Reply to Pandagon

The liberal blogger Pandagon links my post about Obama's "punished with a baby" remark, and then says:

Sean Hannity, for one, describes unplanned pregnancies that result in babies as a punishment for sex he doesn’t approve of.

Here's the quote from Hannity that Pandagon uses:

We live in an age characterized by the maxim “If it feels good do it, regardless of the consequences.” It’s a sex-drenched culture -- from movies, music, and magazines to TV, radio and the Internet -- that glorifies premarital sex, promiscuous sex, extramarital sex, kinky sex, rough sex, and gay sex. You name it, you can find it, and without looking too hard.

Notice what's missing? The words "punishment" and "pregnancy."

Even if you disagree with Hannity's critique of cultural hedonism, it cannot be construed as describing "babies as punishment."

Pandagon highlights the word "consequences" in Hannity's quote and then says:

Right wingers who wish to deprive women of the right to choose abortion, of contraception access, and of sex education believe babies are a punishment for sex.

This has nothing to do with what Hannity wrote. He was asserting as a fact that contemporary culture promotes and encourages the pursuit of sexual gratification "regardless of consequences." That is to say, "Never mind the ultimate result of your actions. Never mind who gets hurt in the process."

Hedonism is anti-social and selfish. There are many possible consequences of our actions that a hedonistic culture urges us to ignore. Among those is the possibility that we will become so callous and hard-hearted that we'll describe babies as "punishment," analogous to a sexually-transmitted disease -- something Obama did, and Hannity did not.

More madness in Argentina

Having nearly caused a famine by raising taxes, now Argentina's President Christina Kirchner wants war:

Argentina's claim to the Falkland Islands, which remain in British hands after the 1982 war between the two countries, is "inalienable," President Cristina Kirchner said Wednesday.
"The sovereign claim to the Malvinas Islands is inalienable," she said in a speech marking the 26th anniversary of Argentina's ill-fated invasion of the islands, located 480 kilometers (300 miles) off shore.
The April 2, 1982 invasion prompted then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to deploy naval forces to retake the Falklands, known as the Malvinas in Spanish.
The short, bloody conflict led to Argentina's surrender on June 14, 1982 after the death of 649 Argentines and 255 Britons. . . .
In her speech Kirchner called for Argentina to strengthen its representation in international bodies to denounce "this shameful colonial enclave in the 21st century."

Such bellicose rhetoric is transparent demagoguery, an attempt to rally a nation suffering under the effects of Kirchner's bungling policies. The British magazine Prospect opines:

Cristina Kirchner exemplifies a figure familiar in the northern hemisphere because of Hillary Clinton (and to a lesser degree Cherie Blair): the intelligent, educated wife of a leader with ambitions of her own.

No, I think Christina Kirchner exemplifies a different sort of familiar figure: The good-looking woman who, unfortunately, is crazy as a loon.

Barr to announce?

Former Rep. Bob Barr could announce his Libertarian Party presidential bid as early as this weekend, The Washington Times reports:

A source familiar with Mr. Barr's thinking says he likely will announce his bid this weekend, at the Heartland Libertarian Conference in Kansas City, Mo., where he is scheduled to speak.
Mr. Barr declined to say whether he would make an announcement, but told The Washington Times, "I will be there certainly, and will be addressing the convention."
He said he has detected "significantly deep dissatisfaction with particularly the Republican Party and the Republican likely nominee," and that leaves an opening for someone with his views. . . .
Mr. Barr said he could appeal particularly to voters in libertarian-minded places such as Vermont, New Hampshire and the Rocky Mountain states, and said he would have a broader appeal than Mr. Nader's candidacy -- partly because the Libertarian Party is already qualified for the ballot in 48 states, and partly because of the principles he would espouse. "The message that I would bring is definitely not a fringe or an extremist message, it's a basic, mainstream message that will have a very broad appeal," he said.

The interesting thing about this is how some conservatives Republicans are reacting:

[A] third-party candidate on the right who did well enough to tip the election to the Democrats wouldn't do much for his reputation among conservative Republicans.

Why should Bob Barr, who left the GOP and joined the LP three years ago, care about his reputation among Republicans? More importantly, why should conservatives support John McCain? Why is electing a liberal Republican better than electing a liberal Democrat?

UPDATE: The New Republic's Jamie Kirchick has Barr running not as a Libertarian but as an independent, provoking much mirth from my Libertarian friend Stephen Gordon. Jamie, trust me: Gordo knows what he's talking about.

UPDATE II: Barr's interview on Sean Hannity's show.

PREVIOUSLY:
3/27: Barr bandwagon rolling?
3/26: What about Bob?
2/11: Paulistas say, 'Why not Bob?'

Look on the bright side

"Saturday Night Live" comedian Chris Farley was 33 when he died over an overdose in 1997. His friend David Spade says:

"I got a lot of s - - - at the end about 'Why weren't you there for him?' But being that close, I dealt with it all the time. And in that situation, before the guy's dead, he's just kind of an a - -hole. Truth is, you get a junkie who's wasted all the time and moody and angry and trying to knock you around, you say, 'OK, you go do that, and I'll be over here.' "

The bright side of Farley's death? I get to congratulate myself that I've already outlived that junkie by 15 years. Also, I'm a father of six, whereas Farley was a Darwinian dead-end.

Just want to put that idea out there for the benefit of any young idiots who might think it's "glamorous" to be a junkie loser.

'A good deal of rumbling'

Al Regnery, author of Upstream, and publisher of The American Spectator, talks to The Wall Street Journal about John McCain:

"I hear a good deal of rumbling from conservatives," said Alfred Regnery, publisher of the conservative American Spectator magazine. Mr. Regnery said Sen. McCain is doing "some" courting but "probably not enough."

A judicious understatement, Mr. Regnery.

This whole WSJ article is premised on the false notion that there is something that Crazy Cousin John can say or do between now and November that will make conservatives vote for him. But the problem is what McCain has already done -- namely, his Senate record for about the past 10 years. No amount of campaign rhetoric over the next seven months can change that. McCain will never get my vote, and I'm sure there are many thousands of conservatives who share that view.

The best hope for the Republicans lies not in what McCain does, but in what the Democrats do. Say, for example, if they nominate a candidate extreme enough to be publicly endorsed by "Hanoi Jane" Fonda . . . But they wouldn't be that stupid, would they?

This is why I have no problem voting Libertarian in November. If the Democrats keep doing stupid crap like this, it won't be close enough for my vote to matter. Besides, I live in Maryland. Not like any Republican is ever going to win this state.

Wingnut to Moonbat: WTF?

Blog Rule #1: Never complain about bloggers who bash you, as long as they link you.

Blog Rule #2: Never complain, but never hesitate to bash 'em right back.

Here in its entirety, except for a little bit of free-speech-chilling censorship, is a post by the (appropriately named) Jabbering Stooge:

Robert Stacy McCain, lovingly linked by Stalkin' Malkin, asks this of Obama's comments that pregnancy shouldn't be used as punishment of uppity sluts who dare think themselves worthy of being more than ninth-class citizens:

Huh? Who thinks of babies as "punishment"?

You and all the other anti-choice, misogynist nutters who keep carping about "consequences" for women "not keeping their legs shut."
This has been Snappy Comebacks to Stupid Wingnut Questions.
Sidebar: You wouldn't believe how many times I saw some variation of the utterly inane “Well, if you didn't want to become pregnant you'd keep your slutty [vulgarity] shut, you [string of degrading vulgarities]!" during my time in various web forums. Quite frankly, it made me ashamed to have a Y chromosome.

