As Goldstein says: God Bless Freakin’ America.

Ricky West has come up with a great analogy that’s near and dear to my own Bundy-lovin’ heart:

Anyone else get the feeling after the 932,231st reference that John Kerry (and his minions) talking about Vietnam is starting to come across like Al Bundy talking about the 4 touchdowns he scored for Polk High that one game?

Want to talk about national defense? Kerry served in Vietnam.
Want to discuss his conflicting statements? He served in Vietnam.
Bring up his voting on funding for the military? Hey, you’re questioning the patriotism of someone who, by the way, served in Vietnam.

I hereby dub thee John “Bundy” Kerry. The service was exemplary, Senator, but it’s not the playoff game @ Polk High, any more. Time to direct your staff to get with the big leagues. Otherwise, as I’ve predicted earlier, this will not be a close election.

All true enough, but as much as I like this, I can’t help but feel that Al would be mighty upset by this one. Either way, next time I’m in Atlanta I owe you a beer, Rick. And a copy of “Big ‘Uns.”

Jon Henke has the lowdown on the Iranian Iraqi “dissident” “insurgent” “community leader” “cleric” Moqtada “Mouthbreather” Sadr – and reveals that the noted “patriotic” “peace” “activists” at antiwar.com seem to be interested only in averting their eyes. Must be all that goodness and light blinding them.

I just love this:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg on Wednesday called Vice President Dick Cheney the “lead chickenhawk” in an escalating war of words over the Vietnam-era military service of President Bush, Democratic rival John Kerry and the vice president.

“We know who the chickenhawks are,” the New Jersey senator said on the Senate floor. “They talk tough on national defense and military issues and cast aspersions on others, but when it was their turn to serve, they were AWOL from courage.”

As opposed to you Demo-rats, whose idea of “talking tough” on national defense is to go around bleating “WWKD” (What Would Kofi Do).

The Bush-Cheney campaign had no immediate comment on Lautenberg’s criticism.

Nor should they bother. The American people know quite well which candidate, regardless of old non-issues, has a solid record on going after terrorists and which one voted for it before he voted against it. Lautenberg is a doddering, addle-pated fly trying to annoy the tiger.

Cheney received five student and marriage deferments of military service during the Vietnam War. The vice president has not questioned Kerry’s military record, but has argued that the four-term Massachusetts senator’s voting record on defense and intelligence issues casts doubts on his judgment for commander in chief.

In other words, Cheney is the one arguing the actual issues rather than “casting aspersions” based on ancient history and eventually (and desperately) resorting to foolish name-calling. The Dems can’t debate the actual issues because the Dems are wrong on them, and they have thirty-plus years’ experience in that if nothing else. Remember my bold-face up there, because it’s going to come back to haunt poor old Feeble Frank in a couple of paragraphs’ time.

Kerry was a decorated Navy veteran in Vietnam and an anti-war demonstrator when he returned home. The presumptive Democratic nominee has said Bush and Cheney have no credibility in criticizing his service and anti-war effort because Bush has been dogged by questions about his Guard attendance and Cheney sought numerous deferments.

“Dogged by questions” — questions asked not by assassins, but by grocery clerks come to collect a long-paid bill. None of which has anything whatever to do with addressing the question of how the candidates might choose to run a war – or whether America is even worth going to war for in the first place. Once again, the Lautenberg slurs are the best they can come up with – but anyone who dares to bring up Kerry’s record, or his own words in recent years, will be referred to as, oh, I don’t know, a “poopyhead” or something. Always remember the Democrat version of the Golden Rule: bringing up any actual issues for debate is an “unfair and vicious personal attack” or “questioning (their) patriotism” — if it’s a Republican doing the bringing up, that is. If you’re a Democrat, don’t ever bring up any issues at all. If someone else asks you about them, mumble a few Tranzi platitudes and get back to the personal attacks. Or just, you know, lie like a Clinton.

Lautenberg defined a chickenhawk as “having the shriek of a hawk but the backbone of a chicken,” and said, “and now the chickenhawks are squawking about Senator Kerry. The lead chickenhawk against Senator Kerry is the vice president.”

Uh-huh. That would be the same vice president who, as noted above, has yet to question Kerry’s military record at all. Would someone please get the distinguished nincompoop from New Jersey another box of Depends? He appears to have shit and fallen back in it again.

