Liberals: Try And Love (Bush) Again?

Patrick farmed some very fine paragraphs yesterday in a post called Avian Chorus, an essay on the unspoken liberal emotion: missing George Bush.

Hard to wrap your mind around that? Yeah ... then mix in themes from The Eagles and five stages of grief popularized by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, and you've got an essay that's definitely not Wasted Time. Excerpt:

You know I’ve always been a dreamer (spent my life running ‘round), and it’s so hard to change—can’t seem to settle down. But the dreams I’ve seen lately keep turning out the same, perhaps because even Barack Obama’s optimism depends entirely on George W. Bush.

Think about “Change you can believe in.” If that slogan works at all, it works only through implied contrast with the kind of change you can’t believe in even after it happens. The once and future progressive conceit about being part of a “reality-based community” is officially on vacation (or standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona), because the election year directive is to embrace only what you choose to believe, while ignoring the rest of the real as much as possible. Without the magnifying glass of George W. Bush to focus his sunshine, Obama would simply revert to form as a glib politician of thin experience and questionable judgment. Accordingly, his campaign is little more than a valentine to denial, which of course is stage one in how people grieve.

Patrick's no New Kid in Town, so you can Try and Love Try Again to get your thoughts so nicely organized and well written, but in The Long Run, I Can't Tell You Why, but the Paragraph Farmer's writing gives you that Peaceful Easy Feeling, so you can just Take It Easy and enjoy some fine writing.

Will MSM Cover Saddam-al-Qaida Links?

Libs love to laugh at W for claiming there were ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, relying on the old canard that Sunni and Shi'ia don't mix. I wonder if their laughter will wane upon reading this:

This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.

The Weekly Standard news item is based on a report gleaned from 600,000 documents from the Saddam era, including letters, memos, computer files, audiotapes, and videotapes. From the report's abstract:

Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance
of and, in some way, a 'de facto' link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam's use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime.

Weekly Standard gives us this summary of some key report findings:

In 1993, as Osama bin Laden's fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there.

For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.

According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to "armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests."

In the 1990s, Iraq's military intelligence directorate trained and equipped "Sudanese fighters."

In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.

That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.

So Saddam's interplay with terrorists not only included al-Qaeda, but went far beyond it, posing multiple threats to America on multiple fronts.

Will America read about this in their daily paper or see it on their nightly news? With the Weekly Standard just posting the story, it's too early to tell -- but somehow I feel that in the end, this will be passed of as just a story a neocon rag ran, discounting the report behind it in order to keep the mythology of the "war that started with a lie" intact.

Quote Of The Day: Third-Worst Edition

"A friend of ours said if the same laws were applied to U.S. Presidents as were applied to the Nazis after WWII, that every single one of them, every last rich white one of them, from Truman on would be hung to death and shot. And this current administration is no exception. They should be hung and tried and shot as war criminals."
-- Zack de la Rocha, Rage Against The Machine

The quote from Zack of the Cockroach is rated the third most obnoxious of 2008 by John Hawkins of Right Wing News, in his post on the year's 40 most obnoxious quotes.

They begin with #40, from Larry Craig:

"(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom."

... and end with ... well, you'll have to see.

BTW, I was going to start with the second most obnoxious quote, but even with all the hyphens, it's just too obscene from concept to delivery to post.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Hollywood's KoolAid Fest Continues: Wimps For Lambs

UPDATED
I just went to the Lions for Lambs Web site to find out how bad it really was but it was so bad I couldn't even get into it without posting first.

The home page presents a bunch of phrases that fly at you before fading away like NanPo's leadership -- world peace, alternate energy, healthcare, no more wars. (I'm not sure how "no more wars" is different from "world peace," but perhaps I'm not nuanced enough.)

The phrases stopped flying and a little window opened, saying "What do you stand for? Type your answer here."

So I did: Free market capitalism and defeating jihadists.

Happily I clicked "enter," only to be confronted by the ugliness of liberal censorship (a.k.a. "tolerance"):

THANK YOU for your submission!
Check back to see if it is approved.
Approved submissions may be posted on the site.

"THANK YOU for our submission?" They must have something dreadfully wrong. I'm not submitting to this crap, not ever!

Just in case you're still curious, I offer you this review, from the Daily Kostic:

It has taken some time, but Hollywood is finally taking the gloves off and punching hard at the administration with unveiled force. Buoyed by artists, actors and producers passionately committed to promoting a serious political message of desperate straits and a need for public activism, this newfound courage has resulted in at least one film that deserves highest praise both for artistry of cinema, depth of emotion, and complexity of message.

Oh Mia Madre! I can't wait ... until it, too, bombs at the boxoffice. And here I thought the Hollywood elite were against bombing.

The Token Dem from our office is excited about this movie, however, as I learned the other day while we were waiting for a plane in San Francisco when Robert Redford came onto Larry King Live.

“That’s going to be a good movie,” he said.

“I’m not going to see it,” was my immediate and utterly unthought reply.

When did this happen? When did Hollywood become so divisive that such see/don't see decisions are made at such a visceral level?

Token Dem pointed out that the shoe used to be on the other foot, with a conservative Hollywood blacklisting Leftists and churning out movies that supported the American status quo. The Left, I assume, reacted just as viscerally to certain stars and certain movie genres, staying away in droves. Mini-droves, perhaps, but droves nonetheless.

But now, put Alec Baldwin, Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, George Clooney or Sean Penn in a movie and half of America will instantly decide not to see it. Perhaps we conservatives are too extreme; perhaps Hollywood is too extreme – which is it?

Neither, entirely, because you can't answer this question in Hollywood. To answer it, you have to go to Boston. I believe the divisiveness stems back to the alliance of Hollywood and the Dems we saw during the 2004 Democratic campaign, and specifically on the reception Michael Moore received at the Democratic convention.

Acceptance of Moore equated with acceptance of Bush complicity in 9/11 and an America too dreadful for most of us to imagine. Yet there he was, given the blue ribbon treatment, seated in the best seats – next to an ex-president, for crying out loud – and gushed over by the Dem political, policy and fundraising elite.

Already, most conservatives had stayed away from Fahrenheit 911, unwilling to fatten Moore’s portly bank accounts; then the convention served to tie that emotion to the Democratic platform. In the campaign that followed, we saw liberal Hollywood at its worst, reaching its nadir when Cameron Diaz, snot and tears aplenty, blubbered to a national television audience that the re-election of Bush would lead to a big, legalized gang bang.