Leaving aside his limited vocabulary, I am struck by the assumptions implicit in Stooge's rant:

• Pro-lifers are "anti-choice" -- Given the slim likelihood that Roe v. Wade will be overturned in my lifetime, and the even slimmer likelihood of a nationwide ban on abortion, I consider the contemporary debate less about "choice" per se, and more a matter of persuading people to choose life. Given my extensive familiarity with the pro-life community, I think my own perspective is widely shared among pro-lifers. Yes, there is a lot of legal and legislative activism, but the overwhelming majority of the activism is about education and advocacy.
• Pro-lifers are "misogynists" -- The Stooge expresses this in several ways, including putting slurs into the mouths of his "anti-choice" strawmen. This accusation is a non sequitur, unless you buy into Stooge's implicit assumption that women enjoy getting abortions. But even women who are politically pro-choice will tell you that having an abortion is a dreadful experience that they would rather avoid. Anybody who's ever been in an abortion clinic lobby knows that it's not a happy place -- certainly not as happy as the maternity wing of a hospital. I would further point out that most pro-life activists I know are women. Would the Stooge say these are "self-hating" women? Automisogynists?
• All consequences are punishment -- If action A leads to consequence B, is B automatically a "punishment" for A? The original object of my criticism was the harshly negative attitude toward babies suggested by Obama's word "punishment." Sex leads to pregnancy and pregnancy leads to childbirth; that much is basic biology. But why introduce the concept of "punishment" to this unremarkable chain of causality? This was the cause of my puzzled "huh"?

More argument (not ranting) to come, after I tuck our "punishments" into bed . . .

OK, now that the "punishments" have gone nighty-night, let me return to the subject of Obama and his defender, the Stooge.

I was listening to a talk radio program Tuesday afternoon and heard a caller who pointed out that Obama wasn't necessarily talking about abortion when he made the remark in question. He was talking about sex education and whether schools should be instruct young people in the use of contraceptives, condoms, etc.:

"Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information."

Along with many other bloggers, I got the issue of abortion got mixed up in there because the original item in the Politico had the word "abortion" in the headline and the article began by describing an exchange between Obama and a pro-life Pennsylvania woman. But a careful reading of the Politico item makes clear that the "punishment" quote came before the subject of abortion was raised.

Nevertheless, Obama did explicitly describe babies as "punishment." Reading the quote again, and understanding the context, this phrase is still disturbing. Notice:

• A baby and a sexually transmitted disease are both "punishment." Is a baby like herpes? Is a baby like syphilis? Obama made this analogy as if nothing was remarkable or offensive about it -- and no one in his Pennsylvania audience seemed to notice.
• To have sex is to "make a mistake." Oops! An accident! "Well, Dad, you see, I was sitting there talking to Suzy, and she asked for a piece of chewing gum. I meant to reach into my pocket and hand her a piece of sugar-free Trident, but instead I made a mistake and unzipped my pants and . . ." As a rule, sexual intercourse takes plenty of cooperative effort. The participants might later regret their actions, but the word "mistake" isn't really right.
• "Information" is the solution. This is my pet peeve with sex-ed advocates, who seem to assume that teenagers get pregnant or contract STDs because teenagers are ignorant of what used to be called The Facts of Life or "the birds and bees." Not only is that absurd -- given that "information" is now more widely available than ever -- but it is insulting to teenagers. Does Obama think his kids are too stupid to figure out how to use a condom? Has he ever Googled the topic? How about reading the instructions printed on the condom package -- does Obama think his daughters will be too stupid to do that when they're 16?
• "Safe sex" is 100% effective. This is the Big Lie of Sex Ed, and one that Obama apparently has never bothered to question. Try this mental exercise: You meet someone and decide to have sex with them. Then the person tells you that he or she is infected with herpes, chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhea and AIDS. However, he or she offers to use a condom. Are you still going to have sex? No, because of your common-sense hunch that condoms are not 100% effective in disease prevention. It is only when there is no reason to suspect a prospective partner of being infected with any disease that most people are willing to trust a condom to protect their health. If they know someone is infected, it's a different story.

What is true of condoms is equally true of contraceptives. Suppose I told you that a given method of contraception was 99% effective. Sounds pretty safe, right? So you use it, and there is a 1-in-100 chance you'll get pregnant anyway. Use the same method again, and your cumulative chances are 1-in-50. Use the same method 20 times, and you're down to a 1-in-5 chance.

This is what is known as The Law of Large Numbers. In a nation of 300 million people, there are tens of millions of sexually active people of reproductive age. Many millions of those will use contraception to avoid pregnancy, and a certain percentage of those will become pregnant anyway.

These kinds of "mistakes," to use Obama's phrase, do a lot to help keep the abortion clinics in business. The woman in such a situation will often say: "Pregnant? How can I be pregnant? We used a contraceptive!" The guy will often cast the contraceptive burden on the woman: "Pregnant? But I thought you said you were safe?"

Pregnancy is the normal, natural and ordinary consequence of sexual intercourse. It should never surprise anyone when sex leads to pregnancy.

Contraception is an attempt to separate the cause (sex) from the consequence (pregnancy). The prevalence of contraception in our society, especially since the invention of the birth-control pill, has led many people to internalize a mental or emotional separation between cause and consequence.

When the psychological separation is proven false -- when the natural consequence overcomes the artificial barrier -- a sort of cognitive dissonance occurs, and the unexpectedly pregnant woman (or her partner) asks: "How could this happen?"

The answer is also a question: "How could you expect that it wouldn't happen?"

This is one reason why the really hard-core pro-lifers are critical of artificial contraceptives. They understand that, to some degree, contraceptives cause abortion.

I'm not advocating laws against contraceptives. But the contraceptive industry is not merely content with legal sales; they want the public schools to promote their products to children at taxpayer expense. (Big Condom and Big Pill have lobbyists, too, you know.) And the promotion of condoms and contraceptives is based on a false premise, namely that their products provide 100% prevention.

Honing the ax

John Solomon employs every possible euphemism to avoid using the words "layoffs" and "early retirements," but it's very clear what's coming at The Washington Times:

As we discussed in our private coffees a few weeks ago, reshaping the newsroom for the challenges of the 21st century and moving the entire company toward profitability were going to require many tough decisions. This is especially true in the current marketplace where traditional revenues are down across the industry. With the arrival of our new budget year, the first round of those tough decisions has arrived: we must determine the appropriate size of the newsroom for its new mission and current resources.

Hint, hint, hint. Solomon continues:

But we still need to find additional savings under our 2008 budget that takes effect today. And just as important, we need to inject new skill sets into the newsroom to ensure we can compete in the news marketplace of tomorrow.
Over the next few weeks, we will make a difficult journey. The effort will be expeditious and fair, even-handed and humane. It will require us to say goodbye to some colleagues we have known for many years and to celebrate their many accomplishments as they leave us. It will also allow us to welcome some new colleagues whose skills will improve our capabilities, particularly in the digital arena.

I've only met Solomon once, and have no real inside information about what he plans. But what he is saying, pretty clearly, is that he's going to ditch a lot of the current staff -- including people who've been there many years -- and replace them with a bunch of new people whom he's pretty much going to handpick himself.

If this is like what has happened at other publications (and the entire newspaper industry has been shrinking for more than a decade), then certain senior staffers -- those over a certain age, who've been there a certain number of years -- will be offered buyouts or early retirement packages. Certain junior staffers, who don't meet the minimums, will simply be laid off.

Again, based on what has happened at other papers, what Solomon will do is to attempt to replace high-salaried experienced staffers with new hires with less experience who will work for smaller salaries.

Special attention must be paid to Solomon's phrase "new colleagues whose skills will improve our capabilities, particularly in the digital arena."

