Shot In The Dark

The Pioneer Press Endorsement

The St. Paul Pioneer Press has endorsed the President for the second time.

The endorsement echoes things many of us conservatives feel:

Like many Americans, we have been disappointed with some of the policies and decisions of President George W. Bush in his first term. He has strayed from the conservative principles that resonated four years ago: Smaller government. Thriftiness. Free trade. His environmental policies and aspects of his social agenda, too, give us pause.

But unlike so much of the media, they get what's important:

But at a time of war, we believe the bar must be set high for a challenger seeking to unseat the president. We expect the challenger to make a forceful, compelling, affirmative case for changing the nation's top leadership. Sen. John Kerry has not made that case convincingly and fails to inspire confidence that he would be able to lead America differently or better.

To say the least.

Read the whole thing.

Covering the Six

Wingmen for Bush is a brand new website on Bush's Air Guard career.

It looks like the President has a better percentage of his former comrades on his side than Kerry does...

Posted by Mitch at 03:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Save It For The Polls

One Big Swede reports:

Fort Lewis College student Mark O'Donnell said he was showing people his College Republicans sweat shirt, which said "Work for us now … or work for us later," when Maria Spero kicked him in the leg at an off-campus restaurant.

Spero then said "she should have kicked me harder and higher," said O'Donnell. "To physically take that out on someone because you disagree with them, that is completely wrong."

It's going to be a long week.

Forced Retirement is Good, Reason 15

Cronkite on Larry King:

Former CBSNEWS anchorman Walter Cronkite believes Bush adviser Karl Rove is possibly behind the new Bin Laden tape.

Cronkite made the startling comments late Friday during an interview on CNN.

Somewhat smiling, Cronkite said he is "inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing."

Interviewer Larry King did not ask Cronkite to elaborate on the provocative election eve observation.

I was expecting to see someone make this claim - someone from Democrat Underground, or the Giggle Fratboys.

Nice to see Cronk has gotten the spirit of the lefty blogosphere pegged!

When Predictions Go Bad

Bill Whittle, October 6:

You may call that a Terror Mastermind. I call it a greasy wet spot on the wall of a cave in Afghanistan.

The man is dead. Dead, or just possibly captured. The likelihood of him having been killed at Tora Bora by US “outsourcing� was rising with his deafening silence concerning each American counterstroke and became 100% when nothing was heard from the late Osama after the US invasion of Iraq.

Bill Whittle
DETERRENCE
October 6th, 2004

Bill Whittle, yesterday:

I am now openly stating that Kerry will win with over 95% of the vote, and praying that my predictive ability remains up to par.

And for my part, I predict Kerry gets 500 electoral votes.

Park the Vote!

Via ASV...

...well, just watch it.

(Not suitable for work)

The Search For Beef

The New Patriot is a local liberal group blog. They have a couple of writers worth reading.

Chris Dykstra takes on Powerline.

He writes (scroll down - their permalinks are hosed) about John Hinderaker's piece yesterday comparing the Bin Laden statement to the cant of Michael Moore and/or the Democrat party. We talked about it on the air today - and the funny thing is, Bin Laden's statement does follow a lot of Democrat talking points about the war, about 9/11.

Dykstra says:

After reading John Hinderaker's, (AKA "Hinderocket" of Power Line) bizarre "analysis" of Bin Laden's speech, I felt like sending him a sympathy card. One can only hope those thoughts weren't as painful to birth as they are to read. I probably shouldn't worry, though. For one so obviously innoculated by right-thought, I'm sure authoring this brainless twaddle was an exercise in ecstasy.

Bizarre brainless twaddle. Oy. That's quite an opening broadside. With an opener like that, naturally Mr. Dykstra will be favoring us with exactly what's wrong with Rocket Man's thesis.

Let's read on:

Mr. Hinderaker submits for our inspection the proposition that Osama Bin Laden has absorbed a few Democratic Talking Points and is now trumpeting them to the world. He says that Michael Moore is the "intellectual leader" of the Democratic Party, ergo, Michael Moore and the Democratic Party wrote Bin Laden's speech.

Well, let's stop here; Rocket doesnt say that, if you read carefully. Or, let's be honest, if you read at all. During our conversation on the air today, the thesis was more like Bin Laden - shrewd an observer of America that he is - is echoing a lot of Democrat talking points and several script points from Fahrenheit 911. (Note to Mr. Dykstra: Indiscriminate use of the word ergo can lead you down rhetorical alleys you don't want to go down. So does crack cocaine. Ergo, if you keep using ergo to make bogus logical connections, you will soon be seen fencing CD players for your next fix)

But enough quibbling. I'm sure the beef is on the way:

He appears to be serious (If I Mr. Hindraker is writing for the Onion, then I apologize and bow before him.)

Still no beef:

First, about Mr. Moore. He is the the intellectual leader of the Democratic Party the way that Sean Hannity, or Larry Kudlow, or Dennis Miller, or Howard Fineman, or ... is the intellectual leader of the Republican Party. In other words, he is not.

Chicken/egg question; Does the Democrat party perfectly reflect Moore, or does Moore perfectly reflect the Democrat party? The answer: Yes.

And neither Hannity nor Kudlow nor Miller nor Fineman nor ... were seated on the dais at the RNC. The GOP website and the GOP power elite haven't been pimping Hannity's show or Miller's program or Kudlow's output.

But never mind; I'm sure the actual factual refutation of Hinderaker is coming soon...

Moore makes controversial films that in some ways parallel Democratic postions. However, he didn't write the platform and doesn't always reflect the ideas of our candidate. He made a powerful visual essay in Fahrenheit 9.11 that was successful in the marketplace of ideas. Hannity and the others have successful media personas, which they generally use to spread the Republican Word. While they all enjoy status as celebrities, none are party leaders.

And Bin Laden's statement echoed none of their talking points, except for the Democrats and Moore.

Secondly, Hindraker seems to think that Bin Laden needed Moore to point out that Bush sat reading a children's book for seven minutes while the country was attacked. Just a gentle reminder - Bin Laden didn't need Moore to tell him he had extra time. Bin Laden enjoyed the favor real time. Remember?

Brief aside: this may be the Democrat talking point that makes me the most livid. It's a canard. I've put together the timeline of everything that happened the morning of 9/11; every action on every plane, every phone call, everyplace the President went, every time Andrew Card broke in, every plane that scrambled...everything. The "seven minutes" made no difference. Zero.

But again, back on topic; Mr. Dykstra is going to show us where Rocket Man is wrong:

As for the rest of it, it doesn't actualy matter what Bin Laden says. He is a master politician and the only thing of which we can be sure is that, just like Bush and Kerry, he is playing to his base.

Right. And what base is he talking to, by parroting the talking points from Fahrenheit 911?

His message is aimed at Arabs, not Americans.

Right. Which is why "the master politician" released his message just before those renowned Arab elections, parroting rhetoric from the noted Arab filmmaker Miq Al Moor.

If he happens to sound themes critical of Bush, it just means he can read the news [825 page compilation of mainstream news stories detailing President Bush's record. 1.4 MB PDF] Hindraker wonders if there will be any "...Democrats honest enough to be embarrassed that Osama bin Laden has enthusiastically adopted their campaign themes?" The answer is no, unless they are as ill-informed as Republicans appear to be.

OK, Republicans ar dum, Democrats are smart. Got it.

But the synchronicity that Hinderaker wrote about is wrong because...?

The question I ask in return is this: Are there any Republicans honest enough to be embarassed that three years after 9.11, Osama Bin Laden is dancing a jig on prime time TV while our troops face attacks from insurgents created and armed through the incompetence of this President?

Yep. It's embarassing. Clinton should have nabbed Bin Laden when he had the chance. No argument. Otherwise, though, the President's been right and his critics pretty much wrong.

But no matter - the real question is, how is Hinderaker wrong? Where is the observation that Bin Laden's statement and the moonbat left's list of talking points are near-perfectly in tune, wrong?

Anyone?

Swifties' Final Push

The latest Swiftboat Vets are out.

Watch it.

So Kerry's a decorated veteran?

There's a decorated veteran. That's the Congressional Medal of Honor that Bud Day is wearing.

Wanna see how he earned it?

Here's his story:

George Day was a 41 year old veteran of combat in World War II and Korea as he flew yet another mission in his third war that August morning in 1967. At first the mission seemed no different than any of the countless others he had flown. Suddenly an enemy rocket slammed into his F-100, destroying the aircraft and setting in motion a chain of events that would turn into a nightmare....one that would last for the next six years.

As Major Day ejected from the battered aircraft his body slammed into its fuselage, breaking his arm in three places and badly spraining his left knee. Perhaps the only stroke of fortune for him that day was that his parachute opened. Upon reaching the ground he was immediately captured and severely beaten. The torture continued for two days during most of which Day was hung upside down with ropes. Finally an enemy medic crudely set his broken arm and the torture let up slightly. So severe were his injuries and so swollen was his left knee that Day's captors considered his incapable of resistance or escape and only loosely bound him for three more days in a damp cave. On the sixth night Day escaped. Barefoot and injured he traveled south for two days, both feet repeatedly cut by sharp rocks and battle debris. Later he would recount the sounds of his pursuers and their dogs all around him day and night, but through great will to survive he managed to stay one step ahead of them.

On his second night of freedom, unable to continue without rest, the 41 year old pilot sought refuge under a bush. His fitful sleep was suddenly shattered by the nearby explosion of a rocket or bomb, he never knew which. The detonation was so close it threw his body into the air and ruptured his eardrums and sinuses. Shrapnel ripped into his right leg cutting large, open wounds. Vomiting blood, disoriented and with no equilibrium, Major Day languished in the brush for two more days. Then he resumed his trek south to what he hoped would be freedom.

For several days meager meals of berries, as well as two frogs swallowed alive, provided the sustenance he needed to continue. After more than a week of struggle Day finally reached the Ben Hai River marking the boundaries of the Demilitarized Zone. Hiding from enemy patrols during the day, he left the cover of jungle that night and used a bamboo log to float across the river and into "no-man's-land". For another week he avoided enemy patrols and several times came heartbreakingly close to attracting the attention of American helicopters and reconnaissance airplanes. With unbelievable strength of character he continued south in hopes of reaching an American patrol that had ventured into the zone.

Somewhere between his 12th to 15th day of escape he began to hear the nearby sounds of American artillery and helicopters. During the darkness of night he continued until the basecamp was in sight. Not wanting to approach the friendly fortress during the darkness that might make the defenders mistake him for an enemy, Day lay down in the jungle to await dawn. Shortly before the sun arose to afford him rescue he looked up to see a North Vietnamese soldier pointing an AK-47 rifle at him. Attempting to escape yet again, Day was shot in his left hand and thigh. A day and a half later he was recaptured and returned to his original prison camp.

Refused medical treatment, Day's gunshot wounds festered and became infected. He was tortured for 48 hours without rest before the enemy finally believed they had broken his will. Day had answered their questions. What they didn't realize was that the man who appeared so broken on the outside had answered every important question with false information. Two months later, totally destroyed physically, Day was sent north to the infamous Hoa Lo prison camp, where further torture continued.

Most Americans are already aware that conditions at the "Hanoi Hilton" were barbaric. American prisoners faced isolation, humiliation, and torture that lasted for year after year. As the war in Vietnam came to a close however, the North Vietnamese captors realized that the release of American P.O.W.s was imminent and relaxed their vigil. American P.O.W.s responded by becoming more daring in their resistance.

In February, 1971 several American prisoners at the Hoa Loa camp gathered for a forbidden religious service. Suddenly they were interrupted by the enraged enemy guards. As the guards burst into the meeting room with rifles pointed at the prisoners, one of the Americans stood to his feet. Ragged, battered but unbroken, it was George Day. Looking into the muzzles of the enemy rifles he began to sing. The song was "The Star Spangled Banner", our National Anthem. Next to him another prisoner stood. Commander James Bond Stockdale was the ranking American in the prison and he lended his voice to Day's anthem of freedom. Soon the other prisoners joined the refrain, and then from throughout the entire prison camp, came the sounds of others. Stockdale, who would join "Bud" Day in receiving Medals of Honor five years later wrote that, although he was punished for the episode, it was exhilarating: "Our minds were now free and we knew it."

I'm not going to quibble with John Kerry's war record; that's for the Swifties to do.

The reason I bring it up is because the Kerry campaign's response was the inevitable "...disgusting lies..." twaddle - which didn't, of course, address a single one of the Swifties' claims.

They can't. They never do.

Would any of them go face to face with Bud Day?

New Kerry Ad

The new Kerry ad says voting for Lurch will lead to "a fresh start in Iraq".

"Er, hi, Ba'athist hardliner with nothing to lose. Let's start over, and let my friend Pierre Omerde convince you to peacefully join a society of whom 99% of the people want to saw you in half in revenge for murdering their parents and siblings..."

The Show Today

Today on the show, we'll be talking with Saint Paul Mayor Randy Kelly - the first major Democratic politician to break ranks and endorse George W. Bush for President.

We'll also be talking with representatives from Protest Warrior, the dead-on and hilarious counterprotest group that's been popping up in the news all over the place.

That plus the Week in Review and Fraters' Funtime, today, noon-3PM on AM1280, or via the web.

Tancredo

Via the Generalissimo, I read Congressman Tom Tancredo's Blog entries about his trip to Beslan.

This is for all of you that buy Kerry's line about the war on terror as a law enforcement exercise.

Curb Your Ire

Yesterday, Jeff Fecke of Blogomodleft reacted with a bit of ire over my notion that Bin Laden has endorsed, and is rooting for, John Kerry:

You are free to argue that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for Osama.

But you're just this side of evil for doing it.

Well, maybe - if that were remotely what I was doing. Fortunately, Bin Laden has long missed the filing deadline for any US office.

No, Jeff missed the point. If he didn't, he wouldn't be a leftyblogger (kid=must). I was commenting on Bin Laden's desire to see Kerry in the White House. It's something conservatives have been prodding the left with for months. It's something that leftybloggers have reacted bitterly over. And it's pretty much the only rational conclusion you can draw from Bin Laden's statement.

The The Powerguys go further still.

Rocket Man notes how Bin Laden's statement was...

...pure Michael Moore. Obviously bin Laden has seen Fahrenheit 9/11, or at least heard about it from other terrorists who have seen it. Just as obviously, they approve of Moore's movie.

Do you suppose there are any Democrats honest enough to be embarrassed that Osama bin Laden has enthusiastically adopted their campaign themes?

Having read a stack of leftyblogs today, the answer is no, although plenty of them are angry that any of us would suggest such a thing.

Note to Democrats: Prove us wrong.

Terms of Armistice, Terms of Surrender

Wretchard from Belmont Club on Bin Laden's statement. I've added the emphasis:

It is important to notice what [Bin Laden] has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.

The conclusion?

The American answer to Osama's proposal will be given on Election Day. One response is to agree that the United States of America will henceforth act like Sweden, which is on track to become majority Islamic sometime after the middle of this century. The electorate best knows which candidate will serve this end; which candidate most promises to be European-like in attitude and they can choose that path with both eyes open. The electorate can strike that bargain and Osama may keep his word. The other course is to reject Osama's terms utterly; to recognize the pleading in his outwardly belligerent manner and reply that his fugitive existence; the loss of his sanctuaries; the annihilation of his men are but the merest foretaste of what is yet to come: to say that to enemies such as he, the initials 'US' will always mean Unconditional Surrender.

Osama has stated his terms. He awaits America's answer.

Read the whole thing.

And think about what you really, really want on Tuesday. Do we want Versailles, or the deck of the Missouri?

If you don't know the difference, learn it before you vote.

Please.

Worlds of Hurt

A couple of personal blogosphere notes.

Emperor Misha's family troubles are finally out in the open. He's filed his divorce papers. He's looking for help. Here's the story.

And Wog has been having some serious health problems this past month, with more to come. Keep him in your thoughts and prayers.

Endorsement Race: 100% of Terrorist Masterminds Endorse Kerry

Bin Laden speaks:

Osama bin Laden, addressing the American public four days ahead of presidential elections, said in a video aired Friday that the United States can avoid another Sept. 11 attack if it stops threatening the security of Muslims.

Reading a statement, the al-Qaida leader refrained from threats of new attacks and instead appealed to Americans.

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said, referring to the president and his Democratic opponent. "Each state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security."

Admitting for the first time that he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden said he did so because of injustices against the Lebanese and Palestinians by Israel and the United States.

Watch for the moonbats to latch onto this bit here:

"It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone," he said, referring to the number of people who worked at the World Trade Center.

"It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God," he said.

Someone look in the Democrat checkbook; Terry MacAuliffe had to have written that bit there. Too obvious.

Well, there you have it. Bin Laden wants Kerry.

Whatcha gonna do, America?

UPDATE: Chumley Wonderbar says:

OBL believes by saying this that Americans will go for Kerry. Seriously. It's a sort of peace offering; hopefully one that the American people won't be stupid enough to fall for.

According to the latest polls, 45% of our fellow Americans aren't the brightest lights on G-d's christmas tree.

How's That?

Kerry, with Tom Brokaw. Insets are mine:

Brokaw: "If you had been President, Saddam Hussein would be in power."

Kerry: "Not necessarily."

Brokaw: "You said you wouldn't go to war against him."

Kerry: "That's not true. Because under the inspection process, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy those kinds of materials and weapons." [Ah. The process said so.]

Brokaw: "But he wasn't destroying them."

