Surely it is inarguable that the debate over a national mandate epitomizes the central ideological divide in the country today.

In broad terms, there is one side that believes liberty can be subverted for the collective good because government often makes more efficient and more moral choices.

Then there is the other side, which believes that people who believe such twaddle are seditious pinkos.

Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/harsanyi/ci_14742998#ixzz0j82DScQ4

“This meeting can do nothing more to save the country!” — Samuel Adams; December 16, 1773

I said, nearly two years ago, that the United States of America as founded between 1775 and 1789 died on November 4, 2008. The result of that election irrevocably demonstrated that the people of the United States – no longer citizens – were timid sheep, easily led astray by a smooth talking shepherd skilled in cheap parlor tricks. The mob finally ruled and was only interested in dividing their unearned spoils.

Yesterday, “the people” in Congress assembled chose to violate both the letter and the spirit of the Supreme Law of the Land in open defiance of the desires of the majority of the people of the United States as expressed through polling data and commit this nation to an absolute and permanent state of collapse. There is no coming back from this. There’s no way to fix this. It will never be repealed. It can never be amended enough to make it tolerable. It is a permanent and unalterable change in the status of We the People from participants in their government to mere subjects and slaves.

The only recourse now is armed revolution. The taking up of arms is not to be done lightly. All good citizens must bide their time, attempt to force a change through the power of the ballot box and work within the tattered remnants of the system. If those efforts fail, only two choices remain: death or slavery.

I am going to be totally selfish. I am happier now than I have been in my entire life. I might accept the yoke with the understanding that some day soon I am going to die and escape this catastrophe.

It is a sad, sad day in the history of the human race. The day all of humanity finally surrendered to slavery.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. — H.L. Mencken; 1919

Has no-one in New Jersey ever heard of this marvelous new invention?? Amazing stuff really, NaCl. When you throw it on snow and ice said snow and ice miraculously melts away. Particularly under the warming rays of a clear winter sun.

I really should expect these sorts of failures by now. Any nation, state or city ruled by mollycoddling fascists is patently unable to deliver basic services. And New Jersey is one of the posterchildren of mollycoddling fascist rule.

So major roads are barely passable – two lanes out of three at best on interstates and United States highways. Secondary roads are an absolute mess and city streets are no better than sleigh paths through one of Robert Frost’s proverbial woods.

It’s unconscionable. With the bright sunshine of the past two days all that’s needed is a good scraping and a healthy dose of salt or cinders applied at regular intervals.

Funny how private driveways, parking lots and lanes are all completely clear and dry – not a drop of snow, ice or even water upon them – while pretty near every surface controlled by municipal services is an utter disaster.

Welcome to the future. You’ll get a ticket if your kid doesn’t wear a bicycle helmet but don’t expect the streets to be passable any time soon.

This country is f**ked up.

You can be tagged for DUI if you catch a glimpse of a beer in your peripheral vision but all the bars are built on major highways. In a just society, we’d understand that if you crash your car while drinking you’re held liable for the crime you’ve committed: property damage, personal injury, etc. Why do we need an additional penalty layer? It smacks of thoughtcrime. Like hate crime laws.

In a rational society, if we were actually concerned about drinking and driving we’d make it illegal to operate a bar that didn’t have a critical mass of pedestrian drinkers to support it. We’d outlaw parking lots at bars. We’d outlaw endless suburban casual dining chains nowhere near population centers. Surely the urban planners can get on board with that! Forced density, drawing people downtown on public transit, blah blah blah.

But no, we’re not a rational society. We’re a society of goddamned puritans. There is a sizable portion of the population who lives in abject fear that someone, somewhere is having fun. So they collect revenue from taxes on businesses and alcohol sales. Then they collect revenue from fines and penalties levied against people who consume alcohol. Then they spend that revenue on parks where your dog can’t shit on the grass, bike paths where you have to wear a helmet and skate parks where you can’t skate on account of the danger.

When did the home of the brave turn into the Fiefdom of Sir Robin?

In keeping with the theme, I face a dilemma. Each time I establish a home I learn something else I desire in a home. One of the absolutes of my existence is that I must live within stumbling distance of a bar. I don’t like to drink and drive. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt myself. I like to walk. I love to drink. I like to walk to drink but not so far that I can’t slither home. This is not a joke, this is a real concern. I have spent several nights sleeping at various inexplicably short distances from my house. Sometimes on a hillside within sight of my back door. Sometimes on the stairs to my apartment. Once, I actually made it through the door and ended up sleeping headfirst on the kitchen floor with my feet out the door.

All of which brings me to my latest search for a suitable home.

It seems the optimal place to live in New Jersey is somewhere on the Patco line: close to work, convenient for having a vehicle, plenty of services, 24-hour access to the city. Given those requirements, Collingswood and Haddonfield present themselves as highly desirable candidates. But there’s no booze. Goddamned Quakers.

So I have to live in the City. With high taxes. And no place to park. And an hour long commute in heavy traffic to work. What an incredible pain in the ass.

Which I can at least partially heal with a trip to the many, MANY bars that will be within comfortable walking distance of my future home.

And if there were 7-11 hot dogs or Wawa hoagies between the bar and my front door, that wouldn’t hurt either.

All intelligent individuals know that people are scum. It is, however, helpful to see examples of scumbaggery to confirm us in our preconceived notions.

To wit: I was stuck in interminable Jersey traffic. At a point where I was forced to merge right for a turn I ended up behind an individual who thought it their civic duty to wait patiently while every jackass in New Jersey turned out of every blessed parking lot we came to into our line of traffic.

I was not at all surprised to note this Samaritan drove a Prius. Even less to note this Samaritan was an Obama voter. After all, isn’t that the message of our beloved President???

“Allow me to inconvenience you for the benefit of those who probably don’t deserve it.”

All that’s left is to Hope this attitude Changes.

I admit that I never saw any of Barack Obama’s speechifying until the Inaugural Address. As that speech was disturbingly flat and full of empty rhetoric I still waited to find out how this supremely unqualified man managed to pull the wool over people whose intellectual abilities I have great respect for.

Happily, he offered a much more mesmerizing Annual Message to Congress. Well delivered. Seemingly sincere. Enough to make you believe that the United States can single-mindedly pursue a total reinvention of our economy, energy strategy, education system, health care regulations and old age pensions while decreasing the deficit and encouraging robust economic growth.

Of course, it’s all horseshit. The bit that made me realize how completely detached from reality all this is came when the President – after blathering about robust economic growth – demanded a carbon cap program to promote renewable energy. I would be delighted if he’d use his immense rhetorical skills to explain to me how companies are expected to recover from the current economic troubles while being simultaneously compelled to completely retool their operations to avoid using traditional energy.

Yep, that’ll work out real well. Looking forward to it.

Allow me to suggest that you do your patriotic duty by making the ammunition industry a bright spot of real growth. Environmental regulations or not.

Buy American! Buy more bullets.

Salt Lake City, Utah

Normally I would take the opportunity on Election Day to encourage you all to go out and vote.

Normally I would have something more interesting to say since I am in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

But as I spent the day back at Golden Spike doing some more stuff that I didn’t have time for yesterday and since tomorrow I’ll be busy in Mormon-Central I think I’ll take the opportunity to give my typical election time pep-talk today.

Vote. Don’t vote. I don’t really care. It doesn’t make a lick of difference this year who wins. In fact, I wish we didn’t have to vote for either of these characters. In fact, I think we’re pretty much doomed no matter who wins.

Iraq is pretty well won. I think we could still lose, but I don’t think we will. The economy will be fine if people will quit tinkering with it.

If McCain wins it’ll be pretty much business as usual. Creeping socialism will keep creeping led by the creeps in Congress. He’ll be creepy to watch and four years of hearing “Bless your heart” in that nasally VP/canadian accent will be even more creepy than Al Gore’s incredibly irritating voice.

If Obama wins it’ll be pretty much business as usual. Creeping socialism will stop creeping and just be what it is. Maybe we’ll finally stop paying lip-service to the Constitution and just discard it all together. And we’ll have four years of Joe Biden’s idiotic statements and a probable resurgence of the Klan to look forward to.

I figure our saving grace is this: McCain will have to tussle with an incompetent Congress so he won’t be able to screw too much up, Obama – probably incompetent himself – will have to work with an incompetent Congress so he won’t be able to screw too much up.

I will leave you with this. I voted for McCain. You gotta vote for somebody and I already think my taxes are too high. And I’m a little bit scared of Obama. Here comes the Hitler comparison, or Stalin if you prefer: who was the last politician to have his face made into art and plastered all over the streets? Who had his own symbol on banners and posters and flags? It’s more than a little frightening that nobody has paid the slightest attention to the man or what he says, or what he does, or who his friends are. Instead he’s a blank slate upon which all our hopes and aspirations are projected.

What happens if he doesn’t turn out to be who you think he is? What happens if his hopes and aspirations aren’t yours? What happens if that red, white and blue “O” and the Andy Warhol face saying “Obey” really begins to stand for something?

Vote, don’t vote. Whatever. I think I’ll move to Texas. At least when the goon squad in the O armbands comes for me I’ll be armed and my neighbors will be armed and we’ll have a fighting chance.

• There are some hippies in Gettysburg who have pasted in their picture window overlooking the main E-W street a running total of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of Monday evening that total stood at something like 5,000.

  In one day at Antietam in 1862 the United States Army lost 2,600 men KIA. In three days at Gettysburg, it lost 3,155 KIA. In three years in Korea the United States lost 36,914.

  To have conquered two territories roughly equal in area to our entire West Coast with the loss of only 5,000 killed in battle over a course of six and a half years is a minor miracle. To see those countries struggling to establish stable and just government – and apparently succeeding – is an absolute miracle.

• When the Iraq War began I argued that it was not only right, it was righteous. To mobilize our money and our blood in service to others and in our interest is righteous.
• If this is a war for oil, why did I just pay $50 to fill up my car today? If we’ve spent billions of dollars and sacrificed thousands of lives to place an army in the middle of the most oil-rich area on Earth – why isn’t gasoline cheaper than a 1955 hamburger?
• I remember in 2003 praying for the war to start on St. Patrick’s Day. I figured the news would call this “Gulf War II” or the “Iraq War” and neither had the ring of the “St. Patrick’s Day War.” Unfortunately the war was delayed until March 19, the “St. Joseph’s Day War” just doesn’t have any panache.

  In hindsight the timing makes perfect sense. If one spends the 17th drinking, and the 18th combatting a hangover, you can’t go to war until the 19th. I’ll bet that’s an early lesson in West Point Strategy 101.

I am doing something that brings the taste of warm vomit to my mouth. If the American people are determined to rush headlong into complete economic collapse in exchange for the suffocating embrace of an all-encompassing nanny-state I – as the good patriot I am – must rush with them.

To that end, assuming a Democrat is likely to win the Presidency, I am officially endorsing Hillary Clinton as the nominee of America’s personal traitorous bugaboo party:

But of course, if you’re not feeling particularly self-destructive you could always vote, reluctantly, for Mr. McCain.

Fuck Iowa. How come a bunch of cow-tipping sheep fuckers get to set the tone of the presidential election?

–Curly, via the Blind Cavefish

Today the voters of Iowa meet throughout the state to pick their candidates for President.  The caucuses are a hideously complicated, direct democracy sort of process so I won’t go into the mechanics of things.  I thought, however, as we officially begin the Presidential Election season now might be a good time to comment pithily on our prospects for the next four or eight years.

I love the Democrat slate.  I know better, but I like to think that in a sane country none of these blow-dried nitwits would have even the slightest chance of being entrusted with the most powerful office on the Earth.  I love ‘em because they demonstrate perfectly what is wrong with the party of Jefferson and Jackson.  There’s not an individual among them.  Nobody who wants to do right for all of the people of the country, they only want to do right by the various groups that back them.  It’s a bloviating commercial for special interests.

Exhibit A – A white woman with a philandering husband whose only qualification for office is that she cares and wants to give each polarized little interest group well-funded Holiday gifts.

Exhibit B – A black man who rose from poverty to B-list celebrity level obscurity whose only qualification for office seems to be that he’s a really nice guy.

Exhibit C – A white man who made astronomical sums of money off of other people’s pain and suffering whose primary qualification for office seems to be that he thinks he’s Williams Jennings Bryan and is only one campaign away from matching the Great Commoner’s total.

All that’s missing is a gay hermaphroditic amputee to complete the collection.  Sadly, if there was a person matching that description in the running they’d be a shoo-in for the nomination.  And there’s really a 50/50 chance that these people might be running the country?  Hell, look at the quote at top – do you want those sort of people determining your President?

The Republicans ain’t much better this time around.  A northeastern Mormon with a flip-flopping problem, a short, socially liberal New Yorker with a speech impediment, a Martian citizen who thinks that flipping the “L” around in revolution to spell “love” backwards is the height of creative campaigning, a by-God Baptist preacher who thinks that international diplomacy would be a lot simpler with hall monitors and a fine, upstanding, consistent, noble citizen of Tennessee who just doesn’t seem to care all that much about the campaign either way.

All things considered, my vote is for whoever seems to least want the job.  Does anyone truly believe that lusting after an office of enormous power and responsibility is a qualification for that office?  Aaron Burr’s great sin was not that he was a traitor or an unscrupulous man: his great sin was that he openly coveted and campaigned for the various offices and trusts that he gained.  There was a time when merely to proclaim oneself interested in an office, to openly seek and campaign for said office, was to render oneself unfit for that office.

Nowadays the campaigns start at birth.  One President isn’t fairly in before politicians are jockeying to be the next to take the oath.  How long have we been dealing with active campaigning for this November’s election?  Since early 2007?  Early 2004?  Since November of 2000?  Christ.  Six or eight months of blowing hot air is too goddamn much, eighteen or twenty-four months is completely unacceptable.

Want to know why the Arctic glaciers are melting at a rate higher than anything potential global warming could cause?  The Presidential Election started twelve months too early.

What the fuck is wrong with the human race?

What would possess someone to drive twenty miles under the speed limit while braking on every tiny variation in incline on perfectly dry and straight roads under reasonable driving conditions?  I can accept driving carefully, maintaining the speed limit and adding an extra level of alertness.  No problem there.  Anything less would be irresponsible.  Even more irresponsible is driving like Granny Gruntcakes on her fucking Sunday drive in the eighty year old Model A when there’s no appreciable reason to do so.

Modern human behaviour is governed by four words: “It’s not about you.”

Meaning, of course, it’s all about me.

I gotta get away from here.  Away from the goddamned country bumpkins.  Away from the goddamned elderly.  Away from the ignorant wigger hicks.  Sadly, there’s no place better.  All places are shite.  And they’re all filled with goddamned people.

Christ, I hate the Christmas season.  I want to be nice.  I want to be kind, and generous, and full of love for my fellow man.  Christian charity and all that.

But it’s goddamned hard to do when people drive like untrained apes, the Salvation Army has legions of drooling asylum parolees ringing that thrice-goddamned bell in every fucking doorway in the nation, people in the stores are downright offensive and the blaring klaxon of commerce is screaming in your fucking face.

When the day comes, and I snap, and I start skinning people.  Let it be known that it is completely justified.

Evel Knievel died last Friday.  He’s being memorialized on my birthday.

What kind of a world are we bequeathing to the next generation?  A world without Evel Knievel, Ronald Reagan, Shelby Foote, Richard Pryor, Milton Berle; the list goes on and on.

What will the next generation of American boys do for fun?  They won’t have an Evel Knievel to emulate.  The closest thing they have is some effeminate metrosexual doing cheap conjuring on live TV so he can pretend to be attracted to supermodels.  Instead of jumping dirt bikes over impossibly high mounds of earth, they’ll lie very still in the bath relaxing their hair and pretending it’s some kind of achievement.

What will the next generation of Americans do when the Martians invade?  Instead of a Ronald Reagan saying “I’ve just signed legislation which will outlaw Mars forever.  The laser strikes will commence in five minutes.” they’ll have some cream-puff, bureaucratic careerist apologizing to the face-melting legions of Mars claiming we must have caused the problem with our Viking landings, the inclusion of the flag on the lander was an obvious attempt at imperial colonization and we’d very much like to surrender immediately, thank you very much, yes, you may atomize the women and children first before wasting the speech writer and claiming complete blamelessness.  If only we’d spent more on the children^TM!

I miss the magnificent bastards, every one of them.  The last link our sissified society had to the heroes of yore.  Men like Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was shot in the side before stabbing his assailant to death with a penknife exclaiming, “No damned man kills me and lives!”  Or Patrick Cleburne, who proclaimed before the hopeless assault at Franklin, Tennessee, “Well Govan, if we are to die, let us die like men.” Men like the Buffalo Soldiers at San Juan, the 77th Division in the Argonne, the men at Bataan, the men at X-Ray, or the Marines in Fallujah.

Will we still produce men like that when there are no role models left?

I want Election Day to be a mandatory day off work.  I want us to go back to the bad old days where votes were bought with whiskey and voters were intimidated by roving gangs of partisan roughnecks.  I want it to be an occasion.  I want people to know that it’s important, that it’s a duty and a privilege to be able to vote.  To know that your vote counts and that if you don’t make a decision it’s likely that prick across the street who always lets his dog shit on your front lawn is going to be making the decisions for you.

Always vote – if for no other reason that to know you’re cancelling out some other prick’s vote.

What I want most of all is to be able to get some local political information available on the web.  I spent a good bit of time yesterday trying to figure out what the ballot was going to look like: who was running, what offices were contested, where the money comes from, what the candidate’s philosophies were?  Do you think I could find one goddamn thing?  Of course not.  I was able to very easily compile a list of the state-level offices, the various judges up for retention and new ones trying to get in.  I made a cheat sheet so I didn’t miss any.  But Prothonotary?  County Commissioner?  School Board?  Not a fecking peep.  Not a word or a comment.  Not a thing.  I had to vote by party: not even knowing if they stand for the same principles I do or just choose a party because it looks good on the ballot and they can always rely on suckers like me.  In the end, I had to leave many of the choices blank.  Better that I’m not voting to screw myself than to offer someone an apparent “mandate of the people” when I don’t even know who they are.  All politics is local.  Which may explain why things are so royally screwed up.

I got the judges right.  Pennsylvanians have a rare opportunity today.  A chance to make their voices loudly heard.  Vote NO on all retentions.  I don’t care if the person in question is the finest judge in the country.  I don’t care if they’ll always rule according to my personal whims.  I don’t care if they end up back at the bar defending the indefensible.  They either voted directly to override the Constitution in the matter of the pay raises or they acquiesced to the usurpation.  Either way, throw the bums out!

And Philadelphia gets a chance to end the long reign of the botched and bungled, the thugs and thieves.  The word in town is Michael Nutter will fix everything.  Phillies got swept in the NLDS?  Michael Nutter will fix it.  Eagles are tanking?  Michael Nutter will fix it.  Flyers are doing alright?  It’s because Michael Nutter is going to win the election!

It will be an interesting election night.  In the morning, I’ll still be locally screwed by nepotists and embezzlers and the state will still be shafted by old boys and egoists.  But I’ll have done my duty.  And only had to dodge the few slavering electioneers at the polling station.

Go and vote.  If only to feel like you’re still one of the soverign people.

Finally, the Pope begins to live up to his name and takes steps to restore the Church to its former glory.

I hoped when Benedict XVI was elected that he meant to make the Church somewhat more rule bound than it has been in the years since Vatican II. He picked that name, after all.

Since then I’ve been a little disappointed. He made more apologies, wishy-washed on a lot of things and generally seemed to be reluctant to make the big, structural changes that are needed. Finally, my dear friends at NPR tell me that he’s made one of those big changes.

He’s normalized the Tridentine Mass.

No longer need people suffer swaying folk singers, autoharps and silly tunes about God and us holding hands and skipping about like useless hippies. No longer do the faithful have to petition questionably aligned bishops for permission to hear the Mass in a long dead language with the priest showing the humble people his backside.

One of my complaints about the Mass has always been that there’s no sense of majesty. There’s no sense of mystery or respect. No sense that you are supposed to be communing with God himself, in His House. Modern churches are all about community, the typical feel-good higgledy-piggledy of our desperately confused society.

Well, bollocks to that. I don’t hold with the modern world and what’s good enough for one thousand nine hundred sixty five years of Church history is good enough for me.

I can hit the Latin service at 10 AM in Harrisburg, eh? I wonder what time the bars on Second Street open? Something to wash down sacramental wine that goes nicely with unleavened bread would be in order.

Here’s the important part of the State of the Union address, edited for clarity:

“. . . my fellow citizens . . . the State of our Union is [a mess].”

That, at least, would be an honest appraisal of the situation. In all the years I’ve been watching the State of the Union I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that was so much an unoriginal cut n’ paste job from speeches of the past. I’m afraid the President’s behaviour a rhetoric has crossed the line from resoluteness to mulishness. My God! How many times do we have to hear about the “Wetbacks for everyone!” plan that’s not – no really – not an opportunity to wildly increase the number of United States citizens who can’t pronounce “George Washington”. In fifty years we’ll be learning about Padre Weems’ apocryphal story of Jorge cutting down the cherry tree.

