art-form:

What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities. The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a racial outrage in an effort to make all criticism morally off-limits. Obama’s campaign drew up a memo delineating all of the Clintons’ supposed racial outrages. Bill Clinton is frantically touring black radio stations to repair any wounds.

Meanwhile, Clinton friend Robert Johnson, a one-man gaffe machine, reminds us of Obama’s drug use and accuses him of being like Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Another Clinton supporter, Gloria Steinem, notes that black men were given the vote a half-century before women.

When living fossils like loathesome childless crone Steinem & the imbecilic Johnson & the robo-Barry White sex-machine Rangel get behind Hillary, you know she is too OLD & her time is TOO FAR BEHIND to really register with the up-and-coming youth who want hope and change rather than policy-wonk partisanship. Brooks has a great finale:

This is the logical extreme of the identity politics that as been floating around this country for decades. Every revolution devours its offspring, and it seems the multicultural one does, too.

The final two points I’d make are: First, this whole show seems stale and deranged to the younger set, as Obama and Clinton seemed to recognize when they damped down the feud yesterday afternoon. The interesting split is not between the feminist and civil rights Old Bulls, it’s between the establishments of both movements, who emphasize top-down change, and the younger dissenters, who don’t. Second, this dispute is going to be settled by the rising, and so far ignored, minority group. For all the current fighting, it’ll be Latinos who end up determining who gets the nomination.

At last, a bridge to the 21st century.

The winner of this civil war might be Bill Richardson for VP?

Clinton's Continued Surrogate Attacks Spur Dormant White Rascism Against Obama?

Eugene Robinson doesn't make a lot of sense most of the time, but I think he nailed it this time:

the strategy could be more subtle. I can't help but recall a certain piece of history.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president, a controversial hip-hop artist named Sister Souljah made an ugly comment about the Los Angeles riots: "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" Candidate Clinton highlighted the remark in a speech to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, comparing Souljah to Ku Klux Klan member David Duke. The episode demonstrated that Clinton was not only tough on lawlessness but also willing to challenge "special interests" -- in this case, black activists.

The Clintons are reading the polls, too; they might well be resigned to the possibility that most black Democrats will vote for Obama. This would mean that South Carolina is probably already lost and that the campaign's focus now has to be on Florida and the many states whose delegates are up for grabs on "Tsunami Tuesday."

Is it possible that accusing Obama and his campaign of playing the race card might create doubt in the minds of the moderate, independent white voters who now seem so enamored of the young, black senator? Might that be the idea?

Yes, that's a cynical view. But history is history.

My bet is that Hillary is going after the cracker redneck yellow dog Democrats in Florida up in the panhandle---she knows S.C. is overcooked and her "Sister Souldjah" moment is at hand.

The Clintons will do ANYTHING to get back to the White House! ANYTHING!

Economic Freedom: US Slips to Fifth

The Heritage Foundation finds that Europe and Asia are making radical progress as they switch to more open economies and adopt straightforward lower taxes.

Looks like "supply side" is working, despite socialist dogma that the state is paramount in directing economic policies. Here's the good news:

Hong Kong and Singapore retained their No. 1 and No. 2 rankings respectively on the annual Index of Economic Freedom for the 14th successive year. Both port cities benefit from low taxes and liberalized trade. Hong Kong, however, saw its score dip slightly due to higher inflation and greater tax revenues.

European countries accounted for half of the top 20 economies considered free or mostly free, with Ireland at No. 3, Switzerland at No. 9 and Britain at No. 10. The U.S. ranked No. 5, and Canada ranked 6th.

Moves by newer members of the European Union to introduce straightforward tax policies to attract more investment were having a radical impact on the region as a whole, the authors said.

"What we are seeing is a very strong commitment to economic freedom in the new EU countries, and this is having a positive impact on policies in the some of the older European countries ... such as France," said Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. "I think we will continue to see this evolve over time and we expect to see gradual improvement in economic freedom throughout Europe as a whole."

And of course, the bad news:

While Europe was moving more greater economic liberalization, the prevailing sentiment in the United States was protectionism, said Mary Kissel, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal's Asian edition.

"We have Democratic candidates coming out against free trade agreement and for higher taxes," she told reporters. "On the Republican side too, there's talk of protecting American jobs. Meanwhile, you have a Congress which is considering a clutch of bills aimed at punishing China for exporting too much to American consumers."

