Thoughts about Mr. Squarepants and Dr. Dobson
Topic: Taking back our Culture
Thoughts about Mr. Squarepants and Dr. Dobson:

First, this probably wouldn't have become the press event it has if, at least in the minds of media commentators like Dr. Dobson, there had not been a subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle campaign for the hearts and minds of kids on television and in the movies - especially during "tolerance" campaigns.

If the press is going to criticize James Dobson, it should also take a hard look at some of the dodgy stuff that the "tolerance" lobby is trying to push onto us - which sometimes goes beyond mere tolerance to advocacy.

I don't think I was the only parent in the 1980s who was more than a little suspicious of the confusing messages sent by "PeeWee's Playhouse," to provide one example - long before "little PeeWee" made his debut at that adult theatre.

I also recall episodes of "Misterrogers' Neighborhood" which were a little scary - there was this visit to the Neighborhood by an acrobatic troupe, members of which performed in Y-front briefs, for example, which led me to put Misterrogers off limits to my kids unless my wife or I were available to supervise.

All of which goes to show that the television is not a good babysitter, something parents should already know.

But the alarms among media watchdogs are a little too easy to trip. Remember Jerry Falwell and the Teletubbies? Morality in Media's flap over Mighty Mouse sniffing his "magic flowers" to get super powers (that was supposed to tell kids it's OK to use cocaine)?

I suspect that sometimes you don't get anything you don't bring with you to an analysis of children's television - if you're already convinced that there's a lot of illicit sex and drug abuse in cartoons (and "the Simpsons" and "King of the Hill" are examples of that) then maybe you'll find them if you look hard enough.
__

Dr. James Dobson's protestation that it wasn't Spongebob Squarepants as such, but his appearance on campaign for tolerance of (among other things) other people's gender arrangements was actually MORE troubling than if he'd had a problem with Spongebob's long eyelashes (for example).

Dr. Dobson seems to be confused on an important point - tolerance is not the same thing as advocacy.

Idiots who pride themselves on displays of their bigotry (toward ANY group of people) in public places or even violence toward them are not being "Christian" as I understand the use of the term, and yet Dobson seems to say nothing about THAT behavior.

If, in opposing the tolerance campaign, Dobson is actually seeking to support publicly-expressed bigotry, perhaps he ought to revisit the origins and usage of the term "Christian."

I stand ready to be corrected if someone can offer examples where I am wrong about Dr. Dobson - in fact, I hope I am wrong on that point.

Here's a simple question - what would Jesus do?

The Gospels are full of Jesus not only being tolerant of, but reaching out toward people on the margins of his society - even women who were about to be stoned to death for sexual immorality.

Jesus' outreach didn't mean He accepted or advocated the behavior that got them in trouble, just that he refused to sit on the sidelines while the crowd pretended that they were without sin and started to pronounce judgment - judgment that in the woman's case who was about to be stoned to death would have been final.

I wonder if Jesus would have gotten worked up over cartoon characters being used in tolerance campaigns or if, instead, He might have taken the opportunity to reach out to the organizers of the tolerance campaign to see if, somehow, there might be some way of addressing the concerns of people who have a problem with sex outside of marriage in general - something which needs doing badly.

Looking at the Gospels again, though, we see Jesus talking to Samaritans - scandalous behavior for a Jewish rabbi in 33 AD - and hookers, and Roman tax collectors, and publicans (people who owned bars, essentially), so perhaps He may have been (shudder) "tolerant" Himself.

Maybe Jesus wasn't as concerned as some of His modern-day followers with throwing bricks at people who didn't look like Him or live like Him or pray like Him.

Jesus' parable of the Publican and the Pharisee tells us a lot about what He thought of preachers who are quick to condemn others publicly and loudly (surely the opposite viewpoint of tolerance of others).

The harshest condemnations of behavior like that are not to be found outside of Christianity, but from within it.

The New Marine One - It's a Scandal... How It Was Covered by the Press
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Press Gets Reality Check
NBC's national news show on Saturday, January 29, 2005 featured a piece presented by Raheema Ellis on the Administration's choice of a new Presidential transport helicopter (which is unofficially called "Marine One").

Ellis started off with a hearts-and-flowers introduction in the Connecticut town where Marine Ones have rolled off the assembly line since the Eisenhower administration.