Having spent 10 years at The Washington Times, I know exactly what he's talking about. Some older journalists simply refuse to learn anything about the Internet. Hell, some journalists have never even learned the most basic keyboard functions on a PC. They have thus allowed their technophobia (or sheer laziness) to render them effectively obsolete.

I feel sorry for any of my former colleagues who will suffer from the "restructuring" that Solomon's warning about, but some of them will be victims of their own indifference to changes in the newspaper industry.

Anybody in the newspaper business who's earning over $50,000 a year and has accumulated four weeks' annual vacation is a fat target for any publisher who's looking to cut costs. Ditto anybody with health issues that require lots of medical treatment. If, in addition to those deficits, you also don't bother to stay on top of the technology required to keep pace with your competition ... Hey, welcome to Layoff City, pal.

I left The Washington Times in January because I had a contract to research a book, and couldn't make that fit into my work schedule. (Not long ago, I saw where a New York Times columnist was listed as being "on book sabbatical." No such thing at small papers.)

However, the timing of my departure -- immediately after Solomon's hiring was announced -- was not purely accidental. I knew Solomon would come into the newsroom with a mission to cut staff, and I didn't relish the idea of going into the office every day wondering if I had a target on my back. Now, some of the people at work who told me I was crazy to quit can enjoy the piranha-pool paranoia of an office environment where downsizing has been announced, but the names haven't yet been named.

Look: I was under 50, earning over $50K, with seven dependents enrolled on the company health plan, four weeks' annual vacation, and tons of accumulated sick leave (since I probably took no more than 10 sick days in 10 years). Even without the additional burden of a right-wing reputation, I would have been an obvious target for any new editor looking to cut costs.

People under 50 don't get buyouts or early retirements, they just get laid off.

You can do some research and see how many people laid off in these recent newspaper downsizings ever work at another newspaper again. Other editors will interpret that layoff as a signal that you were relatively unproductive, and who wants to hire a relatively unproductive journalist?

In a downsizing industry, it's better to quit -- or even to be "fired for cause" -- than to be laid off. If they really want to keep you, they'll ask you to stay. And nobody asked me. I was born at night, but it wasn't last night.

If she wasn't LOTUS . . .

. . . I'd be angry that Lisa De Pasquale linked me in this blogger chainmail. But who can be angry at Lisa Of The United States? Therefore, I'll oblige:

1. Link back to the person who tagged you. [Check]
2. Post these rules on your blog. [Check]
3. Share six unimportant things about yourself.

• My favorite TV show is "America's Most Wanted."
• I always thought Monica Lewinsky was beautiful.
• I hate nearly all sweets except chocolate.
• In the mid-1980s, I was lead singer and rhythm guitarist in a rock band called Strange Talk.
• My favorite dictionary is a two-volume Thorndike-Barnhart (1967 edition).
• I was born and raised in Georgia, but always cheered for the University of Alabama, because my Dad graduated there.

4. Tag six random people at the end of your entry.

• James Joyner
• Sean Hackbarth
• Don Surber
• Mariel Leonard
• Ace of Spades
• Jimmie at Sundries Shack

Now that CPAC's over, Lisa's got waaaaay too much time on her hands.

UPDATE: My apologies to Toni Woods, a/k/a The Coultress, who also tagged me in her chain-blog response.

I most recently saw Miss Woods at George Washington University for Karl Rove's speech. She was onhand for the post-event celebration with GW's YAF chapter, and I was very impressed with how well Miss Woods acquitted herself in the conversation -- considering that she's still only in high school. Here was a high school senior, surrounded by politically aware juniors and seniors at a prestigious university, and Miss Woods was not at all out of place or over her head.

Warning to liberals: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Blogwhoring 101

Mariel Leonard writes:

I've now made my way into the blogsphere. In the course of a Facebook debate about older men, gender roles and Karl Rove with the charming, funny, and always interesting Robert Stacy McCain, I linked my post about intellectuals. Stacy did me the kindness of taking me seriously, and replied via his blog. Of course, this linking back and forth is starting to resemble a fun-house mirror room, but if that's what it takes....

Learned well you have, my young paduan.

Every blogger needs "blog buddies," friends and allies you can count on to throw you an occasional link. This is true even of the big bloggers. Sure, Instapundit is so huge that it seems useless for a small blogger to throw him a hat-tip -- like he's going to notice, right? -- but I do it anyways. It's simple courtesy, it's reciprocity (since he has linked me in the past), and it actually does help Insty, since one of the reasons he's so huge is because everybody links him.

The Funhouse Mirror Principle of the blogsophere, to adapt Miss Leonard's phrase, is a puzzlement to many. But the main difference between a mere online diary and a true blog is that the true blog includes links to other blogs.

This blogs-linking-blogs aspect creates an inherent interdependence and encourages reciprocity among bloggers. Think about the "Barney" song:

I link you! You link me!
We're a happy family ...

Is Instapundit a Big Purple Dinosaur? No, but he really has exhibited a sort of Barney-like leadership among center-right bloggers, teaching them by example how to "play well with others." He doesn't seem to hold grudges or keep score and he'll link even the smallest blogger, if that blogger's got something worth linking.

The important thing for a small blogger, if you want to get linked, is to promote your stuff by e-mailing links to other bloggers. Try to find other bloggers with similar interests and beliefs, and pitch to their specialities. If I write something about terrorism, for example, I might e-mail it to Rusty Shackleford, who sort of specializes in that subject.

This business of asking other bloggers to link you is something I call "blogwhoring." When I was at The Washington Times, part of my job was to promote our news stories to the blogosophere -- and I was absolutely shameless about it. The way I figured it, if the blogs were going to link news coverage, they might as well link our news coverage.

So I was a shameless blogwhore, spamming bloggers far and wide with e-mails touting our news product. Did I get on some people's nerves? I'm sure I did. But a blogger can't link a story he doesn't know about, and it was my job to make sure they knew about our stories.

The other side of blogwhoring is linking other blogs in the hope that they'll appreciate the links and be encouraged to reciprocate -- and I did lots of that at The Washington Times, too. I routinely check SiteMeter and Technorati to see who's linking me, and try to reciprocate when I can. That is especially true when someone links me, quotes part of a post, and then elaborates in an interesting way on the same subject.

Something else I used to do, but haven't done much lately: The "round-up" post. Something big breaks in the news, and everybody's blogging on it, so just do a post that's mainly a link-and-quote sequence (and then trackback wherever possible).

A final point: In the blogosphere, there is no such thing as an unfair advantage. Traffic is traffic, and you get it any way you can. Use whatever influence is at your disposal.

I especially mention this to you, Miss Leonard, because I think you might get more traffic if you'd post a mug shot at your blog, so that your male readers had some idea that you are young, single and not half bad-looking. Guys seem to like that sort of thing.

I'm just trying to help . . .

Terrible Ted, Mouth of the South

Captain Outrageous strikes again:

Interviewed Tuesday for Charlie Rose's PBS show, CNN founder Ted Turner argued that inaction on global warming “will be catastrophic” and those who don't die “will be cannibals.” He also applied moral equivalence in describing Iraqi insurgents as “patriots” who simply “don't like us because we've invaded their country” and so “if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we'd be doing the same thing.”

