CARDINAL GEORGE READS MY BLOG (heh)

Taking my advice (and doubtless that of many others), Cardinal Francis George of Chicago pulled the execrable Fr. Michael Pfleger out of his parish for a couple of weeks of reflection. Too little, too late, I fear, since his personal corruption of the priestly vocation has too long infected his flock and now they are howling and hunger-striking for his re-instatement.

It should never have come to this -- Pfleger has a history of histrionic and outrageous behaviour, arrests for showboating acts of civil disobedience, and has clearly cultivated a form of worship which is antithetical to the conduct of a Catholic Mass.

[Listen to the rambling, hysterical recorded sermon from a week ago, available on the parish website-- listen to the mindlessly raucous response among the congregation, and you'll get the picture. It's the sermon where he compares Herod and Pontius Pilate to Hannity and Colmes, and is basically an anti-YouTube diatribe making excuses (without mentioning any names) for what we've learned about him and Jeremiah Wright. Note that the recordings available for sale feature sermons by celebrity guest preachers, predominantly non-ordained, even non-Catholic -- Harry Belafonte, Cornel West, Otis Moss, Marian Wright Edelman -- which is a violation of Catholic liturgical directives.]

Pfleger has been pastor of St. Sabina's for over 25 years. I don't know how common that is in American diocesan practice, but it's unheard of in my neck of the Catholic woods, where a priest typically stays in one parish between 6 and 10 years -- precisely to avoid the kind of entrenched fiefdom and personality cult Pfleger has created for himself in south Chicago.

Check out the Pastor's CV link on the parish website, and see what he's been up to all these years: a huge scroll of social activist credits and community awards suggesting careerism and publicity-seeking that could hardly spare him time for conventional, unspectacular Catholic pastoral work. In the most obvious case, Pfleger has conducted an ongoing public battle against a wide range of liquor advertising, some of which seems a very conventional exercise of freedom of expression about a legal product, by companies like Seagram's, on the grounds that it is somehow targeted to children. As a priest, would it not have been better to expend this energy within his parish sphere, preaching against the kind of personal moral decay that leads to neglect of children, broken families, and alcohol abuse?

This man has clearly been out of control for most of his tenure at St. Sabina's, and the fact that he has operated unchecked all this time betrays rank negligence on the part of the current and previous Cardinals. Amongst other things, he has adopted two children, now adults-- who let this happen? Sorry, dude, but when you become a priest you choose a way of life which precludes behaving like a married man, including taking on private, personal fatherhood, which can only come at the expense of pastoral fatherhood -- or vice versa. Pfleger's has been a career full of grand public gestures. He may well have taken decent care of his adopted sons, and he may have worked for worthwhile social causes-- but that doesn't mean these were appropriate to his vocation as a pastor.

Now Pfleger is an international scandal (thanks to YouTube). This should never have happened. Sadly, given the state of Catholic leadership in the past few decades, it is no great surprise.


OH OH OH OBAMESSIAH

I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless, this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal... [h/t New York Times ]

Sweet Jesus!!!! (And I DON'T mean YOU, Barack!)

I'd be the first one to acknowledge that John McCain exudes a certain type of grating arrogance from time to time, but he's got NOTHIN' on Barack -- a man who can't seem to stop at mere [vapid] rhetorical flight, and plows on to borderline blasphemy. The only thing new in his victory speech was an odd sense of anger that arose a few minutes in (shortly after he tried to redeem himself by hauling his grandmother out from under the bus where she'd been dragging along since March) and persisted to the end.

THIS JUST IN: HILLARY WILL SUSPEND

Hillary Clinton announced this evening that she will suspend her campaign as of this Friday.

Well, that's the campaign for the Presidency. Her campaign for the Vice-Presidency was launched full tilt boogie in her speech after winning the South Dakota primary last night, stealing Obama's thunder on the night he, truly, accomplished a revolutionary moment in American political and social history.

Be it understood: the serious candidacy of a woman and a black man for the office of President is a revolutionary moment, and is welcomed, in theory. But it's kind of a sad moment, too, in that neither this woman nor this man is fit to hold that office.

Cynics and America-bashers enjoy accusing the country of not being ready for a woman or a black president. BOLLOCKS, as the Brits would say. We're ready. But this is not the right woman, and not the right black man. Together, or separately, I believe the country would recognize this and not elect either of them. The bashers will attribute all kinds of vile motives to it, but it's only wisdom.

JOHN MCCAIN --
QUINTILLIAN, HENRY HIGGINS, CALL YOUR OFFICE!