Sikorsky lost the Marines' business for new Presidential transports, and NBC chose to spend most of the Connecticut part of the segment with a middle-aged lady who spent a couple of minutes emoting and otherwise expressing her disbelief, instead of (say) a Marine helicopter pilot with the squadron which flies the President around, or an independent expert on military helicopters who might be able to offer a more meaningful opinion on the White House's choice.

The balance of the segment was spent

- with a brief "good news" spot in the town in New York state where some of the assembly of the new airframe is happening (Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor in a multi-national consortium which will build the new copters)

- and a long string of "some people say" allegations about undue influence from Lockheed Martin's "Texas connection" and Tony Blair (parts of the new copter will be built in Britain - which, considering the number of Lockheed-Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that the Royal Air Force and Navy are buying, still leaves us with a large trade surplus - and in Italy, where the Agusta Westland firm has been building Bell military and civilian helicopters under license since the 1960s).

If this mysterious, unexplained "Texas connection" is anything more sinister than the Bell Helicopter (a long-time collaborator and business partner of Agusta Westland which produces many Bell-designed helicopters under license) plants near Fort Worth which will also make parts of the new Marine Ones, NBC didn't mention it.

In fact, Raheema Ellis and NBC never explained what Lockheed-Martin/Agusta Westland/Bell's "Texas connection" was at all, just that some people said there was one.

Apparently NBC felt left out when Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes were bandying innuendo about the President in Texas a few months ago and decided to play a little themselves.

What else didn't NBC tell us?

First, the current Marine One helicopter which Sikorsky builds is a version of their Sea King, a design dating back to the 1960s. The White House and Marines wanting something newer for the 21st century is about as remarkable and sinister as the Air Force's ordering modern jet fighters instead of McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantoms or Convair F-106 Delta Darts.

Sikorsky has a newer executive transport, the VH-60, but the Blackhawk UH-60 helicopter on which the VH-60 is based has been plagued by fatal crashes, some of the most recent (during the Iraq war) of which are due to mechanical failures and some of which may be due to operational problems generic to the design. None of these problems make that design attractive as the basis for a Presidential transport.

NBC failed to mention this, which is odd because they and the other networks covered those Blackhawk crashes in detail when Sikorsky was a defense contractor and not a disgruntled former defense contractor... they already had the data in-house and didn't use it.

Then again, that would have been a balanced presentation of the facts.

Let's see if we can guess:

- which state's Congressional delegation (starting with Senator Joe Lieberman, D-Connecticut, who publicly squwaked about the Sikorsky plant in his state losing the Marine One contract despite the fact that the most up-to-date Sikorsky military transport available to the Marines, the Sea Hawk, is built around an airframe which has been implicated in several fatal crashes all over the world due to mechanical or other operational failures);

- whose corporate lobbyists (Sikorsky's, maybe?);

- and which Pentagon insiders (who may have hitched their post-retirement wagons to Sikorsky's star)

might have been spinning conspiracy theories about Sikorsky losing their contract for Raheema Ellis and her team at NBC....

We have to guess if all the information we have to go by is the report on NBC, because Ellis didn't disclose her sources for the dark accusations she floated against the Bush administration.

Those accusations might have looked a lot weaker and less substantial if we knew they were being made by congressional Democrats and officials of the company who lost the contract.

Second, the basic transport version of Lockheed Martin's copter (currently built by the same British-Italian Agusta Westland consortium which will build parts of new Marine Ones) has an excellent safety record, some of which was earned during the recent unpleasantness in the Balkans by NATO military forces.

It's a modern design well adapted to the specific mission of transporting people in comfort, with military performance capabilities - it's faster than the Sea King, most importantly - if needed.

And it hasn't killed anyone. Just on that score, it's understandable how the Lockheed-Agusta Westland-Bell consortium got the contract and Sikorsky didn't.

NBC didn't go into any of that, either. It took me about fifteen-twenty minutes to check these facts on the Web. They weren't hard to find.

The possibility of corruption or patronage in this matter isn't supported by any facts which NBC offered in the report.

That case goes like this:
- the President comes from Texas;
- one of several plants which will build parts for new Marine Ones, and which has been in the business of building military helicopters since the 1950s, is located in Texas (as I understand it, the big plant is going to be in New York state);
- therefore, some collusion must exist between the President and the people who run that plant.

Has Oliver Stone gone to work for NBC while no one was looking?

If Sikorsky had gotten the contract instead in a hypothetical Kerry administration, it could have been argued with equal justice that the award was made as part of a deal with Joe Lieberman and the rest of Connecticut's delegation to Congress to support the Administration during close House and Senate votes.