And we’re going to cut the amount of gasoline used by 20% in ten years? Would that be 20% less than today or 20% less than ten years from now? And how precisely do you expect to do that? Am I the only one who thinks the downside to all these new fuels is still waiting to be discovered? What happens if in five years we find out that biodiesel byproducts cause your toenails to fall off? I guess we’ll be back to gasoline. At $300 a barrel.

I find myself happy to see Democrats in charge of the Congress. I am increasingly convinced that the best possible outcome for government is complete and total inaction. The less that gets done the less likely things are to get worse. I am fully in favor of one entire congress being dedicated entirely to repealing laws: make no new laws, change no existing laws. Spend your entire two years solely repealing existing laws that are old, useless, harmful or insane. Then Congress would be permitted to spend the following congress solely modifying existing law. Still no new laws. Once that job was done, then – and only then – would they be permitted to enact new law but only to repair or strengthen those glaring omissions discovered in the full examination of the previous two congresses.

Less forward progress folks, that’s what we need. A nice long breather. Many of the problems we’re all so eager to see fixed could be repaired merely by repealing the laws that caused the problem in the first place. Less damned laws for everyone.

Well kiddies, what did we learn from the President’s speech?

Democrats don’t just hate Americans. They hate everybody. They hate Iraqis so much that they don’t even believe they might want a better life – even if they need help to achieve it. Maybe I should be a Democrat again.

There is no “magic bullet” to win the war. Gee, imagine that. War might be awfully difficult, not clear-cut and requiring constant revision and reorganization to fight. What was that about plans and enemies?

Looky here, in three weeks we conquered a country the size of California. For three years we’ve occupied said country with fewer deaths than both armies combined suffered in twenty-four hours on the banks of Antietam Creek. Is that not a staggering accomplishment? We can’t acknowledge how stupefying our achievement has been? What a tiny-minded, lazy, jaded, unworthy people we are.

The whole thing is very simple. What better place to have an army than Iraq? Look at a map sometime. Look where Iraq is. Now then, consider two points: there is nothing more essential to the world’s economy at present than oil and there is no place on Earth with more loopy banana-brains than the Middle East. Tell me why, again, we shouldn’t have 150,000 fighting men right smack in the center of the nest of vipers? It’s a beach-head, kids, just a beach-head.

It would be loverly if the Iraqi nation pulled its head out of the sand and really became a sane and self-governing society. I have no doubt that many, even most, of the Iraqi people would like to see that happen. But it doesn’t really matter. Democracy seems to have to come from within. It has been well demonstrated that democracy requires a certain amount of wealth and safety to properly establish itself. Maybe the Middle East is, as yet, incapable of democracy, lacking the Judeo-Christian and Western traditions necessary to establish it. Maybe enlightened dictatorship is the best anyone can hope for at the present time.

But for us to have armed men, tanks, planes and very large, very nasty things that go boom sitting in the desert between Iran and Syria and sidled up to Saudi Arabia is the best possible scenario. It’s something like this, “We’re cool. We’ll all sit around and get delightful tans. But if you make us pay attention to you and we lose the nice all-over bronzing because only our head and shoulders are above the armor plating, you’ll be sorry.” This is a good thing. This is a necessary thing. And I am still damned glad we’ve done it.

Good luck to the Iraqis. Good luck to the American soldier. It is a great and worthy thing we have done, a righteous attempt to spread peace and liberty in accordance with our own self-interest. If it doesn’t work – well, I reckon we just keep some of the land we’ve conquered and set up shop to make sure everyone keeps their eyes well focused on our local presence rather than letting them wander abroad for targets of opportunity.

On this day in 1864 President Lincoln was elected to his second term. Despite a Civil War, despite a horrendously bloody year, despite bitter opposition from domestic enemies and foreign foes, the President retained his position and his governing coalition. One person wrote that “This result is the proclamation of the American people that they are not defeated.”

In 2006, the American people chose defeat.

This was not unexpected. We are not the people we were in 1864, or 1775, or 1941 or even in 1964. We are an urban, comfortable, lazy people: overeducated, overpaid, underutilized. Why fight for anything? I should think that even if we allow the Middle East to collapse, even if gas is $7 a gallon and Tel Aviv vanishes in nuclear fire our lifestyles will continue mostly unchanged. We’ll still loudly complain about the cost of drugs so we can get cheap stiffies and father children we want to kill in the womb. We’ll bitch and moan about increasing the minimum wage so the poor can afford cable TV increases and continue to fuel their ten-year old SUVs.

You know, important stuff.

We can’t be bothered with things like the decline of Western Civilization, the death of reason and truth or people being decapitated because they don’t believe the word of some 6th century lunatic.

Just remember folks, when faced with a choice between a man with no principles and a man with bad principles always go with the fellow who has any principles at all. It’s all about the devil you know.

Thank you America, for confirming my already rock bottom opinion of the common man’s intelligence. Thanks Pennsylvania, especially, for again confirming your status as the United States’ most corrupt State. My own beloved state continues to be the most corrupt in the nation and my own beloved country continues to scramble hastily for the bottom. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to grow a beard, practice my Arabic and start looking for wives to abuse. Life is peachy.

So this is the way World War IV starts, eh? It seems too much like Bismarck’s prediction of the start of World War I. The bad guys seize one soldier, so the good guys shoot some folks up, so the bad guys seize more soldiers, so the good guys bomb their house, then the bad guys declare war, the good guys go to war and pretty soon everyone is jumping in on one side or the other.

Lebanon may be Western oriented but Hezbollah is in charge down south. Syria runs Hezbollah and Iran runs Syria. So who are we fighting? Why is Israel bombing Lebanon? To keep the thing from escalating? It’s getting to be too late for that.

Seems to me the question is this: if we choose to go the route of diplomacy, try to defuse the situation and leave things at the status quo ante bellum what do we plan to do when Tel Aviv is nuked? If we leave Iran as is – we buy them off and pray for peace and quiet – they will get nuclear weapons and they will use them at the earliest opportunity. Then what do we do? Do we let Israel vanish in nuclear fire or do we really go to war?

Pretty soon we’re going to have to decide. Hoo boy.

If I am completely in love with this shirt – for reasons completely contrary to what its “look at me, I’m so cleverly political” creators intended – does it make me a bad person?

I wonder: Would I be roundly denounced for bad taste if I made an identical shirt containing the hammer and sickle and the word “democrat?” Or would folks just own up, as the creators of this fine piece obviously expect of the other side?

I started to write a thoughtful piece on Terri Schiavo’s death. What I wanted to write is a Spider Jerusalem-style hit piece on all the idiots in the world who insist on not thinking about the consequences of this great catastrophe.

The problem is – well, mostly the problem is I don’t feel comfortable using a sufficient number of high-quality, foul-mouthed oaths in this very public forum. So, you’ll get what I can give.

I could steal shamelessly from Dickens, “Terri [is] dead: to begin with.” I hate Dickens; but she is dead and someone killed her. This is not a matter of mercy. This is not an issue of benign neglect. How’s that for a twisted phrase? This is murder, pure and simple. You may define “heroic measures” anyway you like but the deliberate withholding of food and water from someone unable to fend for themselves is the most vile form of murder I can imagine. What would you call it if a very small child was deprived of food and water for two weeks? Fuck ‘em. What use are they to society? There’s potential, perhaps, but there’s also the chance nothing productive will come of all the effort to feed, clothe, wash, and care for the little rat.

I know her parents weren’t thinking clearly. Who could in that situation? I have no doubt Terri would not have wanted merely to exist – she might have chosen to die – but I doubt she’d have chosen starvation. I hear freezing to death is very pleasant. I can’t shake the feeling her husband wasn’t thinking clearly either. His situation certainly smacks of a conflict of interest. I agree that State and Federal governments wildly exceeded their authority and yet I agree with the concern behind their actions.

The only question remaining is what we all take away from this? Do we continue our downhill slide? Do we poke fun at the helpless through depraved websites and horrifying cartoons? Or do we begin to consider that life has worth; that sometimes life ends in unpleasant ways and for incomprehensible reasons but remember that life is a gift and that even the manner of its end can be a lesson?

I’ve been reading Democracy in America; a long read but well worth the effort. It’s amazing to me that a book written by a Frenchman in the 1830s still pegs Americans and American attitudes with at least ninety-five percent accuracy 170-odd years later.

In one section de Tocqueville discusses why there are so many ambitious men in America but so few great ambitions. To my mind – and de Tocqueville’s – there are really only two ambitions in America: money and power. I find that very odd. I have no argument with the assertion that the accumulation of money is an American ambition but the idea that Americans would pursue power is strange. Think about it. Who is the most powerful man in America? Which is the most powerful position?

I’d wager a majority of people asked that question would mention the President. That, of course, is idiotic. I could make a case that Bill Gates is vastly more powerful than the President. In fact, I think the Presidency is Constitutionally and realistically a great deal less concerned with power than it is with responsibility. Nearly all power: the power to tax, the power to set the limits of behaviour, the power to declare war and make peace, the power to act is entirely set aside for the Congress; the people, assembled. The President’s job is to see that laws are carried out and to ultimately take responsibility for the success or failure of the people’s will as embodied in their representatives. He can do nothing on his own – or at least, could do nothing as originally designed.

You want to apportion blame for whatever you think is wrong with the country? You wingnuts want someone to answer for the war? Blame Congress. Don’t attack the person of the President just because Congress shame-facedly abrogated its responsibilities. Somewhere along the way Congress politically calculated that it is much easier to safely throw foam darts at the big dog’s arse long after he’s passed them by. Heavens! To actually declare war! Our constituents might toss us out on our largesse fattened arses! We can’t take responsibility for our actions!

You want change? Vote Congress out. Elect representatives who will publicly swear to fulfill their responsibilities as enumerated in the Constitution. You want to get rid of the President you goddamned moonbats? Force Congress to admit they dropped the ball, get a new Congress, have them take back their power and toss the President out for usurping power.

If you haven’t the stones to do what needs to be done, for God’s sake shut up! The Presidency is not a powerful position. He cannot change the phases of the moon or alter the tides. All he can do is administer within the boundaries imposed upon him by the people.

But we all know the people are idiots. More pity that.

A year and a half ago I said that a state of undeclared war existed between the United States and France. Given my recent reading on the Revolution and its immediate aftermath I am coming to the conclusion that the United States and France have always been at war: sometimes openly, sometimes clandestinely.

It is, therefore, gratifying to see that those in the know are beginning to realize this fact:

Amazing, eighty-six years to the day after the guns fell silent on the Western Front, a joyous occasion elsewhere in France gives hope that the guns may soon fall silent on the Middle Eastern Front.

Happy Armistice Day. Happy Veteran’s Day.

Happy Arafat is Dead Day!

A damned fine day, all things considered.

How many hours, man?! Inquiring minds want to know! I hope conservative Red Sox fans of peace bought a case of champagne and have it all on ice. There has been a great deal to celebrate of late.

If it’s true it’s another great day in a string of wonderful days. I could get used to bewilderingly good news every seven days. It makes the weeks fly by.

It has been an anticlimactic couple of weeks. After the ALCS, the Series went off with a whimper. After the sturm und drang of Campaign 2004, the election went off with its own whimper – mostly from Democrats.

Some thoughts:

• As hard as it is for me to admit it, John Kerry may have proven his fitness for office in defeat. His remarks yesterday were noble and dignified, worthy of a good man and a true American. I am sure I will have infinite opportunity to disagree with him in the future but right now I owe him thanks for his graciousness.

• Nobody noticed, but another President was elected Tuesday: Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. His challengers conceded today with some of the same nobility offered by the Senator. Anyone who thinks the Iraqi people are not watching and listening and praying for the future is insane.
• Congratulations to the American people! I still believe strongly that the franchise should be limited but at least the people made a strong decision one way or the other. 51% is nothing to sneeze at, it’s a bigger mandate than President Clinton had in either of his two terms. Great things are afoot.
• And while on the subject of great things, the most radical year in my memory dashes forward. Arafat is in a coma and, we hope, on his death bed. May he enjoy a glimpse of his 72 raisins as he’s whisked off to his eternal torment. There is great potential here. I leave it to American diplomacy to screw it up.
• Will this election finally be the death knell for 1960s hippie liberalism? I am desperate to have a loyal opposition party again in this country. I know no one will believe it but it is deeply unsettling to me to contemplate voting a straight party ticket in every election. I haven’t yet, but I’ve come close. Where are the Bob Caseys? The Harry Trumans? The John Kennedys? Where are the decent Democrats who care more about the nation than their constituencies? Where are the guys who will vote for tort reform, for tax cuts, against compulsory unionism? We need those people back, badly.

Victory is sweet. We will all be the better for it. Wait and see.

I’ve done mine for the day. Oddly, of all the polling places I passed on my drive from Mercersburg to Gettysburg this morning only Gettysburg had no line. No. 94 and I was in and out in no time flat.

For those of you who perenially complain your vote doesn’t count, consider this: in my family our four votes almost always cancel each other out. Mine counters my brother’s while my father’s counters my mother’s. If nothing else, that’s two less votes for the old and failed versus the new and promising.

As I leave you this fine Election Day please remember, if you’re voting based on emotion don’t go to the polls. If, rather, you’re voting as a reasoning creature that has carefully considered all sides to every issue and are therefore voting Republican by all means hie thee to the polls.

And finally, two comments to mull:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. — H.L. Mencken

Americans always get the President they deserve. — unknown

I’m trying to get my mind off baseball. I can’t begin to express how glad I am that I went to bed in the sixth. The late innings rollercoaster would have had me reduced to a quivering ball of jelly. Or shooting folks from the roof. It could have gone either way.

I’ve had thoughts percolating in my head over the last several days. By now everyone’s up on the latest media/political scandals. Dan Rather airing documents even Michael Moore wouldn’t touch and then defending them at the price of what shreds of credibility he has left. The ABC News memo directing the good people of ABC to nail the President to the wall even if it means letting the Senator slide.

What’s next?

I wonder when the holy scripture of “impartial reporting” came into existence. The news couldn’t have been impartial during World War 2 or Ernie Pyle would not have had a job. The news couldn’t have been impartial during the Spanish American War or we wouldn’t have had a war. The news has never been impartial; it’s ridiculous to think it ever could be. We’re all human, we all have biases and we all filter what we see through the screen of our experiences. To think that Dan Rather – feeling as he does about taxes, war, patriotism and politics – could report impartially on the issues of the day is idiotic. That should be plain to see.

What’s wrong with a biased press anyway? In the early days of the Republic press outlets served as the mouthpieces of political factions. Every town big enough to support a newspaper had two: one for Democratic-Republicans/Jacksonians/Democrats and the other for Federalists/Whigs/Republicans. Down the street from where I live a cannon lies buried in the sidewalk. That monument is all that remains of “Penelope;” the gun that was fired by the town’s Democratic paper to celebrate Democratic victories. Then, bias was loudly trumpeted and allowed the citizenry to make a choice: have your pre-determined views reinforced by your chosen party’s organ or compare the two sides and come to your own conclusion. Then as now, I suspect many chose the former.

Just think, if we’d give up this lusting for an unbiased press – a lust than human nature itself mitigates against – we could simultaneously do away with complaints about equal time, about fairness, about government regulation and control. The market would begin to decide which news outlets survived and which didn’t.

Maybe that’s why weblogs are becoming a viable information outlet. Nobody thinks Cold Fury or The Daily Kos are trying to be fair and even-handed. They’re biased, they’re proud of their bias and their ideas compete in an open market. Whoever sells the best ideas will stay around the longest.

Hurrah for a free media! It worked for the Founders.

Want to know the difference between the President and his opponent?

As soon as the debate was over the President waded into the crowd: shaking hands, taking photos, laughing, joking. Kerry stood on stage joking with Charlie Gibson, groped Teresa and generally regarded the people as the great unwashed.

Who do you want to be in charge?

The ratings for the debate seem to be holding. Still, we’re not getting much substance. Both sides present the same talking points ad infinitum whether they relate to the question at hand or not. Tuesday night I couldn’t help but think there must be a more satisfying – a more American – way to determine who is fit to be the President of the United States.

I’m thinking two meetings between the head men – maybe keep the VP debate as is, that’s typically interesting – but make the Presidential candiates meet twice: once to pander to men, once to pander to women.

Men want to know who’s tougher, who will represent America in all her sometimes barbarous glory. I’d like to see a no-holds barred, bare-knuckle fistfight. Or at least a two-man rugby match. Maybe we could alternate formats by election like a duel: the challenger gets to pick the weapons. That would be fine but who really wants Kerry to pick the weapons? It’d end up being something effete like a windsurfing race or a cream pie throwing contest without the cream pies. You’d just make girly throwing motions while mincing away from your opponent’s faux throws.

Women, of course, want to know how the two contestants feel. I’m sure someone can come up with some good ideas [Audrey? Anna? Are you two paying attention?] The best thing I can come up with is some sort of Oprah-fied, shoes off, feet up on the couch, coffee klatch kvetching about how Te-ray-za just doesn’t stoke the fires like she used to.

Americans could then skip the second, watch the first, watch the veeps fight and glide towards November confirmed in our already-formed assumptions.

The more I think about last night’s debate the more stuff comes back to me and the more I despise that smarmy little weasel.

Before last night I figured Edwards was essentially harmless, an attractive, basically empty-headed fellow picked because he was a southerner with good hair and we all know how addicted the Democratic Party is to the Clinton myth. Now I’ve seen the trial lawyer in him come out. The willingness to sacrifice the greater good for personal gain. The willingness to stoop as low as needed to get to a goal.

Most of this visceral disgust stems from his comments regarding Dick Cheney’s daughter. If any son of a bitch sat across the table from me and brought my family into a debate in any way – even positively – I’d wring his chickenshit neck.

Folks, families are off limits. Especially when that grinning jackass evades a question by outing Cheney’s daughter. She’s not ashamed, the VP has mentioned it himself many times but that’s a decision for the Cheney family to make, not some goddamned useless lawyer pretending to be a candidate for Vice President of the United States. That’s just damned bad form.

What a slimeball.

A young fellow sees a grave inscribed ‘Here lies an honest man and a lawyer’

“That’s odd.” says he, “I didn’t know they buried folks two to a hole.”

I didn’t get to see the full-out gladiatorial combat I expected ending with the pretty boy’s smiling head on a pike but it was a good debate and vastly more satisfying than the initial Presidential debate.

I think Cheney won. He got in better jabs, kept his cool and was slightly less evasive than Edwards. Edwards either oversimplified or flat-out lied about several items – gay marriage and federalism, Saddam’s connection to Al Qaeda, Halliburton’s current troubles – and very often completely ignored the question being asked in order to attack the VP. Fair game, of course, but bad form.

One thing I found very interesting was Edwards’ statement of unequivocal support for Israel.

First, the Israeli people not only have the right to defend themselves, they should defend themselves. They have an obligation to defend themselves.

Now, we know that the prime minister has made a decision, an historic decision, to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza. It’s important for America to participate in helping with that process.

Now, if Gaza’s being used as a platform for attacking the Israeli people, that has to be stopped. And Israel has a right to defend itself. They don’t have a partner for peace right now. They certainly don’t have a partner in Arafat, and they need a legitimate partner for peace.

That’s pretty heady stuff. He called Arafat out and seems to back Sharon and the Israeli plan to the hilt. If he and Kerry agree that the Israelis don’t have a parter for peace on the psuedo-Palestinian side then they have to agree whole-heartedly with the security fence.

I wonder how that will play out if – God forbid – Kerry and Edwards take the reins of power. What will they do when their little anti-Semitic buddies in France and Germany start flogging the perceived evil that is Israel and the Arabs start to whine? I expect to eventually read some backpedaling spin on that one.

I’m lying on the couch typing wirelessly as I watch the debates. Does that make me part of the big leagues?

Some thoughts:

• Kerry is noticably taller. He does have a queer Raggedy Andy cherry-red cheek thing going on. From an Oompa-Loompa tan to Raggedy Andy in a couple of days? Very strange.

• Kerry is nervous as hell. I guess all the punditry claiming this was his make it or break it chance got to him.
• The President said ‘vociferously’ without bollocksing it up. Does that mean people will shut up about his diction?
• Still flogging Vietnam JFK? I would have thought the repercussions of that tack would have warned you away by now.
• I dig the website plug. Way cool.
• The President is very good at staying on message. I wonder if that doesn’t hurt him somewhat; he never says anything different. Just the same phrases over and over again.
• Kerry can’t even say a damned cliche correctly. It’s “If you break it, you bought it” you goddamned Frankenstein looking sumbitch. Christ, do you think if I keep going to Boston as often as I do I’ll start looking or thinking like JFK? If I ask one of you to shoot me, will you indulge me?

Well, that was mind-numbingly boring. The best that can be said is that both candidates have perfected the art of staying on message. Damn fine job of not saying anything interesting or unique in any way.

But the big question is, who won? I’d say at best it was a draw, which the conventional wisdom should convert into a defeat for Kerry. Maybe he’ll calm down in the future. Cripes, if that’s all they’ve got to say on foreign policy – the issue this election will be decided on – how yawn inducing will the domestic policy debate be?

Your friend and mine, the third tier of wingnut politicians named John (McCain) is planning a bill to give us all better television sooner than previously legislated.

