I sent this to Councilman Thune and his assistant:

Councilman Thune,

Mitch Berg here.

I just got off the phone with Ms. Lindgren, who said she’d leave a message for you. It occurred to me that she never asked me for any contact information – an oversight, I’m sure. In any case, I’m writing to follow up.

I’d like to extend an open-ended invitation to join Ed Morrissey and I this weekend on the Northern Alliance broadcast, any time between 1PM and 3PM, at your convenience. We’d love to discuss to your statements, in public and on the Saint Paul Information Forum, about the 28-40% of your constituents who vote Republican, and are (or so you seem to believe) drunken, puking, drug-dealing warmongers.

Now, I know that every time I’ve requested an interview in the past, you’ve pled “busy”. And I know you’re a busy guy, and respect that fact.

So in the interest of reaching “across the aisle” to make sure you’re able to communicate with Saint Paul’s Republicans, and the other Republicans nationwide who’ll be travelling to *our* city, I’d like to stress that this invitation is good for ANY SATURDAY between now and the end of human existence on this or any planet (or your retirement or ejection from politics, whichever comes first). You can come into the studio, or appear via phone – whatever’s most convenient!

If you are not available on a Saturday, I will be happy to *tape* an interview with you, in studio or via phone, at ANY TIME convenient to you, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I will also be happy to meet you with a tape recorder, any place, any time, at your leisure (provided I’m not incapacitated by fits of drunken vomiting and delirium tremens). You, as an elected official, DESERVE the opportunity to reach across the aisle and speak with the 28-40% of your constituents who likely voted against the DFL and you, but whom you nevertheless still represent as president of the city council of one of America’s great cities.

Finally, in the unlikely event that you can’t free up fifteen minutes between now and the end of time for a radio interview, I’d like to submit some questions – under separate cover, obviously – for you to answer at your leisure via email. Pardon my presumption, but this seems reasonable, given that I am a Saint Paul taxpayer.

I will hope you will do me the estimable honor of responding to this invitation (which I’m making public via my various blogs and, this weekend, the show), rather than having to lead a contingent of “drunk, puking, warmongering, drug-dealing, family-values-flouting” Saint Paul Republicans to deliver it in person at an upcoming City Council meeting.

Sincerely,

Mitch Berg
Sober, peace-loving Republican and 21-year Saint Paul Taxpayer

Northern Alliance Radio Network
AM1280thepatriot.com

Shot In The Dark
www.shotinthedark.info

I’ll keep y’all posted.

Last week, the Saint Paul City Council rejected the idea of allowing bars in Saint Paul to stay open an extra two hours during the week of the convention.

Fair enough. No biggie.

Except that the rationale of Councilman Dave Thune was that he didn’t want thousands of Republican lobbyists “puking” on his lawn.

Now, Dave’s a jocular guy. And I know as well as anyone that people will josh around, especially when the subject is partisan politics.

Still – in a purple state, and in a city where between 30-40% of the city does generally vote Republican – the remark was considered inflammatory enough that Senator Sandy Pappas – who represents the same general area at the Capitol that Thune does in City Hall – felt obliged to apologize for Councilman Thune at the podium in the Senate last week.

So what does Dave Thune really think?

Over at the Saint Paul Information Forum – an email discussion group that purports to be open to all, but is basically a DFL hive and news-release outlet – Thune elaborated over the weekend. Read the whole thing at the link, because he slips in some modestly sensible stuff before the really defamatory howler), but to save space I’m going to excerpt it a bit.

It’s a long email – and it makes a few good points. I’m hacking out most of it, but to be fair, he notes…:

Its hard work to be a good owner/neighbor, refereeing domestic disputes and picking up litter and hosing down sidewalks the next morning. I like bars (believe it or not) and I like bars to be on our commercial streets and in our neighborhoods, but I am no fool and I know that:

1. The adjacent homeowners and neighbors will hate the 4 AM close time.
2. There is no way to rule that only a few “select” bars can be open til 4.
You either let them all, or none. The law protects them all equally.
3. Limiting 4AM closing to downtown still puts them beside residences who pay as much taxes as you do and did not purchase a condo on Bourbon Street – they chose Wabasha, Minnesota or Wall Streets.
4. Limiting to downtown is in reality unworkable because you would be
leaving out the popular Mancinis, O’Gara’s and Dixie’s bars.
5. We’ve been told that the cost of law enforcement due to extended hours is upwards to half a million bucks – payable via your property taxes.
6. The test of a great city is not how long you can drink alchohol. To hear
a legislator say that we just don’t want to be a big city is insulting and
obviously the words of a moron.

OK. So far so good. A few minor logical howlers, but nothing we can’t expect from a DFL poobah.

Fasten your seatbelts. The rest of this post is a bumpy ride.

I also know that ocassionally I speak frankly and with a bit of passion.
But I am angry that this is being suggested, to cater to a “special” group
of conventioneers who will be judging us predominately by our bar hours. I am more than a little irritated that cities are being played off against
each other (“we can’t be at a competitive disadvantage”).

It’s called the “Free Market”, Mr. Thune, and cities do compete with each other – ferociously – for conventions.

Now, let’s move to the last bit. And in doing so, remember who’s actually coming to Saint Paul for the convention. Lobbyists? Sure! They go wherever government business is transacted; you can expect there’ll be plenty of ’em here. Media, too – by the tens of thousands. GOP staffers and politicians? Yep. Demonstrators, of course – and Dave Thune has already gone far out of his way to make them feel welcome.

And – most of all, the people around whom the whole event is actually centered; delegates. Thousands of ’em. And their families. And who are these people? Regular folks; working stiffs who’ve plugged away working for the GOP long enough to be recognized; in many cases, being a national delegate is a reward for years, even decades, of phone-banking and fund-raising and walking door-to-door handing out literature and counting ballots at precinct caucuses. Work-a-daddy, hug-a-mommy schlemiels who, through the grace of their state conventions, get to spend a week in Saint Paul participating in a political ritual at once ridiculous and vital to our functioning democracy.
People like you and I and, as it happens, Dave Thune.

People that, at first glance, seem unlikely to puke on Dave Thune’s lawn, at least to you and I…

…but not, apparently, to Dave Thune.

I add emphasis below:

Finally, I may have unfairly sullied the reputation of lobbyists. My friend
[redacted, a lobbyist] pointed out that lobbyists don’t puke, they’re professionals who have experience holding their liquor. Its the amateurs who spew.

He may be right, but the particular lobbyists we’ll have in town that week
are the ones who have initiated this whole discussion.

And of course these are the lobbyists who brought us an illegal and tragic war, a recession, polluted water, expensive drugs, and even the moralists who preach family values but play “outside the box” themselves. They are enough to make me queasy without a snootful…

Sorry Sandy, I don’t apologize.

dave thune
ward 2

Wow.

So a city crammed (for a week) full of responsible, hard-working Americans whose only real “crime” is disagreeing with Dave Thune on politics provoke that much hatred?

This guy is the president of the city council in one of America’s great cities?

If you’re one of the 30-40% of Saint Paul’s voters who vote Republican, this is your government talking (and talking informally among friends; remember, the “Saint Paul Information Forum” is a DFL club in all but name), what does this say to you? Maybe that while the city loves your money (you plutocratic, cigar-smoking Republican, you!), they hate you to the point of venting noxious bilge like this – in private, among friends, anyway?

If you’re one of the Republicans who’s coming to Saint Paul, and planning on spending money (at premium rates, no less) and stuffing the coffers of these two ideological gulags, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, what do you think? Did you start any wars, wreck any economies, pollute any water, import any drugs or cheat on your spouses?

Ask Councilman Thune. Here’s the City of Saint Paul City Council website.

And I’ll be inviting him onto the NARN to elaborate on these statements.

I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE:  Welcome, Powerline readers.  I follow up this story here, here, here and here.

And we’re not done yet.

Andy Birkey is very, very concerned about violence at the Republican National Convention this September.

Well, at least about violence that hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of ever happening – like the button-pushing comment of a couple of morning talk show hosts.

The Twin Cities’ newest conservative talk show host has an idea for managing the thousands of protesters coming to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September: machine guns.

Chris Baker, formerly a talk radio host in Houston, took over the morning spot on KTLK in early March. On Friday, he took issue with the debate among Minneapolis law enforcement personnel as to whether police should limit the use of Tasers and pepper spray on protesters in Minneapolis (link to audio file). Baker’s suggestion is violent suppression of what he calls “stinky protesters” that are part of “an industry funded by billionaires and communist organizations (and) they are well-coordinated and incredibly dangerous.”

Dog bites man. The MNMon gets its monthly stipends from Mr. Soros. A talk show host pushes peoples’ buttons to elicit a controversial, emotional reaction from everyone in the audience, thereby generating more publicity, ergo more traffic.

Which doesn’t fit?

Trick question, of course; they’re all the same.

