Tammy Faye Messner, Nee Tammy Faye Bakker, RIP @ 65

RALEIGH, North Carolina -AP—

Tammy Faye Messner, who as Tammy Faye Bakker helped her husband, Jim, build a multimillion- dollar evangelism empire and then watched it collapse in disgrace, has died. She was 65.

Elsewhere, stocks in mascara and lipstick companies plunged, inexplicably.

That bit of joking aside…. (Which I suspect she would giggle at, too)… I gather she appeared on Larry King the other night, and looked like microwaved death. Some reports I’ve seen have her as weighing in at 65 lbs. Sheesh.  Anyway, she died Friday morning.
There are, of course, a goodly number of the usual bouts of grave dancing coming from the anti-religious left.  I’m not going to bother dignifying those with a link. Yes, it’s true… There were a lot of things in her life that discredited her.  Frankly, I was never a fan of the woman.  But give her this, at least: she never lost her optimism , never went through the “why me” stage.  Not in public, at least.  And I wonder, in all candor, if her many critics will fare as well.  Somehow, I tend to doubt it.

Would the election of democrat, Mrs. Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards, mean the destruction of the State of Israel?  Paul Mirengoff, Powerline, seems to making that suggestion.

It follows that if Iran is hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and using then to destroy Israel, and the probable democrat presidential nominee is hell bent on not using military force that the United States would be unable to anything to stop the destruction of the State of Israel.  How well will that play with Mrs. Clinton’s base?

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WHEN I looked at the numbers last month, the Gallup Poll showed President Bush’s job approval was at 32 percent, and Congress was at 24 percent. Could things get any worse?

Of course they can. Never underestimate the power of the Democratic Party to self-destruct.

Don’t worry Don, if there is any way to make things worse, Harry Pelosi will find it.

Diana West at TownHall.com:

Somehow, American war goals have become a secondary consideration when America wages war. As Command Sgt. Maj. Jeff Mellinger put it to The Washington Times: “We could absolutely crush every one of (our enemies in Iraq), but would you be happy with what is left?”

Well, it sure sounds better than asking American troops to knock on doors, card terrorists and drive over IEDs for the next 20 years. But not to the powers that be. In our new age, in our post-modern culture, American war goals — American self-preservation — are secondary to war casualties, and I don’t mean our own.

That’s who we are — socially humane, expendable and increasingly impotent. It’s not who our fathers and grandfathers were. The men who decimated German and Japanese cities as part of the effort to win World War II as quickly as possible would have been perplexed by descendants who now send American troops house to booby-trapped house and expect to achieve anything but more war, “limited” though it may be.

Talk about waste.

As usual, Diana’s points are well taken.  We have lost sight of the fact that step number one in winning the war, is winning the war. .. not in worrying about whether not we are being “moral”.

War, ladies and gentlemen, is the absence of law and of morality.  The way we reestablish law and morality is winning the damn war. If we don’t win the war, the enemy gets to establish their version of morality and law.  In the most recent instance that means Sharia law, and the morality of the Islamo-Facist.

The fastest way to lose a war is to lose our focus on winning it… I submit that’s precisely what many among us would prefer we do.

For the many long months that Mrs. Sheehan was the leftards’ mascot and darling, she reported no threats on her life.  Now that Mrs. Sheehan has declared her intent to run against Mrs. Pellosi, she is now reporting attempts on her life.  So sayth Free Republic.

Hat tip photo:  Moonbatttery.

William Kristol , in an article due out in the 7/30 edition of the Weekly Standard:

Cindy Sheehan, mother of a soldier who was killed in Iraq, emerged on the American political scene two years ago. Distraught and unstable, she was shamelessly exploited by opponents of George W. Bush and the war while such exploitation seemed to pay political benefits. When she became an embarrassment, she, like others before her, was tossed onto the trash heap of history by her progressive minders.

That exploitation becomes far more problematic when you consider that the woman demonstrably was unstable even before Casey Sheehan became a soldier.

Sheehan was useful to the antiwar left in a particular way. As Jonathan Cohn put it in the September 12, 2005, New Republic, “Sheehan’s value isn’t as a barometer of public opinion or as a source of foreign policy wisdom. It’s as proof of one very simple point: that a person can criticize the war and still support the troops.”

It’s unclear that Sheehan was particularly interested in “supporting the troops”–unless one means by that lamenting the fate of the troops as victims. The fact that relatively few soldiers see themselves as victims, the fact that few families understand their loved ones’ service and sacrifices in that light–that didn’t matter. What mattered to the left was that it was dangerous politically not to “support the troops.” Of course the antiwar left hated what the troops were doing, fighting the enemy in Iraq, and they hated the troops’ goal, victory in Iraq. So “supporting the troops” meant feeling sorry for them, or pretending to–something antiwar politicians and media did with great hand-wringing and hoopla.