With the war, the Left in Hollywood built on Moore’s paranoid, nasty vision of America and began churning out movies like Jarhead, Rendition and In the Valley of Elah that were to feature films what Fahrenheit was to documentaries: agenda-heavy, intolerant and wholly unenjoyable for a significant percentage of Americans.

How unenjoyable? Here's Joshua Goldberg in USA Today:

So far, these movies are tanking. Rendition opened on 2,250 screens, with three Oscar winners in the cast, and it was beaten its opening weekend by a re-release of the 14-year-old A Nightmare Before Christmas. Elah was a bigger bomb than those used in the "shock and awe" campaign. The Kingdom earned less than $50 million, and surely only did that well because it was marketed as an action movie rather than an anti-war one.

Hollywood is drinking its own KoolAid. Even though none of these movies fared well, they satisfied a hungry need shared by the producers, directors, writers and actors to be part of the anti-Bush, anti-war movement, in a blind faith that they would finally be the anointed one who would open the eyes of an America to stupid to see the light.

Now we’ve come to the point when a pointless piece of fluff like The Game Plan makes more at the boxoffice than the last crop of antiwar movies combined, and Lions for Lambs is greeted not with anticipation, but with speculation that perhaps Tom Cruise has ruined his career by signing on.

I believe all this is attributable in part to a dumbing down that has swept Hollywood. It takes intelligence and finesse to be subtle and nuanced but any buffoon can crank out a heavy-handed diatribe. We have had no Dr. Strangelove for the Iraq war; we have not even had an Apocalypse Now.

Finally, it is also attributable to the lemming mentality of Leftist Hollywood, where no one dares to write or fund or shoot or distribute a patriotic, pro-American, pro-military film, even though there is an untapped market.

In Hollywood, it is better to miss the market the approved way than to achieve success outside Hollywood's prescribed bounds, and that's turned so many of us off we won't give our $8 to their cause, we won't give our time to their messages, and we won't support anything about their effort to dishonor our cause.

New Media And America's Most Influential Conservatives

I quibble with some of the Telegraph's selections of the 20 most influential conservatives in America, but from their viewpoint across the pond, they did a pretty good job.

Quibbles: Are Giuliani (#1) and McCain (#9) really seen by conservatives as conservatives? And where is George Bush? Many of his picks and inner circle are on the list (Petraeus, #2, Cheney, #6, Gates, #7, Roberts, #8, Rice, #12, Bolton, #13, Gillespie, #20), but W is nowhere to be seen.

What's particularly interesting about the list is what it says about the media. The old media is nearly nonexistent on the list; only Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor of WSJ, makes the list, coming in at #14. The Telegraph's list of most influential liberals in America doubles that count, with Michael Moore (#7) and Oprah Winfrey (#9), but I think they're undercounting. At a minimum, Don Hewitt, the producer of 60 Minutes, should be on the list, as should Andrew Rosenthal, who chairs the editorial board at the NYT.

New media grab a full 20 percent of the Telegraph's most influential list, starting with Matt Drudge at #3 and running through Rush, #5, Laura Ingraham, #15, and Glen Beck, #18. On the liberal side, I my top 20 list would include Kos and the Blades/Boyd team at MoveOn.org, but no others. The Telegraph puts Kos at #12 and B/B at #20, but adds Ariana Huffington at #16.

Most interesting pick: Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eighth most influential liberal -- actually a very astute pick. He wouldn't be California's governor if he weren't a liberal. One has to wonder if there's room for the classic old liberal Republican now days, or whether the RINO label has made the position unmarketable.

Biggest burn: Elizabeth Edwards made the most lib list at #19, but her hubby didn't break into the top 20.

Best discussion generator: Rudy as the #1 most influential conservative in America. The biggest drag on his campaign is his liberal positions on social issues -- but that doesn't seem to discount him under the British definition of conservative.

Hat-tip: memeorandum

It's A Wonder She Could Find Her Fork

Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs columnist with the Philadelphia Enquirer, accepted the invitation offered on cream colored stock with flowing calligraphy. Yes, she would sit down at the same table as Mah - I'm in the - moud - for dinner patter Ahmadinejad (rhymes with "They're so easy to dupe, which makes me glad"). Not only that, she apparently commited to not upchucking all over the table ('lit by chandeliers, and set with plates of oriental salads and vases of roses') while trying to consume food in his presence.

Rubin is no Bollinger, her column clearly shows. Her insults are tepid and barely heart-felt:

This is a man of overweening self-confidence who believes his own rhetoric. He badly misunderstands the American system, but is certain that he gets it. He prefaces every meeting with a long religious prologue calling for justice, peace and friendship, yet his words increase tensions.

"Increase tensions?" Like something you can take a Bayer for?

Rubin did not leave the dinner overwhelmed by the fact that she had just spent three hours with a very dangerous and irrational man in mad pursuit of nuclear weapons so he can carry out his recurring threats against Israel. No, instead:

The overwhelming sense I had from the dinner was of opportunities being squandered to improve U.S.-Iranian relations.

Rubin hasn't grasped the fact that U.S.-Iranian relations can't improve as long as the East Coast liberal media elite can sit down and extend civility to a man who is doing all he can to kill our troops in Iraq. But her entire column, which purportedly covered the entire dinner conversation, came and went with but one scant reference to Iraq -- and that was more of her "overwhelming sense," not her "overwhelming disgust:"

One was left with the impression that there is slim chance on Iran's side for actions to reduce tensions, including cooperation on Afghanistan or Iraq.

Again, the tepidness. She is merely left with an impression; how Leftist. Never wanting to appear to not be inclusive, never wanting to judge the morality of others, she is merely left with an impression, as if a flaming hot brand of anti-Semitic, anti-American hatred was pushed up against her skin, and left only a faint impression. What would it take to actually make her feel something strongly?

Oh, I know the answer. Looking at a photo of Bush. The cover of her anti-Bush tome makes that clear.

Finally, she concludes:

Frustrating he is, because his rhetoric inflames tensions and gives ammo to politicians who want military action. But Hitler he is not.