Baker continued: “So we’ve been talking about police protection during the upcoming convention when all those stinky protesters are coming. There seems to be a big debate over whether or not police officers will be able to wear helmets, carry shields, use pepper spray and Tasers on this crowd. You know, I’ll tell you what works on a crowd like this — a machine gun, that always works very well.”

Baker’s co-host, “Jordan,” agreed: “Mow ’em down, baby!” he added.

Yawn.

Seriously. So friggin’ what?

Does Chris Baker run any police department?

Closed-Circuit to Birkey:  talk with Media reporter Paul Schmelzer; talk radio is all about pushing buttons.  Not to say I agree with this particular stunt or statement – doy – but please.

Peace advocate and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley heard the violent rhetoric on Friday. “It doesn’t take an expert on the First Amendment to recognize that suggesting the ‘good ol’ boy network’ hand out ax handles and machine guns be used to mow a crowd down comes close to inciting violence,” she wrote at the Huffington Post. “This inflammatory rhetoric looks no different than the reason we are not allowed to falsely yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

Ah. So Colleen Rowley – via the left’s paid stooges in the Sorosphere – is calling for censorship.

Whew.  To think we coulda had her in Congress!

She continued: “I can also speak from personal experience — having worked almost 24 years as an FBI agent — that such remarks would almost certainly elicit investigative concern if the tables were turned and such speech came out of the mouth of someone critical of the government.”

Well, about that…

I have no idea what the “official” level of concern is, but I can’t help but notice that while Andy Birkey is right on the remarks of an obscure morning host in Minneapolis who has absolutely no police command authority, neither he nor the Monitor have ever written about the many, many remarks by the anarkids, and their plans to disrupt the convention, and life in Saint Paul in general (either actively or by passive, tacit approval), plans that are even making putative peaceniks nervous.  Plans to stalk delegates, to attack military recruiters and war memorials, plans (and rehearsals) to actively provoke violence.

So answer me this question, Andy Birkey (or anyone who is paying attention to this story):  who is more likely to actually cause any sort of problem at all in Saint Paul this September?

The “anarchists”  – upper-middle-class fops who are taking out their anger at mommy and daddy by playing at being working-class heroes, who’ve been chattering like a bunch of lemurs on amyl about the disruption they want to cause, the vandalism they want to wreak, the mayhem they plan?

Or a talk show host?

Backup question:  The Minnesota Monitor has been, since its founding, largely a joke.  So what’s the next step down from “joke?”

My congressional “representative” here in the Fourth CD is Betty McCollum.

She is – I’ll be charitable, given the respect due her as an elected member of Congress – not the brightest light on the creator’s Christmas Tree.

Mark Heuring at True North has her pretty well dialled in:

If Betty were running for Congress in many of the other districts in the state, she’d have been hooted off the stage long ago. Betty managed to best a primary opponent in 2000 after Vento died and has held the seat without a serious challenge ever since. Since that time, about the only thing she’s managed to do is regularly issue especially shrill denunciations of the president. Her list of legislative accomplishments is slight.

Mark is right – although we had high hopes for Obi Sium in ’06, it was a lousy time to run anything as a Republican.

But oh, lord, does something need to be done about this woman:

An example of Betty’s legislative prowess and judgment came a few years back, while Arden Hills was negotiating with the federal government to gain control of the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant (TCAAP). Arden Hills had a number of ideas ready to go and the feds were working with local officials to get things done, in the usual painful bureaucratic way. Enter Betty. Betty had a brainstorm — why not use the land, which when developed has enormous potential, to build a giant post office processing facility for the Twin Cities?

There were a few problems with this idea — it would have scuttled any plans that Arden Hills had; it would have inundated an already truck-clogged area with many more massive trucks; and, most importantly, the postal service didn’t want to build in a location that is across town from the airport, preferring instead to expand their existing facilities in Eagan. In other words, Betty’s plan had zero support from anyone who had an interest in the future of the TCAAP site. Eventually Sen. Coleman quietly got invovled and stopped McCollum from pursuing her ridiculous idea any further. Those of us who live in the area haven’t heard much from Betty since, except for the shrill denunciations of Bush she sends periodically by franked mail. I guess we can count that as a benefit.

Other than signing on to absurd anti-war resolutions and yapping like an lemur on Red Bull about education funding, she is really as close to worthless as a Congressperson can be.  Indeed, she is everything that the Twin Cities’ deranged-left imagines Michele Bachmann to be; imperious, disconnected, not very bright.  It’s wishful thinking with Rep. Bachmann; with Betty McCollum – who is too gutless even to respond to media requests from people who might dissent from her point of view – you’re talking the real thing.

Heuring:

The upshot of all this is pretty simple — if the Republican Party could field a qualified, intelligent candidate, he might have a shot at beating ol’ Betty. And this time, the Republican Party has found just such a candidate. Ed Matthews is his name. Ed is a practicing attorney and has an extensive financial background as well. He’s young, smart and understands the issues very well. I suspect that Betty will do everything possible to avoid sharing a stage with Mr. Matthews, because she would suffer greatly from any direct comparison. I met Ed briefly at the 50B BPOU and was very impressed. My guess is that you will be, too.

I also met Ed, at the 66B meeting.  He’s sharp, works a room well, and – unlike McCollum – doesn’t give you the impression that there are wires connected to his limbs and jaw controlled by the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, controlling his every move.

Count on hearing much from Mr. Matthews in coming months.  It’s always an uphill fight for Republicans in the Fourth (AKA “The Venezuela of the North”), but so was Iwo Jima.

Steve Perry at the MNMon on John McCain’s blog success story, quoting Steven Dinan of the WashTimes:

[Official McCain website blogger Patrick]  Hynes said the back-and-forth with bloggers took ‘a great deal of sting out of the criticisms’ over immigration, Mr. McCain’s push for campaign-finance changes and other areas where conservatives have registered their discontent with the senator, who has secured enough delegates to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

“‘It gave him a microphone when others had already left the building,’ said David All, one of the Republicans’ Web pioneers who runs SlateCard.com and who said Mr. McCain has benefited from Mr. Hynes’ ties to bloggers. ‘That very much symbolizes the role of bloggers: We don’t have editors to report to, and there isn’t a big meeting with editors every morning. What that comes down to is personal relationships.'”

Perry:

McCain has gotten good mileage out of his conference calls with righty bloggers, as these posts at Captain’s Quarters,  Townhall and Race42008 attest.

As opposed to the left, which spends millions subsidizing blogs like…well, MNMon, and get…

…well, Ted Lamont.  And Obama Girl.

If you have a heart arrhythmia and a doctor has told you to avoid excessive excitement, skip this post, in which Tom Elko answers the question “has the Minnesota Monitor turned into a syndication repeater for Dump Bachmann (a stalkerblog whose stopwatch ticked past 20:00 about two years ago)?” with a rousing “heck, yeah!”

But don’t give up yet!  Because while the Dump pioneered the edgy blogging technique of copying and pasting entire comment threads from other blogs’ comment sections, Elko has taken us that extra step  beyond that we’ve come to expect from the Monitor.

That’s right; they’re now reprinting transcripts of phone conversations!  In this case, between long-time Bachmann-derangement posterboy Bill Prendergarstst and Rep. Bachmann’s various staffers:

BP: I’m trying to get to [former chief of staff] Andy Parrish.

Male Bachmann Staffer: He, uh…Hold on real quick.

(Put me on hold. After about a minute.)

Presson [the new chief of staff]: Hello, this is Michelle, how can I help you?

BP: I’m trying to get a hold of Andy Parrish, please.

Presson: Is Andy a friend of yours?

Presson: No, I’m not a friend, I’ve spoken to him before–

Presson: Andy isn’t here now, would you like to leave your information and if he calls I’ll give it to him? What’s your name?

BP: I’m Bill Prendergast.

Presson: Oh, Bill Prendergrass, with the Daily Kos, right?

BP: Well, sometimes I write stuff and submit it to the Daily — Look, I’m just calling to try to get in touch with Andy …

Presson: Are you a friend of his?

BP: Well, no, we’re not friends, I spoke to him during the last campaign–

Presson: (pleasantly) I’m sorry, we don’t give out personal information about the staff–

Oh, it gets better!

Oh, I’m sorry.  I lied.  It does not.  It stays right about there.

Coming soon:  Sixth District GOP grocery lists!

(Look at it this way:  it’s $1,500 a month that George Soros isn’t getting anything useful out of…)

How Hanoi Jane spent her summer:

How Cmdr. McCain spent his:

Hey, they even have the same hand gesture…:

Jane and her friends had their rallies…:

[UPDATE:  Oops – that one’s a hoax.  I even remember something about that.  Blah.  Since I’m not Sixty Minutes, “fake but accurate” doesn’t cut it.  My bad.   But this one’s real…]

…and Mac? Well, he and his friends really had only one:

Oh, yeah; Fonda has endorsed Obama.

