AIR CANADA IS PLEASED TO SERVE YOU....

The Drudge Report points to this fine moment in the history of Canada's premiere airline.

THIS IS YOUR PILOT SPEAKING... AND CRYING AND SWEARING. AND DEMANDING TO TALK TO GOD!

How's it goin', eh?

KATZ OUT OF THE BAG:
MORE WISE WORDS FROM URGENT AGENDA

Barack Obama has an idea...he wants to organize a Muslim summit....'Muslim and Western leaders would be invited to the summit for "a discussion about how we can prevent the widening misunderstandings and gaps between the Muslim world and the West.'

Can't you just wait for the photo ops? President Obama with some leader whose followers chop off heads. President Obama trying to "understand" why women have to be beaten. And, naturally, President Obama hearing, from all of them, that the real problem in the world is Israel.

...This just in: Jimmy Carter is quoted as being wild about Barack Obama. If I were Mr. Obama, I'd advise Mr. Carter to devote his time to silent meditation. Real silent.

IT'S DOG EAT DOG


Like most Republicans, I can't exactly rejoice. I'm still recovering from Fred taking a powder about three days after I sent him a hundred bucks. Giuliani has probably been my first choice on sheer political considerations -- i.e., he fears no man (nor woman) and could pretty much chew up and spit out anything or anybody that gets in the Great American Face -- something we've been lacking for a couple of decades.

He too is retiring from the field of battle, having tested the theory that sensible Americans would not allow themselves to be cheated of the full menu of candidates just because eleven people in Iowa rejected some and boosted others -- ditto New Hampshire, where the numbers must rise to at least four score and seven.

Without an incumbent Prez or Veep on either ticket for the first time in what seems like eons, the deep flaws in our eccentric primary/caucus system have revealed themselves, made all the worse by the Democrat-driven front-loading of this year's process, in the name of the Virtual Presidency of the Annointed (see here , scroll to "the Hillary thing") .

The alarums and laments about a likely McCain candidacy, and a rather less likely McCain victory, have begun, and they are compelling. National Review Online carries the best of them, here last night in the immediate aftermath, and this morning in a small symposium. I have said I could live with him, but he was third down the list of people I could live with. He was my guy in 2000 -- and then I got to know him better. Now, not so much....

Oy.


IN THE LADIES' ROOM

By far the most comical response to recent political developments was the New York Chapter of the National Organization of Women crying foul that Massachusetts Senator Ted "the swimmer" Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama, thereby perpetrating the "greatest betrayal" of women and their feminist cause. [h/t: Breitbart.com]

Ex-squeeze me? Let me get this straight-- feminists feel
betrayed because someone declines to support a woman who has (1) sat passively by, riding her husband's political coat-tails and rising to the senate on no merit of her own, while that same husband has groped, seduced, splattered, and likely raped a series of mostly vulnerable women (Canada's Belinda Strumpet not so much); and who has (2) actively joined with that same husband in dismissing, denigrating, harassing, and destroying those women, all in the pursuit of more and more political power and glory.

And furthermore (let me get this straight again) -- the "someone" who has declined to support this political womanbot on her quest for power is a man who emotionally wrecked a perfectly nice wife while fulfilling the family tradition of chasing every piece of tail in sight, including the sole act by which he ever exceeded the other Kennedy males at anything, that being the negligent, if not deliberate, homicide of Mary Jo Kopechne, who floated in an air pocket in his overturned car at Chappaquiddick for at least two hours before drowning, while Ted rested his sore back in a hotel room.

And endorsing Obama constitutes betrayal.

Okay.


AND IN THE NEXT STALL...

The Breck Girl, John Edwards, announces his departure from the race this morning.

I believe I spotted his empty suit in my rear-view mirror.



'BYE.



Good thing he's so rich he won't need to find a job.

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

Senator John F(ing) Kerry, October 2006

No bright young individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment.

Senator Charles Rangel, November 2006


How one such ignorant loser of my acquaintance spends some of his down-time at Al Asad air base:

I've also plowed through several books, since they're a great way to burn hours during duty or on a slow work day. On the way over here, I read Steven Pressfield's The Afghan Campaign (actually I blew through that one on the plane ride over, since it was a very very long plane ride), a fictional account of an infantryman in Alexander the Great's army during his marches through modern-day Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and back through Iraq (interesting historical footnote: Kandahar in Afghanistan, which you may of heard about on the news as an American base, was actually founded by Alexander and named after himself. Originally it was called Iskandahar, with the "Isk" being the local language bastardizing "Alex". There is another city with a similar name - Iskandariya - in southern Iraq near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates).

