SEE YOU IN D.C., YOUR HO-HO-HOLINESS

I'll be in the District with a slight overlap to the Papal visit -- no tickets to anything, but maybe he and I can arrange to meet at some intersection as he mobiles through town.

The city is urging those planning to attend the Papal Mass at the new Nationals stadium to buy a special Metro Pass and leave their cars at home. Their first PSA attempt looked like this (later pulled off the air -- I thought it was kinda cute):



He's no Travelocity Gnome, mind you, but has a certain charm nonetheless.

Habemus pop-star.





TOO BAD THE POPE DIDN'T GET THERE IN TIME TO ABSOLVE JAY ROCKEFELLER

Not too sure what West Virginia Democrat Senator Jay Rockefeller would LIKE to be famous for, besides his surname link to an 18-wheeler-load of oil money.

He SHOULD be more famous for his November 2005 admission that in 2002 he toured three middle eastern countries and tipped them off to the likelihood of our future invasion of Iraq -- a rank act of treason by any sane definition. But that was somewhat, uh, under-reported by the big-name press at the time.

Then there's the question of why, if the thought of war so alarmed Rockefeller that he spread the word among our potential enemies [as in "the friend of my enemy is my enemy"], he nevertheless decried Iraq as the most dangerous thing on the planet since that alien came and removed his brain, and promptly voted to authorize war. Or not. Chris Wallace reported -- you decide.

More recently Rockefeller has been in the news for having proclaimed, at maximum decibels, what will probably go down as ALL TEN of the Top Ten Stupidest Things Any Human Being Could Have Said About John McCain.

McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.

Fisking this piece of fetid political feces isn't really worth the key-strokes. (The most fun part is that the laser-guided missile hadn't been invented yet when McCain was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 -- tied for second place in fun-ness is (a) the fact that he was hit at 4,500 feet, and (b) it took him 5 1/2 years to be "long gone".)

NRO's The Corner says it so well: "Senator Jay Rockefeller, jerk." Full metal train-wreck is here.

Like somebody once said, "I love the smell of Napalm when some politician makes a meal of it."

Over at the Vets for Freedom rally yesterday, attended by Senators McCain and Lieberman, among others, the crowd was treated to this definition of "we're against the war but support the troops" by one veteran/speaker:

This is like somebody coming along, punching you in the gut, and saying, 'oh, I didn't mean that for you, I meant that for your boss.' We despise 'support' like that.

Later, the occasionally impossible Senator Lindsay Graham weighed in at the rally, addressing the assembled military folks:

You want to know who wants you to come home more than anybody? Al Qaeda, because you're kicking their ass.

Indeed.



MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH...

The two biggest men on campus, General David "Peaches" Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, were competing in the javelin catch event over at the Senate Armed Services Committee struggle session. The next president of the United States was in attendance to pepper them with questions -- if we only knew who the heck it was!!!???? Mrs. Clinton seems to have put on the worst performance, but at least she didn't call the general a liar again like last time -- apparently she has grasped the fact that that would be the pot calling the kettle African-American.

Oops.

IN ECONOMIC NEWS:

New York Times/CBS poll results on American national economy: Condition of current economy?

GOOD - 1%
FAIRLY GOOD - 20%
FAIRLY BAD - 48%
STINKIN' BAD - 30%

U.S. in a recession? YES - 66% NO - 27%

National Council on Economic Education (most recent available data):

Number of states requiring one course in Economics for High School graduation -- 15

Number of states requiring one course in Personal Finance -- 7

[NCEE summary What Americans Know About Economics]

WELCOME TO MY HIT LIST


TOP EIGHT HITS:

MEET THE GUYS WHO [allegedly]
WANTED TO KILL ME & THE SPOUSE
-- AUGUST 2006 -- RETURN TRIP FROM OXFORD
AIR CANADA, Flt. 849





















NOW ON TRIAL IN BRITAIN


HANGIN'S TOO GOOD FOR 'EM.