Kerry: "That's what you have inspectors for. [Right. Because the inspectors got Hussein to sit up and pay attention to the UN]
That's why I voted for the threat of force, because he only does things when you have a legitimate threat of force. [Right. You'll recall how well the "threat" of force worked in 1991 - back when Kerry voted against it, incidentally. You'll recall how well 12 years of subsequent "threats" of force helped the Kurds, the Shi'a, the Marsh Arabs...]
It's irresponsible to suggest that if I were President, he wouldn't be gone. He might be gone, because if he hadn't complied, we might have had to go to war,[But wouldn't that have been "taking our eye off Bin Laden"? ]
but if we did, we would have gone with allies, [You mean, the French and Germans? The "allies" who said they wouldn't help you out even now? Those "Allies?"]
so the American people weren't carrying the entire burden. And the entire world would understand why we did it."

So let me get this straight: Kerry "might" have gone into Iraq because Hussein was...flouting the sanctions?

Er - that was one of the four justifications the President gave.

So, if I'm counting correctly, Senator Kerry:

• Opposed deposing Hussein, before he
• Favored removing Hussein (Desert Fox), before he
• opposed invading Afghanistan, before he
• Supported invading Afghanistan, before he
• voted for invading Iraq, before he
• voted against funding the invasion of Iraq, before he
• said it was the wrong war, place and time, before
• the remark above, where he said it was the right war, place and time - maybe?

You say you want him to be President?

Because I damn sure wouldn't hire him as an investment advisor...

Wetterling Lies

I heard the new Patty Wetterling spots today.

In among the "Mark Kennedy hurt our feelings" palaver came this little bit of misleading selective context:

Mark Kennedy even voted for a 23% national sales tax, which would also eliminate the mortgage deduction...".

Naturally, the ad didn't mention that it would also eliminate the income tax!.

Patty Wetterling; the candidate for the ignorant, misinformed and gullible.

Must Be Gonna Be My Day

I have a terrible habit - I drive with the needle at or below empty waaaay too long. Too much to do to bother with putting gas in, doncha know.

I was driving up Snelling Avenue this morning after dropping my daughter off to school, doing about 45 mph, mentally calculating how far below "E" my needle was, wondering if I had time to stop for coffee before I got gas, when I saw the tachometer dip, cough, and then slide down to "0 RPM". That answered that question.

Now, I honestly can say I haven't run out of gas in a car in almost 20 years. But I can't say that I've ever run out of gas half a block from a gas station and with enough momentum to actually get me to the gas pump in style.

With a start like that, how can the day go wrong?

Oh, I shouldn't have asked that, should I?

The KSTP Video

Kerry supporters jumped on yesterday's release of video from St. Paul ABC affiliate KSTP-TV like it was the last bag of closet-grown grass at a Kucinich fundraiser.

The video purported, according to the leftybloggers, to show the presence of RDX and HMX.

According to Jim Geraghty, it's not that simple.

Geraghty reports:

According to this chart from GlobalSecurity.org, the 1.1D classification can be used for the storage and transport of quite a few high powered explosives. Among them are:

Cyclotetramethylene-tetranitramine, wetted or HMX, wetted or Octogen, wetted with not less than 15 percent water, by mass

Cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine, wetted or Cyclonite, wetted or Hexogen, wetted or RDX, wetted with not less than 15 percent water by mass

Pentaerythrite tetranitrate, wetted or Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, wetted, or PETN, wetted with not less than 25 percent water, by mass, or Pentaerythrite tetranitrate, or Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, desensitized with not less than 15 percent phlegmatizer by mass.

So - this orange 1.1 D is the label we would look for on HMX, RDX, or PETN. But did those explosives in these containers have 15 or 25 percent water or other dilution liquid in them? Or did they look pretty dry in that desert?

And as we look at the rest of that chart, we see that a lot of other explosives that fall in the 1.1 D category.

Specifically there are 79 other substances and types of explosive material and supporting equipment that would get the 1.1 D label, including gunpowder, flexible detonating cord, photo-flash bombs, mines, nitroglycerin, rocket warheads, grenades, fuzes, torpedoes and charges. And few of them require any liquid dilution.

Expect the Dems, especially the lefty bloggers, to cling to every shred of pseudo-vindication they can find on this. Expect the rest of us to poke holes in each shred as it comes up.

Bipartisan Reason to Hope for a Bush Victory

So that faux-homespun populist bilge like this can be be banished from the newspapers forever:

If this election is a tossup, it's Moynihan who has done the tossing.

He took out his lucky silver dollar -- an 1878 Liberty head he has carried since he was a boy -- and flipped it: Heads, Kerry wins; tails, Bush.

It came up for the Democrat, and Moynihan says take it to the bank.

Nick Coleman must do half of his columns from one barber shop or other...

Choice Appears: Panic Ensues

Ralph Nader has a bigger than normal following in Minnesota; Minneapolis has a number of Green city councilpeople, so reality is not a big constraint on a lot of the Twin Cities electorate.

But Ralph Nader has them in a panic.

Via the Strib's Rene Sanchez:

David Larson, a Nader volunteer in Iowa, said he is being shunned even by friends whom he has joined at political protests in the past.

"People really seem to think they can get in our face and intimidate us," Provencher said. "We're hearing ridiculous stuff."

I'll bet. Must be like working at a GOP campaign office.

Tom Unzicker, who is driving a van around Minnesota this week for Nader, said he is amused by the threats he keeps hearing from Democrats. "What are they going to do us -- take seat belts out of cars?" Unzicker said, referring to one of Nader's seminal achievements as a consumer advocate.

At St. Olaf, English and her friends said they figured crashing the Nader rally would end in failure.

They were right.

Some Nader supporters were wearing T-shirts that said, "Kerry and Bush Make Me Want to Ralph."

Did anyone mention the liberals are the intellectual ones?

"Shame on you!" a student backing Nader told English's group as she passed through their gantlet of signs.

English and her friends took the taunts in stride. "It's not that we have vendettas against Nader people," said Helen Behr, who had come along from Carleton College. "Kerry just really needs these votes."

"The stakes are too high," Ambuel said.

The crowd coming to see Nader kept growing. Still, English's group found reason to hope. One woman who scoffed at their signs as she passed came back to talk with Behr.

"I agree with a lot of Nader's ideas," Behr told the woman. "It's just that it's such a close race. Any vote for Nader this time could help Bush."

"I've started to think about that," the woman said.

Nearby, a middle-aged man wearing a Nader T-shirt from the 2000 presidential race bellowed to no one in particular: "I'm so conflicted!"

Let it be said for the record that I speak on behalf of all conservatives when I say we don't want the vote of anyone who'd yell such a thing...

Hypersensitive?

Not everyone likes Halloween. Gotta confess, it's not my favorite holiday, either.

But the kids have fun, right?

But a school district in Washington has canceled Halloween - because it bothers wiccans:

There will be no dressing up and no tricking for treats in the Puyallup school district this year. They've decided to enforce a rule that's been on the books for a few years. No Halloween celebrations will be allowed because it is offensive to witches.

Sjodin Case: Death

I've been incredibly ambivalent about the death penalty most of my life.

I also grew up in a small town.

I oppose the death penalty as a matter of very simple principle, for the most part; I think that any chance, even barely plausible, of executing an innocent person is unacceptable. I also think the proof is fairly conclusive that it's unacceptably unevenly applied; fairly easy to get for black-male-on-white murders, extremely rare for female murderers. I have seen compelling evidence that death penalty trials are more, rather than less, subject to inflamed emotion and inaccuracy than non-capital cases. All in all, I guess it's a fair bet that I oppose death.

And then again, growing up in the middle of nowhere, I'm pretty protective of things like kids.

The US Attorney in Fargo is going to ask for the death penalty in last winter's kidnapping and murder of Dru Sjodin:

The suspect in the murder of Dru Sjodin will face the death penalty if he is found guilty of the crime, North Dakota's U.S. attorney announced today in Fargo.

Speaking on the steps of the federal courthouse, Drew Wrigley said he was given the go-ahead Wednesday night by Attorney General John Ashcroft to seek the death penalty against Alfonso Rodriguez Jr.

"We have made clear our intention to seek the penalty of death," if Rodriguez is found guilty, Wrigley said.

He added that the "filing contains only at this point allegations. It does not contain proof."

Wrigley said he will meet with the trial judge in coming days to set the trial site and schedule. The trial venue will be in northeastern North Dakota, Wrigley said.

Where to come down on this one?

Tut tut. The death penalty is so imperfect.

And if they find the guy guilty, I'll shoot him myself.

You know the details, of course:

Sjodin was a 22-year-old student at the University of North Dakota when she was kidnapped Nov. 22, 2003, from the parking lot of the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, N.D.

She had been talking on a cell phone with her boyfriend when the abduction took place.

Rodriguez, a convicted sex offender living in Crookston, Minn., at the time, was arrested a few days after Sjodin's abduction and initially charged with kidnapping.

Sjodin's body was found in April near Crookston, Minn., after several searches in Minnesota and North Dakota.

Rodriguez has remained in custody throughout the search for Sjodin and he is now in the Cass County Jail.

Wrigley submitted the death penalty recommendation to Ashcroft about 60 days ago, he said.

Wrigley told Sjodin's parents of his decision Wednesday night and talked to them again this morning.

He said he told Rodriguez's attorneys of his decision today.

Wrigley said this will be the first time in more than 90 years that the death penalty has been requested in North Dakota.

I'll be following this, of course.

Posted by Mitch at 08:30 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Grrr, Part II

$183 for the drain. Blah.

Off to work.

Cool Title. Lousy Idea.

Visit JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyway.com

Grrr.

Sewer backup. Gotta get it fixed.

Getting estimates for a new furnace. THe tank on my old boiler, judging by the scrollwork on the castings, was from before WW1, maybe original equipment for the house (1891). It was originally a coal-burner, retrofitted for gas in (judging by the fonts on the burner faceplate) the late '40s or early '50s. It doesn't owe me any money.

Very, very light posting today.

Oh - and if you've ever thought about either dropping a buck or two in my "Amazon Honor System" box on the right, or bum-rushing a bunch of my sponsors, now would be a great day for it...

Recognition

Doug Grow writes a fascinating piece about Dr. Robert Fisch, a Holocaust survivor and Saint Paul pediatrician who, among other things, was my daughter's pediatrician when she was a baby.

He's also an artist - and quite a fascinating one, with an amazng story:

Fisch doesn't say exactly when he began to see light amid so much darkness.

Perhaps, it came shortly after American troops freed him from a Nazi work camp, Gunskirchen, in Austria. It was among the last camps freed in WWII.

Near death when he was liberated, Fisch suddenly found himself in a startling position. His German oppressors were begging him for food.

"What should I do?" he recalled. "If I did the same thing they did to me, I would be no better than them."

He shared.

He returned to his homeland, Hungary. He studied art and medicine and in 1956 participated in the futile rebellion against Soviet oppression. He escaped and ended up at the University of Minnesota.

A few years ago, he was knighted by the Hungarian government. He's touched by the honor but amused, too.

"One day the government is trying to kill you, the next it's calling you a hero," he said.

Read the whole thing.

And the #1 Sign That Our Society Over-Medicates

Found in a spam comment (which has been deleted):

Valium is the best muscle relaxant and ant-anxiety medication.

I have enough anxiety of my own, thanks.

The Anti-Sullivan

Christopher Hitchens endorses Bush.

Sort of.

The entire article - every word of it - is essential, on its own terms and to see behind the braying from the left-wing blogs that will inevitably follow.

But here's one of many big payoffs in the piece:

Should the electors decide for the President, as I would slightly prefer, the excruciating personality of George Bush strikes me in the light of a second- or third-order consideration. If the worst that is said of him is true--that he is an idiotic and psychically damaged Sabbath-fanatic, with nothing between his large Texan ears--then these things were presumably just as true when he ran against Al Gore, and against nation-building and foreign intervention. It is Bush's conversion from isolationism that impresses me, just as it is the parallel lapse into isolationism on Kerry's part that makes me skeptical. You don't like "smirking"? What about the endless smirks and smarmy hints about the Administration's difficulties, whether genuine or self-imposed? The all-knowing, stupid smirks about the "secular" Saddam, or the innocuousness of prewar Iraq? The sneers about the astonishing success of our forces in Afghanistan, who are now hypocritically praised by many who opposed their initial deployment? This is to say nothing of the paranoid innuendoes I don't have to name that are now part of pseudo-"radical" rumor-mongering and defamation. Whichever candidate wins, I shall live to see these smirks banished, at least.

Don't just sit there like a tourist with sunstroke. Click the link and read the article.

The Terror Candidate?

Few things seem to rile the left more than the notion that the terrorists want John Kerry to win.

Who can blame 'em? As a Republican, I get incensed when some chuzzlewit drags out the well-worn, long-pummeled warhorses about GOP connections to the Nazis or the Klan or whomever. It gets old.

The problem, though, is that those strawmen are easily lit on fire and kicked off the stage. On the other hand, many terrorists do seem to think Kerry's their man.

A terrorist-endorsing cleric says:

"If the U.S. Army suffered numerous humiliating losses, [Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John] Kerry would emerge as the superman of the American people," said Mohammad Amin Bashar, a leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a hard-line clerical group that vocally supports the resistance.

More:

Resistance leader Abu Jalal boasted that the mounting violence had already hurt Mr. Bush's chances.
"American elections and Iraq are linked tightly together," he told a Fallujah-based Iraqi reporter. "We've got to work to change the election, and we've done so. With our strikes, we've dragged Bush into the mud."

And more:

Abu Jalal, answering questions submitted to him through the Iraqi journalist, devised a simple formula for how his group's attacks on American soldiers draw votes from Mr. Bush.
"They say there are 1,100 dead soldiers. That means 1,100 families hold grudges against Bush and hate him. There are 6,000 families whose sons were injured who hate Bush and will not re-elect him."

Of course it's not unanimous; the article notes a few terror supporters who believe Bush would be their best bet.

My biggest worry? I think that for all their contempt for American society, the terrorists overestimate us:

"The nation of infidels is one, and Bush and Kerry are two faces of the same coin," said Abu Obeida, nom de guerre of a leader of Fallujah's al-Noor Jihadi regiment. "What is taken by force will be returned only by force, and we don't care what the results of the elections are."

We're one?

Well, we could be. Republicans certainly stood behind FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ when they led the nation to and through war. I have little doubt that had Algore won the presidency (shudder), you'd see a very loyal opposition.

But as long as the Democrats' intellectual lynchpin is Michael Moore, the nation of infidels is not one. We have two Americas, all right - one that's realistic about the situation we face, and one that will unleash a storm of aggressive rhetoric while turning inward and hoping it all goes away. Just like that America did in the 1970s.

Surely, Surely Not

Lileks on Sullivan and his endorsement:

But peace, in the end. To repeat:

He knows that if he lets his guard down and if terrorists strike or succeed anywhere, he runs the risk of discrediting the Democrats as a party of national security for a generation

Is it instructive to note which side Sen. Kerry instinctively inhabited in the 80s? Apparently not. Because now he knows that if terrorists strike, he runs the risk of discrediting his party. Got that? Runs the risk. Of discrediting his party. Of all that the theats he might face, apparently that's the one that seals the deal. Look: The guy voted against the first Gulf War. What else do you need to know? UN thumbs up, global test, allies coming out the wazoo, and he voted no. Because that’s who he is. There are lots of Democrats with hard-core pro-defense no-nonsense smite-the-fascist records. He ain't one of them. One might reasonably assume he would only commit US forces unless they were under the command of the Vulcans, and only then if the Federation High Council had given up on the Organians coming in and making everyone’s guns disappear in their hands. If they don't? Back the Sandinistas and hope for the best.

In 1991, the Gulf War had the backing not only of the French and Germans - but of the Egyptians and Syrians. Kerry still voted against it.

He is not, has never been, can never be serious about national security.

Why Keep Digging?

So AmmoDumpGate has been discredited, probably fatally. John Kerry either knew that before his ad buy referencing the story went on the air (and if he didn't, the stupidity involved beggars logic).

So why run with it?

Via commenter MWB, Three Rounds Brisk has an idea:

There was thought to be over 600,000 tons (via Belmont Club) of conventional munitions/explosives in Iraq before we ever invaded. The use of scavenged weapons for constructing IED's is undoubtedly a serious threat in Iraq...but why the frantic effort to exploit this story, in the face of its contested veracity, now? The Kerry ad referenced above is implicit:

"The kind used for attacks in Iraq, and for terrorist bombings."

The U.N. snapped the ball but it sure looks like friendly MSM and the Kerry campaign had the play early. Why?

Paranoid? Maybe - but not implausible.

Why?

Kerry can't give reasons to vote for him, so he attacks. That's traditional - almost reflexive in fact, at this stage of Democrat campaigns. They don't have another DUI story, the ANG line has been flogged to death, and this damned economy hasn't crumbled in the face of $55.00 a barrel crude. This does have all the hallmarks of an October surprise. Did Kerry's people bother to ask themselves why they got handed this story now?

Syria's Assad knows that he's on G.W. Bush's to-do list for the next administration. He also has an ambassador in that august body. Not too long ago he had a non-voting position on the security council. He also hosts Hamas and Hizbollah in downtown Damascus. The U.N. knows that coalition access to Syrian dumps, and the Bekka Valley in Lebanon, will answer a whole lot of questions about Iraq's WMD programs.

The elections in Spain were derailed by targeted bombings that occurred three days before the ballots were cast.

My conclusion: The chances of us being bombed on Friday or shortly thereafter have increased dramatically. And if we are bombed, we'll see RDX/HDX or derivative materials used in the weapons.

