To the proposition that all cultures have equal value, we must always answer, no they do not:

Istanbul - Turkish police have arrested a man who strangled his 14-year-old daughter because she had been repeatedly raped by a stranger. Thirteen relatives who allegedly ordered him to do it were also arrested...

If this seems like a case where Climacus is having another "Well, Duh!" moment, and you are about to say of course there are backwards cultures in the world, please note that it's a truly global issue, and let me get to the next point:

Any moral person should be able to recognize the behavior described in this story as evil, right? It's not just about different customs or different world views, because the "custom" of murdering women who are victims of rape is actually a cultural sickness, akin to cannibalism or child sacrifice (rather close to the latter, in fact).

And it's not cultural chauvenism to say with regard to these, "we are not going to allow you do practice this custom" which obviously is what the Turkish government is doing.

So in recognizing the truth that cultural relativism is wrong in some cases, we must remain open to the possibility that it is wrong in other cases. The point is not to be able to say, "ergo, football is superior to soccer," but perhaps to be able to say this ideology and others related to it, albeit widespread, are also a sickness that must be cured, without being accused of bigotry.

Ok, you can say "Well, Duh!" now if you like; but considering the whole issue leads to a plethora of slippery slopes. Wrong beliefs can be dangerous.

Posted by John Climacus at 04:55 | Permalink

Delivered from the Left, with increasing vigor:

Note to Democrats: it's not too late to draft someone—anyone—else

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...

...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.

[As we noted last week, Al Franken's living room needs to open again for business.]

From the Right - well, no surprises here of course, but the argument is compelling:

The problem is that the conventional wisdom hasn't taken a proper accounting of John Kerry. Here's the truth that Democrats don't want to admit and that Republicans are fearful of speaking openly because they don't want to jinx things:

Kerry is a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate...

Bush has had about as bad a time as he could have had these past two months, and he's not only still standing, but doing better than he was a month ago. And why? Because when he takes center stage, as he did in the press conference last week, he usually helps himself.

Not so for Kerry. To put it mildly....

Events over the past week suggest that Bush may win a substantial victory in November, and for this reason alone: Kerry's performance may seriously depress Democratic turnout. Or drive Democrats to vote for Ralph Nader, just as George Bush the Elder's performance in 1992 drove millions of Republicans to vote for Ross Perot.

Guys, you should have gone with John Edwards.

All that can be added to that is: SHHH!

If they had nominated Lieberman - a pretty fantastical if, I'll admit - he would have a double digit lead over Bush in the polls. Some in the middle America battleground may disagree with Bush, but there's no way in Peoria they'll relate to stories like this one:

On the Friday before his MEET THE PRESS appearance, Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry flew his Washington, DC hairdresser to Pittsburgh for a touch-up, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned...

A Kerry campaign spokesman refuses to clarify if Goetz flew by private jet on April 16 or on the official Kerry For President campaign plane.

The GOP couldn't have scripted this stuff any better.

Posted by John Climacus at 05:54 | Permalink

As indicated a week or two ago, we discern the outline of a new perspective on WMDs in Iraq taking shape.

WorldNetDaily has an update:

Key assertions by the intelligence community widely judged in the media and by critics of President Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all.

But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

In virtually every case -- chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles -- the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.

This will not make it into the mainstream headlines until the right photo op arises.

Posted by John Climacus at 05:05 | Permalink | Comments (1)

From the Syndey Morning Herald:

Iraq had chemical weapons and the means to deliver them ahead of last year's US-led invasion, Israel's military chief said in an interview published today.

Iraq may have transferred the weapons to Syria or buried them in desert sands, said Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, speaking a month after a parliamentary investigation criticised Israeli intelligence gathering on Iraq...

Yaalon, in tacit criticism of the US operation in Iraq, said he would have carried out searches in Iraq in a "different way than the Americans," but did not elaborate.

I think I can elaborate based on several interviews I saw at the time: Yaalon is saying that if he wanted to find the hidden weapons, he wouldn't necessarily have enlisted Iraqi's to escort him from one military base to another, and call that the search. To find HIDDEN weapons, one might have to assume they could be more creatively placed than at military depots.

Americans - we're a bunch of trusting ol' lugs, you have to hand us that.

Assuming the weapons were convoyed out of Iraq before the war, what might have happened to them? Say, wasn't this whole mess originally about proliferation of WMDs?

Jordan foiled an al-Qaeda chemical bomb plot against the intelligence services HQ to use trucks packed with 20 tonnes of explosives that could have killed as many as 80,000 people, security officials said today...

In a taped testimony, Jayussi gave an account of his first encounter with Zarqawi in Herat, Afghanistan, and later in Iraq, and told of how he was trained by his mentor on the use of "explosives and strong poisons".

Jayussi, wearing a blue shirt, appeared calm. His face was swollen, his thinning hair unkempt and he was unshaven. The index finger of his left hand was mutilated and he had a bloodied scratch on the other hand.

This fellow has been in custody for a few days and the entire plot seems to be exposed. Polite applause for our Jordanian friends, please.

On the other hand, we do have our ways of getting information, but they're more nuanced:

He doesn't have a lawyer in the room, but Saddam Hussein apparently is practicing what most attorneys would advise: Don't talk. Diplomatic and military officials say the former Iraqi leader has provided little useful information in interrogations so far — and may even be having fun.

Americans - we may be civilized, but you can't say we don't eventually get the information we need. Well, actually you probably can.

Posted by John Climacus at 05:20 | Permalink

I don't really have the spirit to jump in on this today, so I'll just observe that getting into public life is a decision to be made only after a long and serious investigation into one's own potential exposure. I don't think John Kerry did enough personal recon.

Posted by John Climacus at 12:38 | Permalink

You can almost hear the booming, sonorous, patrician voice of Jacques Kerry's internal monologue as he picks up the morning paper. Now we know why he does not want to release all of his military records. This story is not going away:

Vietnam combat records posted on John F. Kerry's campaign website for the month of January 1969 as evidence of his service aboard swift boat No. 94 describe action that occurred before Kerry was skipper of that craft, according to the officer who said he commanded the boat at the time.