[It's also banned in Britain -- oh well. At least we can be sure that, if convicted, these losers will do hard time in a fine British prison, with Korans, Halal food, personal imam visits, no forced exposure to Piglet, conjugal visits with one or more wives, and probably quick parole under newly enacted provisions of National Sharia Law to be passed in Parliament in the none-too-distant future. And maybe a private consultation with the current Archdhimmi of Ditherbury, Rowan Atkinson Williams.]

KABOOM: A SOLDIER'S WAR JOURNAL

Fantastic milblog discovered this evening. Lt.G has a writing career ahead of him when his gig is up. I haven't scoured enough of his back-story yet (he's only been at it since November, so I should be able to get to all of it), but I thought this one from a couple months ago was terrific. Memo to the Pentagon: this bud's for you. Lt. G writes:

The gripe: A military tradition as time-honored as dehumanizing the enemy, as expected as giving your rifle a feminine name and persona, and as innate in the soldier’s soul as feeling abandoned by the kinsmen they fight for. After all, you don’t worry about the soldiers who bitch, you worry about the ones who aren’t bitching.

Such comprehension doesn’t change the fact that bullshit always rolls downhill - or that at the platoon level, said bullshit rolls in like a crashing avalanche, steadily progressing in size and strength, arriving with a reeking stench of mundane regulations and asinine humorlessness...

Let’s just say that if LT G were Lord Protectorate G of the Desert Cavalry of Pure Raw Awesomeness, things would be a little different.

[A sample of Lt. G's gripe-based proposed reforms:]

-- (*Some*) Field grade officers would have more serious things to worry about during a war than the size of PV2 Van Wilder’s moustache, or LT G’s wear of the Army-issued fleece cap during the day while off-duty. (Hey, I’m a skinny guy. I get cold easily.) Like, oh I don’t know, ensuring that the Iraqi Police have an equal balance of Sunnis and Shi’as on their force to avoid allegations of corruption. That might a good place to start.

-- 12 hours of a bureaucratic trail of tears and papercuts would not be what sends a detainee to jail; finding a freakin’ Soviet-era sniper rifle in his backyard in a water pipe would be enough.

-- I would never go to bed weary and sore and drained, absolutely convinced that the details of me and my men’s lives were nothing more than a PowerPoint slide being passed up the chain-of-command on memory drives. Not even our own presentation. Just one little slide. This happens at least once a week.

This definition of "the gripe" is one for the books -- or at least for the notebooks of journalists and documentary-hacks who trawl the rank and file looking for discontent and then file their pre-determined stories, as if each man who exercises his military prerogative to bitch is to be taken (a) too too seriously, and (b) as representative of everybody else. [On the other hand, perhaps the brass would be well-advised not to take the gripes too too lightly -- should they ever give them an ear.]

Read the rest here, and then read to whole blog top to bottom. I like this guy.

REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Massey Lectures, Toronto, Canada 1967

A daring explanation of how we arrived at the era of
REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza -- a very bright and engaging young priest with a side-career in journalism (who often colours way outside the lines of both his vocation and his expertise, but always worth a read), posits a pretty daring take on the early origins of the fork in the road of American racial politics which brought us to the point that Barack Obama's church of recent decades preaches a "gospel" (let's not dignify it with a capital "G") of anti-Americanism and anti-white racism.

In today's National Post, Fr. de Souza reflects on his reading of the recently published Lost Massey Lectures, selections from a lecture series founded in 1961 by then Governor-General of Canada Vincent Massey [yes, elder brother of tv's "Dr. Gillespie", the actor, valiant Canadian veteran of both World Wars, and naturalized American Goldwater-supporter Raymond Massey!]. Among them is the 1967 lecture by Martin Luther King, which the reader expected to be something along the lines of the noble sentiments expressed in King's most famous speech, the 1963 "I Have A Dream" oration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

What Fr. de Souza found lurking there instead, to his immense disappointment, was the germ of anti-Americanism and statist dependency now thundering from the pulpit of Chicago's Trinity United Church (just as much under its new pastor as under its conveniently retired Pastor Wright), and, by all reports, from the pulpits of many other predominantly black churches across America.

