Content by tacitus
Posted at 11:33am on Jun. 5, 2005 Redstate.org posting rules
By tacitus
The posting rules for redstate.org are as follows:
No profanity. No personal attacks. No harassment or demonization of a particular individual. No disruptive behavior or off-topic remarks for their own sake.
Banning for ideological reasons will take place only in the cases of fundamentally anti-American ideologies. Nazis, Islamists, Communists and racists are unwelcome at redstate.org. Any other person of basic good sense and goodwill, regardless of party, is welcome to participate and hopefully come around to the ideals of Republicanism.
The proprietors of this site are the sole and final judges and enforcers of this policy.
Update [2004-7-12 18:12:59 by tacitus]:
A little clarification is in order. Pursuant to the mission statement, this site is explicitly meant to serve as a conservative and Republican community. Postings, comments, etc., contrary to this purpose fall under the rubric of "disruptive behavior" and will result in banning. You may or may not get a warning -- it depends on how harried the moderators are. If you are coming from a non-conservative, non-Republican context, you are still welcome here, but you must respect the site's stated purpose.
The posting rules benefit everyone. By promoting civility even in disagreement, they help the site avoid the pitfalls of notorious dens of iniquity like Democratic Underground and every unmoderated Usenet thread that has ever existed.
Update [2004-8-5 13:24:19 by tacitus]:
There is confusion over the term "Islamist," and we owe it to readers to clarify. First and foremost, we do not mean to bar Muslims per se. Rather, we mean the folks adhering to the violent and oppressive manifestations of the ideology described by that most neutral of sources, Wikipedia.
Update [2005-4-7 20:44:12 by Clayton]:
Concerning profanity: The rules are simple. If you have any doubt about whether to use a word or phrase, don't. If you still don't know what that means, don't post. Profanity is not necessary to make a point, add emphasis, or convey a message. There are plenty of other places on the 'net to be vulgar and base, but RedState.org will not be one of them. Thank you.
Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (0)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 10:12am on Sep. 15, 2004 Bush surge in....New York?
By tacitus
Quinnipiac hasn't put out too many up to date polls lately -- and a recent national poll would be useful for assessing this data -- but one set of data they have been updating is their New York state polls. The results are deeply surprising: in one month, the President has reduced John Kerry's 18-point lead to six points. In New York. Notably, the state hit hardest by the 9/11 massacres hands Bush a massive advantage on the terror issue.
Are we going to win New York? Almost certainly not. Is this a bellwether of a Kerry campaign in deepening trouble in places it shouldn't be? You bet it is.
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Posted at 12:18pm on Sep. 14, 2004 Message from Victory South -- 2
By tacitus
The latest message from Mark V. Rogers, currently with KBR at Victory South in Iraq, follows.
Yesterday, I took a sightseeing tour of Baghdad, at least as much of it as I could take in through a tiny, four-inch thick slab of glass. Armored buses led by sharp shooters riding atop humvees now comprise the passenger convoys to and from the Green Zone. In times past, some folks made the trip in soft cars (i.e. unarmored vehicles). Jay tracked down one such SUV at the motor pool and took pictures of it.Through a shattered window, I could see that the interior roof had been stained with blood and brain matter.
At Victory, I heard that the trip to the Green Zone was one of the most dangerous trips in Iraq, despite that it only covers a few miles. We just hoped that the insurgents had run out of ammunition the day before in their all-out assault on the Green Zone. A few days before that, one of the luggage vehicles in one convoy got hit by an RPG. A friend of mine who rode in that convoy said they kept moving to avoid an ambush. Someone later returned to rescue the injured driver of the disabled vehicle.
I slept last night in a large tent in Saddam's former front yard in downtown Baghdad. I wonder if Saddam ever let young Uday and Qusay camp out in the yard.
Perhaps he inspired their love of nature. At Victory, Saddam built a series of lakes, one of them stocked with bass, another with trout, and one with walleye.
