Archive Listing
May 24, 2007 - May 17, 2007

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

NEWS FLASH. There's a frightening report out from the AFP wire service:


We concede that our Dowdian use of leader dots conceals the fact that no one presently believes a collision will occur; however, the footage we've acquired -- via Dan Rather's nephew in the NYT photo department -- suggests that the problem of illegal immigation may have just increased by an order of magnitude. If outer space is now filling up with undocumented alien Chebbies, who is safe anywhere on earth?

What would happen if the ceaseless flow of millions of Mexican refugees were somehow distributed across the planet -- to England and France and Germany, to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, the UAR, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, North and South Korea, Japan, Algeria, Somalia, Sudan, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Iceland, Russia, the Ukraine, Finland, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Czech Republic?

Hmmmm.

Come to think of it, this is an idea worth considering. It's got real possibilities. Mexico would be completely empty of people in short order. We could use the place as a maximum security prison, like a much bigger Guantanamo. Cool. Other nations could get some good out of it too. The U.K. might learn that knife control is an impossible objective. Cool. The French and the Germans might learn... well, they never learn anything, but Europe generally might benefit from the arrival of a whole bunch of new indigents determined to test the heretofore boundless generosity of their socialist economies. Cool. The eastern European states might finally forget all their ancient intramural ethnic hatreds and start getting serious about having a functioning international economy based on cooperation and law instead of black-market thuggery. Cool. The intensely racist, insular states of the far east would finally have to learn something about what it means to be a heterogeneous state. Cool. In the near east, the Indians probably wouldn't notice the influx at all unless their Bollywood motion picture productions suddenly acquired mariachi sound tracks and women who constantly shake their rear ends, but the Islamofascists of Araby would suddenly have to confront a brand new infidel "Satan" to despise and conspire against. Maybe they'd even get so busy with their new jihad that they'd forget about hating people who live thousands of miles away. Very cool. Spanish could become the new worldwide language of the underclass, and since our cops and government bureaucrats already understand Spanish we'd have a leg up on national security issues. Super cool.

What if we developed a secret intelligence operation to disseminate maps in every corner of Mexico showing the way to the U.S. border, only printed upside down so that everyone would hightail it to the Panama Canal, where they'd jump over the wall right onto a ship headed somewhere, anywhere but here?

Forget it. The New York Times would publish the whole story before it ever got off the ground. Except if nobody told them about it. So don't. It's not like they actually work at getting their stories. They sit by the phone waiting for some pissed-off bureaucrat to call them with a damaging leak. So don't tell any pissed-off bureaucrats either. If we handle this right, the whole crazy plan might just work. And wouldn't that be grand?

Saturday, June 24, 2006

ALL THE NEWS. Proving once more that it's still the paper of record, the New York Times today revealed that the U.K.'s top secret agent, James Bond, is currently hiding under the bed of Osama Bin Laden and will shoot him as soon as the Al Qaida leader climbs under the covers this evening at his villa in northern Pakistan. The Times published the story despite urgent appeals by the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense,  the Director of the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and the U.K.'s Minister of Defense to keep the operation secret.

The Times article also revealed that Agent 007 is armed with a Walther PPK, a serrated commando knife, a wire garrotte concealed inside an Oyster Rolex timepiece, and explosive cufflinks. An accomplice, identified by the Times as a young Afghan mercenary named Titti Bountiful, is parked outside Bin Laden's mountaintop estate in a heavily armed 2006 Lotus Elise fighter-jet-submarine to assist the assassin in his escape after the crime. The Lotus is red in color and bears the license number 835691. A photo of the vehicle and its exact location is shown on page A-2 of the Times.


Managing Editor Bill Keller said, in defense of the Times's decision to publish, "We are journalists, and it is therefore our responsibility to inform the public about what's going on. We cannot evade this responsibility by taking sides in any foreign policy matter, even if some of our individual publishing decisions offend the evil Christian imperialists who preside over  the world's most despicable capitalist nations. Phony arguments about so-called 'national security' concerns cannot be permitted to undermine the public's right to know the facts."

Keller also pointed out that the British assassin sent to murder Osama Bin Laden is guilty of numerous homicides and has probably committed acts of torture that would never be sanctioned by the Geneva Conventions. "He also frequently engages in unprotected sex and used to smoke cigarettes," Keller added.