For King admirers, accustomed to his prophetic denunciations of violence and injustice, it is almost painful listening to him distinguish between the rioters' violence against property, rather than persons...

While the earlier King emphasized the virtue, discipline and community strength of black America as the means for achieving their emancipation, the later King takes a more statist tone, blaming an economic system that can only be changed by massive government spending... The Massey Lectures have the tone not of prophetic emancipation, but rather a campaign brief for the Great Society expansion of the welfare state.

In 1967, King is greatly preoccupied with the injustice of the Vietnam War, which he opposed strongly. But he has allowed himself to be seduced by the anti-Americanism that tainted the antiwar movement: "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own Government."

It is painful to read that. Whatever American sins were in Vietnam, it is impossible to justify that claim, while hundreds of millions were imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, while millions were starved off the land in the Great Leap Forward.

... in giving comfort to that view, he helped sow seeds that produced the vitriolic anti-Americanism that Reverend Wright demonstrated is now commonplace in parts of black America.

Read it all. And wonder whether anywhere south of the 49th parallel there will be journalists who dare to make this unhappy connection on the anniversary of that day [as U2 would headline it] "Thursday morning, April 4th, shots ring out in the Memphis sky."


SPEAKING OF HEADLINES

Over at Jewish World Review, Jack Kelly reads the tea-leaves on purposely ambiguous headlines about the Iraqi army's Operation Knight's Charge against Muqtada Al Sadsack's Mahdi Army, and the subsequent call (by Mookie himself) for a cease-fire. Not quite outright deception in the Cronkite-Tet tradition, but sufficiently contortionist to disguise the increasingly good news coming (or not) out of Basra.


SPEAKING OF RACE IN AMERICA,
JEREMIAH WRIGHT,
BARACK OBAMA, and all that

Ann Coulter, of all people, [I read her today so you don't have to -- I don't usually, but the headline drew me in] has been reading Obama's audacious autobiography. Well, at least one of them. We know that his 46-years have been SO remarkable that he merits TWO already!

I have my problems with Coulter, but her piece basically relates unvarnished quotations from Obama himself, and it would be hard to write anything more damning. Think he threw his white Grandma under the bus in his apologetic for Pastor Wright? [de-constructed brilliantly here by Mark Steyn] Well, he had long ago thrown Mama from the train in a much more vicious way. After reassuring his worried mother that he wasn't into drugs (was this even true?) with a pat on the hand, he goes on "to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people." [Coulter]

It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.

He's talking about his mother -- like some stranger on a bus or in a shop for whom he needs to act out this soothing pantomime to check some reflexive panic generated by her own son based on his skin-tone! This is deeply twisted.

The most twisted thing about it is that one is left only two possibilities as to where this comes from. Either he has spent his entire rather privileged life as a seething vat of race-based resentment, expertly masked behind a face of moderation and benevolence (in which case we can't lay his attitudes at the door-step of Pastor Wright) -- or he has re-written a problematic but hardly agonizing, and in many ways quite ordinarily pleasant, youth into a saga of racial alienation and suffering, very much under the tutelage of the hate-mongering pastor who has regularly harangued him for most of his adult life.


Either way, Obama comes out looking bad-- he has phonied-up himself in one fashion or another. The only question is, was it for all of his life, or only the last half? A number of his school-friends say they do not recognize the angst-ridden youth of the books -- that they never had the conversations he relates which smolder with racial resentment and alienation. I'm inclined to believe them. Obama's recollections sound entirely too complicated to have been lived out in his boyhood, at least without having brought him to some kind of mental collapse or demonstration of rage long before his star rose at Harvard.

I'm inclined to think this is all post-Wright revisionism. Which is not to say that I think he really believes any of it. It may well be nothing more than the creation of a character that he thought would advance his political ambitions. Mark Steyn, as usual, has this aspect NAILED. [Listen here to his interview on Hugh Hewitt's radio show -- scroll down to #15.]