Sadly, the retarded economists in every country have a lot of clout with politicians. Yet the truth appears to be that in the long run, liberalization works:

The index, which grades 157 economies on 10 economic factors, including property rights, regulation of wages and prices and trade barriers, shows "a very high correlation" between a liberalized economy and a country's prosperity, Feulner said.

Unfortunately, in the short run, ignorant or cynical political types can sway votes away from the greatest good for the greatest number.

Saudis Do USA a Back-handed Favor

Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi has pronounced Saudi oil production as keyed to revenue requirements. Although this is somewhat risible, he is actually doing the US a favor.

When GWB was elected in 2000 after famously pronouncing that the price of oil would not go much above $20/bbl. because he could "jawbone" OPEC into keeping up production, he was not yet known as being a completely feckless second-rater. However, the current price of about @100/barrel means that the US:

1] Should develop onshore fields like ANWR whose 15 billion proven recoverable bbls might come in even higher with new production technology.

2] Develop offshore fields whose gigantic reserves under salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico can be exploited with new technologies at a huge profit.

3] Look into new coal technologies such as coalbed methane extraction and clean coal as the USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with more clean coal underground than almost the rest of the world combined.

4] Develop small nuke reactors using Euro-technology and cookie-cutter production techniques to get away from the China Syndrome hysteria of the late '70s.

5] Realize that the huge oil-price spike introduces profitability into long-capped US once over-exploited fields which now through new technology and higher profits can be exploited for large profits.

6] Keep interest in alternative and renewable technologies alive.

Without the anthropogenic global warming calisthenics of hyper-ventilating hysteria, we can still look for hydrogen-based energy sources and explore new methods of energy, without taking politically expedient and bogus side-tracks like ethanol based on corn---a boon for small farms, but a hoax as far as energy production is concerned.

Beirut Blast Targets American Embassy Vehicle

Beirut continues to be a locus for assassinations that are targeting pro-American, pro-Western political notables.

...suspicion would fall on al Qaeda or Hezbollah.

He said the attack would have been well planned, with spotters tipping the killer off when the vehicle left the embassy and when it approached the blast area.In the past three years, there has been a string of explosions in Lebanon targeting mainly anti-Syrian politicians and journalists.

The last car bombing on December 12 in the Baabda suburb killed Lebanese army Major General Francois Hajj and two other people.

This might be timed to coincide with Prsident Bush's visit to the Middle East, as was perhaps the Iranian provocation with the cigarette boats last week. The enemies of a genuine accord between Israelis and Palestinians may visit more violence on western targets in their efforts to destabilize the region.

In that frame of mind, even Hamas would fall into the list of suspects for the latest Beirut blast.

Big Brain Big Bang Eternal Recurrence?

Cosmology is an ancient science and I took a course in the subject from the standpoint of Philosophy at St. Louis University long ago. A very batty Jesuit priest named Fr. Foote taught the course & usually spoke in sentences ten minutes long, with infinite tangents and dangling modifiers turning his lecture into terminal confusion. Twice a week. There was no chance to ask questions because confusion reigned.

I do like the New York Times because of its Science page every Tuesday. The only major daily to have a whole staff of gifted amateurs examining the expanding boundaries of our human knowledge. The Big Brain piece today is a splendid example.

I am a devotee if not a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche, easily the most intriguing philosopher ever to lose his mind over conundrums and paradoxes that normal people shrug their shoulders over, but bat-guano CA-RAYYY-ZEEE philosophers freak out over to the extent that they spend the last decade of their life---from his mid-forties in Nietzsche's case---in an asylum before dying of sheer madness.

As my sainted mother, herself of German extraction, would say: "Ach, du lieber!"

Nietzsche's theory of "eternal recurrence" verges on reincarnation and posits that we are condemned to repeat our lives in exactly the same way again and again and again. A little like the cosmologists of Cal Tech and MIT, Nietzsche was constantly bumping his head against ceilings of improbable thoughts that 19th century contemporaries judged to be the products of the spirochete that was slowly eating out Friedrich's gray matter---probably from a careless dalliance in his university days when instead of collecting dueling scars, he acquired an incurable social disease.

Und so weiter und so fort.

Nowadays physicists are actively studying the physical basis of Nietzsche's thought experiments. Boltzmann's Brains floating in free space unattached to owners are a simple extrapolation from FN's wildest divagations. Perhaps if I reincarnate, it would be far wiser to be a disembodied brain floating in an etherial vacuum like the Star Child at the end of Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, observing as he prepares to incarnate on this vale of tears as a Nietzshean Superman.

Was man nicht in Kopf hat, muss man in die Beine haben.

Is the Reagan Era Over? Rush Examines Newt's Infatuation with Huckabee

Rush Limbaugh has fine-tuned his Fingerspitzgefuehl to the point that he appears prophetic when his on-air analysis pans out days, weeks, even months later to be true. He discerns the cloud no bigger than a man's hand before anyone else. Here he is on Newt tooting his own flute:

I have suspected -- I've not known, but I have suspected -- that Newt is advising the Huckabee campaign.

I don't know this. It's just a wild guess, but based on this comment, "The Reagan era is over. The George W. Bush era is over. We're at a point in time we're about to start redefining, as a number of people have started talking..." Yes, they are. Every one of these Republicans is starting to talk about redefining the party, and this has been going on since the early days of this, not just now. If you recall, all during last year, I told you this was my big concern: that Reaganism and conservatism were going to be redefined so as to fit the mold of whoever these guys on our primary roster are. One of the things that Newt said is "redefine the nature of the Republican Party in response to what the country needs." Something about that rubs me wrong. Something about that sort of grates on me. The Republican Party is supposed to sit out there and I guess (slurps) moisten its index finger, stick it in the air, find out what people want, and be that? That's not who we are! Now, it may be who populists are. In fact, it is exactly who populists are. Even if you have no intention of following through on what you plan to do as you promise all these wonderful things to your supporters, as a populist. But this is not what the Republican Party has been. It's what the Democrat Party had been.

Cue Fred Thompson, who is coming out in S.C. and hitting his marks suddenly with vim and vigor.

Fred used the very line about Huckabee that Rush is implying about the new populism: that it's the old Democrat Party, the party of failure and corruption that is now seducing Republicans hankering for another bite of the apple like Newt. Huckabee is Democrat social programs with a Republican cultural bias. And Newt seems to like that.

Unless Rush is wrong, and he seldom is. Check the link above for more salutary wisdom from Limbaugh about Mark Steyn's stout defense of capitalism---that much derided economic system that still puts the USA as producing 25+% of the world's goods and services. Why do Americans forget how great and strong we are?

[Newt] said, "The era of Reagan is over. ... It's the end of the Reagan era." It is not. If the Reagan era is over, if the Reagan coalition is dead, what replaced it? Could somebody tell me? Precisely nothing has replaced it, and that's why so many people are scratching their heads, why so many people are a little nervous, because there isn't any real leadership out there that causes people and inspires people to get behind it and go rah-rah and make certain things happen.

I mean, is there a Gingrich coalition that has replaced the Reagan coalition? For that matter, what is the McCain coalition? If we're going to have a new era, what is the McCain era? What is the Huckabee era? What is their winning coalition? They don't have one. You know, all this sounds like Third Way kind of talk, the triangulation of the Clinton years in the nineties. But I don't know what the McCain era would be, and I don't know what the Huckabee coalition is. They don't have a coalition. They're out trying to get votes of independents and Democrats. They're pandering to moderates and independents. Folks, I just want you to think about this: What happens if either of these two guys happen to win, attracting the votes of independents, moderates, the Jell-Os, and Democrats? Does that not equal the demise of the Republican Party? Do you think McCain's out there actually trying to get Republican votes? Is Huckabee trying to get Republican votes? Romney is. Giuliani is. Fred Thompson certainly is. But if we have a nominee that is a nominee on the basis of moderate and independent and Democrat voters, then what happens to the Republican Party?

Do they not know this? If they do know this, is this their aim? Is their objective, for whatever reason -- sour grapes, they don't think they can win as Republicans because they're really not Republicans. Is this the objective here, to redefine (or maybe ruin) the Republican Party? Even so, the coalition of Democrats, independents, moderates, the Jell-Os, that is not a coalition. They don't have a coalition. McCain doesn't have one. Huckabee doesn't have one. They want to transform the party into a center-left party like these so-called conservative parties in Europe, and to do that, they've gotta say, "The Reagan era is over," and they have to embrace expediency, which, in the end, of course, is a losing proposition. Let me hit you right between the eyes here. If you want to find out what would happen to the country with a McCain or Huckabee president, take a look at what's happened to Governor Schwarzenegger in California. Here was a guy who actively ran as a conservative and as a Republican and, as you know, was elected. We all know now what has happened to him.

Schwartzenegger is turning California into a Canadian socialist wannabe province like Michigan, a state which has taxed itself into economic penury. A state where businesses rush to get OUT of its high-tax, high-politically correct environment of Euroweenie mediocrity. Does Rush see any hope on the horizon?

this Republican roster of candidates has always been somewhat disquieting, and we know that it is because if you look at it, it's pretty much evenly spread, the support around all the top-tier people. Look what happens, by the way, when one of them happens to pipe up. Look what happens. I have a headline: "A Combative Thompson Sways Voters -- 'But then last night -- we hadn't even been thinking about him -- all of a sudden it was clear he was the one,' said Mr. Berenberk, a retired teacher. 'The bluntness, the forcefulness. He was really impressive.'" He's talking about Thompson in the last South Carolina debate. So candidate aside -- put Thompson aside for a moment -- when conservative truths are heard, it's an affecting and effective message. People have revelations when they hear it. They just haven't been hearing it from people who want to lead the party and who want to lead the country. So what's lacking here is not ideas and not principles, but the right people to speak them and the right people to develop strategies to win elections based on those ideas and principles. What's lacking, if you will, is intellectual and political leadership.

This jives a bit with the ditzy girl O'Reilly has on to analyze body language and gestures and facial expressions. Last night, she judged Fred Thompson to have "terrible body language..." So Fred has the message, but so far he hasn't revved up enough to deliver the message effectively? Or will he be the last man standing in the OK Corral after the primaries wreak their havoc?
Mark Steyn may have the answer to what we need, and the hope for change might be trumped by the common sense of the American people, many of whom don't know how good they have it.

Rush's lament might presage enough cognitive dissonance to get voters to examine what sort of "change" and "hope" the various snake-oil salesmen, of whom Newt appears ready to join along with Ah-Noooold, are really peddling.

Hitchens Eviscerates the Clintons---Again & Again!!

Christopher Hitchens employs his best polemical artillery to lay waste to the grandiose edifice [some would call it a cocoon] the Clintons have erected inside the Democrat Party.

For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her "greatness" (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?

Sure her husband was disbarred for his serial-rapist tendencies and the ensuing perjury in front of a Grand Jury. Billy Jeff's dissembling, dissimulation, manipulations, prevarications, and outright contrary to past fact statements on just about everything are matters of public record. And both Bill & Hill think it's insulting to ever try calling them to account. They are unaccountable, irresponsible, and consider themselves above the laws of the land. Hitchens keeps on applying the metaphorical wood to their figurative backsides:

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter "Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?" in the paperback version of my book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton "rapid response" team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women's "issues."

Over-the-hill childless crones like Gloria Steinem continue to support this tag team of intimidation towards any female that resists getting hit upon by the Buffoon-in-Chief. The feminazis, as Camille Paglia so aptly reveals, have discredited themselves by an emotional unconditional surrender to "the rapist in the Oval Office" and his hapless spouse. But the feminazis will stand by their [wo]man even though the moral caverns they traverse to do so are dark and deep. Hitchens' sum-up:

Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.

But the black community, as they are far less malleable and complicit than feminazis in the submission to the various houseboys and man-servants that the Plantation Big House of Clinton Inc., rolls out the "vulgar libels" against Barack Obama. As the Wall Street Journal notes in "The Politics of Pigmentation,"

there's .... a cautionary tale here in how identity politics can come back to bite. The left's color-by-numbers approach to attracting votes has essentially painted the Democrats into a corner, making it very difficult for them to prevail in national elections without winning nearly every black vote. The result is the very antithesis of what King fought for -- an over-reliance on blunt racial appeals instead of issues and ideas.