As I’ve said, all anyone has to do to defeat them utterly is simply stand up and tell the truth about them. No wonder they’re all so upset: that squawking you’re hearing is the sound of the Dems’ anti-American Lefty chickens coming home to roost, and we all know what “chickenhawks” do to chickens. The wailing from these shameless and insignificant clowns on the morning after election day is going to be as sweet, sweet music to mine ears.

(Via Cole, who has plenty to say on this himself)

I suppose this is not really a bad thing, just a meaningless and futile one:

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Wednesday for a U.S.-drafted resolution that would punish black marketeers who traffic in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons components.

The measure would obligate all 191 U.N. member nations to punish “non-state actors” dealing in parts and technology for weapons of mass destruction.

Even Pakistan, which had misgivings until the last minute, voted for the resolution in the 15-nation council, giving the Bush administration and its allies a clean sweep.

In a White House statement, Bush called the vote “an important achievement” and urged nations to enact appropriate measures. “We must continue to press these efforts to ensure that the world’s most destructive weapons are kept from the world’s most dangerous regimes and organizations,” he said.

I know Bush pretty much has to do this sort of thing from time to time for political reasons and all that, and I know Bush is a UN guy anyway. But: “an important achievement?” God, please tell me he’s not serious. The last “important achievement” realized by the UN was persuading NYC to agree not to give parking tickets to the various criminals ensconced therein, and that’ll probably be the last one too. No mean feat, sure, but still.

(Via LGF)

If this doesn’t absolutely enrage you, don’t bother telling me about it:

I’ve been mystified at the absolute nonsense of being in “awe” of Tillman’s “sacrifice” that has been the American response. Mystified, but not surprised. True, it’s not everyday that you forgo a $3.6 million contract for joining the military. And, not just the regular army, but the elite Army Rangers. You know he was a real Rambo, who wanted to be in the “real” thick of things. I could tell he was that type of macho guy, from his scowling, beefy face on the CNN pictures. Well, he got his wish. Even Rambo got shot in the third movie, but in real life, you die as a result of being shot. They should call Pat Tillman’s army life “Rambo 4: Rambo Attempts to Strike Back at His Former Rambo 3 Taliban Friends, and Gets Killed.”

But, does that make him a hero? I guess it’s a matter of perspective. For people in the United States, who seem to be unable to admit the stupidity of both the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars, such a trade-off in life standards (if not expectancy) is nothing short of heroic. Obviously, the man must be made of “stronger stuff” to have had decided to “serve” his country rather than take from it. It’s the old JFK exhortation to citizen service to the nation, and it seems to strike an emotional chord. So, it’s understandable why Americans automatically knee-jerk into hero worship.

However, in my neighborhood in Puerto Rico, Tillman would have been called a “pendejo,” an idiot. Tillman, in the absurd belief that he was defending or serving his all-powerful country from a seventh-rate, Third World nation devastated by the previous conflicts it had endured, decided to give up a comfortable life to place himself in a combat situation that cost him his life. This was not “Ramon or Tyrone,” who joined the military out of financial necessity, or to have a chance at education. This was a “G.I. Joe” guy who got what was coming to him. That was not heroism, it was prophetic idiocy.

Tillman, probably acting out his nationalist-patriotic fantasies forged in years of exposure to Clint Eastwood and Rambo movies, decided to insert himself into a conflict he didn’t need to insert himself into. It wasn’t like he was defending the East coast from an invasion of a foreign power. THAT would have been heroic and laudable. What he did was make himself useful to a foreign invading army, and he paid for it. It’s hard to say I have any sympathy for his death because I don’t feel like his “service” was necessary. He wasn’t defending me, nor was he defending the Afghani people. He was acting out his macho, patriotic crap and I guess someone with a bigger gun did him in.

Matters are a little clearer for those living outside the American borders. Tillman got himself killed in a country other than his own without having been forced to go over to that country to kill its people. After all, whether we like them or not, the Taliban is more Afghani than we are. Their resistance is more legitimate than our invasion, regardless of the fact that our social values are probably more enlightened than theirs. For that, he shouldn’t be hailed as a hero, he should be used as a poster boy for the dangerous consequences of too much “America is #1,” frat boy, propaganda bull. It might just make a regular man irrationally drop $3.6 million to go fight in a conflict that was anything but “self-defense.” The same could be said of the unusual belief of 50 percent of the American nation that thinks Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11. One must indeed stand in awe of the amazing success of the American propaganda machine. It works wonders.

