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July 01, 2004
Saddam Hussein Praises Michael Moore's Palme d'Or-winning "Fahrenheit 9/11"
"This is all a theater; the real criminal is Bush. I give this film two culturally-specific fingers up!"
----------------------------------
Evolution of a soundbite:
At noon, the NYT reported the quote as "This is all a theater; the real criminal is Bush," and attributed its citation to a video report filed by Christiane Amanpour.
By 3:30 PM, this changed to "Everyone knows that this is a theatrical comedy by Bush, the criminal, in an attempt to win the election."
The BBC reports it as "The real villain is Bush."
Eventually, though, the "Fahrenheit 9/11" endorsement will come out.
After all, I mentioned Hussein and Moore in the same sentence, which means that there must be a connection between the two.
It's also interesting to note Hussein's reported response to the judge when charged with invading Kuwait: "I am surprised that you charged me with this, being that you are Iraqi and everyone knows Kuwait is part of Iraq."
We can blame European colonial cartography for that particular belief...and all of its consequences.
July 04, 2004
Every American has read the following declaration. We are all exposed to these words. How well we remember them depends, perhaps, on how interested we were in history when this document first came our way.
It is this declaration's civilized, reasonable statement of principle, and its firm announcement of the objectionable facts of oppression, that continues to define Americans not by blood or soil, but by an interconnected set of ideals that form a philosophy of life and governance. It is here that who we are as a people is spelled out, premise by premise. And it is the deliberate, methodical intent displayed here that sets these words and sentences apart and makes them powerful.
Today, we are besieged by the unreasonable arguments of those who mistake emotion for cognition, those who confuse the ideal of the destination with the struggle of the journey, and those who believe that the ability to recognize irony represents perceptive intelligence.
Appeal to base emotion makes for poor argument and poorer government. Perfect justice is reserved for the City of God, not for this Earth. And the ironies inherent in the activities undertaken in the name of the American experiment do not contradict the principles of its founding, but only serve to emphasize their enduring truth.
Today, on this day, read these words again. All of them. It won't take long.
---
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
---
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton
July 06, 2004
Today I am sick of:
Received wisdom.
Sick of my own, of course. But I'm especially sick of other people's. And most particularly extra-super-especially sick other people who repeat other people's as though it was their own.
It occurs to me, as I sit here overhearing a member of the Committed Left regurgitate the List Of Why The War In Iraq Was A Bad Idea into the lap of a hapless Asian with a moderate command of English, that some people's minds are nothing more than intricate cut-and-paste multimedia devices. Snippets of ideas and phrases and visual argument flow in through the eyes and ears and are jumbled around into some sort of vaguely coherent structure which in turn generates a mishmash of output that is judged based on the level of social discomfort caused by its release into the world.
Forget the output's nearness to Truth, and don't judge the potential of this or that string of premises to approach the Truth. Does saying it make you feel good? Does it make ya feel righteous? Say it with me now, Saints! Yayus! Can ya feel the love of your fellow travelers? Can ya get a pat on yer political back when ya stand up to the stupidest members of the opposition? Can ya build up yer moral self-worth by turnin' yer ideas into the default standard of human decency? Can ya banish that knot of despair in yer gut by callin' out in time with Those Who Think Like You? Can ya feel th' powuh, can ya get down with it, can ya convince yerself that ya've got it allll down, that ya've got the lock on truth, that ya know how it is? Yay-us! Then come on down, come on down to the pulpit-ah, and accept the Ideology into your hearts and minds-uh, it's waiting for ya, it's here for ya, it wants to heal you of your uncertainty, it wants to make ya into a great sack of credulous meme-breeding pseudo-intellectual protoplasm!
There is, quite simply, no escape. We've reached critical mass in this country, where Those Who Are In Charge Of Ideas and The Rest Of Us have achieved a near-polar opposition. Those Who Are In Charge Of Ideas have a monopoly on the tools of idea propagation--the media is a vast substrate for the promotion of a certain set of concepts, and the universities are, likewise, an agar hostile to the growth of any dissimilar set. The mind of the People is weak and abused and ready for infection, battered into pustulent submission by imagery that passes for thought and rhetoric that passes for argument.