Leaving aside the insanity of government legislating what sort of television set we have in our living room, our good friend John plans to help us along that path by providing money for the poor amongst us to update their sets and buy better cable service by the deadline. Heavens! Just think, if the inner-city poor don’t have the new digital sets in time UPN would go instantly under! My God, those people might actually have to go read a book or take a walk rather than drool in front of the boob tube! We can’t have that. We want the people quiet and pliable remember? That’s the plan.

Dammit. I live my life by the television schedule but I’ll be goddamned if the Federal Government is going to mandate that I shovel even more of my hard-earned dough toward the cable company in order that they may bring me eleventy-hundred additional home shopping channels and virtually no additional content. Television already costs more than one dollar a day and I only look at nine channels on anything approaching a regular basis.

Men named John are undoubtedly the greatest threat our society has faced throughout its history: John Bull, John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, Johnny Ringo, John Bigboote, John Kerry, John Edwards, John McCain, &c.

I can rail about how we’re a republic, not a damned democracy. I can offer intelligent and well-informed commentary on the virtues of more limited voting rights but nothing assists comprehension like an object lesson:

Marion Barry won a Democratic primary for Washington D.C. City Council by a wide margin.

Only one fellow got it right:

. . . for those who “want to continue to treat D.C. as a colony, Marion Barry is a convenient excuse. ‘See? … They don’t deserve democracy.’ “

Damned skippy.

Today looks exactly like it did three years ago. The sun is shining warm, the sky is a brilliant blue and autumn is in the air.

I understand they’re now calling today Patriot Day. Well, it isn’t. And not just because Patriot Day is April 19, the anniversary of a little conflict in Lexington and Concord as if anyone remembers that.

Today is Remembrance Day and always should be. I don’t mean remembrance in the soft, weepy way our Oprahfied nation would interpret it with candlelight vigils and that inescapably grating Lee Greenwood song but remembrance of the losses we have suffered, the triumphs we have gained and the reason we were forced to fight and win this war.

In your travels today look up into the beautiful blue sky and remember the terrified cargoes travelling through those skies to their doom three years ago. And remember too that some of those chose to fight back and showed in so doing that Americans don’t go quietly, that we still have the same steel in our backbone as did generations before us who fought for liberty on land, on sea and in the air. Raise a glass to fallen heroes and toast eventual victory and always, always

Remember

NPR this morning spent a fair bit of time publicizing the 1,000^th American death in Iraq. Typical for the counterculture media they tried to spin the cost of the war as falling mostly on the poor underclass. They had an expert who said explicitly that wasn’t true: the bottom 25% get weeded out by the army, the top 25% weed themselves out and the middle 50% are our soldiers. Doesn’t that sound like the middle class? Not to NPR. To NPR that’s the lower-middle and working class.

And what about those 1,000 deaths? On September 17, 1862 3.650 died in slightly more than twelve hours. On September 11, 2001 2,948 died in slightly more than one hour. Between March 19, 2003 and September 7, 2004 1,000 people have died.

Sorry kids, that’s a tragedy but it ain’t news.

What has happened to a United States which cannot bear less than one death every three days, and that in a righteous cause? What does it say about the future of our civilisation that we are not willing to fight for that future?

What would we do if Pearl Harbor (2,402 deaths) happened again today?

Never mind. It already did.

Everyone hereabouts has their panties in a twist about an upcoming art exhibit at my alma mater: Gettysburg College. One of these oh-so-clever artists – the kind who are unable to produce actual works of their own but rely instead on so-called satire and societal commentary – has been invited to bring his show “The Recoloration Proclamation: The Gettysburg Redress” to the College for an exhibition. Part of the opening was to be a lynching of the Confederate battle flag on a gallows outdoors. Oddly, the humourless neo-traitorous scum known as the Sons of Confederate Veterans must have caught a glimpse of these plans between NASCAR races and managed to put down their Budweisers long enough to threaten a boycott of the town of Gettysburg for one full year if this exhibit went forward. The town talked to the college, the college partially caved and now we’re to have an exhibit without a lynching and without the artist.

In general, ninety-nine percent of actions wailed against as censorship are not. This affair, I believe, nearly crosses that line. Boycott the exhibit if you like but to propose economic pressure on a town due to an activity which is beyond their scope of control is pretty damn close to that sacred phrase ‘stifling of dissent.’

I reckon I’ll go see the exhibit. It seems innocuous enough if not exactly art. This is just one more reason for me to despise the SCV. Am I glad I never shook their hand, nor dipped my colors in their presence during any ceremony.

It’s one thing to commemorate your heritage. It’s quite another to raise a ruckus defending a banner of treason. ‘Heritage not hate’? I hate your damned heritage.

Someone emailed me with glowing commentary on former President Clinton’s speech at the DNC Tuesday night. He said that speech outlined very clearly the differences between the two parties.

My response follows:

The difference – which he said without being explicit – is this: If faced with a problem are you better off with or without government help?

• I believe that most of the time government is the problem.
• I believe, as Calvin Coolidge said, “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”
• I believe the nine scariest words in the English language are, “We’re from the government, we’re here to help you.”
• I believe the American people have proved over and over again they can do anything if left to their own devices but, like people everywhere, will sit back in the recliner and be babied if the opportunity arises.
• I believe the Federal government’s duties are as follows, “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
  • You can not form a more perfect Union when you divide the citizenry into victims groups: haves vs. have nots, blacks vs. whites, capital vs. labor.
  • You can not establish Justice when criminals are treated as if their crimes are somehow society’s fault, or when you support the annual murder of millions of human beings by doctors bound to use their arts only to heal.
  • You can not insure domestic Tranquility when proclaiming class war, or stifiling dissenting voices.
  • You can not provide for the common defence when you slash military budgets, or ignore prescient warnings.
  • You can not promote the general Welfare by promoting the specific Welfare, or restricting the freedom to choose a school or choose a job.
  • You can not secure the Blessings of Liberty when you can’t smoke in a bar, or bear arms in accordance with the Second Amendment.

That, pally, is the difference.

The Dems are up in my favorite city busily ruining that place for me for all time.

Luckily I don’t care to spend much time in or around the Fleet Center. I am a bit wary of going to Fenway again after Kerry tried to ruin that for me.

But no matter, this is a happy-go-lucky convention. We’re all friends here, don’t you know. It’s not that we’re a raucous partisan crowd united only by our hatred for the President, oh no! We’re all upbeat, united and in luv with John Kerry.

And to prove it, we’re not going to engage in any Bush-bashing.

Funny. If you watched any of the speeches last night and listened to the commentary you would conclude that the threshold into Bush bashing is only crossed when the name “Bush” is mentioned. You can belittle his achievements, dredge up Democratic lies from the past, call him a liar and a thief but so long as you don’t say his name you’re only being upbeat, positive and not engaging in Bush-bashing.

Like I said, funny.

Here’s the text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The most oft cited part is that bit about abridging the freedom of speech but folks seem to forget the lead: “Congress shall make no law . . . ”

This is a quick lesson for Linda Ronstadt, the Dixie Chicks, Whoopi Goldberg, Michael Moore, et al:

You have the right to say what you wish.
Congress has no right to interfere with you saying what you wish.

Here’s the kicker:

The rest of us have the right to tell you to go to hell.

This fellow is effectively losing a week of income due to the impending Democratic National Convention – along with much of the city of Boston – and the city had the nerve to threaten a fine if he didn’t remove the sign.

Fair enough, cities have building codes, etc. They’re well within their rights. I guess he’s just lucky it’s not closer to the election. The FEC might have to crack down on him for expressing political speech too near the election.

I don’t want to be one of those people who loudly declaims how innocent and snowy white their side is while the other side is little more than a wretched hive of scum and villiany. How about we allow the proper authorities time to thoroughly investigate the Sandy Berger issue and, if wrongdoing is shown, we all agree not to spread calumnies about either side for a while?

I’ll be keeping an eye on this. The first wingnut out there in the world who says, “Sure he stole highly sensitive documentation in order to clear his and his former boss’s name but that’s not nearly so bad as what Bushitler/HalliCheneyBurton/WorldEnronCom/bugaboo of the week has done!” gets one right in the kisser.

I just finished watching the President’s speech in York. It strikes me how very comfortable the President is with the people. When you see him in press conferences or at the State of the Union he always seems uptight. Tonight, he smiled, he was relaxed, he spoke from the heart and he wound the audience up.

The chant was infectious, “Four More Years!”

Before I forget, we should all keep the Iranian people in mind tonight. Today is the annual commeoration of the 1999 crackdown. Protests were scheduled for today despite extreme repressive measures taken by the regime.

It’s a little late lads. Democracy’s got a beachhead next door and as history proves, once we’ve got a beachhead tyranny’s days are numbered.

My uncle left some interesting comments beneath the last Kerry smooch picture. I haven’t got anything to say about most of it except to note I’m glad someone in the family is keeping up the Irish tradition of voting with the Democratic machine.

He does pose an interesting question however:

when will you be reviewing Farenheight 911??

I have a policy not to mention Michael Moore either in conversation or on this site. That hasn’t always been the case but since the lad went completely sideways I have made it a policy. The reason is quite simple: I have no intention of even deigning to notice his fevered rantings.

Back when Roger & Me came out I thought it was one of the funniest flicks I’d ever seen. The message was essentially meaningless. Despite what you may want to think people are in business to make money. If they’re not making enough they close or move to where they can make more. That’s the long and the short of it and there’s nothing at all wrong with that attitude. Where would any of us be without money and things to spend it on?

Nevertheless, I started out a Michael Moore fan. I loved Roger & Me and I thought his short-lived television show was brilliant. I know I’ve referred to his re-enactment episode more than once, particularly the bit where he plays the French in every war they’ve ever fought. Comedy gold, baby!

But the fellow has gone nuts. That’s it, just nuts. He was always mean-spirited and propagandistic – I watched Roger & Me again and was annoyed by how much he belabored the point, watching 90 minutes of a fat, rumpled man whining is not a pleasant experience regardless of message – still, he enclosed his message in some decent comedy and tried to spur you to think. Fair enough.

That isn’t the case any more. Now he’s some sort of American Goebbels (pardon the somewhat inappropriate Nazi reference, I can’t think of another propagandist that would be as well-known), churning out increasingly wild-eyed and unrealistic propaganda to feed the masses. He’s guilty of exactly the same thing he accuses others of: twisting the facts to feed his agenda.

In the end my answer to the question is this: I choose not to see Farenheit 9/11 because I do not want to give any encouragement either through my attendence or through my ticket fee to Michael Moore, the film’s distributor, the movie theatres or anyone else associated with this piece of agitprop. I don’t want to talk about the man, think about the man or in any way ruin my day by contemplating the fact that good, intelligent people tolerate and even admire the man.

I think Pennsylvania needs a new state motto:

216 years as America’s most corrupt state!

Hey, with perpetually losing sports teams, a collapsing economy and some of the highest taxes in the Union we ought to be numero uno in something right?

To cement our status and thoroughly earn our new slogan we’ve now legalized 61,000 slot machines – making Pennsylvania second only to Nevada for the number of slots installed. As if that wasn’t good enough check out how our legislators wrote this big bonanza bill:

• The licenses for slots are being basically given away. For a $50 million one-time fee you can get your very own license to print money. An auction could bring in $300 million or more.

• Legislators – the same folks cramming this supposed panacaea down our throats – can own up to a 1 percent stake in any operation. Based on revenue estimates, that’s real money. Likely in the tens of millions. A pretty sweet deal for pressing the Yes button.
• The positions on the new gaming review board are appointed by the same legislators/potential owners who put the whole mechanism into place. Let’s put two and two together, shall we? Legislators who are apparently unconcerned with the people appointing a board with no ties to the people operating an industry well known for corruption and predatory practices. It sounds better and better all the time, doesn’t it?
• But it’s all right, you say. We’re all going to get our cut of the mountains of dough, right? Nah. This is Pennsylvania after all. Theoretically we’re due for property tax relief but not until “the state takes in at least $900 million, which is more than Nevada and New Jersey receive annually.”

So, what do we have here?

A) A chance at a stake in a stupdenously lucrative industry.
B) Sweet patronage jobs to be handed out.
C) Coffers filling with coin.
D) Bupkis

Now match the above with the beneficiaries:

1) State Legislators
2) The Governor, Speaker of the House and Caucus heads
3) Track and betting parlor owners
4) The citizens of Pennsylvania

I made it easy for you.

The Federal Government and the Post Office is closed today for Mr. Reagan’s funeral. Presumably that means that enormous numbers of public employees get a paid day off.

How do you think Mr. Reagan would feel knowing those legions were taking a vacation on the public dime?

Some legacy.

This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.

Ain’t it the truth? I have long felt that Iraqis need a George Washington. Now, I am beginning to think we do too.

“. . . war is mankind’s most natural state: the fittest survive and the greatest technological advancements are made.” — File Card: Destro 1983

OK, that’s not really the point of this little bs session but I always liked that quote and, to a certain extent, I agree with Destro.

In the modern world, presumably under the influence of the hippie generation, we’re taught that man is by nature good. Evil arises through some external force – either environment or genetics – acting against man’s default angelic nature. This is peculiar to me. It seems, rather, that it had been agreed all along that man’s default nature was evil: hence the rise of governments, religion, etc. All means by which to ensure order and contain the worse aspects of our personalities.

In Genesis, God creates Adam and Eve who promptly violate his decree and create the doctrine of original sin. What is original sin except a confession that we are a flawed creation, with the first component of our essence being sin? God didn’t just let people trip along happily, tweaking them when they got out of line. No, he set rules and boundaries and then rained fire from the heavens when someone slipped the leash. That’s what religion and government have done all along: set rules and boundaries and made clear the penalties to be paid for giving rein to their natural instincts.

This original understanding may be coming back into vogue. Theodore Dalrymple writes how he came to the same conclusion by working in the British prison system:

“My vision of humanity has darkened . . . since I began to investigate the lives of ordinary British people in modern conditions. I have come to the conclusion that the default setting of man is to evil and that, if not all, then many or perhaps most men will commit evil if they can get away with it.”

That, my friends, is unvarnished truth. From the kid stomping ants on the sidewalk to the schoolyard bully threatening his fellows to the whack jobs sawing people’s heads off on camera: it’s a pretty steady progression. The rule of law is needed. Swift punishment for transgression and steady monitoring of behavior are the remedies. When your kid tramps mud all over the carpet you’ve just cleaned do you negotiate? Do you try and work out a deal? Or do you smack the hell out of the little rat and try to get them back on the straight and narrow path?

A little more discipline in all things would do us some good.

Are we really all on a perpetually spinning Hamster Wheel of Doom? It would certainly seem so. Case(s) in point:

• The Simpsons last night sucked. It was supposed to be all daring and edgy and talking about how America was now a police state filled with patriotic zombies. Heh. Funny. Not.

  One of the great beauties of The Simpsons is that it has always abused equally. It poked fun at celebrities in the same breath it poked fun at all us morons who care what celebrities eat for breakfast. It roundly denouced both sides of the political divide, picked on the rich and the poor, ad nauseum. Last night’s episode picked on red-state Americans without any corresponding abuse of blue-state folks. Pitiful. I didn’t smile even once. It was actually painful to watch: like looking at Rush Limbaugh or listening to Al Franken froth at the mouth.

  See, Simpsons people, evenly distributing abuse can be done. I just did it. Man, I hate Rush Limbaugh.

• The great state of Massachussets has been doing gay marriages for nearly twelve hours now. What sort of brain-dead idiot opens up a municipal office at midnight on a Sunday night in order to hasten the downfall of Western Civilisation? I am amazed the Federal courts did not put a stop to this, given the very knotty federalism issues involved but I was impressed by the Governor’s insistence that Massachussets’ 1913 law forbidding weddings for out of staters when that wedding would be in violation of their home state’s laws would be strictly adhered to. Naturally, many of the clerks signing folks up to be wed vocally announced their intention to flout that order. I think the FMA furor will have to come to a head sooner rather than later. This is a bad thing.
• Apparently Americans are beginning to give up on the war. Is abject surrender an option? Certainly not. Suppose the war isn’t worth it, what sort of message do you think it would send for us to throw up our hands and retreat at this point? I can’t see any alternative but to continue the war – regardless of blood or treasure – until we succeed. I have no doubt – in fact, I always expected – that it will take 20 years, billions of dollars and probably thousands of lives but we haven’t got a choice.

  If we turn tail and run we’re back in 1973-75: a President many people hate, a victorious anti-war and anti-american fifth column, large deficits and the stain of defeat magnified by the known cost/wasted effort. That is unacceptable.

  If this world is to have any chance of a decent future America must lead. We’ve brought the world this far in 50 years: Europe at peace with itself for the first time since Caesar Augustus conquered the world, the Middle East seemingly receptive to change, virtually no agressive war waged anywhere on Earth. These are things to be proud of. These are things to pursue. This is victory. Nothing less is acceptable, regardless of cost.

I am not a full-on doom and gloom kind of guy, not deep in my heart anyway. Do I think any of these things actually presage the end times or the total collapse of America/Western Civilisation/etc? No. In fact, when pressed to prophesy where we’d all be in fifty years I said, “Basically where we are now.” I see no reason to doubt that theory. We may be trending downward on many things but we’re at the same time trending upward on many other things. We’re longer-lived, richer, and less restricted than ever. Simultaneously, we’re fatter, more in debt and more angry at our freedom than ever. Things tend to balance. Although I do think the overall trend is down.

By the best reckonings today is Niccolo Machiavelli’s birthday. It is, of course, pointless to wish a Happy Birthday to a fellow who’s been dead for nearly 500 years but a celebration of his birth ought to warrant some acknowledgement of his life and work.

I’m a huge Machiavelli fan. I suppose in the modern world folks would call Machiavellianism Realpolitik: taking the most practical steps to achieve a desired result. If you need to ally with a tyrant in order to contain a bigger tyrant, so be it. That may be part of Machiavelli’s philosophy but it certainly isn’t all of it. The lesson to be learned from The Prince is that people respect results and worry little about the means to an end. Machiavelli doesn’t neccesarily advocate tyranny or bloodthirstiness but he does advocate the judicious application of power where needed.

We’d all do well to read The Prince again. In our current situation We The People are The Prince and our namby-pamby actions thus far are neither endearing us to our people nor awing our enemies. Power exists to be applied. Just as your muscles atrophy if not used, power will drain away if not exercised. You can’t make people love you but you can make them fear you. To be feared is better than being hated but either is often preferable to being loved. How many kids do what their parents tell them to out of love and respect?

In the end, as some bimbo said: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

If I had any lust for life at all I’d probably be really excited about tomorrow’s primary. Have you seen Arlen Specter lately? G’wan and tell me that hair is real. Sure, I believe you. Matter of fact, I just saw an Oompa-Loompa duck ’round the corner singing that hauntingly malevolent song. Don’t forget he authored the single bullet theory which makes him either a stooge or the most naive idiot ever to become a Senator.

There have been some real winners vying for that honor over the years.

What to do, what to do? If you’re a Republican you can vote for Pat Toomey. Granted, the guy’s got too much of the polished, slightly drooling look of a career politician but at least he seems like he has some principles. Or maybe he’s just a lap-dog for causes and groups of which I approve. Regardless, anybody is better than Arlen “I figger on tying Strom Thurmond for the longest serving Senatorial corpse” Specter.

If you’re not a halfwit or a labor union member – but I repeat myself – do us all a favor and vote tomorrow. While you’re at it, if you’ve the chance to vote for anyone in the Pennsylvania legislature, vote against the incumbent. It doesn’t really matter who it is, as near as I can tell they’re all bums.

Been reading, yet again, A Government of our Own. It’s a decent book covering the formation of the Confederate States government during February 1861. Now and again the lame-duck President, James Buchanan, comes up in the text and my confused jumble of thoughts about that fellow pops to the fore.

James Buchanan was born less than five miles from where I grew up in a cabin which now stands on the path I took twice a week to gym throughout high school. Once his folks moved out of the mountain gap and into town he lived about half a block from my childhood home. My town seems awfully proud of him – he’s on all the Chamber of Commerce signage and just recently had a statue dedicated to him just off the square – but I have always had mixed feelings.

I don’t think I’ll go into detail, I don’t have that many to begin with. I wish someone would point out to me a few good biographies and/or texts on the actions of the President from 1857 – 1861 so I could get a more complete picture. My reading thus far leads me to believe that at best he was a weak, ineffectual executive and at worst an ignorant traitor. Kind of a bummer. It would be nice to say to folks, “Hey. I come from the same town as a President of the United States.” But if they ever asked who the President was I’d mumble something about Jimmy Buck and hope they didn’t ask for clarification.

What a drag.

Been thinking about slavery again. There was a time when I adopted a nineteenth century attitude: What do I care? I’m still not sure I’d have been an abolitionist – at least not one of the zealots – but I think I might have thought it was wrong and commented on its wrongness. That still wouldn’t make me an abolitionist, just a slightly better human being. A “first rate, second rate man,” as Garrison said of Lincoln.

It’s odd today how no-one wants to deal with the reality of the issue. Everyone loudly proclaims it was wrong! It was evil! It means the nation was founded in evil! Well, I can’t argue that it was wrong. Nor can I argue that we ought to have done something about it well before 600,000 men were slaughtered to stop it. Then again, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone before the 1830s or so arguing that it wasn’t an unavoidable wrong.