Here's an interesting exercise: Let's peek in at the mainstream periodically over the next two days to see how long it takes them to start following this. They're going to have to eventually, but it's really gonna hurt. Here are the links:

Pseudo-news outlet #1

Pseudo-news outlet #2

Pseudo-news outlet #3

Pseudo-news outlet #4

Presumably this episode will be explained as a simple mistake in the paperwork. But the blood is already in the water. If there is anything else questionable to be found, it's probably going to be found between now and November.

In related news, once the sharks start to circle you know you're on the verge of witnessing a frenzy.

Does John Kerry, who supports higher automobile fuel economy standards, own a gas-guzzling SUV? He does, but says it belongs to the family, not to him...

Charles Krauthammer says what more and more people are going to be thinking:

Americans are a serious people, war is a serious business, and what John Kerry is offering is simply not serious. Americans may be unsure whether Bush has a plan for success in Iraq. But they sure as hell know that going to U.N. headquarters, visiting foreign capitals and promising lots of jaw-jaw is no plan at all.

We opined some time ago that an alternative candidate may have to be considered. Now, if I recall correctly, I have been wrong about a great many things, so I certainly may be wrong about this. But I'm guessing that some of those shadowy ideologists who grabbed hold of the reins in December and decided Howard Dean was NOT going to be the Democratic candidate, are at minimum getting nervous. (Read about it here, here, and here.)

We sure are hearing the word "presumptive" a lot as a qualifier for this candidate.

Posted by John Climacus at 04:47 | Permalink

Anyone risking their life for America's sake is a hero in my book. Pat Tillman qualifies as someone special because his life story is so improbable. Take your hat off:

Former NFL player Pat Tillman was killed Thursday while serving as an Army Special Forces soldier on a mission in southeastern Afghanistan, Pentagon officials have told CNN.

Tillman, who walked away from a $3.6 million contract as a safety with the Arizona Cardinals to join the military after the Sept. 11 attacks, was in an area where numerous U.S. troops have been killed in battles with suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Tillman was picked something like 230th in the 1998 NFL draft by the lowly Cardinals, and within a couple years had established himself as one of the premier defensive players in the league. When his rookie contract was completed the St. Louis Rams tried to lure him away with a big dollar offer, but he refused it, saying he would stick with the team that believed in him enough to take him in the draft.

After Sept. 11 he walked away from pro football for the Army Rangers, stating he'd had a comfortable life and wanted to pay someone back for it.

This just scratches the surface - there will be a great deal more in the news in the hours to come.

UPDATE: Via The Corner. Peggy Noonan wrote this in July, 2002 - Go read it.

Posted by John Climacus at 11:32 | Permalink

Some quick hits, on our ever changing world.

Joseph Farah - idealist:

It gives me no pleasure to make this prediction. While I believe Bush has been a failure as a president in many ways and cannot support him for re-election, I know Kerry will prove disastrous for the country.

Many people tell me I should support Bush for this reason alone.

I can't do that. I won't do that. I won't cast a vote for a candidate who doesn't really support the Constitution of the United States, even though he takes an oath to uphold it. I will not vote for a candidate for president who increased spending – not just defense spending, but all spending – so dramatically. I don't believe we'll ever get real political choices as Americans if we keep making the mistake of supporting the lesser of two evils.

Kerry is a dangerous man – and I think he's going to be the next president.

Howard Fineman - talkin' up the Bushwagon:

Why the race is looking good for Bush

...Too many of the commissioners ended up looking like they were pressing to prove that Bush could have and should have prevented the 9/11 catastrophe — a theory the public doesn’t buy. In fact, most Americans tend to blame the rise of terrorism here on the eight-year Clinton administration. Bush, without having to say much, was able to play the political victim....

Richard Cohen - talkin' up the Bushwagon (that is, as much as could be expected):

In the past month or so, everything has gone wrong for George W. Bush. He has been criticized at hearings of the Sept. 11 commission for being lackadaisical about terrorism. Richard Clarke accused him of being weirdly obsessed with Iraq. More than 100 Americans have been killed there in the past 30 days, and Bush was so inarticulate in his recent news conference that you could say he violated the standards of his own "No Child Left Behind" policy. Still, if this keeps up, he'll win reelection in a landslide.

John Kerry - Nailed?:

The military records that Sen. John Kerry posted on his Web site yesterday raise new questions about the actions he took to earn several prestigious war medals and whether he deserved them....

Though the campaign released more than 120 pages of Navy records yesterday, Mr. Kerry still refused to release medical records that more thoroughly describe the injuries.

Among the records that the campaign will not release is any explanation for the injuries that led to Mr. Kerry's first Purple Heart, less than a month after going into combat.

Teresa Heinz-Kerry - Running from the Nail:

So is it conceivable that she could be leveraging her wealth and influence on behalf of her husband's candidacy? Suppose, for example, that she gave money to a friendly fat cat's cause or charity. Would that fat cat be more inclined to give money to Kerry's campaign? Or would the fat cat be inspired to give to one of those mysterious "527" committees that lurk in the shadows of campaign-finance law?

Michael Moore - Nailed:

Cannes-bound Moore, the great protector of the U.S. working class, has outsourced the design of his Web site to a foreign company in Canada...

The U.N. - NAILED!

Al Qaeda - retooling:

The most disturbing discovery for the Americans and Israel was al Qaeda’s new division of labor revealed by the chemical bomb team. It showed the network had departed from the methods familiar to US, Jordanian and Israeli intelligence. The terrorists who drove the trucks across the border from Syria into Jordan were not suicide bombers. Their job was to deliver the trucks to the Iraqis in the villa, who would then drive them on to targets and blow them up. Asked where they got their orders, the Iraqis replied from Saudi Arabia.

Posted by John Climacus at 06:34 | Permalink

Found a new blog, via Lucianne. It includes some good links and seems like a place to visit regularly.