Kristol slides right by something here… something kinda crucial: seeing the troops as “victims” is directly in line with the overall mantra of the left, these days, where everyone is a victim, a victim that needs liberal democrats in power to solve their problems.  Of course, a close examination of those whom the left has adopted as “victims” is less than encouraging; Victims they have remained.  Blacks, for example, have become a permanent class, which are necessary for liberal Democrats to remain in any kind of power whatever.

Kristol does strike to the heart of the matter here, however:

…the “support-the-troops-but-oppose-what-they’re-doing” position has become increasingly untenable. How can you say with a straight face that you support the troops while advancing legislation that would undercut their mission and strengthen their enemies?

You can’t. So those on the cutting edge of progressive opinion are beginning to give up on even pretending to support the troops. Instead, they now slander the troops.

Two progressive magazines have taken complementary approaches in this effort. In its July 30 issue, the Nation has a 24-page article based on interviews with 50 Iraq veterans. The piece allegedly reveals “disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq”–indeed, it claims that the war has “led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.” Needless to say, the anecdotal evidence in the article comes nowhere close to supporting this claim. There are a few instances of out-of-control behavior, some routine fog-of-war and brutality-of-war incidents, and much that is simply trivial. The picture is unpleasant, as one would expect–but it comes nowhere close to living up to the authors’ billing: “The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise.”

Herein, we see the dark underbelly of the left… Which, for so long, has been hiding underneath the “we support the troops” mantra.

Kristol then goes on to speak to the recent slander piece in the liberal paper…”The New Republic”, entitled “Shock Troops”. Says he:

The New Republic, in its July 23 issue, takes a different tack. Its slander of American soldiers appears to be fiction presented as fact, behind a convenient screen of anonymity.

A column entitled “Shock Troops” is said to be the work of “Scott Thomas”–“the pseudonym for a soldier currently serving in Baghdad.” “Thomas” colorfully describes three sets of alleged misdeeds he and his buddies committed in Baghdad: They humiliate a woman in a military dining hall who has been disfigured in an IED explosion (the woman “wore an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn’t really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor”); they discover human remains and one private spends a day and night playing around with a child’s skull (“which even had chunks of hair”), amusing his fellow soldiers; and one private routinely drives a Bradley Fighting Vehicle recklessly and uses the vehicle to kill stray dogs.

My colleague Michael Goldfarb raised questions about this account in a July 18 post on THE WEEKLY STANDARD website, asking for assistance from soldiers and veterans in assessing the truth of the stories told by “Scott Thomas.” Within a day, dozens of active duty soldiers and veterans had come forward to point out errors, implausibility, and indeed the well-nigh-impossibility (in the case of the Bradley) of what was claimed. The editors of the New Republic provided to Goldfarb a couple of allegedly corroborating details–for example, the name of the Forward Operating Base, FOB Falcon, where the taunting of the badly disfigured female IED victim was said to have taken place. Soldiers who served at the base have come forward to say no such woman has been seen there.

There’s far more in the way of discrepancies with the story, of course.  Indeed the number of these discrepancies as gotten so bad, McQ over at Q&O points up:

From The New Republic via their blog “The Plank” in reference to this:

Several conservative blogs have raised questions about the Diarist “Shock Troops,” written by a soldier in Iraq using the pseudonym Scott Thomas. Whenever anybody levels serious accusations against a piece published in our magazine, we take those charges seriously. Indeed, we’re in the process of investigating them. I’ve spoken extensively with the author of the piece and have communicated with other soldiers who witnessed the events described in the diarist. Thus far, these conversations have done nothing to undermine—and much to corroborate—the author’s descriptions. I will let you know more after we complete our investigation. —Franklin Foer

Anyone surprised?

Look; it should surprise nobody that the avidly leftist New Republic is against our actions in Iraq. The reasons are clear; a Democrat isn’t in the White House.

Well, no, not particularly.  This is, I think, of a piece with the remainder of the slander that has been tossed in the direction of the troops that these liberals supposedly support.  And of course, The New Republic, for it’s own part, couldn’t be bothered to check up on its own sources, until such time as everybody else in the world had poked holes in the story.  Now they are “investigating”.  In other words, they’re waiting to see just how bad the damage to this story is, before they react. The pattern is well established, as Howard Kurtz points out:

The issue of veracity is especially sensitive for the New Republic, which fired associate editor Stephen Glass in 1998 for fabrications that editors concluded had appeared in two-thirds of his 41 articles.

Foer called the soldier “an amazing resource — a guy who’s on the front lines, who has a gift for observation and can write.”

***

As the criticism mounts, Foer says he sees an ideological agenda.