While we lie in bed smeared with Vapo-Rub and shivering with the pale sweat of incipient fever, waiting to see which viral load will infect us and take us as Western host, the Eastern corpus struggles with its own virulent sickness...we're all going to end up puking, because that's the essential nature of the monkey, isn't it? Gather, form into groups, establish comfort, seek ease the way that water seeks the low places. Duty is difficult, and honor is so hard that even those who lay claim to it are liars. So much simpler to tell ourselves that by easing the lives of as many monkeys as possible we are, in fact, doing good.
That's the civilized way of committing cultural suicide: corpulent solicitiude disguised as ethical behavior. If we can just make everyone comfortable, we'll achieve Utopia.
Nonsense! Great stinking heaps of it, scattered throughout the world, masquerading as the Ideas of politicians and professors and right-thinking citizens. Snot-yellow satin-sheened wobbly piles, all of it, pus that needs shoveling into the incinerator.
But no.
Can't do that.
Wouldn't want to discomfit anyone, now would we?
Zoo Patron 1: Boy, he sure is upset about something, isn't he?
Zoo Patron 2: Sure is--look at him jump around!
Zoo Patron 1: Wonder what he's mad about?
Zoo Patron 2: Dunno. Can't tell, really...he just keeps screeching and bashing his head against that tree trunk.
Zoo Patron 1: Maybe he wants a banana.
Zoo Patron 2: I don't think so.
Zoo Patron 1: Oh, well...we'll check the site tomorrow, and see if he's making any sense then.
Zoo Patron 2: Sounds like a plan. Let's go watch the monkeys play with themselves.
July 07, 2004
Today's important matter:
Why does brewing coffee sometimes smell like tuna fish?
If you're one of the special few who has experienced this peculiar phenomenon, theorize in the Commentarium.
 I probably missed the point of Christian Parenti's article in The Nation ["The News From Planet Falluja."]. It's the story of one Tariq, "an upper-middle-class Canadian medical student of Palestinian origin. He is a Muslim, fluent in Arabic and English, very smart, very young, brave and a bit naïve." He went to besieged Falluja to help out in local hospitals.
Basically, he was kidnapped by the local resistance, which Tariq claims is mostly Iraqi and "surprisingly uninformed and self-contradictory" about politics. "They don't even watch the news," he says. "They just watch DVDs of sermons and speeches and muj music videos. Even the top guys had no idea what was going on in the rest of Iraq." Elsewhere, he says of the mujahedeen, "They really are simple people...it's all about trust and family. They have no idea about security, technology. It is just God, kin and the nation. It's Alabama in Arabic."
Mr. Parenti seems to suspect that Falluja was a scene of American defeat (the Marines "attempted" ground assaults; they "had essentially given control of the city to the insurgents;" they "tried to enter the city," etc.).
Could be; I'm not there, so I don't know, really. But that's not the nit I'm after.
Which is this:
Tariq repeatedly requested placement in a hospital or clinic but was instead held by this cell and given a tour of life among the fighters. Every few hours he was moved from house to house in cars packed with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and modified Sidewinder missiles (originally developed in the United States as air-to-air missiles, they had been taken from Iraqi warplanes by the mujahedeen, who now used them as shoulder-fired rockets).
Now, according to the US Navy, the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile is 9 and a half feet long and weighs 190 pounds with a fin span of just over two feet. It uses a Thiokol Hercules & Bermite MK 36 Mod 11 single-stage, solid-propellant rocket motor. Its warhead alone weighs over 20 pounds.
In contrast, the Stinger--which actually is shoulder-launched--is five feet long and weighs about 34 pounds, total. The M136 AT4 light anti-tank missile system is 40 inches long and weighs just under 15 pounds. The M-47 Dragon anti-tank missile system is 33 inches long and weighs 22 pounds. The Javelin is about six feet long and weighs 61 pounds.
My point--and I just know you see where I'm going with this--is that there's no way in hell that mujahedeen hayseeds with "no idea about technology" converted an American-made AIM-9 Sidewinder into a "shoulder-fired rocket."
Mr. Parenti is sharing an "otherwise empty hotel" with two other journalists in Baghdad. I don't doubt Tariq's story; neither do I doubt that it was colored a bit as it passed through Mr. Parenti's Green Zone lens.
But Baal-on-a-pogo-stick! How can you be covering a war and not know that you can't just lop the fins off a Sidewinder and shoot it off from your shoulder? I'm no expert, and even I know that's a load o' camel-droppings.
Just had to get that off my chest. It was really bothering me.