Iraq the Model:

I think I’ll have to skip celebrating my birthday this year, but that will not make me less determined than before, and I know that even if other countries pull out of Iraq, we will always have the strongest and greatest nation on our side, the wonderful people of the USA, together with the UK, Italy, Japan and the rest of the coalition forces. We owe you a lot and I pray, and I’m sure, that one day we will be able to return some of your favors and I’m talking about the people not the politicians although I don’t deny those the credit they deserve for doing their job as good as they can. When that day finally comes, you will know for sure that the great efforts and sacrifices you’ve made were not in vain.

I'm not sure that most Americans who have a direct stake in the situation - i.e. are risking their safety or have a loved one who is - view the risk of sacrifice as one they are taking primarily for the sake of the Iraqi people, although the sentiment expressed above is one you'd like to hear more of.

Posted by John Climacus at 06:42 | Permalink

Before getting all positive on you, which we neglected to do at all yesterday, we'll complete that post with a few more resources that may be of interest to apocalypse-nigh aficionados. Visit ye here, here and here. Unrelated to the topic of Islam in Christian eschatology, but an interesting compendium of historical efforts in the area of numerology (and sad witness to what takes place at the outer fringes of Too Much Time On Yo' Hands) is here.

Now, turning to the realm of things that should put a smile on your face:

Al Franken apparently has gotten his bad self into a waist-deep bucket o' lame, as reported by a self-described liberal journalist, demonstrating to my own great relief that the universe is indeed sane:

So at 6 a.m. on Good Friday — the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, the day after Condoleezza Rice testified before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks — I tuned in to 1580, turned on my computer to take notes and sat with both until 11 p.m.

It may have been the most boring day of my life...

...Conservatives turned talk radio into their medium in large measure because many people who considered themselves conservatives felt that their interests and their values were either ignored or denigrated by a liberal mainstream media. One recent poll showed that only 19% of the American public now identify themselves as liberal. That means that if a liberal network wants to be successful, politically or economically, it must also convert a significant number of the 39% of the public that the poll said considers itself moderate.

Good luck.

It's a delicious piece of prose, certainly one to save and savor.

If you watched aghast a couple months ago as the weasel brigade - on the heels of the Era of Clinton - attempted to paint W's military service as some kind of character issue, you'll be amused to see dat de chickens, dey be comin' home to roost. Comeuppance is hell, as poor Jacques is finding out:

The day after John F. Kerry said he would make all of his military records available for inspection at his campaign headquarters, a spokesman said the senator would not release any new documents, leaving undisclosed many of Kerry's evaluations by his Navy commanding officers, some medical records, and possibly other material.

Now, obviously Mssr. Kerry is not an idiot, IQ-wise: So why the self-destructive behavior? During the clamor over Bush's military attendance record, would it not have made sense for Kerry to say simply "I have no doubt George Bush completed his military obligation satisfactorily, and there is absolutely no reason he should be asked to disclose any more information than he disclosed before the 2000 election."? Now, as with his wife's tax returns, regardless of what the records contain there will be a high degree of scrutiny until absolutely everything is made public.

Instead, although remaining largely above the fray, Kerry did make the slightly pointed comment equating National Guard service with "going to Canada, going to jail, being a conscientious objector." Certainly, he did little to quell the demands that Bush prove he hadn't been "AWOL."

Shouldn't Kerry have seen this coming? My take on it is, 1). IQ is overrated as a measure of overall intelligence. In fact, I would argue that some folks with native intelligence get the idea early on in life that looking smart is the same as being smart. Learning the right public persona, forms of speech, ideologies, etc. and generally patterning oneself after publicly-renowned Smart Guys is viewed as the route to actually becoming a smart guy. This leads to an inability to think for oneself and a general intellectual laziness, disinclined to question one's own assumptions and affiliations.

2). Related to the above is a susceptibility to fashionable thinking, to the extent that one can get so caught up in the progression of a public argument that the initial premises are unexamined. The idea that Bush was keeping a secret caught on; as critics fed the flames Kerry stood back and enjoyed the growing conflageration without realizing, "Hey, I've got secrets of my own and I might end up in a bonfire just like that one."

That's my interpretation, anyway. I think there are many in the Democratic party who are decent people but need to spend more time thinking for themselves. Stepping outside the fashionable flow and questioning one's own sacred cows can be liberating and allow a clearer view of reality.

Posted by John Climacus at 01:44 | Permalink

From a Fox News story one night last week:

Graduation from a madrasa in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, requires memorization of 6,666 verses from the Quran, the Muslim holy book, and some say these strict teachings are fanning the flames of terrorism.

There are anywhere between 10,000 and 70,000 such schools in Pakistan...

There is no furniture here; no pencils, computers or magazines. Science, math and English aren't taught ... a world with its own rules behind a wire cage, rules made by the mullahs, not regulated by the state...

It is a world where Usama bin Laden is openly proclaimed to be a hero by the men in charge.

I saw the story - spooky to watch these kids chanting, especially when you consider the numbers involved...even more especially when you consider the worldwide demographic trends which don't tend to favor the West.

But you don't have to fly to exotic places if you want to get in on this program - it's right off Exit 10 and it sure 'nuff delivers the goods from the old country:

The students will be expected to memorize the Koran, all 6,666 verses of it, as part of their studies. In an airy, peaceful room at the top of the mosque, Imam Hafiz-Qari Abdul Basit oversees approximately 15 boys who are learning the sacred text by heart.

Basit himself memorized the Koran at the age of nine. His very name signifies his knowledge; "Hefiz" means a person who memorized the entire book, and "Qari" means that he can pronounce all the words accurately.

Before coming to Piscataway last year, Basit served as prayer leader at the King Fasal Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan, the largest mosque in Asia.

Of course, we have religious freedom in these parts and my personal opinion is that market forces, so to speak, should prevail. Yet the dogmatic anti-liberal-education, or maybe anti-modernism is more accurate - anyway, whatever you want to call the academic approach that has relegated nearly every Islamic-majority society to the back seat in the social and economic progress bus - seems like something you'd want to keep an eye on, religious liberty aside. It's not one of the features you'd ask for if you had the opportunity to choose the culture that will numerically overshadow your own in 50 years.