UPDATE: Video courtesy of Hot Air:

If there is anything predictable about Ted Turner, it's that whenever he speaks in public, he'll say something controversial. In 1999, I was the only reporter in the room when he spoke to a "reproductive health" group in Washington. The story's no longer online, but here's what I reported on Feb. 17, 1999:

. . . Though he fathered "five kids -- boom, boom, boom -- by the time I was 30," Mr.Turner said, he now believes overpopulation is a major problem and suggested people should "promise to have no more than two children."
Mr. Turner recalled a discussion many years ago with Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book "The Population Bomb" predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and '80s as a result of global overpopulation.
Mr. Turner said he asked Mr. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, what the ideal world population would be.
"They told me about 2 billion," Mr. Turner said. World population is now 5.9 billion, but the world could reduce its population to that ideal, Mr. Turner suggested.
"We could do it in a very humane way," he said, "if everybody adopted a one-child policy for 100 years." . . .
Mr. Turner, whose net worth is more than $3.2 billion, got laughs with his responses during a question-and-answer session after his speech.
Asked about [House Majority Whip Tom] DeLay, Mr. Turner said of the Republican congressman: "Nobody that dumb could make it through law school."
Asked what he would say to Pope John Paul II, who opposes abortion and artificial contraception, Mr. Turner responded with an ethnic joke -- "Ever seen a Polish mine detector?" -- and then suggested the pope should "get with it. Welcome to the 20th century."

Turner's reference to the discredited Ehrlich is the key to understanding his ridiculous environmental doomsaying. People who buy into catastrophic theories of the future generally do so out of ignorance, and because such views give them a narcissistic ego-boost: They are wise and see the future, while you are a blind fool.

Someone should ask Turner to explain why all of Ehrlich's predictions have proven false, and what that says about such of Ehrlich's disciples as himself.

UPDATE: This story appears to be going viral, so let's do a quick roundup of blog reaction, beginning with Sundries Shack:

Let’s just say for the sake of argument that he’s right about the temperature change and in 30 or 40 years the entire globe will be warmer on average by eight degrees Celsius. That means that his home city of Atlanta, GA will go from an average temperature of about 61 degrees Fahrenheit to about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the average yearly temperature of Miami, Florida where, last I checked, residents are not generally carving each other into steaks.

Q and O:

So we have [Al] Gore, Turner, Sharpton and Roberson pushing this meme now, do we? Beside the dubious science which now seems to be coming apart at the seams, if you didn't have any other reasons to blow this nonsense off, there are four great reasons to do so.

The big reason I've never bought into global-warming hysteria is that liberals are 100% wrong about everything. Whatever liberals tell me to do, I do the opposite. Liberals warned me about overpopulation, so I had six kids. And you know what they say about a man with big carbon footprint . . .

Grumpy Old Party

In a post about John McCain's "biography tour," Matthew Yglesias remarks:

Ed [Kilgore] notes the analogy to Bob Dole's 1996 campaign, the last time the GOP thought having an old man talk fondly about long-past suffering was a good way to win elections. Relatedly, I think it was Matt Stoller who pointed out recently that the candidate with the more impressive military record lost in 1992 and 1996 and 2000 and 2004 so there's reason to doubt that McCain's genuinely impressive military record will serve as an ace in the hole for his campaign.

One reason the GOP establishment's backing of Crazy Cousin John has been so exasperating to me is the deja vu factor.

The McCain '08 campaign is almost an exact replica of the Dole '96 campaign -- aged, ill-tempered war-hero senator whose voting record is starkly at odds with his claims to conservatism.

Win or lose, it's bad for the Republican Party to have such a candidate as its standard-bearer. It plays to the stereotype of the GOP as the party of boring old fuddy-duddies. McCain's candidacy is also bad for conservatism, insofar as the Average Joe nowadays tends to confute conservatism and Republicanism, so that whatever Republicans say and do is taken as an expression of the conservative credo.

Whenever you bring up the issue of McCain's advanced age, some Republican hack is sure to answer, "What about Reagan?" Three quick rebuttals:

• Reagan was tall. McCain's about 5-foot-7.
• Reagan had a full head of hair. McCain's bald.
• Reagan was a conservative. McCain's not.

McCain's nomination is the triumph of "National Greatness" nonsense, and thus a defeat for conservatives.

BTW, last night I was at a Reason magazine event about the national poker craze, which gave me the opportunity to play Texas Hold 'Em with Yglesias, Julian Sanchez of the Economist and John Tabin of The American Spectator, among others. Tabin is a canny player and won steadily, but I was really impressed with Sanchez, whom I never would have figured for a green-felt wizard. As for me, I stupidly let myself get bluffed out on an early hand by Jonathan Blanks of the Cato Institute, but subsequently recovered and walked away a winner.

UPDATE: I guess I should tell the story of how Blanks bluffed me out, because it's kind of funny. To start with, I hadn't really played poker in 20 years, and back then we mostly played seven-card stud. I'd only played Texas Hold 'Em maybe once for just a few hands, and watching poker on TV has never interested me. So I was both rusty and new to the game.

Still, I was doing the smart thing, playing conservative. If I wasn't dealt anything, I folded -- and the first two or three hands, I got zilch in the deal.

Then came a hand where I got dealt a pair of queens (spades and clubs) and now I was ready to play. I tried to be nonchalant about it, quietly matching whatever was bet, but never raising -- when you've got a pair in the hole, you don't want to bet anyone out of the game.

Well, the flop was no help -- low-number red cards -- and it was the same on fourth street. If somebody was trying to make a diamond flush or a low straight, I might be in trouble.

A couple of guys made small raises on fourth street, but nothing I couldn't handle, until Blanks comes in and makes a big raise. "A-ha!" I say to myself. "Our boy's just hit his straight." And so I folded.

Now the river card: Queen of diamonds. Doggone it.

Still, a straight beats three queens, so I'd made the smart decision by folding. Or so I thought. Blanks continued raising and after he'd been called, he laid down . . . nothing.

Blanks had been going for the low straight, just as I thought. And he actually thought he'd filled it. But he'd apparently misread the community cards, and thought that a three was a deuce, so he got beat by a guy with two pair.

If I'd have stayed in, I'd have won with three queens, but I was bluffed out . . . by a guy who didn't know he was bluffing.

Morning news

Headline of the Day

Passenger At Orlando Airport Had Bomb Materials, Literature In Bag

Plastic explosives and Chaucer?

Sid Vicious strikes again

Fresh out of rehab and on a book tour:

. . . According to Sidney Blumenthal, a senior adviser for former President Bill Clinton and current adviser to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton, at one point [Sen. John] McCain was going to leave the Republican Party and caucus with Senate Democrats.
“And although he doesn’t want to talk to reporters about it now, there was a time and I was privy to some of those who were involved, did conduct negotiations through third parties about whether or not he would leave the Republican Party and become an independent more or less aligned in the Senate with the Democrats,” said Blumenthal on April 1. Blumenthal did not say when those negotiations took place.
Blumenthal made the remarks before an audience at a Barnes & Noble bookstore to promote his book, “The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party.” . . .

Background: Blumenthal has been predicting the death of the GOP for more than 20 years. He was a key White House aide during the Clinton administration, and published a memoir that was unreadable. The day before the New Hampshire primary he was busted in Nashua, N.H., for drunk driving, doing 70 mph in a 30 mph zone.

Smart-aleck kids . . .

Episcopal High School student Katelyn Halldorson gives some lip to alumnus John McCain:

“I think judging by the amount of press representatives here and also by the integration of your previous political endorsements in your earlier personal narrative, we can see that this isn’t completely absent – er political motivation isn’t completely absent,” she said. “Yet we were told that this isn’t a political event. So what exactly is your purpose in being here – not that I don’t appreciate the opportunity, but I’d just like some clarification.”
“I knew I should have cut this thing off. This meeting is over,” McCain joked, before launching into a long description of his biography tour…
McCain concluded the visit by saying, “I hope that attendance here was not compulsory…I apologize if you were unwillingly in attendance here.”
According to one EHS staff member, attendance was required.

Tuition at Episcopal High School is $38,200 a year. The common man will relate to that ...

Hillary who?

