Down-Hill
There's something initially heady but ultimately depressing about being a political cynic: the knowledge that you'll almost always be right. Particularly when the Democrats get back into power.
~ ~ ~
Take their expansion of the so-called federal "hate crimes" law, for example:
This bill wasn't "long-stalled"; it was long dead & buried. No Republican Congress would ever put forth such an unconstitutional encroachment on civil liberties and freedom of expression, and in such a promiscuous'y dissipative, frivilous manner. Come on, sexual orientation is bad enough, but gender identity? And disability? Even if you categorize "gender identity" and "sexual orientation" as "disabilities," it's still absurd.
That absurdity only serves to amplify the core objection: it is the violent act that is criminal, not the motivation behind it. Hatred of a particular group may be morally abhorrent, but you cannot criminalize it without opening the Padora's box of an inexorable, creeping police state where any thought that doesn't have official sanction is outlawed.
And heaven knows Democrats aren't averse to criminalizing thoughts they don't like. They're endlessly trying to criminalize Republican/conservative policy preferences, and the elected/appointed officials who defend them. Ditto fomenting hatred against their enemies - the "rich," "polluters," "Big Oil," "Big Business," the "Religious Right," "neocons," and of course, George W. Bush. Would their "hate crimes" law throw the book at the Bushophobes who make stamps and write books and plays and expend hours on message boards fantasizing about and advocating Bush's assassination? Or Dick Cheney's?
Of course not; THAT's "protected speech." Along with live sex shows and piss-submerged crucifixes and other politically favored forms of "expression." And that is why the President had better veto this, if Senate Republicans don't do their part and filibuster it. If the center-right has to put up with outrages in the name of the First Amendment, then so should the center-left.
It is what comes out of a man that defiles him; but that is a matter between him and God. It is what he does with it that is the purview of the state.
~ ~ ~
Having had the poison pill of mandatory troop withdrawal timetables thrown back in their face, the Democrats are continuing their strategy of forcing the President to veto their spiked Iraq/Afghanistan funding bills by tying a multiplicity of conflicting strings around just over half of the total price tag:
Well, it's a li'l bunny step toward de-funding, which actually is within Congress' constitutional imprimatur. It's also a woefully self-reinforcing load of cynicism. First, it only guarantees funding for the troops through July - which was about how long they would have been able to hold out anyway. Second, it sets the bar for the Iraqi parliament at a level clearly higher than they will be able to reach, making a cutoff almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Third, by doing so it does anything but incentivize the Iraqis to go balls-to-the-wall to meet the demands of an American legislature that clearly wants to run away and wash its hands of them and leave them to their grisly fate. And fourth, it's clear that that dynamic is precisely what the Democrats are trying to encourage and what they are, in fact, counting on.
Their mission remains the same: screw Iraq the way they screwed South Vietnam a generation ago, only this time leave none of their own fingerprints on the corpse. And, his veto pen notwithstanding, their appears to be little that President Bush can do to stop them.
~ ~ ~
Isn't one of the biggest (and most flagrantly dishonest) knocks on Dubya from Donks that he actively eschews allies and alliance-building in favor of "cowboy unilateralism"? D'ya s'pose any reporter or debate moderator might want to ask one of their presidential wannabes, or Hillary, about this little caper?
Whenever I read stories like this I'm tempted to call them "astonishing," or "breathtaking" or some other superlative of surprise. Then I just shake my head and chuckle cynically. Because this is the kind of rote stupidity, the kind of insanity, the kind of blind ideological dementia that we always get when we put the neoBolsheviks in charge. Our only reliable ally in South America, who has stuck his hand out as a true friend to America and his neck out to do our bidding in a vital area of the world, including things, like cracking down on "right-wing paramilitaries," that libs are always insisting upon, and Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry stand there and jeeringly piss in his face based upon obsolete stereotypes, malicious left-wing mythologies, and union hackery. And at a time when Hugo "Castro with Oil" Chavez is busily constructing an anti-American bloc of his own in that same vital region, into whose arms Donk leaders have all but driven Columbia.
