Content by johnt
Posted at 9:18am on Mar. 23, 2007 Hayden waffles, Hoekstra talks, Novak reports.
By johnt
So you thought you were done with Valerie Plame. After all General Hayden had told Henry Waxman that Plame had been a covert agent at the time she was outed, although we not sure when that was, given her neighbors, magazine photo shoots, loquacious husband, and more sieves then a thimble factory.
Through a din of liberal chortling punctuated by almost audible sighs of relief we were told that the case was closed and never mind the hanging threads. It was time to progress to the next scandal without a underlying crime, what had started out as a cottage industry was on the verge of becoming a major industrial enterprise what with a deceitful President exercising his distasteful legal rights to fire U S Attorneys.
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Posted at 9:43am on Jun. 22, 2006 Am I the only one who noticed?
By johnt
Two American soldiers are tortured and murdered in Iraq, the Ny Times covers it on the front page, and my favorite site, Redstate, is still going on with Kos.
To hell with Kos! He represents the lost souls who want to think they have a voice, even if everything they say is vulgar, scatological, and brainless. Kos himself, as well as his minions, is the used, not the user. The manipulated, not the manipulator and besides he probably has profound chromosome problems.
The terible death of these soldiers is a marker; how will the left react, will it in any degree modify their their anti-American,but patriotic, criticism, will that continued criticism backfire on them?
The impact on our ground forces must also be considered. Racked by the knowledge that they have restraints on their behavior probably unknown in military history, will this atrocity push them to revenge or serve only to depress morale. Frustration in the face of the enemies savagery combined with a hyper sensitivity to their battle discipline is hardly a formula to combat efficiency and espirit de corps.
Shattering as it is to lose a son in war is it even imaginable what the families must suffer knowing how these men died.
May God grant these two men the blessings and eternal peace so deserved by them and may His justice right the wrongs done to them.
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Posted at 9:11pm on Mar. 26, 2006 Kos does political philosophy
By johnt
Todays NY Times Book Review. Peter Beinart stops repairing the runs in his stockings long enough to review the latest deep tome from the left, Crashing the Gate, by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and something called Jerome Armstrong, who evidently qualifies as a heavy hitter on the left.
After twenty five hundred years of political philosophy, after Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Montesquieu, and all the rest, two leading exponents of current liberal thought are prepared to show a waiting world what wisdom they have harvested from centuries of ideas, strife,and experience. In a word, the cup is empty. You may steal this book but unless you can pick Howard Dean's pocket don't buy it.
As there does not appear to be highlights I will go over some of the less depressing lowlights. After the expected obeisance to the new media, Democrats having discovered that we've moved passed the wireless, the authors sway into just how closed the party is,how isolated and unreachable the bigwigs are in Washington. This is a bad thing, correctable only by people who have no political experience, couldn't and wouldn't run for office, but who do have computers and a lot of time on their hands. One may surmise that the authors regard themselves as supremely qualified in these last two catagories and only await the call from dimwitted Dem Senators lost in the potholes of Washington.
After this, the new media theme and the fresh blood theme, it's a quick slide into the mosh pit. As referred to above something important is missing, namely the mind and the use thereof. Putting aside the importance of paranoia and stupidity to the left let me give a few quotes.
"This hasn't been a book about policies or new ideas or message----we LIKE to believe the ideas that will lead the democratic party to a new governing majority already exist but they need to be articulated clearly".
Ah, getting the message out. If only there was TV, radio, newspapers,and the net. But why do not these two aspiring Einstiens of politics spare a few pages in their book? Beinart chimes in with
"The problem is that while Armstrong and Moulitsas are confident that democrats largely share the same principles, they can't define what those are".
A minor problem, knowing what the shared principles are but unable to define them. After putting their heads together the authors, neither coming up with ideas of their own or uncovering any in the party they would like to control, cite the Goldwater campaign as a model for change within a party. Well if you don't have a brain cite a model. Beinart to his credit shoots them down;
"Modern conservatism didn't begin in the 1960's------it began in the 1950's when the founders of National Review fused anti-statism, cultural traditionalism and fierce anti-communisn to create the core vision of the American Right".
He then mentions the Heritage Foundation as an incubator of policy and ideas.