THAT would have been a sweet deal - it would have firmed up support for Senate Democrats' long filibusters during votes on the appointment of Federal judges, while decreasing the chances of any aisle-crossing on close votes on other issues by the people from Connecticut.

I'd like NBC to say with a straight face that they would have made THAT allegation against a sitting Democratic president.

Big scandal. Good thing we have the mainstream media to sniff stories like this out, huh?

The Market for Truth
Topic: Press Gets Reality Check
FoxNews' Chris Matthews appeared on Hugh Hewitt's show (please click here to be taken to the post in Hugh Hewitt's blog) and discussed, among other things, the fact that Fox had five times the audience of CNN and three times the audience of CNN and MSNBC combined for this year's inauguration coverage. Now, some people might point out that this is a lot like being elected governor of the Moon, but I would dissent from that appraisal.

People who watch events such as the Inaugural Address are arguably people who are interested enough in political news that their choices in where to get it say something important about the quality and reliability of the news outlet they go to.

Again, three times as many of these people went to FoxNews, a news channel that is constantly criticized and even demonized for its supposed conservative bias by the self-assessed "mainstream media" than to CNN or MSNBC (the mainstream media's outlets for "news only" programming) combined.

That looks to me like a shift in the market for truth. In an open and free market, people go where they can get what they want and need - this is part of how the "hidden hand of the market" works.

If Mr. Matthews' figures are correct, the free market for news as news (as distinguished from news as an add-on to mostly entertainment programming) is shifting toward FoxNews despite an ongoing and long-time smear campaign against that network in the so-called mainstream media.

My opinion? If the mainstream media ignore this development, it's at their own peril.

The post on Mr. Hewitt's blog I linked to (please click here to be taken to the post in Hugh Hewitt's blog) was mainly about CBS' president Leslie Moonves's announcement that "We might have to blow everything up, not an evolution, but a revolution... " and what that might mean for CBS's news division.

I have to agree with Hugh Hewitt and Chris Wallace that Mr. Moonves's announcement probably doesn't portend a shift toward professionalism for the CBS Evening News and their other news products, but something less desirable - perhaps a format change which doesn't involve any fundamental shift toward introducing journalistic ethics - objectivity or avoidance of political partisanship - into what CBS does.

To quote Wallace (from the post on Hugh Hewitt's blog):

"So I don't mind the idea of the revolution, the thing that bothers me is that what he seems to be talking about, and you know it is all just speculation at this point, but what he does seem to be talking about is dumbing down the evening news, and that does bother me.

You know, when he starts talking about having multiple anchors, and the success of The Early Show --which is doing better, it is the CBS morning show, but it certainly is no great evidence of tremendous journalism, or talks about Jon Stewart, whom I admire tremendously, but the idea of putting him on a half hour or nightly news cast --you know, I think what they might want to think about instead is the idea that liberal bias and this kind of group think that you see in the broad mainstream media, maybe if they followed some of Fox's ideas and tried to do a more fair and balanced kind of approach, maybe they'd get an audience that way, but, you know, I don't think you should sacrifice standards, sacrifice the seriousness of what you are trying to do, unless they are planning to go to an hour and I assure you with all their concerns about money, they aren't doing that."

Considering that even Fox's own local broadcast affiliates don't run with FoxNews's more serious content except on Sunday mornings, I can't see CBS or the other big broadcast networks or their affiliates making a shift toward serious - as in committed toward balanced, objective and fair - news reporting. That would have the big commercial TV networks making an ideological 180-degree turn (well, in ABC's case, maybe only a 130-degree turn) in both the content and the presentation of their news programming.

(While a move of that nature is exceedingly unlikely - where do you scare up a whole news department's worth of unbiased reporters, anchor people, producers and writers on short notice, even were you inclined to do so? - it would be a staggeringly gutsy move and might do serious ratings damage both to the local Fox affiliates and to the big commerical news outfits who were still selling more of the same liberal news and analysis. It would be a staggering gamble - but if it paid off at all, it would give the major television news network making the gamble huge winnings in the ratings game.

In the long run, the need to sell such a drastic departure from the norm to stockholders will probably conserve the status quo among the big commercial television news organizations.)

Even PBS News shies away from objectivity in their news reporting, which tells us that the problem isn't money as much as it is politics, because PBS' decisions are not, generally speaking, market-driven. PBS gets money the old-fashioned way - by wheedling, begging and panhandling for it, and getting Uncle Sam to reach into our pockets for some of it.