The Admiral compares this with Jimmy Carter's double-cross of the Shah of Iran, which gave us the mullahgarchy and, eventually, nuclear Armageddon. An apt analogy, that; I just wish I could share his optimism that such underpublicized stunts will keep the presidency in GOP hands a year and a half from now. Remember, it took the Iranian hostage crisis that was the direct consequence of the betrayal of the Shah to persuade half the electorate that Mr. Peanut had to go. Given the current political winds, I can't imagine what would similarly persuade voters to keep Madusa out.
~ ~ ~
But don't worry, my friends. The Democrats have no interest in keeping the Islamist hordes from overrunning our country and turning it into a sea of blood, flames, and death - you know, REAL threats - but by God, they're bound and determined to save us from their mythological boogeyman:
Byron York goes on to remind us of the last time such nuttery was foisted on the intelligence community: the Clinton detour, at the behest of, you guessed it, "Fat Albert" Gore. While al Qaeda and other Islamist terror networks were growing into major national security threats, and the Iranian mullahgarchy was building towards nuclear weapons capability, and Red China was moving its military quality and quantity forward by quantum leaps (with the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign's help, don't forget), Mr. Bill and his dim-witted sidekick were squandering intelligence resources on "[taking] pictures of volcanoes and sea turtle nests and ... air samples of air pollution, as opposed to checking for traces of biological or chemical weapons." And now, as nobody had any reason not to expect, that the Dems are back in the saddle, they're reviving that same idiocy all over again. Why? Because they are blind guides who stick to their leftish orthodoxy no matter what and utterly, vehemently refuse to learn from their multitudinous mistakes. Or, to put it another way, our circuitous meandering back to a pre-9/11 posture is almost complete.
The irony, of course, is that the Dems would entrust the hunting down of mythical continent-spanning hypercanes with Super-Duper Freeze Rays to the same bunch that they exoriated for years for "botching" pre-Iraq war intelligence. I suppose the "logic" is that now that they're back in charge, and if given a "legitimate" mission, the spooks will magically regain their competence.
Makes me want to gag. But then, childish arrogance is also part of the "Dems in power" package.
~ ~ ~
Then there's....
Oh, butter brickle! That's enough for now. Even a man of my powers can only take so much in a single sitting.
~ ~ ~
Take their expansion of the so-called federal "hate crimes" law, for example:
A long-stalled bill that would expand the federal hate crime law to cover violent acts based on a victim's gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability is headed for approval in the Democratic-controlled Congress but faces a White House veto threat.
The House on Thursday approved the measure, the first major expansion of the hate crime statute since it was enacted in 1968. Senate approval is expected soon, putting the controversial bill on the president's desk for the first time since it was proposed nearly a decade ago.
Under intense pressure from conservative religious organizations to derail the bill, the White House on Thursday called it "unnecessary and constitutionally questionable," issuing the latest in a string of veto threats aimed at the congressional Democratic majority.
The measure was spurred by a number of high-profile incidents, including the 1998 killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was brutally beaten in Wyoming and left to die tied to a fence.
This bill wasn't "long-stalled"; it was long dead & buried. No Republican Congress would ever put forth such an unconstitutional encroachment on civil liberties and freedom of expression, and in such a promiscuous'y dissipative, frivilous manner. Come on, sexual orientation is bad enough, but gender identity? And disability? Even if you categorize "gender identity" and "sexual orientation" as "disabilities," it's still absurd.
That absurdity only serves to amplify the core objection: it is the violent act that is criminal, not the motivation behind it. Hatred of a particular group may be morally abhorrent, but you cannot criminalize it without opening the Padora's box of an inexorable, creeping police state where any thought that doesn't have official sanction is outlawed.
And heaven knows Democrats aren't averse to criminalizing thoughts they don't like. They're endlessly trying to criminalize Republican/conservative policy preferences, and the elected/appointed officials who defend them. Ditto fomenting hatred against their enemies - the "rich," "polluters," "Big Oil," "Big Business," the "Religious Right," "neocons," and of course, George W. Bush. Would their "hate crimes" law throw the book at the Bushophobes who make stamps and write books and plays and expend hours on message boards fantasizing about and advocating Bush's assassination? Or Dick Cheney's?