Obama in Pennsylvania:

In his town-hall session Tuesday, and in other campaign appearances in recent days, Obama has sought to frame the race as a general election matchup between him and McCain.
Of course, there's the little matter of a Pennsylvania primary on April 22, and Clinton's double-digit lead in recent state polls.

Campaigning in an uncontested primary?

The R-word

Jon Henke predicts the predictable:

Democrats - whether due to paranoia or calculation - are going to see racism under every rock, and they're going to exploit the hell out of it. This, as long as political points can be scored for it, will be our "conversation about race."
That won't exactly help heal, ease or erase racial problems, but that doesn't seem to be the goal of such accusations.
I hope I'm wrong, but I fear the paranoia is just too deep and the temptation just too much to avoid that sort of thing. There is, of course, real racism in America and it deserves our swift public scorn...but "racist" is not a term to be thrown about lightly and without substantial evidence. Its overuse can only exacerbate real racial problems.

The Democrats' leading candidate belongs to a church whose founding creed calls for "the destruction of the white enemy," but they're pointing fingers at Republicans?

Greenwald Mock-a-Thon

Glenn Greenwald has a new book called "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics":

[Republicans] have cultivated the ability to manipulate media behavior, largely as a result of a media eager to help. But what they do not have is popular support for virtually anything they are doing. And yet they continue to win elections.
How and why that happens -- the deceitful electoral tactics and manipulative personality-based myths the Right has perfected and continuously deploys to win elections, and the ways in which our slothful, vapid and complicit establishment press propagates those myths -- is the principal subject of this book. And understanding and exposing that right-wing/media artnership is a necessary precondition for weakening it.

(Via Memeorandum.) An April Fool's Joke? Alas, it's apparently a real book. Dig the Publisher's Weekly review at Amazon:

The author begins his attack by targeting John Wayne, whom he sees as a template for right-wing notions of American courage and conservative manliness. Wayne's avoidance of military service and his string of divorces, both at odds with his public image, are emblematic in this account of a fundamental hypocrisy implicit in conservative mythologies. Greenwald goes on to argue that prominent Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney display the same hypocrisy in their public ideologies and personal lives.

Glenn Greenwald vs. John Wayne? My money's on the Duke, despite the fact he's been dead for nearly 30 years.

Are liberals so stupid they'd pay money for a book in which Greenwald, a transparently phony sock puppeteer, lectures them about hypocrisy?

Yeah, they probably are. So this book will be a bestseller, and Greenwald and his Brazilian boyfriend will be able to afford to install a new pool at their pad in Rio. I'm sure the Duke would be touched.

I wonder if the book contains any warnings about that notorious bigot, Glenn Reynolds?

'The dignity of living'

I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.

-- Deuteronomy 30:19 (KJV)

Suppose that you or someone you know became pregnant.

Suppose further that, during routine prenatal examination, the doctor determined that there were serious problems with the fetus.

More tests are taken and it is determined that the fetus carries a rare genetic anomaly, a missing chromosone, a condition known as Turner Syndrome that occurs in 1 of 5,000 births. One reason such births are so rare is that doctors estimate that 98% of pregnancies with Turner Syndrome end in miscarriage.

Those born with Turner Syndrome are biologically female, but are sterile, with underdeveloped genitalia and breasts. Short stature (on average, about 4-foot-7 at maturity) and deformity of the face and hands are other common traits of Turner Syndrome. Many with Turner Syndrome suffer other serious health problems, including deformity of the aorta and kidneys.

What would you do, or what would you suggest, in such a situation? Would you carry the child to term or choose abortion?

Abortion? Then there is no Sarah Horowitz, teacher, journalist, poet and social justice activist, who was recently interviewed about her activism:

I was writing a lot of letters for Amnesty International, specifically on the death penalty. I got very good at giving the secular explanation of why we shouldn’t have the death penalty. But I started to realize that what I really wanted to say is that it’s bad for the soul of the nation. And there’s no real traditional political language for that, the collective soul. At some point, I read this amazing sermon by Martin Luther King; he wrote it right after the Montgomery bus boycott. Basically he said don’t get on the bus full of braggadocio, because you still have to live with these people. And I kind of realized that that was the sort of political action that I wanted to be a part of. I wanted to recognize the dignity of living.

Prenatal genetic testing wasn't a possibility when Sarah was born. And, in fact, Sarah's father is a Republican friend of mine and I know him to be pro-choice, at least from a political perspective. Since I never met Sarah, I have no idea what her stance on the abortion issue was, although she was obviously a liberal on most issues. Still, to read what Sarah had to say about "the dignity of living," I wonder if she ever pondered the miracle of her own life.

I write of Sarah in the past tense because she died last month at age 44. She was mourned by those who knew her, including comedian Kenny Altman:

Sarah battled health problems throughout her entire life but she refused to let them stop her from pursuing her dreams and her passions. To paraphrase my rabbi, Micah Hyman, "her spirit was stronger than her body." She was a pure soul, and an amazingly accomplished person -- among other things she was a poet, a Jewish scholar, a teacher of autistic children, and she made the best damn pumpkin Challah I have ever tasted in my life!

Of course, she was mourned deeply by her Republican father. He wrote poignantly about how his daughter, "who until this election was pretty much a member of the Green Party," flew to Iowa to campaign for Barack Obama.

If you want to read what Sarah's father wrote about his "sweet child," you can find it at FrontPageMagazine.com. Because Sarah's father -- my pro-choice Republican friend whose Green Party daughter spoke about "the dignity of life" and campaigned for Obama -- is none other than the famous conservative author David Horowitz.

How do you say 'pander' in Spanish?

I've asked this before, but is Obama trying to lose?

"As farmworkers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair treatment and fair wages, we find strength in what Cesar Chavez accomplished so many years ago,'' Obama said in a statement from his campaign. "And we should honor him for what he's taught us about making America a stronger, more just, and more prosperous nation.
"That's why I support the call to make Cesar Chavez's birthday a national holiday. It's time to recognize the contributions of this American icon to the ongoing efforts to perfect our union."

This idiotic statement can only hurt Obama in his primary battle with Hillary.

• Q. What percentage of Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania will be Hispanic?
• A. A lot smaller percentage than the non-Hispanic working class voters who are afraid of losing their jobs to cheap immigrant labor.

And, man, I can't wait to see how this Cesar Chavez crap plays in North Carolina ....

AOSHQ insight

Blogger girls claim they don't like cocky guys. Ace of Spades translates:

Which leads me to believe 1) women bloggers are nothing like normal women or most likely 2) women bloggers are exactly like normal women in that they lie their pretty asses off.

I would add this alternative:

3) women bloggers are exactly like most other people in that they lack emotional self-awareness.

That is to say, most people never take time to apply intellect and reason to emotional situations, to contemplate their own emotions: "Why do I feel this way?"

If you don't think about things like that, if you go through life never bothering to examine your emotional responses, you will constantly be misled by your emotions -- and misled by people who know how to manipulate your emotions.

For all the vaunted superior emotional sensitivity of women, they are at least as likely as men to lack emotional self-awareness. So asking women to say what they like will not necessarily reveal what they actually do like. Many neither know what they like nor why they like it.

Furthermore, physical attraction dominates all other factors in whether a woman likes a guy, no matter what any survey says. Simple proof: All women like Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt has never had to sit around wondering, "Gee, maybe I shouldn't come on so strong ..." or "Maybe if I wore a different kind of cologne ..." So don't lose any sleep over that crap, guys.

UPDATE: I was just looking at John Hawkins' survey and noticed his stupid description of Cassy Fiano:

Cassy is a very sweet girl, is very sociable, has dated a lot, and has even written several articles on dating.