Big Oil and the other large major institutional sponsors of public broadcasting buy respectability by funding PBS, which is then guided in choosing its programs by a Byzantine process in which the public has only a glancing and impermanent place, judging by the network's content.

I can't imagine the same public that re-elected George W. Bush voluntarily spending money to keep NOW with Bill Moyers on the air, or even authorizing the massive tax exemptions which allow charitable foundations to fund programs such as NOW - which function as hour-long political attack ads favoring the political left, when they aren't coddling the Castro admirer who presently runs Venezuela and stays in office by committing political murders on election day. I can't even imagine who, apart from the same people who prop up the Daily Kos and Moyers himself, even watches NOW. Could that show's ratings have less relevance to its continued presence in the PBS lineup?

No, "public television" didn't get its name from the transparent environment in which its programming decisions are made. The average taxpayer knows a lot less about how sausage is made than about how PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting choose and fund the programs that appear on local public television stations, and that's how the suits in PBS and CPB like it.

Most of the decision makers in the "mainstream media" are politically liberal. This is apparent from the decisions that are made and implemented - when risks are taken in a mainstream media news organization, it's almost always to present a left-of-center viewpoint, almost never to present a viewpoint at variance with the political biases of the people who sign off on corporate decisions.

Dan Rather and Mary Mapes being allowed to cooperate with Democratic Party activists by their bosses at CBS News in the matter of the forged Texas Air National Guard memos is only the most recent example of this. CBS News's highly misleading and selective editing of interviews with Army officers for their documentaries on the Vietnam War is still a by-word for politically-biased and unethical news coverage.

When Big Journalism colors outside the lines, it's almost always off to the left of the page.

ABC's John Stossel is alone among journalists for the Big Three networks in presenting truly objective or occassionally and slightly right of center content in prime time. The fact that he's been allowed to do it for years points to ABC's recognition that people want to hear and see what Mr. Stossel has to say.

Leslie Moonves needs to channelsurf a little and pay attention to what works for other people before declaring a revolution. He might have a better idea of who to put up against the wall afterwards.

Thanks, everybody
Mood:  sad
Topic: Martyred for Freedom

Just over two weeks ago, my son died with eight other soldiers when their Bradley fighting vehicle drove over a large land mine, which threw their vehicle into the air and onto its back.

I will pass over describing what happened after that except to say that the Bradley burned down and its hatches jammed, trapping everyone inside. Everyone died. Luke had a closed casket funeral.

A few years ago, I witlessly used a circular saw to cut tree branches for firewood and lost a finger - the bones of that finger and the finger next to it were shredded. I have to say that apart from embarrassment at having maimed myself for no good reason, I didn't feel a thing until I had been in the hospital emergency room for fifteen minutes.

That merciful numbness of shock is sort of what I've been feeling these two weeks - and is wearing off. I lost one of my sons, one of the people I loved with my whole heart, and it hurts worse than when I began to feel those shredded fingers.

I want to thank everyone who reached out and are still reaching out to my wife and me and Luke's widow in our time of pain. You know who you are, and we might not have gotten through losing Luke without you.

Senators Landrieu and Vitter of Louisiana, where Luke lived and in whose National Guard he served when he died, and Senators Allard and Salazar of Colorado, my chosen home, have all very solicitously asked if there was anything they could do for my wife and me.

Yes, there is something.

Please don't throw my son's sacrifice and the sacrifices of well over a thousand other Americans who died in Iraq away.

Please don't succumb to the urge to retreat from Iraq before it is a working, stable democracy, and before it is strong enough not to collapse as Afghanistan did, becoming a base of operations for terror.

Don't slink away from our obligation to destroy the cancer of terror and expanding tyranny, the way a previous Congress did in Vietnam.

Don't throw what my son died for away. Please.

Armand Luke Frickey, February 2nd, 1984 - January 6th, 2005
Mood:  sad
Topic: Martyred for Freedom
On January 6th, 2004 nine soldiers gave their lives in order to uphold freedom and destroy those who would impose tyranny over us all.

One of those was my son, Armand Luke Frickey. He was worth knowing, and I'd like to help you all know him at least a little bit.

Luke, as we in his family called him, was big in just about every sense of the word. He was generous to a fault. At six feet, four inches tall, he towered over most of us at family gatherings. His shoes would have come in handy during the recent Asian tsunami as emergency watercraft.