Well there you pretty well have it. With centuries of learning and trial and error to study and profit by, with untold thousands of words written and preserved to light their way, with all the information and sources available in current events and technology, two literate adults put their heads together and come up with Process. But what is process without ideas, and ideas grounded in learning and thinking. Beinart gets the last word,"yet having written a book about process they are forced to argue that from the procedural changes they advocate some kind of coherent vision will flow". Good luck, ideas and principles come first.
Edited by Crank for paragragraph formatting only
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Posted at 12:32pm on Jan. 19, 2006 Hillary waffles
By johnt
Mrs Clinton is fashioning herself as a foreign policy guru, albeit with positions that have no relationship to one another. But then consistency is the humbug of little minds and the great are not bound to the conventions of the humble. The Madame, hope of the mentally disjointed everywhere, squezzed herself thru the freight entrance of a building long enough to inform the raptured that the Bush Administration, as you recall, one of the worst in history as who would know better than herself, has been derelict in it's policy towards Iran. How so? Well it has allowed the nuclear question to fester and seemingly is in the grip of lethargy, unlike Hillary who is rumored to have an autographed photo of Curtis LeMay tucked under her silk pillow. We have allowed our allies, a floating noun if ever there was one, to manage the problem, we have "outsourced" our policy. Now outsourced is in the list of trigger words used to cause panic among the geese and barnyard fowl that every four years wander into polling places to undervote. It conjures images of fat, cigar smoking polluters and rogue capitalists pushing honest,overalls clad,working Americans off the end of a pier, while a ship in defiance of physics, loaded with corporalized jobs, steams off to some jungle somewhere where aborigines will find the wherewithall to buy sneakers. So thru the evil of an expanded outsourcing our foreign policy has been paralyzed as has our economy, you have noticed haven't you? Gone are the heady days when indignant liberals challenged our choice of Iraq as a place where failure would be a byword. Do you recall "why not North Korea,why not Iran". Do you also recall the anger at our unilateral action, of ignoring our allies, of seeking imperial hegemony? But times change, opportunities present themselves unhindered by memory or principle, bad becomes good, good bad. I tend to think the people who Hillary hires for brains see something coming and are trying to load the fat lady onto the bandwagon. Now if only they had a memory hole where they could stuff things that come back to haunt.
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Posted at 12:10pm on Dec. 4, 2005 Katrina and Louisiana Democratic Priorities
By johnt
Drudge links to a story on released e mails betwen the humanists of Louisiana. A creature named Bob Mann[ a most inappropriate surname] who is Gov Blanco's communications director,was in a tizzy as to how they might shift blame on the hurricanes respponse efforts. Three days after { hold on to that time span} Blanco was advised to figure out a way not only to lead the state thru one of the worst natural disasters in US history but also to emerge on top in the "nasty" PR war. To those who have the remmnants of decency please note the close juxtaposition of issues and priorities. And note again that this is three days after a storm that was as much a suprise as finding sand in the desert. A WH spokesperson was quoted," President Bush has been very clear that all levels of government could have done a better job". You may pause and consider the difference in approach and demeanor,you may consider the adult and fair assesment as against the infantile,dishonest,and classless effort to evade responsibility, a responsibility the Democrats were elected, appointed, and paid for. You may then analyze and possibly draw conclusions on the nature of the beast. In certain situations you may in the future have to drop the word "compassion' fron your vocabulary.
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Posted at 11:55am on Dec. 3, 2005 In response to a motion by
By johnt
the publisher of the notorious Wall St Journal Patrick "robspierre" Fitzgerald filed a motion requesting the relaese of eight previously unpublished pages from a Febuary ccourt ruling. The direction of his comments and that of attorney Floyd Abrams,who represented both Cooper and Miller, is that his investigation was never about any violation of national security, apparently of any sort, but rather of obstruction of justice. I thought that obstruction charges usually relate to a real or posssible crime, guess not. The very ugly cynicism here,what we knew or suspected all along,was that Saint Fitz, being handed a high profile and cushy case, prolonged this agony for over two years and felt obligated to come back with somebody's scalp. Joe Wilson will ignore this and the crazed everywhere will forget about it in ten minutes.