“A lot of the questions raised by the conservative blogosphere boil down to, would American soldiers be capable of doing things like the things described in the diarist. The practical jokes are exceptionally mild compared to things that have been documented by the U.S. military. Conservative bloggers make a bit of a living denying any bad news that emanates from Iraq.”

Scott at Powerline correctly notes:

Foer’s last point does not come close to doing justice to the questions rasised about the article. And one might respond that the left makes a bit of a living promoting calumnies and hyperbolic condemnations of our armed forces. I trust that the New Republic will at some point supply facts sufficient to verify the anecdotes related in the article or retract it, though the magazine has yet to do either and the hour is getting late.

Not everyone has been so reluctant to find the truth as TNR obviously has, however. The “Scott Thomas” moniker being given the supposedly anonymous soldier?  The American Thinker has been examining this more closely than TNR has been vetting it’s sources….

It turns out that there is a plausible candidate for who “Scott Thomas” might be: Clifton Hicks. The evidence is not conclusive, but it is fairly suggestive. Others are welcome to examine it with a fair mind. Hicks must be accorded the benefit of the doubt, of course.

Clifton Hicks is a former army soldier who did serve in Iraq. Hicks has become that most cherished item for the anti-war crowd, a soldier who fulfills their need for first-hand accounts of war atrocities. Hicks was granted conscientious objector status and a release from the Army after receiving administrative punishment for unprofessional conduct. Since then, and especially recently, he has tapped into the anti-war establishment for self-promotion.

Indeed, the writing style is close enough to have raised my suspicion, before The Thinker mentioned it. that having been said, The Thinker’s analysis is extensive, and I think very close to complete. In any event, it seems clear that Franklin Foer is the new Stephen Glass, particularly if any of this is traceable.
All that said….

The reason why I so extensively got into Kristol’s bit with mentally disturbed Sheehan and the exploitation thereof, is because I think this latest New Republic article, to be more of the same; the far left exploiting the demonstrably mental ill for their own purposes.  The more calloused among us might suggest this to be a case of damaged minds thinking alike.  However, I will leave that to the reader.
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Look; it should surprise nobody that the avidly leftist New Republic is against our actions in Iraq.  The reasons are clear; a Democrat isn’t in the White House. Has the depth of their need for political victory gone so far as to pass along slander wrapped in lies as “news”?  If they disagree with the war in Iraq, it is certainly their right to say so, I have no problem with that at all, though I think the position foolish.  Their right to that position however does not give them the right to fraud and slander in pursuit of the political goal.

Unfortunately, those two commodities, fraud and slander, would appear to be the main weapons in the quiver of the left, these days.

There is one positive note to pass along with all of this; At least now, the question of “whose side are they on” would appear to have been answered.

So, George Stienbrenner isn’t happy with “The Bronx is Burning”?

(Shrug )

Yeah, well, about that….. I’ve got a suggestion for ya, Georgie…. How about putting a real team together?

A team that isn’t routinely getting its lazy backside kicked up around it’s shoulder blades by teams with approximately half the total salary.  A team that doesn’t get thrashed by the Devil Rays, every time they take the field together, for example. Last night’s score? 14-4, Tampa Bay. Today’s score? Well at this writing it’s 2-0 Tampa Bay, top of the 4th.

Putting together a Yankees team that could actually play, might actually distract the fans from the little fantasy that ESPN has going, here.

Here’s a clue, as to how to go about that; Admit that this is not about you, George, and whether not you’re having a good hair day… in real life, or in somebody’s portrayal of you.

See, I admit I’ve never bought into the mystique surrounding the New York Yankees, and every time they lose, as in this entire season, does my heart immeasurable good. That so many baseball fans hold them in such high regard is why I’ve not been a fan of MLB for many years.  That the Yankees are now in a losing season, is enough to peak my interest. This self centeredness that has always surrounded the Yankees organization from the top down to the bat boy,  is precisely why.

You getting the picture, yet, Georgie?

You have to wonder sometimes what liberals are using for brain power.  Ross Doutahat, for example:

I’m fed up with the President’s messiah complex, and I don’t bloody well want to hear any more about Bush’s “theological perspective” that freedom is the Almighty’s gift to all mankind, and so history’s on our side in the Middle East, and yada yada yada.

So, he doesn’t like the reference by Mr. Bush, that freedom is a gift from God?

 Ramesh responds:

Now it may be unconservative to think that an aggressively liberty-promoting foreign policy follows from the idea that all human beings have a God-given right to be free, and certainly Christians are not obliged to believe that it does so follow. But the proposition that our rights are a gift from God is neither un-conservative nor un-Christian; it is a commonplace observation in the context of American political history.

…

Most of the time, however, when people say that our rights come from God what they are most concerned about affirming is that those rights are not created by human beings. That, it seems to me, is true, or else there are no human rights at all.