You can buy RDX off the shelf anywhere in the world. You can identify the compound in hours. I wonder how long to determine the manufacturer, if it is even possible to do?

This is not to say Kerry is complicit in a terrorist conspiracy.

This is to say that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that right now would be a great time to launch an attack to try to influence the election, if you're a terrorist or a client state. If you're Assad, Zarquawi, Bin Laden (assuming he's alive), Arafat or Kim Jong-Il, you have reasons to prefer Kerry to Bush. And if you're Kerry - well, you have to take the breaks you're dealt, right?

May as well be ready, just in case, right?

Nothing to lose, after all...

Logical Gymnastics

Andrew Sullivan surprises nobody with his endorsement of John Kerry.

Except, of course, for the moral incontinence he shows in getting there.

The line that makes me think Sully's finally slipped the surly bonds of reason?

the Democratic Party needs to be forced to take responsibility for the security of the country that is as much theirs as anyone's. The greatest weakness of the war effort so far has been the way it has become a partisan affair. This is the fault of both sides: the Rove-like opportunists on the right and the Moore-like haters on the left. But in wartime, a president bears the greater responsibility for keeping the country united. And this president has fundamentally failed in this respect. I want this war to be as bipartisan as the cold war, to bring both parties to the supreme task in front of us, to offer differing tactics and arguments and personnel in pursuit of the same cause. This is not, should not be, and one day cannot be, Bush's war. And the more it is, the more America loses, and our enemies gain."

"You kids! Start cooperating! If I have to come up there, you're in biiiig trouble!"

Does Sullivan pretend not to know that opposition to any US military intervention, and self-abnegation before other cultures (it's all our fault, you know) are part and parcel of the leftist cant? That you can no more separate these from today's Democrat party than you can detach them from labor unions; it's an integral part of the party's soul. Until that changes - and it won't until the last baby boomer is buried - then Sullivan is hallucinating.

Side Note: Oliver Willis remains a disgrace:

Just stating something for the record. [You have a record?--Ed.] Andrew Sullivan can take his endorsement of John Kerry and shove it. [Cicero weeps--Ed.]This guy was among the most psychophantic [Ollie? It's "sycophantic"--Ed.] of the Bush cheerleaders [When? After 9/11? So was most of the world--Ed.], he was the one flogging the left for having a fifth column [Silly Soros employee - they did have one!--Ed.] when they dared to oppose his beloved Bush, and is responsible for such a litany of smears, distortions, and just pure unadulterated crap that anything coming out of his mouth is subject to the smell test. [Irony, thy name is...oh,it's too easy--Ed.]

And it smells.

I can't stand folks like this, and there's tons of them in the DC media establishment. They have no ideology, [Ghastly, that whole "mental and intellectual agility" thing, innit?--Ed.] but instead jump from movement to movement like the whores they are. No Sullivan, even though it was clear you were content, as long as they gave you the adoration you sought, to be the right's house homosexual ["House homosexual?" Wow.--Ed.] for some time - even as they made quite clear they had no tolerance for your "kind" - this person on the left doesn't want you either. [Your assignment, class, is to diagram the previous sentence. Enjoy.--Ed.] You may not be a hardliner, but you're almost worse - you're an enabler. You did your work for massah [Ironic, coming from one of George Soros' pet seals--Ed.] and now you think its just fine to suit up for the other team.

Repugnant.

Fog of War

Longtime Shot in the Dark correspondent Fingers - an officer serving on active duty - writes in the comments re the mysterious disappearing explosives:

I've been meaning to thump this in and post it....

We have a saying in fighter aviation: "Knowing that you have no SA (situational awareness) is great SA!"

I keep thinking this everytime I hear people bandy the word "incompetent" around.

Monday morning quarterbacks always have the big picture (even captured in slo-mo in most cases) while the players on the field must deal with the situation as it presents itself by absorbing data, processing, making a decision, formulating a plan and acting upon that plan while being prepared to react to, and counter setbacks or misperceived/false data.

Military action, like sports action is the same thing except there usually aren't as many rules (eg. set parameters that one can use to filter data) and people die if the wrong decisions are made, the plan is flawed, or if it is executed poorly.

I know, where are you going with this Fingers?

1. As much as we try to avoid it, stuff happens. Because some grunts in the field moved on from one piece of ground to another and operational neccessity didn't bring other grunts back for 3 minutes or days or weeks, it certainly isn't the CinC's fault. If we want to go that route...it is time to concede what Mitch has been saying all along: "The boss has put together one hell of an unbeatable team." In fact, if Vietnam teaches us nothing else, the only foe we have to fear is us!

2. GW is a pretty bright guy in my opinion. When it comes to military operations he has let the experts do their work while refusing to undermine their hardwork and sacrifice to appease the smarmy bastards who want an apology. Do we think that will happen from the self-proclaimed 'better choice to lead our military?'

Fingers overestimates the opponent - as, perhaps, a military officer should.

George W. Bush could have presided over one of them most successful campaigns in military history; the campaign could have liberated a large country at exceedingly low cost, and engaged a huge percentage of the worlds terrorists in a battle that could have only one winner from a military perspective...in fact, he did. War is messy; enemies try to throw your plans off. Yet the fundamental things apply; Hussein is gone (leaving us to quibble about 380 tons of RDX rather than millions of tons of that and worse), Iraqis are being killed but they have the ability to defend themselves (and they're doing it!), and terrorists are sitting in mosques in Najaf and suqs in Fallujah getting pounded by bombs and killed by snipers, rather than planning more productive and destructive attacks against defenseless people elsewhere.

Most importantly - they're fighting a rear guard action. Every bomb they set off at an Iraqi police recruiting station is aimed at trying to prevent democracy from breaking out; their attacks stand no chance of retaking Iraq - barring the US doing something stupid, like electing a hamster like John Kerry to office.

Still a Time For Choosing

Folsom Jim Phillips from the Infinite Monkeys reminds us that today is an important anniversary for any good conservative:

Forty Years ago today, on October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan gave one of the most memorable political speeches of the century on behalf of the ultimately unsuccessful Goldwater presidential campaign: "Rendezvous With Destiny", more popularly known as A Time for Choosing.

The speech is truly one of the greats; Read it here, or listen to it here.

James adds:

Human nature is such that we all too often rely on our leaders and our soldiers to show courage, strength and resolution. But sometimes, the American people need to step up to the plate, and make the right choice. This is such a time.

November 2, 2004 is, once again, "A Time for Choosing" for all of us. Choose wisely.

The example of Reagan - the lone figure (along with Goldwater) at the height of statism in 1964, standing almost alone against the rapacious O'Neil congress, having to face down his own advisers at Rejkjavik before again facing down Gorbachev...kinda makes beating a hamster like John Kerry look tame by comparison, doesn't it?

Listen to the speech. Or read it. Whatever - just absorb the lesson.

Especially this one:

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender.

Which, all the rationalizations and bloviations of the Kerry Kamp aside, is our choice today.

Damn the Refutation - Full Speed Ahead!

So this is Kerry's October Surprise?

The left, naturally, is throwing everything it has into keeping this story on life support. As well they should - they conveniently had an ad campaign (and plenty of free news push) ready to roll in synch with this story's breaking. Their damage control is as feeble as the original story.

Someone - one of you lefties out there - tell me how this passes the sniff test?

1. 380 tons - 19 full semi tractor-trailers - is not a low-profile operation. Question for you; which scenario is more likely:
   • Looters, operating under constant intelligence overflights, with access to 19 semis (or hundreds/thousands of trips by smaller vehicles) or
   • A Hussein government operation long before any invasion took place? Remember - carrying out the mission after the invasion would be very difficult...)
2. Let's not forget the IAEA tie-in.

So which scenario requires less suspension of disbelief - that the HMX and RDX was gone and the IAEA is playing politics, or that looters carried out a near-superhuman feat of logistics?

The elite of the lefty blogosphere - who are largely bought and paid for by George Soros - is going to blow enough BS into the ether in the next 24 hours to fertilize the Mojave Desert. If you're a conservative blogger or Bush supporter, you have to get ready to get the truth out there.

As Drudge says, "Developing hot".

Open Letter to the Star/Tribune

Dear Editors:

The Star/Tribune prides itself on its ostensible cultural literacy, when it comes to little, trivial, anal-retentive things like football team names.

Pity you drop the ball on the cultural literacy that really matters.

Yesterday, your headline read:

Rebels Kill 51 Iraqi Soldiers

In the US, "Rebels" has a positive connotation; it was a "rebellion" that launched our war of independence; Luke Skywalker led the "Rebel Alliance"; "Johnny Reb" is a revered figure in much of the country; "Rebel Rebel" is a kickin' song. To most Americans, "Rebel"=good.

So while "rebel" might be the term your thesaurus (if not your deeply-held ideology) suggests, may I humbly ask you to think of some more, er, appropriate terms?

I suggest:

• Saddamite holdouts
• Pro-fascism partisans
• Pro-Islamofascist guerrillas
• Armed apologists for a regime that systematically murdered hundreds of thousands...(well, that's a mouthful, isn't it?)

Thanks. I know that together we can make a better newspaper.

Better Late Than Never

Generalissimo Duane finds a story most have overlooked:

A funny thing has started to happen over the last few weeks. People actually started reading the report. And what they have found, by and large, has scared the pants off of them, and made them rethink that maybe it wasn't such a back idea after all to rid the world of Saddam Hussein's government.

The latest entry in the "George may have actually been right all along" caucus is Mortimer Zuckerman, who writes in the next edition of U.S. News and World Report, link here.

After detailing much about what has been reported by people like Claudia Rosett and several in the blogosphere, including how Saddam Hussein corrupted the UN Oil For Food Scandal to the point of being ridiculous, Zuckerman concludes his column this way:

Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "Sanctions were in free fall . . . . If not for 9/11, I don't think they would exist today" and described Saddam as "a grave threat" to the Middle East and to the entire world.

What stopped Saddam was the will of a few strong-minded leaders who believed in a more forceful response than simply joining hands and singing "Kumbaya."

Welcome to the party. And just in time for the election.

Where did that Duelfer report go, anyway?

Cry Satire!

Brian "Saint Paul" Ward, perhaps one of the Twin Cities' most capable satirists, turns his pen on WELLSTONE!, a documentary about the late senator who was killed in a plane crash two years ago yesterday. This piece in the Strib, written under the pen name Susan Lenfestey, is as deft a skewering of the myopia, the provincialism, and the disabling paranoida of Twin Cities left as any I've ever seen.

Saint starts:

"Wellstone!", the locally made documentary about the lives of Paul and Sheila Wellstone, is both a comfort and a painful reminder of all that was lost two years ago today in the piney bogs of northern Minnesota.

And, thanks to Brian's deft satire, we'll see what we lost many, many times during the forthcoming editorial.

Clearly a labor of love, the film also touches on some of the more loopy moments of the firebrand professor's unlikely trajectory to the U.S. Senate, and even revisits the controversial memorial service that followed the plane crash.

While several images burn brighter than others -- such as Wellstone's prescient speech on the Senate floor, risking his reelection by voting against the invasion of Iraq -- the lingering impression the film leaves is how quaintly old-fashioned Wellstone and his quixotic campaigns really were, in several ways.

"Quixotic" is a satiric yet polite term for "on his own frequency". Although Wellstone! was half of our Senate delegation, he really represented the tiny fraction of the population that loved politics as spectacle, as entertainment, as politics for its own sake. He represented the part of Minnesota that not only takes politics seriously, but lives for it.

First, of course, was the low-dollar campaign and the use of the lumbering green bus, its jury-rigged speaking platform reminiscent of the old whistle-stop campaigns conducted from the back of trains.

Second, detractors could find fault with Wellstone for his views and his votes, but he spoke his mind with refreshing clarity and passion, unfettered by pundits and polls.

Former students of Wellstone's have wished he'd allowed his conservative students the same unfettered speech.

And third, like Illinois' Democratic Senate shoo-in Barack Obama, he cared more about public morality (the policies that define a culture's decency) than private morality (the actions that determine an individual's character).

More excellent satire. Brian is lampooning Wellstone's impassioned defense of Rod Grams, who with his relatively moderate views achieved much more in six years in the Senate than either Wellstone or Mark Dayton, but was mugged over "personal morality" issues by the local press - mostly the morality of Grams' son (whom Grams had mostly not raised). Wellstone's supporters (especially in the press) were so forthright about abjuring the cheap, hateful smear against Senator Grams...

Contrast that to today's mind-boggling millions being spent on everything from voter-registration (worth every dollar, if new voters turn out) to a panoply of mind-numbing TV ads.

Brian capably satirizes the double standard of the Minnesota media. Everyone knows that if a dotty baby-boomer neo-marxist professor takes to the road in a jury-rigged green bus, he's a folk hero; if a conservative free-marketeer hit the bricks in such a contraption, he's be dismissed as an eccentric crackpot.

The irony of the major networks -- those civic-minded corporations that preempted most of the national party conventions in favor of the usual sleaze and rot -- profiting from these ads would be delicious if it weren't so fundamentally undemocratic and wrong.

Brian seems almost, but not quite, over the top with this; no Minneapolis leftist coud possibly be this myopic. We laugh along, knowing the Networks ably split the divide between statist authoritarianism and rapacious capitalism. "Civic-mindedness" is for poli-sci majors!

Then there's the dependence on polls, a drag on a healthy democracy as damaging as any addiction. Not only does it force candidates to tailor their views in ways that range from disingenuous to dishonest, it limits the excitement of live campaigning to a handful of key states. You'd think we'd reverted to 13 colonies for all the action the not-in-play states are seeing.

Saint's satire is hilarious here; "Excitement of live campaigning?" To most of the world, that's like "the excitement of a Star Trek convention"! Wellstone was indeed the baby-boomer wonk's dream - and the things those wonks dream about...

And then there's the morality thing. Though Wellstone's last campaign was only two years ago, his lack of moralizing makes it feel like a generation ago.

I almost spit my coffee on my monitor. Lack of moralizing! His hectoring, nagging reprise of RFK's "Poverty Tour" was, of course, the most masturbatory moralistic melange since Jimmy Carter.

Compare that to the flap over Sen. John Kerry's debate reference to Mary Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's openly lesbian daughter.

Predictably, columnists soft on Republicans like William Safire and David Brooks cluck-cluck over this simple statement of fact and suggest Kerry should apologize. The pea-brained buzzards of right-wing talk radio are having a field day with it, saying it's evidence of Kerry's moral depravity.

Brian's on a roll; the image he's satirizing - praising an open-minded, non-moralizing man with closed-minded, hateful and facially erroneous moralizing - is a modern-day Archie Bunker stereotype. This is the sort of thing that makes Brian the best satirist in town today!

Call it what you will -- crossing a boundary, invading family privacy, a calculated political move -- none of it would have mattered if, say during a discussion of middle-class families struggling to make it under a Bush-whacked economy, Kerry had referred to Cheney's other daughter, Liz, as a mom.

I can barely go on. The cliches ("bush-whacked"?), the illogic (like Kerry would have found any political advantage in mentioning a "mom")...Brian really has the local loopy left dialed in.

Shame is the vicious undertow beneath this tsunami of criticism, and President Bush, so skilled at dividing the country he promised to unite, knows it. His Rovian goons pounced on the reference with the laughable ferocity of a lion smiting a mouse.

Here, again, Brian only seems over-the-top if you're not familiar with the grating, preening hypocrisy of the local left.

Bush and his evangelical army (now joined by a right-wing Catholic archbishop who thinks he has a moral leg to stand on) are so busy shaming everyone from gays to prochoice Catholics that they deflect the glare from Bush's own truly shameful ineptitude in office.

Saint lampoons the left's schizophrenic dodging between irrelevancies and strawmen with a glee almost seems to be forced by this point. Its hard to restrain yourself, though, when lampooning the local left, as often as thoroughly as they swerve into self-parody.

In ancient Japan, samurai warriors (known as the Bushi, hmm) who failed in battle committed seppuku, disemboweling themselves, believing that an honorable death was better than a life of disgrace and shame.

The film "Wellstone!" reminds us of what an honorable life Paul and Sheila created together. They deserved a far better death.

As for Bush and Cheney, their heads are so far in the sand that they no longer know disgrace from deceit. Luckily for them, in America we don't expect seppuku; we just vote our failed leaders out of office and give them a hefty pension to write their self-aggrandizing memoirs.

And Brian sticks the landing! In the closing, we see brilliant parody of:

• The incipient violence under the surface of the local and national left, manifested in means as diverse as thugs beating up Bush/Cheney volunteers and the teeth-clenching hatred that causes local lefties to dream of Bush and ritual self-disembowelment in the same breath
• The overwrought view of the Wellstones as messianic figures who "deserved better", as if the virtue of one's life has anything to do with how one checks out (barring those who dive on grenades or race into burning skyscrapers to save their fellow humans)

Bravo, Saint!

UPDATE: I'm informed that Susan Lenfestey is not, in fact, Brian "Saint Paul" Ward writing under a pen name, but in fact an actual Minneapolis writer who apparently intended no irony whatsoever. Indeed, Ms. Lenfestey is not just any free-lance writer, but appears to specialize in anti-Bush, pro-left articles.

My apologies to all involved.

They're Gonna Need Some More Campaign BS

Yesterday, the story swept the internet - the NYTimes reported that nearly 400 tons of high explosives were missing from an Iraqi weapons depot. Josh Marshall, naturally, clung to the story like a life preserver.

Today - NBC says not so:

But tonight, NBCNEWS reported: The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003 -- when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!