LIAR, LIAR,
PANTSUIT ON FIRE

The reason she's so good at it is because she's been doing it FOREVER.

Dan Calabrese of the Michigan-based NorthStar Writers Group files an interesting report of one element of Hillary Clinton's l-o-o-o-o-n-n-n-g-g-g history of Fighting for You, and her v-a-a-a-a-s-s-t experience in national affairs-- i.e., her service on the Watergate investigation team.

FROM WHICH SHE WAS FIRED.

FOR LYING.

AND UNETHICAL CONDUCT.

Source: Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who "fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career."

According to Zeifman, Hillary Rodham, with Burke Marshall [Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair!], special counsel John Doar, and senior associate special counsel [future Clinton White House Counsel] Bernard Nussbaum

engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation. Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach...

Munch on the whole thing here. [hat-tip: Hot Air, via Instapundit]

[N.B.: Just so's ya know -- I beat Rush Limbaugh to this scoop, thanks to the Hat-tipsters above-mentioned.]


LATEST REPORT ON THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE

"FULL METAL PANTSUIT"

THE BULLET MRS. CLINTON WAS REALLY DODGING

Over at Slate.com the perennially pissed (and I mean that in a nice way) Christopher Hitchens unloads one of his typically vein-popping demolition-jobs on Hillary Clinton, to the effect that
(a) not only did she lie shamelessly about being in danger while at least 4,000 American soldiers were protecting her worthless hide when she landed in Bosnia, BUT
(b) she also had a hand in throwing untold thousands of Bosnian Muslims under the Ethnic Cleansing bus when she leaned on Bill to waffle on his previous commitment to defend them, because it would distract from her brilliant national health-care initiative. Money quote:

The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.

Wow. Got to hand it to Hitchens -- when he's outraged, he works without a net. Read it all here.


IN OTHER ELECTION NEWS:

In case you don't recognize him, he's THIS GUY:

THINGS I COULDN'T FORGET
BECAUSE I NEVER KNEW THEM
BECAUSE I WASN'T PAYING ATTENTION

Ultimate political animal Dick Morris relates the startling number of domestic terrorist acts committed between 1974 and 1982 in New York and Chicago by Puerto Rican terrorists pardoned by Bill Clinton in 1999, during his legacy-building, Hillary-for-senator-boosting executive pardon binge [get a coffee and donut before settling in to read this list -- IT'S HUGE-- more here] in his last presidential days before leaving office (with armloads of office supplies and home furnishings). Apparently it was all his staff's fault (everything is always someone else's fault if you're a Clinton) -- seems they were busy doing more than just vandalizing the typewriters.

Money quotes:

Two days before the president announced the clemency deal, New York City Councilman Jose Rivera personally presented Hillary with a packet on clemency, including a letter asking her to 'speak to the president and ask him to consider granting executive clemency' to the prisoners.

...Even in those pre-9/11 days, pardoning terrorists who weren't even remorseful drew public outrage; candidate Hillary soon wound up condemning Bill's decision.

[h/t Jewish World Review]


AND ANOTHER THING I NEVER KNEW:
MOOKIE AL SADR IS GOING TO GRAD SCHOOL

Cincinnatus blogs from Iraq with as much unclassified dirt on the all-Iraqi Basra smackdown campaign as he could squeeze out of the intel guy -- what spurred it (Muqtada al Sadsack announced he was planning to study for his Imamship, signalling that he was backing off from his sworn goal to violently oppose whatever needed opposing, so as to keep the bombs going off indefinitely), and how it's going (not good, so far, but it ain't over yet).


I WANTED TO TAKE PART IN 'EARTH HOUR' TONIGHT BUT...

...there was so much glare coming off the lights in every room in my house and both front and back porches that I couldn't see the electric clock well enough to detect when the hour started, and besides I was too busy watching basketball on my electric TV set and drinking cold beer out of my electric refrigerator.


When things get really absurd, it's time to call on acerbic libertarian zingermeister P.J. O'Rourke to tell us just how bad it really is. Apropos of Earth Hour/Day/Shoes/In The Balance [h/t Ms. Shaidle], P.J. opines:

(1) The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.