I heard a lady on the radio yesterday who is a historian at one of the major Portuguese slave ports in west Africa. She’s descended on one side from slaves and on the other side from the white man who originated the slave trade. Sounds like a contradiction but I don’t think it is, even in this country. Slavery was a social system. It wasn’t just hiring an irish maid to come and take care of the kids. It was like owning a dog, a member of the family. Lives became intertwined and some of the folks screaming for reparations today are probably descended both from the slaves they acknowledge and the masters they want money from. Very complicated. Entirely too complicated to be boiled down into asinine slogans.

My family owned slaves, or at least one. Do I feel guilty? Not in the least. Am I ashamed? Again, nope. Would I like to meet the descendants of the slaves? Sure, they’re as much a part of my family history as my own grandfather. Would I apologize? Maybe, in a general way, but I don’t resent my family for doing so although it would be nice to think they could have seen past economic reality and took a stand on principle.

There are many wrongs done in this world. Some we correct, others we can’t seem to sort out. All books are balanced in the end. Can those of the future be held accountable for the sins of the past? Provided they don’t repeat them I think not. That’s the real trick isn’t it? How to remember and take pains to avoid the pitfalls of the past without enduring shared responsibility for those errors.

A cogent observation on the gay marriage foolishness:

If marriage is a civil right, can I sue the government to appoint me a spouse?

Damned right.

Looks like good old JFK – the skeletal one, not the slightly slutty but generally OK one – is destined to be the Democratic nominee for President.

Nifty, now the campaigning can start in earnest. I had a vision of this whole process as the opening scene of a great naval battle. On the horizon the red, white and blue dreadnaught ‘W’ hovers in range of the ghostly looking yellow battlecruiser ‘JFK.’ It took some time but finally the screen of escort ships around the ‘JFK’ have cleared the field of fire and ‘W’ is ready to let loose with a full broadside.

Man, it’s going to be an engagingly nerve-wracking campaign season but I think the ‘JFK’ will be handily sunk in the end.

I have long maintained that very few people care more about or are better cheerleaders for this nation than legal immigrants. People who thought long and hard about where they wanted to spend their lives and chose to come to the United States and leap through all the bureaucratic hoops needed to become a resident and eventually a citizen of this wonderful land.

I never thought much about expatriates. What does one make of people who decided to leave this nation for another? What were they looking for and what made them think it could only be found elsewhere?

An excellent article today tries to explain the reasoning while simultaneously explaining why, despite its innumerable flaws, this really is the best place on Earth:

. . . my heart rings with pride for “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

We are not free in France. I know the difference. I come from a free country. A rough and ready, clumsy, slapped together, tacky country where people say wow and gosh and shop at Costco. A country so vast I haven?t the faintest idea where I would put myself. A homeland I would have liked to keep at a distance, visit with pleasure, and leave with relief. A native land I walked out on with belated adolescent insouciance. A foreign land where I was born because Europe vomited up my grandparents as it is now coughing up me and mine.

Just amazing. I love the fact that we live in a “rough and ready, clumsy, slapped together, tacky country.” Where else could exist such infinite possibilities?

Gay marriage is now the topic. And it’s a pity since the debate is really about a word. I think you’d have a very hard time producing a majority who would always and forever deny any sort of companionship rights to gay couples. Do I think gay couples should be able to adopt? An argument can be made either way. Do I think gay couples should have hospital visitation rights, the right of inheritance and all that other fun legalese stuff? Sure. Why not?

Do I think gay couples should be able to claim the word marriage? Absolutely not. But that’s beside the point.

At this moment the point is less about whether or not gay couples have any sort of inherent rights apart from the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and more about whether elected officials have the right to break the law or unelected judges have the right to create new inherent rights out of thin air.

This sort of higgledy-piggledy has been going on for far too long. The San Franciscan situation is easily solved – you throw the mayor in jail. You don’t even need to make a declaration on the state of the “marriages” he thinks he’s permitted because since they are in clear violation of the state law they never happened at all. Case closed. The Massachussetts problem can be solved equally as easily. The judges simply have to declare that on second thought, this is a question best left to the people to determine through debate and legislation and remand the issue to the legislature or, better yet, order that a referendum on the question be held at the earliest possible moment.

If, however, these unaccountable robed wingnuts refuse to “doubt a little of themselves” at this critical juncture what are we to do? Nobody wants to tinker with the Constitution of the United States. Look at the mess we’ve made with the amendments we’ve passed so far. Hell, it’s been over 200 years and we still haven’t sorted out the meaning of the very first amendment. Still, the people must be heard. The absolute foundation of civilization cannot be so radically modified without a discussion. Insular Star Chambers tinkering with the building blocks of society cannot be tolerated.

Hence, a Constitutional Amendment. I have no doubt some idiot will read “emanations and penumbras” aplenty out of the text but to me it says very simply that the word marriage cannot be applied to any relationship other than that of a man and a woman. Outside of the reservation of the word marriage all bets are off – provided changes to the law are made by lawmakers, not judges.

Works for me.

Gee, guess I had better say something really deep before people begin to think I’ve sunk into the earth or some-such.

Sorry, nothing meaningful to report.

I guess today would be better suited to the holiday we celebrated last Monday being as George Washington’s Birthday was yesterday. There has been a good deal of talk in the sort of things I read about the travesty of replacing Washington’s Birthday – the official, legal holiday – with the amorphous blob known as President’s Day. Although many Presidents were great men and all did something to advance the nation why should we be celebrating such luminaries as Millard Fillmore, Zachary Taylor, Wm. Henry Harrison, James Buchanan or Jimmy Carter? All were more or less failures, one served only a matter of days before his death, another a matter of months. Why on earth would we reduce the memory of George Washington in order to elevate these men?

I have become, over the years, increasingly fond of George Washington. When everyone first encounters him, in school, he’s portrayed as a statue might be: aloof, above the fray, beyond criticism or engagement. If you take the time to learn about the man you begin to discover someone very different. Someone who burned with ambition as intense as any man in American political history. Someone who was every bit as dignified as the accounts we read but as coarse as a jack tar when occasion called for it.

Did you know Washington threw a hell of a booze fest when running for the Virginia Assembly in his youth? Something on the order of barrels of hard cider and bottles of whiskey and rum. How about at the Battle of Monmouth when his subordinate, Charles Lee, was retreating before the advance of the British main body and Washington’s damning of Lee continued until the “leaves shook on the trees” and was “the most beautiful I ever heard” according to one of his officers.

Add the reality of the man to the reality of his achievements and you have the very model of a strong, independent, virtuous citizen which is ever deserving of emulation and certainly of commemoration to the exclusion of all others.

Does anyone not running for the Democratic nomination for President seriously dispute that we’re in a war for civilization? I find it amazing that while we fight, the world over, to preserve our way of life we are simultaneously undermining the very foundation of all life.

Our dear friends the South Koreans have successfully cloned human embryos for use in stem cell therapy. Let there be no mistake: the patient whose cells were used allowed scientists to create an identical genetic copy of themself with the full knowledge that they (in the form of the clone) would then be disassembled into component cells for theraputic use before being discarded. And we want to have Saddam executed for feeding people into tree-chippers? How, exactly, is this different from having a child and then dismembering that child to harvest the liver, kidneys, lungs or any other needed organs? I should think the genetic information in one’s child should be sufficient to ensure acceptance of the organs in most cases. Yet we (hopefully) consider the latter beyond the pale while the former is accepted medical practice.

Has the world gone completely sideways? We’re in the fight of our lives here folks, we are quite literally fighting a civilization that would kill us to a man if allowed to do so and yet we’re happily engaged in killing ourselves in the name of progress? If I tied gay marriage into this argument would that be too harsh?

Probably. I think they’re all related but I’ve probably pulled too many threads together as it stands. Progress is lovely people, just don’t lose sight of where we came from. The fact we can do a thing does not imply we ought to do that thing.

Ninety-three years young! Of course, he thinks he’s only about twelve but given the man’s achievements he can be forgiven his lapse into senility. Winning the third biggest war of the 20th century takes it out of you, apparently.

It would be nifty to see Reagan reach 100. Surely he did as much for the world as did Bob Hope.

That’s the State of our Union is it?

A good speech, not a great speech. No rousing calls to national greatness but not too much unattainable political garbage either. It had some fine points but at least a couple that worry the hell out of me.

- What happened to the Space initiative? Only a week after proposing trips to the Moon and Mars and mere days after NASA announced the end of life for Hubble due to the restructuring needed to make those trips possible space gets no mention at all? Either the President figures it’s already in motion or he was just trying to do ‘the vision thing’ like his Dad. Smart money bets on the latter.

- The Afghan Constitution “guarantee[s] free elections and full participation by women?” Really? When did that happen exactly? Last I heard, their Constitution guaranteed that Afghanistan would be an Islamic Republic with Islamic Law as the highest authority. Doesn’t that pretty much preclude the above guarantees?

- Oh, and tell me these two sentences aren’t mutually incompatible:

I oppose amnesty, because it would encourage further illegal immigration, and unfairly reward those who break our laws. My temporary worker program will preserve the citizenship path for those who respect the law, while bringing millions of hardworking men and women out from the shadows of American life.

Did I miss something? How on earth do you bring “millions of hardworking men and women out from the shadows of American life” without amnesty? If you ask me, that sounds like the very definition of amnesty. Maybe it’s something in the Washington water that makes words not mean what they mean. Does anyone remember what the definition of “is” is?

But like I said, there was some damn fine stuff in there as well.

- So much for the whiny Democrats who want us to get a hall pass from the UN for everything we do. The President slammed them on their refusal to understand that the Iraq operation is already “internationalized.” Good for him. God bless our allies, I’m glad they’re finally getting some public acclamation for the job they’re doing. Sounds to me like the only “international” parties left off the list were France, Germany, Russia and the collection of thieves and brigands known as the United Nations.

- The marriage commentary was pretty exciting. He stopped about ten words away from openly supporting the Federal Marriage Amendment. Heavy stuff. Glad he finally said something about the Judiciary run amok. Wish he’d have said something about the Congress run amok with his choices for the Judiciary.

- I loved it when he got right in Congress’s face and laid full responsibility for future tax increases directly in their lap.

Unless you act — – unless you act — unless you act, the unfair tax on marriage will go back up. Unless you act, millions of families will be charged $300 more in federal taxes for every child. Unless you act, small businesses will pay higher taxes. Unless you act, the death tax will eventually come back to life. Unless you act, Americans face a tax increase.

Damn right! And then, after the speech, one Congressional nincompoop had the temerity to say that action on taxes “wasn’t going to happen.” Yep folks, that’s the Democratic Party in a nutshell. Never forget, they know better how to spend your money than you do. Why, if you were able to keep your own money you might spend it on things like houses, cars and good schooling. Heaven forfend! What ever will become of our programs to increase abortion on demand, outlaw religious expression and surrender our national sovereignty to pie-in-the-sky utopians from around the world?

Like I said, generally a good speech. Good enough, in fact, that the commentary by the Dems after the speech had already been largely refuted by the President in the Address.

I was looking for the image but can’t find it. I’ll just leave you with the thought. To Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi:

How about a nice hot cup of shut the fuck up?

Global warming my apple-y-round arse!

Sometime this morning it hit me: We’re going back to the Moon.

Just as suddenly it hit me: Fat chance.

What, realistically, are the chances that NASA can jump off its decades-long hamster wheel and do all the things that need doing in order to facilitate a return to the Moon? What, realistically, are the chances that the deeply divided American electorate will even attempt to see the thing through? What, realistically, are the chances we’ll actually make the move for Mars after a successful series of Moon missions?

Pretty much zero, zip and none.

We’ve got no imagination anymore. The last big idea was the promise of the 1960s. We actually went to the Moon. We declared War on Poverty. We thought that we could explore the outer limits while perfecting our inner selves. Didn’t happen. Look at the rhetoric these days: one side trumpets a vision for the future, the other loudly moans that we haven’t carried through the ideas of the past. The bulk of the populace voted for the ideas of the past in 2000. In 2004 the bulk of the population will vote for the promise of the future but not in sufficient numbers to declare a mandate. So, what will we do? We’ll sit still and spin our wheels in mud churned deep by bureaucratic inertia.

Even so, think of the possibilities! Space Elevators lifting larger and larger cargoes into near-Earth orbit waiting to be retrieved and hastened on their journey by lifting bodies constructed and fueled at Camp Liberty, Sea of Tranquility, the Moon. Within our lifetime the United States flag planted in the red dust of Mars. Regular orbital launches by ramjet powered craft hurled into exo-atmospheric flight by railguns. Too cool and yet very possible.

Will it happen? Like the Eagles making it to the big show, I can’t allow myself to hope. This may be a year or a decade or a generation of great achievement but I’m not getting my hopes up. It’s further to fall when we fail and higher to rise if we succeed.

No joke, real gen-u-wine peace loving folks found my comparison of Howard Dean to Hitler from a month ago and left at least one very long and detailed comment clearly enumerating all the reasons President Bush and Chancellor Hitler are exactly alike.

Wow.

There’s even a comment showing how Bush’s name means skull and bones.

Wow.

I’ll just have to jump right out of my chair and join the Green Party. Nah, Nader’s too right wing. NAZI!

For the record – I’M THE FUEHRER! Sorry, inside joke.

Oh bloody brilliant Mr. President. Another wonderful move designed to instill confidence and make America richer and more secure, only this time you can’t come back a year later – like with the steel tariffs – and say, “so solly, big mistake.”

Gee, what do you do with tens of thousands of “undocumented aliens?” In my day they called them “illegal immigrants” and they treated them as what they are, common criminals. That means jail, deportation, pretty much whatever we want to do with them. Talk about breaking a sacred trust. We Americans have welcomed people from all over the world throughout our entire existence. In return we ask only one thing: obey the rules. Now we’ve got an entire class of people who haven’t obeyed the rules, likely aren’t obeying the rules and we’re about to reward them with the greatest prize in the entire world: American Citizenship. Gee folks, how much responsibility do you want to extend to people who have already demonstrated their ability to lie, cheat and steal to get what they want?

So why do it? Apparently the best reason anyone can come up with is that they’ll do jobs Americans aren’t willing to do. Say what? How is it that we hover around 5% unemployment if there are jobs that need doing? How on earth can there be jobs Americans are unwilling to do? How do those oh-so-picky Americans survive? What do they do for a living?

Dollars to donuts they suckle at Uncle Sam’s expansive teat. How hard would it be to say to those people, “Hey, you think you’re too good to sweep floors at Wal-Mart for five bucks an hour? Let’s see how you do with ZERO income. Take your pick, either get arrested and be a leech on society that way or puncture your pride and start working your way up the ranks like everyone else.”

I generally don’t believe in the whole “giveaways to big business” conspiracy but aside from pandering to an ever-growing hispanic population who can’t be bought for the GOP anyway I can’t see any other explanation for this spectacularly idiotic move. I guess Wal-Mart can’t just increase the cost of y-fronts by another dollar and be able to pay folks a decent wage. Hell, it’s not like there’s any competition left. Pity.

Ohboyohboy, primary season is officially upon us at last. Iowans go to the caucuses in two weeks, shortly thereafter comes Super Tuesday and a plethora of other primaries across the country. By March we’ll pretty much know what the ticket is for the November elections. It doesn’t make Pennsylvania, with their late primary balloting, seem like she has much of a say in things but such is our current party-based, electoral system.

But who cares? It’ll be a whole season of bread and circuses. The two party standard-bearers will promise larger and larger allotments of bread for the people at increasingly raucous circuses. By the end of it all you’ll think we’re headed for Utopia only to find out the only way to get there is by offering up all the money in your pocket to the friendly hand of Uncle Sam in the expectation he’ll bestow upon you a little thin gruel and maybe a bit of moldy cheese on Sundays. So, we’ll all laugh at politicos’ campaign promises and assume that, no matter what, this great nation of ours will keep on keepin’ on just like it has for the past 228 years or so.

Stay tuned true believers, it promises to be a fun ride.

I was going to do a whole list of reasons the Democrats are like Nazis (support for euthanasia and abortion, their belief that people can be separated by race with certain races afforded special treatment, &c) but it got pretty harsh so I figure I won’t badmouth them that much.

Still, I saw this picture and it scared the hell out of me. I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. Are the Dems closer to good, old-fashioned German fascists than anyone else out there?

Nuff said

I read a pretty good posting on Redheaded Ramblings about the need for a new definition to encompass all the supposedly cool, hip new kids joining the Republican Party. PJ O’Rorke suggests “Republican Party Reptiles.” Others have commented on “South Park Republicans.” Fair enough, I suppose both are somewhat accurate for the sort of people who would use them to describe themselves.

Apparently there’s something wrong with the label conservative. Strictly defined I suppose there is. I should think there is only a small subset of conservatives and Republicans who really honestly oppose change. I hope nobody honestly thinks that the good old days were anything but normal days a long time ago.

Still, I tend to think of conservatives as people who believe tradition should be preserved and that change should only proceed at a snail’s pace and even then only after exhaustive discussion and debate. Maybe conservatives should really be called preservatives. OK, maybe preservationists?

I don’t want to return to the days when women were expected to stay home and tend to the chilluns. I don’t want the return of slavery, serfdom, or aristocratic rule. I don’t want to see tarriffs enacted, plutocrats running amok through the economy or JP Morgan able to save the nation from depression solely through force of will (and judicious infusions of cash). I don’t want gay men and women to have to cower in dark corners out of real fear of bodily harm.

But, neither do I want traditional morality (as I define it) to become totally irrelevant. I don’t want special victim groups to accrue rights independent of the rest of us. I don’t want businesses outlawed, penalized or demonized solely for doing business. I don’t want a judiciary independent of the citizens any more than I want a judiciary beholden to political pressures.

In short, I don’t want government in my pocketbook, in my home or in my face. I want people to live as people and to treat others as equal citizens with themselves without some finger-shaking nanny bureaucrat telling them they ought to.

I am a strict constructionist, I am a traditionalist, I am a preservationist. I believe in preserving the system of government the Founders created. You know, the one where the Federal government did two things: facilitated interstate trade and provided for the common defense. I believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not selfishness, libertinism and the attainment of happiness.

Good old Massachussetts has managed to drop a HUGE issue into all of our laps yet again. First rebellion against British authority, then the possibility of secession, now gay marriage. What’s next?

This is an ugly one. There’s no way anyone can make a negative comment about the issue without being accused of all the sins in the calendar: bigotry, homophobia, ignorance, etc. I dig this website but even she flew completely off the handle about commentary offered on this whole situation by usually well considered commentators. Oh well, what hope do I have?

No point in rehashing old stuff. I thought I had rambled on about this issue more than once but I could only find one instance. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of the idea of gay marriage. Either define marriage as the union of one man and one woman and cut the whole movement off at the knees or abolish all state recognition of marriage as a central or unique institution and move on. There really aren’t any other good choices here. If a law is enacted to allow a man and a man or a woman and a woman to marry because the Constitution gives folks the right to “privacy,” &c then regardless of what anyone says there’s absolutely nothing but moral disdain to prevent an infinite collection of marital combinations from becoming law: two men and one woman, a child and an adult, a man and a goat, ad infinitum. Moral disdain only goes so far. While I think it’s perfectly right and good that homosexuals are accorded their place in society and ought to be free from all persecution we must all remember that not 50 years ago they were the subject of terrible repression and absolutely outside the bounds of traditional moral society.

A lot can change in 50 years.

Now that I’ve surely gotten myself in serious trouble and ran the risks of being lumped in with the bigots, extremists, evangelical nutbags, &c I think I’ll shut up now.

Had an excellent comment left yesterday. It tended to veer into typical peacenik platitudes but some of the thoughts were valid.

I can’t say that we negated Iraq’s right of self-governing by invasion. Currently, of course, they’re not self-governing but that will change. Without our help – and in spite of 10 years of attempts at every form of help outside military action – there was no chance they’d even have an opportunity for self-government so I think our actions were just. Are we proceeding in that same spirit of justice? That I am beginning to question, although I’d advocate harsher methods of dealing with the uprising. A very small group of people cannot be allowed to disrupt the formation of order through unlawful tactics. They’ve got to compete on the same playing field as all the other interest groups and take their lumps with the rest, that’s democracy. That’s the way the game is played.

As for the arguments against force. People understand force. It’s unfortunate, I don’t like to fight any more than the next guy, but that’s the way it is. We aren’t all enlightened yet. We aren’t all that distantly removed from foraging for bugs in each other’s hair by the light of a dung fire. I am sure there are still societies on Earth that do exactly that, even in the dawning years of the 21st century.

Was removing Hitler by force only a “replacement of tyrants?” Maybe in the case of the East Germans and Eastern Europeans but certainly the West benefitted. I’d argue a similar outcome in our forcing the downfall of the Soviet Union through threat of force, the overthrowing of the Japanese Empire through use of force, the destruction of slave owning Southern society through use of force, &c. There are instances where the outcome was only subsitution of tyrants but very few since the ascendance of the United States onto the world stage.

This is not to say we have always done right. Cogent arguments can be made against many of the actions we have taken in our history. Still, in our time, we are the only superpower. Like Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Like it or not, people will look up to us with a mixture of fear and admiration. The jealous will hate us, the oppressed will appeal to us, the evil will machinate against us. We’ve got the responsibility to lead and police the world; again, like it or not. We can either take the opportunity and responsibilty given and run with it – as we have been doing – or shrink from it and eventually collapse under our own weight as the Empires of old.