Correct.  And more directly to the fundamental point  :

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —

That the connection has never occurred to Doutahat does not put the remainder of his comments in the highest of regard.

Idiot.

Funny, how we’re not seeing much made of this, given what we saw aimed at Rush Limbagh just recently…

LAGUNA NIGUEL, California —FOX- Al Gore’s son faces up to three years in prison if convicted on felony drug-possession charges and lesser offenses related to July 4 traffic stop in Orange County where he was found with 140 Vicodin pills, according to a report from the People.com Web site.

Al Gore III, 24, faces two felony counts of drug possession, two misdemeanor counts of drug possession without a prescription and one misdemeanor count of marijuana possession, the district attorney’s office said in a statement. Gore also was charged with a traffic infraction for allegedly driving faster than 100 mph.

…

In addition to Vicodin, officers found Xanax, Valium, Soma, and Adderall as well as a small amount of marijuana. A source tells People.com that police discovered 140 Vicodin pills on the former vice president’s son as well as dozens of others.

That’s quite an interesting mix we’ve got going here.  Somehow I have some difficulty imagining that he is using all that himself, although I wouldn’t put it past him.  But it does open the possibility that he’s dealing, seemingly.

I’ve seen it more than once in the last week, where those defending Gore… and his kid… from public opinion, have brought up the specter of Rush Limbaugh and his addiction to the prescription drug OxyContin, as a defense. Well, first of all, limbo are caught an awful lot more publicity out of that and Gore has on the this, his second arrest. All of it bad. More, Limbaugh was originally addicted to OxyContin as the results of treatments for a serious medical condition, treatments which were prescribed by a doctor.  These are claims that Gore III simply can’t make as a defense for his arrests.

But on that note, I noticed , about three hours ago:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Purdue Pharma agreed to pay out $634 million to defendants in its OxyContin settlement with federal authorities based in West Virginia.

Purdue acknowledged that staffers had violated prescription requirements for its OxyContin painkiller. The company also acknowledged that its “fraudulent conduct caused a greater amount of OxyContin to be available for illegal use than otherwise would have been available.”

The drugmaker also said that three “top executives” would be charged with felonies. The company said that it will also be charged with a felony.

The $634 million represents 90 percent of the profits for OxyContin sales during the time of the offense.

And this from TriCities:

ABINGDON -Tri-Cities.com As demonstrators gathered outside, victims of OxyContin came from all over the nation to speak their mind at Friday’s sentencing hearing – and tell Purdue executives exactly what they think of them.

Here are some of their stories.

• Teresa Ashcraft, who lost a 19-year-old son to OxyContin, came from Florida to refute the claims of corporate spokesman, who she says blamed the victims for the drug’s effects. “Our children were not addicts. They were just regular teenagers,” Ashcraft said at the sentencing hearing for Purdue Pharma executives. “We have been given a life sentence due to their lies and their greed.”
• Donnie Trent, of Lee County, said he is a recovering addict who tried the drug and then struggled with addiction for five years. He said money needs to be spent on treatment, “because jails are not the answer to addiction.”
• Ed Vanicky, of Georgia, said he lost his wife to OxyContin. “She had been taking OxyContin as prescribed for five months, and it killed her,” he said, while Purdue executives “sat in their plush Stamford, Conn., offices watching the money roll in.”
• Lee Nuss, of Florida, showed the court an urn that contained the ashes of her only son, whose college fund ended up paying for his funeral. She said the death was part of a “legal genocide” of the nation’s youth and said in her opinion Purdue is “nothing more than a large corporate drug cartel.”
• Marianne Skolek spoke about her 29-year-old daughter Jill, who was prescribed OxyContin in January of 2002 and died in April of that year, leaving a young son behind. She called the executives “sheer evil.”
• Victor and Theresa Del Regno are a South Kingstown, R.I., couple who lost their son Andrew to an OxyContin overdose in 2002. Andrew was a college student who tried the drug at a party. “It will allow us to move on,” Victor Del Regno said of Friday’s sentencing. It was “Bittersweet,” he said, “but at least there was some justice.”

With all of this going on, the connections in Limbaugh’s case has not been made by the press, and the left. Not that I would have expected them to.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why; the truth simply isn’t in them.

They were willing to accuse, when the “Limbaugh’s addicted” business first came along, so long as they could possibly damage Limbaugh, but gee, Guess what?  When it came out that the fault of the addiction was on the shoulders of the maker of this stuff, a fact established in a court of law, an admission of “we were wrong” was not to be seen from the press and the left, any more than was serious coverage of Gore’s kid, and his repeated arrests.

.

Tell me again, the myth about how our press is not biased towards attacking those on the right and protecting those on the left.

Caught a rather nice sunset last night. These are taken just outside Bergen, NY. Drill each for full size. Warning: These are large file hi res versions. Caught this while railfanning with the boys, last evening.