Look at her photo and see if you notice anything else. Anything. Or maybe "anythings," plural. Maybe I should see if Cassy would respond to my own survey questions:

• Q. You seem very proud of your large breasts. Do you get many compliments on them?
• Q. Generally speaking, if a guy wants to date you, is it a good pickup line for him to say something about your breasts?
• Q. I mean, wow, they're really nice.
• Q. OK, that last one wasn't actually a question.
• Q. Listen, Cassy, I hate to break your heart, but I'm a happily married man. However, I do have single friends who might be interested in going out with you. As a matter of fact, I have one single friend who is a very well-known blogger. So I have to ask, do you think Ewoks are sexy?

Bad hackery on H&C

Kellyanne Conway pissed me off tonight during her appearance on "Hannity & Colmes."

"H&C" is not my favorite program, but my wife and I were watching it tonight because they had a discussion of Obama's "punished with a baby" remark.

After that, there was a discussion of campaign gaffes in general -- Hillary and the Bosnia snipers, etc -- and Alan Colmes asked Conway a question about John McCain's apparently contradictory statements about the war in Iraq.

Conway didn't even try to answer the question. Instead, she starts trying to spin and hit him with talking points. I can't stand that kind of cheap partisan hack stuff when Democrats do it, and I don't like it when Republicans do it either.

Colmes kept interrupting, trying to get Conway to answer his question: "Will these statements cause a problem for McCain in the campaign?" It would have been simple to answer, "No, I don't think so, Alan, and here's why ..." But Conway wouldn't do that. She kept filibustering, trying to recite some list of talking points she's apparently rehearsed before hand.

My wife shouted at the TV, "Just answer the question!" Finally, I got so disgusted, I changed the channel.

Conway's behavior was rude and disrespectful. Colmes asked a legitimate question that deserved a straight answer. Just because he's an ugly liberal doesn't mean he shouldn't be treated with courtesy.

UPDATE: Just got an e-mail from (no kidding) Alan Colmes:

I guess calling me “an ugly liberal” is your idea of courtesy?

My apologies. It's kind of like making Ewok jokes about Ace of Spades. Ace is not really that hairy. And Colmes is not actually that liberal.

UPDATE II: Colmes e-mailed in reply to my apology:

Hey….everyone calls me an ugly liberal. At least come up with your own material. But your blog looks very entertaining.

And I replied:

Thanks. But stay liberal. I've already got more competition than I can handle in the ugly conservative niche.

Yeah, I'm talking about you, Don Surber.

Babeblogging: Ingrid Bergman

Sunday night, my wife and I watched Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 spy thriller. An excellent film. An excellent hottie.

Bergman is, of course, one of the all-time great beauties of film history, perhaps excelled only by the immortal Grace Kelly.

In Notorious, the close-ups of Bergman were all shot in gauzy soft-focus, as if Hitchcock were trying to hide any evidence of aging. Bergman was 31 by then, and perhaps too old for her role as the dissolute daughter of a Nazi traitor. But on the other hand, she's playing the apex of a love triangle with Cary Grant (42) and Claude Rains (55), so it's rather odd that Hitchcock would insist on portraying Bergman as an ingenue.

Such disconcerting thoughts aside, Bergman is babelicious in Notorious, which I heartily recommend.

UPDATE: Jimmie at The Sundries Shack tries to name two contemporary Ingrid-class babes:

I’d be hard pressed to think of three actresses in the past twenty years who combined strong acting chops with such arresting loveliness.
I can get as far as two: Diane Lane and Charlize Theron.

Not to diss either of those two, but I think the pursuit is fruitless, for several reasons:

• The collapse of the studio system -- Old Hollywood had its problems, but the studios were able to exercise discipline. There was an assembly-line quality to the work, and a level of professionalism was expected. The studios sought out talented actors, invested time and money developing and promoting them as stars, and required them in return to meet high standards. Nowadays, there is no development system, and every actor is a free agent, picking his or her own films, with the result that there are fewer actresses who appear in one great film after another, the way Bergman did in the '40s and '50s.
• Quick-cut editing -- Over the past 20 years, movies have more and more been shot in the quick-cut style first developed by the directors of TV commercials and popularized in the '80s by MTV music videos. Good-bye to the long, lingering close-ups that etched into American minds the beauty of Bergman, Grace Kelly, Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor.
• The fitness/thinness craze -- If you've seen swimsuit photos of the famous actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age, you know that many of them (e.g. Marilyn Monroe) would be considered "fat" by today's standards. Ingrid Bergman might have gotten a fair amount of exercise -- playing tennis, swimming, dancing -- but she didn't run a mile a day, she didn't spend hours on a Stairmaster, she didn't work out at a gym, she didn't have a "personal trainer." Pressured to look "buff," today's actresses inevitably alter not only their bodies but their faces as well. There's less subcutaneous fat on their faces, and thus you seldom see a top movie actress today who has that soft, feminine quality that makes Bergman's face so appealing.
• The blockbuster syndrome -- It's hard to find a glamorous role for a beauty queen if every film is about monsters, robots, explosions and CGI-enhanced fight sequences. Let's face it, if Hollywood remade Notorious today, the Cary Grant part would go to Brad Pitt, who'd appear shirtless in at least half the movie, including the climactic 15-minute gun battle with the Claude Rains character (played by Vin Diesel), during which there would be at least two fiery helicopter crashes. In today's computer-animated comic book fantasies, a movie star is someone who occasional utters a one-liner and otherwise does fight scenes in front of a green screen. There's just no use for an Ingrid Bergman in such stuff.
• Feminism -- Even in the occasional romantic film where the glamour of an Ingrid Bergman might be suitable, the conventions of contemporary Hollywood require that the lead female role go to an ugly woman. Perfect example of this is Elizabeth: The Golden Age. A wonderful movie, but Cate Blanchett is no beauty queen. I've never seen any critic write about this trend toward the "homely heroine," but it's real -- witness the inexplicably successful career of Meryl Streep -- and I can think of no other cause but feminism. In a culture where it is unacceptable to treat women as "sex objects," then it's "discriminaton" to deny ugly women careers as movie stars. So for at least 25 years, Hollywood seems to have operated on the principle that "serious" movies require ugly leading ladies. Thus ugly women like Streep and Blanchett, who would have been playing supporting roles in the '40s, are elevated to Oscar-winners.

So there are many factors that explain why we don't see Hollywood today producing anything like great screen beauties of the Golden Age. Of course, a beauty like Bergman is rare in any age, but it isn't like they've become extinct. They're just not starring in major Hollywood pictures anymore.

Anti-God, anti-baby, pro-Obama?

When he started ranting about atheism, it was inevitable he'd get here:

The basic point, i.e. “teen pregnancy is bad so let’s do what we can to avoid it,” is unobjectionable but this is at least worth a question at the next debate about whether he’d describe unwanted pregnancies among adults the same way. My hunch is people will be willing to cut him some slack because he’s talking about teens: Pregnancy’s more disruptive to a kid than to an adult, and we do after all presume as a matter of law that minors are too immature to make important decisions, so the idea of being “punished” by one’s own ignorance isn’t out of left field.

Where to start?

• "Teen pregnancy is bad" -- And yet, teenagers have been having babies throughout human history. Ever hear of Loretta Lynn, who was a mother of four before she turned 18? How about Margaret Beaufort, who was 13 when she gave birth to Henry Tudor, later King Henry VII? Having destigmatized bastardy, American society now reserves its scorn exclusively for teenagers. Why is pregancy bad at 19, but not at 20? (Maggie Gallagher's "The Age of Unwed Mothers" is the best study of this I've seen.)
• "[U]nwanted pregnancies among adults" -- Sex causes pregnancy. From a Darwinian perspective, sex has now other function except the reproduction of the species. So why do people have sex and then act so horrified when the result is pregnancy? "Oh, my God, this is so unwanted!"
• "Pregnancy’s more disruptive to a kid than to an adult" -- How so? And again, why is the 19-year-old a "kid," but the 20-year-old is an adult? Heck, there are 18-year-old Marines patrolling Baghdad. Why is that Marine's 18-year-old wife a "kid"?
• "Being 'punished' by one's own ignorance" -- Why are people so eager to believe that the teenager who becomes pregnant does so out of "ignorance"? Long before I became a teenager, I understood that sex causes pregnancy, and I suppose that this sort of basic reproductive knowledge is still quite widespread among teens. And the same is true, I suppose, for STDs (the other example Obama used).