Ed writes:

In fact, Obama’s campaign will probably keep their heads down and hope this passes quickly. McCain’s narrative as a Vietnam War POW who suffered torture while Fonda gave his captors photo-ops will resonate even further if she takes to the stump on Obama’s behalf. Her presence would draw connections between Obama’s anti-war supporters and the radicals — like Ayers and Dohrn — of Fonda’s generation. While that might thrill the MoveOn crowd, it will likely lose Obama the heartland, independents, and centrists who will balk at that kind of radicalism, especially while the more moderate option in McCain is available.

Some might be surprised that Fonda didn’t support Hillary Clinton in gender solidarity. Hillary, in this one case, probably isn’t among them, but instead relieved to avoid Fonda’s baggage.

Well, if Obama wants it kept on the down-low, give the man what he wants.

Oh, the hell.

HANOI JANE ENDORSES OBAMA

There. I feel better now.

Sean, the alpha gigglyfratboy at MNDFLPressReleaselius MNPublius, really really thought he had something “light” this morning: some dirt on Derek Brigham, graphics designer to the center-right stars and a principal at FreedomDogs and True North:

The designer of MDE’s and David Strom’s website(s) is compared to a propagandist for Stalin on his website.

“If Derek Brigham lived in the Soviet Union he would have designed propaganda posters for Stalin.“

Some things in this world are funny. Millions of dead Russians– are not not funny.

I’ll cut Sean the benefit of a doubt and assume the double negative was not not not an endorsement of genocide.

The little feeling in your stomach when you just thought about the fact that the guy who designed the David Strom’s website was compared to Stalin’s propagandist?

That deserves a chuckle.

Not as big as the one that Sean deserves.

A little bird – in this case, a source with very close knowledge of both parties to the quote on Derek’s site – writes:

If they knew anything about Pavel [the author of the quote] they would know how much he hates the commies, he grew up under them as a Speznatz [special forces] trainer in Latvia. [Russian Constructivist-influenced design motif is a] tip to his Russian heritage and the great determation in sports with a healthy dose of disdain for the communist shackles it was under.

Wow.

That’d be really embarassing – to try to link a blogger (not to mention David Strom, the most liberty-conscious pundit in the Twin Cities) to Stalin, and then find out you’d not only extracted the wrong motivation, but done it in a way that the originator of the quote would probably find deeply insulting, to say nothing of incredibly presumptuous.

You’d think after last week’s “McCain’s Teeth” incident, the Twin Cities Sorosphere would learn to “be quiet and be thought a fool, rather than open their mouths and remove all doubt”.

(more…)

The tang of cold on my cheek told me it was chilly in the apartment. But under the big quilt, it was still warm. I opened my eyes, rubbed a little sleep out with my left hand, and lightly blew a few strands of her black hair out of my face. I wrapped my hand around her waist as she slept, savoring a few more warm minutes before I began the longest three days of my life so far.

The alarm clock read 5AM; a half hour until it was supposed to ring, and I was already burning daylight. I slowly pulled my right arm from under her head, trying not to disturb her. I had…well, we both had big days coming up.

Slowly – like defusing a land mine – I drew my arm away, slowly lowering her head onto the pillow. No time like the present. I counted to three…

…as she reached behind her and grabbed my arm. I wasn’t going anywhere.

———-

The alarm clock read 6:30. I tilted my head. “Hon, I gotta meet someone. I got a job today”.

She pouted theatrically as she pulled the covers back over her shoulders. “Oh, I know. I gotta get up too…”. She didn’t move.

I stuck my foot out from under the quilt. I took a deep breath, and drawing on a reserve of strength I never knew I had, flipped the quilt off and jumped up. Then it was down on the floor, where I started my morning regimen with my first 100 pushups.

“So…what…choo…got…going…on…?” I panted between reps.

“I got a screen test”, she said, gathering the quilt tighter around her shoulders. “With Joe Pesci”.

“Wow…the guy…from…the Godfather?” I wheezed as I ground through the forties.

“Er…naw. But close. Anyway, I’m not sure what I’m going to use for my audition…”

86…87…She needs a break, I thought. She hadn’t had a good gig since she’d been dropped from the cast of some Lisa Bonet vehicle a few years earlier.

“You’ll…do…fine…”, I said, finishing off the last few pushups one-handed.
“So what you got?” she asked, grinning wistfully as I finished and started putting on my stuff for my morning six mile run.

“Talking with a guy about a job. Never met him.”

“What kind of job?”

“Probably over in Asia. The guy I’m meeting handles mostly Asia stuff, so that’s kinda how they roll”.

“It’s gonna be nasty, isn’t it?” she asked ruefully, rolling onto her stomach and turning to look at me from under the quilt, her soft brown eyes looking just a little moist.

“I doubt it”, I lied. “I’m due for a milk run. Hey – what should I wear?”

She thought for a second. “Imagine you’re a terrorist. You’re sneaking along. You get thirsty. You spot a little brook. You put your little terrorist lips down to the cool, clear water – an’ BAM. A f*ckin’ bullet rips off part of your head. Your brains are lying on the ground in little bloody pieces. Now I ask ya, would you give a f*ck what the guy who shot you was wearing?”

I looked at her, mildly stunned.

She grinned and rolled her eyes.

“Hon? Remember that bit for that audition, OK?”

We laughed as we kissed goodbye.

———-

She’d left for her screen test when I got back from running. I showered up and walked over to the little Greek cafe down on the corner. Mrs. Kiriakos was at the counter, as usual.

“Καλημερα, Μιτσελ!”, she greeted me as she did every morning, with a broad grin and a cup of Καφες ready to go.

“Καλημερα, κ. Κυριακο! Τι ειναι καλο για το πρωινο σημερα?”, I said, feeling that rumbling I usually got in my stomach this time of the morning. Of course, the answer was rarely in doubt…wait for it…

“Χαζο αγορι. Θα παρετε μια μπακλαβα για εσας”. The baklava here was to kill for. And, indeed, I very nearly had – well, not for the baklava, exactly, per se, but there’d been that unfortunate armed robber who’d tried to make off with Mr. Kiriakos’ till a few months back. He’d left the hospital for jail a few weeks later – which was why the normally-taciturn Mrs. Kiriakos was so friendly, and why I usually got a couple baklava a week for free.

I took my seat, and opened up the Times. Economy was so-so; rumblings from the Gulf. I was starting to dig into the latest…

…when my contact walked in. Nigel Worcesterhampton-Bloodnok, a dissipate leaf clinging to a far twig on an obscure branch of British royalty, was the associate case officer for MI7 in New York. Slight yet doughy, with thinning blond hair combed to a perfect peak over his pale face, usually flushed from too much clubbing and scotch and too little nutrition, framed by a foppish ascot. He’d joined the Service after the requisite stints at Cambridge and Eton. Paying for his appetite for all things Dominican – cigars, women and gambling – reportedly led him into some petty corruption when his Service salary and his bankrupt family’s resources gave out, but on the job he was all business.

“Good morning” he grunted, looking over a racing form wrapped around a manila envelope. “I hear Dominican Senorita is running at Monmouth”

“Yes”, I responded, rolling my eyes as I gave the response, “I’m thinking she’s worth $500 to win”.

Nigel sat across the table from me. “Excellent. Here are your arrangements”, he said, leaving the folder on the table and looking, theatrically, at his watch. “Oh, goodness, look at the time! I have an appointment in Manhattan” he said, getting up and making a rushed exit. Nigel was known for neither social skills nor fieldcraft. “Cheers”.

“See ya, Nigel”.

I opened the envelope. A British Airways ticket to Bankok, a Royal Thai flight to the “island paradise” of Phuket, an envelope with $20,000 Swiss Francs, a mission brief, and and an Irish passport for my assumed identity, a Hibernian woodworking machinery exporter named…

…”Nigel, you bastard“, I thought, pondering a week of traveling as “Paddy O’McFitzPatrick”. Nigel’s sense of humor was as odd as his taste in suits.

I shook my head, and turned to the mission brief. This was going to be an ugly one.
———-

I got on the train to Kennedy, on the 747 to Bangkok, and then a Thai puddlejumper to Phuket, the island paradise where the Indian Ocean and South China Sea collide.

I climbed down the ladder to the tarmac, observing the phalanxes of private jets and luxury charters, bearing tony European vacationers, Japanese sex tourists and American slackers to the warm beaches, warmer hookers, and low prices, respectively.

I would have time for almost none of the above. I climbed into the back of a Jeepney, paid the driver half a franc, and started toward Hotel row. I mentally reviewed my long-destroyed mission brief for the twentieth time.

Subject AUDACIOUS is in possession of materials that could be highly embarassing to a prominent politician and potential world leader.

Secure these materials by any means necessary. While lethal force is authorized, as usual, MI7 does not admit to your existence.

I wondered – who could this “potential leader” be? And why would British Meta-Intelligence (MI7) be involved?

Well, that question was way above my pay grade, I thought as a balmy breeze stirred the palms as I checked into my hotel, along the waterfront. MI7 wasn’t paying me contractor rates to ask questions.