OK, it’s just entertainment, and perhaps I’m as guilty as Megan McArdle is, here, of reading too much into it. Frankly, I might not even have made a comment on the book at all, except for this article of hers.  I’d like you to read the whole bit of hers, but for context, I will drop a few edits in here :

But this actually presents a problem for authors. If magic is too powerful then the characters will be omnipotent gods, and there won’t be a plot. Magic must have rules and limits in order to leave the author enough room to tell a story. In economic terms, there must be scarcity: magical power must be a finite resource.

…

But there have to be generally accepted rules. Characters can’t get out of the predicament the author is sick of by having the car suddenly start running on sand. Similarly, if your characters will be using magic, they must do so by some generally believable system.

Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary.
A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult – until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it’s thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired.

Oh, for pity’s sake, Megan.

Had it occurred to you, that being a children’s book, the reason that this is so easily done, is that there’s an underlying moral that Rowling is trying to convey with this part of the storyline… that you never know what you can do until you try… and that most people don’t know what they can do until a great need is upon them.

That’s a popular enough subtheme in children’s books in general that I have trouble believing you actually read any children’s books as a child.

More, it’s a theme that has been repeated all through the Potter series, most memorably when Potter saves Cirius Black from the Dementors, also by use of the Patronus, which he really dind’t know how to do either, until forced to it. Gee, something of a pattern, here… did you miss it?

Perhaps, as some friends have argued, I am expecting too much from a children’s book. But I don’t think that is right. Children are great systemisers, which is why they watch the same shows and read the same books over and over again: they are trying to put all the details together into a coherent picture. “I could do things no one else could do!” is a great thrill; but so is “I know how this works”. You can’t say that about Harry Potter, because Rowling doesn’t seem to know herself

Then please explain to me how it is that so many children have gotten so much more of the series then have you…

I’m willing to bet you knew about it once, but you’ve simply forgotten it…  this mysterious force that allows so many so much younger than you to understand what you do not.  It’s called imagination.

But the best children’s fantasy does something else: it gives one the illusion that the magical world is as consistent and real as one’s own world – that it exists, just barely out of reach.

One’s imagination is the place where such worlds exists regardless who the author is.  When one uses that imagination, rather than , as with the television storyline, having the entire story and every detail about it’s spelled out for you, that world becomes very real to you because you have helped to create it yourself , rather than having someone describe it to you in their terms.  Put another way; The trick to stirring that imagination is not a sharp digital photograph, with all the details revealed, but rather, a watercolor, which the reader can fill in with his own imagination.
That, it seems to me, the most important aspect of this series being attached to Schoolastic as a publisher. Use of the imagination, is one of the primary reasons for getting kids to read. And, adults, for that matter.

I like Megan generally, but she’s clearly out of her depth, here. Leave it to somebody who primarily deals in numbers, to demand a balance sheet for a kids’ story line.
And, yes, I already have the 7th book in the house… as usual. Just picked it up a half hour ago, in fact.

Also Blogging: OTB, Betsy’s Page, Unfogged, Liberal Values, and Greg Mankiw’s Blog

Robin Givhan in the WaPo.

There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

She was talking on the Senate floor about the burdensome cost of higher education. She was wearing a rose-colored blazer over a black top. The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape. The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn’t an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.

I am reminded of 2001: (Emph is mine)

As an early admirer of the Clintons who was shocked awake by the 1993 healthcare fiasco and other scandals (see the transcripts of two 1994 CNN “Crossfire” shows, reprinted in “Vamps & Tramps,” where I defended Clinton accuser Paula Jones and argued that Hillary “hides from accountability”), I strongly feel that Hillary has always benefited from a weird residual sexism. Special treatment is still protectively accorded middle-aged heterosexual women by supposedly egalitarian journalists whose brains go soft when Hillary, who’s as butch as they come, turns on her pink estrogen light. It’s the manipulative tyranny of the mother imago.
But Hillary has already paid a high price for her willful blurring of the ethical borderline. Her maiden Senate speech two weeks ago, which had been glowingly projected by starry-eyed telejournalists last fall as sure to draw worldwide attention as her first step toward the presidency, was sparsely attended and largely ignored by both the press and her fellow senators because of boiling controversies over pardons, furniture and flatware after the Clintons’ chaotic decampment from public housing.

–Camille Paglia

Same game, different cycle. Do you understand?  She’s played this game before.  She recognizes that she’s getting some problems (Most recently from the Pentagon on her anti-war nonsense…) so she breaks out the “look at me I’m female” look.  Or, as Camille Paglia puts it, she turns on her pink estrogen light to hide from accountability.

BitsBallcap Tip: James Joyner, who has a picture. Warning: You may fall asleep.