He had a wacky sense of humor - Dave Chapelle, that sort of thing - which his laid-back exterior tended to hide. Some of the other scoutmasters at our old troop in Indiana called me today just to reminisce and to tell me how Luke had contributed to the life of the troop - Luke's recipe for trail jambalaya is still very much in use there, and the other guys chipped in one day and got Luke a language patch for his uniform - for Klingon - in a salute to his trekkiness and his willingness to be goofy at a moment's notice in a good cause.

When we asked Luke what he wanted us to send him in his next parcel, he asked for pencils and paper for the local schoolchildren, who have none right now. We had just filled a couple of boxes of school supplies and were ready to mail them off to our son when a captain and a sergeant from Fort Carson (here in Colorado) came to tell us our son had died. We gave those boxes to the Army's representatives so that Iraqi school children could have them as our son would have wanted.

I am certain our son's wish was that, in the event of his death, that his widow would be well-treated and allowed to grieve for him in a dignified manner. Contrary to misinformation in newspapers and other news outlets, Luke planned his funeral arrangements with our daughter-in-law. Shortly after Luke's death, we ourselves misspoke on this point to the Denver media, for which we have since apologized to our daughter-in-law.

I ask that everyone respect Luke's wishes - please let his beloved wife take leave of Luke in peace and let her plan his funeral and interment with the Army's help, without further invasion of her privacy of any sort from anyone.

Anything else would be an insult to my son's memory and would betray a complete lack of respect for him and a total disregard for what he would have wanted.

The Homer Simpson Theory on Why the Democrats Lost the Election - "Awwwww - Stupid voters!"
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
I've noted with interest cartoonist Ted Rall's flinging of rhetorical dung in frustration that the American people didn't take their marching orders from the American Left and put John Kerry in the White House.

I'm re-reading Chapman Pincher's Traitors right now, and find that he wrote the perfect summation of Rall's, and apparently much of the entire leftist elite's reaction:

"Those who are truly ideological also partake of the basic arrogance of all politicans and activists, who believe themselves especially qualified to arrange the lives of other people."

American voters disagreed with Kerry and the Democrats' assessment that they, and they alone, are intelligent enough to decide things for all of us - therefore, in the eyes of the Left the voters are wrong, bad, stupid... then, we have Ted Rall using the developmentally disabled as a metaphor for people he doesn't like, showing us the depth of his compassion for those who have already been cruelly misused by fate.

The difference between, say, the Republicans after their inglorious loss in 1996 and the Democrats now is that the Republicans stood up, dusted themselves off, and accepted that they had LOST an election, then resolved to do better - which they then did. Twice.

This time, voters - both an electoral and a popular majority - rationally chose the party and President most apt to defend the nation and keep the economic recovery going.

This happened despite all the lies, misinformation and outright spite dealt out against the President by Democrats inside and outside of the news and entertainment media. It's difficult to think of a bigger and more coordinated attempt to brainwash the American people since Lyndon Johnson's campaign smeared Barry Goldwater as a Button-pushing madman with their infamous toddler with a kitten/mushroom cloud TV ad.

The release of "Dr. Strangelove" during the 1964 campaign foreshadowed 2004's spate of much less worthy movies probably intended to alienate voters from Bush - including a "40th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition DVD" of "Dr. Strangelove" itself.

And still, this time the media onslaught failed when hype and glibness had won for them before.

How many losses will the Democrats need to teach them that you can't fool all of the people all of the time? Will they ever recover from their self-delusional Myth of the Stolen Election, or is that irrational resentment stemming from the 2000 election the glue holding a fractious and troubled Democratic Party together?

The new informing Myth circulating through the Democratic Party at all levels is that John Kerry "tanked" the election, that he was driven by powerful, yet hidden psychological forces to lose.

Kerry sure looked as though he was in the contest to win to me. Perhaps a little tired toward the end of the campaign, but hey, he's an old man. And he sure spent enough of his and his wife's money on the campaign to decide, even unconsciously, to give up.

Maybe Kerry was afraid of a post-election Genifer Flowers-type press cycle - not about infidelity, but about the raging leftist ideologue he was in the 1970s, and the sheer number of people who died in Southeast Asia thanks to his work on behalf of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. But I doubt it. I think that deep inside, Kerry really believes that crap about "never apologize, never explain."

It's certainly a comforting myth, that the Democrats' failure to win the White House this time lay in the frailty of their candidate, and not the essential wrongness of their party's stand on how our government should work. It's never the voters' rejection of what the Democratic National Committee is trying to sell, always something else that costs them elections.