McCain will never win on style, though it would be possible to write a speech which better suits his limited rhetorical gifts than the one he gave, so very lamely, last night. Speech writers, please, do not try to put the cheap gimmick of the Pentecostal refrain into McCain's mouth ["That's not change you can believe in......"]-- it's just not him. The word-smiths did him no service.

Obama has proposed to re-visit the Lincoln-Douglas debates: prepared statements lasting 90 minutes! [Like a sermon at Trinity United? Arghhhhh.] Perfect for Barack the teleprompter king. McCain has proposed, more realistically, a series of town meetings, taking questions from Real People: perfect for him, disaster for the fumbling unscripted Obama.

Let the games begin.

OBAMA CLINCHES

WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

Jack Kelly over at Jewish World Review scans the dossier on the incredibly junior senator from Chicagoland. It's worth posting the whole durned thing:

"GIVE OBAMA THE POTATO TEST"

"We have not exhausted our non-military options in confronting the Iranian threat; in many ways, we have yet to try them," Sen. Barack Obama says on his Web site. "If Iran abandons it nuclear program and support for terrorism, we will offer incentives like membership in the World Trade Organization."

It was Albert Einstein who first defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

"Perhaps Mr. Obama is unaware that one of (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad's first acts was to freeze Tehran's efforts for securing WTO membership because he regards the outfit as 'a nest of conspiracies by Zionists and Americans,'" wrote Amir Taheri in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday.

In 2006, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice offered Iran a package of incentives including "improving Iran's access to the international economy, markets and capital, through practical support for full integration into international structures, including the WTO..."

Sen. Obama can escape Einstein's charge of insanity by pleading ignorance. He didn't know about U.S. overtures to Iran, or Mr. Ahmadinejad's rejection of them. But shouldn't a candidate for president know these things?

In last week's column, I twitted Sen. Obama for saying he'd campaigned in 57 states, for not knowing that his home state of Illinois borders on Kentucky, and for claiming the Cuban Missile Crisis (October, 1962) was defused by President Kennedy's summit meeting with Nikita Khruschchev (June, 1961). Earlier, Sen. Obama said 10,000 people were killed when a tornado struck Greensburg, Kansas last year (the death toll was 12), and assumed Afghans speak Arabic (they don't).

After Sen. Obama took opposite sides on successive days last week on whether Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez should be engaged or isolated, ABC's Jake Tapper described him as "a one man gaffe machine." And that was before his Memorial Day twofer. Speaking in New Mexico, Sen. Obama seemed not to understand Memorial Day honors those who died in war, and claimed his uncle was one of the soldiers who liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. Since Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, and Barack's mom was an only child, this is unlikely.

When this misstatement was spotted by bloggers, the Obama campaign said the senator had in mind his great uncle, Charles W. Payne, who, the campaign said, had served in the 89th Infantry Division, which liberated Ohrdruf, a slave labor camp that was a satellite of Buchenwald. This explanation has satisfied most journalists. But Charles W. Payne is not listed on the roster of the 89th Infantry Division, perhaps because the Kansas State Historical Society says Charles W. Payne entered the Navy on Nov. 10, 1942.

Sen. Obama has told the Auschwitz story before. But in an Oct. 2, 2002 speech, the protagonist was his grandfather: "My grandfather signed up for the war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army," Mr. Obama said then. "He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka." (Stanley Dunham entered the Army on June 18, 1942. Treblinka, which, like Auschwitz, is in Poland, was liberated by the Red Army.)

It isn't a good idea to take what Sen. Obama says at face value. As facts emerged, he issued eight different descriptions of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The "uncle at Auschwitz" story might be again revised.

Dan Quayle was just 41 and looked younger when George H. W. Bush plucked him from relative obscurity to be his running mate. Journalists portrayed Mr. Quayle as inexperienced and not too bright, an image cemented on June 15, 1992, when, while officiating at a spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey, he corrected a 12-year-old's spelling of "potato," telling the boy there was an e on the end.

Mr. Quayle was wrong, but not terribly. "Potatoe" was an accepted spelling through the 19th Century, and the error was on a cue card provided by school authorities. But journalists needed no further proof that Dan Quayle was a dunce.

Journalists have been more kind to Sen. Obama, though his gaffes exceed those of Mr. Quayle, and he has less experience. Mr. Quayle had served four years in the House and eight in the Senate before becoming vice president.

Still, the question arises: Can Barack Obama spell "potato?"