I wish you could have heard the tired, repulsed sigh that just came out of me as I pasted that into my post. He's frustrating because his rhetoric inflames tensions? Not because he kills our soldiers, strips freedoms from his people, quashes opposition, executes homosexuals and wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth?

He's frustrating because his rhetoric makes military action more likely? Not his actions? This woman lives on a parallel planet where reality is what is talked about so insightfully among the intellectuals, not our planet where blood gets spilled, dissidents get tortured, and fanatics try to push entire nations either off the planet if they're Jewish or back a few centuries if they're Islamic.

The only reason she excuses Ahmadinejad from being Hitler is because, she says, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the real power, not the imp in the bad suit. So, then, would Heinrich Himmler be perfectly acceptable as "not a Hitler" to Rubin?

After all this, we are left with the most interest element of all regarding My Dinner With Mahmoud: Someone put together and carefully vetted this invitation list. Someone worked diligently to make sure that no one would be invited who would leap across the table and wring the little @#$%!'s neck.

That someone, I'll bet you a dollar to a donut, is an American working for a lobbying firm in Washington DC who is perfectly content to aid and abet the enemy -- not just the enemy of America, but the enemy of freedom, free speech, political discussions and religious rights.

I think I'd actually be more inclined to wring that @#$%!'s neck than Ahmadinejad's.

Hat-tip: RCP

I Wish I'd Said That

I wrote about UC Davis' decision to un-invite former Harvard prez Larry Summers from a campus speaking engagement. I've written about Columbia's decision to invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak there (here, for example).

But I didn't draw the two together and contrast them as they so juicily need contrasting -- but Victor Davis Hanson did in RCP, where he also wrote this:

Along with a general lack of common sense -- and decency -- the powers that be at Columbia, for all their erudition, don't seem to understand the line between responsible debate and crass propaganda.

Hanson faced collegiate intolerance at Stanford, where his employer, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, invited Donald Rumsfeld to serve on a task force -- only to be met with a petition signed by 2,000 theoretically liberal profs and students. The Institution persevered, and Rummie's in.

I went to college at a pretty radical time -- the late 60s and early 70s -- and I'm trying to think what would have happened if a controversial speaker had been invited to our campus. Sorry to say, I think the students I hung out with would have welcomed Ho Chi Minh, but would have protested an invitation to Dean Rusk or Gen. Westmoreland. However, I can't imagine the administrators of the day inviting Ho or dis-inviting Rusk or Westmoreland.

The ones among my collegiate peers who never grew up, never tasted the real world, and opted instead to stay in academia, are the faculty and administrators of today, and they haven't gotten any more tolerant with time.

Now they're inviting the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on their campuses, are fighting to stop the firing of the likes of Ward Churchill, and are protesting whenever someone like Donald Rumsfeld threatens to walk past their ivory towers.

It's times like these that remind us of the foul stench the 60s left behind, a stench that will take some generations to eradicate.

Give Peace A Chance

The other day, I saw a car with one of those "Coexist" bumper stickers on it -- the one adorned with various religious symbols, as if the only thing lacking from successfully coexisting is someone actually having the idea that we ought to give it a try -- and I thought, "Why not?"

Why not give peace a chance?

We'd have to start, of course, with Guantanamo and Palestine, the two places upon which most of the blame is heaped for not having peace (not that we're blaming the terrorists and Palestinians, mind you; heaven forbid).

We are told that "no word is more poisonous to the reputation of the United States than Guantanamo," so let's be done with it, licketysplit. Here's how:

Our UN Ambassador will stand up Monday in the Security Council and tell the assembled thugs, dictators, kleptomaniacs and genocidal oligarchs that we're closing the terrorist prison in Guantanamo next Monday, so they'd better get off their fat butts and come up with an internationally sanctioned alternative to holding these bloodthirsty #$%&!s in a place that's actually safe.

If they don't, Mr. Ambassador will continue, we'll put the #$%$!s in chains inside a diplomatic pouch, and fly them to their home countries, where we'll have a cadre of Marines deposit them on the steps of those countries' halls of justice.

That's giving peace a chance!

Now, to Palestine, where, we're told, "To empower Muslim moderates, we must take away the extremists' most potent grievance: the charge that the United States does not care about the Palestinians." Never mind that the federal budget includes $150 million for Palestine; we clearly are at least a billion short in the caring department.

So here's my plan. Condi Rice will announce that we've got $1 billion to give to Palestine to use on schools, hospitals, orphanages, elderly care, infrastructure improvements and other peaceful uses. We'll give it to them with one caveat and one carrot.

The caveat is we don't trust them all that much, so we will need full access and oversight to make sure not one dollar of the billion goes to unpeaceful cases like antisemitic education or weaponry. Take it or leave it.

The carrot: If they handle the money responsibly and respond peacefully, we have another billion.

Of course that's only half the story; it is, after all, the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. So we'll pick a day when the Palestinians are one up on the Israelis -- a rocket has been fired from Gaza or a homicidal paradise-seeker has detonated himself on an Israeli street -- and declare it Day One.

We'll ask the Israelis to not retaliate as a symbol of goodwill and peace. If they don't retaliate and nothing else happens, we will have brought peace. Kumbayah.

If they don't retaliate and the Palestinians pull off yet another self-destructive idiotic obliteration of innocents, we'll give the Israeli's an extra billion dollars, wash our hands and have our UN ambassador stand up the next Monday and say, "We really care about the Palestinians. We've done all we can. Your problem. See ya."

Let them give peace a chance.

Now on to the matter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let's give peace a chance there, too.

The president will go on television next Monday and say,

"It is my feeling and the feeling of my generals that if we leave Iraq and Afghanistan, two things will happen. First, both countries will experience bloodshed of unprecedented proportions as the only stabilizing force in the land is extracted. And second, the hoped for diminishment of Islamist terrorist action against the West will not occur. Rather, the terrorists will be encouraged.

"But others, the Democratic leadership in Washington, the editorial boards of most major newspapers and the academics at our universities, think my generals and I are wrong, and they appear to have convinced a strong majority of the American people that we are wrong.

"So, with a plea for forgiveness from those who lost loved ones on 9/11, and from whose sons, daughters and husbands will have now died in vain in Iraq and Afghanistan, I am putting the war in their hands and following their instructions. Next Monday, we begin the total and complete withdrawal of our troops back to our shores.

"May God have mercy on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, and may he also bless America, although I can't for the life of me understand why he would."