And just as a matter of interest, that "6666" figure was an attention-getter. As a sort of hobby, I once spent several years conducting my own "inquisition" - ha ha - into the varieties of anti-Catholic zealotry, and the apocalyptic aspect of it has many, many, many, many fascinating variations. And they're not all obscure freaks, either.

I'm betting, at the moment that particular number was stated, premillenialists the world over spewed their collective coffee all over their collective living room carpets, and went lickety-split up to the study to conduct a fresh exegesis of Daniel and Revelation.

Within Christianity - in the sense of the overall "Christian" community - needless to say you will find here and there no shortage of critical things said about Islam in the sense of inter-faith rivalry and apologetics. Since September 11, there are a number who have started to make the case that, when the real Bad Guy comes on the scene, he'll probably be sporting a beard.

If you happen to be one of those fellows who can't get a decent night's sleep while Antichrist remains unidentified, I'll try and give a little nudge in what may prove to be a helpful direction, with a few more links here, here, here and here. Stay tuned: I suspect we'll be hearing more on this topic in the coming months.

Posted by John Climacus at 06:33 | Permalink

It's so widely recognized that it's a truism, but to make a related point I'm going to state it anyway: People vote according to their interests. To go a step further, we all vote for particular condidates because in a sense we believe we will "get" something as a result of the candidate's election. What we get may be material, such as less taxes taken from our income, new facilities of some type or expansion of a government program that benefits us. It may be emotional, in that the candidate projects trustworthiness and likeability. It may be ideological, such as government sanction of a position we support, or steps taken toward actualizing a specific social or cultural concept. It may be egocentric, in the sense of seeking validation of one's allegiences and past statements. And of course it is often a combination of these, such as "I am voting for the good guy, Candidate X, because he supports School of Thought Y, which as I've always said is the only one that knows how to create more jobs in this country."

[There are, needless to say, other less rational possible motivations for how one votes, such as family tradition or because one is a directionless idiot of some kind, but I am going to leave aside discussion of these because I am assuming the airheads are relatively few. We can also leave aside the point that some people may vote a certain way as a result of being gullible or misled, because these are things for an objective observer to say about the voter, and the focus here is rather on personal or subjective motivations.]

From a macro perspective, the old adage about voting with our pocketbooks probably still holds true, because from a numbers perspective a candidate is unlikely to be elected if a majority of his or her constituents truly believes they will become destitute as a result. The days are long past when you could just hold your pocketbook open and vote for the candidate who drops in the most cash, but the slightly less direct payoff in terms of preservation of the economic status quo, tax relief, job creation and the various entitlement programs can be forthrightly stated as our reason for voting a given way and we're unlikely to draw much attention. Nobody's going to jump up and salute you, but voting according to one's economic interests is a proud tradition wherever people are allowed to vote. (Ok, ok - I realize tax relief is technically very different from entitlements because it was our money in the first place, but that's not the issue here and it would make my argument even more tedius to be more specific. Please bear with me just a little longer).

As we move up in economic status, we are more likely to have the luxury of voting ideologically. I'm using the term very generically here, to mean simply "in the realm of ideas," so it encompasses national security and conservatism and liberalism and abortion rights and all the other philosophies and causes. In fact, as we get way up the socioeconomic scale, there is a tendency to profess purely ideological motivation. "For the good of the community," or "because morality demands it" or in the many ways we express concern for the OTHER guy's pocketbook. It is, in fact, considered somewhat base for the wealthy to vote according to their economic interests, so the only rationales you are likely to hear are those aimed toward some greater good.

What is interesting to observe is when the professed ideological motivation turns out to be a subterfuge for another ideological interest, and further, when it is revealed to be an outright lie. On the former, we can first look at another scenario which is by now generally recognized as a truism: claiming to be motivated by concern for others in supporting a greater reach for government, when what is really desired is simply expanded government power. The Left takes this tack because as a rule they believe they know what is best for everyone else - especially for the unwashed multitudes - and they want to control the wheels of government to further their own intellectually elevated goals. This ideological subterfuge is most frequently revealed in the elites of culture and politics who vociferously support efforts to keep the children of plebians in public schools, while they themselves would never for a second consider sending their own children to such schools. But there are many other examples, from the limousine liberals who want to legislate the rest of us onto buses and bicycles, to the opponents of "tax breaks for the rich" whose huge personal wealth will be relatively untouched by a tax rate increase that would be punitive on a "rich" family earning $150,000 a year. In every case the government is a tool for properly organizing the lives of those who are too stupid or greedy to do so themselves.

But this is hardly a revelation, and you are now permitted to yawn.

More interesting and quite revealing is the case where the rich leftist advocates for people and policies on ostensibly altruistic grounds, when in fact the goal is just to get richer. Some unsurprising cases in point are outed in the recent WorldNetDaily. It seems some noted elites have more to gain from a John Kerry victory in November than mere ideological triumph. Take Warren Buffet and George Soros, who from a position of "Responsible Wealth," despite their fortunes, are willing to suck it up and support keeping the estate tax and imposing global taxes to support struggling economies:

Buffett, for instance, has businesses that actually profit from the existence of the estate tax.

Soros...is a currency trader, with reported vast holdings in unstable financial markets. He has taken a beating in the last few years on his positions in the Russian ruble. Coincidentally or not, Soros advocates global taxes to strengthen institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to bail out unstable governments facing currency crises.

This illuminating article unveils a fascinating web of hypocrisy that should receive as much attention over the next month as Mrs. Kerry-Heinz's refusal to release her tax information, which seems to promise a smorgasborg of very dirty little secrets. In each case there are lies and ideological bait-and-switch to be uncovered.

For us, there is not only the matter of getting at the truth; there is also the entertainment value in seeing the grand and self-righteous exposed as petty and base. Being all about money is one thing, and not particularly revered. Being for a cause is considered more enlightened. But being for a cause that's found to be masquerading for a less noble cause is pretty low, and when your cause is just a front for getting money - well, even the great unwashed can see that you've sunk about as low as a man can go.