An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

Oops.

Watch for more, as the Dems scramble for any sort of "October Surprise". Or "October Ambush..."

Kerry: Six Reasons

Kerry's six big handicaps, according to Victor Davis Hanson.

At least six reasons come to mind that have little to do with issues or substance, but everything to do with style, character, and judgment. First, he comes across, perhaps unfairly so, as an unfriendly sort. He seems to confirm to flyover America that the Ivy League East Coast is a cold place of holier-than-thou privileged reformers who live one life but advocate another. Kerry is a pleasant man, but he nevertheless presents himself as a ponderous aristocrat. His oratory, for all his undeniable mastery of facts and classical rhetorical tropes, is too often humorless, condescending, and pedantic. His photo opportunities that showcase hunting vests or windsurfing look forced, and they lack the natural ease of George Bush on the stump, twanging with his sleeves rolled up. Thus while Kerry does well in debates, he in some sense does not do well, since Americans feel he is either their smug professor or cranky grandfather, peeved that he had to descend from Olympus to impart knowledge to the less gifted. Somehow most would rather be wrong with Bush than right with Kerry.

Second, Democrats should have learned after the Dukakis implosion not to nominate a Massachusetts ultra-liberal. Past voting records, affinity with a wildly unpopular Ted Kennedy, and blinkered assumptions that the Harvard-Boston nexus is synonymous with America marginalize such candidates — as we are now seeing with Kerry, who ineptly fights off the liberal tag, tries to adopt populist mannerisms, and only with difficulty curbs his references to the world of New England high culture. JFK barely pulled it off, but then he was a widely celebrated and nearly disabled war hero, had a stylishly coy wife, and projected a certain vigor that captivated friend and foe alike.

Third, most of us don't like lawyers all that much, at least in the abstract when we are not in need of wills or defense counsel, or being sued. Yet the Democrats nominated two to lead their ticket. Lawyers' capital is their verbiage, but in wartime talk pales before action; and when a John Edwards hits the campaign trail, his glibness sounds mellifluous for the first minute, aggravating by the second, and unctuous, if not nauseating, the third. A friend remarked to me that he normally loves to listen to Carolina accents, but that Edwards has nearly cured him of that taste. The senator knows very little about medicine other than how to sue doctors, so when he promises mobility to quadriplegics we sense it is yet another of his canned courtroom performances designed to fool gullible juries. Next time nominate a businesswoman, general, or actor — anybody but two multimillionaire barristers. Quite simply, the Democrats forgot that their candidates must convince voters, not juries, and that good vocabularies and speaking cadences don't equate to consistent, commonsense toughness in the face of terrorists.

Fourth, Kerry's hypocrisy is finally catching up to him. He talks of raising taxes on those who make over $200,000, but he should start with Teresa, who paid a rate far lower than most blue-collar families. A "man of the people" — and Kerry has cultivated such an unlikely image — simply doesn't windsurf off Nantucket during a war, or snarl at federal bodyguards while skiing at Sun Valley, or peddle around on fancy racing bikes clad in Spandex. Few believe his calls for sacrifice and frugality when he owns a $500,000 powerboat, and could have saved thousands of gallons of precious fuel by symbolically shutting down one of his many estates or parking the Gulf Stream in the hangar and flying first-class. The suspicions about the new Democratic party of multimillionaires such as Terry McAuliffe, George Soros, and Ted Kennedy are only enhanced when it nominates a billionaire to head the ticket.

Fifth, Teresa Heinz Kerry started off as something of a novelty. Then she was praised as being refreshingly candid. But now? I wager that even handlers are more likely to grimace when she lectures, since she has the apparent ability to lose the election in a single moment. She tosses around slurs such as "shove it" and "scumbag" promiscuously, makes accusations of "un-Americanism," and yet, unlike the spouses of Edwards, Bush, or Cheney, finds it difficult to exude even forced public affection for her second husband. Again, fairly or unfairly, her appearances almost reaffirm, rather than cast aside, the public's doubt that if Kerry was not a U.S. Senator and she not a billionaire, neither would have married each other — all a world away from the preferable American Gothic tandem of George and Laura. So despite her elegance, intelligence, wealth, and verve, Teresa Heinz Kerry throughout the campaign has proven to be a walking time bomb.

Mimicking Marie Antoinette, Ms. Heinz Kerry advises the hurricane refugees to go naked, asks who cares about Arizona, tosses out conspiracy theories about wars for oil and October surprises, and assures us that she counsels her husband on "everything" well outside women's issues — precisely what most of us suspected and thus feared. Add in her advice to "vote often," her praise in wartime for dissidents as the true patriots, and her earlier promises to tap her fortune if the campaign got rough and we are left with the image not of a kindhearted philanthropist (which she probably really is), but a headstrong, do-it-my-way heiress, using a deceased Republican's fortune to subsidize trendy Democratic causes while retaining the lifestyle of the true corporate capitalist. No wonder she will not release her full tax records. And when she sneered that Laura Bush's past librarianship was not really a job, she had not a clue that most Americans would consider toiling in the public schools a far more difficult — and more rewarding — task than being a hostess to a billionaire, with plenty of time to brush-up on boutique causes and gripes. All that might sound harsh and terribly one-sided, but it is the image that she, not the media, created with the American voters, and it too contributes to the public's uneasiness with Kerry.

Sixth, at first it seemed neat to welcome in the billions of George Soros and the hype of a Michael Moore. But not now. MoveOn.org is also beginning to grate. Even its slickest commercials come across as crass, and lacking in the populist themes of the graying and grimacing Swift-boat veterans' testimonies. Soros is an unhappy and often cruel character, and he reminds the voting public that all Kerry's cries about Halliburton and Enron fall flat when he is being subsidized with the millions made from international money speculation, which has caused such mayhem in financial markets. After all, nearly ruining the banks and pensions funds in England to make a billion dollars is not a very populist or even kind thing to do. At least Halliburton, unlike Soros and his gang of speculators, creates something real, and its employees risk their lives to build infrastructure for those desperately in need of it.

I have to hope this is sinking in with people...

How's That Again?

Oliver Willis - former readable blog - asks about LaShawn Barber - readable blog - the following:

You know, I've thought many times just how much bank I could make as a "black conservative". I could get the Heritage Foundation to pay me big bucks to write asinine columns for Townhall.com, go to parties with Michelle Malkin and JC Watts, and write books like "Slavery: Not So Bad".

But I like having a soul.

But then you sold it to George Soros...

All The Marbles

Things are looking good for the President this week - but we can't let up.

As the Captain mentioned this morning, he, the Elder, Saint and I went to the Bush/Cheney HQ on Saturday and spent a couple of hours phone banking after the show. Among us, we got about 30 more volunteers lined up for the 96-hour effort to get out the Republican vote that starts next Saturday.

They still need people for that effort - lots of them, for lots of jobs:

• Calling registered Republicans
• Driving Republican voters to the polls,
• Going door to door to Republican houses, making sure they know to get out to the polls - every single one of them
• Helping watch the polls - not poll-judging (the deadline for that is long past), but a variety of other less-official jobs making sure the polling stations are run fairly and are free of shenanigans.
• Other jobs - and you can believe it, there are a zillion things that'll need to be done on Election Day.

So please, call the Bush/Cheney office, volunteer for something next weekend, Monday or Election Tuesday itself.

The weather looks like it's going to be mild; there'll be no early blizzards to keep Democrats away from the polls in droves, like in previous elections (although this is still a long-range forecast, and we can sure hope). We're going to have to win Minnesota the old-fashioned way - getting Republicans to the polls and kicking...donkey.

The Fight for the Democrat Soul

Dan Hertsgaard in the SanFranChron writes about the upcoming battle for the heart and soul of the Democrat Party.

Its an interesting look into at least one faction of the party.

Note that very few names are named, and most of them are either bit players or people whose allegiances are already well-known. Still, it's food for thought.

Hertsgaard writes:

Influential figures on the party's left wing are planning a long-term campaign to move the Democrats to the left, just as right-wing activists took over the Republican Party and moved it to the right over the past 30 years.

If the left's campaign is successful, it could transform the political landscape of the United States, changing the terms of debate and bringing dramatically different policies on local, national and international issues.

Just like the Conservative Revolution in the GOP did, right?

Well, wrong. There's a huge social difference in play, here. Liberalism as we know it grew over the course of forty years, from the New Deal through the war. Both spawned an America, and a generation pf Americans, with deep faith in their government's ability to solve problems - and the ability to ignore the unintended consequences of the government's power. The Democrat party became the party of statist solutions - under the likes of Truman and Kennedy and Humphrey, statism coupled with the great exceptionalistic vision of America. The Republicans of the day - Eisenhower, Nixon, and a whole generation of Minnesota Republicans - on the other hand became the party of exceptionalistic vision and slightly-less statist solutions.

The Democrats abandoned their legacy in the seventies. The Republicans saw that Americans were not only not following - they also becoming disenchanted with the statist vision, and after the dismal seventies yearned for the exceptionalistic vision that the Democrats were using for kitty litter. It was a change in political climate unlike any since the Great Depression. Goldwater knew it, Reagan jumped on it...

...and the Democrats, in Minnesota and nationwide, still don't get it.

After George McGovern's landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972, some centrist Democrats argued that Democrats had become too liberal to win national elections.

The accusation was repeated after Michael Dukakis' lopsided loss to George Bush in 1988. Leading the charge was the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of centrist Democrats who subsequently pushed the party rightward on crime, economics and foreign policy during the presidency of Bill Clinton, himself a council supporter.

Now, leftist Democrats are planning to challenge the centrists' control. The leftists argue that many Democrats, especially the party establishment in Washington, have become too much like Republicans and too afraid to stand up to right-wingers like George W. Bush.

As a Republican, I applaud this move. I think - no, I believe in my heart - that September 11 reinforced in most Americans the beliefs that Reagan held and brought out; that America's strength is its people and its spirit and its exceptionalistic tradition, rather than its bureacracy.

Read the whole thing. It has fodder for a couple more posts at least.

How Far We've Fallen?

Are Americans dumber than we used to be?

I mean, Americans as a whole?

Jeff Jacoby wonders about it.

He writes:

Somin suggests that widespread political ignorance may be, in one sense, "rational": Since no individual's vote is ever likely to be decisive, no voter has an incentive to work hard at acquiring enough knowledge to make an informed choice. But by that argument, voters shouldn't bother showing up on Election Day, either. Many don't, of course, and we hear endlessly about the need to increase voter turnout. But more alarming than the tens of millions of non-voting adults are the tens of millions of adults who do vote despite knowing next to nothing about the candidates and the issues.

It was not ever thus. A century and a half ago, ordinary Americans grappled with public controversies at a level of sophistication that would be unthinkable today.

In 1858, tens of thousands of Illinois voters, many unschooled, crowded fairgrounds and public squares to watch Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas debate his Republican challenger, former congressman Abraham Lincoln. The topics they wrestled with were among the weightiest in US history -- the expansion of slavery, the authority of the Supreme Court, the limits of popular sovereignty. The candidates spoke not for 90 seconds at a time, but for 90 minutes at a time. There were no spin doctors, no instant polls, no TV talking heads -- only thoughtful candidates and serious voters and the clash of ideas in the public arena.

The dumbing-down of our politics is no small thing. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, "it expects what never was and never will be." Widespread political ignorance poses a potentially lethal threat to our democratic freedoms. If we were smarter, we'd be worried.

Of course, politics was a big hunk of the entertainment available back then, too.

And (he says, listening to a woman bloviating about the military on C-SPAN), the way the media dumbs down the news, perhaps it's understandable.

Conventional Wisdom: Wrong?

For the past week, the scuttlebutt has been that Mark Kennedy's poll numbers in the MN 6th Congressional District were scary-bad - that Wetterling's numbers were challenging Kennedy's.

King tells us that reality is taking hold, thankfully:

Two big pieces of good news for the 6th District incumbent Mark Kennedy in his race with Patty Wetterling. First, WCCO released about 30 minutes ago a poll showing him ahead of Wetterling by 52-34, with 14% undecided. It's a relatively small poll of 351 likely 6CD voters, a district which typically identifies as 4-3 Republican. The margin of error is 5.3%. The margin of the poll is quite close to the margin with which Kennedy defeated Janet Robert in 2002.

It'd be wonderful if Wetterling polled just a little better than the inexcusable, moronic Robert. But the news for Kennedy is good, and it's a good thing.

More good news, says King: The St. Cloud Times has endorsed Kennedy.

Ohio Democrats: "Minorities are Incompetent Bums!"

A court has ruled in an Ohio case, saying that provisional ballots - the ones that many counties will issue if they're not sure about a person's qualifications to vote - must be cast at the polling place in the person's home precinct.

A federal appeals court ruled Saturday that provisional ballots Ohio voters cast outside their own precincts should not be counted, throwing out a lower-court decision that said such ballots are valid as long as they are cast in the correct county.

The ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals supports an order issued by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Democrats contend the Republican official's rules are too restrictive and allege they are intended to suppress the vote.

Ohio Democrats on Saturday night decided not to file an appeal in the case, one of the first major tests of how such ballots will be handled in a close election. Polls show that the race between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry in the key swing state is too close to call.

This, of course, will help fraud-proof the election ever-so-slightly; we should have fewer cases of people claiming "honest! I just moved here on the first! Really!" in precinct after precinct. It should make it incrementally harder for fraudulent registrations to be exercised on election day.

The Democrats? Oh, they're mad:

The Ohio Democratic Party and a coalition of labor and voter rights groups had argued that Blackwell's order discriminated against the poor and minorities, who tend to move more frequently

Maybe - I know I moved a lot when I was poor - but wasn't that what the immense voter registration drive was supposed to address?

Most state require provisional ballots to be cast in the voter's home precinct.

Fisk Nick: The Winners!

After hours of painstaking critical analysis, I can finally, and with great and appropriate fanfare, announce the winners of the first (but no doubt not last)...

Fisk Nick Coleman Contest!!!

The winners will receive...a virtual standing ovation.

Ready?

Well, then, click on the link!

First, though, I have to compliment all the contestants, who boldly went where I've gone too many times before. Commenter "Jarhead" summed up my feelings perfectly, mixing the same combination of Coleman Fatigue with the continued inability to stomach the relentless illogic when he said

You know Mitch. Reading Nick (I need to learn my place) Coleman just sucks the life right out of me. I find it amazing that he can just keep droning on paragraph after paragraph, week after week like he does. All I can come up with is...

(Nick, the government is already in charge of buying flu vaccine. What more do you want?)

I feel your pain. Semper Fi.

And Mark Wallace goes beyond fisking to actual correction - which is what we are supposed to do, when Nick Coleman's fragrant illogic hasn't driven us to, I dunno, hosting contests to celebrate his ineptitude:

"but if you weren't in line long before then, you didn't get one of the 150 numbers that were given out."

Instead of freaking out the seniors and trying to support Kerry as the same time, why don't you tell people where they can get the shots. Here's the MN Hlth Dept link:http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/dpc/cgi-bin/fluschedule/fluclinic_process.cgi

By the way, there were many, many excellent entries that rationally explained where Coleman was wrong, and for each of those entries I'm deeply grateful; it shows that at least some people aren't being fooled. However, since this contest is about ridicule more than real education, I've not ranked them among the winners. I hope you all understand, and again, thank you!

Anyhoo - with no further ado, I present the winners! Coleman's original text is italicized.

Fourth Runner-Up - Terry out-theatricizes Coleman - no mean feat:

"It was time to leave the PROFESSIONAL BUILDING. I wished everyone good health and walked out onto Hennepin Avenue. When I looked down the street and squinted, I could almost see Lakewood Cemetery, four blocks away.
The gates were open."

(and the Tall Man from Phantasm was walking through the gates with a coffin under each arm, one made of the cheap pine Minneapolis provides for indigents, and the other piteously small. He wore a Bush/Cheney t-shirt)

Third Runner-Up - Paul Zrimsek found the joke I for which I searched in vain on Thursday:

"I've never been here before, and I'll never come again, either," said the 88-year-old retired Postal Service supervisor from Little Canada
as he got his first taste of what getting health care would be like if he were from Big Canada.

Second Runner-Up - Rex felt that imitation was the sincerest form of fiskery:

Chet Brigm had never read Nick Coleman until Wednesday. He hopes he won't ever need to read him again.

"I've never read such crap before, and I'll never bother again, either," he said. "I had to read the whole thing to find out he didn't know where to get a flu shot, either. I thought he knew stuff."

First Runner-Up - To Chriss, of course, satire is even more sincere:

As he stood shivering in line, John Barnes, an African American (U.S. Navy, retired) muttered, "(Expletive deletive) government should stay out of the vaccine business. Ever since Hillary's bill in 1994 the government is the primary buyer of these vaccines, making it unprofitable for drug companies to produce them, so only a few companies bother to make them. And these are probably the worst companies. It's the story of liberalism: good intentions, bad results because the focus is on feeling good about yourself rather than solving problems."

(Oops, that quotation never made Nick's article. He quickly deleted it from his tape recorder and moved on to a more 'knowledgeable' source.)

And the Winner... - Karen pushes Nick Coleman back through the "fourth wall"

"When my kids get sick they get very sick," she said to no one in particular.

("no one in particular" - why, Nick, you shouldn't be so disingenuously modest!)

Again, thanks to all the entries. If you didn't win this time, rest assured - there'll be another, just a surely as there'll be a Coleman column on Tuesday. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another...

(P.S. - Chumley, of course, is completely in his own class with his fisking. Too big or comprehensive for my contest, but a stitch anyway...)