I'm not sure whether Uday preferred catching the fish or feeding them. Someone showed me the spot at the edge of one lake where he fed dissidents feet-first into a wood chipper. No doubt, some of the victims came from his nearby "Perfume Palace", apparently so dubbed because it housed many of the girls he had kidnapped and forced into unmentionable service.
As of late, the situation in Iraq has greatly destabilized. Two days ago, an unseen enemy force staged a successful invasion of my gastro-intestinal track. At some awkward hour last night, I had to talk my way past one of the Gurkhas guarding the palace, because in a mad effort to find a restroom, I had forgotten to carry my badges with me. The one benefit of Saddam's megalomaniacal dictatorship has to be his palatial toilet stalls.
Despite an increased schedule of visits to said palace, I had hoped to sponsor my own immune system in a counterstrike. However, all of my experienced coworkers warned me that it would last for weeks. So, I found myself sitting in the medic's office (sitting is better than lying on a table). A newspaper article pinned to the wall warned me all too late not to eat native Iraqi food. In a sidebar, it listed common symptoms of tapeworms, cholera, and a few unpronouncables. If, a year from now, large abdominal cysts rupture and cause me organ failure, you might want to warn a guy named Steve that he's got the same fate coming.
Posted in User Blogs — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 1:15pm on Sep. 12, 2004 Message from Victory South
By tacitus
A few weeks ago, my friend Mark V. Rogers signed up with KBR to do IT work in Iraq. Barely a month later, he is stationed at Victory South. We will be featuring intermittent e-mails from him as they arrive. They are reprinted only with his explicit permission, and all copyrights are his. If you have questions or comments for Mark, please leave them in comments here, or feel free to e-mail me.
Greetings from Victory South!
A heightened sense of alertness hung over the camp yesterday as the terrorist calendar marked a commemorative occasion. Out here, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to fire a rocket, but an attack on September 11th seemed too obvious. They waited to wake me up just before 06:00 on September 12th.
Thank goodness for the jarring sound of explosions, because my new alarm clock failed to go off. I might have overslept. By the fourth and closest bang, I had thrown on my PPE (personal protective equipment) and joined my buddy P.J. We crouched behind a towering concrete barrier and waited for our third companion Jay, who apparently took the time to put on matching socks.
Some people joke that smoking saves lives because a week or two before I arrived here, a guy stepped outside for a cigarette just before his bedroom was blown to pieces. However, P.J. tells me the story of a guy he knew who stepped out on his porch for a cigarette shortly before his porch was blown to pieces. The consensus here is that God has either signed your name on a mortar or He hasn't.
Several days ago, I met a Texan named Monty, who works in the Green Zone. When asked why he parades about in a 10-gallon hat, he replied, "They can't shoot worth shit, and I'm hoping they're aiming at me."
Remind me never to stand next to a cowboy.
....
I've heard that our radar tracks incoming mortars, but I don't know that we have any counterbattery fire. The helicopters are usually pretty quick to the skies.
Our morning was quiet compared to what happened in the Green Zone. A friend of mine there said it was hell. Supposedly, we had five unexploded ordnances on the ground somewhere, but I guess they got that cleaned up already....
I have an Iraqi friend who gives me the low-down on local sentiment. She believes Iran has a lot to do with Iraq's problems today. That corroborates what my Iranian friend told me last December.
More as it comes.
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Posted at 10:04pm on Sep. 11, 2004 Heads up.
By tacitus
No confirmation, of course -- and catastrophic accidents are no stranger to this benighted land -- but I suspect the North Koreans have just detonated a nuclear weapon.
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Posted at 4:37am on Sep. 10, 2004 The lonely beacon.
By tacitus
[W]e have concluded that genocide has taken place in Darfur. We urge the international community to work with us to prevent and suppress acts of genocide. We call on the United Nations to undertake a full investigation of the genocide and other crimes in Darfur.
The Government of Sudan has not complied with UN Security Council resolutions, and has not respected the cease-fire which it signed. The rebels are also guilty of cease-fire violations and failing to carry out past commitments. It is clear that only outside action can stop the killing. My government is seeking a new Security Council Resolution to authorize an expanded African Union security force to prevent further bloodshed. We will also seek to ban flights by Sudanese military aircraft in Darfur.