About everybody on the planet, seemingly, has picked up on this story within the last few days of the kid who went ahead and put together a dream truck, only to see the environmentalist fascist crowd in his neighborhood decide that he wasn’t being environmentally friendly.  I’ll link Joyner, here, because it’s handy… and he in turn quotes the WaPo:

On a narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington, where Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm, one man bought a flashy gray Hummer that was too massive to fit in his garage. So he parked the seven-foot-tall behemoth on the street in front of his house and smiled politely when his eco-friendly neighbors looked on in disapproval at his “dream car.” It lasted five days on the street before two masked men took a bat to every window, a knife to each 38-inch tire and scratched into the body: “FOR THE ENVIRON.”

[…]

He bought the used 2005 vehicle a month ago from a dentist in Fairfax County and left it in a shop for several weeks so it could be outfitted to his specifications — new, bigger tires and a “lift kit,” meaning it would be higher off the ground. Groves, who grew up in the District and works in marketing for a local radio station, said he wanted the car in part because he is starting a company, Washington Sports Marketing, that is “image-based.”

He said he wants to get it towed and repaired but fears extremists might not be done making an example of him. “I’m worried about what I do now,” he said. “If I get it fixed, do I put it back in the same spot three weeks from now?”

Suber suggests:

These cretins are dangerous persons who are using environmentalism as an excuse to terrorize a man.

Put them in Palestine and they throw concrete blocks (“rocks” as the media call them) at Israeli soldiers. Put them in Germany in the 1930s and they lead the charge for on Krystallnacht. They were the Midnight Riders in she[e]ts burning crosses in the South during Reconstruction.

James himself points out that:

Unfortunately, while the vast majority of people would eschew violence, far too many are willing to smirk at it if it’s directed against those they dislike.

Yeah, well, brown shirts are like that.  And in reality, that’s what we’re dealing with here. Class envy tied to a brownshirt mentality. If you think I’m kidding, take a look at some of the other comments that James quotes.
I drive the Buick version of the Trailblazer, these days… a Rainier. Here’s a few more pics, if you like. I get around 16mp around town, 21-22 on the highway. Not too shabby, for a 300hp rig, actually. In the seventies, this would have been considered a small vehicle.
And guess what? The H3 uses the same Atlas engine, and gets about the same MPG…. within a few tenths of an MPG.

Am I now to fear that some bozo’s going to wreck my vehicle because he thinks I should be driving a Yugo? It’s probably not likely, because it’s not as visible a vehicle.  Not as “in your face”.  But if this was for the environment, if all this destruction, all this anger was because of the environment, wouldn’t my truck be a target as well?  That it is not, suggests that the environment is not the issue for these morons.

Perhaps if we look closely, we’ll find some similar holes in the remaining arguemnts by these supposed ‘eco-warriors’… Let’s examine some of the standard anti-SUV arguments:

SUV’s support terrorists

While this would be true if we were actually getting a significant portion of our oil from the Middle East, we’re not. Iraq, for example, only accounts for around 9% of our consumption, under the normal conditions we’ve not had for some 10 years now.
Let’s also consider the idea that all automobiles burn fuel, and often at as high a rate as SUV’s, the whining not withstanding. Looking even closer, let’s say that the SUV uses 20 gal per week, on average. Meanwhile the driver of the average car gets a little better, burning perhaps 8 gallons per week less. Are the folks at the Detroit project telling us that it’s just the money for that eight gallons that funds terrorism, and the rest are OK?

So, by those lights, shouldn’t that be ANYTHING that burns gas or uses oil contributes? Why just SUV’s? Should we be shutting down NASCAR and NHRA competitions because they’re anti-American? Do we all become Amish to satisfy these people? The question becomes, of course, at what point does this Liber-Lieâ„¢ get to absurd levels?

And I’m not even going to get into Al Gore and his jet collection.  His SUV’s. And so on.

SUV’s Pollute

Again, comes the question about ALL autos. The fact is, the pollution from such vehicles are no worse than the vast majority on the road today, Including the mini-coffins the left would have us driving.

There’s no real need for the SUV

I’m forced to agree with Charles Galbach, who speaks to these points better than I:

“In the first place, the purchase of SUV’s by businesses was the result of your close buddies, the tax lawyers and their cohorts in the not that long ago Democratically controlled congress which permitted or encouraged a windfall tax deduction for SUV’s, posing as “trucks”. Since the Republicans have a history of trying to bottle up lawyers, including tax lawyers, where they belong and also have a history of opposing business taxes rather than the Democrat method of manufacturing loopholes, it had to be the Democrats who conjured up this ruse. It obviously backfired with unintended consequences.

Secondly, it was the Democrats who forced the auto industry into creating vehicles that couldn’t hold even 2 adults and 2 children without them being squashed inside a thimble sized vehicle. These same vehicles are underpowered and therefore unsafe on any highway at any speed. They qualify for no more than zipping around an area no bigger than your typical gated community – a role better served by the usual golf cart.