Posted by John Climacus at 12:45 | Permalink

There is a dawning realization that the U.S. style of military confrontation needs fine tuning, along the following lines: Don't assume the war has ended until the enemy has said "uncle", loudly, multiple times, and only then do you take the boot off his neck.

Good articles, noting "it's the war, stupid", are here, here, and most importantly here.

Being civilized, basically gentle folk, we like to assume that most everyone else, including those wanting to kill us, are the same. Give them a whipping, then cut them some slack, and pretty soon we'll all be hugging and sharing a cold one. See, Americans are basically nice. Unfortunately, while true, that assumption leads to a position of erring on the side of decency and over-cautiousness in responding to threats. Wait several days to address the vicious murders of four citizens and you look weak. This will turn around.

Posted by John Climacus at 06:18 | Permalink

We used to consider ourselves Ann-Coulter-Republicans, then Michelle-Malkin-Republicans, but I am going to pull rank here and declare that we at Joe's Original Alpaca Burger Corporate Headquarters are henceforth Condi-Rice-Republicans. Mr. Cheney, if you feel in any way moved to reconsider your role for the next four years, and the pitiful lack of fishing you'd be doing as Vice President Cheney, I just want to say there's more to life than putting on a suit seven days a week.

Before turning to Condi's day in the sun, some pointers on ideology from Victor Davis Hanson. This excellent set of unmaskings comes in the context of a debate at FrontPageMag.com. Hanson is pitted against some clever leftists, and his skillful responses in this lengthy piece are worth reading carefully. This snippet is a response to an anti-American Arab who has done quite well for himself since getting his own little piece of the American dream:

And why is it that so many intellectuals who migrate from the Arab world to the United States and the West are so angry with host governments that have alone accorded them rights and protections unknown anywhere in the Arab world? Surely a fraction of invective about the present administration might be diverted to efforts at grass roots reform abroad rather than parlor talk here. A Jefferson or Washington did not stay in England to whine to the King about his support of Tories, but sought to match rhetoric with real democratic action.

And to make the weekend doubleplusgood for you, here's VDH on the Sept. 11 "Commission" in NRO:

Now, in the middle of this terrible conflict, unlike the postbellum inquiry after Pearl Harbor, we are holding acrimonious hearings about culpability for September 11. And here the story gets even more depressing than just political opportunism and election-year timing. After eight years of appeasement that saw repeated attacks on Americans, Pakistani acquisition of nuclear weapons under Dr. Khan, and Osama's 1998 declaration of war against every American, we are suddenly grilling, of all people, Condoleezza Rice — one of the few key advisers most to be credited for insisting on using our military, rather than the local DA, to defeat these fanatics.

This basic story, which Osama must be getting a good chuckle out of, is becoming ubiquitous, but some further points worth reading are made by Clifford May.

Now, if you watched the testimony, you already know that Condi did really well, and Richard Ben-Veniste had a Trent Lott/Howard Dean moment and we can only hope he will never be heard from in a public forum again. Omarosa is no longer at the top of America's "Never Ever Hire This Person" list.

So today comes more news in the Democrats Say 'D'OH!' category, which I first saw in this reference from WND. Condi Rice gets some unexpected support from Democratic Senator Bob Graham from his May 27, 2002 interview with Human Events magazine:

Graham added that threats of hijacking in an August 6 memo to President Bush were based on very old intelligence that the committee had seen earlier. "The particular report that was in the President's Daily Briefing that day was about three years old," Graham said. "It was not a contemporary piece of information."

While we're on the topic of who knew what when, Human Events rings out with a clarion call that should serve as a central theme for the 2004 elections:

Did our national leadership respond too slowly to the threat of al Qaeda? Absolutely. But given what we now know that President Bush did do before 9/11 (as compared to what President Clinton did in his 8 years in office), it is also true that American voters acted too slowly to elect a President decisive enough to take the steps needed to kill the threat.

You're not going to hear about this from the network news, but the WMD issue continues to simmer. As we noted the other day, sumthin's up with them inspector dudes. They have not been able to interview many of the key players from Saddam's weapons programs, because the ones they talk to keep turning up dead. So how come the conclusion 'we were all wrong'? Maybe there's still some of that oil-for-food cash floating around? Well, not everyone is willing to ignore the obvious. Here, a Republican stands atop the ideological morass, yelling 'Stop':

"I want the world to be informed that these individuals are being assassinated, and it's not because they have a new cooking recipe," said Rep. Steve Buyer, Indiana Republican and chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs oversight and investigations subcommittee

Like Mr. Buyer, U.S. officials are wondering why Saddam loyalists are killing his weapons scientists if the Iraqi dictator did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

And more on this from The Washington Times:

The bloodshed has had a chilling effect on Iraqi scientists. Fearing they might be targeted, at least 50 have fled the country. Many others have refused to cooperate with coalition authorities. Mr. Deulfer said he was struck by the "extreme reluctance of Iraqi managers, scientists and engineers to speak freely."

Ok time for the good news portion of our report. First, go read Austin Bay, as he tells what happens when Fallujah Islamo-fascists Meet The Marines.

Now, go enjoy Wes Pruden in full Whap! mode, Here's a sample:

You can't help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the doofuses, who all winter had been getting a little help from their friends in the elite media in search of bits and pieces of bad news to produce an unvarying tone of gloomy mood music to go with a manufactured landscape of deep shade and dark shadow. Why wouldn't the public-opinion polls suggest that half the American public think the country is mired in recession?

...What has actually happened is that the economic markers have surpassed those set during the second Clinton term, which usually is presented as the greatest four years in the history of the republic. The stock markets, which went south with the pricking of the dot.com boom, have grown by a little more than a third since the peak set in 2000 and, taken together with surging home prices, have set a record for family net worth. The stunning jobs growth in March marks the seventh consecutive month of jobs gains, with 61 percent of American factories showing payroll expansion. This, too, is the highest percentage since July 2000.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Posted by John Climacus at 06:49 | Permalink

Just a few morning notes before Condi goes on.