Then we'll see what happens when we give peace a chance. We'll see if we can get to next Monday without some serious second-guessing about the leadership of the Dems, the media and the intelligentsia.

That leaves the matter of the Islamofascists' quest for nuclear, biological and other weapons of mass destruction. Surely, after all these efforts by us to give peace a chance, they will give that up and let the infidels live in peace, won't they?

There will be no need now to maintain surveillance and diligence, no need for the Patriot Act or the NSA. There simply will be no one left who hates us. Surely, since we've given peace a chance, we won't have to worry about some day seeing a mushroom cloud raise into our spacious skies, over our amber waves of grain.


Yes, let's give peace a chance, shall we?

NYT Pretends It Doesn't Get CHIP Expansion

The Children's Health Insurance Program should have been contained by President Bush the first time he had a chance, but he tried magnanimity. Congress responded without so much as a thank you, and pushed the program far out into left field.

CHIP was questionable even as a restricted program, limited to providing government health insurance to children who lived in poverty. But the program gave states financial incentives to enroll more children, and instead of doing the hard work of finding children in poverty, the states did the brainless and effortless work of just expanding the income levels accepted into the program.

Now New York accepts families with incomes of 250 percent of poverty and the legislature wants to push it up to 400 percent ($82,600 a year). California is pushing to jump its income limit from 250 percent to 300. You get the point: The trend lines are pointing to the creation of a massive new federal entitlement.

And is entitlement ever the word. In a highly prejudiced piece against Bush's new policy of dialing the program back, the NYTimes sniffs:

Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey, said: “We are horrified at the new federal policy. It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.”

Already, it doesn't occur to the big brains at the NYT or to Kohler, whose state accepts children from families with incomes of 350 percent of the poverty level into CHIP, that restricting family income levels does not restrict access to health insurance; it simply forces well-to-do families to stop sucking on the teat of a federal program that was never passed by Congress in its current state.

To end the expansion of the program, Bush announced new restrictions yesterday, taking advantage of the Congressional holiday. Here's the draconian new policy that had Kohler and her fellow socialized medicine advocates in a huff:

In the letter sent to state health officials about 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Dennis G. Smith, the director of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations, set a high standard for states that want to raise eligibility for the child health program above 250 percent of the poverty level.

Before making such a change, Mr. Smith said, states must demonstrate that they have “enrolled at least 95 percent of children in the state below 200 percent of the federal poverty level” who are eligible for either Medicaid or the child health program.

A modest proposal at best, this Bush strategy is simply trying to stop the runaway greed of states that are more interested in federal incentives than covering the poor. But what gets the Left's goat is that the proposal would put the brakes on a program that has become a congressional end-run around a wary public towards a national health insurance program.

Congress passed a shell of a program so they can retort "we did no such thing" when accused of creating a national health insurance program, but they knew full well what the states would do with the incentives they built into CHIP. They're redefining "children" to higher ages and redefining "poverty" to higher incomes.

Faced with a modest Bush slow-down proposal, the NYT comes out swinging, calling the program "popular" in its lead, the use of a word that is anything but objective. The program may be popular around the editorial board room of the NYT, but that's hardly universal.

Before it gets around to defining the Bush proposal, NYT tells its readers:

• Bush proposed the changes during a congressional recess
• State official say it will cripple their health care programs
• "As on other issues like immigration, the White House is taking action on its own to advance policies that were not embraced by Congress."
• Four Republican govs (including that RINO, Schwarzenegger) like the program
• The letter notifying states of the change in policy was mailed at 7:30 on Friday

That last point really got NYT's goat, because it meant Saturday, Sunday and Monday went by before it got to write its snarly little story.

But look, containing CHIP is vital. The Congressional budget office has said that the $30 billion budgeted for the program for 2008 through 2012 is not enough -- but that's only because the states have moved eligibility far above the poverty line.

The only thing Bush has done is attempted to apply some fiscal conservatism to a program that's rife with liberal exploitation. That's a good thing, but it takes wading through paragraphs of propaganda to get to that point in the NYT coverage.

And the blogosphere? Look at the links at memeorandum; they're a carnival of the outraged radicals, including BartBlog ("Why does Bush hate kids?"), Firedoglake ("Bush to kids: Forget about more public health care"), Crooks and Liars ("Compassionate conservatism for kids") and Feministe ("Bush A*&holery continues re: SCHIP").

Methinks the prez did something right.

Estrogen Radio's Period Ends

Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and their feminist buddies were going to teach the talk radio world, which they saw as male dominated, a thing or two when they launched their own women's radio network last year, GreenStone.

Green or not, they apparently didn't have the stones to succeed, and have followed Air America into the dustbin of bankrupt liberal radio concepts.

Now "talk radio without the testosterone" is gone, despite its grand effort to appeal to a big bunch of modern American women. Says NYPost:

Why did this effort fail? After all, the programming carefully was designed by feminist experts to appeal to female tastes. According to Steinem, "women are more and more turned off by the hostility and argumentative nature of AM talk radio." Greenstone Media was supposed to capitalize on that by offering a different tenor, more "community" and greater respect for different points of views.

GreenStone offered the typical liberal fare - boasting of interviews with Ralph Nader and Alec Baldwin - but also included programming that was downright girly. Morning show segments included "Mean Mommy," with advice for mothers, and "What's up with Guys," providing insights into the elusive male brain.

Sounds like any number of successful programming concepts -- Oprah and Oxygen come to mind -- but ...

GreenStone's problem was it couldn't attract an audience of either gender. The programming was picked up by only eight affiliates in small to mid-sized markets. Apparently, GreenStone's programming wasn't the talk that women really want.

Not that it can't be done, mind you. Laura Ingraham pulls in 5 million listeners a day. But then she's not a tepid lib. No rants, no whines, no platitudes, just good solid thinking, clearly articulated -- a concept that apparently goes beyond the talents of Fonda and Steinem.

hat-tip: Jim

The Racists, Classists At Mother Jones

Meet Bill Duane, who epitomizes what happens when your belief systems hinge on relativity. He is also the quintessential NIMBY, a guy I run into in some permutation or another, with every development project I work to get approved.

Duane is a Marin County liberal (how redundant is that?) who lives in a $1 million bungalow and has given his time to liberal causes, including Habitat Humanity ... that is, until the poor dared to come into his neighborhood, that is.