Other than “how do I do this?”, I thought as I took the key from the “concierge”, a club-footed Hindu who I’m pretty sure worked for the DGSE.

“Your bag, Mr. O’McFitzPatrick”, asked the bellhop.

———-

First things first. I needed to find some tools of the trade – the kind of thing you can’t carry on international flights. And while there were any number of people in Phuket who could fix me up, there was only one that was so desperate that he’d do anything to help.

With the ongoing collapse of the USSR, the local KGB station chief, Yuri Stukachev, was at serious risk of having his decade-long idyll disrupted by the most mundane of causes – budget cuts. He’d managed to wangle being stationed in Phuket in ’80, at the height of the Cold War, when the SoPac Rim was still bleeding from the dominoes that fell in the seventies. But Phuket had been a bucolic backwater then, and was even more so, now; bucolic, and gorgeous, with the sort of lifestyle that mid-level KGB bureaucrats in the dying days of the Soviet Union couldn’t get for love, money or violence; indulgences that would have made his Leningrad cohorts drool with envy, Stukachev could get for a pittance, even on his rapidly-deflating KGB salary, to say nothing of his side trades in drugs, racketeering and prostitution.

So Stukachev was taking bids on everything.

I stopped by “Phuket Tall and Big”, a clothing store that was the front for the KGB station. A slinky Chinese-Thai girl with lively, darting eyes greeted me from behind the cash register.

“是老闆嗎?” I asked. The girl nodded, and motioned for me to follow her into the back room.

As I stepped through the door, someone grabbed me from behind and jacked me up against the wall, hard. I didn’t resist; this was about as pro forma as it got.

“Добрый день, Евгений Борисович”, I grunted as casually as one can while being jammed up against a wall and frisked for weapons. “Вы бы, по крайней мере купить ужин для меня, в первую очередь?”

Yevgenii Borisovich Batiukh, the Sevastopol-born “muscle” of the operation, wasn’t amused. He never was. He finshed frisking me, and spun me around.

“Каков Ваш бизнес с товарищ Стукачев?”, he grunted, sizing me up through the squinting slits of his eyelids.

“Я передаю грязных капиталистической “lucre”, I said, grinning at my stolid audience. ” что вы хотите остаться в Пхукете. Право? ”

His left eyebrow raised just a millimeter – and it was all the “tell” I needed. Of course he wanted to stay in Phuket, with its soft tropical breezes and its cheap Korean vodka and cheaper Malaysian floozies; the alternative, with the wheels quickly flying off the KGB, was a posting to Chelyabinsk or some such hellhole.

I had him.

“Следуй за мной”, he muttered, motioning toward the door to the back room.

———-

It took me five minutes of one-sided conversation with Stukachev – sort of a Slavic Don Knotts – to get what I needed; a Czech CZ85 9mm pistol, carefully sanitized, with no serial numbers. And, more importantly, a name.

Joshua Micah Grombacher.

In exchange, I gave him $500 in mixed bills, and a piece of legal paper on which I’d scrawled “I will be sending Yuri Stukachev the secrets to America’s defense systems, within the next two weeks. I will convey these secrets ONLY to Mister Stukachev, and ONLY if he’s in Phuket, where he can be reached. Or the Riviera. Sincerely, President George H.W. Bush”.

Stukachev told me Grombacher – a UC Berkeley dropout with contacts in a number of transnational leftist organizations – was staying in a flat above a brothel in the town’s red-light district. He gave me an address, which I memorized.

“Благодарим вас, господа”, I said, pocketing the pistol and nodding to Stukachev. I offered Batiukh a “high-five” on the way out. He ignored it with a steely glare.

I bought a couple of cuban cigars from a shop next door as I planned the rest of the evening.

———-

I waited at a bar until after dark, having a few cocktails and delightful conversation with a Japanese lingerie model who was vacationing in the area before finishing her PhD in Comparitive Literature; her opinions on James Joyce were as smoothly serpentine as her figure – before taking my leave to get on with the evening’s work. I found a jeepney and rode to a corner a few blocks from Grombacher’s flat. The evening was warm, but not unpleasant, stirred by a breeze coming from the ocean; the streets were crowded with streetwalkers, pushers, grifters, Thai sailors and the occasional tourist; this wasn’t really the tourist-friendly part of town.

There.

I walked in front of the brothel, nodding at the Mamasan as I walked past, “Enter Sandman” by Metallica wafting out through the window over the sound of the girls and their johns negotiating the evening’s contracts, and slipped into the alley. There was a rickety, rotting wooden stairway that led up to a veranda attached to a second-story flat. I pulled the pistol from my pocket and racked a round, holding it under my un-tucked, billowing Hawaiian shirt as I silently padded up the stairway.

I got to the top, and heard voices…

…and pop – pop. It sounded just like…

…a silenced pistol, I thought as a rush of adrenaline poured into my system.

I leaped up the last two stairs and through the open door, scanning the corners of the room, pistol at the ready.

Two slackers, wearing tie-died tank tops, cargo shorts and sandals, looked at me. One, with dreadlocks, giggled. The other, with longish, dirty blond hair, smiled.

“Dude”.

“Josh Grombacher?” I said, backing to the corner of the room.

“Dude!” he responded.

“And you?”, I asked the guy in the dreadlocks.

“Dude. Derek Redlock”.

You don’t come across that every day, I thought. “I’m looking for some documents…”

“…oh, yeah, Dude”, said Grombacher. “I figured somebody would come by looking for them. The ones from Barry. Dude”, he said, “You can have ’em. They’ve been a pain in the ash since I got ’em”.

“Dude”, Redlock giggled, “you said ash. I need to torch up…hey, Dude”, he said, getting vaguely serious, “why the gun? You harshed my mellow”.

“Oh, that”, I said, pocketing the pistol. “I heard that popping sound, and thought it sounded like a silenced .22 pistol, used for assassinations”. I walked to the end-table near the couch, and picked up a Glass-Pak muffler that’d been converted into a bong, turning it over in my hand, marveling at the creativity…
“Oh, no – dude, we were doing Amyl poppers…”

pop…pop…pop…

“…that was the sound of a silenced .22″, he said, slumping to the floor.

The door splintered, and two stocky, muscular Asian men in gray suits burst through. Without thinking, I spun around and smashed the first one in the face with the Glass-Pak bong, knocking him reeling into the second man, sending his pistol clattering across the floor. The second stepped sideways, and leveled a silenced pistol at me – but he was too close; I knocked the silencer aside with my forearm, and the shot went wild to my left, scorching my hands with gunpowder residue but missing me otherwise. I brought my knee up into his crotch, and head-butted him as he collapsed with a cry of pain; I stripped the pistol from his hand as he fell, and dispatched him as he reeled to the floor looking in vain for his footing. I turned and finished #2 in mid-teeth-spitting.

“Dude”, Grombacher exclaimed, wide-eyed; he’d not had time to move from his spot on the couch.

“Get up, man. We gotta get outta here”, I hissed, willing myself not to panic, grabbing for the unruly stack of documents, scanning them quickly.

It looked like a questionnaire with some hand-written notes, and it seemed – innocuous? – as I scanned random notes:

“I believe handguns should be confiscated from citizens…

…I think abortion should not only be legal, but a civil sacrament…

…paying taxes makes you a better person…
…Sincerely, Barry…” I couldn’t make out the last name. O’Donnell?

I’ll finish it later, I thought.

“Look, Josh, those two guys are gonna have a backup team. We gotta move”.

“Dude”, he said, nodding enthusastic agreement.

I tossed the .22 and pulled out the CZ85 – no need to be subtle. “Any other way out of here?”

“Dude”, he said sadly.

I looked in the bedroom as I stuffed the documents in my pocket. “C’mon”.

We slipped through the window, and ran along the roof of the bordello for about fifteen feet…

SHKANGGGGGGG

A bullet ricocheted off a metal exhaust pipe. I ducked and rolled…

…and saw the silhouettes of two men running behind us, and a bright muzzle flash with a loud report. Grombacher fell; “Dude!” he yelled in alarm and pain.

I turned and fired four quick shots, mainly to get the two charging men to reconsider. They took cover. I rolled behind a chimney. I quickly stuffed the documents into a crack in the brick.

“우리에게 문서, 그리고 우리가 걸어 드리죠”, one of them yelled in a clipped, guttural North Korean accent.

Yeah, right, I thought. I’ve heard that one before. I was in deep kimchi; those bastards never let anyone go.

“제 생각 넘겨줄 수없습니다 – 저는 교도소 시설이 아니합니다.”, I yelled with more bravado than I felt.

One of the men was starting to maneuver to outflank me. I had to move…

I rolled out from behind the chimney, toward a half-wall, as the other man, carrying the unmistakable outline of an AK47, ran to new cover about ten feet away.

All the opening I need, I thought, squeezing off two shots as I rolled; both rounds caught him in the forehead. Instant bulgogi, I thought grimly as I rolled behind the brick half-wall.

The other man panicked, and started backing toward the stairs, spraying shots at where I had been with a Russian-made AKR submachine gun, trying to keep my head down as he backed toward the window. I lined up a shot. One was all it took.

I slowly got up and walked over to Grombacher.

“duuuuude”, he muttered weakly. He needed medical…

…I heard a phump, and everything went black.

———-

Stars circled my field of vision. I shook my head; focus! Focus! I commanded myself. My head felt like it was going to split open.

I was lying on the roof. Gradually my eyes focused on the silhouette…

…of a woman, with long, white hair, wearing a knee-length leather trenchcoat.

“We meet again, Mista Bug”, she hissed.

Crap, I thought. Li Chuk Soon, AKA “The Black Widow”, North Korea’s most notorious “fixer”, I thought, remembering a long-forgotten briefing.

“It’s BERg, you illiterate swine”, I said.

“Where the documents?”, she said, reaching into her pocket.

“Why should you care?” I groaned, looking for an option, finding none.

She drew a nasty-looking corkscrew-shaped device from her pocket, as she covered me with her pistol. “Because these documents will enable us to play hob with your presidential election, someday, and will make Dear Leader the master of the whole wide world…”

She stopped.

“And…?”, I asked, trying to remember my old torture-resistance training, and coming up with nothing…

Her eyes dilated, and a drop of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth. After a few seconds, her knees buckled, and she fell to the ground. As she slumped forward, I saw where something – a hollowpoint pistol round, from the looks of it – had hit her in the back of the head, which was a raw salad of blood and tissue…

…and looked up, gradually focusing on the figure of Yevgenii Batiuk, a silenced Heckler and Koch automatic trained where Soon’s head had been.

“И сейчас, вы находитесь в МОЕЙ долга!”, he said, emotionless.

Yep, Yevgenii, I certainly am.

“I guess so”, I muttered, trying to clear my head, feeling sticky blood on the back of my scalp where Soon had sucker-kicked me. “How can I…”, I started, before remembering who I was talking too. “Итак, как же я буду выплачивать долг?”

And for the first time ever, Batiukh grinned. “У вас есть первый сезон “заместителей мир” по Бетамакс? В ублюдки в Москве не будет посылать их к нам.”

I rolled my eyes. “да”. I think I could find a copy.

“Не делайте мне подождать, Михаил Павлович”, he said, slipping into the darkness.

I got up, cleared my head, and walked over to the chink in the mortar where I’d stashed the documents. As the sounds of the street wafted up to me, I pulled out a cigarette lighter and lit “Barry’s” questionnaire on fire.

I remembered the Cuban cigar from earlier. I pulled it out of my pocket and lit it with the flames, taking a couple of luxurious puffs as I watched the papers burn. As they finished, I tossed the glowing flimsy embers on the roof, and went over to try to get Grombacher to the hospital.

———-

UPDATE: Damn. I miswrote again. The “questionnaire” wasn’t filled out until 1996, on the occasional of Barrack “Barry” Obama‘s first run for the Illinois Legislature. Not 1991.

UPDATE 2: I erred further; video shows that I was really working as a nightclub DJ in the fall of 1991. I wasn’t in Thailand, and I apparently had nothing to do with Marisa Tomei’s audition for “My Cousin Vinny”.

It was an honest mistake.

UPDATE 3: Hey, I think Joshua Micah Grombacher is some kind of senior policy analyst for Obama’s campaign, anyway. Honest. I do.

The District 49B GOP continued the revolt againt the Sturdevant Republicans.

After denying endorsement to RINO Kathy Tingelstad last month, the district GOP endorsed an actual conservative.

Brad Carlson was there:

Cimenski was voted the nominee over two other prospective candidates in our House District’s nominating convention this morning. In an impassioned nomination speech, he vowed to embrace the core conservative principles of the GOP which were abandoned by the likes of Rep. Tingelstad, who herself was in the audience. In fact, Tingelstad received verbal daggers from all three prospective nominees for her vote to override Governor Tim Pawlenty’s veto of the Transportation bill. There is no question that the citizens in 49B are still smarting from that vote.

In continuing his speech, Cimenski talked of returning public service to the grassroots level.

I don’t believe in this idea that you have to choose a Republican candidate to endorse who’s so-called “more electable”, even if they’re not most in line with the platform. This is what has happened to our party the past eight years, and look where we are now.

And you can’t go wrong in a room full of conservatives if you occasionally invoke the philosophy of our finest President

If I may borrow a quote from Ronald Reagan and put a Minnesota twist on it: We don’t have a $935 million deficit because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a $935 million dollar deficit because we spend too much.

Brad notes that the DFL is going to fight like hell to pick up this district – and if they do, they’ll consider it a validation of the idea that Republicans should go back to the bad old days, before 1998, where the part stuffered from Stockholm Syndrome and were largely only DFLers with better suits.

So it’s time to fight like hell right back.

Closed Circuit to Flash:  what do Hillary, FoxNews, and the Northern Alliance have in common? (*)

I have a very different impression of Hillary Clinton today than before last Tuesday’s meeting — and it’s a very favorable one indeed.

That’s right; Richard Mellon Scaife!

The conspiracy deepens!

OK.  All non-Flash readers may rejoin this conversation.

(more…)

It’s been a crazy week.

No, I know – it’s a crazy week for everyone. It always is. Among the urban, urbane, working-guy’n-gal set, every week is set to puree, these days. If people aren’t constantly complaining about being too busy and too swamped, other people wonder if you’re abusing Xanax or something. But suffice to say it’s been worse that most; most of it “not good”, none of it catastrophic. One of those “not red-letter” weeks, let’s just say, the kind that make me look forward to biking-to-work season, which opens (come hell or high water) next week for me.

But Mr. Dilettante notes something that I, and a lot of local bloggers, missed covering this past week; Senator Coleman announced his candidacy on Wednesday.

Local center-right bloggers were muted in their coverage:

I wasn’t especially worried about missing the event, since I figured that other bloggers would be there and would write about the event in detail. The ever-reliable Michael Brodkorb was there of course and there’s substantial coverage of the event over at MDE, as you’d suspect. But as yesterday spread into today, I started to notice something. Many of the other prominent center-right voices in the Minnesota blogosphere hadn’t written anything about the event, either. Nothing from Powerline. Mitch Berg was otherwise occupied. AAA hadn’t weighed in. No barking from the Freedom Dogs. Not a peep at Anti-Strib. Bupkis at TvM. And most notably, nothing at True North.

I’d chalk it up to a couple of things:

1. Most of us center-right bloggers – not having a Soros-like sugardaddy – have to work day jobs. Coleman’s announcement came amid a very busy work day; perfect timing for the dead-tree and broadcast media news cycle, bad for a guy who’s gotta get to meetings and deliver stuff. I sent my regrets to Coleman’s press people, who – I have to say it – have done a great job at reaching out to center-right bloggers this past year. Kudos to them.
2. Some center-right bloggers – the ones farther to the right on the continuum – are upset at some of Norm’s votes. Norm is not a pure movement conservative; he is a consummate pragmatist, as befits someone who ran a highly liberal city for eight years as a conservative DFLer against a hostile majority, and had to win election against not just Paul Wellstone, but his memory borne into eternal hagiography by the swooniest mob since the Beatles played Shea Stadium. Norm is not the perfect conservative; he is, however, good enough on all issues, and leads the pack on a number of issues, most notably shining a light on the cockroach den on the East River, the UN. But for Senator Coleman, “Oil For Food” would be just another Texaco marketing promotion. He’s generally right on the war, mostly right on spending, generally on the ball on judges; against that, I’ll forgive ANWR and his few other not-quite-conservative miscues.

So while I was remiss in not covering the Senator’s announcement, let me make it perfectly clear; I am fired up for Norm, and I’m going to do everything in my meager power to keep Norm in the Senate.

Mr. D:

As bloggers we’re all independent actors — despite what some people would have you believe, there’s no “ScaifeNet” or “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” afoot. We all make independent, idiosyncratic judgments concerning what we write about. And there have been some interesting local stories in the last few days, including the controversy at Forest Lake High School and the light bulb bill that Rep. Bachmann introduced, among other things. In all of that, Norm seems to have gotten lost. I’m not sure what it means, but the apparent lack of interest in Coleman’s event must mean something. And it would seem to be a good idea for Norm’s campaign people to see if they can ascertain the larger meaning.

Well, there’s no larger meaning at Shot In The Dark. D’s right, of course; this week was a mad blender of breaking news, and – events aside – while Norm’s announcement is important, it was hardly “news”; I don’t think anyone woke up Tuesday morning wondering if the Senator was going to bow out of the race.

But let nobody misinterpret my silence; this blog and the voter behind it supports Norm Coleman. I support him against the DFL’s nominee (I’m rooting for Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer!), and would do so against anyone the DFL could or would conceivably put in the race. While I differ from Norm on a few things – and tell him so, and tell you, via this blog, as well – Minnesota has had no better Senator in the two decades I’ve spent in this state; if Minnesota Republicans screw that up because of the odd ANWR vote, we’ll all be the poorer – literally and figuratively – for it.

Go, Norm!

Molly “Ms. Sensitivity” Priesmeyer responds to Michael Brodkorb (I’m gonna pull an Eva and link to a comment) about the furor over her “McCain’s teeth” post. About the fact that Mac had his teeth bashed out by North Vietnamese goons…:

I was not aware of the fact. I simply was linking to a post that revealed “his teeth” had become a topic of discussion on the blogosphere. Buzzfeed.com is an aggregator site that collects trends of the day.

It beggars my imagination that someone – especially someone whose MNPost profile claims she writes about “veterans”, especially someone who claims to be a journalist with an interest in covering politics – can possibly not know that McCain was tortured to and beyond the limits of human endurance during his five years of captivity. Or, for that matter, that he’s a cancer survivor – and some cancer treatments play hob on a guy’s teeth.

At it beggars it even more to think she’s going to try to slink away by saying “I was just linking…”. Yesterday she said:

…it’s at least refreshing to see McCain’s teeth get a razzing (though, unfortunately, not a cleaning). It gets a little tiring listening to the same sexist cries that Hillary Clinton is just too ugly to be president. Hatin’ on the looks of all the candidates? Now that’s equality!

That’s not a “link”, Molly. That’s an endorsement.

UPDATE: Charlie Quimby leaps to the defense, with a post that basically quibbles (Quimbles?) about how many teeth McCain lost in captivity, and how they were lost (was it bad nutrition?) – and, like any good leftyblogger, finds a Bush anecdote:

One of McCain’s aides tells me that two years ago, campaigning with McCain, George W. Bush asked him if the senator would like to work out with him. Told that McCain did not, could not, really “work out,” Bush replied, “What do you mean?”

Which might have been a little more germane had the President then followed his ignorant statement with “those broken old-man arms sure do look icky, don’t they?”

Quimby also dredges up a photo of a woman at the ’04 GOP Convention wearing a Purple Heart bandaid – a tacky mockery of the wound that led to John Kerry’s Purple Heart – and asks:

And of course, today’s critics would never stoop to mocking a candidate’s war wounds.

I’m not sure when “I know Molly is, but what are you?” became an accepted debate tactic – but as a matter of fact, no. This critic never did; I roundly condemned that particular stunt on the air and, if memory serves, in my blog. I treated Kerry’s war service and decorations as off-limits.
Look – it’s not a the end of the world that Molly Priesmeyer was ignorant about John McCain. It’s even forgiveable (if dumb) that she mocked the candidate’s teeth; she’s built a career out of shallow, ill-informed mockery.

It’s just interesting to point out that snide, trite, shallow mockery is what passes for coverage of politics these days at the Monitor. Why, it’s like they’re just another Kos diary, or a cheap lavishly-paid version of Cucking Stool.

Quimby also allows…:

Priesmeyer’s piece was dumb and insensitive, of course, and now it belongs to the polemicists like Berg and Brodkorb, who will make much more of it than it deserves.

This sentence is worth a post on its own.

We’ll come back to that.

UPDATE AND BUMP: Someone at the Monitor (I’m gonna guess Paul Schmelzer, but it’s just a guess) gets i Steve Perry notes that the MNMon got the message; they’ve pulled the infamous “Presidential Teeth” story from the front page:

To answer the question from GOP blogger Michael Brodkorb that kicked off the controversy about this post yesterday: No, neither Molly Priesmeyer nor I was aware that McCain had had his teeth broken as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war. No, we would not have piled on with further aspersions on the appearance of his teeth if we had known.

The item was not intended to make a serious point of any sort, as we thought the headline suggested right off the bat (“The dental gap: Does McCain have presidential teeth?”). It was a bit of web ephemera that we found funny mainly for its absurdity–sort of like the videos we’ve posted from Obama Girl, the McCain Girls, and La Pequena, and items we’ve written about phenomena such as social media sites obsessed with Barack Obama. The POW backstory turns a joke noted in passing into a lousy joke. And we’re sorry for that.

Fair enough. Although the fact that this is “Web Ephemera” in the first place is sort of disturbing.

We’re also sorry that this dust-up has inadvertently provided yet another sideshow in which genuinely important questions about the candidate and his campaign are circumvented. There’s far too much of that going around.

Well, let’s be honest, here: it’s conservatives – like Michael and, incidentally, I – who’ve been holding Mac’s feet in the fire (figuratively speaking) for most of a decade now, while the media and the center-left uncritically lionized him as the “acceptable Republican”. Many of us have been asking questions about the “candidate and his campaign” since before the beginning.

But that’s another whole issue.

To: Molly Priesmeyer, Rent-a-Blogger and Snark-Minx

From:  Mitch Berg, Unpaid Hack

Re:  John McCain’s Teeth.

Ms. P,

 I realized that I said that I’d try to contact you the next time I had a question about your coverage of an event.  And since the Sorosphere is suddenly all afroth over the state of Senator McCain’s teeth (that’s why we go to the Sorosphere; all that cogent analysis!), it’d be a good time to ask you…

…except your email address doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the MNMon’s (really, really badly-designed) site.

Sorry.  Pinky swear, I tried!

So anyway, here’s my question:  When you copy and paste a line that 5,000 other leftybloggers write:

If bloggers are saying one thing about John McCain this week it’s that the 71-year-old has some serious grit. Of course, that grit comes in the form of McCain Mouth, a deformity that apparently causes teeth to look like a mess of yellowed and contorted Chiclets. Today, BuzzFeed.com has picked up on the mouth meme, turning McCain’s piano-key chompers into an official phenomenon.

The consensus? “They’re old.”

Well, not nearly as old as the Senator is. 

Because – you do realize this, don’t you, Ms. Priesmeyer? – Senator McCain had a bunch of his teeth broken off at the gumline while he was being held as a POW.  Which, of course, can set a guy up for a whole lifetime o’ dental hurt. 

But you didn’t know that – right?  If you’d known that, you’d never, ever have written such a deeply, disturbingly dumb piece.  Right? 

Seriously – please plead ignorance. I’d like to know that even the MNMon has a level below which even they won’t sink – although reason tells me my faith is probably misplaced.

While looks are an easy and lame target,

[Being more mature than he used the be, the writer bites his tongue at the too-easy retort, knowing he’s a better person for it] 

 it’s at least refreshing to see McCain’s teeth get a razzing (though, unfortunately, not a cleaning). It gets a little tiring listening to the same sexist cries that Hillary Clinton is just too ugly to be president. Hatin’ on the looks of all the candidates? Now that’s equality!

No, that’s just stupid and sophomoric.  Dinging Senator Clinton on her looks is stupid and sexist.  Ripping Senator McCain for the appearance of a mouth that had the living sh*t beaten out of it by NVA goons is its own punishment, at least among people with consciences.

Glad to see Steve Perry’s bringing some professionalism to the good ol’ MNMon!

UPDATE:  Brodkorb is even less-amused:

This is really disgusting attack on Senator McCain and Minnesota Monitor should be embarrassed

Michael has more faith in Steve Perry than I do. 

UPDATED UPDATE: I’m gratified to see that the lefties in Brodkorb’s comment section are even more cheesed-off than the rest of us. 

RE-UPDATED UPDATE:  Mo’N @ Jo’T has the photoshop of the day.

UP-UPDATED UP-UPDATE:  I never actually put Minnesota Monitor on my blogroll, so I can’t remove it in a fit of pique.  I’m considering adding it for about five minutes, so I can gas it. 

Ideas?

I crawled through the mud, a G3K carbine in one hand, a handful of slimy, suspect topsoil in the other, as the rain poured down.  The corner of a spare magazine cut into my hipbone as I slithered over a small clump of rocks, and back into a small coulee that led me up the slimy, festering hillside.

The ridge above the airfield at Tuzla was dotted with trees, most of them blasted bare by years of shelling and mortar fire from the Bosnian and Serb sides alike. With only scrubby, ugly shrubs to hold the soil in place, the hillside was slowly eroding down into the valley below.  It was as ugly a place as I’d seen – recently.

BANG.  A loud rifle report split the rain-drenched quiet ahead of me.  “Back on the ball, Mitch“. 

I looked down the ridge to the tarmac 1000 meters away, and my mission was re-clarified; the C130 transport plane, with the crowd of troops and civilians huddled behind a Humvee behind it, pinned down by sniper fire.  Fire from the snipers I was hunting.

Down on the tarmac, I saw a man in camouflage make a run for a dugout by the runway; a couple of SVD sniper rifles, unseen in the scrub not far in front of me, barked almost simultaneously, again and again. The man zigzagged between the geysers of mud that the 7.62mm shots spewed into the air as he dove, head-first, into a slit trench.  He made it, miraculously.

“This is Stain Six…” an out-of-breath-sounding voice yelled over the radio, “Vulture and Vulture Chick are pinned down on the tarmac. We need to get the snipers…”

The snipers’ rifles cracked again, and the voice cut off a second later.  Stain Six – the Secret Service mission leader – was pinned down hard.

I had to find the snipers, and I had to find ’em fast. I was hoping my backup would get there soon.

“Golfball Two One” crackled over the radio, in a thick scandinavian accent – Gohlfboll Turr Vonn. It was Sergeant Janssen, leader of the Danish squad that was my backup, “this is Golfball Tree Two. Ve’re pinned down. Ve can’t help“.

Crap. My backup was backed up. I was on my own.

I crawled through a shallow depression behind the wreckage of an old Serb T-55 tank whose turret had blown off and sat on its roof twenty feet away – and saw my target. Two Serb snipers, they and their long, menacing-looking rifles swathed in ghillie netting, taking their aim. Another man, serving as their spotter, peered into binoculars, muttering in guttural, clipped Serb.

One of them fired a shot, the report echoing across the valley as I used the noise to cover my movement.  I slowly crawled around the rear bogey of the wrecked tank, sizing up the Serb position. Something wasn’t..quite…right…the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I looked around, my senses heightened by enough adrenaline to restart Keith Richards’ heart…

…there. In the woods – another Serb, covering the snipers’ rear, his AK47 at the ready, turning…

…toward me.

Our eyes locked. For a split second, we hesitated. I was quicker; my first round caught his AK47 right in the receiver, sending shards of stock and metal slicing into him, slamming his rifle into his stomach like Mike Tyson in his prime. He grunted in pain as he fell behind a log, his rifle twisted and useless.

The snipers and spotter turned, alarmed. The spotter lifted a WWII-vintage MP40 “Burp Gun” toward me as I spun; instinctively, I double-tapped him with two more rounds. He dropped out of sight over the lip of the hill, his peaked Serb army-pattern cap flipping crazily through the air, as I turned to the sniper on the right. Two more shots finished that business. The other sniper, overcome with panic as he tried to turn his bulky SVD toward me, rolled over the lip of the hill, chased by two more rounds that dug up big divots where his chest had been a thousandth of a second earlier, rolling out of sight.  I dove for the lip of the hill, to make sure he didn’t come back up, when every muscle from my butt to my neck clenched tight at the jarring racket of Sergeant Janssen’s squad’s MG3 machine gun, sounding like a jackhammer set to “puree”. They’d got him.

And suddenly, the hill was secure.

I ducked back behind the wrecked tank and grabbed my radio. “Golfball Two One…”, I started…

…and caught the end of another transmission. “…Jaguars eencomeeng; ten secohnds. Ten secohnds. Ten secohnds” a voice in a French accent repeated, seeming oddly disconnected.

Crap. They called in air support!

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the glint off the canopy of the French Jaguar fighter-bomber, and a yellow flash…

…which I didn’t have time to process. I leaped instinctively toward the first hole I could see, diving into a shell crater just as the air around me was rent by the impact of a dozen 2.75 inch rockets, their detonations joining together like ripping metal, thousands of steel fragments lacing the air above my boots in a maelstrom of angry metal that drowned out the French jet roaring overhead.

I poked my rifle out of the crater as the smoke roiled around me. Under cover of the smoke, the radio squawked “Vulture and Vulture Chick are safe. Good job, all”.

“Sergeant Janssen“, I thought, peering over the edge of the crater and down the hill, teeth clenched in fear…

…which relaxed when I saw Sergeant Janssen and his eight squaddies; they’d ducked, too. Janssen waved. “Indskrænkette fransker!” he yelled.

I slithered down the slope to his position. “Er der en anden skrive i Fransker?” The squaddies laughed – as much from my atrocious Danish as from the release of tension – and, after they shook off the concussion and the close call, formed up to continue their patrol up the ridge.

Me? I walked back to the base. I safed my rifle as I got to the cut through the barbed wire around the Ukrainian position, waving to the Ukranian UN troops that guarded the perimeter.  One of the privates manning a machine-gun gave me a thumbs-up; they’d been taking fire from the snipers, too.  I returned the gesture as I walked toward the cluster of huts that was the Ukranian enclave, on my way back to the US area.

Their company sergeant-major, Yevgenii Batiukh, a crusty fortysomething who was hard-boiled enough a soldier to make R. Lee Ermey’s “Gunnery Sergeant Hartman” in Full Metal Jacket look like Andy Dick, who’d spent more time in Afghanistan than some Afghans I’d known, stepped out from behind a quonset hut, holding a bottle.

“Доброе утро, Михаил Павлович”, he grunted, his never-smiling face nodding approval.

” Добрbl Джин, сержант батюх”, I nodded back.  The faint outline of a grin creased his leathery jawline.

“В снайпера исчезла, и вашим “первой леди” была в состоянии ходить из самолета в аэропорт!”, he said, with the lift of an eyebrow and a quizzical, ironic smirk that seemed incongruous on his hawk-like sergeant-major face.  Batiukh poured shots of slivovitz into two tin, Russian-pattern canteen cups, and handed me one.  “Как ЧТО происходит?”, he said, eyeing the G3 that hung from its jungle sling around my shoulder.

I grinned back as I slammed the shot. “Я не знаю! Действительно!”.

“поп!”, he said, drawing his finger across his throat, smiling fully this time.

We shared a laugh, and I left him, walking back to my hooch, a converted Serb bureaucrat’s office, looking forward to clearing a couple days’ buildup of mud and worse off of me.

I unlocked and opened the door…and stopped short. Something wasn’t as I left it.  My hand instinctively reached toward my pistol, and I checked out the corners of the room.

I relaxed second later, as I noticed a silk blouse lying on the floor.

I cocked an eyebrow, and walked toward the back room. A pair of jeans hung from the doorknob. I opened the door.

“Hi, Hon”, Marisa said seductively, covers pulled up around her neck. “How’s your day?”

“Rough one”, I grinned, feeling not so rough at all.

She took a bottle of Croatian merlot, poured a glass, and dipped her finger in, licking it suggestively as she set it back on the chair. “I heard the First Lady and Chelsea had a hard time getting out of their plane today”.

I grinned. “Yeah, I heard that, too. Hey, aren’t you supposed to be filming?”, I said as I cleared my rifle’s action and reached to turn down the light.

“I had a day off.  And it looks like you’ve been a…dirty boy…”

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION: I’m informed that video footage shows I was actually working as a technical writer at at a retail shelf space brokering company during Hillary and Chelsea’s trip to Tuzla, was not in fact a freelance “minder”, did not interact with the Ukranian or Danish armies – indeed, have never been to Bosnia – and had no involvement with Ms. Tomei.

I guess I miswrote…

My bad.

My watch was running a bit slow.

Fortunately, there’s another hint Algore might run.  So I was able to reset my watch.

Oh, yeah – go, Al.  Whooie.

Whatever.

“Peaceful” “Street Theater” protesters interrupt an Easter Mass in Chicago:

Six Iraq war protesters disrupted an Easter Mass on Sunday, shouting and squirting fake blood on themselves and parishioners in a packed auditorium.

Three men and three women startled the crowd during Cardinal Francis George’s homily, yelling “Even the Pope calls for peace” as they were removed from the Mass by security guards and ushers.

Why are these morons not doing the same thing in mosques, demanding an end to terrorism, female circumcision, the murder of gays, stoning of women pregnant out of wedlock…?

The solipsism and self-absorption of the “anti-war” left never ceases to astound.

Syl Jones tries to jam words into Barack Obama’s mouth – and, by extension, into everyone’s head.

Somewhere in the middle of Barack Obama’s speech about race in America, one can imagine him thinking, “I’m tiptoeing through a minefield and my feet haven’t been blown off.” Yet, that is. There’s still time.

After all, the comments by his pastor Jeremiah Wright have been characterized as anti-American,

I suppose there’s a bright side to inventing HIV to keep the Third World down?

and Obama himself has been cleverly linked to those comments.

Mr. Jones:  if I spent twenty years in a church where George Gordon Winrod was the minister (and know Jones is old enough to get that reference), do you think one would need to be unreasonable, much less “clever’, to “link” me to racism and anti-semitism?

But let’s cut to the ventriloquism:

From a political point of view, Obama hit the ball out of the park with a sweeping, personal indictment of racial politics in what will be remembered in the black community as The Speech. He sought to communicate his unique perspective as an interracial American and to do so honestly, hoping that his listeners and his critics would engage as adults.

But here’s what Obama couldn’t and didn’t say, because his political viability hung in the balance. Think of these as the redacted remarks from the junior senator from Illinois:

And think of my responses as the heckling that Obama’s redacted thoughts Syl Jones’ projections deserve.

“Why am I being asked to justify the comments of a man who is free, as is any American, to say what he wishes, to express his unique point of view?

“You” aren’t.  “You”‘re being asked to spell out how much impact the caustically-racist beliefs of “your” former spiritual advisor have had on “you”, by people who also have that same right.

“How many of you have relatives — not pastors but members of your immediate family — who use the N word, who disparage blacks, Hispanics and Asians with regularity?

“You” mean using terms like “ice people?”

Not me.  Not a single one.

“Were you running for president, would you be expected to repudiate your grandmother or your crazy uncle or even your father for making what you might consider to be racist remarks? I don’t think so.

How many of “you” would have publicly hailed that crazy uncle as “your”spiritual advisor, and made him a part of “your” presidential campaign?

“Why is Jeremiah Wright being condemned for essentially repeating the beliefs that millions around the world have expressed: that America is fundamentally racist?

Because America is not fundamentally racist.

Or let me put it another way; all of humanity is fundamentally racist.  Many if not most of the world’s languages have racism codified into them; they have many words for “human”, of descending value, depending on how close to the speaker’s town, tribe or nation the “human” hails. And given that racism is a fundamentally human condition, can Jeremiah Wright or Syl-Jones-via-Obama name a single significant, racially heterogenous country in the world that has done more to expunge racism from its public life?  That’s fought a civil war, the bloodiest war in its history, whose causes all linked back, directly or indirectly, to racism?  That’s so completely politically transformed itself (over the past sixty years) to try to repudiate racism?

I’m sure any book Jeremiah Wright could use to look up the answer is too soggy with splittle to be of much help.

But how about you, Senator Obama Syl?

What is it about ‘fundamentally racist’ that you do not understand? A nation that has consistently denied people of color equal opportunity, that uses antiquated laws to enforce unequal justice between offenders based on race, that incarcerates a huge percentage of black men, that even puts them to death in far greater proportions than white men — a nation such as this is indeed fundamentally racist, and the fact that so many of you refuse to understand this shows how ignorant you really are.

What is it about “made cataclysmic efforts to atone for that history”, “show me the consistent denial of opportunity to people of color in the past twenty years, and I’ll show you an endangered species, socially, legally and politically”, “even black commentators with any integrity note the corrosive effects of popular culture, government “aid” (and, yes, 400 years of devaluing the black male) and its manifestation in black-on-black crime” that you do not understand?

“Why isn’t it enough that I have come before you as a man and said that I want to bring us all together, and that I have shown you my own personal values time and time again?

Blame “your” fellow travellers, who’ve gone over the social lives of every single conservative candidate in my lifetime with fine-toothed combs looking for dirt…

…that they didn’t credit in their books!  That they didn’t call their “personal spiritual advisors”!  That were not their spiritual avatars!

I did not call the Clinton campaign racist when they attempted to belittle me and my candidacy as ‘a fairy tale.’

If “Fairy tale” is racist, perhaps the problem is that people like Jeremiah Wright, Syl Jones and Jesse Jackson have stripped the term of all meaning?

I have stuck to the issues

Huh?

“I suspect that even if I am elected president, what I actually do will never be enough, because the dead weight of those who are determined to win at any cost — whether through racist invective or personal smear campaigns — will bring this country down to its lowest common denominator. The truth is, even if I am ready to be president, America may not be ready for me.

“America” – part of it, anyway – suspects that “you” aren’t ready for prime time, that behind “your” moderate rhetoric beats the heart of a far-left Chicago ward heeler (since goodness knows there’s not much else back there), and – worst of all, that bringing that up is going to have your water-carriers, like Syl Jones, calling us “racists”, when all we are doing is subjecting you to the same scrutiny any other politician gets – and, in this age, deserves.

“If we were having an adult discussion about race, and if the majority of you listening were able to accept the diversity of views that exist on this subject, I wouldn’t need to say any of this.

And if “you” could accept genuine “diversity of views”, “you” wouldn’t be stupid enough to be putting this condescending internal monologue out there.

I would be judged on my merits as a man, without the persistent reading of tea leaves to which I have been subjected.

Then it’s “you” that are the racist, Syl  Senator Obama.  “Your” merits as a man are scarcely up for debate – I’ve seen not a single credible commentator attack you, personally.  Your merits as a candidate for president are completely fair game.  “Your” choices in spiritual advisors are what’s being questioned, here, and if “you” think it’s any different for a white candidate, the “you” are the one that’s not ready for a mature dialog.

That in itself is a sign of the systemic racism against which I am swimming in an attempt to change the course of the nation.”

And that, itself, is a sign that “you” are the one that’s hiding behind the most convenient possible definition of racism.

But Obama didn’t say this.

Good for him.  He’s too smart for that.

Rasmussen says that the Obama/Clinton lock on Minnesota is fading a bit:

In Minnesota, the latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows Barack Obama leading John McCain 47% to 43%. The election poll also shows McCain essentially even with Hillary Clinton, leading her by a statistically insignificant 47% to 46%.

Obama leads McCain by eight points among women but trails by a single point among men. Clinton leads McCain by twelve among women but trails by seventeen among men.

Obama leads McCain by fourteen points among unaffiliated voters while McCain leads Clinton by nine among those same voters.

McCain is viewed favorably by 58% of Minnesota voters. Fifty-seven percent (57%) say the same about Obama while 50% have a favorable opinion of Clinton. Compared to a month ago, Obama’s favorables are down seven, McCain’s ratings have fallen four points, and Clinton is down one.

Rasmussen has downupgraded Minnesota from “Likely Democratic” to “Leaning Demcoratic”.

Just keep tugging on that rope.

Via Roosh:

By the way – in an era in which the prolific solo-blogger on a mission seems to be endangered, Roosh is becoming a daily stop (indeed, via them miracle of the feed reader, he already is).

Go forth and fail to read him no more.

The times were dire.

The good people were dispirited.

Evil silliness seemed to reign supreme, and threatened to overwhelm the good people and their lives.

The people cried out for a hero.

And from the east southwest, to the skirl of a plastic Viking horn, one arose:

Join me and other Freedom Loving Americans who stand in support of our Troops at the Lake Street/Marshall Ave. Bridge on the 5th Anniversary of the Liberation of Iraq. The Anti-war Kooks will be there. Let’s show ’em that they do NOT hold the majority opinion.

Bring signs, American Flags, Bells, Horns,

Enge – the irrepressible one-man conservative counterprotest movement – will be gadflying the “peace” protest at the Marshall-Lake Bridge from 5-6 tonight.

Enge was responsible for one of my favorite moments in my radio career. Four years ago, at the helm of the Engemobile (a stake-bed pickup festooned with right-leaning banners and flags, and a big honking sound system), Enge was gadflying one of the Smugosphere’s “peace” protests at Summit and Snelling. He called in to the NARN broadcast, then in progress.

I asked him to turn the Engemobile’s sound system over to AM1280, and drive through the intersection slow down in the middle of the crowd of “peace” demonstrators.

He flipped the station on, cranked the speakers, and maneuvered into the crowd.
“Grow up, take a bath, and get a job!

Great to have ya back, Enge. 5PM is a byatch, but I’ll give it my best shot.

I didn’t get to hear Obama’s “I Am Not A Racist” speech, but Jay Reding did:

Rhetorically, this is brilliant stuff. But like everything else that Obama says, once one gets past the wonderful words, the message itself is largely meaningless. Sen. Obama admits that Rev. Wright is a racist with a deeply disturbing view of America. Yet he won’t back down from him (any more than he already has). On one hand, he thinks that this country needs to have a conversation about race—on the other, he is siding with people who preach a gospel of racial division.

Sen. Obama just can’t have it both ways.

It’s a given that the nation needs a “conversation about race”. Framing the conversation is the hard part.

Maybe we need a referee…

UPDATE: E-Mo at Hot Air:

It’s essentially a non-distancing distancing, akin to the non-apology apology. He excuses Wright’s anti-American rhetoric with a mixture of rationalizations. Wright gets a pass because he served in the military, because he grew up in another generation that apparently hated America, and because he does good work in other areas. Obama also makes the curious claim that rejecting Wright means rejecting the entire black community — something other black churches might see as rather presumptuous. Obama essentially argues that the same kind of anti-Americanism can be found in all black churches, and speaks at length about how the legacy of racism and Jim Crow makes this incendiary rhetoric ubiquitous.

Is that true? Hardly. Black ministers have flocked to the airwaves over the last few days to vehemently deny that kind of argument. However, Obama has little choice but to argue this, because he needs to cast his situation as having little choice in spiritual venues.

All generalizations are false, including this one – and Ed’s. Is it true that this racial rhetoric is common in Afro-American churches? No, but where it’s present, it is very prominent. There is (or has fairly recently been) at least one Baptist church in Saint Paul, and another in Minneapolis, that I’d cautiously classify as being in the same rhetorical category as Wright. If there were such an identifiable undercurrent of paranoid racism in a white denomination, they would be a (justifiable) uproar.

Now, the First Amendment defends their right to preach whatever they want, and I’ll defend that right (not “to the death” – Patton said my job is to make the other poor dumb SOB die for his country, and I’m cool with that) – but nothing about the First Amendment immunizes people from criticism.