You may or may not recall last year's discussion in various places of a possible U.S. "flypaper" strategy in Iraq, the idea being that it's better to get all the bad guys together in a place such as Mesopotamia and let our forces fight them there, than to have them making their way to Europe and the U.S. Whether intentional on the part of U.S. military strategists or not, that seems to be what is happening, and now there is further confirmation in today's news that "Palestinian fedayeen fighters have joined the ranks of the rebel Mahdi Army militia in recent days".

If you need an eye-opener today, or just have an interest in end-of-civilization-related discussion, you'll probably get a nice jolt from Arnold de Borchgrave's trenchant look at 'fifth columns' here and abroad (although if his figures are correct these would be more properly called simply 'rising political entities'):

In the Netherlands, Muslims are a majority among children under 14 in the country's four largest cities. Rotterdam, a port city where half the people are of foreign origin, will soon unveil Europe's largest mosque. In Brussels, the capital of the European Union, Muhammad has been the name most frequently given for newborn baby boys. Osama is a close second....

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) stubbornly refuses to concede that there are several thousand American Muslims — out of 6 million — who applaud the events of September 11, 2001, and firmly believe the U.S. is the fount of all global evil. Some 400 are currently being monitored 24/7 by the FBI....

And if you don't care about CAIR, take my word for it, you really should if you live in the U.S. If your great-grandaughter grows up illiterate and wearing a burka, the history books will report CAIR as one of the prime movers of that cultural tradition in America. Learn much more here and here (and if you've got some spare change there are probably worse ways you could use it than to send some to these guys because they're probably going to need it.)

On a related note, check out this report on the British press coverage of the 'Mosque hit' by U.S. forces in Fallujah. Idiotic major media serving as unwitting provocateur to terrorists is not particularly surprising, but it does lead to the interesting notion that they could do precisely the opposite if they so desired: The press could play a huge role in demoralizing whatever 'fifth column' may exist here simply by putting a particular spin on the news. Some samples might be "Islamic governments admit economic incompetence" or "Terror master: 'We cannot defeat modern military forces'" or "Study: Link found between Wahabbism, homosexuality". Heck, why not? There's so much blather out there masquerading as news that some good, earnest yellow journalism wouldn't sully the whole any more than a speck of dust on an ocean liner. And think of the good it could do. But, alas, the media are occupied making other points, some of them laughably dumb, some just plain corrupt.

Hey, you want dumb? I'll show you dumb (and just a little bit pathetic, if you happen to be either a Democrat or a U.S. soldier):

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on Wednesday called the situation in Iraq "one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life."

"Where are the people with the flowers, throwing them in the streets, welcoming the American liberators the way Dick Cheney said they would be?" Kerry said in an interview with American Urban Radio Networks.

But the wackiness does not end there. Tell Jacques he's on the radio and his weenie-muse kicks in:

In an interview broadcast Wednesday morning, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry defended terrorist Shiite imam Muqtada al-Sadr as a "legitimate voice" in Iraq, despite that fact that he's led an uprising that has killed nearly 20 American GIs in the last two days.

Speaking of al-Sadr's newspaper, which was shut down by coalition forces last week after it urged violence against U.S. troops, Kerry complained to National Public Radio, "They shut a newspaper that belongs to a legitimate voice in Iraq."

It's been said here before and it will be said many times again: Al Qaeda for John Kerry!.

To end on a positive note, which you may notice has been instituted as a semi-priority since our recent sabbatical ended, I'll ask you to go read this story about the one part of Iraq that is not a bloody mess, and the people who have made it that way.

Posted by John Climacus at 09:53 | Permalink

This is looking like it has the seeds of a civil war in it:

In the last 24 hours, Shiite radicals of Baghdad and southern Iraq have gone on the warpath, vying with the Sunni Triangle’s al Qaeda and Baathist guerrillas in anti-US violence. One year after ending the combat phase of the Iraq war, the US-led coalition finds itself fighting therefore on the two fronts....

In the first hours of what looks like evolving into the second Iraq war, it is impossible to predict how the combat will develop or where the coalition and the radical Shiites are heading. The fact that the US Iraq command decided despite the Shiite flareup to go ahead with Operation Vigilant Resolve in the Sunni Triangle to avenge the Fallujah lynching of four Americans and attack that killed 5 US marines Wednesday, March 31, indicates that the United States is determined both to fight the Sunnis and to clamp a tight lid down on the Shiite threat to kindle the flames of civil war.

The big question is: why did the Bush administration and US command fail to heed the operational bond developing for ten months between Iran, Syria and the Hizballah and the deployment of one of the world’s most vicious troublemakers, Imad Mughniyeh, in Shiite Iraq last fall? The transfer of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to Syria between January 10 to March 10 2003 was ignored in the same way with unfortunate consequences.

Big picture thinking, once again, escapes the U.S. government. Or would it be more accurate to say they are extraordinarily scrupulous about passing out blame.

Little Green Footballs passes along an even more ominous development, from the Iraqi blogger Zeyad. It is reportedly hitting the fan in four Baghdad neighborhoods.

Jonah Goldberg, however, says Whoa, Nellie! Let's not jump to conclusions.

Well, I'm not going to believe anything until I hear it from Fox News. (and at this moment there's nothing there yet)...

....That is, unless it shows up on Sky News first, which is reporting the possibility of something grim.

Posted by John Climacus at 07:15 | Permalink

The cautious-to-a-fault communication deficiencies in the Bush White House are truly stunning, but on top of that there seems to be an ideological maelstrom blanketing the entirety of American popular culture. True facts are not getting out, and what is getting out is Orwellian-scary and fun-house-weird. Today's post is meant to help remedy this situation.

WMDs in Iraq: The American Thinker has a fascinating article, by Douglas Hanson - who "was a US Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and is a Gulf War I combat veteran. He was an Atomic Demolitions Munitions (ADM) Security Officer, and a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Officer" - raising serious questions about what is going on with the Iraq Survey Group.