I absolutely agree with Allahpundit that this quote alone is not going to wreck Obama's campaign. But Allahpundit's discussion of the subject reflects the same Planned Parenthood-approved cultural assumptions that informed Obama's gaffe.

What I can't get about Allahpundit is that, on the one hand, he seems to share Mark Steyn's concern about the demographic decline of the West, and yet on the other hand, he appears indifferent to the cultural causes of that decline. A culture where it is acceptable to tell a pregnant teenager that she is being "punished with a baby" ... well, it's a Culture of Death.

'I love the hell out of all of them'

My friend who's a master chief petty officer in the Navy sent me this video. It's not new, but I'd never seen it before. It's awesome:



If that doesn't put a lump in your throat, I don't know what will.

Professor Rosen cites me

Headline on NYU Professor Jay Rosen's PressThink article:

The Love Affair Between McCain and the Press
Sprains the Brain of the Liberal Blogosphere

McCain sprains brains mainly among the insane.

Professor Rosen cites my comments from yesterday's post -- pointing out that conservative voices have spent years bashing Crazy Cousin John -- and remarks, "This is worth more thought."

You know what else is worth more thought? Natalie Portman.

My point being not just that Natalie Portman is hot -- although, let's face it, she's thermonuclear hot -- but that politics is not the only thing that makes life worth living. If your life is so empty that you're obsessing on politics in a desperate attempt to fill that gaping psychic void, total craziness is the most likely outcome.

Professor Rosen was kind enough to send me an e-mail alerting me to the fact that he'd cited my blog. I sent him an e-mail in reply:

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. As an ex-Democrat myself (I voted for Mondale in '84), I am fascinated by the way some Democrats are blind to the fissures and factions in the GOP coalition. John McCain has been an antagonist of conservatives on so many issues -- campaign finance, immigration, taxes, etc. -- and yet, to hear liberal bloggers tell it, he's a vicious right-winger, ideologically indistinguishable from those conservatives (Coulter, Malkin, Ingraham, etc.) who find him disgusting.

The politics of insanity on the left has grown because of a succession of stressors: The '94 Republican Revolution, the '98 impeachment, the '00 Florida showdown, 9/11, the unexpected '02 midterm defeat, war in Iraq, Bush's re-election. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Americans don't really give a damn about politics, but for some people -- including too many bloggers -- politics is everything. And for rabid Democratic partisans, the past 10-15 years look like a Gotterdammerung. It appears to have driven some of them around the bend.

This is part of the reason I have no trouble saying I don't care who wins in November. Hell, let the Democrats get the White House back, so they no longer have any Evil Neocon Warmonger Scapegoats to haunt their dreams and fuel their propaganda. The country survived Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; it will surive Obama or Hillary.

Besides which, John McCain is a treacherous asshole.

Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy -- the First Three Rules of Journalism.

More media love for McCain?

The NY Daily News ties Crazy Cousin John to the mortage crisis:

When Sen. John McCain addressed the nation's burgeoning mortgage mess last week, he insisted it was time for a little "straight talk." . . .
What McCain did not say - which some believe smacks of politics - is that two of his top advisers were recently lobbyists for a notorious lender in the mortgage meltdown.
John Green, the senator's chief liaison to Congress, and Wayne Berman, his national finance co-chairman, billed more than $720,000 in lobbying fees from 2005 through last year to Ameriquest Mortgage through their lobbying firm, disclosure forms reviewed by the Daily News show.
Ameriquest, which since has been bought out, was forced to settle suits with 49 states for $325 million. More than 13,680 New York homeowners got taken for a ride by the company, records show.

I like how the reporter begins with a feature lead, then switches to editorializing -- "which some believe smacks of politics" -- before bothering to report the facts. Yeah, tell me again how the MSM are in the tank for the GOP . . .

'An absolute douchebag'

Just checked the SiteMeter and noticed traffic from a blog whose proprietor is a member of the "progressive netroots community" Apparently, being a "progressive" in good standing requires spewing epithets like a Tourette's sufferer.

The aforesaid progressive blogger has dubbed me "Girlname McS---head," and further elaborates: "Jesus Christ f---ing a pogo stick, what an absolute douchebag."

That last string of incoherence was in reaction to my self-description as, "Award-winning columnist, reporter, editor, author, bon vivant and raconteur." These are simply facts:

• In 1996 I was awarded the George Washington Medal from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, Pa., for my 1995 series of columns about the National Standards for U.S. History. (The award was presented to me by Georgia Gov. Zell Miller in a ceremony at the governor's mansion in Atlanta.)
• I have earned my living as a reporter and editor since 1986.
• I am co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons.
• My Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionary (1967 edition) defines bon vivant as "a person who is fond of good food and luxury" -- just ask anyone who knows me.
• Thorndike-Barnhart defines raconteur as "a person clever at telling stories, anecdotes, etc." -- again, just ask my friends. (I've even been known to employ le mot juste now and again.)

Judging from the limited vocabulary displayed in his screed against me, that progressive blogger could benefit from a little more time spent with a dictionary.

More to the point, he has no sense of humor. He doesn't get the mock-braggadocio of ending my self-description with "bon vivant and raconteur." I might just as easily have described myself as "the clown prince of wingnut pundits" or some other jesting pomposity. This mixture of boasting and self-deprecation is my routine, my shtick. It's like the garbage man who tells his friends he's a "sanitation engineer." Get it?

No, he doesn't get it, because he's a fanatic who has no life. Speaking of which, I never did get around to posting photos of the Code Pink protesters at the Karl Rove speech Friday at GW:

Now that you've seen a couple of pictures of the idiots who wasted their Friday afternoon bothering motorists on E Street, let me show you two photos from inside GW's Elliott School of International Affairs, where students were lined up to hear Karl Rove speak:

Notice the difference? Outside: A handful of aging losers with nothing better to do than to make nuisances of themselves. Inside: Well-dressed young people who are ambitious to lead lives of meaning and purpose.

The saddest thing to me is that the people on the outside chose to be there. Nobody forced them to join Code Pink and become public nuisances. They volunteered for that gig.

Worst president ever?

No, not Jimmy Carter. I didn't say "worst American president ever." Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe might well be the worst president in world history. Mugabe turned one of Africa's richest nations into an economic basket case, and now it appears he's been overwhelmingly defeated for re-election:

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party has claimed an overwhelming victory in the country’s general election, prompting a warning from President Robert Mugabe’s camp that the early declaration amounted to an attempted coup.

(Hat-tip: Hot Air.) Kind of sounds like Al Gore's people bitching about butterfly ballots in Palm Beach, or John Kerry's supporters whining about "disenfranchisement" in Ohio, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, Mugabe's thugs are a bit more dangerous than idiotic "progressive" ranters on the blogosphere. Getting rid of Mugabe could take a civil war:

To Robert Mugabe, today's presidential election in Zimbabwe is not so much a vote as war. From his campaign slogan - Get Behind the Fist, over a picture of Mugabe waving a firmly clenched fist - to speeches invoking the liberation war against white rule, the president of Zimbabwe has defined his campaign to extend his 28-year rule as the final struggle against British imperialism and its fifth columnists in the opposition.
"We must deliver the final blow against the British on March 29," he told one of his final election rallies. "We are in a war situation. This is a time to fight, not pleasure."