This new Myth of the Impotent Candidate and the "We Was Robbed in 2000" mantra both are potent narcotics, numbing the awareness among the Democratic rank and file that something is awry, even rotten, at the very center of the Democratic Party's national leadership.

In a country where people vested in retirement plans and others who, directly or indirectly, own securities - a very large segment of the country - own most of the country's wealth, the Democrats' constant harping about "the rich" is absurd... or would be if the Democratic Party hadn't early on been able to inflict the ability to hold conflicting views simultaneously that George Orwell made famous in his 1984 as "doublethink" - on so many of its members.

"The war is bad and Kerry would have won it for us right now," "we haven't been able to search every cranny of a country the size of California for weapons of mass destruction and that means they were never there... " - the true-blue Kerry supporter seemed able to juggle all of that - and more - in his or her head and never doubt any of it.

The national press, so highly attuned to any slight inconsistency in the Administration's policies, never betrays the slightest awareness or even suspicion that they themselves are helping impose Orwellian doublethink on vast numbers of people. Fortunately, those numbers weren't vast enough to win a Presidential election this time.

I think that the Bush victory indicates much greater-than-average intelligence on the part of the voting majority.

In this election, most of the voters resisted marketing techniques that have been proven time and time again to sell even the shoddiest and most overpriced crap, combined with a hard-sell campaign in the press to slant the news to whatever degree necessary to enhance Democratic election prospects.

But not even these techniques could sell John Kerry and Democratic policy (the particulars of which were wisely soft-pedaled during the campaign).

Not only did Kerry lose, but on Inauguration Day the Democratic contingent in the Senate will be smaller than it's been since the 1930s.

The Democrats should be inveighing against the increase in sales resistance and general intelligence among the American people - that's what cost the Donkey Party the election this year.

Endocrinology the Bob Marley Way
Topic: Adventures in Spam

From time to time it becomes apparent that the Internet really IS the Great Equalizer.

Every day, I see spam Email scams that only people who grew up speaking English would have tried to pull on native English-speakers a few short years ago being attempted by people with an incomplete command of the grammar and idiom of our language.

NOW, the nature and density (you'll see what I mean) of the errors in many spam Emails suggests a Caribbean or other non-Anglo-American point of origin. Now, far be it from me to suggest that this alone would make such spam automatically inferior to domestic British or American spam... on the contrary, these attempts at electronic hucksterism have a certain charm that more technically proficient spam lacks.

Example:

"Enjoy your lifetime with Somebody Increase Internal Secretion

After the 21 years, your trunk slowly checks releasing a important hormone known as Soul Growth Internal Secretion.

The step-down of it, which governs grades of other internal secretions in our physical structure is at once responsible for many of the greatest general signs of growing old, for example wrinkles, gray light hair, fell energy, and vitiated intimate purpose.

(link) Read additional info... "

Now, doesn't that make good-old-fashioned spam seem cold and impersonal by comparison?

This new bit of spam reminds me of Peter Tosh's "Legalize It," most famously covered by Bob Marley and the Wailers, which extols the many medical benefits of marijuana, cannabis, ganja -

"It's good for the flu
It's good for asthma
Good for tuberculosis
Even umara composis

Legalize it - don't criticize it
Legalize it and I will advertise it"

Of course, the Caribbean tone I perceive in the message could have something to do with the steadily increasing accumulation of snow here in metropolitan Denver, and a subliminal wish on my part to be where snow never accumulates just now.

The Briar Patch in Ohio, or "Gee, why isn't there a recount?"
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Democrat Voter Fraud
What Hugh Hewitt and company call the "fever swamp" and the rest of us think of as "left wing conspiracy theorists and wing nuts" is in full hue and cry demanding a recount in Ohio and elsewhere.

And the lack of an Ohio recount is a little odd. You'd think as close to the wire as the election got there, and as impassioned as this election was, that a recount would be a natural.

The inhabitants of the fever swamp have concluded that John Kerry just doesn't have the 'nads for an Al Gore-caliber national temper tantrum, and he doesn't want to expose a notional loss of the election due to Republican election fraud:

A much more satisfying and plausible hypothesis is that John Kerry and his close strategists didn't want a recount because they were afraid of exposing massive Democratic voter fraud in Ohio.

Think about it for a second. At least fifteen million dollars, according to dissidents from within the Democrats' inner circles, was available to fund recounts nationwide.