Of course not; THAT's "protected speech." Along with live sex shows and piss-submerged crucifixes and other politically favored forms of "expression." And that is why the President had better veto this, if Senate Republicans don't do their part and filibuster it. If the center-right has to put up with outrages in the name of the First Amendment, then so should the center-left.
It is what comes out of a man that defiles him; but that is a matter between him and God. It is what he does with it that is the purview of the state.
~ ~ ~
Having had the poison pill of mandatory troop withdrawal timetables thrown back in their face, the Democrats are continuing their strategy of forcing the President to veto their spiked Iraq/Afghanistan funding bills by tying a multiplicity of conflicting strings around just over half of the total price tag:
A House Democratic proposal introduced yesterday that would give President Bush half of the money he has requested for the war effort, with a vote in July on whether to approve the rest, hinges on progress in meeting political benchmarks that Iraq has thus far found difficult to achieve.
The House measure, which could come to a vote as early as tomorrow, would substantially raise the pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to meet lagging commitments - including new laws on oil revenue and de-Baathification, constitutional revisions, provincial elections and the demobilization of militias - that Bush has said are crucial to the success of the U.S. military strategy.
The plan would make about $43 billion of the administration's requested $95.5 billion immediately available to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, train troops from both nations and pay for other military needs. Congress's approval of the rest, intended to last through September, would await Iraqi passage of restructuring laws, or Bush's ability to prove that significant progress had been made. The July vote would mark the first time a mandatory funding cutoff would come before Congress.
Well, it's a li'l bunny step toward de-funding, which actually is within Congress' constitutional imprimatur. It's also a woefully self-reinforcing load of cynicism. First, it only guarantees funding for the troops through July - which was about how long they would have been able to hold out anyway. Second, it sets the bar for the Iraqi parliament at a level clearly higher than they will be able to reach, making a cutoff almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Third, by doing so it does anything but incentivize the Iraqis to go balls-to-the-wall to meet the demands of an American legislature that clearly wants to run away and wash its hands of them and leave them to their grisly fate. And fourth, it's clear that that dynamic is precisely what the Democrats are trying to encourage and what they are, in fact, counting on.
Their mission remains the same: screw Iraq the way they screwed South Vietnam a generation ago, only this time leave none of their own fingerprints on the corpse. And, his veto pen notwithstanding, their appears to be little that President Bush can do to stop them.
~ ~ ~
Isn't one of the biggest (and most flagrantly dishonest) knocks on Dubya from Donks that he actively eschews allies and alliance-building in favor of "cowboy unilateralism"? D'ya s'pose any reporter or debate moderator might want to ask one of their presidential wannabes, or Hillary, about this little caper?
Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, returned to Bogota this week in a state of shock. His three-day visit to Capitol Hill to win over Democrats in Congress was described by one American supporter as "catastrophic." Colombian sources said Uribe was stunned by the ferocity of his Democratic opponents, and Vice President Francisco Santos publicly talked about cutting U.S.-Colombian ties.
Uribe got nothing from his meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders. Military aid remains stalled, overall assistance is reduced, and the vital U.S.-Colombian trade bill looks dead. Uribe is the first Colombian president to crack down on his country's corrupt army officer hierarchy and to assault both right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas, but last week he confronted Democrats wedded to outdated claims of civil rights abuses and rigidly protectionist dogma.
This is remarkable U.S. treatment for a rare friend in South America, where Venezuela's leftist dictator, Hugo Chavez, can only exult in Uribe's embarrassment as he builds an anti-American bloc of nations. A former congressional staffer, who in 1999 helped write Plan Colombia to combat narco-guerrillas, told me: "President Uribe may be the odd man out, and that's no way to treat our best ally in South America."