(2) The people who believe that, as a result of industrial development, life is about to become a hell, or may be one already, are guilty, at least, of sloppy pronouncements. On page 8 of Earth in the Balance, Al Gore claims that his study of the arms race gave him "a deeper appreciation for the most horrifying fact in all our lives: civilization is now capable of destroying itself."
In the first place, the most horrifying fact in many of our lives is that our ex-spouse has gotten ahold of our ATM card. And civilization has always been able to destroy itself. The Greeks of ancient Athens, who had a civilization remarkable for lack of technological progress during its period of greatest knowledge and power, managed to destroy them fine.

(3) Sen. Ted Kennedy: "And when the Reagan administration was selling arms to Iran, WHERE WAS GEORGE?"
Answer: Dry, sober, and at home with his wife.

I don't know what this last bit has to do with the environment, but I feel my personal environment improves exponentially when somebody stuffs it to Ted Kennedy. More O'Rourke jewels here.

GOOD NEWS FROM THE FRONT

When Cincinnatus signed up for the Corps back in '03, we started our subscription to Leatherneck Magazine, which calls itself the "Magazine of the Marines" though that's in a pretty familial sense, since most of the news from the battlefield is a couple of months old and admittedly boosterish. Then there are the history articles, the profiles of people, places, weapon systems, and new books of interest. So it's not exactly the strategist's in-house organ. But we like it, and it still tells some hard truths.

Every month I make myself go to the page titled 'In Memoriam'. It usually falls somewhere past page 50. It begins with a black-bordered box which lists all Marines who have died, by whatever means (hostile or not) on active duty the previous month-- economical notices of the name, rank, age, home base, place and cause of death. That's followed by a page or more of notices of the passing of old vets, usually aged anywhere from 50 to 85, with obituary tributes of varying lengths.

In the worst of times these past five years the black box has taken up half or more of the first page. I make myself read every name and age, and the circumstances, and I try to imagine the pain of their families as the lives of their 18 and 19-year-old treasures, and a world of dreams for them, come to an abrupt halt.

Since early 2007 there has been a sea-change in the size of that box. It varies from month to month, but on the whole it has been mercifully shrinking. The March 2008 issue of Leatherneck arrived last week. On page 58 we read the following:

Ooh-rah.

Praise God.

A GENUINE IRAQI MARTYR:

ARCHBISHOP PAULOS FARAJ RAHHO, Chaldean Bishop of Mosul, was found dead today, after having been kidnapped two weeks ago and held for an enormous ransom of weapons and money. He had just finished saying the Stations of the Cross at the Church of the Holy Spirit, and was about leave in a car with three unarmed companions, all of whom were killed when their car was attacked. The Archbishop was then kidnapped at gunpoint.

As a man in need of medication for a heart condition, it was thought that he might have died from his chronic ill health, but

Church officials said Thursday, however, that Archbishop Rahho was shot in the leg when he was abducted on Feb. 29. Gunmen sprayed his car with bullets, killed two bodyguards and shoved the archbishop into the trunk of a car, the church officials said. In the darkness, he managed to pull out his cellphone and call the church, telling officials not to pay a ransom for his release, they said.

“He believed that this money would not be paid for good works and would be used for killing and more evil actions,” the officials said. [h/t New York Times]

Appeals from the Vatican and the Iraqi government for his safe return were ignored. If there were formal appeals from the U.S. government they did not make headlines, but American soldiers accompanied Iraqi special forces in the hunt for the Archbishop.

Authorities were tipped off by the Archbishop's murderers about the location of his body, which was found in a shallow grave outside Mosul. He had been dead for as much as five days.

Looks like a real trouble-maker, doesn't he? Oh, yeah, this guy had to go.

Gotta hand it to those geniuses in Al Qaeda-- they really know how to advance their cause. Dick Cheney got ahead of himself a few years ago (no, really?) , but it seems pretty clear that the rubbish at AQI have finally become bona fide 'dead-enders.' This was a desperate, pathetic pointless killing -- their stock-in-trade, actually, so no news there.