There aren’t any really good Great War movies so it’s very difficult to visualize November 11, 1918 unless you’ve been in a muddy trench and even then you can’t possibly imagine the noise. After four years of the most horrendous and catastrophic conflict the world had ever known, a cease fire agreement was finally brokered to take effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Somewhere out in the moonscape that was northern and eastern France huns and tommies, poilous and yankees were hunkered down while overhead the great shells kept thundering overhead. Suddenly, silence descended. The cacophony that had raged day and night since August 1914 ceased, church bells began to ring and those who survived picked themselves up out of the mud and began to process what they’d lived through.

This year there are many new members of the veteran’s brotherhood. The people that are fighting in Iraq, be they Polish, Belgian, British, American or others extend the long line of soldiers who have fought through history for the rights and liberties of others. They join the columns of blue clad fellows who marched through Georgia to end slavery. They fall in with the doughboys and GIs who travelled across great expanses of water to fight on behalf of the imprisoned people of Europe and Asia.

There have been precious few times in human history when men fight almost selflessly. Less, perhaps, for national interest than out of human interest. For all the arguments for and against our current conflict allow me to reiterate the one indisputable fact that remains: there is one less tyrant in the world. In Iraq, there are no more people being fed into tree-chippers, there are no more children being raped and discarded to satisfy a sadist’s twisted fantasies, there are no more mass graves being dug, no more gas attacks poisoning entire populations, no more tyranny.

Surely those are good enough reasons for anybody.

Get out and vote today! Not much happening in PA, typical school board, borough council stuff but some places are having very big elections. Mississippi and Kentucky are voting in new Governors, today could cement GOP rule in the south. Philadelphia’s electing a mayor, we’ll see today what matters more: good transparent governance or race fealty. Hell, if the KKK ran a candidate and expected all the white folks to vote for him out of racial solidarity the whole country would go nuts – how’s come it’s OK for a black mayor to do exactly that?

I do have one complaint about the whole voting thing – I can’t say I’ve seen any good, concise rundown of the positions of the variety of candidates running for all my little local offices. Apart from soundbites and billboards indicating that they feel your pain and really care – shades of Clintonism – I haven’t seen anything concrete. So, what’s a brother to do? Voting straight ticket is stupid and small-minded. Not all Republicans are good and not all Democrats are bad. Hell, I damn near voted for a Green Party kid today – he’s young, he self addressed envelopes to the voters and he brought free drinks to the polling place. I did, however, come to my senses at the last minute.

All that aside, one hopes that when voting for a Republican one knows nothing about that one is choosing someone in the solid Ronald Reagan/Theodore Roosevelt mode rather than the squishy Arlen Specter/Jim Jeffords mode. Likewise, I suspect there are Democrats out there cut from the Andrew Jackson/Zell Miller mold rather than the Al Gore/Dianne Feinstein mold. How does one know?

In a pinch I tend to pick women and irish folks. That is, only if the Republican candidates are known and don’t appeal to me. I’ll never vote straight ticket but I do wish someone would provide better information to the voters.

The offical new Episcopalian bishop of New Hampshire was installed yesterday. In case you haven’t noticed he’s “the church’s first openly gay bishop.” Interestingly enough, most news coverage leaves out that little word openly which makes it an entirely different story.

Naturally, vividly covering the uproar over “the church’s first gay bishop” makes opponents of the elevation look like a bunch of backwards gazing, 16th century neaderthals. Toss in the word “openly” though and you’ve got an entirely different story. Now, the fellow is not just gay – which any reasonable person must allow for and tolerate – he’s openly gay, which means he’s actively gay. Which, unfortunately for him, is quite clearly proscribed by the very Word he claims to profess.

It’s a hell of a mess. I would not begrudge a gay man elevation to whatever office his talents suit him for. I would not even begrudge an “openly” gay man his station – that is to say a man who is open and clear about his sexual preferences without acting on them. Where I take exception is in elevating a man, who lives with another man, who is quite clear about his nocturnal activities to the status of Bishop. I think it sets a bad example, not least in that it is directly contrary to the literal word of the Bible. This may be alright for someone in public office or the business world but surely a shepherd of the flock ought to adhere to both the spirit and letter of the law?

It may be that his new station will draw people to the Episcopalian church, impressed by its tolerance and desirous of a “safe” place to worship. It’s more likely that the sort of people this act might be expected to draw are pretty well uninterested in organized religion of any kind and so, rather than drawing in new people it’s likely to alienate those already in the church. I’d reckon that most folks who profess and practice a creed are relatively traditional types of people in this day and age, and the brave new world ushered in by the new Bishop of New Hampshire is not likely to appeal to them. Nor, for that matter, is the church which brought such a world into existence.

You have to smile when you read this (straight out of the Philadelphia Inquirer):

As the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor, John R. Staggs has been shut out of political debates, shunned in media coverage, and seen as a mere interruption in the battle between Mayor Street and Sam Katz.

. . . some of Staggs’ ideas, such as providing more jobs by shortening the workweek to 30 hours without pay cuts, also are outside the mainstream.

John Bataille, also 17, was not as impressed and shook his head in apparent amusement at times. He said he thought Staggs’ idea to trim the workweek so that businesses would be forced to hire more workers was not sound. “That wouldn’t work. The companies would run out of business,” he said.

OK, so if 17 year olds being educated in our generally substandard public schools can plainly see the bankruptcy of socialist ideals – what the hell’s wrong with: the media, the Democratic Party, the people who vote in blue states, et al?

Only in Philadelphia would the revelation that the highest levels of city administration are under investigation by the FBI result in that administration quickly gaining in the polls.

And why do you think this is happening? I’ll give you two guesses. If you suspect the race card, you’ve got it in one. Suddenly a thoroughly corrupt administration, under investigation, is being compared to FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King and other civil rights figures. Great googly moogly!

Pity Katz is the opposing candidate, and too bad he’s white. If he had half a backbone or he was the ‘right’ color he could come right out and call it like it is: is there really anyone out there who thinks Street has been a good mayor? Black or white, it doesn’t matter. What’s at issue is his ability to do his job! If, as it is vividly apparent, the current administration has been an unmitigated disaster for the City of Philadelphia culminating in a Federal investigation of corruption shouldn’t the dude be tossed out on his ear? Fair or not?

Ahh, but it’s the City of Brotherly Love – spelled Bruthaly – and it looks to them like big, bad whitey’s out to keep the bruthaman down.

My God, if it weren’t so ridiculous it’d be sad.

The first ‘taikonaut’ is, at this very minute, whooshing by over our heads at an incredible rate of speed and probably napping or eating freeze dried fried rice prior to his re-entry and touchdown around 6 tonight.

I know, China is likely to be the next big rival for the United States. And I know, the rivalry is more likely to be a hot war than a cold war because of Taiwan. But still, today isn’t a day for rivalries – except the good, competitive kind. Rather, today is a day for celebrating humanity’s limitless capability for achievement. China has launched a man into space! How cool is that? Until now there have only been two nations that launched men into space: the Soviets and us (I count the current Russian federation as an offshoot of the Soviets – same people, different uniforms). Now there’s a third country that took the great plunge and I hope and expect the Chinese won’t be content to rest on their laurels as the US and Russia have. I hope they push on with their program, try to develop more advanced craft and make big plans for the future of their space program. Maybe that will force the US to push ahead with all the ideas we’ve got in the pipeline:ion engines, lifting bodies, space elevators, reusable launch tubs, Moon bases, Mars missions.

Sometimes a little rivalry is good. Maybe now we’ll get our heads out of the sand and press on into the sky again.

What an odd day. Californians toss Davis out on his ear, elect Arnold (I just figured out why journalists only call him Arnold – you try and spell his last name!), and yet reject Proposition 54 which would remove the potential for any sort of racial higgledy-piggledy in the future. Peculiar.

Meanwhile, closer to home, a regular sweep of the Mayor’s office in Philadelphia revealed several sophisticated listening devices. Nifty. The FBI immediately exonerated the Republican candidate for Mayor by declaring this was not a dirty political trick – but, like a columnist said, “. . . if the FBI knows who didn’t plant the bug, then it must know who did.”

What a day. Stay tuned for nasty insinuations and lawsuits galore – both in Philadelphia and California.

You didn’t think I actually stayed up late enough to watch the show I’m about to babble about did you? Shame on you.

Nope, taped it and looked at it this morning. The Daily Show with Jon “I’m so goddamned superior” Stewart.

Haven’t seen the Daily Show since Kilborn left, it used to be a ritual in college. Damn fine, damn funny. But Stewart had pissed me off even before he took over and I swore off the show. Still, I taped it last night since the fellow who turned me on to National Review was on. Jonah’s a pretty funny guy in print so I figured it would be cool to see him on the telly.

I was right.

Chock full of pithy comments about principles and politicos. He had two quotes that made me laugh out loud but right now I can only remember one, “I like my conservatism with more smiting and wrath.” Damn funny.

And the show wasn’t bad either, maybe it was just that the possibilities for satire are so rich when covering Democratic debates and the California recall but I was in tears after about ten minutes.

I won’t take back all the bad things I said about Stewart though, he’s still a smug bastard, and I don’t expect to become a regular enough viewer to form alternative opinions. Still, for half an hour I laughed out loud and remembered the old days.

Saw G. Gordon Liddy last night at Gettysburg College. An interesting fellow, and not what I expected. He was fairly subdued, effectively presenting a lecture on the history of the Jewish people to the present day, attempting to dispel the myth that the Jews were never there and that they’d invaded Arab land. Nifty stuff and he tossed out dates, names and places I’ve never even heard of.

He only presented the sort of in-your-face, demogogic style I expected once or twice and then, mostly during the Q&A. Oddly enough, for the liberal hotbed I take Gburg to be there were only two or three wingnuts asking questions. One asked a number of intelligently phrased but iditiotic debate-type questions. One was an anti-globlization type trying to say that the conflict would fade away once multi-national corporations took over the world and the last was an old lady attempting to claim that only 15% of Trans-Jordanians (Palestinians) supported terrorism and who – when faced with the comment that her Palestinian friends danced in the streets on 9/11 – tramped away muttering, “I am so tired of hearing that propaganda.”

Nothing terribly exciting though in the rambling talk. He touched on Israel’s decision to get rid of Arafat though he couldn’t decide whether he’d be killed or expelled. He did tell one questioner that he wouldn’t be writing any insurance policies for Arafat. He also mentioned that he’s getting information from Israeli intelligence that Iran will likely have a nuke by the spring and that the IDF has plans in place to simultaneously strike all Iranian nuclear facilities – a la Osirak – before development is complete. Of course, he said, that will mean war.

I love it when people who are listened to say the same things I’ve been saying for a while now. All the Trans-Jordanians will have to be killed or expelled. All Islamofascists will have to be killed. Iran will have to be dealt with in the short-term rather than the long-term. Etc, etc.

God bless Israel anyway. I take back all the bad things I’ve ever said against the Jews. It’s nice to have an ally who is willing to do what is neccessary. As soon as we get over needing to be liked we’ll be able to do what is needed as well.

Or, as the President apparently calls it, “Patriot Day.” Anyone remember what today is all about?

This is a war, kids. Nobody knows it, nobody understands it but this is a for-real, knock-down, drag-out, last-man-standing kind of thing. It’s worse than any previous war our nation has ever experienced. It’s not a matter of capturing the enemy’s capital city – we’ve got two now and things show no signs of abating. It’s not completely a matter of killing the enemy’s soldiers, I reckon we’ve done better than three of theirs dead for every one of ours and we’re not all that much closer to winning the fight. In fact, the closest comparison I can think of is the old European religious wars.

We’re not doing politics by other means here, this is a full-on clash of civilizations. Us against them with no middle ground. If you think there’s a point of compromise, a place where we could work out a sort of North v. South Korea, 38th parallel, live and let live arrangement allow me to direct your attention to the nation of Israel. That’s pretty much the size of it, either we prevail or they do. And to ensure our victory we’ll have to wipe them and their religion off the face of the earth, bury it in the dustbin of history along with all the other sacred and profane religions that have caused upheaval throughout mans’ history.

I once believed this whole conflict was just Islamic growing pains, kind of like we Catholics went through with the Inquisition and the afore-mentioned religious wars. We fight for our faith and then realize that, hey, faith is based largely on what men tell you and since men are fallible maybe God doesn’t really want you to disembowel your enemy’s wife. Maybe it’s just your commanding officer that wants that. Unfortunately, Islam doesn’t work that way. The Koran is not like the Bible, it’s not an oral history filled with the Word of God filtered through the ear of man. Nope, it’s the literal Word of God, infallible and inflexible and as such, its commandments must be obeyed to the word. There’s no reforming a religion that thinks that way. There’s no room for change.

It’s tough, I don’t personally have a problem with most Muslims since I don’t think most Muslims are any more committed to the literal basis of Islam than good church-going Catholics are committed to our dogma. Still, facts are facts and a religion that makes it an inarguable duty to overthrow all other faiths by the sword and demands unquestioning fealty to what has to be fallible scripture is not one you can deal with.

Like I said, tough.

But enough of my zealotry. Go out and enjoy this beautiful day, nearly identical to the day two years ago that we commemorate. Have a pint or two, spend some time with the rest of humanity and remember what we’re trying to accomplish here. It’s the last gasp of the centuries of tyranny that led to this point – it may well be the reason America was so blessed to begin with. It’s a hell of a fight and we’ve got to win.

Sure the title’s redundant but September 10th is a fixed date, just like September 11, December 7, September 17 (five points if you know both reasons why), et al. September 10, 2001 was the last day of the old world. When the sun went down on September 10 and arose on the beautiful sunny morning of September 11 everything that had been was gone forever. All the happy-go-lucky optimism and stupid cultural sparring was at an end.

This day is important. This means something.

Right, enough of that. More tomorrow. In the meantime, I will share the one staggering revelation I have had lately that I could remember after arriving here in the Great Soul Hoover of North Hanover: Election 2004 is eerily like Election 1864.

Most of you will have no idea what I’m talking about but consider this:

• In 1860, Lincoln won election in a three-way race with a minority of the popular vote.

• For Lincoln, anyway, the people who lost were so pissed and so certain their world was about to shrivel up and blow away under the influence of the Black Republican administration that they actually decided to set up another country. A bit more extreme than our current whiny multitudes but you can see the similarities.
• A faction of loopy bastards – traitors not foreigners, though – attacked United States installations touching off a war which divided the populations of both warring sides.
• In the election of 1864 an ex military man ran against the sitting President on a platform of peace (this will work perfectly if Wes Clark tries for the nom).
• The opposition party’s platform called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and negotiations to end the war soonest.

I am certain there are many more parallels than that but that last one is the real kicker. Make no mistake, the Democratic platform in 2004 will be identical to their platform in 1864: End the war. Straight away. No fooling around. Bring the troops home, surrender territorial gains and apologize profusely for being the reason behind the war’s beginning in the first place. Our President might well be muttering Lincoln’s words right now, “. . . I will have to so cooperate with the President-elect as to [win the war] between his election and the inauguration as he will have secured his election on such grounds that he cannot possible [win] it afterwards.”

Now consider what would have happened to the world had the United States been separated in two by the exercise of faction in the 1860s. Do you honestly think our surrender now would be any less catastrophic?

Wotta crock! Folks, we live in the shadow of an angry God. I’ve never been a real fan of Jesus – too much the smiling hippie-freak for me. I mean really, are you going to trust a man with long hair and a beard who comes out of the damned desert preaching love and happiness? Hell no. I’ve always been more of a fan of the Old Testament smiting and burning Lord. My kinda guy. Get out of line, he’ll lay you low. Really piss him off and he’ll do your whole town.

That’s why I don’t get this free will thing, we’re all enabled to make choices right? So, here we have a joker who gives us the ability to see what’s wrong, understand that things have to change, potentially gives us the ability to change it but then also gives us the choice: should we remake the world around us or tune into Boy Meets Boy? Hrm, one guess what the steaming masses of idiocy pick.

Dammit. Sometimes Alla the time I think we’d all be better off if some damn asteroid had actually hit back in 1998 or whatever so we didn’t have to watch those terrible asteroid disaster movies.

But, then again . . . I could be well on the way to a comfortable drunk and reading anti-social comics while listening to angry music and bashing my way through worthless teenagers in order to get an overroasted supper. I leave it to you to decide.

Want proof the Democratic Party has gone completely off the multi-culti deep end? They haven’t even asked a single question yet but they’ve announced, in English and Spanish, that this is to be a bilingual debate. Christ! They couldn’t even bring themselves to write New Mexico, instead they had to write Neuvo Mexico

Yep, that’s pretty messed up kids. Do you want to trust your future to people who can’t even agree that English is the language of the United States?

Yipes!

As I recall it was something about little white boys and girls sitting down with little black boys and girls and all men are created equal while the lamb and the lion bang junked Fords into plowshares or something. Pity the dream’s all shot to hell now, though.

40 years ago today, it was a hell of a dream. A nation devoid of racial categories. Where every man and woman had the right to rise as far as talent could take them. It could have been beautiful but what do we have left? The continued division of society into smaller and smaller interest groups with each howling like some little kid at dessert time.

Like Judas said, “It was beautiful, but now it’s sour. Yes it’s all gone sour.”

On a happier note, someone attempted to firebomb the North Philly HQ of the Republican candidate for Mayor of Philadelphia. And, guess what?! The leading suspect is part of Mayor Street’s brother’s old gang. Surprise, surprise. Sounds like typical Philly gangsterism to me – onliest difference is that the gangsters are wearing three-piece suits and infesting City Hall.

Wonder if this will finally do the Street Administration in? Somehow I doubt it. How much you wanna bet they blame Katz for orchestrating the entire thing and then start blathering about race?

Yes it’s all gone sour.

I knew it would happen eventually and the bleating has already begun. Why oh why, they whine with their face buried in their hands, can’t a naturalized immigrant run for President? Heavens, they exclaim, naturalized citizens have every other right and duty how can we prevent them from aspiring to the highest office in the land?

Well folks I gotta say, I’m not at all in favor of amending the Constitution to allow foreign-born Presidents but, for a change, I can understand the argument. I am a firm believer that most immigrants are the best people to talk to if you really want to hear why this is so great a country. They chose to come here, they voluntarily renounced all foreign allegiances and took upon themselves the duties of an American citizen. It’s a big step to go from being at worst a subject and at best the coddled child of a semi-socialist nanny-state to being a full partner in the life of a nation and having to make it on your own hook. Still, I don’t think naturalized citizens should be able to become President and generally for the same reasons as the Founding Fathers.

Sorry kids, but I don’t much care how long you’ve lived in America – unless you came here as an infant with little or no knowledge of your original homeland you’re always going to carry a torch for home. How often do you read of new citizens who still fly the flags of their home countries? Hell, I have an Irish flag in my living room and my family’s been around for a minimum of four generations. Not to mention that people might come here, take citizenship and still be entwined with their home country and potentially have relationships back home that could be exploited by those who wish to do us harm.

The Founding Fathers had a different set of reasons for putting the native clause in the Constitution but there are still innumerable new reasons to bow to their ancient wisdom. One of the beauties of America is that we always expect the next generation to do better than ours, why can’t immigrants live that dream and work to see their native-born children rise to the heights of leadership?

So, I missed the anniversary of the dropping of the first two atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) but amazingly enough, I’m spot on time to celebrate the end of the war on V-J day, August 15, 1945.

For all the hassles and worries nuclear weapons have caused in the 58 years since they were first deployed early on a summer morning the alternatives are unthinkable. Consider Iwo Jima or Okinawa on a massive scale with waves of civilian suicide attacks not to mention a scorched earth strategy and early estimates of up to one million Allied casualties. I’d say it was a pretty fair trade-off.

So, hooray for the atom bomb and the fellows who designed it. Hooray for the men who flew it and the folks who cleaned up the mess. Hooray for victory and the building of a new world order.

Do you think two atomic bombs in say, Tehran and Riyadh would have the same effect?

Goddamn, last night reminded me why I love this country! All the lights are out in a wide swath of country: New York, Detroit and Cleveland are dark but does the rioting start? The looting? Nah, people calmly left their places of work, camped out throughout the city and generally looked for ways to adapt to the situation and beat the heat the best they could with what they had. I saw pictures today of folks having a pizza dinner at a sidewalk cafe illuminated by a car’s headlights. I saw other people hitching a ride on a delivery truck to get out of Manhattan. Folks delivering groceries around neighborhoods to use up the product before it spoils. People helping people. No government involvement – the states and cities turned down federal help – just ordinary folks making do the best they can. Unlike the French.

The whole blackout thing is a reminder of how vulnerable our existence on this wildly spinning globe really is. Not 100 years ago a dark night in lower Manhattan would have been relatively typical. Now, we lose power and don’t know what to do. But still life goes on, NYC may be generally closed for business today but nobody’s panicking, nothing untoward is happening and we’ll be all set by Monday morning.

Fecking cool.

On another note, did anyone get out to see Mars last night? Big red moon and a bright little red dot off to one side. Spooky. Does anyone else find it coincidental that, given our current international situation Mars is in its closest orbit in thousands of years? Makes one think.

