READ IT AND WEEP

Some days I spend a whole day crobbling together a post for this blog. Other days there is absolutely no point, sometimes for the good reason that someone else has done it, said it, so much better than I could ever hope to.

Today thanks are due [a "hat-tip" hardly says it, a 21-gun salute might begin to cover it] to JULES CRITTENDEN at Pajamas Media and Forward Movement (via Hugh Hewitt), who has put together a post that should sear itself into the mind of every person who will express an opinion and/or cast a vote mindful of the state of our union anytime in the next two years.

Read it, watch every video (if you can bear it), and weep.

Weep for the busloads of cowards, traitors, drunks, frat-boys, shrikes, whores, monomaniacs, saccharine grannies, bloated bores, pocket-stuffers, pimps, pederasts, panderers, gropers, drowners, pasty-white-flabby-assed Monday-morning hangin' judges, posturing nit-pickers, onanist pig-counters, and assorted self-sodden mediocrities whom we routinely elect to the highest positions of power-- perverters of law, of language, and of the truths of history-- denizens of the political pond from the scum at the top, through the toxic larval wigglers in the middle, to the slithering bottom-feeders.

And then stand in awe and wonder that there were ever people of courage, principle, and eloquence as those celebrated on this post, in such abundance as to have lived and written the history that brought us all into being.
























And then say a prayer that something short of a cloud of anthrax and radioactive fallout, and an acre of severed heads, gives enough of us the wake-up slap to be conscious of what, on our best day, we might be capable of doing for each other.

TWO DAYS AND COUNTIN' till we toast old St. Paddy (Patrick, Padraig, Poric, O’Whatever).

Big plans in a certain local Irish household, which may include my annual pummeling of the Bodhran.

Anticipated Events of the Green Day:

(And I don’t mean these people)

A GATHERING OF EAGLES

will face off with Jihad Jane Fonda and friends:

What: Gathering of Eagles

When: March 17th, 2007

0700-1600 (7 AM to 4 PM)

Where: The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall, Washington D.C.

Why: To stand silent guard over our nation's memorials, in honor of our fallen, and in solidarity with our armed forces in harm's way today. Read our mission statement.

Leftist activists who march to the Pentagon [on Saturday March 17] will discover that their path won't be as clear as it has been in the past.The group, led by Cindy Sheehan, Jane Fonda, Ramsey Clark and their ilk, plan to gather March 17 at the Vietnam Memorial Wall to begin a march to protest America's involvement in the Iraq war. The date marks the fourth anniversary of the war's beginning. This time, however, protestors will see objectors if they spit on Iraqi veterans again, or throw paint on a war memorial. This time, they will encounter a buzz saw of Vietnam veterans and supporters who will gather to protect the Wall, and show their support for U.S troops. The counter-protestors are calling themselves the Gathering of Eagles. [hat-tip U.S. Vets Dispatch ]

P.S. Apparently Rolling Thunder, the brigade of bikers who are dedicated to keeping Veteran/MIA issues on the front burner, will have an official presence (minus the bikes) at the Gathering of Eagles. The Patriot Guard Riders—another briga de of bikers who travel far and wide to protect the dignity and privacy of military funerals from being disrupted by monster Fred Phelps of the Westboro “Baptist Church” and his bizarre spawn—do not take an official stand on the GOE, but invite their membership to attend, in colors, if so inclined.

Sure wish I could be there – think I’ll buy a set of armbands for the family.

BIRTHDAY GREETINGS TO ACTOR
and TROOP-SUPPORT TROUPER

GARY SINISE

I’d be surprised if quietly determined Veterans' advocate Gary Sinise were to be seen on hand with the Gathering of Eagles on Saturday, since he tries to remain above politics as he carries out his tireless work on behalf of American military personnel, and of the Iraqi children whose lives have been impacted not just by four years of war but by a two-generation-long reign of Baathist terror. [Besides, it’s his birthday on Saturday-- happy 52nd, ya big kid.]