D-DAY IN VANCOUVER:
WE WILL FIGHT THEM ON THE BEACHES, DUDE!

GNARLY!

Today is the opening day of the British Columbia Human Rights Commission kangaroo court trial of MacLean's Magazine for the thought crime of publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn's (as it were) seminal work on the demographic suicide of the West.

Canada inches closer to parallel rule by Shari'a? Follow the story as National Post reporter Andrew Coyne liveblogs from the courtroom here.


Keep up to date with the merry band at Free Mark Steyn who have nominated him an honorary Scotsman in the William Wallace mold.

Buy a tee-shirt to support Steyn's (much less affluent) fellow victims of HRC tyranny, the Canuck 6 .

DEMONSTRATE , even as we speak (8:00 a.m. Western time), oh hip and edgy Vancouverites who once prided yourselves at being part of the "revolution", northern-most bead in the demonic rosary of the left coast -- outside Robson courthouse, with the merry band from the Covenant Zone, folks bold enough to envision a new Canada where we back up and start again at Magna Carta.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FRONT:

Presidential Hopeful Barack O'Bama visits Mt. Rushmore and asks the kind of tourist question that gets Americans mocked and deplored in the high-culture hot-spots of Europe:

"Duh, how did Cary Grant get up there?"

The day before, the Obamas resigned from their membership in Chicago's infamous Trinity United Church of .... [oh God, I can't even say it] after yet another flagrantly racist foaming diatribe was delivered, this time by guest preacher (and long-time Obama spiritual adviser, until that evening when he got scrubbed from the website) Catholic priest Fr. Michael Pfleger. Observe the following grotesque white minstrel shows:






And later the same day, at his own church, Saint Sabina:




And Mr. Obama expects us to take him at his word when he asks, "Duh, how did these racists get up there?"

Memo to Chicago's Cardinal Francis George (my dinner companion once, and a very fine man):

This is NOT ENOUGH. You must deal with this man.

I understand that the diocese has been reluctant to move or muzzle him because he's "popular and successful" in his parish. As Mother Teresa once put it: God does not ask us to be successful -- he asks us to be faithful.

Fr. Pfleger is a perverse, delusional, unstable megalomaniac in the thrall of the Evil One. Such people are often successful, and tremendously popular too!

One of the advantages of a hierarchical Church is that people in authority can act to purge those with spiritually poisonous views. I am never one to advocate kicking our worst offenders out of the priesthood, thereby loosing them on an unsuspecting society where they can do further harm under no one's authority.

I believe Fr. Pfleger (like Cardinal Law, and any number of other bad apples) should be moved to remote locations where good priests and other religious labour from dawn till dusk to minister to the truly deprived: the diseased, disabled, abandoned and impoverished of Africa, India, Jamaica, Haiti -- where every day is like the last, and tomorrow will look the same, as you bathe, clothe, feed, bandage, comfort, bless, and finally bury the poorest of the poor, day in and day out until the end of your days.

It is good work. It can redeem, even the arrogant showboater, or the craven and comfortable bureaucrat. Cardinal George, for the sake of the reputation of your wounded Church, and for the sake of the corrupted soul of your Chicago priest, deal with Fr. Pfleger, NOW.

I'M BEHIND IN MY READING....

BECAUSE:

We've been bizzy bizzy with family stuff, including and mostly, the culmination of #3 son's term at Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport. Proud moments all round, enhanced by attendance of #1 son, freshly returned from Iraq. These two book-ended #2 son, who is set to change the world in the battle for energy independence!

Triple threat, folks!

The new ensign would never sully the relationship by gushing so, but I'm sure he joins us in bottomless gratitude to the man breathlessly known to his maggots as "Drill-Instructor-Gunnery-Sergeant-Jones- United-States-Marine-Corps"-- thanks, Gunny, for turning him into a mensch.


We don't know who shot it -- and Gunny Jones would like to shoot whoever shot it -- but some freakshow went "outside the family" and posted their drill competition on YouTube. It was HOT.




ON THE BOOKSHELF

Nobody noticed much -- well, at least not the same folks who are reading What Happened* with drool running down their chins-- when former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, published War and Decision, the definitive (so far) and authoritative account of the Bush administration's path to war in Iraq. That's because the book is so detailed, exhaustively documented and footnoted that it was obviously too serious to be ground up and spat out in 15 seconds by Chris Matthews. So, like, who cares, eh?