I also finished Thieves of Baghdad, an account of the looting of the Baghdad National Museum after the initial invasion and the efforts of a Marine colonel to recover the stolen artifacts while dispelling the many falsehoods about the looting perpetrated by a lazy media. Great book: it's part Indiana Jones, part CSI, and part Black Hawk Down all in one. Once my wife sent me a small selection from my library, I went through Bernard Lewis' The Muslim Discovery of Europe, an Arab-eye's-view from primary sources about the contact and conflict of the Muslim world from its creation to its decline with its European, Christian adversaries.

I've started the first volume of Plutarch's Lives (as part of a trip through ancient history I've assigned myself, beginning with Herodotus and working its way through the Persian Wars, Peloponnesian War, and now the decline of Greece combined with the ascension of Rome), as well as Triumph Foresaken, the first of a new two-volume history of the Vietnam War written by a current professor at the Marine Corps University who seeks to correct much of the "conventional wisdom" about that conflict that is, based on a review of recently released primary sources, quite often factually wrong. I'm almost done Victor Davis Hanson's The Soul of Battle, a review of three generals from different eras - Epaminondas from ancient Greece, Sherman from the Civil War, and Patton from WWII - and how they imbued the ideologies they personally held into their troops, thereby giving them victory in three different wars of liberation.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I educated myself on global warming - its myths, its facts, its actual effects, and the most efficient way of combating those effects - with Cool It. I'm also keeping up my science fiction fetish: I read A.E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher, a story sort of about a 2nd Amendment society with an all-powerful empress whose might can be checked by ordinary citizens who can purchase highly-advanced firearms from private gun shops. And, I'm re-reading an oldie I went through long ago, Frank Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment, a tale about a twisted social engineering experiment on a planet whose inhabitants are not allowed to escape...until now. And I'd be remiss if I forgot to mention The Real Festivus, sent me by my parents, written by the Seinfeld screen-writer whose real-life family tradition inspired that famous episode.

It's amazing what you find when you take the lid off the jarhead and have a peek inside.

Also amazing how much a warrior can get done ONCE THE WAR IS PRETTY MUCH WON.

REPUBLICAN POLITICAL MATH 101:


OTHER RANDOM THEOREMS AND EQUATIONS:

HUCKABEE minus 100 lbs. = No longer a mile wide,
but still an inch deep.


"OH YOU TWO! --- JUST BEE-HAAAAVE!!!"



"Uh, excuse me -- there are THREE people in this debate. Call on me? I got my hand up! Over here -- yoo-hoo -- teacher?!"

Hardball's CHRIS MATTHEWS -- LITERARY COMEDIAN

Definitely one of the week's funniest unwitting howlers. Chris Matthews made his public mea culpa for saying what so many of us are thinking (I guess the old saw about politicians also applies to journalists: the definition of a "gaffe" is when a politician accidentally tells the truth). Shooting from the lip as usual, Matthews opined that the only way Hillary Clinton got into the senate was on the sympathy generated because her husband "messed around".

He was wrong, as it happens -- far more than her husband's misconduct, Mrs. Clinton owes her seat to Rudy Giuliani's prostate. (He got cancer and missed his opportunity to wipe the floor with Hillary in the New York senate race.)

However, Matthews was forced to do the apology dance, and did it with the "I was right but I didn't mean to be hurtful" contortion to which we have become accustomed. Toward the end, bursting in with a patriotism-distracter, Matthews spoke of

...our uniquely American hope that we can actually make things better, that we can make the greatest of countries, not only survive, but as [author] William Faulkner once said, 'prevail'.

William Faulkner? WILLIAM FAULKNER said we should prevail???? Not General Petraeus? Not Ike Eisenhower? Not even John McCain?

Please, Chris, please -- don't reach so far, don't bend so low, for God's sake don't hurt yourself. It's such a long, LONG way to go to be SAFE. It's such a deep, DEEP dive to take to demonstrate what an utter coward you are.

Chris Matthews -- faithful foot-soldier in the Oxford Mississippi militia, picking off our enemies one minie-ball and paper cartridge at a time.


SPEAKING OF VIOLENT JOURNALISTS

The New York Times has once again distinguished itself doing violence to the truth, and assault and battery on the American military, through a shoddily-constructed, grossly distortionate hit piece called Across America: Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles, a predicably stuck-in-Vietnam story of screwed-up veterans wreaking mayhem on their fellow-citizens back home.