Air America Affiliate: "Equal Opportunity Laws Are For Peasants

The Twin Cities' FrankenNet affiliate is advertising for a producer for a as-yet-unannounced morning show (which means Marc Moaron's "Morning Sedition" must really be burning things up.

Here's the advertisement for the new position. The position itself looks pretty crappy and thankless, like most "producer" gigs at third-tier stations (I know - this job description reads almost exactly like the job I held at KSTP-AM back when was the #10 station in the market).

But the real payoff is at the bottom of the job description. Emphasis is added:

Producer Sought for Morning News Program

Part-time producer with at least 2 years major market experience sought for new morning news program on 950 AM KSNB in Minneapolis.

Requirements Include:

• College level or broadcasting school education or related field of equivalent experience required.

• Two (2) years experience as a producer in a broadcast environment or equivalent. [Or equivalent? What? Spinning records at a nightclub? There is no equivalent! - Ed.]

• Strong interest, knowledge, awareness, and appetite for local/national current news events. Able to quickly conceptualize stories for radio presentation and is able to write and produce a radio newscast utilizing material from all available sources. Proven ability for accuracy and follow-through. [These will be trained out of you, of course - you're working for FrankenNet, now - Ed.]

• Able to effectively screen telephone calls for on-air talk shows in a professional manner while providing accurate information.

• Willing to accept responsibility and work under moderate supervision while resolving varied problems, which require general knowledge of company’s policies and procedures.

• Able to work under pressure and effectively handle the stresses of the responsibilities of the position and assure on-air hosts receive material for broadcast on time as the services performed affect company image, clients and the listening audience [because goodness knows you'd never want to hurt the "image" of Wendy Wilde, who was an embarassment at WCCO, and is easily the most wretched excuse for a talk show host in the Twin Cities today - Ed.].

• Have an acceptable on-air presence and voice quality and be able to enunciate clearly and read copy fluently as required. [In the great tradition of those seasoned radio pros Lizzzzzz Winstead, Marc Moaron, Wendy Wild and Janeane Garawful - Ed.]

• Consistently works hours required. Works more when required to meet deadlines including odd shifts, weekends, holidays, overtime, evenings, etc. [In other words - you're part-timer, but they'll work you like a sled dog. Hey, pallie - you wanted to get into talk radio! - Ed.]

• Work in compliance with Company policies and procedures.

• Work effectively in a team environment. [in the sense that the guy in the parade who sweeps up the horses works in a "team environment". Talk radio producers have immense turnover for a reason - Ed.]

• Maintain positive and cooperative rapport with staff, management, and clients. [Did they mention that talk radio personalities tend to have egoes that put Diana Ross to shame? - Ed.]

• Project an appropriate professional appearance and demeanor.

Qualified candidates are welcome to e-mail their cover letter, resume, and references to:

Janet Robert
E-mail: [redacted]

No walk-in candidates will be considered. NO PHONE CALLS PLEASE! REPUBLICANS NEED NOT APPLY! Otherwise...An Equal Opportunity Employer.

jrobert, 10/19/2004 3:28:48 PM
Message#152851

Whoah. So let's get this straight - it's an equal opportunity job, but Republicans need not apply?

I'm no lawyer. I always snooze through the Human Resources lectures. I also know that the interview is when things like "wrong political affiliation" tend to get weeded out. That's how Minnesota Public Radio does it; they're ultraliberal, but they're not stupid. Even wacko-lefty KFAI will let the odd Republican in the door.

But if you do know HR or EEOE law, I'll toss this out to you. Can they do that? I'm sure its legal, of course - but it's the babbling, head-up-the-butt stupidity of the posting that amazes me.

If its illegal, of course, I'd like to make sure the whole world knows it.

On Talking With O'Neill

I had a one-hour conversation with John O'Neill yesterday. Unlike his last several major media appearances, nobody screamed over his points. Nobody bogged the conversation down in irrelevant tangents. We cut to the chase, and stayed on the chase for sixty complete minutes.

So, lefties; where are the lies? What precisely are they?

Not slight misstatements, not errors in memory by sixty-year old men who muffed minor details of firefights that took place 35 years ago. Where are the lies as re Kerry?

You're saying Kerry really was inside (not next to, not near) Cambodia? Ever? You're saying that Kerry really didn't file the report from the USCGC Spencer that led to his Silver Star, even though he was the only officer aboard? You're saying something that 90+% of his comrades in arms will refute to your face - Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Don't-Care-About-Politicses alike?

Quick. Where are the lies?

Piddly diversions will be dealt with harshly.

The World As It Is

Via Powerline, a cartoon by one of their readers, Matt Chisholm:

Remember; if you call the President "Bushitler!", you're exercising your first amendment rights. If you question John Kerry's pathetic record in the Senate, you're engaging in a smear campaign.

If you support Republican get out the vote efforts, you're a xenophobic angry white suburbanite - but if you're a thug who intimidates Republican voters, you're exercising understandable anger.

If you're James Carville, vile piece of filth, you're a "character". If you're Karl Rove, who does exactly what Carville did for a living, and is other than a vacuous troll to boot - you're in league with Satan.

Got that?

And I hereby dare anyone to try to shout me down at the polls.

NARN Today

We'll be interviewing John O'Neill today on the show during the whole second hour.

Join us live from noon-3PM on AM1280, or join us on the internet.

Blitz

The Wolves ad, along with Ashley's Story, are two of the more amazingly effective campaign spots I've seen this campaign.

I can see why Bush saved 'em both for the final stretch.

Paging Dara Moskowitz

Chumley at Plastic Hallway has the Restaurant Review Line of the Year:He's obviously making his move, now that Martha's in the joint...

On Hewitt Today

The Northern Alliance is filling in for Hugh Hewitt on his national show today. Tune in from 5-8PM Central - it's going to be a fun one, and there'll be plenty of time for phone callers.

Stretched Too Thin

Part of the support for last week's Democrat fraud - the spurious rumors of an impending draft - was the notion that "we're stretched too thin", and that there's no way to get enough manpower under a volunteer system to fight the War on Terror.

Buncombe. We've been there already.

Currently the US Army has ten active duty divisions and two "integrated" (largely reserve) divisions, along with eight National Guard divisions that would be called up only under the direst circumstances.

In 1988, just past the height of the Cold War and after Reagan's defense buildup, the US Army had 16 active duty ground divisions, plus ten National Guard divisions. The "peace dividend" of the early nineties was paid for, for the Army's part, by disbanding a total of six divisions, totalling over 120,000 combat troops. They also disbanded a Corps headquarters (VII Corps), which was in effect a large division by itself, with tens of thousands of troops, largely support troops (everything from accountants to mailmen to medics) but also including thousands of combat and combat support troops (armored cavalry, aviation, combat engineers, artillery).

The Navy and Air Force underwent similar cutbacks; the Navy has fewer aircraft carriers, many fewer surface ships, and about 50-60% of the submarines it had twenty years ago; the Air Force has about 60% of the Tactical Fighter Wings it had at the height of the Cold War.

Remember - we had a volunteer military all through the '80s.

So - while the US had 20-30 million fewer people at the height of the Cold War in the eighties, we had a volunteer military 40-50% larger than the one we have today.

Would increasing the size of our volunteer military to cold war levels be easy or inexpensive? Generally, no. Would it require a draft? Absolutely not. In fact, given the latest round of re-organizations in the Army (converting each division from three large Brigades designed to fight massed Soviet armored attacks in Central Europe into four smaller, more mobile and flexible Brigades more suited to operating in places like the third world) should give each division (in theory) a lot more actual fighting power for the logistic load than the current organization.

It might require a minor miracle to equip all those new units with the same level of modern equipment that our front-line units have today, though, and that's completely ignoring the fact that draftees are just plain harder to train to the standards of effectiveness that a volunteer military expects.

So the Democrat notion of a draft is not only militarily and socially idiotic - it's just plain not needed. The numbers just aren't there.

Kerry Visit

I didn't go to the Kerry rally yesterday - although I did drive past the Kerry headquarters on Wednesday, and thought briefly about grabbing a ticket. Work called, though.

Naturally, ">Nick Coleman went. Oh, his column is about someone named Mr. Fun, which given Coleman's predilections would have to be a juggler in a hairshirt.

But he did say something interesting.

Coleman:

Thursday night's rally produced a nice campaign turnout, but it also was proof we have reached campaign burnout: Thousands of Kerry supporters left before their man finished talking, scramming like Twins fans in the sixth inning of a blowout, going home glad to have seen their champion but feeling no need for another inning of stale lines about how Bush should've killed Osama in Tora Bora.

It was exactly as dull as a George W. Bush sound-bite festival, where the crowds stay polite and applaud each chestnut wearily, like you laugh when your kid tells you the same old knock-knock joke for the 100th time.

Wow. I've been to two Bush rallies; the crowd at each was just this side of frenzied; at the one I MC'ed, I checked for walkouts - there were almost none. I'm not a big professional journalist who knows "Stuff" like Nick Coleman, but the walkouts at the rally in Blaine numbered in the dozens, not "thousands", if you believe Nick Coleman (and I fully admit it is disingenuous of me to start now).

Still, I like the sound of that.

Jim Yuk

David Strom at the Taxpayer's League writes:

Here is a shot of a bumper sticker we will begin distributing next week. It would be wonderful if they popped up on cars around the Twin Cities during the last week of the campaign.

Send requests to Markg@taxpayersleague.org with name, address, e-mail, etc. and you too can have your very own Star Tribune bias "Mr Yuck" bumper sticker. Let's get these out there (the physical ones will probably be available Tuesday, they are being printed now).

Can I get the 8'x8' size?

Up Two?

The latest Mason Dixon poll of battleground states shows shows Bush up two points in Minnesota.

If you believe Mason-Dixon - and I'm deeply ambivalent about polls in general, after their performance in Minnesota in 2002 - it's shaping up fairly well for Bush in battleground states that voted Gore four years ago:

Pennsylvania: Kerry 46, Bush 45
Oregon: Kerry 46, Bush 45
Iowa: Bush 49, Kerry 43 (!!!)
Wisconsin: Bush 45, Kerry 45
New Mexico: Bush 49, Kerry 44 (!!!)
Michigan: Kerry 47, Bush 46
Minnesota: Bush 47, Kerry 45

This is the first "official" poll anywhere that I've seen to confirm what a little bird told me the internal polls were saying two weeks ago - Bush has moved into a slight lead in Minnesota.

All touch and go for now, of course, but this is the best it's looked in Minnesota for a very long time.

Fisk Nick: The Contest

I thought about fisking Nick Coleman's latest opus, but then I realized: I've done this dozens of times. I've picked his stuff apart more often than my lawn mower.

My heart's not in it like it used to be. And yet it needs to be done; Coleman is a droning, predictable, biased pox on local jounalism; as poxy as local journalism is, that's saying something.

So here's the plan; Captain Ed has pretty much cornered the market on the Caption Contest, in which his readers sort of fisk a photo of John Kerry some newsmaker or another. Why not take the next step?

Why not, indeed?

So here's the plan:

1. Read Nick Coleman's column
2. Pick a sentence or paragraph
3. In my comment section, leave your personal fisking.

Winners and runners-up will be recognized on Friday night.

Leave them only in the comment section; people sending email entries will be forced to listen to old tapes of KSTP's "Nick Coleman Show" until they pray for the sweet release of death. I give 'em five minutes.

Bad examples:

"I've never been here before, and I'll never come again, either," said the 88-year-old retired Postal Service supervisor from Little Canada, a suburb on the other side of St. Paul." (That explains the mail service I used to get in south Minneapolis!)

"Fifty thousand people may die of the flu this season, but the only flu shots within 25 miles of St. Paul Tuesday were being given inside a converted residence on the 3100 block of Hennepin Av. S. There was a fancy veterinarian's office two doors away that looked a lot nicer than the place where old people were waiting for hours." (Not only that, but the animals are probably better interviewers than Nick Coleman).

"The house had a big sign on it that said "PROFESSIONAL BUILDING," but it reminded me of a house where college pals of mine used to go to buy an ounce or two of medicinal plant clippings. Except my friends got better service." (If it were a government program, they could have fixed that)

"Only in America," said Barb Feiler, a 68-year-old Roseville woman who was there with Gunnar Pettersen, 71. She didn't mean "only in America" as a good thing. "This is a disaster," she said." (And then the thought police came by and summariy executed Feiler and Petterson for their disloyalty. Only in America).

"It was time to leave the PROFESSIONAL BUILDING. I wished everyone good health and walked out onto Hennepin Avenue. When I looked down the street and squinted, I could almost see Lakewood Cemetery, four blocks away. The gates were open." (They don't bury careers. But you're too busy cremating yours, anyway...)

You can all do better, of course...

Guardian Angle

Last week, the UK's lefty Guardian newspaper urged its readers to write letters to voters in Ohio.

Bad idea:

Terry Brown had received a letter from a Scottish Guardian reader. The navy veteran and retired lorry builder was "offended" as he read the polite note, from Nicola Smith of West Lothian, with its denunciation of the Iraq war as a "farce", and closing plea to remove from power "the parties responsible for this war".

Springfield News-Sun
The Clark County press has not taken kindly to the letters

Mr Brown looked out at his front garden, decorated with a US flag on a tall pole, a giant carving of an American eagle and a wooden cross marked: "September 11, 2001".

"I feel very strongly that this was an invasion of my privacy," he said. "The right of my wife and myself to decide whom to vote for should not be affected by any other country. That was a freedom we fought for many years ago. It was 1776."

Quick, Le Monde - start your own campaign!

Tougher Than The Rest

What's being tough worth?

Yglesias writes:

Ezra Klein's got this just right. The notion that a group of hardcore killers, willing and eager to detonate a nuclear device in an American city, would be impressed or scared by the "toughness" of a US president is absurd. Moreover, the idea that any American president would lack the toughness to stand up to a group of hardcore killers, willing and eager to detonate a nuclear device in an American city is absurd.

True, but it misses the point in a way that highlights deficiencies in Yglesias' background, which I'm guessing (with all due respect) is short on military history.

"Toughness" on defense is easy. Gun control activist Carl Rowan became famously (if hypocritically) tough when he shot a burglar in his house. And even the most pacifistic nation can fight like a tiger if their home is sacked; pacifistic Norway and Denmark fought with great tenacity and, yes, toughness after their nations were occupied by the Nazis. Note: "after".

Yglesias continues:

The issue is not toughness, it's whether or not you have policies that would be effective in preventing hardcore killers from acquiring a nuclear device. That requires toughness in certain circumstances, but it requires much more than that. Sheer willpower and willingness to shed blood are not the be-all and end-all of effective anti-proliferation policy. They're not even the beginning.

Yglesias seems myopic here; blood is not the only measure of toughness, and certainly not the only one that matters in fighting proliferation. And "Policy" delivered without the willingness and "toughness" to enforce it is as worthless as policy that doesn't demand enforcement.

Ronald Reagan had an anti-communist "policy". It required military toughness, of course - the invasion of Grenada sent the Soviets a message about Reagan's resolve - but more importantly, pure resolve; Reagan's famous obstinacy at the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev was both a tipping point in the end of the Cold War, and a move that was almost unanimously opposed by Reagan's own advisers, to say nothing of the American media. And yet Reagan stayed the course, and history has proven him right.

Applied to nuclear proliferation, policy is easy; even John Kerry can declaim "proliferation is bad!". But toughness in this area is measured by the willingness to make that policy stick; the willingness (indeed, zeal) to tell a tyrant "Bullshit", as Kennedy did in setting the blockade of Cuba; it can also mean the ability to give that resolve teeth (as Israel did when they destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981).

Question: who believes that John Kerry will have either the resolve to hound nuclear transgressors back to heel? Or to stand up and call the most dangerous transgressors for what they are? Or to go in and destroy them if needed?

What on earth makes you think so, if you think so?

Why Conservatives Need to Vote for Bush

Chris from New Patriot points us to a Doug Bandow piece in Salon, "Why Conservatives Must Not Vote for Bush".

We'll get to Bandow in a moment.

Dystra says:

I have been arguing for the last couple of years that Bush is no conservative.

So have many of us. It's the reason I supported Steve Forbes to the bitter end in 2000. It's the reason I was, at best, a lukewarm Bush supporter (at least he wasn't Algore) until September 11.

Dykstra continues:

Please also note, believing in some conservative values does not neccessarily mean one cannot also believe in progressive values. They are not mutually exclusive at all.

No, indeed; genuine conservatism is more progressive than the movements that have co-opted the term "progressive" in recent years.

Oh, yeah - Bandow's piece: read it, but don't expect much in the way of enlightenment; Andrew Sullivan says the same things, and says 'e better. And he's still wrong.

Bandow runs through a litany of the same things most of us genuine conservatives have been harping on - a lot of things that might matter, except for that war thing: spending, mainly.

But then, there's that pesky war on terror thing:

Yet Bush's foreign policy record is as bad as his domestic scorecard. The administration correctly targeted the Taliban in Afghanistan, but quickly neglected that nation, which is in danger of falling into chaos. The Taliban is resurgent, violence has flared, drug production has burgeoned and elections have been postponed.

The Taliban and violence are always endemic in Afghanistan, drugs are a side issue (how very eighties of Mr. Bandow - and since when does the Cato Institute care about the War on Drugs?), and the Afghan elections were a hugely successful watershed.

Iraq, already in chaos, is no conservative triumph. The endeavor is social engineering on a grand scale, a war of choice launched on erroneous grounds that has turned into a disastrously expensive neocolonial burden.

Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, contrary to administration claims, and no operational relationship with al-Qaida, contrary to administration insinuations. U.S. officials bungled the occupation, misjudging everything from the financial cost to the troop requirements.

So many diversions; most of Iraq is not in chaos, the "no operational relationship" canard dodges the real point of the Hussein/Terror (not just Al Quaeda) relationship, and WMDs were not the only justification for war, merely the only one that the left thinks we didn't succeed at.

Particularly shocking is the administration's ineptitude with regard to Iraq. Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek, "On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq -- troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani -- Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong.

Bandow and the unavoidable Zakaria assume that anyone would have done better; that tripling the number o troops would change the situation in Iraq (doubtful), that "international support" would matter one iota in Iraq today (the terrorists would pack up and leave if we had the French imprimatur?), that keeping the old regime in positions of power would have done more than "make the trains run on time", that the exiles will make any different outside of what their own merits will provide once the elections take place, and that anyone would have predicted Sistani's actions.

Bush has a record in Iraq - imperfect, but at least an empirical record. Bush's detractors are still operating from the purely hypothetical - and mostly doing it badly.

By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq.

Really? Would Mr. Bandow like to tell that to the Kurds? To the Shi'a of the southern part of the country?

What else? Oh, yeah - he's not a wonk:

The final conservative redoubt is Bush's admirable personal life. Alas, other characteristics of his seem less well suited to the presidency. By his own admission he doesn't do nuance and doesn't read.

Bandow is speaking cant. Bush does nuance just fine; he just doesn't make the nuance the keystone of his approach, as the wonky likes of Clinton, Gore and Kerry do. Reading? Reading lots and lots for fun is one of those things the hypereducated value - as do I - but it's hardly a dealbreaker. And finally:

He doesn't appear to reflect on his actions and seems unable to concede even the slightest mistake.

Oh, that'd be brilliant, wouldn't it? Perhaps if his opponents were rational grownups, it'd make sense. But the opposition - petulant media wonks, inflamed lunatics at MoveOn, and a Democrat party motivated more by hatred than by their own party's core values (whatever they are) - aren't. Showing hesitation in the face of such an onslaught is like showing indecision when facing an angry dog - it's an opening you'd be nuts to provide.

Beyond that, what does Bandow have? A few quotes from Jonah Goldberg (with context carefully trimmed) and...Tucker Carlson?

Tucker Carlson? Why not cite Arne Carlson, while you're at it?

Back to Dykstra:

A Reaganite argues that Bush is a dangerous, profligate, moralizing radical -- and that his reelection would be catastrophic both for the right and for America.

I wasn't aware you were such an admirer of the Reagan legacy, Chris!

Bush's domestic policies have been troubling to conservatives, again, since the beginning. Expect a serious conservative push to restrain domestic spending after the election.

But, after you trim out the distortions and just-plain-untruths of the lefty cant on Iraq, as well as the swathes of just-plain-unreality as re the general War on Terror, Bush is the only candidate whose views work. At all.

So when Dykstra says:

I predict there are enough conservatives who will reject the boy-president. If they can't directly vote for Kerry, they will deny Bush their vote on principle by voting for one of the least objectionable third-party candidates.

Conservatives are intensely pragmatic, as a rule. Surely there are some conservatives who will deny Bush the vote on principle. Many, many more will realize that whatever Bush's ideological faults, he's better than the alternative.

Bandow cites the canard that Kerry, if presiding over a Republican congress, would spend less money. That's an understandable notion, coming from someone at Cato (Bandow is a senior fellow at the libertarian think tank). In peacetime, it's a fine plan; the Republican '94 Congress did wonders in reigning in Bill Clinton's statist vision; the six ensuing years of gridlock did much to ensure prosperity...

...but not peace. A gridlocked government is a good thing when there are no more pressing concerns. But we have those concerns today. The sooner we deal with them, the sooner we can return to a time and place where noodling about with abstractions like induced gridlock are tenable again.

Oh, yeah - as re Dykstra's closing point, about conservatives staying home? I bet the total number of conservatives who sit out voting for Bush would fit in Andrew Sullivan's vacation home, and leave room in the kitchen.

The NARN Weekend

After this Saturday's Northern Alliance broadcast, join us down at the state Bush/Cheney headquarters in Saint Paul as we phonebank to help get out the vote! It's for all the marbles this time; every bit of help counts, but only if it shows up! Please, be there.

The address for the headquarters is:
1445 Energy Park Drive St. Paul MN, 55108

Phone:
651-645-5614

Click here for a map.

Afterwards, join the NARN at a nearby watering hole, and watch Elder demonstrate his new synchronized swimming routine.

Statistically Speaking

This last few months have been amazing for this blog.

In June, I had my first month where every weekday had over 1,000 visits. September was the first month where every day of the month had over 1,000 visitors to the site.

This month's milestone? Over 2,000 visits every weekday, so far. And 2/3 of the way into the month, I've already had more unique visitors than my best month to date.

I'm sure the election has a lot to do with that, of course - I'm expecting a falloff in November - but thanks to all of you for reading!

Open Letter...

...to all of you lefties who are up in arms over Sinclair's airing of Stolen Honor.

In the past week, you (collective) have:

• tried to abrogate the First Amendment by siccing the FCC on Sinclair
• Put pressure on Sinclair advertisers
• Tried to invoke fuzzy, murky election law to stifle the documentary
• Claimed that the documentary "isn't news" (having never seen it)
• Rejoiced as Sinclair stock's price fell (artificially - which is why so many analysts are calling it a Buy now)...

But in all that, nary a word about Kerry's record, his meetings with North Vietnam, and the effects his actions had on our POW's.

Anyone?

In Your Heart...

Carl Albing - local blog fan and an author you should support if you're a programmer - is dabbling in campaign art:

John Kerry: A Life in Quotes

Hawkins has the goods - the most detailed digest of Kerry's history in quotes I've ever seen.

Read it. Absorb it. Forward it.

Ashley's Story

If you came directly out from under a rock to read this blog, you might not have seen Ashley's Story yet.

It's one of the more moving campaign ads I've ever seen.

Who can quibble with it?

Josh "ua Micah" Marshall, of course.

Oh, Marshall leaves Ashley alone. But he notes (with my added emphasis):

If you click around the site a little further though you see that the money is actually for a slew of anti-Kerry attack ads.

There is an Ashley's Story ad, about how President Bush changed the girl's life. But that's just one. The other eight include the 'Surfer Dude' ad ridiculing Kerry as a windsurfer who flipflops, another -- What If -- that asks the terrifying question of what would have happened if 9/11 had happened on Kerry's watch rather than President Bush's, and a slew of others of a similar sort.

Every notice how every ad that criticizes Kerry gets called an "Attack Ad"?

Franks Carpetbombs Kerry

As a student of military history, few things have irritated me as badly as John Kerry's consistent spinning of the campaign in Tora Bora as a mistake by the President.

I'll be charitable, and call it a "misstatement" on Kerry's part. But it's a misstatement on which he needs to be held accountable.

US, British, Australian, Danish, Norwegian and German special forces led an army of Afghans into the mountains of the Tora Bora to flush out the remnants of the Taliban and Al Quaeda that had fled the fall of the rest of the country. According to Kerry, we should have waited for the regular US military - the troops of the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne, mainly - to arrive on the scene.

"The scene" being a place to which few people are acclimatized, the jagged peaks and arid plateux of the Hindu Kush, much of the area over 10,000 feet above sea level. It's a brutal place under any circumstances; nearly devoid of roads, it defies conventional military operations, as the Soviets found to their chagrin 20 years ago. Helicopters don't perform well; trucks and tanks flounder without roads; mens' physical performance is grossly impaired until they are acclimated to the area. Kerry's blandishments about "outsourcing" the operation and shunning the "best trained troops in the world" is pure illiteracy; well-trained as they are, the US regulars didn't know the area, they weren't acclimated to fighting in the environment yet, the area was not conducive to regular military operations, and the locals, led by the Special Forces, were the right troops at the right place at the right time.

Tommy Franks - who led the campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq as commander of Central Command - hammers Kerry's half-baked assertion in a NYTimes Op-Ed today. I've added emphasis in places:

First, take Mr. Kerry's contention that we "had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden" and that "we had him surrounded." We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001. Some intelligence sources said he was; others indicated he was in Pakistan at the time; still others suggested he was in Kashmir. Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.

Second, we did not "outsource" military action. We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora, a mountainous, geographically difficult region on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is where Afghan mujahedeen holed up for years, keeping alive their resistance to the Soviet Union. Killing and capturing Taliban and Qaeda fighters was best done by the Afghan fighters who already knew the caves and tunnels.

Third, the Afghans weren't left to do the job alone. Special forces from the United States and several other countries were there, providing tactical leadership and calling in air strikes. Pakistani troops also provided significant help - as many as 100,000 sealed the border and rounded up hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Surely Kerry knows how he's mischaracterizing the operations in Tora Bora; certainly his entire campaign staff can't be illiterate about military history. Right?

But Democrats as a group tend to be profoundly illiterate on the topic. And it's them that Kerry is aiming at - the vast, teeming hordes of well-meaning Democrats who dont' know the difference between an F-16 and an M-16, the people who think Von Clausewitz is a brand of mineral water, people for whom "strategy" and "tactics" are interchangeable; the uninformed.

That's the depressing part - realizing how much, indeed, of Kerry's campaign is built on spreading disinformation to the uninformed. Disinformation about the draft, about social security, about the tax cuts and the economy, about Tora Bora...

...and, indeed, about the entire war on terror.

And they are the ones to whom Franks' last line is directed:

The war against terrorism is the right war at the right time for the right reasons. And Iraq is one of the places that war must be fought and won. George W. Bush has his eye on that ball and Senator John Kerry does not.

The truth is out there. Amazingly, it's in the Times this morning.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: I forgot - there were also Canadian special forces involved.

Location, Location, Location

Patterico notes the some serious fact-checking on some incredible LATimes spinning for Kerry.

The subject? Zarquawi's presence in Iraq, and the media's and CIA's cluelessness about it.

Patterico notes about the Times' claim that there was no evidence Hussein harbored Zarquawi:

(I'm not sure why the Times is referring to something the CIA said "last summer." I think the reporters are confused. I think the story means to say that Bush said this summer that Hussein had harbored Zarqawi, but a CIA report delivered to the White House about two weeks ago found no conclusive evidence of that.)

If the story is going to say that Bush made assertions in this speech that had been contradicted by his own officials, you'd think the story would back up that accusation with something more convincing than a Bush assertion which is undeniably true -- Zarqawi fled to Iraq, got medical care, and set up terrorist operations -- but which, the article claims, implies something that has not been substantiated by the CIA.

That's the most questionable assertion he made? (By the way, the earlier, more interesting version of the article had claimed that Bush made "several questionable assertions" in the speech.)

By the way, even the implication attributed to Bush is not that "questionable." The Times doesn't tell you that officials have said that the case is not closed on whether Saddam harbored Zarqawi. And for good reason: it is pretty far-fetched to think that Hussein had no idea Zarqawi was there. Michael Totten observes:

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, Baghdad under Saddam Hussein was a place that was as difficult to enter as it was to leave. You couldn’t exactly waltz in there as a foreigner and check yourself into a hospital as if you were showing up to buy smokes at a corner grocery in Brooklyn.

And if Zarqawi wasn't welcome in Iraq, why did he choose Baghdad as a place to see a doctor?

Bush must be doing well, if the Times needs to spin this hard to defend Kerry.

Read it all.

Stolen Honor To Air: Petards being Stress-Tested

Chumley Wonderbar says "Stolen Honor" will air this coming Wednesday at 9PM on the Twin Cities' WB/Sinclair affiliate.

In other news, the Democratic Party was rebuffed in its effort to get a situational revocation of the First Amendment today.

Ironic, isn't it? The left burns up a bank full of political capital getting McCain-Feingold passed, allowing their in-the-tank media free reign - and they're upset that the right is doing it better.

I'll be tuned in. (Now that would be a fun listener event. Any of you venue owners out there wanna host the NARN on Wednesday?)

It's Not Scrappleface

Arafat Endorses John Kerry, according to LGF.

Well - sort of.

When the Man Comes Around

Via LGF, one mighty fine animation...

Why I'm Voting Bush

Hugh Hewitt's Blog Symposium question is a good one: Why am I voting for Bush and not Kerry?

When I was a boy in North Dakota, I wondered how I could bring children into the world among the Minuteman silos that dotted the plains; the imminence of oblivion was no abstract notion to me. But thanks to Ronald Reagan's resolution and vision, that threat disappeared by the time my oldest was born.

On September 11, the threat returned, worse than ever. John Kerry's vision is to co-exist with Islamofascist terror, the way we co-existed with Mutually Assured Destruction in the '70s.

That's not the world I want to leave my children. For that reason alone, George W. Bush is the only moral choice.

Bush isn't perfect. My Northern Alliance colleague King Banaian puts it well in his post on the subject. As much as the left excoriates his putative conservatism, Bush is far too moderate on domestic issues (although his fortitude on tax cuts earns a bunch of points back). He needs to cut spending.

But Reagan proved that economic mistakes can be fixed; dead Americans can't be. We are in a war. Not a police action. Not a law-enforcement exercise. The Democrats have proved over and over again that, debate-time bloviation aside, they don't take the war seriously. Under Democrat rule, America will fall back into wishful appeasement; Islamofascism will flourish.

War or no war, I'd never vote for Kerry, based on his post-Vietnam activies and his Senate record - or lack thereof. To vote for John Kerry, one needs to suspend enough disbelief to beggar all logic.

The choice is this: On the one hand, tell my kids they'll have to accept the same, wretched Devil's bargain I grew up with, and leave them a worse world than even I inherited; on the other, give them hope that imminent oblivion might again be just another scary bedtime story, with a little perseverence.

Bush is the only hope for that in this election.

Unfit To Lead

I'll be perfectly honest, as I always am; I didn't support George W. Bush until his nomination was locked up (I was a Forbes guy), and didn't honestly become enthusiastic about him as president until the day he stood on the rubble of the WTC, and the speech to Congress that followed. He was no orator, but he came into his own that week, and I become an unabashed supporter.

So I can be convinced. It's true.

But I can honestly say I have never, ever felt for even a moment that John Kerry was qualified to lead the United States. His record in the eighties was that of the opportunistic, commie-coddling appeaser; we have evidence that, under pressure, he's not only not a leader - he is, in fact, a craven, dithering simp, as P.J. O'Rourke noted while observing Kerry during a crisis during the electoral overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos:

Village Voice reporter Joe Conason and I had been tipped off about the walkout, and when we got to the church, we found Bea Zobel, one of Cory Aquino's top aies, in a tizzy. "The women are terrified," she said. "They're scared to go home. They don't know what to do. We don't know what to do." Joe and I suggested that Mrs. Zobel go to the Manila Hotel and bring back some members of the Congressional observer team. She came back with Kerry, who did nothing.

Kerry later said that he didn't talk to the COMELEC employees then because he wasn't allowed. This is ridiculous. He was ushered into an area that had been cordoned off from the press and the crowd and where the computer operators were sitting. To talk to the women, all he would have had to do was raise his voice. Why he was reluctant, I can't tell you. I can tell you what any red-blooded representative of the U.S. government should have done. He should have shouted, "If you're frightened for your safety, I'll take you to the American embassy, and damn the man who tries to stop me." But all Kerry did was walk around like a male model in a concerned and thoughtful pose.

This is your "war hero?" People think this hamster will lead the US against the people who rammed airplanes full of people into the World Trade Center?

Mark Steyn has him dialed in.

Steyn hs more on why Kerry is unfit to lead this nation.

Key quote:

The ''I'll hunt down and kill America's enemies'' line was written for him and planted on his lips. The ''It's just a nuisance like prostitution'' line is his, and how he really thinks of the issue. What an odd analogy. Your average jihadist won't take kindly to having his martyrdom operation compared with the decadent infidels' sex industry, but the rest of us shouldn't be that happy about it either. Kerry is correct in the sense that even if you dispatched every constable in the land to crack down on prostitution there'd still be some pox-ridden whore somewhere touting for business. But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place. In Boston, where he served as a ''law enforcement person,'' the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for not-all-that-euphemistic ''escort services.'' In other words, while you can make an argument for a ''managerial'' approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender. This is aside from the basic defect of the argument: If some gal in your building is working as a prostitute, that's a nuisance -- condoms in the elevator, johns in the lobby; if Islamists seize the schoolhouse and kill your kids, even if it only happens once every couple of years, ''nuisance'' doesn't quite cover it.

A typical "moderate" objection to Bush goes something like "In four years, he hasn't done a great job".

Forget about John Kerry's legislative record (such as it is). In twenty years, John Kerry has been an abomination as a leader in time of crisis.

Ballad of the Yellow Beret

Mark Dayton (via Powerline), explains last week's bugout in yesterday's Strib.

Dayton says:

I acted, based upon a top-secret Intelligence Report, dated Sept. 15, 2004, from the Counterterrorism Center in the Directorate of Central Intelligence. One officer of the Senate described the report as "the most declarative statement" from the national intelligence community that he had seen during his 30 years in intelligence and law enforcement.

As well it may have been - but only one of several statements, according to this piece in last Thursday's WaPo:

It was an extreme possibility on a menu of unknowns that had less-threatening options. All 535 members of Congress continued to work as usual until this week, when Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) shut his offices, sent his staff home and cautioned people against visiting Capitol Hill.