In addition to touring his incredibly accomplished Lt. Dan Band for the USO, and maintaining (with screenwriter Lauren Hillenbrand) the work of his foundation Operation Iraqi Children, Sinise is now the official spokesman for the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial

– a project underway to erect a memorial to all disabled veterans, near the National Mall in Washington D.C.When I first heard about this project, I had a moment’s hesitation. Supporters are seeking $65 million to design, build, and maintain the memorial.It’s only natural to wonder whether that money might be better spent on the needs of the veterans themselves, especially as we are finding out more and more about the degree of bureaucratic negligence our wounded veterans are enduring as they try to access medical care.

On the other hand, there are many different kinds of wounds, and as many ways to salve them: while it is unconscionable to cut corners on pragmatic needs like facilities and therapy, official recognition, appreciation, and evidence of history’s remembrance offer something very real to the veteran who has given some portion of the prime of his life in service to his fellow man, and must carry with him the scars and confined horizons of a permanent disability. We are all of us body and soul, and both must be nourished.

I can’t say that I am completely knocked out by the memorial’s design, as proposed— it seems to have borrowed a lot from the Vietnam “Wall” without having learned the lessons which made it necessary to add Frederick Hart’s brilliant sculpture “Three Soldiers” to the Vietnam site;

nor has it been guided by the success of the deeply evocative Korean War Memorial,

and the failures of the cold, Soviet-bland National World War II Memorial.

Perhaps one can hope for some re-thinking of the planned site before it comes into being. My advice: lose the “branding/logo” look of the little star, and don’t be afraid to go “heroic”—it works for the Marines across the river.

Anyway, kudos to the CSI:NY birthday boy for his continued hard work, always minus the Hollywood-style grand-standing. Hope my fellow Chicago native spends some part of the day enjoying his green beer.

SI VIS PACEM, PARA BELLUM

That’s “If you want to live in peace, be prepared for war” – or something like that. (My Latin starts to flag after the Credo and the Salve Regina.)

It’s also the name of the weblog of Iraq vet Rusten Currie, whose sentiments about his work in the Big Sandbox I highlighted here back in February 2006. He doesn’t write a lot since he’s been home, but I occasionally drop in for a visit, and this one yielded something interesting, datelined last February. Currie received a communication from “an NCO in Afghanistan" whose thoughts of the moment echoed Currie’s own when he was in theatre. Apparently that NCO is really TIRED of a whole lot of things about this war—money quotes:

I am tired of Democrats who tell me they support me, the soldier on the ground, and then tell me the best plan to win this war is with a "phased redeployment" (liberal-speak for retreat) out of the combat zone to someplace like Okinawa...

I am tired of the Democrats whining for months on T.V., in the New York Times, and in the House and Senate that we need more troops to win the war in Iraq, and then when my Commander in Chief plans to do just that, they say that is the wrong plan, it won't work, and we need a "new direction."...

I am tired of senior officers and commanders who fight this war with more of an eye on the media than on the enemy, who desperately needs killing....

I am tired of the decisions of Sergeants and Privates made in the heat of battle being scrutinized by lawyers who were not there and will never really know the state of mind of the young soldiers who were there and what is asked of them in order to survive....

I am tired of senior officers and commanders who are too afraid for their careers to tell the truth about what they need to win this war to their bosses so that the soldiers can get on with kicking the ass of these animals....

I am tired of Code Pink, Daily Kos, Al-Jazzera, CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, ABC, NBC, CBS, the ACLU, and CAIR thinking that they somehow get to have a vote in how we blast, shoot and kill these animals who would seek to subdue us and destroy us....

I am tired of hearing soldiers who are stationed in safe places talk about how hard their life is.

And my personal favourites:

I am tired of begging to be turned loose so that this war can be over...

I am tired of Rules of Engagement being made by JAG lawyers and not Combat Commanders. We are not playing Hopscotch over here. There is no 2nd place trophy either.

There’s more – visit retired intel officer Currie’s SVP,PB site and lap it up. (Consider going back and reading on from his first post – I haven’t read them all, but what I’ve seen would give the,..er... LIE to the Kerry/Rangel/American Friends Service Committee meme that only the hopeless and clueless join the military. Would love to see Rangel trying to tackle all the Latin that keeps popping up through Currie’s posts. Duh-h-h-h-h…….)