Al-Qaeda won’t be defeated in Afghanistan, even if we did kill all their operatives there. Only through careful and logical changing of the underlying conditions that allow for the ideology to foster will Al-Qaeda be defeated. Ask the Israelis if 50 years of blunt force have eradicated the Palestinian resistance. For that reason, Tillman’s service, along with that of thousands of American soldiers, has been wrongly utilized. He did die in vain, because in the years to come, we will realize the irrationality of the War on Terror and the American reaction to Sept. 11. The sad part is that we won’t realize it before we send more people like Pat Tillman over to their deaths.

Let me get this out of the way right off: yes, I know we’re strong enough as a nation to tolerate this sort of utterly mindless idiocy. Yes, it doesn’t mean much in the end, and this zurramato’s blather will never, ever be mainstream opinion. Yes, it’s good to have this sort of putrid garbage right out in the open, so we know exactly where the smell is coming from. I don’t care. At the risk of sounding like every whining liberal’s cliched nightmare of a gunracked-pickup-driving ignoramus with no more unrotted teeth than IQ points, I’ve gotta say this anyway:

This filthy, spoiled, dimwitted, self-centered, America-hate-pimping little ingrate ought to be decorated with plenty of feathers and hot tar, splashed around in a cesspool a bit, and ridden out of the country on a rail. What the hell is he even doing here in the first place? Why, he’s furthering his liberal education to improve his prospects in the evil American job market. In other words, he’s taking advantage. He’s taking advantage of a system he clearly despises, a system built, maintained, and defended for him by far better men than he’ll ever manage to become. (And along those lines, check this ridiculousness out: Gonzalez was part of a group of smegma-faced little snots “fighting oppression” by protesting a 65-dollar-per-semester increase in his college fees as an international student. God, what a…I’m sorry, I seem to have run out of derisives that are strong enough to express my contempt for this little pussy.) And he has balls enough to mock that system, and the men who built it, even while sucking at its teat for every comfort it can give him.

This ass-brained twit ought to be carrying those balls straight back to Puerto Rico with him. In a box. Today wouldn’t be soon enough to suit me. Call it stifling of dissent, call it jingoism, call it repression, call it whatever you like. I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck.

Update! Here’s the antidote. It’s long, but read every word of it – and then relish the delicious thought of this nimrod’s somehow getting the opportunity to put his “intelligent,” “nuanced” outlook forth around a group of Marines. Christ, but I’d pay a hell of a lot of money to see that one. He wouldn’t last a moment – but then again, he’d never have the guts to do it in the first place. I’d predict a lot of stammering, yammering, and a sudden spate of backpedaling that would leave the sidewalk scorched under his feet and make the Roadrunner look sluggish.

Updated update! Forgot to mention that I found this excrescence via Sullivan.

Update to the updated update! Michele points to a site that has more on this intestinal microbe, including this funny comment:

My God, it’s the bastard child of Gilbert Gottfried and Janeane Garofalo.

We played basketball with a kid like this in high school. Little bastard never would fit through the hoop.

Whoa, that’s good squishy.

Ace says this:

And no, we’re really not trying to pin 9-11 on Clinton. Clinton was guilty of many things — a neglectful, Panglossian procrastinating style of foreign policy high among them — but one can’t say Clinton “caused” 9-11. Clinton was America’s leader, the man America installed as CINC. To the extent Clinton is to blame, we’re all to blame.

But it is worth remembering that Clinton “solved” the Al Qaeda problem by lobbing cosmetic cruise missiles at camels. That didn’t actually solve the problem, but it did solve the political problem — it reassured the nation that we were “doing something” about terrorism.

We weren’t really, of course. But in terms of politics, those ineffectual missiles “solved” Clinton’s problem.

What is galling to us is that it seems many Americans want to go back to precisely that sort of “solution” — the phony “solution” of merely getting a problem off the front-pages of newspapers while doing absolutely nothing to actually solve it, and indeed making it worse by encouraging it to fester and metastasize.

The hatred is directed at the perpetrators of these horrific crimes.

But there’s another feeling, too. It’s not hatred, but it is nearly as intense an emotion, because it’s directed not at some barely-glimpsed lunatic cultist in the faraway Kush, but towards people we talk to everyday.

It’s a feeling of frustration and disgust.

It sure is. Maybe after the Dems are handed their empty, fatuous heads in November for the second major election in a row they’ll clue in. Maybe.

John Cole is back again, and as always he’s doing the heavy lifting for the rest of us VRWC’ers. Just scroll, that’s all I can really tell ya.

Update! And speaking of doing the heavy lifting, Wretchard has a far better and more in-depth grasp of what’s going on in Fallujah than I do. Once again, scroll, scroll away. This is truly indispensable stuff.

VDH:

Mr. President, we are now in the fourth year of what clearly has become a quagmire with no end in sight. Opposition to your conduct of the war is growing by the day. Do you attribute this present mess to your own failure to communicate?

The more things change, etc. Democrats (all but synonymous with Jurassic Media here) — wrong then, wrong now. One thing you can always count on them for: error. The other thing: refusal to acknowledge it.

And here we go already:

WASHINGTON, D.C.— With the air gushing out of John Kerry’s balloon, it may be only a matter of time until political insiders in Washington face the dread reality that the junior senator from Massachusetts doesn’t have what it takes to win and has got to go. As arrogant and out of it as the Democratic political establishment is, even these pols know the party’s got to have someone to run against George Bush. They can’t exactly expect the president to self-destruct into thin air.

With growing issues over his wealth (which makes fellow plutocrat Bush seem a charity case by comparison), the miasma over his medals and ribbons (or ribbons and medals), his uninspiring record in the Senate (yes war, no war), and wishy-washy efforts to mimic Bill Clinton’s triangulation gimmickry (the protractor factor), Kerry sinks day by day. The pros all know that the candidate who starts each morning by having to explain himself is a goner.

What to do? Look for the Dem biggies, whoever they are these days, to sit down with the rich and arrogant presumptive nominee and try to persuade him to take a hike. Then they can return to business as usual—resurrecting John Edwards, who is still hanging around, or staging an open convention in Boston, or both.

If things proceed as they are, the dim-bulb Dem leaders are going to be very sorry they screwed Howard Dean.

Yeah – like Howlin’ Howard would’ve gotten you moonbats any closer to the Oval Office. This has been posted a couple of places already as well, but the thing to remember is that it comes from the Village Voice. The Village freakin’ Voice, people.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the Dems are toast, as they so richly deserve to be.

Several blogs are talking about this one, and it does indeed bear looking over:

Caches of “commercial and agricultural” chemicals don’t match the expectation of “stockpiles” of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. “At a very minimum,” Hanson tells Insight, “they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly.” Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment’s notice.

At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a “camouflaged bunker complex” that was shown to reporters – with unpleasant results. “More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent,” Hanson says. “But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The ‘agricultural site’ was also colocated with a military ammunition dump – evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.”

That wasn’t the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai’ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin – a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. “Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up,” Hanson says. “It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that ‘no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.’”

At Taji – an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia – U.S. combat units discovered more “pesticides” stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum. Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. “They were labeled as pesticides,” he says. “Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps.”

Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding. “If it wasn’t a chemical agent, what was it?” Hanson asks. “More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier’s perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy.”

The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that’s the problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn’t fit the image the media and the president’s critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq’s weapons ought to look like.

I think that after having lambasted the Bushies for their supposed “failure” to connect the dots on 9/11, it’s more than reasonable for the rest of us to expect Bush’s critics to do a little dot-connecting of their own here. Saddam was hostile to the US; he was in material breach of a dozen and a half UN resolutions; he had used WMDs on his own people; his regime was an important link in a chain of terrorist-sponsoring states; and whether or not there was any direct connection between his regime and al Qaeda is entirely irrelevant, since the WoT was intended as a break with past doctrine – a doctrine which would have us restrict our efforts to attempting to arrest or perhaps kill Osama. Neutralizing Osama is only one spoke in a much-larger wheel, and anyone who thinks that dismantling the Taliban and al Qaeda will end Islamic terrorism is living in a dream world.
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Okay, so here are the photos I promised from the weekend’s fun and excitement, which was a benefit for a local biker that the band played. The thing was a poker run that ended at Joe’s Bar and Grill in Charlotte, and as you can see, a good time was had by….well, me, at least.
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So I’ve been out most of the day and heard nothing whatever about this till just now, but apparently the Marines are holding some sort of mass barbecue in Fallujah. Godspeed, guys, and KATN; send ‘em to hell in a crowd and smoking. More later after I watch a bit of news here. Oh, and the pics from Sunday finally arrived in my inbox, so they’ll be coming up later too.

Update! False alarm, looks like. Some Specter fire, a couple of blown-up warehouses, and then another pause to negotiate with terrorists. I think there are two things we really need here: 1) to be going through Fallujah like a strong laxative, and 2) a few new generals. Ralph Peters has been saying this sort of thing all along, and today he’s said it again:

Since the cease-fire, our troops have had to endure the ludicrous charade of “negotiations” with the Fallujah city fathers – breaking the rule that we never negotiate with terrorists or their surrogates. The resulting “agreement” to turn in heavy weapons led to the mockery of sending the Marines a pick-up truck full of junk while the terrorists gained weeks to prepare their defenses, construct ambushes and organize a far tougher resistance than they could have presented two weeks ago.

Our enemies are laughing at our folly, while creating a myth of heroic resistance in Fallujah – for which we will pay dearly in the months and years ahead.

“Experts” warn that we mustn’t alienate the hard-core Sunnis or the fundamentalist Shia’s. Wake up and smell the cordite: They’re already alienated. They’ll never love us. So we’d better make damned sure they fear us.

The Battle of Fallujah isn’t about one city. It’s about the future of the entire Middle East. Despite the low number of casualties in historical terms, this could prove to be one of the decisive battles of history in its long-term effects.

We must win. If the enemy fights from mosques, level the mosques. If they fight from hospitals, gut the hospitals. If they open fire from orphanages, turn them into blackened shells. We cannot allow terrorists any sanctuaries. The men we face – and the watching world – interpret our decency as weakness.

The diplomats have had their chance. Now it’s time to fight.

Peters has always advocated being harsher than I think we really need to be, but our difference is more one of degree than of kind. And that last line is simply undeniable. I’m all for going out of our way to spare the innocent — probably further than Peters would agree with — but I doubt there are all that many truly innocent civilians left in Fallujah at this point. “Destroy the village in order to save it” may be an oxymoron, but “destroy the city in order to save the nation” seems to me a pretty sound proposition in this case.

I knew this was coming sooner or later, of course, but I really figured it would take a bit longer here in Big Tobacco country. I should have known better; looks like I underestimated the eagerness of Democrats to micromanage our lives for us:

Lighting up a cigarette in a public place might get more difficult in Charlotte if one City Council member has her way.

Democrat Susan Burgess wants to expand the city’s anti-smoking laws beyond public buildings.

“I have a real interest in the effects of second-hand smoke on the public health,” said Burgess, who has a graduate degree in public health.

Oh izzat so, Suse? Then you might want to take a look at the facts before pushing on with your busybodying.

Ideally, she would like to see a ban similar to those in California and New York, which prohibit smoking in businesses such as restaurants.

“My daughter lives in New York City, and they have no smoking in restaurants and she says it’s just great,” Burgess said.

There’re buses, planes, and trains leaving every day, sweetie, and there’s a great big old interstate highway running right smack through the middle of Charlotte that will dump you out at the Holland Tunnel if you’d rather do your own driving. Don’t let the door etc. The light at the end of the tunnelvision:

But getting a similar law for Charlotte would be difficult. In North Carolina, municipalities are prohibited from passing indoor air quality rules that are more stringent than state law. Right now, state law restricts smoking in places such as schools, hospitals and public arenas. South Carolina has a similar law.

I’m sure Suse will find some way around that. Seems like they always do.

Been pretty busy today with this and that, and so almost forgot to mention that the pictures from the weekend’s knock-down drag-out should be up tonight or tomorrow morning. I’m just waiting for the guy who took ‘em to e-mail ‘em to me. Ought to be some real doozies in there, although I don’t think he managed to capture the show-within-a-show backstage towards the end of the set, which is a crying shame. Not that I’d ever post those publicly anyway, Miss R. Ahem.