One possibility among many.

Dayton continues:

For now, however, the Senate itself is closed. I considered it irresponsible and immoral for me to return to the relative safety of Minnesota and leave my Washington staff exposed to unacceptable risks, of which I was aware and they were not.

And yet the "risks" of being in Washington DC are pretty well-known, according to DC's police chief, Charles Ramsey:

"It's not based on any credible information that's come in. Nobody knows why he is doing what he is doing," Ramsey said. "It doesn't take a brain surgeon to think that the White House and the Capitol are targets. But there is no credible information about planned attacks -- nothing to set off the reaction we saw."

Dayton continues, with emphasis added by me:

Some have said, from their own safety far away from Washington, that my action sends the wrong "message." My staff are not "messages." They are real people, named Jack, Chris, Laura, Demian and Delta. Most of them are young, and many are the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Minnesotans. Their lives are precious, and they are my responsibility.

"From our own safety?"

You were elected to the job, Senator Dayton! You're in DC because you wanted to be! Because your pals in the media pulled an epic slime-job on Rod Grams!

Do not sneer at me for being here in Minnesota. We're your "constituents". Remember us?

And while Jack, Chris, Laura, Demian and Delta are precious, so are the couple of million other people in the District of Columbia; if the news you got is so terrible, why don't you break ranks and share it?

Leaders lead by their examples, and they lead from the front lines during times of danger, not from the rear.

Put another way:

Brave Sir Robin ran away
Bravely, ran away...away...
When danger reared its ugly head
He bravely turned his tail and fled
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out
Bravely talking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin

Dayton continues:

If senators had wanted to send a message to the nation or the world, the Senate should have remained open through the election. There is plenty of unfinished work, which is scheduled for completion in a postelection session. Instead, at the decision of the majority leader, the Senate closed the earliest in my four years there, and members left town, leaving their staffs behind.

So while the Senate is out of session, the lives of Jack, Chris, Laura, Demian and Delta are precious to force you to close down your office - but if you were going to be in town debating dairy subsidies, Jack, Chris, Laura, Demian and Delta would be out of luck?

Oh, yeah - and speaking of "leading from the front", your leadership hasn't gone un-noticed:

"It's kind of scary to me that he might know something others don't," said Thomas Jordan, 45, a general laborer who has worked on the Senate side for a year after 10 years on the House side. "We just had a general meeting today -- we're supposed to have one every other Wednesday. . . . One of the staffers happened to bring it up -- that one of the senators had gotten a little paranoid."

Dayton continues:

No one can predict the future with certainty, and the intelligence report I read did not purport to do so. It did, however, identify a more likely period of time for a terrorist attack. Additionally, early this month CNN reported that Al-Qaida's No. 2 operative issued a statement on an Islamic Web site urging attacks on U.S. and British interests. His similar statement preceded the bombing in Madrid, just before Spain's election.

Their statements also preceded the Afghan war, the '02 elections, the UN deliberations on Iraq, the invasion of Iraq, the Olympics, the 2003 Cub Scout Jamboree, Arbor Day and the Daytime Emmies. It's what Al Quaeda does these days.

Scuttlebut has it, Senator Dayton, that you're not going to run for re-election; that your erratic performance of the last four years has rendered you a liability to your party.

Please, Senator Dayton - run for re-election. I relish the thought of being able to play a part, any part, in defeating you in open electoral combat.

City Pages Endorses Bush!

Well, not exactly the whole City Pages. A typical opinion in the Twin Cities' weekly freebie tabloid, known for paranoid liberal editorial opinion (about which more later), incoherent and dilletantish music criticism and, by the by, some excellent local hard-news reporting, is much more likely to fret about City Pages writers being shipped off to camps in Idaho than to support, or even fairly appraise, the President.

So I can only assume the ideological fact-checkers at the City Pages were in some electronica-induced haze of confusion when they let Dara Moskowitz' latest restaurant review slip through.

Moskowitz [emphasis mine]:

This would be a landmark in any town, but for St. Paul I feel like it's about more than dining--much, much more. I mean, think about it: Could it be possible that the idea of imminent financial doom has finally released its clench from the throat of hardworking St. Paul? Is it possible that the specter of the Great Depression is actually, finally, now, in the post-silicon, Pinot Noir-tinged present, lifting? And while we're at it, has anyone noted lately how essential to St. Paul F. Scott Fitzgerald is, he who above all equated glitter with doom, high flying with crashing, and splurging with divine fury?

Well, consider this your invitation to just toss history on the compost heap with last week's bananas because this is now, and splurging is currently equated with great value and satisfaction. I mean, now you can make a reservation at A Rebours and live in that glittering moment that the Great Gatsby should have been able to enjoy, if he could only have been a little less St. Paul and a little more ah...well, I don't want to say California here, and I don't want to say Monaco, exactly, but since A Rebours means, roughly, against the grain, perhaps what I mean to say is, a little less old St. Paul, and a little more A Rebours.

What city is more old-school DFL than Saint Paul? Indeed, in the review above, how can one not use Saint Paul itself as a metaphor for the traditional, joy-abnegating, paranoid, fear-choked radical left that...

...that is in control at the rest of the City Pages?

Good news, indeed. Enough to make you want to go out for a celebratory dinner.

Someplace less expensive, though. I'm a conservative.

News Flash: More Liberal Tools Endorse Kerry!

Mark from New Patriot notes that morenewspapers are endorsing John Kerry, in a move that should shock the casual observer, since it's not only exactly what they have done in every election in recent memory, but it's exactly what every Republican has been predicting with a wry grin since the beginning of the campaign - with one stunning exception.

Desrosiers says:

This probably says more about Bush's singularly awful performance as President than it does about Kerry's greatness.

Or - I suggest this is more likely - it says that the liberal-slanted mainstream media had their endorsements written long before the campaign began; had the Democrat convention endorsed a set of wind-up chattering teeth for President, the New York Times would be saying "We believe that with Mr. Windup Chatteringteeth as president, the nation will do better."

Desrosiers gets one thing right, however, proving that the local leftybloggers are better than the giggly fratboys that dominate leftyblogs nationwide:

In fact, most of the endorsments I read today seem to do more kicking around of Bush than praising of Kerry

I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

UPDATE: Welcome, visitors from Pandagon - two of the guys I had in mind when I said our local leftybloggers were better than the national ones. By the way, when they say I'm "playing to type" - er, yeah. I'm a conservative, and a critic of the media. Can't sneak a thing past 'em!

While you're here, check out my good friends at Fraters. They noticed a few odd, er, synchronicities in the various endorsements. Think about it for a while.

But hey - welcome! Feel free to engage in reasoned conversation. Then go back and show the Wonder Twins how to do it!

Off Message?

The City Pages prominently runs an interview with Andrew Borene, former Marine intelligence officer and a leader of "Veterans for Kerry".

I'm not one to quibble with the experiences of someone who was in Iraq. However, I'd have to question whether it's a great surprise that someone who went to Breck School and MacAlester College - both of which are factories that crank out young liberals - would end up a Kerry supporter, with or without a hitch in the Marine Corps.

Indeed, almost as an afterthought the article notes:

I guess I used to be what they call "Republican in name only." Kind of a Ramstad Republican, you know--socially liberal and fiscally conservative.

As if that's not relevant.

But I thought this contradiction was interesting: Borene - who was a junior lieutenant on the intelligence staff of the First Marine Division - decries the fact that occupation of Iraq is being handled as a regular military mission...:

This sideshow in Iraq where we send 150,000 teenagers without enough equipment to manage the occupation...

...after which Borene opines...:

How do you get them? You use special forces, you use intelligence operations, you find a couple of them and drop some black helicopters and guys in black pajamas, and you whack them. And that's the kind of operation we need to launch. This sideshow in Iraq where we send 150,000 teenagers without enough equipment to manage the occupation, and without the kind of international support we needed for that battle on the Iraqi front, it really detracted from our ability globally to stop the spread of terror.

So let me get this straight:

• The Administration has dealt with the campaign in Afghanistan from the beginning, as today, as a special forces operation, exactly as Borene describes,

  but...

• Bush is wrong for having taken the regular military elements of CENTCOM - the big, heavy units with their tanks and self-propelled artillery and huge supply chains - to Iraq, rather than Afghanistan, where...
• According to even Borene, they're not needed?

Am I the only one who notices this?

Jiggered?

Steve DenBeste returns from hiatus with accusation:

In my opinion, the polls were being deliberately gimmicked, in hopes of helping Kerry. In early August it looks as if there was an attempt to engineer a "post-convention bounce", but it failed and was abandoned after about two weeks. But I'm not absolutely certain about that.

The data for September, however, is clearly an anomaly. The data is much too consistent. Compare the amount of jitter present before September to the data during that month. There's no period before that of comparable length where the data was so stable.

I've been wondering about the major polls for quite some time, the way the oversampling changed over time.

Den Beste has a graph that illustrates his point:

I've circled the part in question.

There's no doubt that the lead has see-sawed over the course of the race. But notice the other changes in leads; the numbers have wavered back and forth with a saw-toothed wave; they've transitioned in a natural flow.

When reading a graph, and you see the abrupt, square-wave changes you see in the circled area, it pretty much inevitably means something has stepped in to alter the normal flow.

That, as I was saying at the time in what I thought was a too-cynical aside, was the major magazines jiggering the polls to set up Kerry for a big rush.

If there's a rational alternate explanation, let's hear it. Note: "It just happened! Get over it!" won't cut it.

Synchronicity?

Elder from Fraters Libertas on the lock-step, talking-point-like synchronicity odd, surely coincidental similarities between the NyTimes and Strib's endorsements of John Kerry.

Slippery Weasel vs. Lying Weasel

The difference:

• Saying "I have a plan..." when you don't have one makes you a slippery weasel.
• Saying "My opponent has a plan..." when he doesn't have one - say, to implement a draft - makes you a Lying Weasel.

That is all.

Sign of Desperation?

Days after Kerry's "victory" (according to the media and the lefty blogs) in the third debate, most polls show a slight Bush lead. Nothing to get remotely complacent about - the 72 plan will not be wasted in this election - but things are feeling better than they did before the convention.

So how hard-up are the Dems for some good news?

Atrios today plugs a poll that shows Kerry up 50-47.

The latest Democracy Corps poll which just landed in my inbox has Kerry up by 3.

Democracy Corps? Who 'dat? [emphases mine]:

Democracy Corps is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people. It was founded in 1999 by James Carville, Stanley Greenberg, and Bob Shrum. Democracy Corps provides free public opinion research and strategic advice to those dedicated to a more responsive Congress and Presidency.

So perhaps the real story is that a DNC front group like "Democracy Corps", run by the likes of Shrum, Greenberg and Carville, could only gin up a three-point lead for Kerry.

And lest you were wondering:

Bob Shrum has taken a leave of absence from Democracy Corps while he is working on John Kerry’s Presidential campaign.

Of course.

Common Decency

Hugh Hewitt's Weekend Symposium question is a good one: "How deep a hole have John Kerry, Mary Beth Cahill and the Edwards dug for themselves? How lasting the damage?

Before I answer this, I have to ask myself a question: how cynical do I feel about my fellow American?

I thought about it for a moment, and answered "pretty dang cynical".

Let's talk about it.

What does it take to be a Kerry supporter in this election?

To buy the Kerry line to the point that you consider him presidential material, you have to simultaneously believe that:

• George W. Bush was responsible for a recession that began well before he was nominated to run for the Presidency
• That tax cuts on "the wealthy" were responsible for the job losses during the recession,
• that "targeted" tax cuts given to score political points rather than foster contribution to the overall economy will be the cure...
• ...for an economy that's growing at a healthy clip
• That Bush "lied" by using a justification for war in Iraq that Bill Clinton and, incidentally, John Kerry and much of the liberal media wholeheartedly endorsed when their party was in power
• that John Kerry, internationalist extraordinaire who publicly called for a "global test" on American self-defense, would act first and foremost in America's best interest
• That "letting inspectors..." who work for an international body that was paid-off and in the tank for Hussein "...do their job" would ever have twigged to any weapons programs that Hussein did have,
• that porous sanctions imposed half-heartedly by paid-off politicians who had a fiscal interest in the sanctions' removal would even remain in force, much less break Hussein's stride
• that a candidate who has spent his entire political career subverting and short-changing our military, either by commission (his "Winter Soldier" testimony, his meetings with the North Vietnamese in Paris) or omission (his impatient frenzy to cash in the "Peace Dividend" by downsizing and down-budgeting the military in the nineties, and his votes under a variety of motivations against a fair chunk of our current military arsenal) will be tough on defense in the middle of a war,
• that a man who believes that terrorism in the eighties and nineties was ever a "nuisance", and that fat 'n happy, ignorant "nuisance"-hood is a desirable state for the nation's foreign policy has the faintest intention to "hunt down and destroy" terrorists
• that a man who has stated he'd respond to "imminent" threats - from an enemy who operates in complete, cloistered secrecy and whose operations are incredibly resistant to intelligence-gathering efforts - is capable of even recognizing the threat we face, much less effectively dealing with it
• That ceding our health care system to government control will, in abeyance of market laws, make health care simultaneously more affordable and yet better (all the while with John Edwards' strings being pulled by the Plaintiff's Bar)
• That decades of voting for abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are consistent with the rigorous Catholic faith of the good altar-boy

Given a population segment that must simultaneously buy all of those premises (or choke back their horror at them, which may be worse), how big a stretch is it to assume that they'd be equally facile at ignoring the deeply-hypocritical assault on Mary Cheney's privacy and basic human dignity?

To become part of Kerry's base, you must ignore so much reality, suspend so much disbelief, and employ such Kerri-Strug-like logical gymnastics, it beggars the imagination to believe anyone in that base would even bat an eye at their candidate's hypocritical, calculated "faux pas".

Among the swing voter? You must again ask yourself how cynical you feel about your fellow voter.

I live in Saint Paul, heart of liberal darkness, and Twin City of Minneapolis, "Berkeley on the Prairie". I may not be the one to ask.

The Politics Of Recreation

I went to a meeting this morning in downtown Minneapolis.

In the elevator up to the branch office, I stood next to a couple - a very well-padded late-fortysomething woman wearing a Kedwards button on her coat (which looked like it had come pretty recently from Nordstrom's) and a short, thin, stooped fiftysomething guy with the sort of short, well-trimmed gray beard that screams "longtime MPR contributor and work for a non-profit".

WOMAN: Well, I'd love to be able to go visit Europe without having to worry about people attacking me for being American.

GUY: Yeah. I think we'll have to count on vacationing in a Blue state this year!

WOMAN: (somewhat animated) But I'd really like to be able to visit Europe sometime in my life. Maybe I'll just tell them I'm a Canadian!"

(GUY and WOMAN leave elevator)

Let me tell you a story.

Back in 1983, I went to Europe. The trip started with a three week tour with the Jamestown College Choir, and ended with a few weeks of bumming around the continent and the UK.

It was, of course, at the height of the Cold War. Anti-American feeling was pretty intense in some quarters.

I remember one night at a nearly-deserted dormitory we were bunking at in Paris (at L'Ecole Centrale d'Arts et Manufactures, for those familiar with the area, in the south 'burb of Chatenay Malabry - sort of the Burnsville of Paris), just after giving a concert at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Paris was riven with riots at the time - students were up in arms over, if I recall correctly, the price of croissant in their cafeterias, and were looting and burning much of central Paris in retaliation. A few of my choirmates and I (Ron Monson, "Tuba" Moser, Rich Larson, Mark Strobel and I, if memory serves) were sitting on the stoop, comparing notes about what we'd seen in the city. Suddenly, fireworks started going off all around us. A couple of Frog college boys were dropping Chats Noirs from the third floor. We restrained ourself from running upstairs on a Search and Destroy, which was probably best for us and them (the average French man is smaller than my dog, and we were all corn-fed North Dakota guys). It was June 6th, if memory serves. Welcome to France? Glad to be here, Nozzeules Du Ass.

Later that evening, I went across the street, alone, to grab a beer. Background: If I have a big advantage over most tourists, it's that I'm completely unafraid to try other languages. You could send me to Vietnam, and within a day I'll try to order my meal in Vietnamese; I might order Bun Heo Nuong (grilled skewered porkchops on cellophane noodles), and end up with boiled dog lungs on toast (or in jail), but I'll keep trying, and eventually be able to take care of business. I was doing this in French; it was the only language my high school offered that I never took (I took a year each of Latin and Spanish, in addition to three of German, in which I also minored in college), but I'd spent the previous couple of days picking up the survival-level stuff I needed ("Deux Bier, s'il vous plait!", "A bas l'Francais!", "Les Chars Blindees! Les Chars d'Allemagne! Allez Vite! Allez!", and "Attencion, Monquiez Surrendeux aux consommez du Fromage"), and had a good enough ear to deliver my pigeon-French with a German accent.

So I walked into a bar, and ordered a Belle Strasbourgoise (sp?) beer, piling on the German accent thickly enough to cover my Americanness, but not enough to provoke panic and surrender. "Deux Franc, said the bartender - two francs, about thirty cents back then. Vive la France, I thought as I paid, and tipped one to boot, and settled back to watch the scenery.

A group of Americans came in, jabbering in English. The bartender cocked an eyebrow at Frenchman sitting two seats down (who smiled back), and went to take the order.

He addressed the Yanks in French, natch. "We'll have four BELL STRASBURG BEERS", replied a twentysomething woman in a U of Michigan sweatshirt, leaning on BEERS as if extra emphasis would make the order more clear.