The world cannot ignore the suffering of more than one million people.
For the first time in history, a nation has invoked Article VIII of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The wheels are in motion to bring an end to the horrors of Darfur. Where the Europeans shirked the responsibilities of their humanity; where the Arabs decided that solidarity was preferable to morality; and where the United Nations functions as an impediment to justice, one nation is taking a stand.
That first nation to ever formally declare action against a genocide in progress under the Convention? The United States. And the leader who made the decision to make history on behalf of a common humanity? George W. Bush.
Read on.
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Posted at 4:54pm on Sep. 9, 2004 Fulfillment.
By tacitus
Hot on the heels of Red State's prediction that an offensive against the terror havens in Iraq is in the offing, American and Iraqi forces have overrun one of those havens: the city of Samarra.
Read on.
Posted in War — Comments (2)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 1:26pm on Sep. 9, 2004 Dear Wolves
By tacitus
Sheep here. Trying hard to keep fellow sheep in line. Doesn't help when you eat us. We promise to try harder so you won't.
Sincerely,
Sheep
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Posted at 11:11pm on Sep. 8, 2004 The light at the bottom of the barrel.
By tacitus
Part of the reason
href="http://nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/campaign/08CND-CAMP.html?hp">John Kerry's attacks on the President over the Iraq war href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/weekinreview/05filk.html?hp=&pagewanted=all &position=">ceded href="http://nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/08policy.html?hp">swaths
to the very Islamists we are presumably locked in a life-and-death struggle with,
the Bush Administration has a lot to answer for in its too-often lackluster conduct
of this war. (By the bye, it is a willing cession: no battlefield defeat or
logistical exigency drove us to this political decision.) In this, the
critics of the war and the Administration are on firm ground.
But they generally err on two counts. They err in the assumption -- near universal
amongst them -- that things now are as they shall be: as if Lincoln's presidency
ended on the many occasions when the Army of the Potomac retreated in defeat; as if
FDR's administration ended when the American fleet was smashed and our territory
from Manila to Wake was overrun.
And they err in the assumption that John Kerry will do better: this assumption
usually premised itself on a further assuption -- that things cannot get worse.
Difficult to grasp as it may be to the apocalyptic-minded, things can get
massively worse. And John Kerry is hellbent on accomplishing exactly that.
Read on.
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Posted at 10:37am on Sep. 8, 2004 Now that's what I call pro-life governance.
By tacitus
The Netherlands, whatever its glorious history as a bastion of pro-Americanism and Protestantism, is in the modern day a sad bastion of some of the more barbarous manifestations of secular Western culture. More pernicious than the infamous red-light district of Amsterdam is the growing Dutch fascination with the institutionalization and promotion of -- there is no other way to put it -- death. The grotesque spectacle of the Netherlands's euthanasia regime is perhaps the most prominent example; but where there is killing of the old and sick, there is inevitably killing of the young and well.
And so we get the abortion ship.
The ship itself is an unremarkable craft; the organization that operates it, Women on Waves, is reminiscent of nothing so much as the pre-Civil War American pro-slavers, desperate to expand their evil institutions to free lands -- lest its fruitful absence anywhere discredit them and their worldview. And so the vessel travels to nations with a strong pro-life traditions -- Ireland, Poland -- and, within sight of those shores, takes in women and kills their unborn children at their request. It is a veritable floating abbatoir, and hitherto the frustration of pro-life governments unable to stop its pernicious work so long as it circles in international waters.
"Hitherto" because the Portuguese are having none of it.
Portugal, with some of the strongest pro-life laws in Europe, is blocking the abortion ship from coming close enough to perform its work -- and threatening to sink it if it tries. Pathetically, while conceding the Portuguese right to do this, the Dutch government has interceded on behalf of the maritime symbol of what its once-proud nation has become. But Portugal will not bend: Portuguese courts have endorsed the stance, and it looks as if a lonely battle for life in Europe may here be won.
The fight goes on. But for now, bravo to tiny Portugal for standing firm where other nations and American courts flounder and fail.