It would have been ho-hum had it not been so heinously context-free, recounting as it did the 121 known killers out of the more than half-a-million troops who have rotated in and out of Iraq (more if we factor in Afghanistan] -- while failing to note that this represents a rate of 24.2 homicidal offenders per 100,000, which is lower than the U.S. national average in a similar age bracket (18-24) -- that being 27 per 100,000 for 2006. Oh, yes, and lower still than the rate during those peaceable early Clinton years, which peaked at 43 per 100,000.


Noting the importance of this kind of investigative probe into murder trends by population sub-group, Iowahawk immediately got on the case, and tracked the criminal tendencies of professional journalists.

Whoa, Nelly!

Alarums and Excursions!

What he found!

Bottom line: If someone approaches you on the street holding a microphone, put your hands up in a hurry, and insist that they show you whether it's LOADED.

HEY, I GOT LINKED ... sort of.

William Katz -- "an intern for a U.S. senator; an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear-war theorist; an editor at The New York Times Magazine; a comedy writer for Bob Newhart; an interviewer for The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson; and the author of ten novels" -- has his own blogsite now called Urgent Agenda. It features many wise words, among which is the pledge to do battle for the preservation of the English language, especially through avoidance of some of the most ubiquitous verbal crimes in popular use, collected on his "Endangered Speakies List".

I sent him my congratulations, and an appropriate "daffynition" of one of his pet speakies. He acknowledges me here. (Oh I'm so famous, she said "famously".)

PERMITTED TO REMAIN ON MY CAR WHILE PARKED
ON BLOOR STREET IN DOWNTOWN TORONTO:














RIPPED OFF MY CAR WHILE PARKED
ON BLOOR STREET IN DOWNTOWN TORONTO:














YES, INDEED -- As Mark Steyn can tell you, we have a little bit of a Free Speech deficit here in old Canuckistan.

RECENTLY DISCOVERED SECRET TAPES

(h/t Professor Bainbridge via Instapundit)



More here.

Heh.

THERE'S A SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE
and I'm one of millions.

I was really prepared to believe that Mrs. Clinton had a spasm of genuine emotion when she had her little "moment" (sniff, sniff) before New Hampshire primary day. And if it worked to put her over the top, well, good for her -- she knows her [pathetic, bathetic] constituency.

Then she turned up for the victory speech. In a grey flowered dress (I'm given to understand it was a dress -- I couldn't see behind the podium) worthy of a World War I sheet music mother, and she came to us "with a full heart" about how "she found her voice".

THOUGHT I WOULD PUKE.

I had actually found myself believing it all: a four-act drama that began with the chirpy "It hurts my feelings" at the debate. Then the tears (total self-pity, but real, I thought), and the "Iron my shirt" protestors. Then the pink-scarf walk-about. Then the "full heart" -- ridiculously reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson's heavy one. (Or the drunken mother in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-moon Marigolds -- how's that for esoteric?!)

And the grey dress -- not new -- seen previously (1) at the time she complained of the "boys club" piling on, and, oh yes, (2) in an appearance with a tall transgendered person named Donna at a Human Rights event, where the dark pant-suit would have been uncomfortably ambiguous.

And I thought, "My God -- I have SO been HAD!!!"

The Anchoress, on the other hand, NAILED IT back on JANUARY 2 !!!!

What I dread most in this political season is the “genuine” moment - and it is coming, soon, sometime between today and tomorrow, or tomorrow and New Hampshire - when Mrs. Clinton, in her ongoing effort to turn herself into whatever the polls says she must be, cries in public. It’s going to be genuinely ghastly.

And it was.

PUKE.

MAYBE. MAYBE NOT.....

Hilly/Billy and Obambi still too close to call.

John Edwards refuses to bail -- maybe if he doesn't win, his father the millworker will get some votes (they talk about him so much he's probably going to get lots of write-ins).


TO ABSOLUTELY NO ONE'S SURPRISE....

The New Republic unearths what crackpot libertarian (and fake Republican) RON PAUL has been hiding under his tin-foil hat: paranoia and prejudice. He's toast, at last.


Paul has vowed to continue the campaign until the mother ship comes to transport him away.

I predicted earlier that
New Hampshire would see
BILL CLINTON MUZZLED
if Hillary was to succeed
in the first primary.



He wasn't.

She's screwed.



It's what he's good at......

Over at the Western Standard Blog, Obambi is slapped with the ULTIMATE CANADIAN INSULT:

Obama is shallow and ill educated enough to make an outstanding Canadian Liberal MP.

Is there no depth to which some people will not stoop??????

Read the whole teeth-grinding article if you dare. Somebody doesn't like Bambi.

DAVID WARREN, in his high priestly office as spitfire pundit for the Ottawa Citizen, assesses the entrails of the American election in its early phases here.