*On the up-tipped (for lack of weight) end of the see-sawing book shelf comes the slash-and-burn memoirs of former Bush White House Press Secretary "Beam me up Scotty" McClellan, called, amusingly What Happened-- what indeed?

Seems the short and doughy one took his thumb out of his mouth long enough to apply his fingers to the keyboard, in an attempt to put the hurt on the guy who, he thinks, did him dirt.

Of course, he's a little confused about how it was that Bush did him dirt-- it wasn't by feeding him tainted wafflings, nor by relieving him of his position. The real injury inflicted on McClellan by Bush was giving him the Press Secretary job in the first place, a position for which he was manifestly unsuited from Day 1, and had improved not one whit by Day 750 or whenever it was that he was blissfully put out of our misery.

I stand by my first assessment of Scott McClellan:

The Anchoress called him a “milquetoast.” She is entirely too kind. One hears many different things about Ari Fleischer, not all of them flattering, but as the guy facing the wolverines in the Washington press corps every day, he was a master. It was distressing to learn that he was leaving, and when McClellan stepped in I was convinced this had to be a temporary measure until a grown-up could be hired. From day one McClellan has struck me as the worst possible choice for his job, with the look of a sweaty, dough-faced prep-school prefect living in perpetual fear of being wedgied in the boys’ john and stuffed in a locker.

(the rest here) -- and I must say that he has fulfilled my highest expectations. (His book is published by folks associated with George Soros-- I'm just sayin'.) Even if one accepts the claim, now being blasted about, that McClellan's book is a pack of lies and lie-lets, Bush is still not off the hook insofar as this is yet another example of the price everybody has paid for the Texan's taste for cronyism over qualifications.

Cries of "lying Judas" seem a bit over the top in response to McClellan's oeuvre. I think "little puke" probably covers it.


FINISHED IN THREE SITTINGS.

READ THIS.

MICHAEL YON -- MOMENT OF TRUTH IN IRAQ.

Read this.

Ask politicians and pundits if they have.

Pay them no heed if they haven't.

OH HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY HERETICS!!

OH HAPPY CLAPPY CRAPPY HERETICS!!

Going viral on the 'net: the closing liturgy of the 2008 West Coast Call to Action conference, or, as it might otherwise be known, afternoon calisthenics at the seniors' home.

LOTTA gray hair in this group.

The processional hymn is SS-LO-O-O-O-W-W-W enough for our local St. Vincent de Paul, but I think we'd draw the line at the dancing. And the puppets.

[Did you hear the one about the middle-aged Martha-Graham-wannabe who got brained with a thurible?......]

HMH-361 checks in to
Marine Corps Air Station Miramar

-- reporting safe return, Sir-Yes-Sir.

Papa Bear is home.

BREATHE.












Now if he'd just report in to MOM!!!!
(waiting, waiting, waiting......)

CONFERENCE-BLOGGING FROM THE CAPITOL

The conference isn't mine -- I'm just a spousal hood ornament. We're ensconced in the old-world elegance of the [Fairmont] Chateau Laurier -- spacious grand lobby salons, tastefully dim hallways, room with 14-foot ceiling. All mod cons, conceived and acquired under the supervision of one Charles Melville Hays, then General Manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway of Canada, who unfortunately never spent a night in his beautiful hotel, due to his having chosen to report to Ottawa via an ocean voyage on the RMS Titanic in April 1912. Sigh.

Pleasant walk around the impressive Parliament Hill district. Not so pleasant walk around the slightly grubby tourist market area. Highlight of Day One: riding the elevator briefly with Salman Rushdie.

Day Two included some official activities, followed by my getting swept up into the flow of the annual March for Life, Canada's entry into the frustrating uphill battle against abortion. Not nearly so well-attended as its sister march in Washington, D.C. -- but this they have in common: no matter how many thousands, you won't see it reported on local or national news. It looked like this:

Also in the neighbourhood: Canada's official war memorial, the sculpture representing a scene from World War I, but built in remembrance of four major wars in which Canada has participated.

Magnificent, folks.

WHAT I'M READING:

Moment of Truth in Iraq by Michael Yon. Digests and expansions upon the dispatches of the past couple of years, spent embedded up to his eyeballs with troops in combat all over Iraq. Yon is one of a handful of self-embedded reporters, telling the facts and placing them in context (others: Michael Totten, Bill Roggio, J.D. Johannes [buy his documentary Outside the Wire]).

Cranky, melodramatic maybe -- Yon remains the Master.

WHAT I HAD FOR BREAKFAST THIS MORNING:

TOAST!!!!