A statement of disgust and condemnation of this crime, issued by the Ramadan Foundation, a British organization of Muslim Youth, is welcomed -- let's hear more of this from you folks in the R.O.P. (Religion o' Peace)

For the repose of the soul of Archbishop Rahho:



Barring anything nuclear, Winefred bids farewell from now until the dawn of Resurrection.


Easter music of Jachet de Berchem -- O Jesu Christe

SOMETIMES JON STEWART GETS IT, LIKE, TOTALLY RIGHT



AND SOMETIMES A GUY NAMED "WRIGHT" GETS IT ALL WRONG



"Jesus was a poor black man...." Well, I guess that's a lie of convenience when, like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, you've given honors to Louis Farrakhan, who has some, er, problems with Jews and their "gutter religion".....

Note: It is everywhere claimed that Farrakhan never actually called Judaism a "gutter religion" -- only a "dirty religion." Well that's completely different. One customer/reviewer of Arthur J. Magida's Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation, over at Amazon.com, sets us straight on the origin of this apocryphal insult. What Minister Farrakhan really said was,

...to practice judaism, which is following the doctrine of the law of moses the lawgiver in the old testament of the bible, according to orthodox jews is the true judaism. To exploit people, particularly BLACK people, feeding on them and taking money out of the BLACK community charging exorbitant prices for cheaply made goods and services, is someone that is practicing a gutter religion by using BLACK people to enrich the jewish community.

Ah. You see how these things can get blown all out of proportion?


GOOD THING NOBODY AT THE CLINTON CAMPAIGN HAS NOTICED ANY OF THIS RACE STUFF GOING ON AT OBAMA'S CHRISTIAN MADRASSA PARISH, OR ANYTHING RACIAL OR BLACK OR DIVISIVE OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT, EVER, EVER, EVER.





WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU?




Army Spc. MONICA BROWN, a medic, wins the Silver Star for Valor for saving lives in Afghanistan.

Maybe we won't have a woman president this time around, but maybe, maybe......


WHILE, ON THE OTHER HAND....
WHAT GENIUS SUGGESTED THIS GUY TO
HEAD UP THE MIDDLE EAST COMMAND?

Admiral William "Fox" Fallon was promoted from his job as chief underminer of U.S./China policy at the Pacific Command, to undermining U.S. Middle East policy over at CINCCENT. Now he be outta here. "Resigned" was the euphemism, I think.

Max Boot weighs in as to why he got the boot, at the L.A. Times. Fred Kaplan gives the broad picture at Slate.com. Everybody would have us believe that Fallon's no fool, but the fact that he invited Esquire magazine to lick his toes, and that he seems to have a Nancy Pelosi-esque grasp of the success of the Surge, makes us wonder if it depends on what your definition of "fool" is. (Especially if his disdain of the surge has more to do with disdain for General Petraeus than for the facts on the ground.)

Maybe we'll get the real story if Fallon gives another interview at AL-FREAKING-JAZEERA.

What genius, I ask you? Why, I believe it's that Bob Gates fellow, who all in all would probably rather be at A & M. He has struck me as a bit weenie from the get-go, and seems to be determined to fulfill my worst nightmare that he's just another failed Texas crony of W's. Oy. Well, at least Fallon resigned instead of staying on, lying low, and then whining publicly about bad ideas that weren't his fault (see Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez --- WA-A-A-A-A-H-H-H-H! )

WHERE THE BUCK REALLY STOPS IN THIS MAN'S ARMY -- and debriefing

SIR, YES SIR!

Just checking out the website of Officer Training Command Newport, where #3 son is newly admitted into the Navy. Did not find immediate answer to the question I had in mind, but the following seemed extremely informative:

If you are a NEW ACCESSION attending ODS, DCO, OCS, you are not required to complete the NKO portion of the CBT's until arrival to OTC.

To establish a NKO/e-Learning Account, click on the links below:

All prior enlisted personnel, ODS, LDO/CWO, DCO, OCS, NSI, BOOST,

are required to complete the online courses

Mmm-kay.....