What's particularly delightful about the portrait of Duane I read today is where I found it: Not in a conservative magazine or a building industry magazine, neither one of which would have bugged Duane, but in Mother Jones.

What a horror! A bitter, unflattering profile in one of the most prominent liberal journalis in America. How bitter?

Bill Duane knows most people can't afford homes like his $1 million bungalow on a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. That's why the Marin County attorney volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Until recently, that is, when the group announced plans to build two affordable duplexes just down the street from him. "Habitat usually goes into a blighted neighborhood and enhances it," Duane says. "Here, they are coming into an enhanced neighborhood and blighting it." ...

Duane and I climbed into his Mercedes station wagon and drove to the project site, a hillside of chaparral and grass. He'd promised me it would be obvious that congestion was already bad. A lone Toyota Prius with a "Save Tibet" sticker silently cruised by. "Usually this whole area is packed with cars," he insisted. And if I researched the matter, he hinted, I might learn that the endangered Tiburon mariposa lily grows here (naturalists doubt it), and that an Indian burial spear discovered nearby might have belonged to the county's namesake, Chief Marin (a Marin anthropologist says Duane is "reporting things that are not there"). Duane next raised an environmental justice concern: Placing the affordable housing in the shadow of million-dollar homes fosters "a slave kind of mentality."

Let's put this another way: Duane the liberal is covering racism and classism with phony liberal covers -- the environment, Native American culture, and made-up concern for the mental state of the poor. None of it is true, but that doesn't matter to someone with ungrounded morality -- it makes him comfortable with a position that should be inherently counter to his core beliefs.

I see this all the time. Young activists who have never given a thought to having to ride an ambulance to a hospital are suddenly concerned that a new development will cause longer emergency response times. Moms fight projects because new students will cause school overcrowding, even though their kids go to private school.

What's most interesting about this article isn't the article itself, but how conservative some of the comments are, and how straightforwardly racist and classist the liberal Mother Jones readers are in the comments to the article. Sure, there are plenty of commenters who vilify Duane with typically nasty liberal-rant, but comments like these were a surprise:

• When did it become "required" that people get to live wherever they want without making the sacrafices or progress necessary to get there?
  
  
• The truth is that middle/upper-middle class people don't want the poor, minorities, immigrants, or uneducated (read that "white trash") living near them because of the damage these groups cause. Let's be honest, these groups move into a neighborhood and, inevitably, they destroy the property and drive up crime (vandalism, drug dealing, gangs, etc.). They have no respect for themselves, much less anyone/anything else.
  
  
• I have worked hard all my life to live AWAY from people who require low-cost housing.
  
  
• Delayed gratification has been replaced by the "I want; therefore, I am entitled to have - NOW!" mentality. Why, as I am paying for my home, should I also have to subsidize the "below market" home of my neighbor?
  
  
• Anyone who disagrees must have a racist, bigoted cause and, because they do not agree, are obviously stupid. ... Expecting people to actually work, save and sacrifice for what they want does, in your estimation I guess, make me a racist, bigoted, elitist bonehead.
  
  
• I simply don't give a inch to project housing. I live next to it. It's all trash and they're still trash. Say the word "project housing", I'll roll over the floor, point at you, and laugh! It never works and it'll doom to failure and more failure. It's not about bigotry, try living next to it and you tell me what you think. Try living in a mobile home park and tell me what's it like. Been there done that, all trash!

How can readers of Mother Earth, a magazine that rages against the machine and glorifies the causes of the Left, be comfortable espousing thoughts like these?

It's simple. Liberalism is the ultimately flexible belief system. Just march in the next anti-war rally, vote for the pro-gay marriage candidate and be in the opening night crowd for the next Michael Moore movie, and be reconciled.

More Evidence Dems Root For Failure

Those compassionate Lefties at Democratic Underground are beside themselves with glee:

The largest single home foreclosure auction in Las Vegas history will take place this weekend on Sunday, Aug. 5 at the J.W. Marriott in Summerlin. It starts at 1 p.m.

Drive through any neighborhood in the Las Vegas Valley and you are bound to see evidence of a housing market in a free fall.

"I would say this is a new home someone bought, whether they could not afford it or they decided not to move, whatever the case may be -- obviously unlived in as you can tell. Everything is brand new," said Joe Iuliucci, a Prudential real estate agent.

Eighty homes located near the Northern 215 Beltway and Jones will be auctioned. Last year's auction had only twelve homes.

An upside-down American flag accompanies the brief. Is DU normally a real estate blog? No. Then why the interest?

Because they're anti-greed (other people's greed, that is) and anti-Bush. The presumption is people were too bought-into the materialistic society and spent beyond their means in order to keep up with the Joneses. It's OK to keep up with the Mother Joneses, but not the Joneses. And their hope is that a real estate market in "freefall" (it's not) will be bad for Bush and good for Dems.

And where are the people -- you know, The People -- in all this? Well, let's take a look at some of those conspicuously consumed homes that are on the auction block:
These do not appear to be the homes of greedy people. The Left used to worry about the working man. Shoot, they used to be the working man. Now that they're spoiled brats, college professors and guilty rich folks, they see a home auction and they immediately think people like them ... but not as smart as them ... are going under, and it's Bush's fault and consumerism's fault and America's fault.

But it's just people who are down on their luck, or who bought the hustle on a bad morgage. The Left should be compassionate, concerned, even outraged ... but they're just ugly.

Rosie: Lessons From The Master

What a pussy. For all her dyke bravado, all it took was one person to stand up to her and call her a coward and Rosie was gone, like that. Kaput.

Can you imagine a conservative storming off the set because a liberal yelled at her? When don't liberals yell at conservatives on the set?

Can you imagine a conservative talk host's main writer drawing mustaches on pictures of her boss' adversary? Can you imagine a conservative talk show host having a writer?

So Rosie was determined to teach us all about liberalism (not that I watched The View to learn from her). Give her an A+. She's done an outstanding job.

Drive A Phoneymobile!

Want a definition of the apex of well-healed liberalism? How about Al Gore at the Marin Civic Center? That should do the trick.

And how did all these fine Warmie hysterics get to the event, where Gore was hawking his new book, The Something or Another That's All Wrong About This Or That. Here's how:

Yep. SUVs, minivans and assorted high-end sedans.

