Hmmm. The Democrats must be in charge again.

When the media start telling the troops' opinions of war critics, they must think Bush is beaten. I wonder how many NBC correspondents will stay behind to cover the real civil war when we pull out.

Sigh

Why bother? Bush is still being criticized for denying Global Warming when he's acknowledged it over and over and over . . . Not that he's right about it, but he's entitled to a few mistakes.

Dogs and Cats living together!

The LA Times is crusading against campaign finance reform.

Who says Romney's campaign isn't internet savvy?

He edged out Giuliani in the Pajamas Media Straw Poll. Only somebody with a lot of email addresses could pull that off.

Here's to Freedom of Speech . . .

and to Michael Gordon who has surrendered his at the insistence of his employer, that bastion of freedom, the New york Times. I hope his drink tastes as watery and flat as his abject apology for expressing his own "purely personal view" when asked. Why, if this blatant support of our troops isn't crushed ruthlessly, the Times' campaign to dishearten the American public and bring about the worst and most pointless surrender in the history of the republic could fail. Maybe the ACLU would agree to stand up for Gordon's rights, if he hadn't already surrendered them.

Here's what Gordon said on The Charlie Rose show:

“So I think, you know, as a purely personal view, I think it’s worth it [sic] one last effort for sure to try to get this right, because my personal view is we’ve never really tried to win. We’ve simply been managing our way to defeat. And I think that if it’s done right, I think that there is the chance to accomplish something.”

I'm sure Mr. Rose's viewers will be gratified that his guests from the New York Times will not feel free to answer his questions honestly, but only give the official line of the paper's opinion dictators.

Update: Here's how the NYTimes "reports" a victory by the good guys. HT: Best of the Web. Taranto also mentions the Gordon incident and notes another case where a Timesian expresses his personal opinion on Rose's program but got no reprimand. Of course, he was in no danger of getting out of lock step with the Editors.

Chuck Hagel!

No, I mean it. Chuck the poseur SOB.

What's so great about Microsoft?

Not its product development, apparently. The cost of letting the monopolist off the hook, and the ignorance of the people who should be able to see through Gates' technology is special excuse.

Damn that George W.!

Michael McBride introduces me to this quote from the original George W. (Washington): Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.

In thinking about that statement and the current frenzy to find a way to embrace defeat in Iraq, I feel more contempt for our politicians and press than ever. What a bunch of pukes!

Pelosi returned from her opinion-confirming trip to Iraq and announced that her opinion had been confirmed and that she saw nothing worth losing the lives of American young people. Of course, she thinks of Irag not as a war to be won, but as a problem to be solved, and impliedly, the people of Iraq as nobody we should care about. Ooh, that's an ugly thought, but I can't change the conclusion. She must have won every election she ever ran or she'd have given up and we'd never have heard of her.

Good News, I hope.

The French are having more babies, but whether they are of the old French stock or of immigrants from Turkey, Arab nations and Indian subcontinent is difficult to determine:

The increase in French births seems not to be disproportionately due to immigrant births, the conventional inference, but that the native-born are having more babies.

This can't be proven by statistics since, in the name of French "égalité," French statistics do not take account of race or national origin. But children are thick on the streets of the most prosperous quarters of Paris.

Let's hope it's the Gauls having new little Gauls.

"But some are more equal than others"

If this headline, Was 9/11 really that bad?, doesn't make you think of Orwell's Animal Farm, you haven't read it. It culminated a decade of acts of war which escalated because we didn't take them seriously. Try to imagine what kind of attack on our country could be worse, and it's probably in the works.

The author:

David A. Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a contributing editor for the New Republic, is the author of "The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It."

His argument is that 9/11 could have been a lot worse. Well, yeah, but the Second World War could have been a lot less devastating if the rest of Europe had stood up to Hitler earlier on and nipped Nazism in the bud. Nobody knows how many innocents have been murdered and starved to death in the Soviet Union, Red China, North Korea and Vietnam because we were tired of war. It's unlikely that we even know how many are being similarly brutalized in nations below our radar, like Sudan, the Congo, etc., because the U.N. has become the chief obstacle to relieving their suffering instead of the chief means of relief as it was intended.