Janet Jackson ain’t shit in a handbag, that’s all I’m sayin’.

This just might be Mark Steyn’s best effort yet:

The 9/11 Commission? Nobody cares. You can’t drive the car when you’re staring in the rear-view mirror. And, as those polls showed, if Americans are forcibly plonked in front of that rear-view mirror, they lay more blame on eight years of Clinton administration policy than eight months of Bush administration policy.

WMD? Another dead horse. Whether you were pro-war or anti-war had nothing to do with WMD. Bush thought Saddam Hussein had ‘em, but so did the French, Germans and Russians, and they were all anti-war. For most pro-war Americans, the need to whack Saddam was more important than the pretext on which he was whacked. He was unfinished business from Sept. 10. All the rest is footnotes, more rear-view mirror stuff.

That’s why even the old quagmire scenario now playing 24/7 on the cable channels doesn’t work for Kerry. Visiting foreigners often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan, usually found below the Stars and Stripes: “These Colors Don’t Run.” To non-Americans, it seems a trifle touchy. But for a quarter-century the presumption of the country’s enemies was that those colors did run — they ran from Vietnam, from the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, from Mogadishu. Even the successful campaigns — the inconclusively concluded Gulf War and the air-only Kosovo war — seemed designed to avoid putting those colors in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, these colors ran from the African embassy bombings, and the Khobar towers, and he pretty much expected them to run from 9/11, too.

A narrow majority of Americans get this: Being seen not to run — or, if you prefer, being seen to show ”resolve” — is now an indispensable objective of U.S. foreign policy. So, when four contractors get lynched and hung off a bridge in Fallujah, poor foolish Sen. Robert Byrd may think it’s time for an ”exit strategy,” but most Americans want to see the thugs who did it hunted down and killed.

One day it will not be necessary to sell ”These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts. But it is as long as Byrd, Ted Kennedy, Michael Moore & Co. are twitching to add Iraq to the pockmarked pantheon of Vietnam, Iran and Somalia.

Plenty of reason for optimism about the forest these days, folks, bleak and sickly though the individual trees may look now and then. You gotta figure that the Left and their media cohorts are waxing by turns glum and then hysterical for some reason other than that it’s fun to act that way.

(Via Quick)

It’s an old joke, but it sure seems apt: how can you tell when John Kerry is lying? The punchline I’ll leave to you all.

Okay, so I got up to a million uniques without killing anybody, or anybody else killing me, although there’s been more than one offer made on that score, believe me. My usual response to that sort of thing is to post the general vicinity of my usual haunts with a link to Mapquest, unless I take it seriously, which hasn’t happened yet. If ever I do, I suppose my response would be to load a few spare mags.

Okay, so the fact that I got to a million without any bloodshed is surprising enough, sure, but the question is: what the hell am I going to do next?

Well, I dunno. But I’m pretty sure it will involve cursing a bit.

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Stay tuned….

No free ice cream today, folks. Not that I’m suffering from the kind of seasonal/cyclical doldrums Lileks is; rest assured, I’m as ornery and loudmouthed as ever, and I don’t see any change on the horizon either. I’m just not gonna have time today. Got a lot to do to get the bike ready for the weekend, got some setlists to put together and some tweaking to do on the new guitar I got last week, and blah blah blah….

HOWEVER…check back over the weekend, and keep checking. There will be pictures. That’s all I’m sayin’. In the meantime, feel free to hijack the comments section of this post with any topic you like. Here, these ought to be enough to get the ball rolling.

Man – Goldstein is getting all literary and metaphysical and stuff today. Start here and scroll diagonally, that’s my suggestion. He just might be onto the start of something entirely other here.

Nice one, George (emphasis mine throughout):

Right after September the 11th, I said, if you harbor a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the terrorists. I meant that. The American President, when he speaks, must speak clearly and must mean what he says. I meant what I said. The Taliban were given a notice. They didn’t respond and so we got rid of them — it just wasn’t America, it was others.

“…must speak clearly and must mean what he says” – which sentiment makes up no part whatever of the kind of man who could seriously utter such a sentence as “I voted for it before I voted against it.” You want to know the difference between Bush and Kerry? Right there it is, all wrapped in as neat and concise a package as I can imagine. One of them has integrity. The other doesn’t. Very simple, very easy to grasp.

