Patriot Games

While impatiently indulging my son in letting him finish the game he's playing on the Gameboy he only gets to play when he's at my office because his grades have been in the toilet all year, let's visit a few brief news blurbs.

~ ~ ~

Would somebody please explain to me what in the blue hell this boob is talking about?:

Senator John Kerry accused the Bush Administration on Saturday of stirring up a "spirit of intolerance" to suppress dissent over the war in Iraq.

Kerry said the Bush Administration is targeting opponents of the Iraq war in much the same way he was attacked for protesting failed policies in Vietnam in the 1970s.

"Spirit of intolerance"? "Suppress[ing] dissent"? Dissent is all we've gotten from seditionists like Lurch. Non-stop. Deafening. Vile. Vituperative. Slanderous. Vicious. Mendacious. Obnoxious. If Bush has been trying to "suppress dissent" over Iraq, he's either abysmally crappy at it, or I shudder to think how insufferable the "dissent" would be if he wasn't.

I'd say something like, "But seriously..." at this point except that I don't see how to do that. This is one of the dumbest public statements I've heard or seen any pol utter this year. It makes me half wonder if Mr. Heinz is Pat Kennedy's connection.

The barest clue I can discern comes in the following grafs:

"Dismissing dissent is not only wrong but dangerous when America's leadership is unwilling to admit mistakes, unwilling to engage in honest discussion and unwilling to hold itself accountable for the consequences of decisions made without genuine disclosure or genuine debate," said Kerry, D-MA.

"Although no one is being jailed today for speaking out against the war in Iraq, the spirit of intolerance for dissent has risen steadily, and the habit of labeling dissenters as unpatriotic has become the common currency of the politicians currently running our country," he said.

Sooooo...refusing to capitulate to John Kerry's soggy, flaccid, discredited geopolitical analytical skills constitutes "suppressing dissent"? Or is it his hurt feelings at being labeled accurately? And by the way, nobody was jailed for speaking out against the war back in Mr. French's Vietnam "glory" days, either.

Makes you wonder what color the sky is in his world. Then it makes you smile when you realize that his unrequittable lust for the presidency can only be sated in this one.

~ ~ ~

Last week Fox News got hold of a videotape that more or less completely humiliates "Emir" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the one-time al Qaeda kingpin in Iraq. So which media outlet rushed to Zarqawi's defense? al-Jazeera? Another AQ audiotape?

Would you beieve the New York Times?

…clips of Mr. Zarqawi’s supposed martial incompetence were unconvincing.

The weapon in question is complicated to master, and American soldiers and Marines undergo many days of training to achieve the most basic competence with it. Moreover, the weapon in Mr. Zarqawi’s hands was an older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising. The veterans said Mr. Zarqawi, who had spent his years as a terrorist surrounded by simpler weapons of Soviet design, could hardly have been expected to know how to handle it.

And yet this yuppie jihadi who, at least in this tape, has more confounded difficulties with a firearm than Elmer Fudd on a hunting expedition, is the same numbnut whom the "Pink Lady" continues to insist is "defeating" us in Iraq.

Is this the brand of "patriotic dissent" to which Jean Doigt Kerry was referring? And how is it any different from cheerleading for the enemy?

~ ~ ~

Maybe the above is why Fox News is now the most trusted source of news in America:

The Fox News Channel is the most trusted news source in America, according to a new poll released by the BBC and Reuters that surveyed 10,000 news consumers around the world.

Asked which news source they most trusted, 11% of Americans named Fox News - more than any other news source in the U.S.

Fox News led the broadcast networks by substantial margins, with ABC coming in at 4%, NBC - 4% and CBS - 3%.

Just goes to show that we, the People, still know chicken salad from chicken you-know-what.

And ain't nothing "faux" about that.