TRACKING OSAMA

AN elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan's borders.

The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units.

In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked smugglers along the US border with Mexico.

Everywhere you chase this story it seems to originate at The Australian – odd that no America-based, Ward-Churchill-loving, Friends o’ the Earth types seem to have picked it up—guess they just can’t bear to see that among today’s aboriginal folks are some who have eschewed the call to Professional Victimhood and have embraced a long-standing heritage as proud (if not always particularly well-treated) members of the American military, dating back to the Civil War.

Initially I thought this might just be a “stunt”—have we noticed that the Bush administration is not above doing things that are downright silly in the face of deeply SERIOUS challenges? (F'rinstance, sending horse-faced muffin-mom Karen Hughes out to cheerlead for her Dubya amongst the far-flung Islamistas—God help us.)

However, a little judicious research [here and here], and one realizes that the use of these trackers is a move (like so many others) long overdue, one that a really serious war-president would probably have made some time ago. Interesting stuff, this.

SPEAKING OF BIKERS

At the movies: WILD HOGS

You gotta love it – Hollywood (and those Canadians & Europeans) fall all over themselves trying to be deep and significant, wallowing in the ever-metastasizing delusion that they are capable of re-making the world into a model of simple, peaceable, non-materialistic Care-Bearing (one that they themselves could never manage without private jets and an entourage), and who is it who connects with the film-going public?

A bunch of mid-century men with thickening torsos and creeping crepe-necks who set off on motorcycles on a journey of self-discovery on which they discover that free-spirited, irresponsible rebels are jerks, and it’s okay to be, on the whole, kind of boring as long as you keep a spark of fun tucked away here and there. It was dumb and silly. A packed theatre (with a disproportionate presence of male-pattern-balding in attendance) laughed happily all the way through, and burst into warm (not wild) spontaneous applause when the trick ending wound up.

TAKE THAT, you Blood-Diamond/Syriana/Day-After-Tomorrow/
Manchurian-Candidate/Jarhead/Death-of-a-President -thumping artistes du cinéma.

Nice try. Touchstone Pictures is laughing all the way to the bank.

Interesting stats at Yahoo movie site:

14 critics from major papers – average grade D+

"The contempt of Wild Hogs for its audience is so glaringly self-evident it's sickening."

Over 9000 viewers who spent the money – average grade B (with many giving straight A’s)

Get a grip, critics! Did anybody buy a ticket thinking this was going to be screenplay by Noel Coward?!

P.S. Google "Wild hogs -- images" and be astounded at how many pages and pages there are of pictures that have NOTHING to do with the movie of the same name.

FINAL NOTE

If you pray for anything in St. Patrick's name, please let it be that the day of this ghastly holy card art dominating Catholic taste will some day meet its well-deserved apocalypse.

GACK.

FURTHER TO THE
PLAME NAME BLAME GAME:

So-called "CIA LEAK CASE"

+ + DEMOLISHED + +

TOP TO TOE, COVER TO COVER,
WEASEL TO SCUMBAG (Bush to Fitzgerald)

D.C. lawyer J. Peter Mulhern marks this nadirest of nadirs in the abyss of American justice -- in his words,

...one of the most appalling perversions of a civilized judicial system since France sent
Alfred Dreyfus to Devil's Island because the ruling elite didn't like Jews.

-- and totally purées the whole miserable lot of 'em at The American Thinker. A great site to consult for reassurance that SOMEBODY'S thinkin' whenever it looks like the whole world is run by idiots.

Mulhern's title, Get a Grip Mr. President, could apply to just about any moment in the entire Bush presidency -- and leaves the reader to conclude that the chances of the President doing so now are as infinitesimal as ever they were.

Plame Name Blame Game, round two:

LIBBY LYNCHED





LIAR










LIAR

SO WHY ARE THIS GUY'S PANTS ON FIRE?