Perhaps these ladies can translate...


for the benefit of these guys...

Ahoy-vay!

LET THE VEEPSTAKES BEGIN!
MCCAIN CLINCHES IT



Ladies and gentlemen,
the Republican nominee.




Sleep with one eye open.




HRC
(Her Royal Cackleness)
pulls it out of the fire in Texas and Ohio


Middle East be damned -- she's got her own Two-State Solution.

HUCK-A-BOom.....


The Arkansas governor, compares himself to St. Paul, quotes the prophet Isaiah and former Kansas City Royal George Brett, and bows out. And that's a good thing.

DO YOU THINK THEY'LL VOTE FOR YOU IF I
BUY THEM ALL A CAR????

WHAT I'M READING

This morning I decided to pick up a book I've had on the shelf for ages, that Buckley kid's No Way to Treat a First Lady.

Not just because we're all still keening over the loss of WFB and have Buckleys on the brain -- I had been thinking for some time that this was an opportune season for once again revelling in the satirical verbgasms of WFB's son and heir Christopher [looking winsome at left], in his thinly veiled fantasy about the White House murder that might have been, had certain lamps and ash-trays taken a fatal path.

Talk about last minute -- I've started the book just 24 hours before what may be the final day when it can be assumed absolutely that any literate American will understand what it's about. After tomorrow, when Hillary Clinton's political career will likely be dealt its mortal wound, the relevance and recognition factor for Buckley's hilarious (Hillary-us) novel will have begun their warp-speed plummet. Catch it while it's still maximum fun, people!

The reality-based inspiration for Buckley's tale of a First Lady accused of "assassinating" her POTUS-husband [after he's found dead in the bed next to her, following an energetic tryst in the Lincoln bedroom with a donor's wife and then the ensuing marital smack-down] is clearly the embattled Clinton-on-Clinton White House marriage during the Lewinsky period -- a fact which might have him courting accusations of slander were he not to draw a clear, chronological distinction between his aptly-named lead character, "Beth MacMann" (Lady Bethmac) and the former First Lady, on page 21, calling Beth

a far cry from Hillary Clinton, who contented herself with taking care of her husband and giving the occasional tea for congressional wives.

Uh, yeah. We all recognize that woman.


HOW WE KNOW THAT RADICAL FEMINISM IS DEAD
[and it's not just because this is a Hillary item]

Feminist eye-con Gloria Steinem displayed her customary grace and perspective while out on the stump for Mrs. Clinton in Texas. Money quote:

Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight years. [The media would ask], ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?

[Audience laughter -- at what???? This passes for wit? Not to mention that it makes no sense whatever.]

I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don’t think so...I am so grateful that she [Clinton] hasn’t been trained to kill anybody. And she probably didn’t even play war games as a kid. It’s a great relief from Bush in his jump suit and from Kerry saluting...from George Washington to Jack Kennedy and PT-109 we have behaved as if killing people is a qualification for ruling people.

Oy.


Let's have a memory moment -- it's 2004 and Ms. Steinem has hit the political trail again:

Steinem still has the leggy looks of a rock star -- and enough edginess to bring a room full of punk rockers to their feet. She did that in November when she introduced the feminist punk band Le Tigre while on the road stumping for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

John Kerry -- hot rocker and baby-killer. What a relief not to be campaigning for that guy again!
























Mrs. Clinton hits on yet another winning strategy.

A LITTLE TOUCH OF HARRY --
HE WISHES IT HAD BEEN MORE

Back at my post of May 16 last year I opined as how Prince Harry's aborted deployment to Iraq [Basra] with the British Army was the shameful work of a shameless media -- that if they could just keep it under wraps termporarily, he might successfully deploy to the hinterlands of Afghanistan, and do some soldier-stuff that might yet make a man of him, not to mention serving his country in an inspiring way.

The Brits obviously took my advice (heh) -- but the shameless media of other countries did not.