Throughout the campaign, Mrs. Clinton has led Mr. Obama among black voters, thanks mostly to name ID and her husband's popularity. With his victory in Iowa and close second in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama has started to cut into Mrs. Clinton's black support. With her remarks, she's now given him an opportunity to make further inroads. And as the fallout shows, she'll have to be very careful about pushing back on this front if she wants to keep black supporters from abandoning her en masse, not only now but in November when they could decide to stay home.

Barack has acquitted himself well in standing above the nasty little dust-up caused by clumsy Clinton ham-handedness as Hillary accused Obama of attacking her in a bare-faced lie---it was the neutral Cong. John Clyburn of S.C. who was the one pointing out the possible insensitivity of subordinating MLK to LBJ.

The Clintons thought they could steamroller their way to the Democrat nomination, but Obama now appears to be a formidable obstacle, as his ju-jitsu politics allows Hillary the space to fall on her face---he needn't respond, she does it to herself.

The Military-Hating NYT Spews PTSD Garbage on Front Page

The NYT has always denigrated the US military, usually in subtle indirect fashion, as a homage to the loathesome Upper West Side reptiles who are its prime audience. These Pauline Kael denizens ["I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon"] have either treasonous DNA in their genes, or have acquired it by transference living among the mentally-disturbed and ideologically twisted parasite hives that flourish in the neighborhoods. [I worked for Paul O'Dwyer in '68 in NYC & visited every Democratic "club" in Manhattan, so I denigrate from personal experience.]

James Taranto deconstructs the latest inflections that the NYT propagates concerning the evil ex-military. Interesting that the stats this agitprop drivel comes up with don't vary widely from a control population of young males of the same age. Nor, of course, does the NYT note the ethnic or racial backgrounds of the ex-military murderers, so its PC stance is another hypocrisy inserted into its article. It mentions about a half-dozen cases all implying white male murders, but no info that could implicate the crime-prone black or Hispanic vets who might live in murderous neighborhoods and be susceptible to violence, as the young Vegas vet was living in a gang-ruled turf in a nasty 'hood.

The two pieces of crap that wrote the piece were both female, and presumably anti-Iraq war in their orientation. Powerline puts some perspective on the Upper West Side view of the military & PTSD:

The Times article goes on just about forever--it is nine pages long on the web--but it consists almost entirely of anecdotes about a handful of the 121 alleged crimes. The stories are indeed sad, and some of the soldiers and veterans involved no doubt did suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Still, the Times' approach is astonishingly unsystematic, especially since the paper takes seriously the idea that the U.S. military may be responsible for the supposed crime wave:

At various times, the question of whether the military shares some blame for these killings gets posed.

When it is not recounting stories of crimes committed by servicemen, always from a point of view sympathetic to the idea that service in a theater of war was a contributing factor--"plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, [Mr. Sepi] often needed alcohol to fall asleep"--the paper waxes pretentious:

Decades of studies on the problems of Vietnam veterans have established links between combat trauma and higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, gun ownership, child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse — and criminality. On a less scientific level, such links have long been known.

“The connection between war and crime is unfortunately very ancient,” said Dr. Shay, the V.A. psychiatrist and author. “The first thing that Odysseus did after he left Troy was to launch a pirate raid on Ismarus. Ending up in trouble with the law has always been a final common pathway for some portion of psychologically injured veterans.”

Now put yourself in the place of a newspaper editor. Suppose you are asked to evaluate whether your paper should run a long article on a nationwide epidemic of murders committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan--a crime wave that, your reporter suggests, constitutes a "cross-country trail of death and heartbreak." Suppose that the reporter who proposes to write the article says it will be a searing indictment of the U.S. military's inadequate attention to post-traumatic stress disorder. Suppose further that you are not a complete idiot.

Given that last assumption, I'm pretty sure your first question will be: "How does the murder rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan compare to the murder rate for young American men generally?" Remarkably, this is a question the New York Times did not think to ask. Or, if the Times asked the question and figured out the answer, the paper preferred not to report it.

As of 2005, the homicide rate for Americans aged 18-24, the cohort into which most soldiers fall, was around 27 per 100,000. (The rate for men in that age range would be much higher, of course, since men commit around 88% of homicides. But since most soldiers are also men, I gave civilians the benefit of the doubt and considered gender a wash.)