He also passes on the Mo-Do coined moniker (prophetically, we hate to admit) for now-frontrunner Barack Obama:

"OBAMBI"

I love it-- appealing, fluffy, naive, clueless, and frozen in the headlights of life-threatening world events.

Alas, no Republican Godzilla yet on the horizon to make short work of little deer.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT:

The goal of Democrats -- and their allies -- over the next two years should not and cannot be to stop the war cold turkey. The goal should be to politicize the issue in preparation for 2008.

"I may not agree with the assessment of the far left, but at least they're honest. They think we've lost in Iraq and that we should get out now. Contrast that with those who see in Iraq a wonderful opportunity to win more seats for their party, like publius. It pleases me to no end that if I end up getting killed in Iraq, at least my wife can take comfort in knowing my death may help the Democrats win the White House in 2008. Really, that makes it all worthwhile."

The passage above is an extract from a typically acerbic blog post written on February 19, 2007, by Major Andrew Olmsted, a career Army man who had been blogging since 2002. He began his first tour of Iraq in July of 2003, at which time his blog was picked up by the Rocky Mountain News.

Major Olmsted died on January 3, the first American fatality of 2008. His unit was ambushed by insurgents in Diyala province, north of Baghdad.


A man with such a lot to say would naturally leave a final post to be read in the event of his death. He asks that no one politicize his death, for any side of any argument.

Hmmm. Tall order.



Requiescat in pace.

IT'S OFFICIAL

I'M A TWO-STAR
BLUE-STAR MOM




Number Three Son just swore his oath today and signed the papers to enlist in the Navy. He checks into Naval Officer Candidate School next month.

Anchors Aweigh, me boy!

Vodkapundit writes an open letter to Iowans -- says it all. Money quote:

Des Moines (literally, French for “tell me about the rabbits, George”)

32 years ago, your Democratic brethren took one look at Jimmy Carter -- the worst 20th Century President bar Nixon, and the worst ex-President ever -- and declared, “That’s our man!”

Three decades later, and along comes Mike Huckabee. Same moral pretentiousness, same gullibility on foreign affairs, only-slightly-less toothy idiot’s grin. Then you so-called Republicans took a look at Carter’s clone and said, “That’s our man, too!”

Yeah -- what he said.

In answer to the preceding questions:

YES, IOWANS ARE
FRICKIN' DERANGED.


Huckabee wins big, Edwards beats Clinton.

These are two of the emptiest suits on the modern American political scene -- Huckabee sincere but flimsy as wet kleenex, Edwards thoroughly phoney from hairspray to shoe-polish.

Salient observations from National Review Online's "Corner" blog:

From Mark Hemingway:

Edwards: He came out to give his concession speech to U2's "(Pride) In the Name of Love" and immediately started talking about his grandmother and father working in a textile plant. Suffice to say, I immediately needed an airsickness bag.

Mike Huckabee: The only people I know who are excited about a Huckabee victory are friends who are rigidly pro-life Democrats. That about sums it up.

Hillary Clinton: ...relative to Edwards and Obama, she seems better on foreign policy and national security by a factor of ten. Still, there's something deeply satisfying about watching the Clintons start to go gently into that good night...

From Mark Steyn:

Obama: Content-wise, Obama's victory speech was totally lame... But nobody cares. He's likeable, he's upbeat, and he's new. We shouldn't take away from the Senator's achievement tonight. He's made history.

[opening lines of the speech:

“They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided; too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose."

This is clearly a reference to race. Obama has certainly achieved an historic first for a black American. But who among the living are the "they" who said it could "never" be done? Does anyone seriously believe that in 2008 an otherwise able candidate would be barred from success because he's black? Poppycock.]


From Rich Lowry, the money quote:

Here's one way to look at it: 60% of voters were evangelicals. Huck beat Romney among them 45-19%. 40% weren't evangelicals. Romney beat Huck among them 33-13%.

Romney strikes me as a little slick and slippery, and I don't totally buy him. Huckabee, on the other hand, is either genuinely unslick, or brilliantly fake-unslick -- but God spare us another (after Bush) dull-minded, hearty-feely, God-channeling, purer-than-thou and oh-so-saved-forever, rote-learned Bible boy in the Oval Office. They're nice enough folks, but they should stay on the farm and not be put in charge of anything that means life-and-death for the whole country, not to mention the world-- at least not in however many lifetimes it will take to remedy the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Huckabee gave a content-challenged acceptance speech full of rambling puffery and a hint of smuggery -- and I began to sense that, for the broad spectrum of the electorate of both parties, he may yet be able to produce negatives even higher than Hillary's!