Nearly 3,000 Frenchmen are dead due to the unprecendented heat wave sweeping Europe this August. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people, you think. True, but as usual, many of the casualties are the elderly – probably the only folks in France who remember the friendship of the United States and what the past glory of France (such as it was) really was like. Be nice if the young would die off, less blathering about the third way, unilateralism and the like. But, alas, it is for the old and better to die and the rest of us to carry on.

Funny, in the United States when it gets hot we take precautions: ease off the coffee, drink more water, stay in the shade, wear sunblock. Why is it that in nanny-state Europa I envision all these people waiting patiently in their homes, slowly baking to death as sure as if they were sitting in an oven, expecting some kind social worker or at least a gendarme to stop by the house with a government supplied fan? Maybe they can use the hundreds of pages of the proposed Euro-Constitution to make fans. Best use I can imagine, unless they can find the subsidized cooling apparatus amendment somewhere amongst the beaureaucratic legalese.

It just all seems appropriate somehow.

I’m just full of piss and vinegar today, ain’t I? Read the first really excellent commentary on why a segregated school for gay kids is a decent idea. You ought to read this page, down towards the bottom are some excellent letters but this one’s the keeper:

“Mr. Nordlinger: I am gay and only 22 years old, which means it wasn’t too long ago that I was in high school in a small town in Wisconsin. I can tell you with absolute certainty that those few students who were openly gay (I was not one of them, for the record) went through hell day in and day out. They were constantly ridiculed by students AND teachers alike. Comparing the abuse ? verbal, mental, emotional, and sometimes physical ? gay students suffer to the abuse overweight kids suffer is absurd. Both are certainly damaged emotionally, but when a gay kid is constantly picked on for being gay I think it affects him in a way different from an overweight kid. The overweight kid walks away from the experience feeling rejected because of his appearance, but the gay kid walks away from the experience feeling rejected because of who he is. . . .

“Moreover, I think the abuse actually engenders certain political attitudes that conservatives find undesirable. The gay kid who is constantly picked on starts to resent all straight people for the way they’ve made him suffer and he will want nothing more than to reject every aspect of culture that he believes is representative of heterosexuality (fidelity, marriage, abstinence, etc.). I also think it causes him to identify his sexuality as being more central to his being than a gay student who wasn’t picked on does (me, for example). I would think that, as a conservative, you would want to avoid this . . .

NYC is about to invest a relatively large amount of capital in expanding a public high school for the LGBT youths of the city – that’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered for those of you who live solely in the country. I am having a very hard time with this, I know it’s a bad idea but I can’t come up with one good, unassailable argument why. I guess the do-gooders claims of the need for a “safe environment ” for these kids is a reasonable argument but how about considering the following:

• The SCOTUS just leapt merrily through more loops than a typical croquet court in order to find that diversity of viewpoint – which can apparently only be gained through enforced racial discrimination – is a compelling state interest and therefore trumps Constitutional guarantees of equal treatment. Not to lump all LBGT folks into some sort of massive stereotype but surely there is a severe loss of diverse viewpoints in excluding heteros from the bulk of daily life. Admittedly, I don’t know what the teaching staff will be but it seems peculiar to me that segregating these people while enforcing integration for others is considered a good thing.
• And while we’re thinking on good things, how positive a thing is it for these kids to be divided up based purely on their sexual identities at such a young age? I lean more to the nature side of the nature v. nurture argument when it comes to debating the causes of homosexuality but still, shouldn’t we be attempting to shield kids from their sexual natures until their old enough to comprehend their whole selves? I know it sounds touchy-feely but if we’re all-fired up about teen pregancy and underage sex, etc why in the hell would we be supporting the skiving off of an entire subset of kids based on their sexuality?
• Like I mentioned before, the safety argument is the only one that holds any water in favor of this hare-brained scheme. Still, doesn’t safety derive in part from learning how to live within the rough and tumble confines of society? One cannot expect the rest of the world to bend themselves in such a manner as to accomodate all of one’s wishes. Surely it’s better for everyone to have to learn to get along? If that means toning it down a bit and keeping your head down more often than not, so be it. I had to learn, often the hard way, I see no reason others should be molly coddled and protected from the slings and arrows of normal life.
• Finally, make no mistake about it, this is segregation. Granted, these kids – or their parents – are willingly consenting to the segregation but not only do I think this will have a negative impact on the kids that attend Harvey Milk High but how about all the other kids out there in the normal public schools who will not have contact with gay folks on a daily basis? So much for tolerance. Remember how rough we all were on the kids that road the little bus? Or the ‘tards that had to toddle off to the special classroom to struggle through Dick and Jane? How the hell are straight kids, particularly in that developmental stage, supposed to learn tolerance if they don’t go to school with gay kids, work with them in class, eat lunch with them and all the other myriad daily opportunities for interaction that leads us to learn and grow?

Not that any of this will make a difference. The goal of the left is for each of us to see ourselves as part of some small subset of humanity deserving of special treatment due to our uniqueness. There has been talk for years about resegregating schools for black kids, offering classes in made up languages (remember Ebonics anyone?), splitting the sexes, etc. Why not a school for red heads? Hell, we’ve been persecuted! A judge in Ireland actually handed down a stiffer sentence to a fellow with red hair because, as we all know, red hair means a bad temper. How about fat kids? Skinny kids? Don’t they have unique problems too? Don’t they get picked on as well?

If you bother to read the mainstream press or, God forbid, look at the frothing at the mouth inanity that passes for television news these days you might be thinking we’re in over our heads in Iraq. Like my Mom keeps saying, look at Afghanistan. We didn’t do much over there, they’re still pretty much a mess. Why is Iraq any different? I mean really, people are dying over there.

Too right, one or two Americans every day – regrettable but understandable. Meanwhile the Baathists are being killed or imprisoned at a much higher rate. It may seem like a trade-off now – which scares the bejeezus out of the Vietnam generation with their inflated memories of bodycounts on the evening news – but to the rest of us, not saddled with false memories of a bad war it’s just the way the game is played. Look at our accomplishments in the last week alone, we whacked the two runners-up to the Iraqi head office. We’re close on the tail of the main man. We’ve nicked his bodyguard and now have 37 of the top 55 most wanted either in custody or six feet under. Pretty much everywhere outside the Sunni triangle is calm, cool and collected with people increasingly happy as the concept of liberty begins to soak in. I’d say we’re doing pretty damn well considering we underestimated almost every aspect of our post-war plan.

The Iraqis didn’t rise up to help us. In hindsight understandable, since we left them twisting in the wind 12 years ago. The infrastructure is almost entirely collapsed – we didn’t see that one coming. Who’d have thought Saddam would let his power and water subsystems completely collapse while scooping up the latest bargains on gold plated winky massagers? Hell, we damn near left the old government – albeit decapitated – in power.

Well, now we’re sorting it out. Kill all the bad guys and start from scratch. It’ll be a long and difficult process but it will work out in the end. Comparisons between Iraq and Afghanistan are utterly useless. Afghanistan has nothing with which to construct a pluralist democracry. They’ve no natural resources apart from heroin, no middle class, no educated group of people to step up and take charge. In 20 or 40 years when several generations of kids newly educated in the schools and society we’ve left behind have advanced to leadership positions there may be hope. In the meantime the best we can hope for is some sort of federalist society where the central government generates enough order to keep the very worst elements out of the country while the warlords continue to run their fiefdoms.

Iraq is completely different. It has a learned people: doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, engineers, etc. It has resources in oil. It has a generally secular society due to its fascist/communist past. What more do you need to make a functioning democracy?

Just the knowledge that the beast will not return and that the people can count on Uncle Sam to help them rebuild.

The word is that Uday and Qusay are toast courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division. I understand the desire to get the confirmation info out as soon as possible in order to score morale/hearts and minds points but seriously guys, depending on a captured, high-level Iraqi minister to tell the truth about such an important event? It could just be me but I think I’d have waited for independent DNA/dental/facial recognition evidence before I trumpeted to the world that we finally got the bastards. Surely given the current brouhaha about so-called intelligence failures we’d want to hold off a bit and make absolutely damned sure we had the right dudes before we went broadcasting it all over the world.

I have a nasty feeling this is going to turn out badly.

In other news, finally went to see Charlie’s Angels last evening. Very odd flick. A good half of the time I was literally wincing as the flick mercilessly insulted my intelligence, exploited the women stars and bubbled over with giggly girl power. The other half of the time I thoroughly enjoyed it. It actually had a better plot than the first one and flowed like a comic book brought to life – better than three-quarters of the comic book movies out there. Bernie Mac was funny as hell, as usual and I dug (natch!) the main irish gangster.

All in all it was a enjoyably painful experience. If you’re in a bit of a masochistic mood, it’s probably worth the trip.

It’s fecking Bastille Day. I’d love to expound at length on the vile perfidy of the fecking French, just as they so richly deserve. However, I’m feeling entirely too mellow and somewhat sleepy to really get worked up over it.

Suffice it to say, damn the French! Sod them all. There are few races more useless upon the planet than those damned, uppity, self-congratulating socialists. Hell, there’s no other nation on Earth who has managed to so pervert the promise of the American Revolution like the French. The North Vietnamese come close but only the Frogs could take first-hand knowledge of what we sought and so twist it as to end up with Robespierre.

Bollocks.

But I do miss my irish whiskey. Goddamn the IDG.

Seems like gay marriage is the hot topic right now – at least if you can manage to filter out the bad noise about how desperate the Dems are to gain traction on the President. I imagine I’ve covered this ground before but allow me to elaborate on why I think this is a Very Bad Thing^TM.

To start with one has to ask, why is marriage a big deal anyway? What’s the bloody point? I suppose, back in the day of dragging your woman around by the topknot, it was a far better idea to spread your seed as liberally as possible. Surely many dozens of those future humans got bumped off daily by the wide assortment of predatory beasties inhabiting the early aeons of the planet. Being fruitful and multiplying was the order of the day.

As folks settled down a bit and began to tame the land such willy-nilly fruitfulness became more trouble than it was worth. If a man owns land and farms land we couldn’t have him exponentially multiplying himself onto his neighbor’s lawn. So, someone decided we’d settle for one man and one woman in order to ensure societal stability. It didn’t hurt that the folks who wrote down the Book of Genesis recorded that God himself started with one man and one woman.

This arrangement also led to the happy result that when folks got down and fruitful the kids grew up in a more stable environment and determined to get fruitful with only one other person themselves.

To ensure the continuity of this newfangled idea society, over the years, came up with all sorts of incentives. Tax credits, joint accounts, big wedding bashes, honeymoons, etc. Of course, marriage isn’t all happiness and bliss for the two become one, rather it’s a contract with society. If big-S society provides the married couple with certain benefits the married couple in return provides society with stability and the means to propagate itself.

So, why shouldn’t we allow gay folks to marry? Surely some stability would do them good? Absolutely, I say. Stability would be a most excellent thing and I am loath to see anyone unable to tastefully express their attachment in the most public manner possible. However, what benefit does society get? Stability is fine as far as it goes but, like I mentioned before, the main benefit of stability is that offspring are raised in a positive atmosphere conducive to their becoming good contributors to society. Gay folks can’t provide that. Certainly they can adopt unwanted kids and raise them up to be productive citizens but that can’t propagate the species and given the birth rate troubles western civilization finds itself in, non-procreators are becoming a serious problem.

So, civil marriage – and the benefits that go with it – is a social contract. If you can’t fulfill your half of the bargain then what’s the point?

I knew I had something to write about yesterday but in the course of the day it entirely slipped my mind and now I’ve got more important things to think about so maybe I’ll discuss, “Hulk smash!” later.

For now, happy July 9. I haven’t seen any hard news yet but I hear there are several demonstrations already happening around this country in solidarity with the Iranian people. I guess it’s still pretty early in the morning in Iran but today’s supposed to be the big day for protests against the mullahs, ayatollahs and other unsavory theocratic numbskulls who have been busily attempting to destroy Iran and the world over the past 30 years.

I always argued that Iraq would be the beachhead and that beachhead would lead to a revolution for liberty throughout the middle east. Looks like I may be right after all. Should we start calling this the third American Revolution?

Let the thugs in Iraq snipe at our boys, like the President said, “Bring ‘em on.” We’ll sort out Iraq in due order, Iran is ripe for the revolution, Syria is looking scared and the Saudis will shortly realize we’re not fooling around anymore. Couple these incursions with our impending focus on Africa, our continuing negotiations with Mexico, our new inroads into eastern Europe and our squabbling with old Europe and you can see the United States is determined to spread liberty around the globe and make us all happier, safer and richer to boot.

Hot damn, Pax Americana may yet come to pass. If we continue to have conservative administrations anyway.

Old Strom Thurmond died the other night, I suppose proving something about folks who spend their whole lives working and find nothing left to do when they retire. He was a mixed message sonofabitch during his many terms in office, sometimes hiring black folks to work for him ahead of the curve and then turning right around and filibustering civil rights legislation in the Senate.

I met the old fellow once, about five years ago. We had gone to the Capitol to sit in on a night session approving the President’s actions against Iraq, this was at the same time as the impeachment verdict came down. Sure enough, coming out of the building as we were going in was the old Senator leaning on the arm of an aide. He took a sort of sideways glance at us – we were dressed in full Federal Civil War dress at the time – and I think considered we had come to burn him out. Mumbling something about damnyankees, he was quickly hustled out into the night.

Odd dude.

I am sure I had more to say but this has been a peculiar day and I’ve still got to catch a plane to Bean-town before I sleep. So much for “rest for the weary.” It looks to be a very rough couple of weeks.

Hah! Looks like an Iraqi scientist, safely away from Iraq with his family up and told the occupation authority where to go and look for parts of a gas centrifuge – used for enriching uranium – he had buried in his back yard after the first Gulf War. Hell, the dude even said he was told to tuck this away for a rainy day, when everyone’s back was turned. Ain’t that about a bitch?

So much for the “no WMDs Bush lied!” crowd. Looks like we’ve got some fairly solid evidence that Saddam did have a nuclear program and had hidden it while we were pussy-footing about with him. And what else? One of his own scientists told us about it once he was free from fears of retribution – just like the President said they would.

But of course, this will all be glossed over as we ramp up the stories of American casualties caused by an increasingly annoyed Iraqi populace and how we’ve got to get out right now. That’s sarcasm in case you hadn’t noticed. But, it is 120 degrees in Bagdhad with no running water and no electricity. Maybe summer wasn’t such a hot time to fight a war.

Looks like it’s now official. Thoughtcrime is now illegal in some states and apparently speech is no longer protected by the First Amendment if it’s un-PC.

Scary.

As I read it, it goes like this: If I tell an off color joke in a bar and the dude sitting next to me happens to be a polack, rabbi, relative of Adolph Coors, what have you and is offended – not only have I broken the law but the bar has broken the law by allowing me to say such horrible things inside their place of business. Man, me and my big mouth, I am really going to have to start watching what I say which is, of course, exactly what they want. Soon all thought will be cleansed and all adjectives will be banned and we’ll all be on the same level of existence. Divided into our little sub-groups mind you, we wouldn’t want to sacrifice diversity, but none better than another – unless you’ve got highly pigmented skin.

I have seen the future friends! It’ll be lovely, trust me. Remember, all are equal but some are more equal than others.

Looks like the Supremes – not the musical group – are up to their typical tricks and unwilling, once again, to slap down a reasoned and explicit decision encompassing the best principles of Constitutional law. I understand the Declaration of Independence is not law, merely an expression of first principles, but obviously they completely ignored the phrase “all men are created equal.” And, as a matter of real, Constitutional law they seem to have misplaced their books covering the Fourteenth Amendment. Here’s the relevant bit from Section 1:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

I don’t see anything in there indicating that black folks have more of a right to an education than white folks. I do see language indicating that black folks have as equal a right to the fruits of the system as brown folks or yellow folks or pink folks or red folks. How, exactly, does diversity gained through a quota system ensure “to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws?” Seems to me someone’s getting screwed.

While we’re on the subject of diversity I can say from my own personal experience it’s total and complete bollocks. Gettysburg College is a very politically correct, liberally bent school – just like most others – and, I’m sure put a high premium on diversity. And for all that presumed effort did I ever interact with people of other cultures or skin color on a daily basis?

Nope.

So much for the rounding diversity is supposed to provide. People are people, no matter what the social engineers would like you to think. People will always cling to others with similar interests. All of us oddballs who liked Python and discussing esoteric subjects in the middle of the night clustered together, etc. Such is the way of the human animal, we’ve been acting the same way for tens of thousands of years despite innumerable efforts to change our behavior and although we no longer think poorly of people simply based on their external appearance our natural desire to segregate ourselves according to whatever bizarre social subgroupings we so choose will never go away.

Where have I been? It’s been the devil’s own week but I have a spectacular weekend to look forward to. A good night’s sleep and 7 hours of perfect work-y bliss and I’m off to Bal-mer. As Cartman would say, “Sweeeeet.”

Before I go, I thought I’d leave all of you with this lovely little tit-bit.

Seems America’s most ungracious loser feels that conservatives have too solid a lock on the media – cable news and radio at least – and so liberals need their very own network to air “progressive” viewpoints.

Now, that’s just plain funny. Liberals pretty much run the majority of print news, the viewpoints of CNN, MSNBC and network news is fairly slanted left but, according to Mr. Bearded Lady, ” . . . there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party.”

Oh, you poor baby. I would have thought by now it was quite clear that the success of Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and all the rest can be directly traced to the idea that the public WANTS to hear an alternative viewpoint. Well, maybe Hannity and O’Reilly did good because people just don’t get enough Mick in their diet. I can’t say so-called conservative outlets are any more or less biased than the rest since I’m an unabashed partisan but surely the public has chosen. I should think the somewhat reformed coverage we’re seeing out of the more mainstream outlets – not to mention the recent troubles of the New York Times – are somewhat due to the fact that the public has voted with their feet and just won’t suffer their news to be filtered through Big Nanny’s happy-filter anymore.

Thanks ever so much Al, but we’re big boys and girls now. We actually like to make our own decisions about schooling, guns, seatbelts and – imagine that! – we like to spend our own damn money.

Could it be? Do we have ‘em on the run? If so, God be praised.

So, what’s the latest war news? Same same I suppose with the odd exception that the military is starting to publish nigh-daily enemy bodycounts. I firmly believe in war, I wish we’d do it more often and I think that once we get our head out of our collective backside we’ll sort Iraq out riki-tiki. I do, however, find the bodycount reports a little eerie.

But on to what I wanted to say today. A friend told me he “loves America but hates Americans.” OK, fair enough if that’s what you mean. I myself don’t like 100% of the human race (those I do like are too few in number to make even a statisically significant percentage). What I think he meant though is something akin to the old bumper sticker standby, “I love my country, it’s the government I’m afraid of.”

Very clever. My question is, where do you draw the line between the country, the people and the government? The way I see it, the people are the government. Matter of fact it says so in the supreme law of the land. Hell, it’s the first three words! We the People . . . It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

The problem is not neccessarily the government – at least not the government we see in action on C-SPAN or sputtering for soundbites on the nightly news. That government is accountable to the people, if you don’t like ‘em, throw the bums out! What we all dislike is the shadow government. The faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats stashed away in innumerable concrete caverns and huddled Gollum-like over their mohair subsidies. That’s what we don’t like. You can’t ever get rid of a government program. The great national helium reserve, from the days when airships were going to be essential to national security, is still alive and kicking. The aforementioned mohair subsidy, from the days when the Army wore woolen uniforms and sheep were going to be essential to national security, is still pumping dough into an unneeded industry.

So, what do we do? What would you do if you had absolute oragnizational power for one day? Me, I’d slash the federal workforce by probably over 50%. I’d outlaw public employee unions – what gives people working for the taxpayer the right to unionize in order to squeeze more money from the taxpayer? I’d eliminate the Departments of Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development. I’d combine Commerce and Labor like it was when it was created. I’d fold Agriculture into Interior. I’d rename Homeland Security the Department of Defense and rename the DoD the Department of War. That’d pretty much clarify responsibilities wouldn’t it? I think we could safely roll the VA back into the Dept. of War. The DoT should be eliminated or rolled into the DoI. I think that pretty much covers everything.

Think of the money we’d save. Think of the possibilities of making the federal government do only what it is mandated to do: provide for the common defense and regulate interstate trade.

Man, that’d be nifty. And then maybe people’d stop being annoyed with the monster they themselves created.

Has anyone actually looked at the Federal Budget lately? I don’t mean the OMB or Congress, obviously that’s their job and just as obviously they don’t do it. Why else would they pass the Farm Bill, the steel tariffs, argue about the tax cut, etc?

But seriously folks, out of a 2.2 TRILLION dollar budget – that’s $2,200,000,000,000 I think – only $785 billion actually accomplishes the duties of the government! The rest of it is welfare – Medicare, Social Security and the like. That just sounds massively wrong to me. One third of the dough the guv-mint takes from us every day actually goes to things that make our lives possible, the rest goes to our parents, grandparents and other assorted poor, unwashed masses. One third of that paltry seven hundred odd billion then goes to the military. So, in effect, free giveaways to various and sundry welfare programs are roughly TEN TIMES more important than our security?