Whenever I read stories like this I'm tempted to call them "astonishing," or "breathtaking" or some other superlative of surprise. Then I just shake my head and chuckle cynically. Because this is the kind of rote stupidity, the kind of insanity, the kind of blind ideological dementia that we always get when we put the neoBolsheviks in charge. Our only reliable ally in South America, who has stuck his hand out as a true friend to America and his neck out to do our bidding in a vital area of the world, including things, like cracking down on "right-wing paramilitaries," that libs are always insisting upon, and Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry stand there and jeeringly piss in his face based upon obsolete stereotypes, malicious left-wing mythologies, and union hackery. And at a time when Hugo "Castro with Oil" Chavez is busily constructing an anti-American bloc of his own in that same vital region, into whose arms Donk leaders have all but driven Columbia.
The Admiral compares this with Jimmy Carter's double-cross of the Shah of Iran, which gave us the mullahgarchy and, eventually, nuclear Armageddon. An apt analogy, that; I just wish I could share his optimism that such underpublicized stunts will keep the presidency in GOP hands a year and a half from now. Remember, it took the Iranian hostage crisis that was the direct consequence of the betrayal of the Shah to persuade half the electorate that Mr. Peanut had to go. Given the current political winds, I can't imagine what would similarly persuade voters to keep Madusa out.
~ ~ ~
But don't worry, my friends. The Democrats have no interest in keeping the Islamist hordes from overrunning our country and turning it into a sea of blood, flames, and death - you know, REAL threats - but by God, they're bound and determined to save us from their mythological boogeyman:
What a difference an election makes. Today the House of Representatives will debate whether global warming is so serious a threat to American national security that the Director of National Intelligence, normally busy with issues like al Qaeda, Iranian nuclear research, and North Korean missiles, should be ordered to put aside other projects to create a special National Intelligence Estimate on climate change. So far, majority Democrats have pushed the proposal through the House Intelligence Committee — on a party-line vote — and there is a good chance it will become part of the final intelligence authorization bill passed by Congress....
Republicans disagree. Their objection is not a denial of global warming, nor even an argument that some claims made about climate change, most notably by former Vice President Al Gore, are exaggerated. Rather, the GOP objection is that many other agencies inside the U.S. government are studying climate change, and there is no pressing need for the CIA to join in. “Why would it be in an intelligence bill?” asked committee ranking Republican Representative Pete Hoekstra in an appearance on C-SPAN Wednesday morning. “What added value does the intelligence community add to this debate?”
The question is particularly acute, Republicans say, because the intelligence agencies are already stretched by the war on terror. Citing Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, Hoekstra added, “Do we really want to start diverting resources from those threats to global warming?”
Byron York goes on to remind us of the last time such nuttery was foisted on the intelligence community: the Clinton detour, at the behest of, you guessed it, "Fat Albert" Gore. While al Qaeda and other Islamist terror networks were growing into major national security threats, and the Iranian mullahgarchy was building towards nuclear weapons capability, and Red China was moving its military quality and quantity forward by quantum leaps (with the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign's help, don't forget), Mr. Bill and his dim-witted sidekick were squandering intelligence resources on "[taking] pictures of volcanoes and sea turtle nests and ... air samples of air pollution, as opposed to checking for traces of biological or chemical weapons." And now, as nobody had any reason not to expect, that the Dems are back in the saddle, they're reviving that same idiocy all over again. Why? Because they are blind guides who stick to their leftish orthodoxy no matter what and utterly, vehemently refuse to learn from their multitudinous mistakes. Or, to put it another way, our circuitous meandering back to a pre-9/11 posture is almost complete.
The irony, of course, is that the Dems would entrust the hunting down of mythical continent-spanning hypercanes with Super-Duper Freeze Rays to the same bunch that they exoriated for years for "botching" pre-Iraq war intelligence. I suppose the "logic" is that now that they're back in charge, and if given a "legitimate" mission, the spooks will magically regain their competence.
Makes me want to gag. But then, childish arrogance is also part of the "Dems in power" package.
~ ~ ~
Then there's....
Oh, butter brickle! That's enough for now. Even a man of my powers can only take so much in a single sitting.
posted by JASmius at 3:50 PM
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