+ + + +


"Grandstanding, show-boating, evidence-suppressing, justice-perverting, narcissistic, bottom-feeding snake?......

Who, MOI?"







Unindicted co-conspinmeisters:

Stay tuned for the continuing story of the woman who wanted nothing more than to preserve her quiet anonymity, tucked away, Emily-Dickinson-like, in the privacy of her parlor, writing tiny little memos to the twins-- cruelly, tragically EXPOSED!!!

If you think the leak is of any importance at all, then read the story [hat-tip, David Frum at NRO] of how it ACTUALLY took place (a subject which appears to have been COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the trial just concluded).

There is only one lesson to be learned from this episode: Lewis Libby has been convicted of being a friend of the Bush administration. Richard Armitage is not, and was never, a friend of the Bush administration, so for him, the leaker, there will be no consequences. Ever. If you think the leak is of any importance at all, you should be furious.

ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF HAG-DOM

Boy do I feel prescient and clever and ahead of the curve and all that stuff.

I had the foresight to refer to conservatist sorceress Ann Coulter as a "nightmare hag" DAYS before she torpedoed her vestigial respectability by lobbing the other F-word ("faggot") towards Democratic Presidential Forlorn-Hopeful John Edwards, the one-term temporary Senator from North Carolina. Coulter should know better, of course, but has proved over time that being quick with the verbal stiletto and asserting her presumed superiority over her morally, politically, and intellectually bankrupt opponents is the highest possible priority in her public appearances, with effective argument and persuasion lagging way down the shopping list.

Something tells me she has lobbed her last grenade while preaching before a receptive choir. Oddly enough, however, she may have increased her chances of being asked to appear at venues where she is unpopular, because who on the left could now resist giving her a platform on which to degrade her own camp and undermine its cause?

Coulter has built her career on accusing liberals of engaging in every kind of aggressive tactic except rational dispute-- of choosing to spout wildly exaggerated insults and slanderous comparisons (Bush as Hannibal-Lecteresque theo-tyrant Chimpy McHitlerburton) instead of taking on the right's arguments and answering them point by point. (Ah, Bill Maher-- how conveniently he illustrates what I mean.)

Newsflash, Ann: "Faggot" is not an argument about whether John Edwards has any business pretending to qualify for national leadership.

"Faggot" does not address his big-bucks ambulance-chasing legal career, culminating in shelling out about $6 million to erect a personal palace 2.5 times the square footage of Jefferson's Monticello (not including the slave quarters-- Jefferson's, that is).

"Faggot" does not describe his decades-stale platform built on the manufactured crisis of "two Americas" and the phonied-up biography about his po' trailer-trash beginnings.

"Faggot" might put a few people in mind of that delicious piece of 2004 film-footage wherein Edwards fluffed his hair for about ten straight minutes, but the world (especially on the left coast) is full of people of both sexes and every deviation therefrom who can spend more time thinking about their hair than they do their presidential vote, so the epithet just doesn't say anything useful.



Putting John Edwards' name and the word "faggot" in one sentence , while scrupulously avoiding actually calling him one, is exactly the kind of content-free, hysterical, cheap, sleazy, brainless, diversionary B.S. Coulter has been accusing the left of for years. She herself has always been a completely useless commentator, in my view, because she has increasingly preferred bullying to persuading-- even as she bolted like a scared bunny from an incoming cream pie... [See my earlier post on the Coulter "barracuda" factor.]

Now she has joined the ranks of the enemies she despises by taking up their favourite technique-- perhaps, sadly, because she discovered that it works for them quite well. But it should come as no surprise to her that what works for the left in the public arena never works for the right-- the rules are different. What gets you press, and fans, and cocktail invitations amongst the vapid elite of left-wing society will probably only garner Ann Coulter a leper-bell she can't silence, and the word "unclean" beaming out from her skinny little tank-top.

Good riddance.

I called it!