This piece is another one of those "it needs to be said" essays (seemingly following the success of the "shock jock" phenomenon) that are so popular today. They come most often, but not always, from liberals who are writing them just for the frisson of being impolite, nay rude and outrageous. They're trolling for attention and denounced on conservative talk radio and Fox News Channel, but the tactic is getting old, and, I hope, being seen for the puerile nonsense it is. To be respected on the left these days you have to be angry, foul-mouthed and childish. But I thought that when Jonathan Chait uncorked the storm of abuse with his The Case for Bush Hatred: Mad About You in The New Republic, making it OK for pseudo intellectuals of the left to behave like two-year-olds. If this is populism, Senator Webb is welcome to it.

They're not really opposed to war, as long as it's against George Bush

Mark Steyn:

The open defeatists on the Democrat side and the nuanced defeatists among "moderate" Republicans seem to think that big countries can choose to lose small wars. After all, say the "realists," Iraq isn't any more important to Americans than Vietnam was. But a realpolitik cynic knows the tactical price of everything and the strategic value of nothing. This is something on an entirely different scale from the 1930s: Seventy years ago, Britain and Europe could not rouse themselves to focus on a looming war; today, we can't rouse ourselves even to focus on a war that's happening right now. Read 100 percent of the Democratic presidential candidates' platforms and a sizeable chunk of the Republicans': We're full of pseudo-energy for phantom crises and ersatz enemies, like "global warming."

Global warming is one of those enemies you can raise money to fight, we probably will never defeat it, but it scares people. It has now achieved politically correct status, assuring that everybody in Washington will pay lip service to it.

Unexpected consequences file

I must admit, I really like Don Surber's blog. Today he notes the dissatisfaction of the NYTimes that nobody but second tier candidates seems to be interested in taking "free" federal campaign money:

Being an NYT editorial, Bush is to blame: “President Bush is so unpopular that a power vacuum is opening up in Washington …”

The real snit is not stated in the editorial. The NYT is pissed because the politicians are not taking that “free” money from the Federal Elections Commission in exchange for restrictions on how they run their campaigns. Said the NYT:

“Congress should fix the broken public financing system, which has not been significantly updated since it was adopted in 1974. Spending limits need to be raised, to keep pace with ever-rising costs. More money needs to be put in the fund, and there should be more flexibility to help candidates who accept public financing compete against big-money candidates who opt out.”

Taxpayer-financed presidential campaigns have led to millions going to the likes of Ralph Nader, Lyndon LaRouche and Dennis Kucinich.

Hmmm -- I think I meant fourth tier candidates.

Senator Reid: Mr. Transparency

Harry Reid has another sweetheart land deal in the works with a suspicious connection to a law he wrote which benefits the seller of the land.

Nope, no culture of corruption here.

How can they miss us if we won't go away?

Joe Hallett accurately points out what's wrong with our social safety net: the Pampered Generation, we Boomers, have taken from our parents, our employers and our government; and are now busily consuming our children's earnings, and technology is extending life to a point where retirement is a free ride.

Bursting their Bubbles

Robert Kagan notes the Emperors' lack of clothing:

In Iraq, American soldiers are finally beginning the hard job of establishing a measure of peace, security and order in critical sections of Baghdad -- the essential prerequisite for the lasting political solution everyone claims to want. They've launched attacks on Sunni insurgent strongholds and begun reining in Moqtada al-Sadr's militia. And they've embarked on these operations with the expectation that reinforcements will soon be on the way: the more than 20,000 troops President Bush has ordered to Iraq and the new commander he has appointed to fight the insurgency as it has not been fought since the war began.

Back in Washington, however, Democratic and Republican members of Congress are looking for a different kind of political solution: the solution to their problems in presidential primaries and elections almost two years off. Resolutions disapproving the troop increase have proliferated on both sides of the aisle. Many of their proponents frankly, even proudly, admit they are responding to the current public mood, as if that is what they were put in office to do. Those who think they were elected sometimes to lead rather than follow seem to be in a minority.

He's right. Sometimes leading means you have to persuade your followers to do the right thing rather than what they think is most easy.

What Conservatives Want

Via Don Surber -

Jeb Bush rallies conservatives by knocking Congressional Republicans for abandoning their principles:

"Don't take offense personally if I get mad at Congress," the Republican former Florida governor began. "It's important for us to realize we lost, and there are significant reasons that happened, but it isn't because conservatives were rejected. But it's because we rejected the conservative philosophy in this country."

He added, "If the promise of pork and more programs is the way Republicans think they'll regain the majority, then they've got a problem.

Not only the spending, but their failure to stick together and make the case for the war drove conservatives to sit this one out. They saw the polls and broke ranks and ran. No guts.