I predict (I pray) that the Huckaboom will bust, and we can get back to a contest among serious people who belong on the world stage. (That's assuming weirdsmobile Ron Paul finally does the honorable thing and falls on his sword-- and are there other speed-bump candidates still out there? I forget.)

THE HILLARY THING:
The pundits seem to agree: never has so much money, massed organization, and intimidating raw power been expended on behalf of an anointed candidate to such disastrous effect, done in (for this round anyway) by the toxic combination of her own profound dislikability and her husband's bizarre mix of mysterious charm and suffocating self-absorption. I see Bill being muzzled in New Hampshire, perhaps even hidden until his black eyes have healed. Mere Hillary will be loosed upon the world. Which is too bad -- she is eminently beatable by any strong Republican. Obama is not. Crap.

Bottom line: The whole Iowa circus has become ridiculous at the best of times, compounded this year by the Election Strain of Bush Derangement Syndrome. This front-loaded primary mess is the direct result of the delusional state in which the left has been seething since the 2000 election.

Having concluded by early 2007 that they were never going to be able to change administrations through impeachment, they decided to just pretend it was an election year and anoint their unstoppable candidate, whose election was a foregone conclusion -- thereby achieving a virtual change in government, a good year before electoral reality caught up with the comforting delusion.

A strategem well-befitting this gaggle of wrinkled flower-children. Ambitious, if rather unhealthy.

Not gonna happen. Well, maybe it's too soon to say that. After all this excitement, the truth is we're no closer to knowing how it will all come out than we were yesterday.

Bring on the next debate!

FOOTNOTE TO YESTERDAY'S POST:

POLLS SHOW
TOP THREE DEMOCRATS
RUNNING NECK-AND-NECK
FOR IOWA CAUCUSES


MEMO TO IOWA:

ARE YOU DERANGED?

JOHN EDWARDS?

The only thing more disturbing than the Iowa "Huckaboom" is the thought that there are also enough doofuses in the same state to consider the preening, posturing, class-warfare-mongering, silk-suit, country-club ambulance-chaser Edwards as even remotely fit to run the United States of Anything.

Actually I did once hear a perfectly reasonable explanation for Edwards' appeal: he was poor, and he got rich -- richer than freakin' Elvis! WOO-HOO!!! Gotta love that boy! He's so damn rich! He BIG rich! And he didn't even have to marry a dipsy-wipsy ketchup widow to get there! Oh yeah! My hero! HE da MAN! etc. etc.........


And Lord knows, he's pretty.

LATEST POLLS SAY IOWA CAUCUSES
WILL FAVOR HUCKABEE


MEMO TO IOWA:

ARE YOU DERANGED?

Please, somebody tell me that no single state in the union has such a large proportion of doofuses (doofi?) that this guy could actually win it.


Just how big a knucklehead is this saucer-deep Evangellyrolling Creationistamatized, Hagee-schmoozing, Arkansas smarm-artist?

Oh, about THIS BIG.



(Sweet God, wasn't one enough?...)








McCain. Guiliani. Romney. Even Thompson.

Could probably live with any of them, flaws and all.


Huckabee? I'd have to move to Canada.

Oh yeah -- I already live there.


A-A-A-A-G-G-H-H-H-H!!!!
WE'RE NOT SAFE ANYWHERE!!!!

Okay -- put your head down and lean into the wind. Let's get the "Hawkeye Cauc-ae" over with, and move on to a state with a real primary.


P.S.:
In the Democrat camp, the polls show the three leading candidates running neck-and-neck. To the degree that there's any neck involved...

2007 -- good riddance -- for too many sad memories with the power to overshadow the good stuff; for separation, deaths, betrayal by "auld aquaintance" (too painful to "be forgot" quite yet) -- for cowardice and calumny from the squalid halls of government.

On the other hand... babies reached their one-year mark, kids took first steps on the road to life, scattered and shattered friends re-grouped and made music, good folks in distant lands laid down arms and came to the radical conclusion that U.S. Marines can walk on water.

Despite the amusing bumper sticker (heh), a man in a uniform brought promise of peace -- not so much through superior firepower as through unshakeable perseverence, not to mention compassionate, respectful, innovative, brilliantly intelligent and breathtakingly courageous toe-to-toe, man-to-man, cor ad cor exercise of human virtue, forging and drawing on the bonds of common humanity.

His nickname used to be Peaches.

Man of the Year (perhaps the decade),
General David Petraeus.

More people's chances for a Happy New year, and some light at the end of a smoking tunnel, probably depend on this one man at this moment than on any other person now living.

He has his detractors.

We spit on them.


I have a son in Iraq who is fighting boredom.

For that we thank you, General.

The sun has already risen on a better day.