AND ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GLOBE, WHERE SOMETHING THAT REALLY COUNTS GOES ON UNNOTICED:

Self-embedded battlefield correspondent Michael Yon had a rare success in delivering an online dispatch from Baghdad today. Now in his third year of front-line reporting from way, WAY outside the wire-- probably the first man to make an authoritative call on the "civil war" aspect of the Iraq conflict [he defined it narrowly and concluded that it was of questionable relevance to the mission]-- Yon weighs in on life amid the "surge."

Money quotes:

With the odometer running over many embeds, [Command Sergeant Major Jeffrey] Mellinger has taken me about 4,000 miles (total) up and down Iraqi roads, visiting units from north to south, east to west, showing that the military truly opens their doors to writers who will stick it out. They don’t even have to like you: my fights with the Army are well-known, yet they continue to open their doors. There’s a lesson in there. I wrote that Iraq was in a civil war shortly after covering the first elections. I wrote about commanders who did poorly, and ISF units that couldn’t shoot straight, and I wrote about the veneer of victory in Afghanistan cracking under the weight of a poppy-fueled Taliban resurgence. Yet they still let me in.

It’s a reminder of why I am so proud of my country, despite our many problems. It’s also a caution about why we must stick with our people who have been mostly abandoned at war. I understand the position of the journalists. Especially the ones who get blown up or shot at fairly regularly, but the informed interest of ordinary Americans is critical to the outcome of this war. And the truth is that our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of whom rarely (if ever) see a writer, are abandoned by default...

There’s a lot of talk back at home that morale among American forces is low here. While writing this, I called Rich Oppel from the New York Times, who is in Baghdad, to ask him how morale looked from his vantage. Rich said that a lot of the soldiers are not happy with the extensions of their tours, something I have heard soldiers complain about also. However, I watch morale very closely. More closely than all else. Low morale in a particular unit can be the result of poor leadership in that unit, or just not getting mail, for instance. But gauging morale is not a simple affair of asking a few soldiers. A person has to live with them across Iraq. Having done so, my opinion is that overall troop morale is good to high. (If their morale could be bottled, it would probably would sell like crack, then be outlawed.)

Michael Yon -- support the embed with donations and purchases here

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant

Happy
Saint David’s Day!

Eat a leek for the
Wonder of Wales.



Fond memories of residence and holidays in fair Gwallia.


SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22
HOUSTON, TEXAS

IN BETWEEN: AIR CANADA
My new bumper sticker (feel free to duplicate and distribute at will -- copyright is hereby waived)

If the only way to get to Heaven was on Air Canada, I wouldn't go.
...They'd probably just cancel the flight anyway.

I could tell the whole tale, of the four flights between February 16 and the 26th, but we'd all be asleep in short order. Let's just start with lost luggage.

February 18, PVD to YYZ:
on a Beechcraft (about 20 seats) with a total of 6 passengers. Six pieces of luggage (four checked, two carry-ons). My suitcase does not appear. I join the angry, seething crowd at the baggage claim desk and, while trying to file my report, am told by the Air Canada employee that "Whining will get you nowhere." There are five or six telephone calls to the baggage tracing number, one trip to the airport, and numerous attempts at the internet bag tracer. At the time of my departure for IAH on Wednesday, February 21, the bag is somewhere in limbo, waiting for customs clearance.

Departure to IAH:
Delayed because neither the flight attendant nor the ramp crew notices that there's an electrical cord lying in the hatchway when they pull the door closed. The cord winds around the emergency chute, which will deploy if they open the door to get the cord out. We change planes. Our 8:40 a.m. flight leaves at 2:00 p.m., minus 14 of its passengers who didn't get seats.

Cut to Monday, February 26:
YYZ has cancelled numerous flights due to an onslought of 3 or 4 inches of snow. My 5:00 p.m. flight from IAH to YYZ is filled with people who've been waiting since early morning. We depart IAH at about 8:00 p.m., and arrive YYZ just after midnight.

Not one single piece of luggage belonging to the 70 passengers emerges onto the carousel. An angry, seething crowd clusters around the baggage claim desk. It appears that the cargo hold of the plane did not leave Houston empty (one of our fears), but the Toronto crew did forget to remove the luggage once it arrived at YYZ. All passengers eventually receive their bags and are ready to leave by 2:00 a.m.