July 09, 2004
Spam poetry:
where can't obliged people home
bottom news carried
actually child uncle appeared half ticket
--"Dawna Kum"
I think it really highlights the isolation of the elites in this culture from the problems of the working class, and it simultaneously chides the common people for their hunger for sensationalistic tabloid-style stories while empathizing with the plight of broken families who can't afford to go see Prince's Musicology tour, which is like 90 dollars for decent seats.
Overheard on Trinity Place, Manhattan:
"You can't just suck my face and lick my nipples and call it a night."
July 13, 2004
OK...just keep it cool...a little twitch now and then is all right...maybe a Tourette-style squeak!...but man...nobody needs to know just how close...how close you are to just ripping it up with a full-on gibbering jump-on-the-desk and cackle-like-a-loon freakfest...keep it cool...don't drink any more coffee...not even decaf...'sOK, you'll be all right...
...mmmmrrrrfffllll!!!....
The Spirit Booth Beebread Coroutine Grandmother Newsletter
Wouldn't it be nice?
Wouldn't it be groooovy?
I mean, how utterly hep and up to the very moment would it be?
There she goes! Wearing nothing but a Coke and a smile, Liberty streaks across the great soccer field of human experience.
Would it be luverly?
I would say that yes, it would be luverly.
But: I digress. What I'm really on about (aboot in the Canadian) is this: by God, I've had it with all you humans, with your mistaking biology for eternal morality, your endless fat heads spouting solipsism disguised as truth, and the terrible chemical concoctions you choose to call cuisine. And your miserable sense of interior design! Only the Chinese and the Arabs have managed to come close, and the rest of you might as well live in plywood crates with piles of your own feces.
Honestly, do you have any idea of the effort that went into designing the human sensory apparatus? So that you could perceive the natural order of things? And then: the opposable thumb! Good Lord, that should've clued you all in. Look! you should have exclaimed. We have digits that allow us to paint our names on grains of rice. Perhaps we can use these paws to create fine dwellings and finer societies.
But no. No! Wretched flea-bitten hairless monkeys! Ooooo, if they still let us smite things I'd smite you all and start over again, don't you doubt it for a moment, and when I did there wouldn't be stupid movies and soft-serve ice cream and the notion of "better hair" wouldn't even be joked about when deciding which person gets to control weapons that split the very fabric of matter.
Idiots!
The weekly meeting is in the basement of St. Matthias church for the month of August, and meeting leaders are responsible for securing punch, cookies, and prophylactics.
July 16, 2004
 Longtime readers may have noticed a change here...not so much with the attempts at Serious Political Thought and so forth. I figure: why bother? There are plenty of other people out there doing that, and doing it better than I do.
THEREFORE, I have decided to give A-Head entirely over to my whims. Which means sporadic posts of dubious utility, but also means that it's a bit more fun for me and much less of a chore.
And, as you can see, I'm alot happier.
July 20, 2004
"The safety word is 'banana.'"
--Lois Griffin
July 21, 2004
Right now, I'm living in a nice fluffy Nerf world where nobody important stuffs secret things in his pants, socks, or anywhere else. If I leave the fluffy world, I think about things like:
- "Who has put pubic hair on my Top Secret codeword document?"
- "The Senator would like to thank you for your advisory service to his campaign...but he has asked for your resignation, because the documents you supplied smell like feet."
- "Well Dan, with proper lubrication, you can hide almost anything almost anywhere."
This is all Ken Starr's fault. 18 months of thongs and vaginal cigars and sink ejaculations left permanent naughty scars on my internal political Viewmaster.
I feel so dirty.
July 23, 2004
 Lessee here...first, there was the Syrian Band of Flight 327...14 Syrians with weak stomachs and a penchant for McDonald's, who may or may not actually have been conducting a Terrorist Probe, or maybe they were just messing with American minds, which is just rude, because this is where they're gigging, the ungrateful Semites. Then there's the story of a fellow with the Middle Eastern cant who was in an airplane bathroom removing the mirror and trying to get through the wall into the cockpit before an Air Marshal broke down the door which, if true, is certainly cause for concern. And, yesterday morning, authorities stopped a New York bound train in Newark and questioned the passengers, because someone found what the New York Times euphemistically calls a "religious message" in an envelope in the restroom. In one of those Gosh What A Modern Age We Live In moments, I was on a cellphone on a ferry in the middle of the Hudson river talking to my mother in California who told me about the train in Newark.