One of the reported incidents occurred near Karbala where there appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area of 55-gallon drums of pesticide. In addition, there was also a camouflaged bunker complex full of these drums that some people entered 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 nerve agent. A full day of tests on the drums resulted in one positive for nerve agent, and then one resulted in a negative. Later, an Army Fox NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] Recon Vehicle confirmed the existence of Sarin. An officer from the 63d Chemical Company thought there might well be chemical weapons at the site.

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 non-existence. 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 six feet underground. The "agricultural site" was also co-located with a military ammunition dump, evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.

Another find occurred around the northern Iraqi town of Bai’ji, where elements of the 4th Infantry Division (Mech) discovered 55-gallon drums of a substance that mass spectrometer testing confirmed was cyclosarin and an unspecified blister agent. A mobile laboratory was also found nearby that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. And only yards away, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, as well as gas masks were found. Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up. It seems that Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping their ammo dumps insect-free...

Hanson provides a great deal of additional insight and disturbing facts, so please go read it. This ISG deal is really baffling. What is going on with these guys?

Fallujah: Understanding the enemy is a slow, sort of evolving process, apparently. Tammy Bruce says it is now time to raze Fallujah:

I’ll remind you of what it took to quell the beasts of Germany and Japan in 1945: complete and total destruction. There was a reason why we bombed Dresden into oblivion. There was a reason why Berlin was not saved. There was a reason why two atomic bombs had to be dropped on Japan after Hiroshima: they still refused to surrender unconditionally.

Beasts of violence and destruction understand one thing: destruction. The media, of course, are comparing the Fallujah horror with Mogadishu. Almost with gleeful hysteria, the Left and their water boys, the mainstream media, seem desperate to cast this as Mogadishu. Why? To make George W. Bush look bad, that’s why. Because they revel in horror. Because they need Americans to be just like them. We must see a pit like Fallujah as Saddam's last bunker. The time for political correctness, worry about inflaming the situation, and restraint, are over. This is war. The people of Fallujah have decided to continue the war, so it should indeed be visited upon them with no mercy.

Lee Harris has a slightly more depressing take, but one well worth absorbing and contemplating:

Fallujah should spell the end of the neo-conservative fantasy that all human beings want the same things. It should awake the Bush administration from its dream that what the Arab street really needs is democracy. Fallujah represents the end of the road for that kind of thinking and that kind of talk.

I think the fact of the matter is there are still plenty of sick-minded lowlifes in Iraq. Saddam Hussein did not preside over such a monstrous dictatorship for so long because EVERYONE lived in fear of him and his sons. Chesterton once said that in any society, 20 men can overcome even the strongest tyrant. There had to be a significant Baathist body politic beyond Saddam's family for the former regime to maintain control.

But in the run up to the war, there was in the news coverage and probably in the minds of many of us an assumption that once we killed the head, the body would die off quickly, Saddam's henchmen would return home to their farms moist-eyed, and the 99% of the population living in fear would rise up to thank us. Well, the government body did die pretty quickly, but that 99% figure deserves some consideration. If the let's-put-'em-through-the-plastic-shredder demographic was only 1% of the population, that's 200,000+ ungrateful bastards living amongst the remainder of the population welcoming our soldiers as heroes. If the bad guys and the beneficiaries of the old regime were a larger percentage of the population, as is likely the case, well, the situation is going to stay ugly for a while.

Having said that, we turn to the Left's interpetation of events. This was a post by Daily Kos after the Fallujah outrage:

Every death should be on the front page

Let the people see what war is like. This isn't an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush's folly.

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

by kos on Thu Apr 1st, 2004 at 15:08:56 GMT

You can't find it on his site anymore, because there is now a semi-semi-retraction:

My language was harsh, and, in reality, not true. Fact is, I did feel something. That's why I was so angry.

I was angry that five soldiers -- the real heroes in my mind -- were killed the same day and got far lower billing in the newscasts. I was angry that 51 American soldiers paid the ultimate price for Bush's folly in Iraq in March alone. I was angry that these mercenaries make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month. I was angry that the US is funding private armies, paying them $30,000 per soldier, per month, while the Bush administration tries to cut our soldiers' hazard pay. I was angry that these mercenaries would leave their wives and children behind to enter a war zone on their own violition.

Yes, "Kos" is an idiot on whom we normally should not waste even the slightest mental energy, but there is a useful perspective to be gained from the above. I'm not going to get into the issue of why the government pays for mercenaries versus what U.S. soldiers earn, or what the mercenaries are doing there, or what has been done in past wars, because I have no idea and for now do not really care. The interesting point is that this twisted fellow is missing the sheer horror of what the bad guys did to these Americans. WHAT THE BAD GUYS DID. No sympathy for the dead, and the mob of barbarians is viewed as some kind of value-neutral fact of nature, a given, in the situation which Bush has foolishly led America into.

And his conclusion seems to be, better that America had left people like this running the country. War is horrible, therefore never is war justified. This is a vivid, unedited, certainly unintended exemplification of the total hypocrisy of the modern Left. While professing to advocate for humanitarian goals, they reflexively turn a blind eye to - if not outright support - the most odious regime if it furthers their current political aims. They will turn a blind eye to - if not outright support - the most universally recognized wickedness if by doing so they can score points against President Bush. Their anger at Bush has completely supplanted their own humanity.

Lileks does a much better job than I at smashing the clay feet of the false ideology:

Is the world angry at Russia, which spends nothing on AIDS and rebuffed Kyoto? Is the world angry at China, which got a pass on Kyoto and spends nothing on AIDS for other countries?

Is the world angry at North Korea for killings its people? Angry at Iran for smothering that vibrant nation with corrupt and thuggish mullocracy? Angry at Syria for occupying Lebanon? Angry at Saudi Arabia for its denial of women’s rights? Angry at Russia for corrupt elections... Is the world angry at the thugs of Fallujah?