Next we need to know how many servicemen have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. A definitive number is no doubt available, but the only hard figure I've seen is that as of last October, moe than 500,000 U.S. Army personnel had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Other sources peg the total number of personnel from all branches of the military who have served in the two theaters much higher, e.g. 750,000, 650,000 as of February 2007, or 1,280,000. For the sake of argument, let's say that 700,000 soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors have returned to the U.S. from service in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do the math: the 121 alleged instances of homicide identified by the Times, out of a population of 700,000, works out to a rate of 17 per 100,000--quite a bit lower than the overall national rate of around 27.

But wait! The national rate of 27 homicides per 100,000 is an annual rate, whereas the Times' 121 alleged crimes were committed over a period of six years. Which means that, as far as the Times' research shows, the rate of homicides committed by military personnel who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan is only a fraction of the homicide rate for other Americans aged 18 to 24. Somehow, the Times managed to publish nine pages of anecdotes about the violence wreaked by returning servicemen without ever mentioning this salient fact.

Hinderaker's Powerline piece effectively shows that the two pieces of crap and their editors are COMPLETE IDIOTS!

Hinderaker finally poses a perfect question. As a reporter for about two years of my variegated career, I can report that the rate of alcoholism is roughly about fifty percent, including the many years I was not a reporter and as a diplomat or oil strategist, interacted with reporters in informal cocktail or lunch situations. Here's Hinderaker's accurate observation:

I've got a suggestion for the editors of the Times: next time, why don't they undertake a research project to identify all murders and other forms of homicide committed (or allegedly committed--no finding of guilt necessary!) by people who are, or recently have been, employed by newspaper companies? They could write a long article in which selected crimes allegedly committed by reporters, editors and typesetters are recounted in detail, accompanied by speculation about whether newspaper employment was a contributing factor in each case. No need to wonder whether reporters, editors and typesetters commit homicide at a rate any different from the rest of the population--a single murder is too many!

Here's another idea: the Times' story on veterans' crimes repeatedly focused on the role of alcoholism, which the paper associated with the stresses of military service. How about a survey that compares alcoholism rates among reporters and soldiers? Just on a hunch, I'll wager a dollar that the alcoholism rate for reporters is higher.

And you'd win that wager, John, by a handy margin.

Clinton Camp Busy in Process of Destroying Itself

Napoleon had a famous answer to someone who asked him how he had won the Battle of Austerlitz:

"I applied a lesson I had previously learned never to interfere in a battle when the enemy is in the process of destroying itself."

It appears Sen. Obama is applying to same lesson as the CEO & ExVP of Clinton Inc. are sending out whackjobs to try to blame Obama for Hillary's habit of putting her foot in her mouth.

Tonite it was Rep. John Lewis [Ga] who was on PBS Evening News flailing & trying inarticulately to explain how Obama was to blame for exploiting Shaheen's calling him a druggie in NH & Robert Johnson of BET doing the same last night. When it was pointed out that the Clintons were accusing him of exploitation of their mistakes when he actually had remembered Napoleon's maxim & kept quiet, this got the Snoop Doggy Dog of Congress more exercised than ever.

When Hillary makes a comment and the media begins to criticize while Obama keeps quiet, it might be a good idea underreact, rather than push the panic button as Billary have been doing the last few weeks.

And the Clintons should like Obama in the link above, send a memo to their organizers not for outside distribution to keep their yawping and frothing at the mouth to a minimum, or S. Carolina will be another Iowa.

NYT Op-Ed Page Breaks Out with the Truth

William Kristol has employed his niche on the NYT to point out liberal lies and mealy-mouthed doublethink. Of course, the loons on the left cannot abide one of their altars of disinformation to be sullied by facts and reality-checks. Here's a bit of Bill's spanking of the queen of both-sides mouth-talk:

Yesterday, on “Meet the Press,” Hillary Clinton claimed that the Iraqis are changing their ways in part because of the Democratic candidates’ “commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009.” So the Democratic Party, having proclaimed that the war is lost and having sought to withdraw U.S. troops, deserves credit for any progress that may have been achieved in Iraq.

That is truly a fairy tale. And it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of ... George W. Bush. The horror!

Yes, the Heart of Darkness resides in the chest of Hillary, but the horror is perceived outside this Queen of Darkness.

Success has more than just a thousand fathers, now mothers are getting into the act!