We’re making good progress in Afghanistan. I’m proud of Karzai. He stepped up and led. The Afghan army is functioning. Listen, there’s still work to be done there. There’s work to be done in most countries where tyranny reigned. See, it’s hard to go from a tyrannical state to a free state. It’s hard to go into a society where if you stepped out of line, you were brutalized, into a society where people take risks for peace and freedom.

And that’s what you’re seeing in Afghanistan, and, frankly, that’s what you’re seeing in Iraq. In Iraq, I saw a gathering threat; the world saw a gathering threat; the United Nations saw a threat. I went to the United Nations. I said, listen, you’ve been calling upon this guy to disarm for 10 years, he’s chosen not to. Now let’s give him one final chance to do so. And unanimously, the Security Council stepped up and said, disarm or face serious consequences. And so did the United States. And when you say, disarm or face serious consequences, you better mean what you say when you say it.

Now, what part of the above do you think the Dems are going to profess not to understand next? Seems plain enough to me. But then, I’m not a complete idiot, nor am I a party-before-country guy, as someone else just said here the other day.

And Saddam Hussein chose not to disarm. Listen, we viewed him as a threat; the intelligence said he was a threat. We all thought he had weapons. We found out — the truth will be known over time. We found out he had the ability to make weapons. He had the capability. I think the intent was clear. After all, he hated America. He paid suiciders to go kill Jews. He used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. And so he defied — he defied the world. And he’s no longer in power. The world is better off for it, and so are the people of Iraq.

The Libyans made a good decision to disarm. They were — they were dangerous. We have found more than we thought they had. But they made a wise decision to do so. The reason I bring all that up is the war on terror is broader than just the Afghan or the Iraq theater. The war on terror is finding cells and routing people out before they attack. The war on terror is to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The war on terror is to call people to account early, before it’s too late. The war on terror is to recognize America is a part of the battlefield and we must deal with threats before they’re too late.

As opposed to waiting until the threat is imminent, or going back to our pre-9/11 “strategy” of denying we’re in a war in the first place, both of which are quite clearly unacceptable — again, what part of it will the Dems misunderstand and/or misrepresent this time?

The long-term strategy of this government is to spread freedom around the world. And I believe — I told you, a free Iraq will be a major change agent for world peace. I also believe a free Palestinian state would be a major change agent for world peace. Ariel Sharon came to America and he stood up with me and he said, we are pulling out of Gaza and parts of the West Bank. In my judgment, the whole world should have said, thank you, Ariel. Now we have a chance to begin the construction of a peaceful Palestinian state.

The Palestinian leadership has failed the people year after year after year. And now is the time for the world to step up and take advantage of this opportunity and help to build a Palestinian state that’s committed to the principles of individual rights, and rule of law, and fairness, and justice so the Palestinian people have a chance to grow a peaceful state, and so that Israel has a partner in peace — not a launching pad of terrorist attacks on her border.

‘Nuff said. I think that Texas cowboy maniac has summed things up pretty well here.

I’ve held off on mentioning Air America’s troubles because these bureaucratic disasters (and yes, there’s a reason I call it a bureaucratic disaster) can take time to fully shake out, and I didn’t want to start kicking the corpse while there was any life at all left in it. It might still be jumping the gun to declare the whole mess well and truly over, but things are definitely looking bleak for anti-American radio:

Despite a court order to return the all-liberal radio network to Chicago, it appears the Windy City won’t have Air America by the end of this month, leaving New York City as the sole Top 10 market for the fledgling company.

Besides No. 1 market New York, Air America’s next largest region is No. 16 Minneapolis, with other affiliates in Portland, Ore., Riverside, Calif., West Palm Beach, Fla., Key West, Fla., Chapel Hill, N.C.,and Plattsburgh/Burlington on the New York-Vermont border.