Everyone, except the rabid few enviro-whackos can see this. As a result, we see mom driving around in an oversized vehicle which is the only one that can hold her kids and a couple friends on a trip to soccer practice – or grandma driving around in an oversized vehicle which is about the only thing safe enough for her to drive on her daily errands.”

To this excellent commentary, I would add one more point: Like millions of Americans, I tow frequently enough to make a truck an economical choice.

Cars have been so downsized that towing with anything less is simply unsafe if not impossible. As an example, I will never forget the sight a few years ago while in Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, the sight of an obviously honeymooning couple using a Dodge Neon to tow a fairly small sized popup camper. We were at a parking spot along the ocean, near a popular eating spot. There’s a sizeable hill out front. When he pulled in, I could smell his brakes burning, from trying to get down the hill without smacking something or someone. They ate, and left. Well, they tried to…. They got stuck going back up that same hill… the car had all it could do to hold the trailer against the hill… and the trailer only weighed a couple thousand lbs.!

You do NOT want people and equipment like this next to you on the highway. But just think of all the gas he’s saving, right up to the part where they both die horribly because he can’t control the thing.

If higher MPG’s is the desired goal, fine, go after it. Meantime, leave me something that actually works. Create something that can tow 6000lbs, without getting into trouble, is safe in an accident situation, and yet gets 45mpg, and is at a reasonable initial cost, and is as dependable as our current modes of transport, and I’ll buy it.

Meantime, leave me the beep alone.

Which leads me, finally, to a personal comment, to those of you who think small cars are “safe”.

I hesitate to say this.
Twice now, I’ve been at the scene of an accident… once where I knew the victims personally, and once where I happened upon an accident before the police arrived. Both fatal accidents, both one car accidents, and both situations where the person would have lived had they had something better than a Ford Fiesta in one case, or a Prius, in the other. In both cases, they valued a gallon of gas over their own lives, and paid the price…. And I’m left with the horrible memory of those two incidents.

I will never drive such a vehicle, and I don’t give a hot crap WHAT kind of gas numbers it turns in.

SUV’s Aren’t safe in accdients, having higher accident death rates.

NHTSA figures report that 64% of SUV deaths are blamed on lack of seatbelts, not of vehicle design. And of those, a sizable number are related to tire failures, which in turn are caused by lack of tire maintenance… simply keeping the tires up to pressure, and THAT in fairly isolated cases. When those incidents are factored out, the death rates in SUV’s are actually LOWER than for the kind of tincans the left would have us in. Much lower.

Sorry, but from any angle… ANY angle…this anti-SUV argument doesn’t hold up. Since all these arguments are so easily defeated, it strikes me that what we’re seeing is more a political ploy, than anything else. An excuse for a bigger attack. An infamous socialist (is there any other kind) Adolf Hitler, had the Jews as an excuse for his attacks. The socialists of today have the SUV as their excuse. I refuse to be a victim as they were, for the purpose of someone’s political ploy for power.

Billy points up (Very well) that the objections to such vehicles are superficial and come from dubious sources. That’s pretty much the same point I brought up back in 2002, while camping:

Liberal idiocy, which as usual, is disguised as ‘caring and sharing’, and anyone opposing them of course, is ‘greed’. There is perhaps no place where the standard liberal arguments take on more of a quality of utter stupidity, than with regards to the subject of transportation in America. I ran into this in all it’s glory, at a gas station on the way up here to my little vacation spot.

To put this story into perspective allow me to show you my rig: I drive a 1995 Chevy Astro conversion, with a 4.3L V6, which usually gets around 23-24 mpg on the highway, after I did some minor mods to it. (even stock, Chevy reports the unit gets around 21 mpg on the highway.)

It’s rather comfortable, having powered velour seats, wood paneling, a TV/VCR combo, which feeds up to four sets of headphones for the kids, two AM/FM/ Cassette Stereo units, one which feeds the afore- mentioned kid headphones. Makes longer hauls much easier on the driver, I can tell you. It’ll seat 7, for short trips, four for longer runs. It has a seat in the back that with the touch of a power button, folds into a bed. Curtains in the windows. Twin A/C units, twin heaters. Direct and indirect lighting, as well as reading lights at every passenger position. For those of you who know about such things, this van is set on an S-10 frame. It’s a really great over-the-road road rig, and already has well over 100,000 miles on it, 30k of it this year so far, with two additional long-haul trips planned before camping season ends in October. OK, that’s the truck.

Trailing along behind is one of the smallest pop-up trailers on the road… around an 8 foot box, weighing, when fully loaded, around 1500lbs. Sleeps five people, if they’re really friendly. This is not a 10,000lb 5th wheel…

So, keep these specs in mind as we proceed here. The importance of them will become apparent.