With the massive pool of volunteer talent on tap to stage protests all over the Buckeye State and allege mopery and dopery, why not contest the elections there? Why not do it just on the chance that there were legitimate errors that could have changed the outcome?

The only answer that makes any sense is "Because the Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee know they themselves were the ones doing the cheating, stuffing ballot boxes, filing bogus voter registrations, and in general trying to fix the election in Ohio."

It's entirely possible that a thorough recount in Ohio would only have resulted in Federal marshals knocking on the DNC's offices with arrest warrants.

Please, Brer Kerry, don't ask for a recount in Ohio! Whatever you do, don't throw us in that briar patch!

We dodged the bullet called John Kerry... (action: wipes forehead in relief)
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Take THAT, you...
THANK YOU, GOD!!!!

Took me a while to get over the sense of nearly having gotten John Kerry as President. The idea of having the lives of the 1,000-plus Americans who have already died in Iraq and the ones who will die in the future traded for nothing at all in an eventual LBJ/Nixon-style pullout by the Master of Indecision was infuriating.

Bush, by comparison, has a plan - not a perfect one, and probably not the one I'd have gone with, because I'd have told France, Germany and the UN to go to hell and not erected the huge foreign bureaucracy which has now demonstrated its lack of connection with the Iraqi people.

"Pottery Barn theory," my foot - if we broke it, just be grateful there's more "it" we haven't broken yet and shut up. Speaking of which, I hope that in the new Bush administration, Colin Powell is given the chance to represent countries with whose foreign policy he agrees more fully than our own.

But the drubbing which the Sunni resistance has had coming for a while in Fallujah is going to happen.

Other pundits, notably a fellow who wrote a letter to the Weekly Standard a few days ago, have said it better than me - we may never win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, so the idea should be to empower most of the people who live there and want nothing to do with terrorism to run their own country, and kill the terrorists as efficiently as possible. Large-yield high explosives should help.

We may need to partition off the Sunni Triangle, call it "Occupied Iraq," and keep troops there for fifty years - the way we did in Japan, Germany and Korea. Would we have hesitated to do that if it had been Nazis rising up against us in Berlin? If the Islamofascists want to line up for easy destruction in Fallujah, hey, it saves us hunting them down.

But the idea that we are going to get out if Iraq at some point and hang up our shootin' irons is so wrong, it's difficult to say just how wrong it is without resorting to profanity.

There are plenty of other nests of terrorism which need cleaning out, like the entire Indian Ocean and the Sulu Archipelago.

Those Australians who don't see why we need to be delivering bomb-o-grams to every Islamofascist on Earth are going to be getting the memo very soon, because their northern neighbor Indonesia is full of Islamist radicals, many of whom have already started screaming that all those "Crusaders" Down Under need to die. I'm sure someone's going to decide just how Bush caused THAT presently.

But I digress. George W. Bush is the first American President to actually have won a majority in the popular vote in 16 years - since his dad handed Dukakis his butt in the 1988 election. No more "selected, not elected" BS from the fellow travelers.

The President has majorities in both Houses of Congress, which means all he has to deal with is Tom DeLay and people like DeLay who are going to obstruct and hinder the President's agenda to prove how powerful they are. They can, however, be dealt with, even if the cure involves a little Chapstick.

And the Republican majority in the Senate is NOT quite large enough to prevent Democratic filibusters, but IS large enough to make the Republican majority's rumblings about "going nuclear" and amending the procedural rule which permits those filibusters in the first place much more plausible than they were before the election. THAT would be enough of a show to make me get cable, just so I could tape the proceedings on C-SPAN.

I wish that I'd taped Charlie Rose today (we get it on Boulder's PBS station rebroadcast at about 1-2 pm). There they were, four journalists sharing a single frontal lobe, Rose, Mark Halperin (who is something important in ABC News' political department, and who gave the 1992 Clinton campaign an advance look at, and crucial time to spin a response to the letter from 21-year old Bill Clinton thanking his ROTC advisor for "saving him from the draft,"), and two editors from Newsweek, all betraying their lack of objectivity (no surprises there, apart from Mark Halperin squirming uncomfortably when one of the brain donors from Newsweek popped off in a particularly stupid way, and later, Halperin actually standing up for a friend in the Kerry campaign whose name came up during the post mortem) and loyalty to the fallen (sort of a surprise - but maybe crapping on John Kerry is an homage to objectivity for a liberal journalist).