Talk about an assault on reason!

For more fun, including photos of truly dangerous "Gore/Obama 2008" people and a photo that makes Gore look like Dracula (a scroll-down treat), see the photo-carnage at Zombietime.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Test Shows Conservatives More Complex Than Liberals

I'm not sure that this is what Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, set out to do, but his research into the basis of our morality has shown what is obvious to most of us: Liberals run on a pretty simple clock, whereas the clockwork of conservatives is far more advanced and complex.

Did he really say that? You bet:

Haidt argues that human morality is a cultural construction built on top of - and constrained by - a small set of evolved psychological systems. He presents evidence that political liberals rely primarily on two of these systems, involving emotional sensitivities to harm and fairness. Conservatives, however, construct their moral understandings on those two systems plus three others, which involve emotional sensitivities to in-group boundaries, authority and spiritual purity. (emphasis added; source: Brightsurf)

Got that? Liberals are worried that the guppy doesn't get hurt and that everyone sings Kumbaya with perfectly balanced voice quality. Conservatives are all for not harming and being fair, but create a much more complex structure for their moral measurements.

Adding in-group boundaries basically means we conservatives are conformists and are more likely to find immorality in the wanton destruction of social mores than liberals, who tend to see such destruction as a moral attribute. Rage against the machine, fight the man. Authority means, of course, respect for authority. Liberals get no moral readings from that attribute, but it's big to conservatives.

Haidt's last point is interesting: the spiritual roots of moral decisions. I think he's wrong here because his survey focuses on religion, not on beliefs. Dennis Prager correctly states that there is more dogma in the Liberal faith system (environmentalism, human rights, tolerance) than in any established religion. If Haidt had designed his survey instrument differently, I believe "core belief systems" would have scored as high with the liberals as with the conservatives, if not higher.

Haidt kindly makes it possible to take his survey. It takes about 10 minutes to complete and it's an interesting process. I'm a smidge right of right-of-center and here's how I fared:

(Click chart for larger image)

Sure enough, my scores are heavily weighted to the three moral compass points on the right, the ones liberals tend not to factor in on their moral judgments: Loyalty, authority and purity.

Here by comparison, is the average of all of Haidt's responses:

The chart does not mean there are more liberals than conservatives. It means the two liberal moral compass points are shared by conservatives, so they score quite high, whereas the conservatives overwhelmingly make up the loyalty, authority and purity team.

You can fact-check that statement by noting that purity -- something that means next to nothing to most liberals -- is the lowest-scoring "evolved psychological system" of the five.

Harm and fairness are very simple psychological systems. If there's a bruise, it's harm and it's immoral. But a conservative wants to know whether the bruised party was with the authorities or not with them before making a judgment.

Similarly, fairness means fairness for all, which is why liberals have such a problem with Guantanamo, demanding equal judicial rights for terrorist combatants captured on the battle field. Conservatives will question whether those terrorists crossed the moral boundaries of our society, whether they're a threat to the nation (authority), and whether their motives were morally pure.

For us, the call is a no-brainer: Of course they deserve Guantanamo, or worse. And it's just as easy a call for the libs: No way do they deserve Guantanamo.

Haidt concludes,

The recent scientific advances in moral psychology can help explain why these conflicts are so passionate and so intractable. An understanding of moral psychology can also point to some new ways to bridge these divides, to appeal to hearts and minds on both sides of a conflict.

I'm with him on the first part, but don't think knowledge of moral psychology will help one bit to create better understanding because we can understand where the libs are coming from as we share two of their values, but they can't understand us because they don't share three of ours.

Murdoch's Bid Will Fire Up Dean & Kucinich

"I believe we need to re-regulate the media," Howard Dean blurted recently. He's probably really thinking it this morning when he unfolded his liberally biased Washingon Post to read of Rupert Murdoch's $5 billion bid to acquire Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Barrons and a number of other financial pubs.

I prefer to quote from the DJ publication, the WSJ:

Rupert Murdoch's surprise $5 billion bid for Dow Jones & Co. could put into play one of the nation's last family-controlled newspaper companies, raising the possibility of other bidders, from media companies to financial buyers to Internet giants.

News Corp.'s bid of $60 a share in cash, or a combination of cash and stock, is pitched at a price roughly 67% above the recent market value of Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal and a number of financial-information businesses. The offer puts a large premium on the publisher at a time when most newspaper companies are losing readers and advertisers to the Internet.

It's easy to see why Murdoch would want Dow Jones. He's launching a Fox Business channel to compete against MSNBC and Bloomberg and owning the DJ's many business publishing properties would give him the instantly superior content. He likes business and DJ's all business. And he likes the WSJ editorial line.

A marriage made in heaven ... unless you're a Dem.

Already stressing about the ability of Fox and conservative talk radio to reach intelligent high-propensity voters at a scale far greater than their drop in the media bucket size, Dean, Kucinich and company will get the heebie jeebies all over when they think of Murdoch adding the nation's premier business powerhouse, with the best conservative editorial page going, to his collection.

Murdoch's' timing couldn't be worse. The Dems have already submitted bills to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, which so graciously dumped by Ronald Reagan, and now all they'll have to do is shout "Fox News!" as a punctuation to their rants about Rush and the rest, and the Left will rally to a new cause. So what if the cause represses the free speech and freedom they supposedly hold dear?

The Bancroft family, which own most of the DJ shares and can turn out over 50% of the vote with it's super-voting super-shares, is reportedly not interested in selling -- so Murdoch is likely to create a Fairness Doctrine tempest and leave the table with an empty teapot.

Does anyone remember life under the Fairness Doctrine any more? Just think, "Jane, you ignorant slut." The Ackroyd/Curtain SNL skit was based on TV editorializing at the time, when the station owner's guy would opine the "legit" opinion and some counter-thinking hack would come back with 20 or 30 seconds on the other side.

It was appalling and useless.

That wasn't even fine for the time, when there were no options to the three networks, PBS and a few local market independents. Now there are options aplenty and opinions overflowing, so the public has no need for Congress to mandate how they'll get their opposing view.

Besides, when was the last time you heard a network news station give an editorial opinion in editorial opinion dressing? They don't do it anymore; rather it permiates their broadcasts with shades of bias and slant. Liberal Congress will look at them and say there's no editorializing going on, so no counter-position is necessary.