Mugabe's vicious demagoguery against whites -- and his economically disastrous practice of "expropriating" farms owned by whites -- is no different than how Hitler demonized Jews. It's a classic blueprint for despotism:

• Name a class of scapegoats. Ideally, the scapegoats should be a small and unpopular minority.
• Blame the scapegoats for all society's ills.
• Claim that the scapegoats are so evil that extreme measures are justified to defeat the scapegoat's nefarious schemes.
• Defame anyone who criticizes the anti-scapegoat measures as being "pro-scapegoat."

Condoleezza Rice just denounced Mugabe as a "disgrace" :

"We've made very clear our concerns about how this election might be conducted, given the very bad record of Mugabe concerning his people, the opposition and the region," Rice told reporters after meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

"We've tried to make a case ... that there needed to be free and fair elections in Zimbabwe as much as it was possible. It's difficult since really no international observation was allowed," the top U.S. diplomat said.

"But really, the Mugabe regime is a disgrace to the people of Zimbabwe and a disgrace to southern Africa and to the continent of Africa as whole," she said.

Pray that Mugabe exits peacefully. A civil war in Zimbabwe could be a bloodbath of such monstrous proportions as to make people forget Darfur and Rwanda.

UPDATE: Democrat=Socialist reminds us that Mugabe is good buddies with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and says:

Who can blame the guy for fighting tooth and nail to hang on to his presidential palace, limo’s and pimped out suits?

(Photo via Dr. Flap.)

She feels our pain

Hillary practices strategic bill-paying:

A pair of Ohio companies owed more than $25,000 by Clinton for staging events for her campaign are warning others in the tight-knit event production community — and anyone else who will listen — to get their cash upfront when doing business with her. Her campaign, say representatives of the two companies, has stopped returning phone calls and e-mails seeking payment of outstanding invoices. One even got no response from a certified letter.

Hey, lots of cash-strapped Americans can relate to Hillary on this. If the phone bill's a month past due and the electric bill's two months past due, you write a check to the electric company and hope the phone doesn't get shut off before you get paid again.

Michelle Malkin is more judgmental:

[T]he woman who promises billions and billions of your money to help other people pay their bills, won’t pay her own . . .

Jammie Wearing Fool is also unsympathetic:

She sure can be a skinflint when it comes to her own money, but will lavishly spend yours. What a hypocrite.

C'mon, guys -- you need to be tolerant and understanding, like Richard Mellon Scaife:

Her meeting and her remarks during it changed my mind about her.
Walking into our conference room, not knowing what to expect (or even, perhaps, expecting the worst), took courage and confidence. Not many politicians have political or personal courage today, so it was refreshing to see her exhibit both.

Now what Scaife needs to do is write checks to a few straw donors, so Hillary can pay her bills with illegal contributions. Courage!

UPDATE: Instapundit calls it "cash-flow management." I'll remind my wife to use that phrase next time the credit-card company calls.

UPDATE II: Allahpundit's feeling "schadenfreude" over Hillary's cash crunch. It hurts when people talk that way about my close personal friend. Allah's probably just jealous, like Don Surber.

AOSHQ vs. 'free expression'?

I read Ace of Spades HQ mainly for the jokes, but Ace is also excellent when it's time to get serious, as for example when a post about terrorism elicited some anti-Muslim comments that were inexcusably hateful.

Ace deleted the thread and warned the morons:

This is a business. People do read this at work.
I am getting tired of having to remind people of these basic facts. You are threatening my very g-d----d livelihood and no, your "right" to free expression is not going to trump my right to make a buck.

It's an important distinction. The First Amendment does not require the proprietor of a blog to publish your comment. You can't complain of an infringement of your "rights" if the blogger bans you or deletes your comment. You can argue that the blogger is treating you unfairly, but it's his blog, not yours. If you don't like it, go start your own blog and write whatever you want there.

Exit question: Ace hasn't linked me in at least six or seven days. Does that make me an oppressed victim? Is he attempting to stifle dissent? Is there a "chilling effect"? Does anybody even care if my "exit question" is actually four questions?

Nutroots bizarro world

Dementia is always fascinating:

The left-wing blogosphere is declaring an all-out war against the mainstream media – desperately concerned that inside-the-Beltway reporter-love for D.C. fixture McCain is already creating too large a mountain for any Democratic nominee to scale. . . .
McCain opponents need to get personal with reporters who seem to favorable to the GOP candidate. “They need to be shamed before their own public,” Digby said.

(Via Memeorandum.) Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each, individually, have been getting twice as much network TV coverage as John McCain. Combined, the Big Three networks give the two Democrats four times as much coverage as they give the lone Republican.

The former POW is now MIA as far as MSM coverage is concerned. And yet the "progressive netroots community" is ready to rush the cyber-barricades because McCain gets a favorable mention on Chris Matthews' MSNBC show that nobody watches?

If liberal bloggers want to chastise the MSM for its long love affair with Senator Amnesty -- hey, get in line. Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin have been complaining about this MSM-McCain romance for years, and Rush Limbaugh's been doing it since at least 1999.

Roger Simon is disoriented by the progressive jihad against Chris Matthews:

My poor head is spinning here. I can't keep up with all this. I think I'm going to go call Woody Allen and see if he remembers my mantra.

Roger, try this mantra: "I have a gub"!

UPDATE: A journalism professor says my arguments are "worth more thought," while a liberal blogger calls me "an absolute douchebag." Hey, as long as they're sending me traffic, I don't care if they call me Imelda Marcos.

'Punished with a baby'?

UPDATE 4/4: Reply to Pandagon.

* * * * *

Just about to log off when I decided to check Memeorandum, and saw Obama's bizarre defense of abortion:

"Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. . . ."

Huh? Who thinks of babies as "punishment"?

Better yet, what kind of father would describe babies as "punishment"? As a father of six children (three of them teenagers), I was dumbfounded by Obama's use of this phrase. Of course, this being a Democratic primary, there's really no difference between Obama and Hillary on the abortion issue, but Obama's bizarre phrasing is still remarkable.

Nathan at Stop the ACLU was shocked:

Regardless of your feelings on sexual education, this statement oozes with animosity. It also reveals the true heart of Barack Obama. Despite his so-called “understanding” of both sides of the abortion issue, any person that could utter such cold, abhorrence when discussing a fellow human being has no intention of displaying any goodwill to pro-lifers.

While I am not prepared to say that one ill-phrased sentence "reveals the true heart" of Obama, it doesn't enhance his reputation as a great speaker.

Also, if Obama wants to keep his girls out of trouble, it's not really so much about "teach[ing] them . . . about values and morals" as it is about keeping a sharp eye on your kids' friends. Peer pressure is dangerously powerful, so don't let your kids hang out with trashy hoodlums.

With girls, it helps a lot to drill one thing into their heads, from the time they're old enough to talk: Boys have cooties.

UPDATE: Linked by Michelle Malkin -- thank you, ma'am.

UPDATE 3-31: SiteMeter showed a bunch of Google hits on this post, and when I went to Memeorandum, I saw the story had been picked up at Christian Broadcasting Network by David Brody, who says:

I understand Obama was talking off the cuff and these were not prepared remarks. I also know that when you're on the campaign trail 20 hours a day you will say something you wish you hadn't. But still. "Punished with a baby?" That just doesn't sound right. Why use the word punished? I would think that word would be alarming to people and possibly offensive to those who have had babies out of wedlock.

And perhaps most offensive to those who were born to unwed mothers: "Mom, was I punishment?"