Month: October 2004

Jake and me and a whole load of others.

ROVE IN OHIO: Watch what the Mayberry Machiavelli is up to. New Donkey has some insights.

NO DECLINISM: Carroll Andrew Morse doesn’t believe that John Kerry can bring us to “victory” over Jihadist terrorism. But he never defines “victory.” Can it mean the death of every single Jihadist on the globe? I’d love it to, but no serious person thinks that’s going to happen. Does he mean winning the war in Iraq? Well, Kerry says he intends to. You may think he’s incapable of such, but that’s a different argument than one about intent or will. Then Morse cites – again! – the Kerry quote from Matt Bai and equates it with Arthur Schlesinger’s view that we can live with “minor” terrorism. I begin to despair of the abuse of this Kerry quote. There is a distinction in the English language between the present and the future tense, a distinction apparently lost on many Kerry critics. I know this distinction might be dismissed as dreaded “nuance,” but what Kerry clearly said is that he wants us to get to the point in the future when terrorism is merely a “nuisance.” Given our inability to end it entirely – an inability conceded by this president many times – I’ll take that as victory. Look, it’s just rhetorical silliness to say we can end terror as a tactic for ever. It’s been around from the beginning of time and always will be. What we can do is crush organized Jihadist terrorism and try and bring about a democratic space in the Arab Islamic world so that Islamism loses political traction. Both candidates agree on that. It’s just that one candidate – in the most important test of his capacities so far – has obviously messed up dramatically. Morse wants to reward such incompetence and then pretends he’s a hawk. If he were really a hawk, he would not be ignoring Bush’s real failures and impugning Kerry’s imagined ones. If you care about ending Jihadist terrorism, ask yourself: can we afford four more years like the last year in Iraq? How many more Abu Ghraibs? How many more Fallujas? How many more al Qa Qaas? How many more debacles before we actually lose? The reason I’m for Kerry is that I want to win. And I refuse to ignore reality.

CHUTZPAH AWARD: “The role of a president is to confront problems, not to pass them on to future generations and future presidents,” – president Bush, attacking Kerry, yes, Kerry, on fiscal irresponsibility. Does he have any shame? Or does he simply have no idea what his own fiscal legacy is?

Mystery Pollster sees growing evidence that Bush might win the popular vote but lose in the electoral college. Can history really be that ironic?

You need to get out some more:

Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the bizarre death of a blogger whose head literally exploded in the final week of the election! No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion but a small room at the blogger’s residence was sprayed with blood and brain matter when Gerard Van der Leun’s head suddenly blew apart. Experts say he suffered from a condition called Hyper-Cerebral Blogosis or HCB .
“He was deep in concentration with his eyes focused on the screen and his fingers frozen over the keyboard,” said Laguna Beach early responder, Miguel Wilsonista. “He seems to have hit ‘Post’ for what had to be the 3,456,856th item of inept political photoshopping this year when the blast occurred.
“His browser history documents that he went from Drudge to Real Clear Politics to Talking Points Memo to Instapundit to Fox News to the New York Times to MSNBC to Kos to Roger Simon to Little Green Footballs to The Corner to Atrios to Google News to Allah to Belmont Club to Wonkette and finally, and probably fatally, to Andrew Sullivan. All of a sudden his hands flew to his temples and he screamed in pain. Seals and surfers far below on Main Beach in Laguna looked up from the water startled by the shrieks of agony cascading down from Arch Beach Heights. Then, as if someone had put a bomb in his cranium, Van der Leun’s head popped like a firecracker.”

Yes, I really am the final straw.

This televised evidence lends credence to the notion that al Qa Qaa was indeed looted after the occupation, and not before. But there’s a question: why does the Pentagon not know for sure? Why is their investigation ongoing? The missing armaments have been known to the Pentagon for well over a year. The very fact that they still don’t know what happened – or even when the site was looted – by itself proves negligence with respect to this issue. And it’s worth reiterating that this is no indictment whatsoever of the troops. They were doing what they were told. The only people scapegoating the troops are, yes, the Republicans. Et tu, Rudy?

“I just think that if you’re responsible for this kind of a big policy failure, you ought to be held accountable for it.” – Francis Fukuyama, on why he’s not voting for Bush.

South Park’s Stan gets hounded by P. Diddy. And his electoral choice is between a douche and a turd sandwich. Sounds familiar.

Here’s a broadside against the Democrat from my friend, Marty Peretz:

John Kerry speaks, not unfairly, of George W. Bush’s habits of denial. But Kerry himself is in denial. He is in denial about the United Nations. He is in denial about the Australian election that returned to office for an unprecedented fourth term its prime minister who has been, with his country, a pillar of the Iraq coalition. He is in denial about Japan, whose government, unlike Germany’s and France’s, does not carp at the United States. He is in denial about Afghanistan, where, for the first time in history, men and women, riding on donkeys and walking barefoot across great distances, have exercised the right to choose those who govern them. He is in denial about Iraq itself. The Jordanian daily Al Ra’i recently called Moqtada Al Sadr’s apparent retreat from armed struggle “a farewell to arms” that is as politically significant as the establishment of the provisional authority. Has Kerry come close to recognizing this? Has he acknowledged that the Bush administration has negotiated with nato a plan to send, starting in November, up to 3,000 soldiers to train Iraqi troops? These soldiers will be under the command of General David Petraeus, who is mustering the military might and political will to retake much of the Sunni triangle. Many Iraqis now have second thoughts about opposing the coalition. Even the BBC has said as much. But Kerry hasn’t.

Yes, there’s denial on both sides. Whose is more dangerous? That’s the question. And if Kerry wins, he can expect to be subjected to relentless scrutiny from pro-war types like Marty and, ahem, your humble blogger.

“I think one thing you have to face up to is the fact there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution – and those are Bush supporters,” – Seymour Hersh, at the University of Michigan.

More deception from the far-left, coordinated by Harold Ickes. Worse than Michael Moore.

BAUER LIES: Here’s another mendacious ad from the religious right in Oklahoma, orchestrated by Gary Bauer. Similar tactics in North Carolina forced one paper to retract an endorsement. I wonder if Bill Kristol, noted defender of lesbian dignity, will complain.

The 2004 election version.