St. Paddy's Odds & Ends

Another desperate attempt to catch up on all the bloviating of which you, dear readers, have been woefully deprived.

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Does this make anybody else as nervous as it does me?

China is training increasing numbers of Latin American military personnel, taking advantage of a three-year old U.S. law that has led to a sharp decline in U.S.-run training programs for the region, an Army general said Tuesday.

General Bantz Craddock, who oversees U.S. military operations in Latin America, said military members of all ranks are receiving training in China, In addition, he said, more and more Chinese non-lethal military equipment is showing up in the region...It's a growing phenomenon."

Craddock testified before a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing where lawmakers from both parties called for the elimination of the law that authorizes U.S. training programs only under certain conditions - requirements that some countries refuse to accept.

And what is this law? Ah, there's the catch-22:

At issue is a U.S. law that mandates an end to military training in countries that refuse to exempt U.S. citizens overseas from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

Talk about a Hobson's choice. Either we allow American servicepeople overseas to be....well, "Shanghaied" by politically-motivated ICC prosecutions for "war crimes" and other BS that circulates through the Extreme Media and gets picked up by our enemies hither and yon, or we give the ChiComms carte blanche to subvert the whole of Latin America at the same time that the Iranian mullahgarchy is doing so from the opposite direction.

To be over the barrel or inside it. There must be a third option, but it beats me what that could be, and the stampede towards kowtowing to the ICC looks already underway in any case.

Bet it won't blunt Beijing's penetration of our, um, southern flank, though.

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You know how abortofiles assured us that Roe v. Wade wouldn't lead to abortion on demand? And how we were told that the enshrinement of sodomy as a constitutional right in Lawrence v. Texas was never going to lead to sodomarriage? Do you also recall the opposing slippery slope predictions on each, and how they were vindicated?

Welcome to the next one:

With the sweetly titled HBO series Big Love,' polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline "Polygamists, Unite!'' Newsweek informs us of "polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement.'' Says one evangelical Christian [sic] big lover: "Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle.''

Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With Big Love it moves to suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.

As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage.

It stands eminently to reason. As Charles Krauthammer goes on to note:

[I]f traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as gay marriage advocates insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement - the number restriction (two and only two) - is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

The humor in this - and yes, there is some - is that rump rangers are actually outraged that "big lovers" are trying to piggy-back their gimmick, as though homosexuality were legitimate in any sense of the term. And when pedophiles attach their car to this perversion train, as is inevitable, will the polygamists, too, get all huffy and puffy, as if to exclaim, "There goes the neighborhood!"?

Can one even have a neighborhood with no "houses" left standing?

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Speaking of gimmick infringement, John Kerry just ripped off Al Gore big-time:

Failed presidential candidate John Kerry offered a startling prediction Friday morning: If the U.S. doesn't change its global warming ways, New York City and Boston will be destroyed by flooding by 2036.

"I can say to an absolute certainty," Kerry told radio host Don Imus, "that if things stay exactly as they are today absent some unpredictable change in what's going on, within the next 30 years the Arctic ice sheet is gone.

"Not maybe, not if, the Arctic ice sheet is gone," the Massachusetts Democrat insisted, before offering his hair-raising prediction....

Kerry blamed the Bush Administration's environmental policies for the coming destruction of New York and Boston.

"Europe and the other countries are responding," he told Imus. "The United States remains oblivious - at least the Administration remains oblivious."

Yeah, "Europe and the other countries are responding" - by completely blowing off their Kyoto-mandated greenhouse emissions targets, and for the same reason "the Administration remains oblivious" - the ruinous economic cost of a miniscule reduction in greenhouse gases that have little or no impact on global climate in any case. The difference is the Bushies are honest about this, while "Europe and the other countries" want to have their greenstremist self-righteousness and eat our "cake" as well as theirs.

If the global warming chicken littles had a case, they, and those pathetic pols who pander to them, wouldn't have to resort to such absurd hysterics.

I can't help but wonder, though, whether Lurch managed to rant and rave and sweat like Fat Albert. A slight variation in his plodding monotone, perhaps? Like when his silk napkin is folded the wrong way, or his Grey Poupon turns brown?

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If Marvelous Mark Dayton is calling you a "grandstander," you are officially ready to have the fork stuck in you.

And as if to confirm the traversing of the Chondrichthye Elasmobranchii, Senator Censure came up with this rare gem:

Mr. Feingold said he had received "a massive response on the Internet" to his censure proposal. Some members of Congress and many liberal activists are pushing for impeachment of Mr. Bush. Mr. Feingold yesterday repeated his view that Mr. Bush's actions were "in the area of an impeachable offense."

However, the senator said he does not view impeachment as a prudent course.

"The Constitution does not require us to go down that road. I hope that in a sense I'm a voice of moderation on this point," he said. "It may not be good for the country in a time of war to try to remove the President from office even though he's surely done something wrong, but what we can't do is just ignore the wrongful conduct." [emphases added]

His expressed "hope" is his way of saying, "All my Democrat colleagues had better get their fat asses out here on the fringe with me so I don't look like the fruit-loop-in-a-windstorm I've made of myself." But, on the other hand, he did admit that we're at war.

As an aside, did you know that Kerry and Feingold are running for president in 2008? A croissant-sized hairlip would be less conspicuous.

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And lastly, two rhetorical questions:

***Isn't this the sort of thing they used to do in the Evil Empire?

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***Shouldn't this take the luster off the "Condi for Prez" fetish?