JUST BECAUSE....

Kudos to anyone who's doing their bit for demographic balance, but some people obviously have more talent for it, in every way, than others. (Sheer speculation, but I don't imagine these are the sort of folks who attend Democratic fundraisers in San Francisco.)

[hat-tip: BMW, via Hugh Hewitt]

IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT,
GET AWAY FROM THE GREY-HAIRED WOMAN....

.....and if you can't cope with salty language, today is not your day to go skinny-dipping in Winefred's Well.

Time out from frothing about the Democratic candidates to assess the situation for the Republicans.

Kathy Shaidle (give her some money -- she's getting sued by Canadian fascists) has contributed what is probably the best of the "think positive" JOHN MCCAIN alternative campaign slogans:

"I don't know much about economics, but I did stay at the Hanoi Hilton once."

Very charitable of Kathy.

Here are some less positive, less charitable slogans (from IMAO), and one Consummate Redneck Triage Assessment (Hat-tip: Ms. Malkin @ HOT AIR).

MCCAIN:

---You hate him; he hates you; now lets kick some foreigner ass.

---He'll screw over terrorists even more than he screws over Republicans.

---Today's challenges require the leadership of a cranky old bastard.

---You think he cares what you blog? He didn't care when the Vietnamese were torturing him.

---If there's one issue you need your candidate to be right about, it's Iraq (which luckily is the only issue McCain is right about).

---McCain '08: The comeback grandpa!

---McCain. The Vietnam War isn't over until HE says it's over.

---McCain '08: Because the Path to Citizenship Runs Right Through Your Backyard

---We could do worse. Not much worse, but worse.

---McCain. Because these times call for blinding fits of white-hot rage.


AND JUST TO MAKE SURE THE LEVEL OF DISCOURSE DOESN'T GET TOO TOO ELEVATED--
Red State Update, comin' your way.

OH COME ON, NAT!
QUIT PUSSY-FOOTING, AND MAKE YOUR POINT!



Jazz critic, unswerving libertarian, happy atheist, and ardent pro-lifer, NAT HENTOFF, weighs in on the prospects of an
Obamanomination:




Infanticide candidate
for president

Oh.


money quote:

But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama — in the Illinois Senate — also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

(hat-tip Jewish World Review)

Stupid kid -- imagine having the audacity to hope for life.

TOP OF THE FOLD:

L.A. TIMES LAUNCHES DRIVE TO DECLARE DISABLED UNQUALIFIED FOR OFFICE WORK --

THE CHOICE ON JOHN MCCAIN:

EITHER HE'S TOO CRIPPLED TO BE PRESIDENT,
OR HE SHOULD LOSE HIS TAX-FREE MILITARY PENSION

Oh, and by the way, he's old, and he's had cancer.

Read all about it here and pay close attention to the Deep Thoughts of one Robert Schriebman, a senior Pentagon tax advisor and tax attorney who recently retired as a judge advocate for a unit of the California National Guard.

If McCain can hike across the Grand Canyon, then why should he be getting disability payments from the government that are tax-exempt, Schriebman asked.

Ooooooohhhh. And all those Iraq veterans seen running marathons on their prosthetic legs or wheeling through them in specialty wheelchairs -- why are these parasites getting tax-exempt payments, eh? Are there no prisons? Are there no work-houses?

Same goes for this parasite, Marine vet Eugene Roberts, who has run across the United States [for Jesus, no less] on two buggy-springs where his legs used to be until a little contretemps in Vietnam. What would he need a pension for anyway?






L.A. Times -- first on the ground to, um, doggedly pick up the news. No wonder this kind of crap is referred to as a "scoop".

HIATUS

Winefred bugs out for a few days, to attend a certain conference:


Ooh-rah, and all that. Winefred was proudly instrumental in arranging for the keynote speaker,

this guy.... [with that chest who needs kevlar?]














... who wrote this book==>



It's a long story.

Should be fun.

Will try valiantly to wave at Pope.

Film at 11:00.

WWDD?

What would Dante do?

Where would Dante put this guy? I imagine there's a very, very special little room with his name on it.

[Fair warning -- there's foul language. Kind of a Bill Maher specialty.]


As John Paul the Great, of happy memory, was wont to say, "Be not afraid." The vile slanders and poisonous hate of Bill Maher are not new-- we have endured worse, and who remembers the slanderers? Maher will pass away, perhaps stubbornly clinging to his bitterness and fear, and we will remember and believe in the divine order which governs all creatures, especially as it has been explained by such a magister as this one:

SWEET JESU, GEORGE, WILL YOU QUIT READING PEOPLE'S EYEBALLS????