This has created a bit of nervousness for Your Humble Narrator. Not that I fear the loss of my own life life or limbs--I think that, most likely, the next Terrorist Event will be a plane going BOOM up in the sky, rather than being used as an Allah-guided air-to-ground missile...American passengers simply wouldn't allow anything else. Neither am I as nervous as some people, which I find odd, because I actually attended the first Terrorist Event. Still: frost this yummy concoction of fact and rumor of with 500 pages' worth of 9/11 Commission Report (.PDFs both great and small available here), and you've got yourself an anxiously tasty treat. It's nerve-wracking-riffic!
Before the July 4 weekend, Peggy Noonan suggested that Americans might need a sort of break from all of this History-Makin', and that Long John Kerry might be just the sort of dull Gaul to provide it.
The only problem with that: as Americans we haven't been asked to do anything. Except "shop." And "go about our business." Oh, and "be vigilant," whatever that means.
Packrat Lileks recently found a bar of Victory Soap in an old box o' krep--a small bar of cheap WWII-era hotel soap, emblazoned with the V-for-Victory insignia and its attendant dit-dit-dit-dah Morse code sigil. Back then, there was no possible way to deny we were at war. If your hotel soap didn't remind you, your monthly ration book of food staples did. You remembered we were at war when you had to patch your car tire instead of getting a new one, because all our rubber was transporting our boys across the battlefields of Europe in trucks and returning them safely to ground on fat-wheeled bombers. When you stuck your hand in your pocket to get some change your fingers got grubby because the pennies were made of easily-blackened zinc-coated steel instead of copper, which was being used for the shells that were pounding Japanese-held islands in the Pacific.
There was no doubt. There were no homegrown propagandists explaining to the stupid Americans how FDR was all buddy-buddy with Hitler's cousins. Celebrities weren't lining up to compare him to female genitalia, and they weren't giving speeches at the National Press Club about how oppressed and silenced they were.
It made sense to the polity: we were attacked by the Japanese, and Germany declared war on us four days later. To protect ourselves, we undertook a massive, nationwide effort that was directed not just at Tokyo, but at all of the Axis Powers that supported each other in their efforts to attack us and our allies. Did we head off to the South Pacific on December 8, 1941? No. We first invaded Vichy-controlled Morocco, so we could then move through it to attack German forces in North Africa while the British attacked them from Egypt.
Iraq is close to the geographic center of the Middle East. It borders Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. It's a stone's throw from Afghanistan and Sudan. And now, the US Central Command has a base of operations there with over 100,000 troops.
Does that make sense to you? It makes sense to me, because this is a war. Strategically, we have placed our forces in a position from which they can strike at any of our enemies in the region. That's the sort of thing you do in a war.
Not that you'd know that from watching the news or reading the papers, or from listening to our incumbent President or his hopeful challenger. During WWII, a troop ship was sunk, with a loss of 1,500 American soldiers. The papers didn't report it, because it might have adversely affected the morale of the nation. Today, we hear about every American death, in ones and twos, every scratch, every injury, day after day. Half of the political leadership is unwilling to behave as though we are in a war because it might benefit the sitting President. The other half is unwilling to do so because they're afraid of being accused of scaremongering and using the Iraq campaign for political ends. The incumbent has mistaken a time of crisis as a mandate for the imposition of Christian domestic policy, creating unnecessary strife on the home front. The challenger diffidently echoes the incumbent's war strategy while relying on the irrational animus of his base to carry him into office.
This is a sad, pathetic joke. The American polity is a moody, spoiled adolescent, so unsure of itself, so mired in the midst of a navel-gazing identity crisis, that it can't even clearly recognize a punch in the face as the initiation of combat.
Ms. Noonan thinks I need a break--and she's right. I need respite from this half-assed, wage- war- in- comfort- with- a- Frappuccinoâ„¢- in- one- hand- and- the- TV- remote- in- the- other nonsense. FDR was on the radio 17 times in four years during WWII--where is our President? I want basic briefings on our progress abroad. At home, I want to know that our airliners are protected, and not subject to Norm Minetta's flaccidly inoffensive PC whims. I want to know that my local hospitals and first responders are being given extensive and effective training in dealing with biological and radiological exposure. I want to know that we're spending the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to secure our nation's seaports. And if these things are not occurring, I want to know that too, and I want to know why.
I'm sick of relying on rumor and anecdote, and I'm fed up with our half-educated, incompetent, partisan media, and I'm disgusted by our lazy, frothing, muddle-headed citizenry.