But they'll look at Fox and holler foul, and they'll look at conservative talk radio and want to kill it with a thousand Allan Colmes'.

Murdoch's bid -- while interesting, especially in light of the relative lack of interest in the Chicago Trib and LAT -- couldn't have worse timing. Let's hope the Bancrofts quickly kill it, removing fodder from the liberal unfairness machine.

Darfur: The Near-Perfect Leftist Cause

At the bottom of Mark Steyn's column today was this announcement he found somewhere in his Internet trolling:

"On Sunday, April 29, Salt Lake Saves Darfur invites the greater Salt Lake community of compassion to join with us as we honor the fallen and suffering Darfuris in a day of films, discussion and dance with a Sudanese dance troupe."

Here's a bit more, from a Deseret News op/ed by a SLSD (Save LSD? No, Salt Lake Saves Darfur.):

Salt Lake Saves Darfur, the local organization of the international Save Darfur Coalition, in observance of the Global Days for Darfur, April 21-29, is sponsoring a series of events to bring the plight of these suffering people to the vision and the hearts of the great people of Salt Lake and Utah. On Saturday, we will be sponsoring, in partnership with the Westminster College chapter of STAND, a lecture by noted Africa and Sudan expert John Prendergast titled "Stopping the Genocide in Darfur." This lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 7 p.m. in the Gore Auditorium on Westminster College's beautiful campus in Salt Lake, and will also be broadcast for those unable to attend.

On Sunday, April 29, Salt Lake Saves Darfur invites the greater Salt Lake community of compassion to join with us as we honor the fallen and suffering Darfuris in a day of films, discussion and dance with a Sudanese dance troupe, Kakwa Union USA, at Salt Lake's magnificent Main Library and Plaza, from 1-5 p.m. This event is also free and open to all. We will discuss ways to get our government to insist on the immediate placement of adequate United Nations peacekeepers to "stop the killing now," get our government to pay its fair share of the costs for this international peacekeeping effort and insist that our government and institutions divest themselves of any entity deriving profit from the inhumane Al-Bashir regime and the slaughter of the innocent people of Darfur.

I'm sure these people are well-intentioned, but their leftist approach is a tragicomedy. Darfur's tragedy; our comedy. They 're going to teach and appreciate and talk and talk and talk. Yet for all of this, they are utterly without a clue. They're only true action is buried in another of their endless discusions:

We will discuss ways to get our government to insist on the immediate placement of adequate United Nations peacekeepers to "stop the killing now," [and] get our government to pay its fair share of the costs for this international peacekeeping effort ...

Do these people not read the news? Everyone wants U.N. peacekeepers in Dafur, including "our government" ... except for one bunch: the Islamists in Khartoum, who block every effort to stop the killing. The Save Dafur group should be saying to stop relying on the U.N., which already has added Dafur to Rwanda on its list of African genocides it did not stop, but they love the idea of the U.N. so much they can't reject the reality.

And I can't for the life of me understand why the Save Dafur crowd wants us to reduce the amount of our contribution to the U.N. efforts, but there it is: "... get our government to pay its fair share of the costs ..."

Over at SaveDafur.org, the looniest mothership since the Heaven's Gate cult suited up for the coming of the Comet Hale-Bopp. Here's their call to action:

Push for the deployment of a strong UN peacekeeping force.

Increase humanitarian aid and ensure access for aid delivery.

Establish a no-fly zone.

With the exception of the no-fly zone, which will do nothing to stop the killers who arrive by Toyota pickup and camel, they have absolutely nothing new to offer, and no way of offering it, other than the U.N. Humanitarian aid is good, great actually, but its effect will be temporary if people continue dying. It won't make much difference if their stomachs are full or empty when the Janjaweed arrive.

All this points to one conclusion: The Save Dafur crowd should be pushing for military action by the U.S. in Dafur. They know it's the only think that will save the Christians -- funny, they never mention this is a Muslim-run genocide of Christians -- is an invasion to take out Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir and his thugs in Khartoum, as we took out Saddam Hussein and his thugs in Baghdad.

But they can't bring themselves to call for such an action because recognizing the need for Iraq, and thus aligning with Bush, is more evil to them than the genocide in Sudan.

While Dafur is a universal cause, the SaveDafur.org approach has become a near-perfect leftist cause, right up there with global warming. There's no risk to them that they'll actually have to do anything beyond the symbolic. There will be no draft to stop either crisis, and most important, it appears that there will be no solution to either any time soon.

That means they can go on watching Sudanese dance troops, discussing options, and most important of all, feeling holier than the GOP, for the indefinite future.

Steyn said what this all reminds him of, and he's absolutely right on. I remember seeing the bumper sticker 40 years ago, and the noble struggle (no sacrifice required) goes on today:


It's a shame Tibet is under China's' thumb, and it's an abomination that al-Bashir remains free to kill Christians in Dafur. But neither country is the least bit strategic so they suffer on, far outside the spotlight, while the world, conservative and liberal alike, are appalled ... and unable to muster the will to take the fight to Khartoum.

p.s.: One thing I like very much on the Save Dafur Web site is its call for divesture of investments in companies that do business in Sudan. I hope they will reciprocate, and share my enthusiasm for Divest Terror, which does the same for all terror-supporting states.

Pushing Emotional Buttons For Peace

Driving back from a client meeting a few minutes ago, listening to the horrible news out of Virginia Tech, I passed a grey minivan with a particularly awful bumper sticker disgracing its rear bumper. Here it is:

The driver was a 30-something woman who looked "Orange County liberal." In other words, her hair wasn't dyed blonde and cut stylishly, her clothes weren't bright and well tailored, and her makeup was minimal. Not exactly one of the Real Housewives (who all vote GOP).

What is it with the Left and sloganeering? We on the Right are so inept at it that a while back Bookworm ran a contest to see if we actually could sloganeer with the best of the Lefty jingle-writers. (I, ahem, happen to have known the winner for quite some time. I'd link you, but that was back in her Blogger days and the link to her old site's not working.)

Of course you know the answer to why the Left out-slogans us; it's always the answer for differences between the left and the Right: emotions versus analysis.

Lefties love a slogan like "War is Terrorism" because it is so emotion-laden. They don't just dislike war, as Conservatives do, they hate it with a passion. That passion makes them incapable of seeing any good in war ... much as my Incredible Wife from time to time is incapable of seeing any good in me. Fortuantely, she's a Conservative, and her moments of emotion pass so we'll be happily marking our 25th anniversary later this year.

This particular slogan is particularly attractive to the Left because it defiles our commendable rejection of terrorism by making it morally equivalent to war. Doing that must wash our little minivan driver's synapses with great gobs of seratonin, since it earns a double emotional whammy: It makes her feel good and it makes we analytical souls feel bad.

She has made America and its leaders no more moral than al Qaeda and its leaders. Quite a feat for three words to pull off.

"War is Terrorism" also serves her purposes well because it places blame for 9/11 on us, not the terrorists. If war (the first Gulf war, in this case) is unjustifiable, then striking back at the warrior is not unjustifiable. As such, the bumper sticker is a bit stealthy, letting her say the unsayable, but not directly. Should she be confronted on the point, she has the choice of reacting emotionally, or like France.

It doesn't matter whether Saddam had it coming for invading Kuwait and supporting terrorism. After all, he didn't start a war. He merely invaded a country. We did the truly bad thing, starting a war, because we challenged him, so we are the bad guys and it is our actions, not Saddam's, that cannot be justified.

That's quite a lot of emotional power packed into three words. And being Conservatives, our reaction is to bury this bumper sticker's emotions in a carefully analyzed and researched blitz of words.

We see that the differences between the two, war and terrorism, are profound and center on innocents. Terrorism deliberately targets them, the more the better; war concentrates on those that can harm your side, which necessarily means not targeting innocents and focusing instead on military, infrastructure and leadership targets.

One could argue that Hitler's war was in fact an act of terrorism, but technically, the argument fails because words have definitions. Morally, however, Hitler's actions are at least equivalent to terrorism; terrorism raised to a very high level.

Defensive war is entirely another story. In a traditional defensive war, the goal is to destroy the invading troops who, because they are invading, by definition are not innocents. If part of doing that means launching attacks against the attacker's homeland, that could be terrorism if the attacks deliberately targeted innocents. But again, most nations realize that such attacks are neither defensible or strategic; it is better on both counts to attack the nation's head, not its citizens.

Dresden? Hiroshima? Yeah, every argument is complicated. Hiroshima is easy to explain: It was basically a military factory town, and something had to be done to stop the suicidally intense Japanese. Dresden to some extent is explainable by the inexact technology of the day, and our morality is proved by the care and expense we take to fight clean wars today. It was also, like Hiroshima, meant to be a back-breaker, a will-killer that would shorten the war. Did it work? Perhaps. Would we do it again? Never.

As I drove by our liberal emoticon, I noticed that the door of her minivan was bashed in. Could it have been the deliberate act of an angry Conservative, suddenly yielding all analytical insticts in an uncontrollable rush of emotions?

Highly unlikely. It was probably just another example of lousy Liberal driving.

"Reasonable" Green Candidate Cheered 9/11

A couple hundred bloggers have already written about the Green candidate for national office in Vancouver who wrote after 9/11 that he wanted to pump his arm in the air and shout "Yeah!" as the tragedy unfolded ... but there's a bit more to this outrageous story that was broken by Katie Rook, writing in Canada's National Post:

A federal Green party candidate in Vancouver-Kingsway is standing behind a controversial editorial he wrote more than four years ago in which he describes the falling of the World Trade Center twin towers as "beautiful."

The editorial, entitled, A Revolting Confession, was first published on Nov. 28, 2002 in an alternative newspaper, The Republic of East Vancouver, which Kevin Potvin [photo] founded.

"When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said, 'Yeah!' When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, 'Beautiful!' When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side, that little voice had nearly taken me over, and I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air," Mr. Potvin wrote in the editorial.

The 44-year-old bookstore owner, who ran for municipal office in Vancouver in 2005, said he at first withheld the editorial, publishing it only after he was approached by others who felt the same way.

Potvin did write in the editorial, "This is a revolting confession." Does that mean he feel's it revolting that he thought that way, or revolting that he confessed it? I'm not sure, but in either case, it wasn't revolting enough to keep him from sharing his thoughts with others.

In the interview, Potvin not only showed callousness towards the tragedy, but also stood as a defiant example of multiculturalism and secular moral relativity run amok:

"Let's face facts. If the news on the morning of September 11 was that 3,000 Tanzanians or Burmese had been killed, they wouldn't have broken in on regularly scheduled programming, or cancelled football games, and there'd be no conversation about it the next day."

It's been five and a half years since Potvin wrote the editorial, plenty of time to rethink his thoughts and offer an apology for them. But instead, he's moved further into the whackosphere:

"I have no idea what happened on that day, but it's certainly not the story that Washington propagates."

This is a man who's running for national office -- albeit, at impossibly long odds, since the previous Green candidate for the seat got 1.8% of the vote -- who, were he to win, would be taking his 9/11 viewpoints to Ottowa and would use his voice to sway Canadian foreign policy.

I poked around a bit and found that Potvin is still writing in his little journal, The Republic of East Vancouver. (Interesting, isn't it, how blind the the hard Left is? The world is littered with mis-named Republics of This and Republics of That which arose during the Leninist/Stalinist era for the sole purpose of exploiting the people, yet they soldier on under the illusion that Socialism is viable.)

In it, he wrote:

My nomination as the Green Party candidate for Vancouver Kingsway went uncontested on March 24, and so the campaign is off and running. Thanks to all who came out to support me, and to those who wanted to but couldn’t attend!

The result of a Green win in Vancouver-Kingsway will be all other national parties taking a much more serious look at responsible economic policies and realistic industrial policies in light of what we’ve learned about global warming the last few years.

Ah, Potvin, you dog! What a grand vision! All national parties will look at you, a man who wanted to cheer as terrorists attacked North America in the name of anti-Democratic, Islamic repression, a man who since has devolved to the point where you actually thinks America did this to itself ... and they will see you as the new source for "responsible" and "realistic" policies.

He then lays out how he plans to take the election with an 850-vote victory margin.

He concludes;

“How?” is the remaining question.

Well, here's an idea. He could fly an airplane loaded with innocents into a building loaded with innocents somewhere. That should get him a lot of attention, and I'm sure they'd all hear a little voice inside of them that said "Yeah!"

Gave Peace A Chance. Ripped Me Off.

This is too rich.