The New York Times is currently the largest selling newspaper in northern Pakistan.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

PSAYINGS.5A.40. There's a nice little article in The Hill today about Rahm Emanuel, the upcoming congressional election campaign, and Howard Dean's strategy for the party as a whole. Despite some differing views, both Emanuel and Dean sound optimistic:


Dean makes some interesting word choices here. All that talk about feathers. Four mentions by my count. Maybe I shouldn't be reminded of this, but I am. And shouldn't he be a little careful about discussing sclerosis when some of the party's strongest war draft horses are Teddy Kennedy, 74, Robert Byrd, 89, Harry Reid, 67, and John Murtha, 74? Right now, it's Murtha who's carrying the banner for the whole party on opposing Bush's policy in Iraq. Everybody else is diddling around with phantom dates for future withdrawal, while Murtha is proposing real changes, as he did last week on Meet the Press:


Lots of right-wing bloggers have been criticizing Murtha for these remarks, but I have to admit I think they're kind of brilliant. Change of direction is precisely what the Democrats are about, what they are counting on to sweep the country in the fall. And I think Howard Dean had better reconsider his desire for "younger members," because he really needs the older members to lead the preferred change of direction, which is headlong into the past.

In every possible policy area, the unifying principle of the Democrats is nostalgia. Not nostalgia for any one time, mind you, but for a whole range of eras when Democrats were in charge and had ideas of some kind about what to do. Murtha's MTP transcript suggests he's nostalgic for the good old days of post-Vietnam, post-Cold War foreign policy, when any sort of military setback could be immediately solved by unconditional surrender in the field. If only we could go back to the halcyon Clinton years when it was possible to ignore a half dozen terror attacks on the U.S. and its people, assets, and possessions....

Many pundits have oversimplified this kind of Democrat yearning, associating it only with a desire to return to September 10, 2001, but that's not really an adequate explanation. Al Gore, for example, is presently trying to revive his corpse of a political career because he wants to go back to November 2000, when for a few heady weeks he thought the ruthless Clinton political machine could steal an electoral victory for him in Florida. Hillary is looking even farther back. She wants to go back to the national mindset of her husband's first 100 days in office in 1993, when there was an honest-to-goodness chance of selling the American people on a socialized healthcare approach that hadn't worked anywhere in the world, but she dropped the ball then and is desperate for another chance at it because she thinks she knows just how to do it now.

Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, John Dingel, and dozens of other Democrat senators and congressmen want to turn the clock even farther back, to 1974, when the party that controlled both houses of Congress and all the mainstream media managed to drive a Republican president out of office in disgrace. They know they could do it again now if they could just stamp out talk radio and the blogosphere -- and muster a few more votes the old-fashioned way, by writing their own corrupt gerrymanders.

John Kerry has never really left the year 1971, the one moment in his life when he was able to convince himself that he was somehow acting on principle in smearing his fellow combat veterans and hastening the military defeat of his nation in the Vietnam War. If he could go back and just make a few small changes in his conduct then, he's sure that he could have gone on to the presidency.

Teddy Kennedy wants it to be the early sixties again, when his brother was admired like a movie star and the government was gathering up the resources and momentum that empowered Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, MediCare, MedicAid, and hundreds of other ineffective progams that would make it permanently impossible to control the federal budget.

The Congressional Black Caucus wants to go all the way back to the mid-1960s, when their complaints about racism and discrimination evinced real moral authority, not disgraceful whining about racial inequities that are now more their fault than anybody else's.

Pick your Democrat. The future is a closed book to them. They're all aimed squarely at different points in the past. The broken records who can't stop recounting votes from 2000 and 2004, refighting the debates that led to the Iraq War, or resenting their own shameful role in defending the presidency of an amoral lout who lost them control of Congress. The apologists for Stalin, Hiss, and the Rosenbergs who believe, regardless of all the evidence, that Karl Marx was onto something with his hatred of God and capitalism. The New Deal dinosaurs who still think the education crisis can be fixed by pouring more billions down the rathole of the public school system, who still wish FDR had gotten away with packing the Supreme Court so that the traditional foundations of the Constitution could have been done away with in one fell swoop, and who still believe government legislation could cure every ill if only they could raise taxes high enough.

Nostalgia can be fun, and more than that, it can be comforting in times of turmoil, change, and confrontation. Maybe the American people are ready to jump on the Democrat bandwagon this fall. That's their choice. Dean and company certainly hope so. But I hope they understand the real direction they would be choosing -- and recognize just who it is that's really the reactionary force in contemporary American politics.

Back to Archive Index