Are we at war or not, people? Make up your damn mind. Enough of this neurotic freakshow.
July 27, 2004
Fiddling With My Neural Radio
[Bzzzz.]
[bzzzzz. snap!]
[*p*i*n*g*]
I captured a vegetarian this afternoon. I force-fed him five sticks of pepperoni, then branded a giant W into his forehead and released him back into the wild.
[ClicK. k-chik-a-bing!]
Your search - "vegetarians for Bush" - did not match any documents.
However,
In addition,
Your search - "crack-addicted transexuals for Bush" - did not match any documents.
[kra-fungow...ik-ik-ik...ding!]
Didja like the bunting, Andy? Didja?!
[Schvoop.]
THEREFORE, lesbians are more than 75 times as likely as vegetarians and crack-addicted transexuals combined to support Bush.
[Freeeow]
...and you can't stop me man nobody can stop me i am the most unstoppable thing since that uh that guy you know the one they couldn't stop? well that's me only like ten times more unstoppable...
[......]
Clearly, I have sailed off into the ever-deepening twilight world of the mumbling street-corner box-and-shopping-cart brigade.
I mean: 120 channels, and there's nothing on.
July 28, 2004
Well, if Michael Moore can make mindless propaganda, so can I.
An Instapundit reader's response to Ted Kennedy's idea of what "toned-down" means prompted me to steal that reader's idea and make a 30-second bit o' political spew.
You can view said spew right here and right now.
So...where's my millions of dollars? And my legion of French fans?
Oh...right.
Silly me.
July 29, 2004
I caught a glimpse of the New York Times dead-tree edition headline this morning, in big ol' 28-point type: EDWARDS GIVES STRONG TRIBUTE AS DEMOCRATS NOMINATE KERRY.
Gee, ya think? I was expecting something noteworthy, like CLINTON DOESN'T THINK MUCH OF REPUBLICANS, or maybe MS. KERRY EXTREMELY WEALTHY.
I wonder how big the headline will be when the elephants nominate Bush? We'll see.
Mr. Edwards, referring to Kerry's Vietnam Swift boat service (which, frankly, we just haven't heard very much about), said that
Mr. Kerry's crewmates 35 years ago "saw up close what he's made of." He added: "They saw him reach down and pull one of his men to safety and save his life. They saw him in the heat of battle; they saw him decide in an instant to turn his boat around, drive it straight through an enemy position and chase down the enemy to save his crew.
"Decisive. Strong. Is this not what we need in a commander in chief?"
Yes. Yes, I think that's what we need. Here are some other quotes that might shed light on whether Kerry has those qualities.
Swift boat veteran Steve Gardner reports that "The John Kerry that I know is not the John Kerry that everybody else is portraying. I served alongside him and behind him, five feet away from him in a gun tub, and watched as he made indecisive moves with our boat, put our boats in jeopardy, put our crews in jeopardy... if a man like that can't handle that 6-man crew boat, how can you expect him to be our Commander-in-Chief?"
"Senator Kerry is not fit for command," says Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, USN (retired).
Captain Charles Plumly, USN (retired), said that "Kerry would be described as devious, self-absorbing, manipulative, disdain for authority, disruptive, but the most common phrase that you'd hear is 'requires constant supervision.'"
Vietnam coastal patrol veteran Jeffrey Wainscott said, "That he would malign my service and that of his fellow sailors with no regard for the truth makes him totally unqualified to serve as Commander-in-Chief."
Another patrol vet, Bernard Wolff, deeply resents "John Kerry's using his Swift boat experience, and his betrayal of those who fought there as a stepping-stone to his political ambitions."
Captain George Elliott, USN (retired), said that "In 1971, '72, for almost 18 months, he [Kerry] stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains -- there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief. It just galls one to think about it."
Of the 23 Swift boat officers of Coastal Division 11 who served with Presidential hopeful John Kerry in Vietnam, 11 consider him unfit to be C-in-C, four oppose his candidacy on other grounds, four more are neutral, two are deceased, and two are working with Kerry's campaign.
So, out of 21 surviving fellow officers from his Division, John Kerry's candidacy has the support of...two.
There's plenty more, here: Swift Boat Veterans For Truth.