Oh baby, remember than one the next time you’re tempted to vote for a Democrap.

Today is D-Day yet again, 59 years later. It’s funny, every assault during WWII and subsequent – and prior – wars happens on D-Day but there’s really only one capital-D D-Day. It struck me first last night when someone looked at the clock and tried to calculate the French time, the Ox and Bucks were probably on the Orne River bridge by then with thousands of men packed tightly into C-47s winging their way over the channel and tens of thousands more festering in ships on their way across from England. Pretty amazing.

I understand the citoyens of Normandie remember, odd that the rest of France does not.

It’ll be the obligatory partial Private Ryan viewing followed by The Longest Day tonight. Tried to watch some of The Longest Day last night but somehow ended up passed out on the kitchen floor. I remember sitting in the chair watching the flick and the next thing I know it’s 4 AM and I’m snoring on the floor. Dunno what happened in between but at least my pants were still on and I didn’t smell like petroleum jelly.

You never know in my neighborhood.

Anybody else sick and tired of hearing about these goddamned WMDs? First of all, I hate the wording “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” How frigging stupid is that? An atom bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, anthrax – quite obviously – is not. If you have to use some sort of catchy sobriquet I think the British “Weapons of Mass Effect” is far more accurate. So much for spin.

But seriously folks, did our government lie to us? Why did we go to war with Iraq? Was it, as the press would like you to think, solely because the intelligence community offered evidence presented by those in power indicating Iraq had quantities of easily accessed WMEs?

No, goddamnit. That was not the bloody reason at all.

Funny isn’t it? After September 11 all the papers were full of vitriolic spew accusing the intelligence community of letting us down, of not cluing in the people in charge and of not doing everything they could to avert this horrible tragedy. Now, post-Iraq, the papers are full of vitriolic spew accusing the people in charge of browbeating the intelligence community into doing everything they could to cause this horrible tragedy. Bugger off you bastards.

We went to war with Iraq because, as I read yesterday, Saddam had a contract with the United States. He’d give up his WMEs, prove he did so and we’d let him live. He violated that contract innumerable times over the past 12 years and we finally got a chief executive who has the brass cajones to call Mr. Moustache on his repeated abuses.

When you make a deal with US, you live up to it or we kill you. We have the power. It’s just that simple.

So, when do you think the press will find something else to complain about? Iraq may be a mess but it’s getting better. The economy may be a mess but it’s getting better. Looks like 2004 is shaping up nicely, too bad there’s not much out there to frighten the American people with, I suppose the purveyors of FUD are pretty much screwed.

Serves ‘em right.

George Will has a nifty new column today praising the President’s recent round of tax cutting bliss. Both economically and politically these cuts are one walloping good idea:

. . . as a stimulus to the president’s political stock and conservatives’ aspirations, the latest tax cuts, signed Wednesday, will be doubly successful. They will make it more difficult for a Democrat to win the presidency. And should one win, the cuts will make it more difficult to use the presidency for Democratic purposes.

Hah hah, silly Democrats – socialism is for the French.

Er, all I can say is, Whoa.

It is absolutely impossible to get a handle on our President. I am beginning to understand why some folks with negative views of America and her people ascribe every evil under the sun to him.

You just can’t ever figure out what he’ll do next.

He came into office pledging fairness and free trade and then passed a steel tariff. He’s staunchly pro-life but hedged on the stem cell issue and hasn’t forced the point on abortion or cloning. He was elected in no small part because he was a conservative Republican and the red state Americans were behind him yet he voices his willingness to approve an extension of the Clinton “Scary Weapons Ban.” He wants to push democracy in the Middle East against the wishes of nearly every other nation on Earth and yet he won’t take hold of the situation in Iraq and he happily flogs a worthless “roadmap” for the Palestinian question that’s chock full of the same old useless ideas.

Now we’ve got a tax deal at last. Less that half of what was asked for and not without some very bad things included but it gets across the idea of the original plan if not its substance.

The problem is, it’s all set to expire at the end of next year.

Of course, the argument goes, Congress will never sunset the provisions because then they’d be tax-raisers. Well, excuse me but haven’t I heard some of the more portside members croaking that tax increases might be just the ticket to save the world? I dunno, I think the bill will help but will it be enough, will it last long enough and will people give it a chance?

And what will our fearless leader do next?

This is probably the only unalloyed truth printed in an Arab newspaper all year:

“Egyptian media also uses language you just wouldn’t see in any American newspaper. In a review of the movie Daredevil in the Gazette, the massive African-American actor Michael Clarke Duncan is described as ‘a hefty negro.’”

That’s almost as funny as the frenchmen line from last week.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I have a theory.

Let’s say that the majority of liberal types are urban folks, I could be wrong but I don’t think so. I don’t mean just big cities like NYC, Boston, LA, etc but also decent sized towns. It then follows that the majority of conservative types are country people, small villages and rural areas.

Do you think city folks turn liberal because of a culture of dependency?

Face it, you simply can’t live in a larger town without depending on others. This is not to say you can live on a farm without some measure of dependency, but to live in town means you rely on someone else for essentially all your needs and everything you want or need is at your fingertips. If you live in a rural area you might have to drive yourself many miles to acquire needed goods and services and there are times – snowstorms, power outages and the like – where you have to fend for yourself.

I wonder if the culture of dependency leads urban people to decide dependency is best for everyone. You know the old, “If I need it, it’s obvious others would too.” As much as I dislike Jefferson and Madison for their hijinks at the beginning of the 19th century their concept of the United States as a coalition of self-sufficient landholders is the best way to avoid the dependency issue. We’re not supposed to ask the government for anything except the security to do what we wish. We contribute to the government in order to provide for common needs we cannot provide for individually – things like roads, schools and national defense. Everything else is our responsibility individually or in shifting coalitions – welfare, personal income, child rearing.

Wouldn’t that be a much simpler way to live? Why do we need the government lecturing us on what sort of car seat to buy our kid? We can’t do our own damn research? Talk to friends and neighbors to get an opinion? Why on earth should the government be dictating that people can no longer smoke in bars? The patrons can choose not to visit a smoky place, the employees can choose not to accept employment in a smoky place. So much for individual responsibilty, instead we’re dependent on the big G to molly-coddle us from cradle to the grave.

It’s a big problem, we’ve been dealing with the exodus to the cities since the early part of the 19th century and we haven’t gotten it sorted out yet. Why can’t everyone just admit and understand that what’s good for them isn’t necessarily good for everyone else? Central planning doesn’t work, Stalin proved that. I don’t demand much of people, just the basics. Understand and abide by some basic societal/moral code and then let everyone else be.

Is that so hard?

Now he’s done it, now he has definitely bloody well done it. Back in the summer of 2000, when nobody really knew who George W. Bush was and I, in particular, was unsure of what sort of President he’d turn out to be I determined if nothing else, I’d vote for W because I felt sure that with him in the White House, all this anti-gun garbage would stop. Now we’ve got a Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican in the White House and Clinton’s “anti-scary weapons” ban is up for renewal and what would we expect? That the ban would be struck down like the reactionary crap it was 9 years ago? Sadly, you’d be mistaken. Instead our dear President has voiced his willingness to reauthorize the law and possibly, if the liberal bunny huggers have their way, expand it to include basically any weapon made after 1945 and most pump-action shotguns. Lovely. Just what we need in a time of war.

You really ought to read what’s prohibited in this new act: AKs of all shapes and sizes, SKSs with detachable magazines, pump-action shotguns with more than a 5 shell capacity, M-1 carbines and potentially even the M-1 Garand fer chrissakes! The weapon that won World War 2 and is constantly lauded by generals and soldiers alike is likely to be banned under this new law.

When the original “assault weapons ban” came out I was not in favor of it but I could let it slide, most of the weapons were not ones I was interested in owning and the restrictions on magazine capacity, etc were not onerous. I am a big fan of compromise, maybe if we give them the most egregious weapons they’ll leave us the hell alone. Unfortunately the wild and wooly left has never learned the meaning of the word compromise (they also have problems with the meaning of the words fascism, Nazi, Taliban, diversity, democracy, republic and federalism among others). So, instead of taking what was offered and enforcing existing laws they’ve reached out their bony claws grasping for more. I am now a strict believer in the NRA and all they try to do, you simply can’t give an inch to these people! If you give an inch, they want a yard and so forth. Look at the history of the culture wars over just the last half century – every time we offer a compromise they take it and then sweep all remaining protected areas off the table. We conceded that maybe Vietnam was not such a hot idea, they’ve now forced upon the populace that the military and military action is in all ways and in all situtations a bad thing. We conceded that maybe victorian standards of sexual morality were a little strict, they’ve now come to the point of trying to force acceptance of polygamy, polyamory and pedophilia.

I dunno, I am a child of modernity. I don’t advocate intolerance (though tolerance does not imply acceptance) and I try to meet every person as a person – not as black or brown, gay or bi, woman or transsexual – but just as a human being who is as entitled to live their lives within societal boundaries as anyone else. It just doesn’t seem like that’s good enough anymore, there can be no compromise, just unremitting war until one side is destroyed.

Unfortunately, it looks like we’re on the losing side.

Oh W, how you wound me. Here I was thinking you were Rooseveltian in the Teddy “speak softly and carry a big stick mode” and instead you’re turning out to be Rooseveltian in the Franklin “the guvmint is the source of power” mode.

Best thing I’ve read today:

In France, as many of you know, people work 35-hour weeks, take a month or so paid vacation, and, if they work for the government . . . retire on full pensions at age 57. The bad news is that this is all coming apart because the good news is there are fewer and fewer Frenchmen being made these days. Soon, the ratio of working Frenchman to loafing Frenchman will be one-to-one.

“. . . the good news is there are fewer and fewer Frenchmen being made these days.”

That’s just priceless.

You’ll have to read the article to figure out what the above means.

What are we going to do about free Iraq? Our government is basically at war with itself. In Congress the Democraps are doing their utmost to stymie any proposal put forth by the administration in the hopes they can keep us poor and stupid and thereby undermine any recent achievements and ride the wave of dissaffection to success in 2004. Naturally they’ll lose but, in the meantime, we stay poor and stupid. For an excellent example on how far these cowards are willing to go to stymie anything and everything put forth by the conservative national majority see the ongoing troubles in Texas.

And it’s not just Congress, the administration is at civil war. The State Department has done everything it possibly can to undermine the goals of the President. From botching the Iraq job at the UN (which they pushed for), to propping up the Saudi regime (look where that’s got us), to refusing to deal strongly with North Korea and Iran, to doing everything possible to confuse and slow down the reconstruction of Iraq. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has been trying to move things ahead, to project American will through American power and make the whole world a better, safer place for all peoples. Of course, the Pentagon’s not perfect either, I’ve read some condemnations of Sect’y Rumsfeld for sending an undermanned force into Iraq and then trying to pull them out before the nation-building job is done.

Basically it comes down to this – things can’t be done by half measures. You’d think people who were so terrified of the spectre of Vietnam would have learned that by now. What do you get when you try to limit the impact and footprint of operations? A bloody damned mess, that’s what? So, what’s wrong with stationing half a million troops in Iraq? Order through force, it’s what empires do, and make no mistake – we’re an empire now. A benevolent one to be sure, but we’re definitely an empire. We bring order out of chaos and leave places better than we found them, that’s the idea anyway.

What a great big crap sandwich we’ve got to take a bite out of. So, what do we do now? I say enough higgledy-piggledy: station troops at street corners to control the population, take a firm hand and put people back to work – clearing debris if nothing else, take power out of the hands of Iraqis until they’re ready to exercise it – in a year or more. Stay the course, shock and awe and don’t hesitate to throw your weight around to accomplish our goals.

One of those two seems to be all the talk right now, both at the federal level and in my dear commonwealth.

Can I say that I am absolutely, sick and tired of hearing “But we have to doooooo something!” This pathetic bit of verbal garbage goes hand in hand with, “But it’s for the poor!” Not to be confused with, “But it’s for the children!”

You know what? F the children. I never learned how to diagram a sentence or do any real grammar in the government funded public schools. Part of the reason I get annoyed with my own writing is my complete ignorance of sentence structure, proper punctuation and extended vocabulary. Part of it’s my fault, naturally, for not giving a damn but I was a kid. Aren’t all kids like that? Year after year we pump more dough into an educational system that immediately siphons the money off into teacher’s union coffers.

You know what else? F the poor too. Which is better: programs to put people to work, abstinence instruction to prevent teenage or unmarried pregnancy, a vigourous defense of the institution of marriage or the alternative? A massive federal bureaucracy dedicated to keeping themselves employed by keeping you poor, stupid and dependent. There will always be poor people, some by choice, others by crapping out on the great Universal dice game. I feel sorry for them but what can we do? The causes of poverty are not universal and catholic. Every poor person is poor in a different way and for a different reason, how can you fix that by throwing cash at it?

I always thought the slogan of National Review was kind of silly:

Sure, it sounds effete and ineffective but dammit, it’s the truth. It’s what we all need to do. Jump up in whatever political body you can gain access to and yell, “Fucking STOP!” Stop spending my damn money on useless causes without any foresight or calculation of the consequences. Stop doing anything when what’s needed is focused attention to those problems we can solve and considered thought for those problems we can’t.

If we think we’ve got an answer then it’s most definitely an unsolvable problem.

It’s been a pretty eventful week, and I’m not just talking about world events this time.

Saddam’s birthday was Monday, April 28 – who knows where he was to celebrate it. One fellow suggested Saddam, Osama and Mullah Omar were holed up in a cave together over a cupcake with a single candle. Happy friggin birthday, dood.

April 29 marked Holocaust Remembrance Day – I still clearly remember us making a trip to DC while in college to see the Holocaust museum a year or so after its opening and being unable to get inside since it was Holocaust Remembrance Day – the lines were around the block. Still, wandering around the Tidal Basin with the cherry blossoms coating the ground like a pink petaled carpet wasn’t a bad way to spend the day.

Yesterday, April 30, was the 200th Anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. With the stroke of a pen the size of the United States was doubled and we gained free navigation of the Mississippi as well as ownership of the entire interior of the continent. Not a half bad deal for sixteen million dollars.

And today is May Day, which used to be a hell of a big deal in the Soviet Empire just like Saddam’s birthday used to be a hell of a big deal in Iraq. All in all the past four days are a wonderful contrast – three days to remember the discarded ideologies and catastrophes of the past and one day to recall the great promise of the future.

So much for waxing poetic. I now return you to your regularly scheduled drooling.

It really bugs me when perfectly intelligent people spout the tenets of liberalism, skate perilously close to socialism and get personally insulted when I don’t agree with them. It’s part of the reason I put the Mencken quote on the page, I don’t have all the answers and neither do you. “But,” they cry, “it’s a crisis! We have to do something!”

No. We bloody well do not have to do something.

“Oh heavens,” they exclaim, “think of the poor. Think of the children.” Hrm, do they think I’m entirely heartless? You think it doesn’t bum me out to see poor folks scraping by to eat and put a roof over their heads? Sure it does, it may not seem like it sometimes but I’m still mostly human. Nevertheless, I’ve seen poor folks who couldn’t pay the rent but always had cable TV. So, sometimes it’s a matter of priorities. But what about those folks who didn’t make that choice and who are honestly trying to do the right thing? Well, the best thing for them to do is get a job. And how do we ensure there are jobs for everyone? My philosophy says to make it inexpensive to do business – particularly small, entreprenurial business – and let the market take care of the problem.

And there’s so many more things to deal with: inefficiency in public transportation, bad schools, decaying cities, the like. Surely the best way to solve these problems is by central planning? Have the government set rules and regulations and dictate how these things should be solved. Well, maybe not the federal government – maybe you’re right, they’re just too big and can’t deal with the minute and rapid changes needed – maybe a regional layer of government?

Gee, does that smack of Stalin-era Soviet “Glorious Five Year Plan” to anybody else? Why not let local communities decide for themselves how to deal with things? Sure, it’s inefficient and some things might not get done but democracy proves that inefficiency is the best way to ensure the greatest possible measure of liberty for all. The Third Reich was marvellously efficient at ensuring the trains to Auschwitz ran on time and always came back empty in order to receive another load – numbered, catalouged and cross-referenced. Pardon me if I don’t think efficiency is the ideal to aspire to.

Top-down government doesn’t work, has never worked and can never work. The United States proves – by its very existence – that it’s the people who have ideas and cooperate with other people to put those ideas into action that make things happen and make a nation great. Sure, the people are often ignorant and sometimes stubborn but, in the end, if left to their own devices they usually make the best choice.

Trust in the great mass of ignoramuses we call America. They haven’t led us wrong yet.

So I got a comment to my other post on Sen. Santorum’s comments basically saying the same thing all the lefties and other bleeding hearts are saying:

Breaking sodomy laws (and I break PA sodomy laws quite often in my own bedroom) and committing polygamy, bestiality or incest are not even remotely comparable.

I would tend to agree with that statement but that’s not the bloody point! The point is that making it unconstitutional to pass any sort of law regulating sexual behavior is a damn bad idea. Whether or not states choose to pass such laws should remain up to them. I suppose if pressed I’d probably go along with repealing any anti-sodomy laws on the books – I already said I thought it was in poor taste for the gendarme to cite those two lads in Texas.

Sodomy ain’t the damn point, comparing it to bestiality, incest, rape, polygamy, etc isn’t the damn point. The point is, should government have the right to set some boundaries on sexual behavior? If the Supreme Court declares anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional that opens the door for the argument that laws prohibiting any behavior behind closed doors are unconstitutional. You may not see it now, but then again, I’ve been told that fifty years ago nobody talked about blowjobs in public and some folks didn’t even know what they were. Now we’ve been through a President who splashed that particular little practice all over the papers.

Slippery slope folks, what is unthinkable today won’t be so unthinkable in the future. And if we grant the possibility of permission for such things now, you can be sure people will take advantage of that possibility in the future.

Hey, if you like the rear-entry stuff, fine. I’m not going to break down your door or report you to the gestapo. But, do I think your right to give or take it in the butt is enshrined on the level of our freedom of speech or freedom of the press? Hell no!

And that, my friends, is the point.

A great many people who I respect and generally agree with seem to be getting their panties all in a bunch about Senator Santorum’s comments on the anti-sodomy case currently before the Supreme Court. Apparently, Texas has a very old law banning non-heterosexual sex in the home. Naturally, the gendarme don’t go bashing down doors after hours looking for people banging away in the privacy of their own home but, in this case, some neighbor called in a possible burglary, the police arrived and discovered two men enjoying each other’s company in a Bibilcal sense. I’d say citing these two fellows was a damn bad call but whaddaya wanna do? It is Texas after all.

So, now the Supreme Court is asked to rule on the Constitutionality of such laws and Sen. Santorum made the following comments which have led to the afore-mentioned panties bunching:

“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything,” the Pennsylvania lawmaker said in a recent interview, fuming over a landmark gay rights case before the high court that pits a Texas sodomy law against equality and privacy rights.”

So, what’s wrong with that? He’s not saying the laws are a good idea, he’s not equating homosexuality with all the sins in the calendar. All he’s saying is that it’s not a good idea to enshrine a Constitutional right to whatever sort of sexual behavior you want to pursue in your own home. And he’s absolutely right in his conclusions, if you have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to consensual sexual activity in your home then no form of consensual sexual activity can ever be banned. That opens the door to polygamy, polyamory, bestiality (so long as you can prove the hamster offered its consent), etc. Does anyone honestly think that’s a good idea? Certainly there are some who do, but they’re also the sort of people who see society as hopeless and therefore open to complete destruction before they erect a shining new edifice in its place – the penile symbolism might be intentional.

I can’t say that a moral stand can be taken on homosexuality. There are cases to be made for all sides of the issue and I don’t know what to think. I am inclined, however, toward the live and let live school of thought. You do what you like, I’ll do what I like. There are things that should not be acceptable though due to their impact on society. Two men or two women in bed together isn’t neccessarily one of them, three men and two women or one man with ten wives just might be. And that’s what we do not wish to see enshrined as a “right.”

Since the war’s pretty much over and at least one poor, technologically crippled soul mentioned they couldn’t read the page since I put the Dissident Frogman’s banner up top, I’ve removed it to here.

It’s too good just to let go.

Not a whole hell of a lot to say today. The war is going excellently despite all efforts of the press, the politicians, the entire rest of the world, etc to disabuse us of that notion. I’m very tired – due, no doubt, to staying up until 4 AM on Sunday morning and getting far drunker than I ought to have – and so don’t give much of a damn about anything.

But, check out these searching questions and see if you know the answers:

. . . while it is censorious of politicians and soldiers, the media is completely uninterested in monitoring its own behavior. Would Mr. Rather have gone to Berlin amid the SS to interview Hitler in his bunker as the fires of Auschwitz raged? Would NPR reporters have visited Hitler’s Germany, paid bribes to Mr. Goebbels, and then broadcasted allied shortcomings at the Bulge, oblivious to the Nazi machinery of death and their own complicity in it?

I know! I know! Teacher! Call on me!

I have been turning this over in my mind for some time so I thought I’d throw it out there and see what everyone thinks. I believe that a state of undeclared war exists between the United States and France.

I’m positive, at least, that’s how the French see it. It seems a fairly good explanation for their behavior of late and their absolute inability to apologize for or admit – perhaps even to see – their error.