Figures Chapel Hell (aka Berkeley East) would be on the list. And I call it a bureaucratic disaster because it fits so nicely in the pantheon of typical liberal snafus and their usual MO: identify a problem where there isn’t necessarily one, throw somebody else’s money at your idea for solving it, then sue somebody when you fail. Impose your most-excellent brainstorm on the rest of the pig-ignorant world from the top down in a doomed attempt at doing an end-run around the tried and true formula for real-world success. All we need now is for a Democrat congressperson to introduce legislation demanding taxpayer funding for this crucial effort to aid the “oppressed minority” of liberal talkers and the cycle will be complete. Oh, and there’s one more small detail that makes it perfectly fit in with my take on the whole thing:

A Chicago source familiar with the situation told the Tribune “a Multicultural representative showed up at WNTD’s offices, … kicked out Air America’s lone staffer overseeing the network’s feed to the station from New York, switched over to a Spanish-language feed, and changed the locks on the doors.”

Yep – Lefty propaganda being fed to us benighted flyover knuckledraggers directly from the tap in New York City, whether we want it or not. Now there’s only one thing left out of this hilarious picture: a slogan, which I am only too happy to provide for you: “Air America: won’t somebody help The Children™?”

Well, maybe there’s just one more thing: calling posts such as this one “hate speech” and/or “stifling of dissent.” There, I think that about covers all the bases. But I have to add that I really hope they stay on the air long enough to fail properly and completely. Otherwise, they’ve got a ready-made excuse to fall back on, and we’ll never hear the end of it.

Update! Damn, I forgot to include the most trusty liberal shibboleth of them all: “The failure of Air America is all Bush’s fault!”

Well, well. SDB just got an e-mail from one of the “embedded” French journalists (embedded with the terrorists, that is – and what a nice opportunity for a few well-placed American mortar rounds that whole assemblage would have been) who were palling around with the Iraqi terrorists who launched a SAM at a DHL cargo jet. Steven had blasted them for their obvious coziness with the enemy; the “journalist” (read: enemy) saw the post, didn’t like it much, and fired back at Steven thusly:

I don’t know who you are but what I just found on your web-site is really unfair and disgusting. You probably picked up the fact that our reporters were with the Iraki insurgents on the mainstream news. That is right. The fact that we were a French magazine was enough for you to spread the usual French bashing bullshit.

Now let me tell you one thing. If only you had taken the time to get a copy of the magazine, you would have found that in the same issue, we ran a eight page story + interview of Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. That alone tells that contrarily to what you think we don’t present one aspect of the story. We do journalism. Hey guys, we are not Fox News!

Cheers

Regis Le Sommier
US Correspondent for Paris Match

Yep; every bit as vapid, morally obtuse, and self-righteously indignant as you’d expect from a French journalist. Steven gets the last word in beautifully in his completely priceless final response. Read it, and wonder no more why I usually put items on France in the “Our Enemies” category here. If being this misguided, soulless, clueless dingbat’s enemy is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

We all know what the liberal “solution” to terrorism is; we all know what the Dems would’ve had Bush do to thwart 9/11. And we all know what the end result would have been, too:

TED KOPPEL: “In any case, sir, the essence, if I may, of your complaint, if I may call it that, is that the FAA, acting on a directive from the intelligence branch of the federal government, detained several Arab men and prevented them from boarding their flights?”

MOHAMED ATTA: “Yes. That is correct, Mr. Koppel. And that’s racism. Racism and racial profiling and it’s illegal and we’re suing for damages.”

TED KOPPEL: “You and . . .”

MOHAMED ATTA: “The other gentlemen who were detained for racial reasons. We were pulled out of line, searched, our possessions were confiscated . . .”

TED KOPPEL: “These would be the famous box cutters?”

MOHAMED ATTA: “We’re not allowed to cut boxes, I guess. Not in Bush’s America, I guess. Not with Bushitler in charge!”

The rest of this article is subscription-only, and I don’t have one, so I can’t excerpt any more of it. But this gives you the gist, and it ought to shame the Dems enough to induce them to abandon the outrage and partisan carping and finally grasp what the stakes are here; why their preferred approach failed utterly; and why they ought to be trying to help in coming up with some real-world solutions to the problems they did so little to acknowledge, much less resolve, when they were in charge. And the sad thing about it is, it will do none of those things. Ah well; maybe after the next attack, they’ll learn something at last. Or, you know, not. Because in the end, one has to recognize that after half a dozen such attacks throughout the Nineties and then 9/11 itself, they’re still saying the same damned things they were then. And that’s the maddening thing about it. Reactionary conformism, politically-correct ineptitude, thy name is Democrat.