This delay affords me time to comb the rows and rows of abandoned luggage between the ten huge carousels in the international claim area. Twice. I do not find the lost bag of February 18. (But I do find heaps of bags thrown into corners, one cluster of at least forty pairs of skis-- what a great vacation those people must be having!!-- and mass disorder on an epic scale.)

I am then directed to the domestic claim area, on the other side of a glass wall, where, I am told, a huge load of baggage has recently been cleared by customs. I exit the international area and then push my cart backwards through the exit doors to the domestic area, and begin to comb the rows of baggage there.

It's not here:



Or here:



Or here:


Or here:
The sorrowful voice of a fellow bag-pilgrim is heard nearby: "This is like a needle in a hay-stack."

I reply, "This airline is beyond embarrassment." He responds, "I agree-- and I work for them."

He wears a dark blue uniform with braid on the cap and sleeves. He is an Air Canada pilot, whose bag is also lost.
In the spirit of kindness he tells me, "If you don't find it here, there's a room, over in the corner, where there are about 200 bags. Just ask at the desk and you can look in there."

I have always known, in my heart, that somewhere there's a room.

I walk over there. No one pays any attention to me, so I find the room on my own, and walk in.

Nine days, with more phone-screaming and swearing and walking up and down amid piles and heaps of lost luggage than I dare relate, and at last I have found my bag. Of February 18. I arrive home, with all my luggage, 2:30 a.m., February 27.

Richard Branson could put this airline out of business in 2-3 weeks. I wish he thought it might be worth it.



AIR CANADA -- STOP THEM BEFORE THEY KILL AGAIN.

FOX NEWS -- SO HIP IT HURTS

Threw away a late Sunday evening recently watching the FoxNews lineup of, er, um, “light?” – “comedy?” – programming. Started with the second half of If Hollywood Ran America. A great idea, lots of fodder for mockery, comedy, or dry and biting satire. Alas—none of these to be found anywhere.


Followed by The Half-hour Newshour, Fox’s new venture into the “fake news” market now dominated by Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and Stephen Colber-r-r-r-r-e’s Colbert Report.

Jon— Stephen— a word to the wise: lie quiet and content, your jobs are secure. The best comment on The Half-hour Newshour (and I can’t hat-tip this because I don’t know who said it first) has to be that it resembled nothing less than the script which would have been produced had a bunch of rabidly left-wing bloggers and activists set out to create a satire of the type of mean-spirited, puerile show that their mean-spirited conservative enemies would think was funny. Padding out the occasional genuinely funny line or bit was a bunch of limp and lame-o pokes in the liberal eye that went from sophomoric to really offensive.

Next on the lineup was It’s Out There, Fox’s new cutting edge overview of what’s hot on the blogs and the ‘net in general. Hosted by Kirsten Powers and the often grating Michelle Malkin—a woman whose thought processes are usually on course but whose TV presence can leave me clenching my teeth. Malkin has been a blog pioneer, and has been on the receiving end of vile dirty tricks and verbal abuse (apparently there are those on the left who think that calling her a “Chink” constitutes an argument against her positions—she is, in fact, a Filipina)—so she knows the workings of the blogosphere as well as anybody. When it comes to being annoying, she’s certainly not in the Ann Coulter league (nightmare hag!), but... I dunno, sometimes she bugs me. Also assisting on It’s Out There is some guy named Griff Jenkins, a Fox roving video reporter and techno-geek. Also a little irritating—nothing I couldn’t handle.

Nevertheless: I didn’t last through the entire show. The information was less than exciting, some of it downright stale, and the inter-hostess banter was oh so lame-o.

Dear FoxNews: GIVE IT UP!!!!

COLBERT COULD BEAT YOU SENSELESS WITH A POPSICLE STICK!!!

NEW SUNDAY PROGRAMMING = SUCKS!!! HUGE!!!!

And while you’re at it, lose Shepard Smith. My initial impression of him turned out to be bang-on.

Just found this on YouTube. It's more entertaining than the subject it parodies.