I mainly watch Charlie Rose for the entertainment factor - for those of you unfamiliar with the fellow, imagine if Dan Rather was the product of a massive cloning project - what happens to the clones that fell on their heads or otherwise had less than full Rather mental acuity?

I submit that they are given talk shows on PBS.

Bill Moyers was obviously a pre-production prototype model, and Charlie Rose... well, "BONK... sorry, Charlie, no CBS anchor deal... we'll see if Papa Liberal Smurf Bill can get you on over at Public Broadcasting. Here's a lollipop."

Anyway, it was a good entertainment day on the Rose show. The sharks of the working press were in a frenzy, having discovered (or suddenly felt free to disclose) what a loser John Kerry is as a political candidate (I leave the rich field of all the other ways John Kerry may or may not be a loser unexplored in the interest of brevity).

Bob Shrum came in for a shellacking for not telling Kerry to counter Bush's vicious political tactics sooner (they lost me there... was the Prez being rude about Kerry on washroom stalls or something? I thought that given Kerry's history as a self-promoting, opportunistic, looney-left gladhanding dim bulb, Bush passed up a lot of opportunities to send his opponent through the rhetorical wood-chipper).

But even Nasty John "This Time It's Personal" Kerry couldn't do the job of bearing the guidon of knee-jerk liberalism across the finish line at November. He used dependent clauses in his speeches, fer Chrissake! (I am not making that bit of analysis up. Someone who gets vastly overpaid by Newsweek said it. Vastly overpaid.)

Mrs. Heinz-Kerry, their kids, expensive outside consultants all labored in vain, trying to get the Senator to speak in short, understandable sentences.

In the end, John Forbes Kerry's life-long infatuation with the sound of his own voice may have been the only thing standing between us and a particularly nasty and difficult-to-fathom personality cult.

God works in mysterious ways, His Wonders to perform.

"This collapse of civilization was paid for by the Democratic National Committee."
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Taking back our Culture
The vote of an American citizen is one of the most valuable things on Earth, and should be safeguarded accordingly. The idea that requiring voters to adequately identify themselves before voting is "intimidation" is, not to put too fine a point on it, a load of rank, smelly bullcrap.

Think about the potential for people to show up at a polling place, representing themselves as the voters named on some of those bogus voter registrations we mentioned earlier.

Then think about elections becoming largely meaningless things which have no impact on who runs the country.

I am all too aware that just under half the country may think that's where we are anyway. The staff of the Democratic National Committee makes very nice livings BS-ing people into believing that, and they have a very efficient nationwide network of people to spread their lies for them.

If all of a sudden, people didn't think that when they lost an election, it happened strictly according to the law, the DNC would all have to settle for being much less important than they now conceive themselves to be.

The problem with stirring up anger and hatred in other people's hearts is that it's not a very exact science. Ask Yassir Arafat - the bastard spent his entire career twisting the tail of the tiger he was riding harder and harder to distract its attention from the fat man riding on top of it. If the news reports are accurate, he may already be talking the matter over with a fellow named Shaitan.

The concept of non-stop intifada didn't just happen. Once the Oslo Accords eliminated much of the reason for Yassir Arafat to exist, he needed more unrest just to stay alive, so he had more unrest and has had as much unrest as he needs ever since. Presumably his successors in the "terror as a business" dodge will need even more unrest.

The several potential Yassir Arafats here in the States - the David Dukes, Pat Buchanans, Al Sharptons and Louis Farrakhans may at some point decide to kick it up a notch beyond the very capable work of Terry McAuliffe and James Carville, and convince the people in this country who live in perpetual anger that someone somewhere has it better than they do - what Winston Churchill called "the politics of envy" - to rip our country apart.

Eventually this rhetoric will find tangible expression, as it did during the summer riots of the late Sixties or early Seventies, or the rise of the so-called militias in the Eighties and Nineties.

Anyone want a second Civil War, this time with modern communications, data processing, weapons technology - mass weapons technology, including chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons - and cryptology? The Democrats are taking us there with their politics of envy and rage and tactics of personal demonization

The new, divisive, demonizing party politics to build up power bases by drastically exaggerating conflicts between groups in society is heading us right down that road. How long before Al-Qaeda and the other Islamofascist groups buy into and deepen the forces splitting our fractured nation as they have in so many other countries?

Maybe by then, the fortunate people high up in the Democratic National Committee will be able to move away from this country before we start actually shooting at each other because we see each other as "those people in the other party." It won't be their problem any more, will it?

Just one more mess they walked away from.