But even if you admit that the world is angry at America - so angry that the poorest of them can’t wait to come here and stake a claim – you have to stand in awe at the sheer political idiocy of Kerry’s conclusion. Boiled down:

There are countless numbers of things that we could be do minimize the kind of anger and ... almost recruitment that has taken place in terrorist organizations as a result of the way the administration has behaved.

"It's all about what we have done to make them angry, because if we had been more flexible and treated them better they would never have done anything bad to us in the first place - truth being relative, human nature being essentially good, and America and Israel being essentially bad." These are the central lies in the ideology.

"Bush must go down." This is the emotional wellspring.

In the further interest of unmasking lies, we turn to an excellent capsule summary of the events leading to 9-11 by Ann Coulter which you should go read right now. Here's the conclusion:

On Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush had been in office for barely seven months, 3,000 Americans were murdered in a savage terrorist attack on U.S. soil by Muslim extremists.

Since then, Bush has won two wars against countries that harbored Muslim fanatics, captured Saddam Hussein, immobilized Osama bin Laden, destroyed al-Qaida's base, and begun to create the only functioning democracy in the Middle East other than Israel. Democrats opposed it all -- except their phony support for war with Afghanistan, which they immediately complained about and said would be a Vietnam quagmire. And now they claim to be outraged that in the months before 9-11, Bush did not do everything Democrats opposed doing after 9-11.

What a surprise.

Finally, in reference to our note yesterday about the poor jobs situation providing the lone issue on which the Democrats could argue against Bush with any type of cogency...it looks like we're gonna have to take that one back. First, there's this interesting perspective from Bloomberg:

The movement of U.S. jobs abroad "has been blown out of proportion" mainly because domestic companies in the United States have been slow to increase hiring, said Martin Baily, chairman of former President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. "There was lots of offshoring going on in the 1990s, but job growth was so strong in the U.S. that nobody really took much notice."

While reliable figures aren't available for the last two years, the Commerce Department estimated on March 18 that the number of Americans employed by U.S. affiliates of majority non-U.S. companies grew by 4.7 million from 1997 through 2001. In the same period, the number of non-Americans working at affiliates of majority-U.S. companies abroad rose by 2.8 million.

The creation of jobs outside the United States by American companies hasn't played a significant role in the current "jobless recovery," said Baily...

But the big news is this:

Economy Adds 308,000 Jobs in March

U.S. employment rose last month at the fastest pace in nearly four years as hiring jumped in a wide array of industries, the government said on Friday in a surprisingly strong report that stunned financial markets.

There was other good economic news today as well. The interesting thing to watch now is, should the economy really continue to improve, in what ways the big-lie ideology is amended to address it. We'll be following this pretty closely, although if the best they can offer is this kind of inanity, we won't be following it for very long.

Kerry: That's why I've proposed a strategy that revitalizes our manufacturing sector and puts us on track to create 10 million new jobs in the next four years.

I'm sorry, but if I'm going to analyze a piece of propaganda I require a certain level of creativity, some devious ingenuity in the truth-bending and myth-weaving, or it's really just not worth my time.

Posted by John Climacus at 08:02 | Permalink

These are tough times to be a Democrat. It's difficult to argue persuasively against the Bush administration on any issue save for the loss of American jobs during the Bush presidency. Now, this is a real issue, and Bush better address it candidly and consistently in his public communications, but the fact is those manufacturing jobs are never coming back to the U.S. no matter who is in the White House and everyone knows this. If you're an advocate on the Democratic side you can push this issue to the forefront of the debate but you can't talk about it for very long because no one has a clue what it's going to take to turn around the anemic job growth. The only generally agreed upon solid policy is exactly what Bush is doing - keep trade free, cut taxes on small business and try to extend them into the future to create incentives for companies to expand - but of course no Democrat can say that at this time.

The Democratic leadership is thus at a bit of a disadvantage rhetorically. This is where the chimera-proxies come in, third-party-type individuals and organizations taking potshots at the Bush administration from angles that might be difficult to pull off from within the Party. The problem here is, so far the proxies have all turned out to be major lamers.

Oh, of course the Democrats still have the network news/celebrity/mainstream press/higher education-industrial complex working for them. But its influence is waning, big time.

Chimera-proxy Paul O'Neill: Well, his credibility issues are old news, and he's in a wee bit of trouble, still. Upshot: No lasting impact on the president. D'oh!

Chimera-proxy Richard Clarke: Came out of the gate with a bang, then began to stumble. Now he's in free fall and Bush's ratings in the polls have actually improved.

Richard Miniter, who interviewed Clarke extensively and had considered him a "hero", has a brutal piece in today's Opinion Journal

There is other evidence of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda that Mr. Clarke should have felt obliged to address. Just days before Mr. Clarke resigned, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations that bin Laden had met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization. In 1998, an aide to Saddam's son Uday defected and repeatedly told reporters that Iraq funded al Qaeda. South of Baghdad, satellite photos pinpointed a Boeing 707 parked at a camp where terrorists learned to take over planes. When U.S. forces captured the camp, its commander confirmed that al Qaeda had trained there as early as 1997. Mr. Clarke does not take up any of this.

At least he'll get some stardom out of the deal.

Double d'oh!!

Chimera-proxy Air America: Despite having Al 'radio god' Franken at the helm, the third member of the Axis of Lame seems destined to be another letdown. Preaching to the choir in six - COUNT'EM, SIX -largely Democratic urban markets? In a genre that is hardly under-represented in the media already?

D'OH!

We'll close discussion of this sad situation with an excerpt from a damn reassuring story by Ron Rosenbaum, saying goodbye to the Left:

Goodbye to a culture of blindness that tolerates, as part of "peace marches," women wearing suicide-bomber belts as bikinis. (See the accompanying photo of the "peace" march in Madrid. "Peace" somehow doesn’t exclude blowing up Jewish children.)

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

Goodbye to paralysis by moral equivalence: Remind me again, was it John Ashcroft or Fidel Castro who put H.I.V. sufferers in concentration camps?

This should be required reading for all the good folks still under the spell of the weasel wing of the Democratic Party.

Posted by John Climacus at 04:06 | Permalink