Since they really haven’t got any military to speak of they’re fighting us with every weapon at their disposal: the press, the “international community” and that most potent of all weapons – Gallic snootiness.

Hrm, maybe a no import/export agreement among American merchants is in order? Could we apply economic pressure like we did to England in pre-Revolutionary times? It’d be an interesting theory. Let’s see how the old frogs like it when they can’t eat at McDonalds, Pizza Hut or Taco Bell anymore and when we stop drinking their wine and eating their smelly cheese.

I’ve already stopped drinking Irish whiskey (owned by the French). What will you contribute to the cause?

I know it probably shouldn’t, but this just makes me so damn happy I can’t stand it.

Finally, there’s some backlash against morons who engage in knee-jerk protesting without any reasoned arguments to offer. I actually like Tim Robbins’ movies (can’t stand Sarandon but that’s a whole ‘nother story). I respect his right to be heard but, at the same time, I can’t countenance automatic anti-anything just because you’re a strong liberal and think your rights are being trampled upon merely because your party is out of power. Hey, tough rocks folks. That’s how democracy works. If you don’t like it, stop your anti-American hustling, visit reality for a little while and convince some of the normal voting public that you’re right. That’s what we conservative/Republican types did last fall and lookee here, we actually regained control of the Senate against all odds.

Gee, you don’t think this means the peace-niks and Clinton-lovers would actually have to work at getting their message out – that of course implies they even have a coherent message. Nah, it’s much easier to flash peace signs at the Academy Awards, speechify when people are essentially forced to listen and only complain to your own crowd.

Oh yeah, and then scream censorship when you realize nobody cares.

Ever try typing with your middle finger tightly wrapped to staunch bleeding? Not much fun, I can assure you. Ahhh, the perils of PC repair. Why do they leave solder points so damn sharp? Don’t they know blood is highly corrosive and therefore not wisely rubbed all over sensitive electronic components? Stupid chinese.

I realize our travels in Iraq are a war of liberation and all that but I dearly miss the old signs from wars gone by. Like Admiral Halsey’s sign from WWII which I posted in this very location last year. Or the soon-to-be-erected “Welcome to Baghdad. Courtesy of the 3d ID and 1st MEF.”

Well, finally I’ve heard about one. Simple and unassuming as befits the great nation that erected it. You ought to read the article because it’s great but here’s what the sign said:

We crossed the checkpoint – manned by a lone British outpost whose guard was ecstatic when given a cold Coke – into the barely noticeable DMZ (zigzag obstacle course through a sand berm), and then, somewhat anticlimactically, we found ourselves in Iraq. The only sign of the country is a cardboard sign hammered to a stake in the ground, handwritten:

“WELCOME TO IRAQ. 4th MARINE DIVISION.”

Goddamn. We rule.

You want further proof that Saddam is an very naughty, bad bad, evil, terrible fellow? Look no further, MotD.org is proud to present as a public service – the proof!

Can you tell the two great dictators apart? I dunno, if it were night in Baghdad when they took the photo (or day on Coruscant), I’d have a pretty tough time telling them apart.

What a wonderful day! Today is the 138th anniversary of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia – all but ending the American Civil War. And what do you know? I woke up this morning to hear that regime control in Baghdad was at an end – all but ending the Second Gulf War.

What a day for victory!

So, now what? Just as in the Civil War the next weeks and months will be filled with mopping up operations, explaining to partisans and terroristic militias that the war is over, they lost and they’d better pack it in now before they’re killed or tried as war criminals. Isolated strong points may hold out for a while, particularly in the north, but main resistance is at an end. Do you think there might be incidents like the Japanese hold-outs from WWII? Dudes up in the mountains somewhere who don’t get the word that the war’s over and keep watching and waiting for their time to strike? Even so, they’ll be minor and few and far between.

I sure hope we’ve got a plan for post-war administration for, as far as I’m concerned, with people dancing in the streets celebrating liberation now is the time to present it. Want to cement the good faith of the Iraqi people? Demonstrate how you’re going to give them their country back.

But for the moment, savor victory and keep the faith.

I think the DoD should hire me, after a sufficiently obscured payroll route, to offer the real answers we ought to be giving during the daily Centcom briefings:

“Sir, Peter Paul Nincompoop of the BBC. Can you elaborate on the need for shelling the Palestine Hotel, obviously not being used by forces loyal to the regime and home to foreign journalists? And, can you also indicate why you persist in killing unarmed and unoffending journalists throughout the country?”

“Good question Peter, the long and the short of it is, this is a war. If folks are stupid enough to be gallivanting throughout the country without any prior notice of their whereabouts then they deserve to be killed along with the forces for which they’re providing propaganda outlets. As for the hotel, we very much regret the loss of journalistic life – particularly as it seems to be (according to the media) more important than the lives of American troops – but again, if you’re brain-dead enough to stay in Baghdad, in the center of the storm, how can we be held responsible for your safety?”

“Mr. Oppressor, Jean-Paul Wingnut of Free French Vichy News. Can you offer us specific figures on how many poor, innocent Iraqi civilians you’ve mindlessly slaughtered in the past weeks? Is it more or less than the millions of children you’ve killed over the years with your unneeded sanctions? Second question, can you explain why you persist in killing un-uniformed Iraqi militia? Obviously they’re not combatants, even though they’re shooting at you…I mean, really…they haven’t got uniforms. They are obviously just freedom fighters.”

“Yes, well, as I said before. It’s war folks, people die in war. That’s what happens. I won’t hand out specifics on casualty figures except to say we’re doing an unimaginably good job in discriminating between targets and the civilian casualties thus far are something less that 1/2 of 1% of the deaths caused by Saddam’s goons over the years. As for the Fedayeen terrorists, they’re making it very hard for us to keep from killing real innocents by their cowardly and patently illegal means of waging war, a terrorist is a terrorist no matter what they think they’re fighting for. And if you think supporting a Stalinist regime is worth fighting for – oh hell, why am I bothering? You’re French.”

Yep the media have finally proven that they’re just craven fear-mongering jackasses. I can’t say I’ve heard one reasonable question in the last several days of Centcom briefings. Howabout asking how the boys are doing? How about asking if there’s any message the United States military would like to express to the people back home? Friggin’ morons.

All in all though, this weekend’s been a damn sight different than the first weekend of the war. Victory is at hand. Rejoice damn you!

Whenever I think about the war two quotes keep running through my head. One, appropriately enough is from Three Kings:

“Move in fast, leave the safeties on. Hit them with the blinding power of American sunshine.”

Isn’t that just about what we’re trying to do. Move quickly, don’t shoot unless you have to and bring them food, water and freedom. Not necessarily in that order.

The second quote – from Rough Riders – kept playing over and over in my mind during the first heady days of the lightning advance into Iraq:

“We are finding them, we are killing them, we are advancing!”

I think those two quotes taken together sum up perfectly the often confused and confusing nature of this war. We are moving quickly, we are killing without remorse when needed but more often we’re relying on our sunshine to clear out the dark recesses of tyranny and breathe new life into a long-suffering society. And how about that spectacular rescue last night? A combined arms operation, breaks into an Iraqi base disguised as a hospital, grabs one of our own and evacs her all without losing a man. Now that’s just damned impressive and should go down through the ages as one of the great accomplishments of POW rescues. Unfortunately, nobody remembers those acts of heroism, they’re just not glamourous enough.

So, keep going fellas, keep killing some, keep saving others and then keep on bringing the “blinding power of American sunshine” to the darkest corner of the Earth.

Funny how that always sounds vaguely ominous. I love it.

Anyway, I think the war has entered a new phase over the past several days. We had the blitzkreig phase of the war and now we seem to be concentrating on slowly tightening the noose around Baghdad coupled with the mopping up/consolidation of our gains thus far. I doubt it has anything to do with a failed war plan or any of that other traitorous balderdash that bald wanker Arnett spouted off for the enemy the other night but I do think we’re all a little bit surprised at the mistrust of the Iraqi people. I suppose once we’ve shut down Iraqi TV and cordoned off Baghdad we might see a little more gratitude and understanding from the people. But, then again, how much gratitude can one expect when you’re rolling tanks through people’s front yards? I suppose we ought to be satisfied with a shared cup of tea from time to time.

Liberation day is coming, but what’s more important is that we’re showing the world we won’t hesitate to use our power to ensure our peace and security. What’s more, we’ve come to the understanding that stability is not always in our best interests. Stability can often be an enemy, particularly when it gives the rats in the sewers time to plot against us.

Shamelessly ripped from The Corner

It’s a little reactionary, but this drives me nuts. NRO is full of nice, brilliant people. Can one of you kids please tell me how a bunch of hippie-wanna-be, rubbing-the-numbers-off-Daddy’s-AMEX, will-pass-school-because-they-spout-the-same-bile-as-their-professors protestors will tell a single mother who arrives to work 1/2 a day late and gets docked for four hours pay because the bus route she rides is clogged by idiots and cretins taking the occasional bong-hit- how do any of these silly protests make any sense?

There is a constitutional right to protest, although not explicit. The explicit rights regard speech and assembly. There is not a right to loiter, harass, or disrupt commerce. There is not a right to trespass. There are actually laws agaist those actions. I say arrest the leaders of these protests, and bill them and their organizations for the police protection that they inspire. I know for a fact (as a consultant to a local city government) that even the KKK pays for their police protection when they hold one of their vile ‘rallys’, in which- I am proud to say- the last had four times as many counter-protesters as the rally itself.

To me, as the taxes paid on commerce help support the military and some of their ‘targets’ are governmental, direct impedence of entry or egress is an act of terrorism at most, sabotage at median, and harrasment at the least. Raise my taxes a 10-spot a year to print more citation books.

Since when did a 25-year-old idiot-for-hire for ANSWER, or some other crackpot organization care more about saving a brutal tyrant whos own people want him gone, than they do for a single parent that needs to get to that second job after working ‘graveyard’ to feed and shelter their kids in Bed-Sty or Haight-Asbury? The hypocrisy and lack of that ellusive ‘grasp’ is just damn near startling.

Yep, made that argument before. But I’m more in favor of “direct action.” That is, shooting the damn, dirty hippies before they can disrupt a fine Thursday in the Big Apple. But, howabout this for the downlow on our current crop of protestors?

Reader Heather Wilhelm writes:

just got to my office after visiting 50th and 5th. My thoughts: This protest was straight out of Monty Python….Half of the people at the protest a) hadn’t shaved in weeks b) didn’t seem to know where they were. Despite the helicopters and what seemed about half of the NYPD force, I don’t think there could have been more than 200 people there. My personal highlight: As I was giving a shout-out of support of the NYPD, an older, grizzled man grabbed my arm in a panic. “Your bag, man,” he said, pointing at my bright blue shoulder satchel. “It’s CURSED.” He looked geniunely terrified and backed away. “I know these things, man, I can see it in that blue, man?” And then he went back to shouting “No war!” at the cops. If this is the fifth column, we’re in good shape.

Whoa, maybe we ought to hand out some heavy drugs. Just think, position large hookahs in the backs of paddy wagons and play Mr. Softie music while driving slowly alongside the protests. Lure them in man, it’d be just like the pied piper and shit.

I was thinking last night about why I was so eager for this war and what my reasons are for supporting the war. Iraqi liberation is all well and good, no people have ever been created that deserve to live under tyranny. Am I ready to sacrifice tens of thousands of dead Americans for the cause? Am I willing to die for that cause? Actually, no. And that’s the revelation I had last night. The real reason I’m so keen to see this war prosecuted is rooted in my deep and abiding need to follow the rules.

I’ve always tried to follow the rules. I read directions, I obey the law and never do anything totally out of bounds although it often seems like I do. I think others should be made to obey the rules as well, the world isn’t a democracy, there are some things that are non-negotiable. You had better not invade your neighbor if he gives no offense. You had better not blow up skyscrapers for no good reason. You had better not feed people feet first into tree chippers or plastic shredders or whatever. You had better do the best job possible to ensure liberty and provide for the needs of the world’s people. I’ll let Thomas Jefferson make the point for me:

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

There you go, if the government won’t ensure Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. Bingo on all the tyrannical regimes the world over. Them’s the rules folks, play by them or be subject to total anhiliation. I think it’s incumbent on the United States, by hook or by crook, to ensure all governments are held to the very simple precepts laid out in the Declaration of Independence. We’re the biggest, baddest defender of the oppressed on the block, we’ve got the power and the skills to make people follow the rules. Who are we to shun that duty?

After I spent all that time writing that last missive I went and found out that Jed Babbin had already said the same thing (read the March 25 entry about Big Dogs, etc) and, as usual, much better than I could.

In truth, it has been many television and print pundits–not Rumsfeld or the president–who taught us that this war would be easy, and that all we had to do is show up to win. But now that we have hit a few speed bumps– and that’s all the negative developments of the past day were–people are saying that we’re back to the “q” word: quagmire. Oh, please. We’re six days into this, with less than half the casualties we had in the First Gulf war. Our troops are now engaged in the first big battle with the Republican Guard, and by all reports are kicking tail. CENTCOM refused to get into the “body count” business today, and wisely so. The trail of blood and burnt vehicles will tell the tale too well, once the battlefield is safe for journalists to wander.

My people, my people! Come brothers and we’ll fight the evil of whitey! Got this today from a friend. It makes some excellent points but there’s a lot in there that’s debatable, reprehensible or just plain wrong. Regardless, it’s an interesting read:

SOME VERY GOOD POINTS
Slavery Reparations – by Fred Reed
On the Web I find that Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, is demanding that whites pay reparations to blacks. It’s because of slavery, see. He is joined in this endeavor by a gaggle of other professional blacks.
I guess he’ll send me a bill, huh? I feel like saying, Let me get this straight, Hank. I’m slow. Be patient.
You want free money because of slavery, right?
I don’t blame you. I’d like free money too. Tell you what. I believe in justice. I’ll give you a million dollars for every slave I own, and another million for every year you were a slave. Fair enough?
But tell me, how many slaves do you suppose I have? In round numbers, I mean. Say to the nearest dozen. And how long were you a slave?
Oh. In other words, I owe you reparations for something that I didn’t do and didn’t happen to you. That makes sense. Like lug nuts on a birthday cake.
Personally, I think you owe me reparations for things you didn’t do and never happened to me. I want reparations. Kinda silly, isn’t it?
But if we’re going to talk about reparations, that’s a street that runs in two directions. You want money from me for what some other whites (and blacks) did to some other blacks in another century. How about you guys paying whites reparations for current expenses caused by blacks? Not long ago blacks burned down half of Los Angeles, a city in my country.
Cities are expensive, Hank. Build one sometime and you’ll see what I mean.
Whites had to pay taxes to repair Los Angeles for you.
You can send me a check (certified, please).
Now, yes, I’m told you burned LA because you didn’t like the verdict in the trial of those police officers. Well, I didn’t like the verdict in the Simpson trial. But I didn’t burn your house or place of business and loot Korean grocers. Over the years blacks have burned a lot of American cities Newark, Detroit, Watts, on and on. Now add in the fantastic cost over the years of welfare in all its forms, of large police forces and jails and security systems in department stores. I can’t live in the capital city of my own country because of crimes committed primarily by blacks. Toss in the cultural cost of lowering standards in everything, especially education of children, for the benefit of blacks.
See what I mean?
Now, I’d view things differently if you said, “Fred, blacks can’t get anywhere in a modern country without education. We know that. We need better schools, smarter teachers, harder courses, books with smaller pictures and bigger words. Can you help us?”
I’d say, “Hallelujah! Hoo-rahh! Not just yes, but heck yes. Let’s sell an aircraft carrier and get these folks some real schools and get them into the economic mainstream.” I’d say it partly because it would be the right thing to do, and partly, because I’d like to add more of your people to the tax base.
The current custodial state is expensive. I’d just love for blacks to study and learn to compete and stop burning places.
But is it going to happen?
You may not believe it, but I, and most whites, don’t like seeing blacks as miserable and screwed up as they are. I spend a fair amount of time in the projects. Those places are ugly. It’s no fun watching perfectly good kids turn into semi-literate dope dealers who barely speak English. It just plain ain’t right.
But, Hank, what am I supposed to do about it? I can’t do your children’s homework, I can’t teach them how to read. At some point, people have to do things for themselves, or they don’t get done.
Maybe it’s time.
I’ll tell you what I see out in the world, Hank. I think blacks are too accustomed to getting anything they want by just demanding it.
True, it has worked for over half a century. Get a few hundred people in the street, implicitly threaten to loot and burn, holler about slavery, and the Great White Cash Spigot turns on.
Thing is, whites don’t much buy it any longer. Most recognize that what once was a civil-rights movement has become a shake-down game. A career for a few fat cats. Very few people feel truly responsible for the failings and inadequacies of blacks. Political correctness keeps the lid on — but everyone knows the real score.
Which scares me, Hank. On one hand, many blacks hate whites and are inclined toward looting and burning. (The whites you hate are the ones who marched in the civil-rights movement. Ever think about that?)
On the other hand, whites quietly grow wearier and wearier of it.
Not good.
On the third hand (allow me three hands, for rhetorical convenience), blacks keep demanding things. As I write, you demand reparations for slavery. Blacks in Oklahoma (I think it was) want money for some ancient race riot. Other blacks reject the Declaration of Independence, blacks in New York hint broadly at burning and looting over a trial, yet more demand the elimination of the Confederate flag, blacks in Alabama want “Heart of Dixie” removed from license plates, and the federal EEO apparatus, which means blacks, wants to sue Silicon Valley for not hiring nonexistent black engineers.
That’s a lot of demanding for one month, Hank. What happens if
whites ever say, “No”?
Now, how about you? You’ve got a cushy job up there at Harvard, and you can hoot and holler about what swine and bandits whites are. I guess it’s lots of fun, and you get a big salary for it. But don’t you think you might do blacks more good if you told them to complain less and study more? For example, if you want blacks to work in Silicon Gulch, the best approach might be to find some really smart black guys, and get them to study digital design, not Black Studies.
That’s how everybody else does it. It works. Then blacks wouldn’t feel left out, and racial tension would decline.
Sound like a plan?
Just out of curiosity, how many hours a week do professors of Afro-American Studies spend in the projects, encouraging poor black kids to study real subjects, Hank?
What do you think Hank? Ever really stopped to think about what all this really means?

I know, I know. Where has he been? To tell the truth, except for the one little spasm of creativity on Tuesday I haven’t felt much like anything for going on a week now. I just can’t get excited or upset or even care at all about anything. Kind of weird but these sorts of things happen from time to time. There was a point at which this sort of nothing-feeling would have worried me so I’d have done something incredibly stupid to relieve it, nowadays I just figure it will pass in time.

But seriously folks, a point I’d like to make. The lefties are out in force. America is evil. As one fellow said sarcastically, “it seems as if we Americans are constantly on the verge of an ethnic pogrom.” Apparently we’d all be much better off if Stalin was in control. One might think the South Vietnamese and the North Koreans are terribly fortunate America lost those resepective wars (actually a tie in Korea but like MacArthur said “There is no substitute for victory.”). Here’s what I think: There’s no doubt America has made mistakes in the past although very few of them were deliberately malevolent, most of them were due to the political exigencies of the time. The one that leaps to mind is the decision of the Founders to ignore slavery in 1787 in order to get the Union going. The point is, there has never been a nation more willing to admit to its mistakes and try to make amends and move ahead as a people than this one. There is no other nation who would even permit the sort of debate we allow nor try as hard as we do to ensure everyone is given a voice. It just don’t happen folks. Nobody else out there has accomplished what we have in our ongoing efforts to truly be a society of equals where all have a voice. Granted, not everyone is truly created equal — we’re not all smart, we’re not all thin and pretty — but everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law and despite what the lefty morons would have you believe that exact thing happens, more often than not.

I hold out hope for all. I don’t think I was ever a lefty. I always hated commies and still get annoyed when people hang the red banner in their room. I always loved America although from time to time I really despise her people (mostly stupid commies and Democrats). I did once vote Democratic but that was purely due to perceived economic policy, I always hated absolutely the social policy of the Democratic party (anti-life, anti-gun, anti-family, anti-self determination). I always hope that when people “grow up” and really start to read and think rather than just parrot the party line they’ll become conservative but it worries me to no end when I see perfectly intelligent people continue to ape the liberal line. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Oh well, back to the old standby. People suck.

Maybe later, if I remember, I will share my revelation on why it is I hold Canadians in such low esteem.

If I could stop being so damned serious I might just go to one log and put political and other rants on the same page. Does anyone even read the irregular political stuff? Right, heard on NPR this morning (no abuse, I hate Stern and I think 93.5 was playing Rush and you all know how I feel about Canadians) that German language experts are lately bemoaning the increasing use of english words and phrases in normal speech. They even played a snippet of a speech by Chancellor Schroeder where he used the words “lead nation” in the midst of a stream of German. Crazy. They also said that the citizens of Saarbrucken are petitioning to have English replace French as the second language of choice in schools. Anything that reduces Frenchy influence and importance in the world sounds good to me. What was I saying about Pax Americana? Anyone else note the irony of all this? The Germans are beginning to come to terms with the fact that English may soon be the international language of business and diplomacy and here, in our own bloody country I can’t even go to McDonalds without having to scan through the Mexican menu to figure what I want?