Here is their synopsis of Kerry's much-vaunted service:
John Kerry's service in Vietnam lasted 4 months and 12 days, beginning in November 1968 when he reported to Cam Rahn Bay for a month of training. His abbreviated combat tour ended shortly after he requested a transfer out of Vietnam on March 17, 1969, citing Navy instruction 1300.39 permitting personnel with three Purple Hearts to request reassignment. So far as we are able to determine, Kerry was the only Swift sailor ever to leave Vietnam without completing the standard one-year tour of duty, other than those who were seriously wounded or killed.
Does Kerry's four months and 12 days of combat service abroad thirty-five years ago outweigh Bush's domestic National Guard service? Maybe. Maybe not.
Does Kerry's four months and 12 days of combat service abroad thirty-five years ago outweigh Bush's four years of service as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces during the conflict that will define the 21st century?
I don't think so.
The media made a Big Deal about the National Guardsmen who "didn't remember Bush at base."
Well, it seems that quite a few people do remember Kerry in Vietnam.
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[And, before I get e-mails: yes, I know that SBVT is affiliated with Texas Republican activist Merrie Spaeth, and that Spaeth Communications, according to the Kerry campaign, "is a Republican-headed firm from Texas which has contributed to Bush's campaign and has very close ties to the Bush Administration," and that SVFT spokesman John O'Neill, a Republican from Texas, "was a pawn of the Nixon White House in 1971."
I don't really see how that's any different from, for example, the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a supposedly non-partisan group which seems to specialize in media promotion of the anti-Bush views of some of the families of 9/11 victims. Peaceful Tomorrows is funded by the Tides Center which in turn receives financial assistance from other liberal foundations, including various Heinz family endowments. Teresa Heinz (she's married to John Kerry, you know) chairs at least one of those endowments.
The Tides Center is a 501(c)3, a tax-exempt non-profit, which means that it "may not engage in direct support or opposition of a candidate for political office."
Apparently, though, publicly opposing President Bush is all part of Peaceful Tomorrow's efforts "to open up a public dialogue about appropriate alternative responses to the September 11 tragedies," so it's OK. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a tax exempt non-partisan public advocacy "527" organization, and that's OK, too.
My point is: look at what's being said, and who's saying it, and base your judgment on that, rather than who's paying the bills. Do 9/11 widows have a certain amount of credibility? Sure.
So do Swift boat veterans who served with John Kerry.]
July 30, 2004
This has already been excerpted on Instapundit and Vodkapundit, and has been commented on by Ed Driscoll and Charles Johnson, among others: Tom Junod's "The Case for George W. Bush" in this month's Esquire. Go read it before reading any of my blather--read it instead of my blather, if you're pressed for time.
The piece is a concise and intelligent description of the peculiar Bush hatred that has gripped so many in this country, written by someone who is himself afflicted by it, and who perfectly captures why that hatred is so balefully stupid:
The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it's easier than conviction.
Junod also handily dismisses the fatuous, morally bankrupt romanticism which animates the conception that privileged nihilists like Michael Moore have of terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere:
We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling "blood and treasure," then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.
That's what it's all about, people, right there: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all.
You can see the consequences of the loss of that ability every time Linda Ronstadt sings "Desperado" and dedicates it to Michael Moore; every time Janeane Garofalo splutters into cooly ironic incoherence on television; every time the activist flakes of the left organize a puppet show and call it political action. The loss of the ability to properly discern evil, and the reluctance to declare oneself superior to it, is subsequent to the loss of reason, the discerning logos that makes politics possible.
You can also see the consequences of that loss and reluctance in the frail words of the hopeful Senator Kerry, who passively promises us that "Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response," but cannot bring himself to commit to actively shaping the world to prevent such an attack; who offers us the pablum of "We just need to believe in ourselves;" who, by declaring his intention to "bring back [the] time-honored tradition [that] America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to," demonstrates that he has little comprehension of the exigencies of victory, or even of the actuality of the war itself.
Iraq is not the war. Iraq is a campaign in the war. And John Kerry's way of winning that campaign will be to "reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers [...] and bring our troops home."
Then what? Turn America into a fortress? Hunker down? Wait for the next inevitable attack on American soil, spend years waiting for intelligence that will never be certain because of its very nature, then do nothing because it doesn't meet the UN's evidentiary requirements?
It's about real moral certainty, Senator Kerry. It's not about nuance, or intellect, or animus disguised as conviction. You're relying on all three, because you think that this election is about Bush.
It isn't, and you're going to lose.
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