Harry put in ten good weeks, and then a couple of marginal ladies'-type publications in Germany and Australia let the royal kitten out of the bag.

This could have gone pretty much unnoticed, but then the human megaphone, Matt Drudge, got hold of the story, and the jig was up. Harry had to be extracted forthwith from Afghanistan for the safety of himself and his comrades (though he will probably now be a fairly good-sized target in Britain -- that was inevitable, one supposes).

Drudge, on the whole, does pretty good public service -- he only occasionally gets ahead of himself on the facts. But in this case, he had his facts correct -- he just had no conscience about the consequences of making them public. He could have waited six more weeks -- then big headlines, big graphics, big story on the Prince Who Pounded the Taliban. But he refused to risk being scooped. So he put a big fat target on Harry's back, and the backs of his mates. But what the hell, eh? Drudge got the big score -- that's what counts, right?

Drudge offers an email for comments, [DRUDGE@DRUDGEREPORT.COM] but I'm not aware that they ever get posted anywhere. So here's what I sent him:

I don't suppose we'll ever know exactly who was first to leak that Prince Harry was serving in Afghanistan, though I understand the Drudge Report boasted an exclusive. Imagine that -- boasting at being first to put not just Harry but everyone he serves with in imminent danger of being specially, and no doubt spectacularly, targeted for death by Taliban murderers. You must be so proud!

As the parent of two members of the American military (one in Iraq), and a friend to people with a son in the British army (who served in Basra, and dreaded the scheduled deployment of Prince Harry there, once it was broadcast in the news), I condemn whole-heartedly your complicity in the publication of news which served no purpose whatsoever beyond endangering the lives of finer men than you, and frustrating the remote possibility that an aristocratic wastrel might be made something resembling a man at last, for the betterment of both himself and the increasingly sad-sack country over which his family reigns. Had he been permitted to complete his deployment without exposure, the headlines and your readership would have been just as big when the word got out that he had returned home -- no loss to you.

Disgusting. Shame.

When CODE PINK calls a CODE RED --
Who ya gonna call?

Not Ghostbusters!

Misery-muffin, motor-mouth, and pain-in-the-peacenik, the (appropriately-named) Medea Benjamin, apparently got into a scuffle with a drive-by spit artist while striking peaceful poses in front of the embattled Marine recruiting office in Berkeley, CA. She had the stones to chase after the guy until he got out of his car to confront her, at which time she feared for her safety and pushed the panic button.

Unfortunately for her, this time there were no police anywhere in sight, so she did what real Americans do in a crisis.

She called out for [wait for it] the Marines.

Some radio talker (of whom I know nothing else) covers the whole thing here.
[h/t Michelle Malkin at HOT AIR]

Gotta love it.

THINGS TO MAKE YOU SAY,
"HM-M-M-M-M-M...."

Creative soul Roger von Oech is visiting Vietnam, including the place John McCain called "home" (NOT) for 5 1/2 years. Take a gander. [h/t Instapundit]


Meanwhile back in Sweet Home Chicago, one of Barack Obambi's close associates, Tony Rezko, [pictured at left between.... Bill and Hill! Love it!] goes on trial on charges of being one of the bigger rats in the sewer which is (and has been for a good century and a half) Chicago/Illinois politics.

Promises to be revealing as to just what sort of goo Mr. Obambi had to wade in, in order to shoot to the top in so short a time. The proceedings do not appear to be aimed with any specificity at He-who-shall-not-be-middle-named, but it remains to be seen whether there will be something lingering around him besides the Odor of Sanctity. [h/t Instapundit again, with help from NewsAlert and ABC]


YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS INDEPENDENT MEDIA IN CANADA

... and they're saying that Obambi is talking out of both sides of his mouth about NAFTA. Thanks to CTV for reporting that there's apparently some nudge-nudge/wink-wink going on when the Senator tells Ohio that NAFTA will be up for grabs in an Obama administration -- because his operatives tell Canadian trade officials that, aw shucks, he's just joshin', 'cause he's tryin' to win an election. Captain Ed, now at HOT AIR, gives the details.