"Quatre Strasboo", responded the bartender. He poured the drinks, and went back to the Americans. "Trawsomm Fronc" (I told you I wasn't good at French), he asked. The Americans paid thirty francs for the four beers.

They more than tripled the price when they heard the accent.

I'm thinking today - I'll bet those Americans would have paid the regular market price for those beers if we'd elected Jimmy Carter, instead. Right?

Right?

Simple fact: The French detest us. They almost always have, barring a couple of times where their national survival hinged on our ignoring that fact. America was their Waterloo long before Waterloo was; the Seven Years War and the Louisiana Purchase were a great turning point in French history, and not a good one; the loss of their territories in the Western Hemisphere represented the beginning of the ebb of French imperial designs. Sure, they sent us guns, troops and ships during the Revolution - because they saw our revolution as a thorn in Britain's side; when we didn't turn into a French client state (indeed, when we fought a brief, undeclared war against France in the early 1800s), the animosity returned, where except for the odd period or two where we saved their asses, it's been there ever since. (Sure, some French love us. God bless 'em. As France will be becoming a Moslem nation in the next half-century or so, good luck to 'em).

Other Euro nations and peoples think lots of things about us, from the contemptuous to the admiring. It comes from a lot of sources; historical and territorial envy, contempt for American society, art, values, faiths, occasional gratitude for the hundreds of thousands of boys we lost convincing the Europeans that mutual self-destruction was outre...

But whatever the source, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself when the subject of European (especially French) attitudes toward the US go:

• If those tourists who got screwed in that bar in Chatenay Malabry in 1983 had had the ability to do so, should they have traded victory in the Cold War in for a fair price on their beer?
• Had we been able to, should my choirmates and I have traded freedom for hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans for our peaceful conversation?
• Is the putative tranquility of my well-padded elevator-mate's hypothetical future spree down the Champs D'Elysees a worthy swap for leaving the world's terrorist breeding grounds unmolested, and France's source of blood graft undisturbed?

  And finally,

• Do you think that if America were conquered by, say, Iranians, a single Frenchman would volunteer to storm ashore on any beach, anywhere on the Eastern seaboard, to liberate us?

Just curious.

Rationality Rears Its Transient Head

Amid all the lefty howling over Sinclair Broadcasting's airing of Stolen Honor next week, Josh "ua Micah" Marshall has what amounts (in context) to a sane, responsible idea.

He writes:

A thought.

I understand that George Soros is a rather wealthy man. Perhaps he should announce that he is interested in buying 90 minutes of prime time air time on Sinclair Broadcasting to show either Fahrenheit 9/11 or, even more appropriately, Going Upriver, the new movie out about John Kerry during the Vietnam era.

Great idea, Josh!...

Er, except why just Sinclair stations?

If Sinclair won't sell the time, they're exposed for what they already clearly are. If the FEC won't allow it, on the premise that it amounts to a de facto campaign contribution to the Democrats or the Kerry campaign, then the folly of our current campaign laws is exposed.

Yeah! He's onto something!

Here's what we conservatives should do: Buy a couple of hours on Air America to protest their slanted, biased views!

Oh, wait - they'd reject it, because they have a First Amendment right to broadcast a liberal agenda. OK, fair enough.

So how about we get a group to buy ad time on commercial broadcast stations to redress the active spin against that group's cause? Say, the NRA, maybe? They have (allegedly) deep pockets...

...oh, wait. That was tried in the nineties. The networks and many local affiliates rejected NRA-sponsored ads intended to correct lies told about them by the likes of Sara Brady. Nothing compels them to carry advertising that counters their agenda, apparently.

Oy. So apparently Josh "ua"'s idea...:

I doubt somehow that Soros would ever end up having to spend the money. But he has a big enough checkbook to force the issue.

...is doomed.

Liberals are obviously singled out for discrimination in the media!

Resounding Kerry Victory

As the "Pundogarchy" noted after the third debate on Wednesday, it's groaningly obvious that John Kerry won; in fact, as they were saying within seconds of the end of the debate, Kerry's numbers were booming in the polls to reflect that resounding Kerry victory:

President Bush (news - web sites) opened a four-point lead on Democratic Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) the day after the final debate between the White House rivals, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Friday.

Bush led Kerry 48-44 percent in the latest three-day tracking poll, which included one night of polling done after Wednesday's debate in Tempe, Arizona. Bush led Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts, by only one point, 46-45 percent, the previous day.

Kerry pulled one out when he needed it, obviously.

As the pundogarchy also noted, Kerry clobbered Bush among undecideds:

An improvement in Bush's showing among undecideds and a strong response from his base Republican supporters helped fuel the president's rise.

"The good news for the president is that he has improved his performance among the small group of undecideds," said pollster John Zogby, who found 6 percent of likely voters are undecided. "Nearly a quarter now say that he deserves to be re-elected, up from 18 percent in our last poll."

Kerry clearly had the President's lunch, as the pundogarchs said he did. And those overnight flash polls (no, not Flash polls, the other kind) that showed Kerry winning by a 2:1, 4:1 or 25:1 margin - the ones that had Oliver "Giggly Fratboy" Willis chuckling all day yesterday - were deadly accurate.

As a crestfallen, depressed Captain Ed reminds us, we need to watch what the candidates do, as Kerry, his confidence swollen by his resounding victory in the debate, takes the battle (Ed hypothesizes) into newly-ripe-for-the-picking Bush territory:

As Jim Geraghty at Kerry Spot advises, watch carefully which states each candidate visits over the next three days. I predict that outside of Ohio, Kerry spends all of his time in Gore states, while Bush spends most of his in Gore states as well. Defense vs. offense -- it tells you what the professional polls really show.

Kerry won. Kerry won all three debates, in fact. Kerry is a strong, strong closer, he sure is.

I'm taking my two kids and their two friends to a movie. Good thing I have enough cash for five admissions.

Where Was This When I Needed It?

This Murphy's Law Calculator would have saved me a whole lot of trouble.

Or at least helped me quantify it.

Surprise

As you've no doubt heard, US and Iraqi forces are in action in Fallujah, in what appears to be an escalating series of raids into the city.

The military is playing their intentions close to the vest:

Maj. Francis Piccoli, spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told The Associated Press that two Marine battalions were engaged in the fight backed up by aircraft.

He would not say the attack was the start of a major campaign to recapture the city, saying he did not want to jeopardize any future operations.

Piccoli said the goal of the operation was to ''disrupt the capabilities of the anti-Iraqi forces.''

Speaking as someone who has grown deeply cynical over the media's role in this election and in trying to shape US policy, this remark from Gandelman was interesting:

And the L.A. Times piece [claiming that the administration was holding off on offensive operations untl after the election] may have been "information" released as a smokescreen to gain the elementary of surprise. As someone who worked on a newspaper I can attest that there is an ongoing battle about whom will use whom -- will the source use the reporter or the reporter use the source? In this case, this certainly qualifies as a major military operation -- so it looks as if military sources used misinformation to lull the "insurgents" into a false sense of normalcy..

Did it work against the insurgents? Possibly.

It seemed to work against the less-astute lefty bloggers...

Make A Wish

I started in radio by hanging around the studio at KEYJ in Jamestown, ND when I was 15. My pal Dick Ingstad, a year ahead of me in high school, worked there (he had the genes - his oldest brother is LA megajock Shadow Stevens). Even before I started, though, there was one big thing, one Holy Grail of broadcasting, that always called out to me.

My favorite moments in radio are the ones when large, life-altering events are going on; even in high school, I loved working during tornado warnings, for example. There's a buzz and crackle about being on the air when things are happening, when you're tracking a world of faster-than-real-time developments and trying to digest them and make them understandable and get them on the air that's as pure a drug as I've ever had.

The big kahuna? Since I was 10 years old, I've wanted to do a Presidential election-night broadcast.

It might just happen this year. Things are still "developing hot" as Drudge would say, but stay tuned.

Base The Vote

The WaPo reviews the new, post-debate George W. Bush:

The president is selling conservatism a lot harder than compassion these days. His "uniter, not a divider" persona seems a quaint vestige, and in recent days, his stump speech has been especially rife with ridicule for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry. He routinely calls his opponent "dangerous," and mocks him repeatedly as a "Massachusetts liberal" and someone who sits on the "left bank" of the American mainstream.

Bush has effectively ended his direct appeal to swing voters, his aides say, and will spend the next 19 days speaking to his hard-core supporters. He will remind them to vote, work hard and get excited.

Thing is, I think he'll win over a lot more undecideds - the ones who are still undecided after all of this campaigning - by going directly to the right anyway.

It's going to be a fun three weeks.

Those Big-Government, High-Tax Republicans

Steve Gigl on the Strib's moronic endorsement of Kerry in an editorial today.

I was going to rip this one myself before work cold-cocked me. But Steve has the goods.

The Strib loves Republicans, as long as they're the Arne Carlson/Elmer Anderson-style "DFL-Lite" Republicans...

Kerry's Plan - Via Python

Kevin Murphy, on Kerry's plan as interpreted by Monty Python:

Moderator: You have a new plan.

Senator Kerry: Can I just say here Chris for one moment that I have a new plan?

Moderator: Er... exactly. (he gestures but she does not say anything) What is it?

Senator Kerry: Where? (looks round)

Moderator: No, no. Your new plan.

Senator Kerry: Oh, what is my plan?

Moderator: Yes.

Senator Kerry: Oh what is my plan that it is. Well Chris you may well ask me what is my plan.

Moderator: I am asking.

Senator Kerry: Good for you. My word yes. Well Chris, what is it that it is - this plan of mine. Well, this is what it is - my plan that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine.

Moderator: (beginning to show signs of exasperation) Yes, I know it's yours, what is it?

Senator Kerry: Where? Oh, what is my plan? This is it. (clears throat at some length) My plan that belongs to me is as follows. (clears throat at great length) This is how it goes. The next thing I"m going to say is my plan. Ready?

Moderator: Yes!

Senator Kerry: My plan by J Kerry. Brackets Senator, brackets. This plan goes as follows and begins now. I will spend more at the beginning, still more in the middle and then more again at the end. That is my plan, it is mine, and belongs to me and I own it, and what it is too.

That does it. I have to do an "Upper Middle Class Twit of the Year Contest" featuring Kerry, Silkypony and Terayza...

Why Bush Won

John Kerry had boundless stores of facts (leave aside that many were obfuscatory, contradictory or wrong). He noodled endlessly (within the context of 90-second statements) about the minutiae of one program or another. He pecked away at the periphery of many of the President's points.

Kerry sounded Senatorial - in the good and bad senses of the term.

Bush focused on the big picture. I've read a bunch of the leftybloggers in the last 12 hours; they thought this was a weakness of Bush's. I think they're wrong. People don't look to the President to be in full wonkish command of all the facts and figures of government; that was Algore's problem, and I think it's Kerry's, too.

Bush sounded like a President. More importantly - and I bet the polls show this - Bush sounded like people think a President should sound.

Different Worlds

Read Oliver Willis' take on the debates.

Tell me he was watching the same debate we were.

Picture the sound his head is going to make when it explodes Election evening...

Wrapup

Craig westover: "Can't score it - but the first debate where bush was on the offenseive".

King Banaian: "Bush won 10-9 on his own merits, but deduct a point from KErry ont he faith question. Kerry shoulda shut up!"

Scott Johnson: "10-8 bush, but without much confidence in my judgement. KErry seemed like a synthetic person who doesn't believe his own bullshit any more. Kerrry's answers to some of his criticisms is more spending..."

Captain Ed: "Stomp!" I presume that means Bush won...

King echoes (and calls my attentio to Hewitt): "The worst fumble by Kerry: Not answering the cost question on health care."

Jo fro Jo's Attic: "I"m biased, but I think KErry's spinning his tires. That sounds confident, but that's how I feel..."

Swiftee - "Dubya did wha the needed to tonight..."

End of the night

End of the night - HUUUUGE Standing O!"

Anoka Flash (token libeeral in teh crowd): "I go with thwat I said before - Bush looked rested up. I think the polls will show Bush won -he far exceeded expectations. Thought Bush was sharp (in delivery) tonight...

Marrying UP?

KErry's "I'm an example of someone who married up..." HUUUUUUGE gale of laughter. Brian "Saint Paul" Ward - "That's the first time KErry's smiled all night..."

Kerry's "integrity, Integrity, Integrity" line; I asked for a show of hands for everyone who thought it felt forced. Meg from Bush/Cheney: "See how he struggled with that? If he cant' talk about how he loves his family, how can he serve his country?"

Moonbat Alert

"When people pray for me, I can feel it". Oy, vey, the moonbats are going to spit froth all over that one...

Kerry: "Freedom is a gift from the allmighty - no, everything is a gift from the almighty!" What's this, one-upmanship? The crowd is razzing Kerry mercilessly...

At the NARN Table...

Brian "Saint Paul" Ward - "I hope it's not just the booze talking, but I think Bush is hitting a home run".

Around the Room, Part IV

Scott Johnson - "It's pretty even".

Ed: " I think Bush is doing great"

Kerry: "One combat division, one support division". Huh? What is a support division?"

Margaret Martin: "President is kililng him - he ate his wheaties!"

Dwight Rabuse - "Bush is comfortable with himself in a way he wasn't in the first two debates, and engaging Kerry directly in a way he didn't before..."

Around the Room again

Random guy in a 173rd Airborne Brigade sweater: "I think the first debate bush was sizing him up, the second one he was plaing with him, and this time he's crushing him".

Marion and Nathan - "Bush is very active and accurate. THis is the best he's done".

Tablefull of bloggers, includng John form Crazy but Able and Steve from Helloooooo Chapter 2: John: "I'd even take a flawed plan for health care - he NEVER gives specifics!"

Pat, sitting with the PRotest Warriors: "Bush is like hitting it out of the ball park! He's cathcing Kerry in every lie, and holding his feet to the fire! We actually have a moderator who's asking Kerry a tough question!"

JOhn "Policy Guy" LaPlante - "Bush is talking like a wonk - but he's not really making all the points. But he's a politician who needs to get votes. I think he needs to translate policy points into moral points; why is privatization important, for example..."

Meg from Bush/Cheney - "I'm middle class, but he's not saying aything to me. All the stuff about evokig God's name is driving me insane! My family s benfitting, becaues my husband brings homne more money, and we feel safer since 9/11. Call it "Cowboy v. Nancyboy. Dan Rather must be crappig his pants. ".

Laura from Bush/Cheney - "Bob Schieffer is being a LAMB tonight; you can thank the Powerline guys for that!"

Larry from Bush/Cheney - "Did he just say we should fingerprint all aliens?"

Wandering the room

8:26 - BUsh on sanctity of marriage - biggest round of applause of the night. Boom.

Talked with Nancy from ProtestWarrior - "Bush is rocking!"

8:28 - Teresa, "I think Bush is n the offenseive".

8:30 - Bartender: "They're tipping pretty good, considering they're not drinking all that much." That's actually a pretty good endorsement, I think.

8:31 - Larry, from the Bush/Cheney campaign: "Bush is getting all the homerun lines". Laura from B/C - 'protect the earth, but not the babies?" Larry: "Kerry's babbling!"

8:32 - Flipped over to Matt Yglesias' blog. He's carping about how Bush's mouth looks. Tooooooo wierd. Way to focus on the things that matter, leftyblogs!

8:36 - Rocket man: "He's walking right into a trap on the flu vaccine...Bush is doing very, very well!". Rocket man likes it. Rocket man hates everything! Listening to Kerry talking about healthcare, Craig Westover: "That's why we're having a problem with the flu vaccine..."

8:38 - Captain Ed - "KErry's been very defensive so far...Bush is doing very well">

Long-suffering Jay Larson - "I came up to the front to sit - people in the back are getting amost livid!"

Cindy: "Kerry's not doing so well this evening - he's not answering the questions - he's out of touch with the average American, and he just repeats and repeats what he's been saying for weeks - I think te prsident is doing a much better job - appearing realistic, yet conveying strength. I mean, we know he can't put these things in place without taxes!

Observations!

8:14 - Every time Kerry says "I have a plan", the crowd goes nuts. I don't think Kerry's going over.

"Bush seems like he got a nap - he's much sharper tonight"

8:16 - during Bush's "His rhetoric doesn't match his record" quote. "YOu pay and he goes ahead and spends..." - the walls are shaking, baby!

Rocketman - "So far so good!" THAT is saying a lot!

Asked a random guy in the crowd "how's it going"? "It sounds awfully familiar..."

8:20 - Kerry rips on the cutting of Pell grants; smattering of applause in the crowd.

Asked "The Doctor" how Bob Schieffer is doing: "He's warming up". He seems - 20 minutes into the debate - to be trying to keep even-handed...

8:24 - Jack from Edina: "Bush is on f**cking fire!! When he gets going...I don't like when he get sinto a bidding war wtih Kerry, but I'll overlook it..."

8:25 - Kerry's bogged down in Pell Grant trivia - Bush is sticking to the big picture. BIG plus for Bush, I think.

From the crowd

8:11 - Anoka Flash from Centrisity: "I went to the bar and told them that Im surrounded by Republians -make it a double!"

Debate kickoff

8:00 - John "Rocket Man" Hinderaker got the crowd pretty cranked up - so now that we're on the air, it's like sitting in the "Rocky Horror Picture Show".

8:07 - you should have heard the crowd when Bush invoked the "nuisance" line. Amazing. The crowd is jazzed.

Sign being handed out...

Just vote for us and you will get up out of that wheelchair and walk.

Posted by Mitch at 08:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack