Peyton-hating

I'm always amazed at the large number of sportswriters who despise Peyton Manning. Manning works incredibly hard to be the best player he can be. He is unfailing polite and helpful to the media. He stays after games and practices until the last question has been asked (unlike petulant types such as Tom Brady who have been known to stalk off and leave the media in a lurch after a bad game). Yet the antipathy is there.

Today's example from Ryan Davis:

Eli Manning appears to have everything that Peyton does not: guile, sportsmanship, leadership, and a winning persona.

What's with that?!

Detainee sues over loss of bomb-making privileges

Enjoy. (from RCP)

How the left embraced muslim murderers

The Anchoress has a good post on the "is Islam the enemy" debate raging in parts of the blogworld. She has a quote which needs to be repeated:

One of the great ironies of the post-9/11 period is that while violent Islamic jihadists attacked this country, there is a constantly growing network — both organized and unorganized — of in-place apologists at virtually every level of society all ready to defend them. Criticize jihadists, and people on the left will call you a racist. An Islamophobe. A bigot. I have seen this too many times to count, and the reason I call it ironic is that before 9/11, feminists routinely criticized the veil. Gay activists did not hesitate to condemn Islamic homophobia. Atheists condemned Islam the same way they condemned Christianity. After 9/11, the PC crowd suddenly included a group which they’d previously neglected, and it seemed to me that the 9/11 attacks helped the image of radical Muslims with the left in this country. And in most newspapers, and on many campuses.

Killing Americans will do that for you. The left will embrace you and make you one of their pet causes. There's nothing the Hate-America-first crowd loves more than folks who join the Kill-Americans crowd.

"N-word" vs. "F---ing Jew B------"

The MSM is all atwitter over whether Senator Allen used the n-word many years ago. Standards have apparently changed. A few years ago, a number of witnesses confirmed that Hillary Clinton had used the expression "f---ing jew b------" in a screaming tirade against a campaign consultant. Ann Coulter discussed it in a column and made an interesting observation:

it's not as if Tipper Gore stands accused. This is Hillary. Hillary of the lamp-throwing temper and f-word profanity. (Neither Hillary nor her husband questioned that she had used the phrase "f-ing bastard," only that she would have identified the ethnicity of the f-ing bastard. Even when she's throwing lamps and cursing like a sailor, she's ethnically sensitive.)

Too bad she's never been ethically sensitive.

Sen. Leahy: Idiot or Liar?

Dafydd notes the stupid comments of Senator Leahy on Bora Bora (note this quote is his best recollection of what he heard):

Even though they [the Bush administration] had him [Osama bin Laden] cornered at Tora Bora, they yanked the special forces out of there to send them to Iraq.

He writes:

I was evidently misinformed that the Battle of Tora Bora took place sometime in December of 2001. There was not even a resolution on the table to invade Iraq at that time... the resolution was not even introduced into the Senate until October 2nd, 2002; it passed the Senate without amendment on October 11th, and was signed by the president on the 16th. And we did not send troops there until March of 2003.

So in the consensus reality -- rather than in Leahy's own private version of history -- more than two solid years elapsed between the battle of Tora Bora and the call-up of troops for an invasion of Iraq. Whatever caused us not to kill or capture bin Laden in 2001, it certainly had nothing to do with the not-yet-extant invasion of Iraq.

Has this been the Democrats' plan all along, why they took over the government schools: to so damage Americans' knowledge of history that demented demagogues like Pat Leahy can make risible claims like this on the Senate floor and not be laughed out of Congress

Busting MSM myths about NSA eavesdropping

AJ Strata explains how badly the MSM and the Democrats have misrepresented the facts about the NSA program eavesdropping on terrorists. After reading what he says, it is painfully clear that the corruption/incompetence question is before us again.

There is simply no way for a story to get this screwed up if journalists are honest and competent. Either the MSM has deliberately presented this story dishonestly in order for it to serve as propaganda for the Democrats or they are a collection of brain-dead cretins. Those are the only possible explanations.

Sabato: Idiot or Liar?

As seems to happen on a daily basis, we have an instance where there are only two possible conclusions, the liberal involved is either a liar or an idiot (i.e. corrupt of incompetent). Larry Sabato provides us with evidence in support of both propositions. Since I suspect that most readers here have read about the story at other blogs with higher readerships, I will dispense with a rundown of the facts.

I want to point out this:

Professor Sabato either doesn't understand that he said what he professes not to have said, or doesn't understand the difference between statements based on personal knowledge and statements based on hearsay. He appears not to know what he has done, or that he has done wrong.

Regardless of the merits of the underlying story, Sabato's behavior is unconscionable. And just like Bill Keller and the NY Times, the more he explains himself, the more he reveals himself to be an idiot.

He's not just a danger to political opponents, his incompetence makes him a danger to everyone (most of all himself).

What National Health Care Would Look Like

This is what your medical care will look like if Hillary gets her way. With the same "savings" and "efficiency".

More Bredesen corruption (again)

Bill Hobbs has details on another in a very long list of corrupt practices of Tennessee's current governor.

Priceless

I know MSNBC is a joke. And I know that we shouldn't expect much intelligent thought from the average journalist. But this quote from Chuck Todd is not to be missed:

Despite having governed fairly conservatively for the past eight years in the country's most important swing state, Jeb has not seen his job approval suffer.

Imagine. Unfortunately for his readers, Chuck can't quite wrap his brain around why Ronald Reagan was such a great president.

How sad. How pathetic.

Science as political advocacy

At Big Lizards, a look at how Britain's top scientists are demanding that no one do any research which disagrees with their conclusions about global warning. Read it all.

What's up with Sabato?

Tom Bevan of RCP points out that Larry Sabato is way out of bounds in making an accusation against George Allen that he is unwilling to substantiate. And that was before he knew this:

UPDATE: The USA Today blog reports: USA TODAY political reporter Jill Lawrence spoke with Sabato this morning. She reports he told her that he never heard Allen use the n-word, but believes the future senator did because "people I know and trust" have told him it happened.

What a tool!

The France of North America

A week ago, NRO had this piece by Rich Lowry. Michigan is the ultimate liberal governmental haven. With the expected economic benefits. Read on to learn why Wyoming loves what Michigan has done to help it grow.

More Bredesen corruption

Bill Hobbs has the story.

Bill Clinton's terrorism priority

Tom Maguire has a very good point on how we can tell whether terrorism was a Clinton priority:

Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam delivered "War in a Time of Peace - Bush, Clinton, and the Generals" in May of 2001. Although he covered Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, there is not a hint of a mention of Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden. That suggests that, in all his digging and interviewing on the topic of Clinton at war, Halberstam never uncovered Clinton's war on terror, or did not experience Clinton's people pounding the table and emphasizing its importance.

Not serious, not responsible -- John McCain

The Captain explains why John is unfit to be a US senator, much less our commander-in-chief.

Why he won't be nominated

John McCain -- moral exhibitionist.

If a team of geniuses sat down to design a man who should never be President of the United States they would come up with John McCain. Fortunately the character flaws that make him unfit for the Oval Office also put that office well beyond his reach.

No question about Patriotism

Daffyd is not questioning their patriotism. Not one bit. They have none, without question:

The new media motto is "Amerika, scourge of the world!" I want to make it absolutely clear that I don't question the media moguls' patriotism. I nakedly assert they have none.

Sponsoring Lies and Slander

I have pointed out before that the Democrats have little to campaign on besides lies and slander. They are the foundation of every one of their political campaigns since I became an adult. Baseball Crank pointed out this story. Palm Beach Democrats had plans to officially sponsor a crank conspiracy film about 9/11.

Crank also notes something I didn't know:

Newsweek reports that Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emanuel (IL) has been using his brother Ari Emanuel, Michael Moore's agent for Fahrenheit 9/11, as a key cog in the Dems' fundraising apparatus in Hollywood.

Why are the Dems' leaders associating themselves with 9/11 conspiracy theories, and those who peddle them? Are these decisions the mark of a political party that is serious on the issue of national security?

It doesn't seem so.

source -- The New Editor

Lazy, ill-informed journalist criticizes Bush

Power Line notes gross incompetence from the Wash Post. What a bozo! Paul writes:

Part of Chandrasekaran's criticism of the reconstruction is that our administrators were lazy and ill-informed. Can the same be said about an author who failed to check basic facts in his story and, consequently, got them wrong?

The problem with Democrats

It's the dishonesty combined with the stupidity. That's my take on this post about Dems and taxes. The Anchoress:

See, this is one of the reasons I HAD to leave the Democrats. There is a disconnect, a fundamental refusal to engage in reality; to look at a thing and say, “gee…maybe we should rethink our old taxing habits,” seems not to be in their make-up. Unemployment is incredibly low - lower than it was in the “full employment” 1990’s. Tax receipts are incredibly high. But tax cuts are bad.

That’s right up there with the whole Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill debacle, whereby “strong, feminist women” were suddenly delicate shrinking violets unable to endure a ribald joke. Sexual harrassment - a serious issue - got defined downward for political expedience and suddenly the same women who had declared themselves “sexually emancipated” were cowering at a man’s appreciative glance at their legs, or a risque joke…that is, until Bill Clinton got into office and then, suddenly, we were told “boys will be boys” and “some guys have to be allowed one free grope…” or, you know…a woman complaining about sexual harrassment was “what you find when you run a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park.”

The inconsistancy, intellectual dishonesty and politically expedient double standards and rationalizations are breathtaking. I may not be a Republican much longer…but sometimes I wonder if I will ever be able to vote for a Democrat again.

Our pitiful press

The Anchoress makes a point that needs to be emphasized about the abominable performance of the news media in the plame debacle:

the press really, really simply wants to walk away from this story. They want to walk away from the reality that they carried lying Joe Wilson on their shoulders and gave him credibility he did not deserve. They want to walk away from the fact that through all of this not one of them has asked Valerie Plame a single probing question - not about her status at the CIA, not about the forged documents that seemed to have passed through her jurisdiction - not about how she got her Joey sent to Niger to begin with, not about nuthin’. Valerie walks away and doesn’t get asked a thing.

Not one of them have asked Valerie a single question.

Think about that for a moment. Pitiful. Incompetent. Ridiculous. Of course, they are biased. Of course, they are mere propaganda puppets for liberal Democrats. Being biased doesn't excuse the need for simple competence.

How can you even pretend to cover a story and not report any of the details relating to Joe's lies and Valerie's role? People who are biased are going to spin. People who are incompetent are going to fail to do the bare minimum work expected of their jobs.

It isn't just the bias. It's the gross incompetence.

Democrats' anti-semitism

Ed Lasky has a long article pointing out the rise of hatred toward Jews and Israel among Democrats.

I think this all traces back to the hate-America-first attitude so prevalent among Dems. Add the loathing of the US military voiced by Bill Clinton and felt by many of his supporters. For those who hate America and especially our military, Israel stands out as a country whose very existence is dependent on both.

Paying for health care

I liked the analogy in this article:

risk pooling won’t reduce overall spending or even individual affordability. A dinner party analogy demonstrates why. If a person can’t afford a steak, letting everyone order a steak, pooling the bill, and distributing it back to individuals doesn’t make the steak more affordable. As a society, there is no other table to which to send the bill.

What she doesn't discuss in the article is how much we spend on the last few weeks or months of life. Anyone who complains that we spend more than other countries is really complaining that we don't cut off the dying the way socialized countries do.

Complications in Memphis

I didn't know that Harold Ford, Jr.'s brother is mounting an independent campaign for his Congressional seat since a white liberal won the Dem primary. I'm sure all the extra attention to his family and the long history of corruption is just what Harold needs. Interesting report here.

What is really interesting is that liberals are all set to blame a Ford defeat on racism. Those bigots in Tennessee just couldn't vote for a black will be a constant refrain. Ford has been the most liberal of Tennessee's congressmen and he has no credentials other than his family, with its corruption well-known. In a state which voted against Gore for president, why would rejection of a liberal Democrat be racist?

But now we have the delicious irony unfolding in Memphis. If Cohen is beaten by Ford's brother, it will clearly be a case of blacks rejecting a liberal Democrat solely because he is white.

Winning in Iraq?

Read what Owens has to say. He gives a knowledgeable summary of where we are and why things are improving.

To all the Chicken Littles he quotes at the beginning, I repeat the question I have never seen anyone answer yet -- name any US president or any country for that matter which has done a better job conducting a war of this type better than Bush.

Simple question. Just name one.

Misleading MSM

Bill Hobbs points to this from MRC debunking a story run by ABC on Good Morning America:

GMA's Disillusioned Republican Woman Not Really So Republican
Friday's Good Morning America featured a segment with Robin Roberts in Memphis with three Southern women, identified as Republicans, who are all supposedly "having second thoughts about their party" and now plan to vote for Democrats. But a quick Internet search found that two of the three have backgrounds which raise questions about their fidelity to the GOP. Janna Herbison, identified on screen as "Republican turned Democrat," declared: "I used to consider myself to be a Republican." She scolded Republicans: "Don't say they're [Democrats] aligning themselves with the terrorists because they disagree with you. That's un-American." But while Herbison was Press Secretary to Republican Tennessee Governor Donald Sundquist, best known for a failed effort to enact a state income tax, she was also the Press Secretary for the Tennessee House Democratic Caucus. The other, Robin Rasmussen, who insisted that "I voted Republican in every election since I was 18," appears to be on the Board of Directors of Planned Parenthood, which doesn't make it impossible for her to be a Republican, but certainly suggests she's long been politically active for a liberal social cause.

You think "losing" that Planned Parenthood vote is going to hurt the GOP this November?

CIA torture techniques

At Hugh Hewitt, Dean points out the techniques at issue:

The techniques sought by the CIA are: induced hypothermia; forcing suspects to stand for prolonged periods; sleep deprivation; a technique called "the attention grab" where a suspect's shirt is forcefully seized; the "attention slap" or open hand slapping that hurts but does not lead to physical damage; the "belly slap"; and sound and light manipulation.

Wow! And how exactly does that compare with the Hanoi Hilton, Castro's gulag, Saddam's prisons or standard AQ treatment of prisoners?

Yes, Bill Press is insane

Newsbusters points out how Press has lost it.

Defending Dishonest History

Lenin, Stalin and their followers preached that good was defined as anything that furthers the revolution. Truth was irrelevant. Lies and propaganda were moral. After the left came to dominate our college campuses, relativism came to dominate most of the social sciences, particularly history. Today, history is routinely subverted in order to advance current political goals of the left.

Betsy points out Howard Zinn's interview with Dennis Prager and his view that the USA has been a force for ill in the world. Betsy reminds us that Zinn's history text is widely used in schools around the country. She also provides us with a reference to Zinn's frank admission that honest history is undesireable.

“Objectivity is impossible,” pop historian Howard Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

How stupid are Dem voters?

Betsy gives us a taste of the incredible stupidity of Democrtic voters. USA Today is reporting a poll which shows that over 40% of voters think that Bush is manipulating gas prices down for the election. As Betsy points out, if the GOP had that kind of power, why would they ever let prices go up?

We don't need no stinkin' logic

At Powerline, they have a post showing that an MSM attempt to discredit Bush in rebuilding Iraq has a problem. The story's premise isn't supported by any actual evidence. In fact, the evidence cited actually refutes the premise.

But hey, journalists don't need to worry about such trivial details.

Barone-- Fitzgerald has questions to answer

Michael Barone is not only the smartest political observer in America today, he is an honors grad of Harvard Law School whose outstanding law school performance garnered him a very prestigious clerkship with a Federal appellate judge (one step below the Supremes). In his post about Victoria Toensing's review of the perfidy surrounding the handling of the Plame affair, he writes:

About Wilson, a serial liar, there is not really much more to say

...

I think the most troubling questions she raises are about Patrick Fitzgerald, who "knew from the day he took office that the facts did not support a violation of the act." So why did he continue the investigation? I think he has a responsibility to answer that question.

Anyone who has watched the beltway over the last 30 years knows that a prosecutor who had abused White House aides so badly would be tarred and feathered by the MSM if they were Democrats. In fact, there doesn't even have to be any wrongdoing by the prosecutor for the MSM to shower abuse. The fact that there have been no calls for an accounting from Fitzgerald tells you all you need to know about MSM claims of being fair and balanced.

More Dem corruption

The Captain has the details.

Patterico points out how Newsweek lied

Via Glenn, Patterico points out how badly Isikoff skewered Bush's AG by slicing up his words to create a meaning totally at odds with what he said. Lefties have used the untruthful article to bash the administration ever since.

MSM playbook on lying about the economy

The Captain points out the AP's approach. Bury all the good news. Write about one person having difficulty. It's all Dubya's fault.

Movie wins award for showing facism in US

The movie which starts by showing Dubya assassinated won an award for its "truthfulness". Dafydd writes:

"international critics" at the Toronto Film Festival yesterday awarded a special "Fipresci prize" to the movie Death of a President:

The film, a fictional documentary showing the assassination of President Bush, was noted by the jury "for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth."

Yes sir, you read it right: the movie that begins with Bush being gunned down and concludes with a "Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"-like denouement, in which America's underlying Fascism, tyranny, and violent anti-Arab bigotry is revealed, was awarded a prize in Canada -- for being fake but accurate!

MSM-- making up lies to aid propaganda effort

I noticed this from Betsy. The writer of the 9/11 movie has responded to the McCarthyism of Democrats and their left-wing friends, the MSM:

In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, "No." I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings--wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.

The hysteria engendered by the series found more than one target. In addition to the death threats and hate mail directed at me, and my grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger, there developed an impassioned search for incriminating evidence on everyone else connected to the film. And in director David Cunningham, the searchers found paydirt! His father had founded a Christian youth outreach mission. The whiff of the younger Mr. Cunningham's possible connection to this enterprise was enough to set the hounds of suspicion baying. A religious mission! A New York Times reporter wrote, without irony or explanation, that an issue that raised questions about the director was his involvement in his father's outreach work. In the era of McCarthyism, the merest hint of a connection to communism sufficed to inspire dark accusations, the certainty that the accused was part of a malign conspiracy. Today, apparently, you can get something of that effect by charging a connection with a Christian mission.

Brady Quinn is now barred from winning the Heisman

Notre Dame is getting clobbered at home in a big game with Michigan. Quinn has terrible numbers. Halfway thru the 4th he has 3 picks and averages less than 5 yards per attempt.

Using the same standard which was applied to Peyton Manning, it is now absolutely impossible for him to win the Heisman. Even if the Irish win every other game on their schedule and he puts up the best numbers in college football history, he's toast under the Manning standard.

In 1997, Bob Griese and others described Manning as the best QB to come out of college in 15 years (meaning since Elway and Marino). He won more games as a starting QB than any player in college history. His statistical numbers were incredible.

Brady Quinn is not the best college QB in the last 15 years. His stats are not awesome. And he just lost his big game in a blowout.

Therefore, based on the standard applied to Peyton, he cannot win. [It should also be noted in a matter of delicious irony, that the Eastern and Midwest writers who searched so desperately for a reason to reject Manning are the same ones most likely to favor a Quinn candidacy. If they don't immediately write him off today, we can conclude how honest they are (not).

Dumb vs. Stupid

Watching the last minute of LSU and Auburn. LSU is down 4 and had to go the length of the field. Auburn started the idiocy by rushing only 3 men and allowing QB Russell to make really easy throws to move down the field. Then Russell took a sack rolling out when he absolutely couldn't allow it and had lots of opportunity to throw it away. Then Auburn went back to rushing 3. But LSU stupidly failed to throw all the way to the end zone on the last play of the game and came up 4 yards short. Dumb beats stupid 7-3.

More questions about Libby persecution

Victoria Toensing asks some very good questions in this Opinion Journal piece. A J follows up with some thoughts.

How Powell, CIA and Justice created Plame game to gut War effort

AJ has a post of a comment which must be read. The commenter's ability to know of what he speaks is attested to by Clarice Feldman, DC attorney and author at American Thinker.

Read it now. Some quotes:

political operatives at CIA and the New York Times, with a little help from a friend who had been an ambassador (and maybe another friend at State), staged a disinformation operation that they hoped just might bring down a president.

Read the details. And he wraps up:

What am I suggesting? Simply this: I suspect that there was a conscious decision within the Department of Justice (but with the willing collusion of officials at State and the CIA) to use Plamegate as a tactic to neutralize the Administration’s GWOT policy, at least as that involved the legal interpretation of sensitive issues. What other explanation could possibly make sense of the known facts? This neutralization would be accomplished not through argumentation but by knowingly abusing the criminal justice system to tie key members of the Administration in knots, using Fitzgerald, the FBI and, above all, Fitzgerald’s grand jury. Plamegate was a political-ops put up job from start to finish–at least once the CIA/State/Justice cabal got their hands on it. But because it used the FBI and a Federal GJ to hound persons who the cabal knew had committed no crime or misconduct whatsoever, it was also a gross and knowing abuse of the criminal justice system, and that’s an important matter that deserves far wider publicity than it has yet received.

If this is even remotely accurate, Fitzgerald should be disbarred and sent to prison. For a long time.

MSM -- is the ignorance worse than the bias?

J R Dunn points out another example of how incompetent journalists are.

What's nastier than beheading with a dull blade after hours of torture?

Colin Powell and other gutless wonders in the Beltway crowd are saying that our enemies will likely treat our captured soldiers worse than they already do if we don't grant to terrorists protections which the Geneva Convention denies them. I agree wholeheartedly with The Captain's assessment:

In this war, this argument seems particularly despicable. We have been treated to images of broken and tortured bodies of our soldiers on television and the Internet, courtesy of the animals who oppose us in this war. No one suffers under the delusion that captured soldiers will ever return alive, let alone receive Geneva-approved treatment. Our enemy doesn't even fight according to the GC, so why should they treat our soldiers any better than they treat the civilians they target for their attacks?

If Powell and Levin and McCain can name one modern conflict where our enemies gave POWs treatment in accordance with the GC, I'd be glad to post it right here on my blog. Don't expect that kind of an update any time soon.

Why Peggy Noonan can be irritating

I like Peggy Noonan. And I think she has written a lot of good stuff. I've also pointed out some big disagreements I have with her. Reading her latest column for the WSJ, I found myself getting irritated with her even though I surely agree with her main point that Dems are making a big mistake when they make the election all about Bush.

I think I know why she is irritating in those instances when I find here so. Not just in this column, but every time I disagree with her. It is this -- she takes as given the news she gets from the MSM and the assumptions that go with it. I guess it goes back to the years she worked for Dan Rather and CBS.

She lives in Manhattan and believes the MSM. Let's give her credit for generally supporting the GOP despite the massive amount of left-wing propaganda she inhales every day. But one has to question how someone committed to facts and truth could keep inhaling the propaganda every day.

Because in the end, much of the left/right divide in our politics focuses on facts. And if you believe the "facts" spouted by Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson, Michael Moore, Howard Dean, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary, Algore, Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy which are trumpeted by the MSM, most of what you believe is simply not true. And the foolish policy choices which arise from an understanding of these "facts" may actually seem to make some sense.

As I reflect on this, I wonder how much George Will's and William Buckley's views of the war in Iraq are due to this same phenomenon. Are we at a crossroads where our policy views inevitably flow from our sources of information?

Has the MSM gone so far that the question of one's politics can be answered by whether one accepts the MSM as a reputable source for honest news? Is there now developing a split among conservatives -- those who accept the MSM as honest news brokers and those who dismiss the MSM as propagandists?

John Kerry is a very important man

It's just not right that people laugh at him so much. He has an important job and knows lots of important people. Besides, he can't help it that he says such stupid things. So let's all give him the respect he deserves.

OK -- here's the post about Kerry's promise to kickass from Just One Minute which led to the funny comment by BumperStickerist I just posted below.

BTW -- here's the comment I left:

Why don't we also remember that Kerry put up after-action reports on his web site claiming he was the skipper of the boat described therein which was involved in very heavy fighting. Except the fighting happened before he was skipper of that boat. The reports just vanished from his site after the Swift Vets reported for duty. Do you think it was hackers?

Oh, and one of the men on the boat during that heavy fighting suffered a very bad head wound and was hospitalized for a good while. He was gone before Kerry took command of the boat. Yet somehow, he was able to speak at the Dems national convention for Kerry in 2004 about Kerry's heroism leading the boat. That's a real head scratcher.

Surely the crack investigative journalists of the NY Times and Wash Post will clear it all up for us. Maybe Mary Mapes and Dan Rather can help. And if OJ ever gets tired looking for the killer, I'm sure he can lend a hand, too.

Rather be lucky than good

A comment on Tom Maguire's post about Kerry's promise to kickass with the Swift Vets was so good, Tom posted it as a separate item:

I finally admitted to a liberal friend the obvious truth - I voted for Bush because he's both pure evil *and* the luckiest bastard on the face of the earth. I mean, seriously, look at just a couple key events:

Bush joins the Texas ANG - Kerry joins the Navy Reserves.

Bush completes TANG training for jets, flies jets, volunteers for Vietnam only to be told that the pilot skills he has aren't needed.

Kerry joins the Swift Boats at time they were patrolling off coas - the duty changes to river patrolling, Kerry gets shot at by people intent on killing him and his crew. Kerry leaves by choice after three months.

Advantage: Bush

Bush skates through the last two years of his TANG duty, but does so with such foresight as to bury almost all traces of his duty record leaving only notes from a dental record exam.

Kerry works as an admirals aide for the balance of his active duty stint - but manages to get caught on tape during a meeting where assassination is discussed, travels to Vietnam while on Reserve status to meet with the enemy, has his Silver Star citation ammended twice times, publishes an anti-war book that's later debunked.

Advantage: Bush

Bush: Sat for 6.5 minutes after hearing about the 9/11 attacks in a room with a bunch of kids, a teacher, and a camera crew.

Kerry: Sat for an hour, stunned to the point of inaction, in a room full of adult elected officials with no camera present.

Advantage: Bush

Bush: Able to surround himself with a cadre of people able to engineer election fraud on a massive scale in Democratic-controlled precincts undetected, destroy two huge buildings in the middle of a major US city without any actual, you know, evidence left behind, destroy our basic Constitutional rights in pursuit of his neocon vision of a Unitary Executive and still have the energy to clear brush from his ranch while on vacation.

Kerry: Can't get the balloons to release on cue.

Advantage: Bush

There comes a point where you just marvel at the timing of events in favor of Bush and the way the Democrats clusterfuck their way through life and decide 'fuck it - Bush'

Seriously, if the Left can't defeat the Evil that is Bush, how the hell can they be trusted to defeat actual Evil?

Dems on Election Board refuse to investigate

Bill Hobbs has details. Don't hold your breath waiting for them to do what the law requires. They see their function to be helping Dems win elections. Accordingly, Dems don't commit election fraud in this state. Even if they admit it on the floor of the State House.

Propagandists covering for Liars

Hugh:

I knew it was coming. But it is still jarring to see the extent to which the agenda journalists of the MSM will cover for the Democratic Party, even when it means abandoning a very good story certain to attract readers and serve the public's interest.

Perhaps the sad story of MSM's collapse can be condensed in a case study surrounding this race by the poobahs at Columbia School of Journalism. Dean Nick Lemann wants his students to learn power skills in order to reinvigorate the profession. Perhaps he should preface those classes with an admonishment: First, get the facts out and get them straight.

Journalists face a terrible delimma -- tell the truth or help liberal politicians. They can't do both. And if they do the former, they won't long be employed as journalists.

The Politics of Hollywood

Scrolling down through Mickey Kaus, I enjoyed the fun he has with a writer who worries about the power of right-wingers in Hollywood (from 9/10):

are you worried about an "emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian politican and religious agendas"? Maybe I'm complacent about the threat, but isn't that a little like worrying about the growing anti-Zionist foothold at The New Republic? If you put Hollywoods's entire network of right wing people in David Horowitz's living room, you wouldn't have much trouble getting to the hors d'oeuvre tray. If you tried to put Hollywood's network of left wing people in the Los Angeles Convention Center, the fire marshal would close it down.

Stupid, moronic homophobic bigots

The Anchoress:

There is something pretty hypocritical about whispering “gay” about someone as though it’s a bad thing, while mouthing the usual “not that there’s anything wrong with that” platitudes. There’s an insane sort of, “we don’t think it’s bad to be gay, but we think you do, and so we’re going to suggest and smirk and giggle that someone you like is gay, and then you’ll hate them, because you’re all homophobes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like gays, and we’d never promote intolerance or make things more difficult for them, we’re just playing a political game…no harm done, you stupid moronic bigots!”

I always am left wondering…who are the stupid moronic homophobe bigots? The ones who really don’t care what adults do in the bedroom as long as it’s consensual, or the ones who need to constantly talk about it, speculate on it and use that speculation as a “negative?”

It’s sort of like driving behind a vegan who has six “I’m a compassionate Vegan” bumperstickers on her car. You want to ask, “who are you trying to convince, me or yourself?”

Ny Times teaches reporters to obstruct justice

Clarice Feldman and A J Strata discuss the steps the NY Times is now taking to avoid criminal sanctions when it violates the law. Clarice notes that they brought their troubles on themselves.

Stupid or Naive, Dems still dangerous

From A J,

The Democrats are now either dangerously foolish because they tried to spin a serious issue and have only crippled our defenses, or they are dangerously naive because they cannot see beyond their Bush Derangement Syndrome and see when their partisan obsessions take them into dangerous waters. Either way, the left and the Dems now represent a risk to our country because they have proven to not be up to the job of protecting it. A risk that can be simply avoided by not letting them run the country right now. Maybe they will figure it out in 2008. I doubt it, but at least they get a chance to do better. In national security we don’t get second chances.

Liberalism requires bribes to succeed

I loved this take from The Captain on the column which ran in The New Republic claiming that pork was necessary for liberal policies to be enacted.

Plumer's argument amounts to an admission that the kind of big-government, intrusive spending that will come from perennial policy stands of progressives has no chance of succeeding through democratic means. The only way in which single-payer health care and greater federal protections for unions can ever pass is to have a built-in bribery mechanism to sway enough votes for massive growth in the federal government.

I agree with him on that point, and it demonstrates the corrosive nature of pork better than anything I've previously written. Fundamentally, pork undermines democracy. It greases legislation that clearly could not command a majority into law, not through superior rhetoric or demonstrated competency but through payoffs and extortion.

How Dems support our troops

Reading this post from Hugh Hewitt reminded me of a post I've been meaning to write.

Bill Clinton, in one of the few honest moments in his life, wrote that he loathed the military. Most liberal Democrats share his opinion, although many try to claim that they support the troops.

Note to Dems:

It isn't "supporting the troops" to claim that they have bungled badly their mission in Afghanistan.

It isn't "supporting the troops" when you claim they are incompetent in Iraq.

It isn't "supporting the troops" to claim that they are a bunch of losers who only joined the military because they couldn't get a job.

And it isn't "supporting the troops" to say that they are lying when they come home and speak of all the great progress being made in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Describing people as a group of lying incompetent losers does not constitue "support". Even in the looking glass world of the liberal left in America.

The "Hate America First" gang has been hard at work

How slanted have the networks been in their reporting? MRC has the details.

No need for facts

This professor has decided that there isn't a threat of terrorism in the US. Because there haven't been any attacks.

Does he have access to any of the information available to the FBI or other security agencies? No. But he knows their spokesmen are lying. Because he is a professor.

A J Strata, on the other hand, points out that the NY Times criticizes the president for reminding us that the threat of terrorism is real:

Last night, President Bush once again urged Americans to take terrorism seriously — a warning that hardly seems necessary. One aspect of that terrible day five years ago that seems immune to politicization or trivialization is the dread of another attack.

When Mr. Bush warns that Al Qaeda means what it says, that there are Islamist fanatics around the world who wish us harm and that the next assault could be even worse than the last, he does not need to press the argument.

I don't suppose we should be surprised that the Times appears to have no clue that a significant percentage of those on the left think that terrorism is no threat. The Times hasn't a clue about much of anything.

Confronting Terrorism

As another year has passed, Cox and Forkum added another panel to their 9/11 cartoon.

Also, scroll down in their next post to the picture of those trapped in the second tower. It was taken after the first tower had collapsed.

Remember.

Dems, MSM, terrorists and civil liberties

You have to read this. And remember it the next time some Democrat pretends to care about civil liberties (right after threatening broadcasters with punitive censorship). Remember this the next time some MSM editor explains how important it is to publish a story in order to keep government honest. Remember this the next time some left-wing lunatic tells you that Dubya is a threat to civil liberties.


Freaking Democrats and their corrupt propagandists.

Evil or Stupid?

Big Lizards demonstrates that the MSM is united in the effort to boycott the truth out of Iraq. He wraps up by expressing a thought which I've had:

Oh, how I wish I could lock the mainstream news anchors, the elite newspaper editors, and the wire-service presidents in a room and ask them a few questions, then just keep asking and asking until they finally broke down and answered. (All right, maybe just a soupçon of waterboarding.) For people who yammer endlessly about "the public's right to know," they're remarkably unforthcoming about anything that might hurt their patrons, the Democrats.

I'm still trying to sort out which newsmen are actively evil... and which are just useful idiots.

How accurate are economic predictions?

As good as using a dart board blindfolded.

The truth on Plame

Baseball Crank has a good fisking of the ridiculous item put out by David Corn. Corn was one of the primary tools used by Wilson and Plame to push their quest for fame, money and glory. Of course, he now "reports" as though he were a disinterested journalist. And fails to give the straight scoop.

AJ has much more. He notes that Corn has exposed all kinds of CIA secrets with his reporting and done far, far more damage than anything the wing nuts allege was done by the White House (which of course, we now know definitively the WH didn't do).

Urban legends about McD's coffee lawsuit

I was not aware that so many left-wing kooks had bought into the idea that serving coffee at recommended temperatures should be punishable to the tune of 2.9 million smackers. Here is a rundown of the foolishness spouted at one popular left-wing web site.

Never letting facts get in the way

The NY Times is worse than self-parody. It gives new meaning to the idea of self-imposed incompetence. Like the girl we once thought just played dumb in order to keep guys interested, we are becoming increasingly convinced that the Times really is that damn stupid. Andrew Cline and Tom Maguire each take a turn trying to explain how bad the Times has become. Maguire's take: "NY Times Editors Go Insane".

Good smackdown

Jeff Goldstein demonstrates that Andrew Sullivan is losing touch with reality. Now that the Supremes have said that Congress needs to vote on how to conduct the war, Sullivan imputes dark and sinister motives to the President for asking Congress to vote.

How the MSM lies about the economy

Engram has details. Glenn pointed this out, but it needs to be underlined and highlighted. The MSM cherry picks and distorts the data for one purpose -- to attack Dubya.

It becomes clearer to me with each passing day that Americans hate their fabulous economy because reporters uncritically spout depressing economic nonsense on a regular basis.

...

The upshot is that ever since the American economy has been influenced by globalization, the phenomenon that reporters are fretting about today (namely, the "odd" and "depressing" and "mysterious" disconnect between wages and productivity) has been in effect. But they don't seem to have the slightest clue about that. After all, their job is not to present you with the facts; it is to make you depressed about Bush's handling of the economy. And recent polls show that they are very good at their job.

Tennessean cites own failure as support for its politics

The Tennessean, Nashville's dominant daily paper, says the voters don't have the information they need to make sound decisions about taxes. Bill Hobbs pointed out this post which identifies who has the ability and civic responsibility to solve that problem of access to information.

Debunking ANOTHER liberal economic myth

Big companies such as Wal-Mart control less and less of our economy. Liberal myths notwithstanding, the data is clear. Steve Antler has the graphs.

Difference between life and death

Cox and Forkum highlight a column from RCP with a solid cartoon. From the column:

[T]he disaster in New Orleans was caused, not by too little welfare spending, but by too much. Four decades of dependence on government left people without the resources -- economic, intellectual, or moral -- to plan ahead and provide for themselves in an emergency.

The whole column is a must read.

And Forkum's summary is right on:

Yes, this is about a failure of government, all right. It's about the failure of big government and the welfare state and the whole philosophy behind them. It is about the vital necessity to move away from government handouts and toward personal responsibility and private initiative. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the moral difference between self-reliance and dependence on government is ultimately the difference between life and death.

For news media, evil = right wing

The Captain has a post on the rise of anti-semitism in Germany. I want to focus on the way the German magazine posed the problem in the quoted interview. The head of the Jewish Council in Germany states that the problem is getting much worse and identifies politicians who encourage it such as the leader of the Left party and a minister from the Social Democrats. Although both of these folks are very much on the left, the magazine identifies anti-semitism as a right-wing problem.

Volunteer Vacations

CNBC just had a segment on people taking vacations where they go help others. One example they discussed was going to the Gulf Coast to help build houses with Habitat for Humanity. Although a nice piece overall, the very first example they gave just made me want to spit out my diet coke -- travelling overseas to help women with "women's empowerment".

Somehow that just didn't seem to rank right up there with feeding the hungry, building shelters, and teaching better farming techniqes.

Solving the health care cost issue

Dafydd is right. Use MSAs, enact tort reform, reduce government mandates. Sounds like a winner.

Heads they win, tails you lose

At Volokh, Jim Lindgren points out the perfidy of Democrats on compulsory national service:

Remember those phony stories that individuals and the press were spreading about Republican plans to bring back the draft after the 2004 election. Fraudulent emails were sent to college students laying out supposed Republican plans, and some in the press covered them, not as the hoax they were, but simply as a seemingly plausible story that party officials were denying.

At the time, the only people in Congress introducing legislation to bring back the draft were Democrats. Now the Democrats are pushing a proposal to require compulsory service from all young people for 3 months for civil defense purposes.

The Democratic political message to voters seems clear -- if you hate the idea of a draft, blame those nasty Republicans. However, if you like the idea of a draft, vote for the Democrats who propose one.

Exploding another liberal myth

Glenn pointed out this post from Greg Mankiw. MSM reports of declining job security are false.

For some years it has been that reported that employees in the United States experienced widespread, substantial declines in job security or stability over the past several decades. Various newspaper articles have suggested that big structural changes in labor markets mean that job security is a "myth," that lifetime employment with a single employer is far less likely than it was, say, thirty years ago. Workers themselves worry that their prospects for keeping a job for a long period have shrunk, that they may need several jobs during their careers. "There is, however, a striking lack of solid empirical evidence to support these claims," writes economist Ann Huff Stevens.

The data:

in 1969 the average tenure for men in the job they held for the longest period during their careers was 21.9 years. In 2002, the comparable figure was 21.4 years, not much different. Just more than half of men ending their careers in 1969 had been with a single employer for at least 20 years; the same was true in 2002.