Seems the President has been at it again with the retinal scans: sees God in the eyes of Pope Benedict XVI.

Stop it -- just stop it. Listen to the holy man, read his books -- knock it off with the "turn around, bright eyes" crap. You haven't exactly knocked anything out of the park so far with this little technique.

RECENTLY PROCLAIMED
FROM ATOP MT. SINAI

(translation: recently coughed up at a San Francisco fundraiser by the Obamassiah)

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

GALLERY OF BITTER SMALL-TOWNERS

CLINGING TO GUNS....

[BANG BANG -- I GOTCHA!]






[OKAY, I SURRENDER.]

AND RELIGION

THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH -- SMACKDOWN!

OUR INTREPID REPORTER, self-embedded war correspondent MICHAEL YON, gets a very, very, very timely op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. As usual, he produces the unexpected, perhaps even the counter-intuitive.

The Ship of Fools which is the American Congress (at least its Democratic leadership, and their lap-dogs in both parties and in the press gallery) should just give up and go home NOW, since they haven't the sense to hang their miserable heads in shame. Read it and weep, morons:

Let's 'Surge' Some More

[money quote:]

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.

[emphasis added - as if!]

Yon remains the man. Proud to have been slippin' him cash lo these many years.

CANADA'S HUMAN-RIGHTS NAZIS
STILL HARD AT WORK

It would take an air-traffic controller to sort out the lawsuits flying back and forth over Canadian skies, in the ongoing effort to make sure that Canadian standards of civility are maintained, those standards being:

(a) No one will ever say, publish, or THINK any idea which could be found discomfiting or offensive to any Muslimist, atheist, homosexualist, or pro-abortionist person, institution, or pet rabbit.

(b) Statute (a) will apply selectively and decreasingly to Jewists, but only if they are liberalists and either atheists or secularists.

(c) If Christianists or pro-life-ists or conservatists (large or small "C") of any persuasion whatever think that any provision of Statute (a) might successfully be applied to them, they are smokin' somethin' and it ain't incense.

(d) Statute (c) goes double for Catholicists, unless they are also liberalists, pro-choicists, and fans of 1960's hymns by Marty Haugen and David Haas. (see here)

The latest victims of Human Rights Commission abuse are Canadian bloggers, one of whom is the formidable (in both Official Languages) Kathy Shaidle over at Five Feet of Fury, where all the latest developments are being monitored by the minute.

I do feel quite neglected since there are no complaints about my blog -- nor, to my knowledge, have any of the articles I wrote years ago for Catholic Insight Magazine been singled out in the multi-page (content dating to 1994) Human Rights Complaint filed against the publication last December (more here) .

Meanwhile, the complaint against columnist-to-the-world and journalistic god Mark Steyn appears to have been dropped, and the Commission just settled for a summary verdict of Guilty on one count of violating Statue (a) above.

Apparently Chief Commissioner of the Ontario HRC, Barbara Hall (at right, photographically speaking), has found the appropriate role model for the exercise of her responsibilities: The Queen of Hearts' Prime Directive --

SENTENCE FIRST! VERDICT AFTERWARDS!

Today is all about...

Petty Officer Second Class (SEAL) Michael A. Monsoor














...who will receive the Medal of Honor posthumously in a ceremony at the White House April 8, 2008. He will receive the award for his actions in Ar Ramadi, Iraq on Sept. 29, 2006. On that day, Monsoor was part of a sniper overwatch security position with three other SEALs and eight Iraqi Army (IA) soldiers. An insurgent closed in and threw a fragmentation grenade into the overwatch position. The grenade hit Monsoor in the chest before falling to the ground. Positioned next to the single exit, Monsoor was the only one who could have escaped harm. Instead, he dropped onto the grenade to shield the others from the blast. Monsoor died approximately 30 minutes later from wounds sustained from the blast. Because of Petty Officer Monsoor’s actions, he saved the lives of his 3 teammates and the IA soldiers. Monsoor also received the Silver Star for his actions during the same deployment in May 2006, when he exposed himself to heavy enemy fire to rescue and treat an injured teammate.



His tribute site here .

Blackfive was on the case when it happened -- "People you should know"



Footnote: WATCH THIS SPACE: LOST AND FOUND -- SADDAM'S WMD?

[Previously covered by Kenneth Timmerman here.]

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]