I left town with less than a full tank, so at around 150 miles out, upon finding some fuel priced $1.27/gal vs the $1.55 I usually pay, I decided it’d be worthwhile to fill the rest of the 27 gallon tank, which when topped usually takes around 32 gallons total. Must be a monster amount of a feed pipe on this thing. It’s one nice thing about having a good sized tank; when you find it cheap, you can load up, and roll past the $1.55/gal places.

Anyway, I pulled in, and proceeded to load up, when a rather nice looking blonde in a Camry Solaria came in for a little liquid motion. She squirted around 5 dollars worth into her car, and then looked at the amount the van had taken on. Her eyes bugged a little, as she motioned toward my pump, and her face got a little red.

“Don’t you know how much gas those SUV‘s waste?” Once I stopped laughing, I pointed out that strictly speaking mine was not an SUV. I further pointed out that the car she was driving had only a slighly smaller engine than the one in my van… her 3100cc vs my 4300cc, and that in fact her car according to the EPA, only gets around 25mpg on the road and averages around 19mpg.

(OK truth to tell, I was a little off, as it turns out, the site http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/findacar.htm lists it as 19 and 27.. Not bad, for off the top of my head, and still not as good as my much larger Astro.)

How, I asked her, can she drive such an inefficient mode of transportation? Of course, she went ballistic, and then lacking something better to say, apparently, she pulled out the same defense all liberals do when the tripe they’ve been force-fed is challenged by someone with actual facts: She call me a liar. I’ve come to understand you’re hitting a truth they can’t argue with when they do that. I suppose there are a few who will see themselves here.

She then flamed me about the amount of space being wasted, and did I really need to have all that space, did I have to drive something so large. I reminded her it was in fact a mini-van, and would she like to look inside and point out to me what space got wasted, between my wife, my two boys, the dog and our luggage. She declined, spouting some more crap which I didn’t even bother listening to. She then fumed off, ripping a little environmentally friendly rubber as she went out into the street in front of an oncoming tractor trailer, who had tolock up all 24 wheels to miss making environmentally friendly liberal/riceball pancakes out of it all.

I filled the remainder of the tank, got some coffee, and continued on my way, fully expecting to see her again along the road. I never did. As I drove up to the campsite, perhaps 300 miles distant, I began to wonder a bit at the encounter at the pump. It seems to me that many encounters in various political discussion venues are rather like this one. The liberal attacker being gleefully ignorant of the real world, and calling anyone who disagrees with them (all together now) a liar.

How does all of this tie in with the stated topic? Well, rather simply, really. I submit to you that the biggest enemy of America today is not Bin Laden or any of his bloodthirsty idiots. Our biggest enemy is the willful, nay, GLEEFUL idiocy of the left, of which I was treated to a glowing example that afternoon.

What amounts to is, they are trying to impose their values on the rest of us.  Just like the brown shirts.  Billy makes this point whether nicely, addressing Saint Andrew the incontinent:

“Enviro-activists go all terrorist on us. The Washington Post story is here. I have to say that while I completely abhor the violence, I don’t abhor the sentiment. Parking a 7-foot high Hummer in your neighborhood is about as irritating as watching one careen down the small streets of Provincetown. We have to create a social stigma toward people totally contemptuous of the environment.”

That’s pretty funny, faggot.

Get it, Andrew?  That’s about as deep as you creeps are going with all this.  If you get to go around tagging people with attributes that they haven’t earned, then watch out, kid.  You say it’s “totally contemptuous of the environment” but, then, a squeaky import petunia who doesn’t value an American-sized machine for personally transporting himself on the scale of this continent might be expected to start getting the sniffs about it every once in a while.

See how easy it is to sneer like that at other peoples’ values?

Why don’t you just shut up and stay out of it?

Because if he does, Billy, he and his ilk won’t get the power they’re after.

That’s what this is really about.  It’s not about the environment, it’s not about the politics of oil, its most certainly not about the practicality of the machines, since they have no logical means by which to judge, it’s about power. political power.  The ability to impose their own morality.

And isn’t that interesting, that this should come up with Sullivan?

I mean, first of all, I must admit to a certain level of amusement, when people like Sullivan start coughing up accusations about how the Hummer, and other such vehicles, are a manhood extension… sought out only by those whose manhood needs the help. The cognitive dissonance in that accusation coming from the likes of Sullivan alone, is worthy of a full length column, by someone with far better writing and analytical skills than has Saint Andrew. Sigmund Freud himself could spend a bloody lifetime writing research papers on that moron. here somebody whose politics is wrapped around the idea of what the rest of society thinks of his sexual habits.  The irony of him making such a comment getting right by him doesn’t surprise me in the least… he hasn’t a hope in hell of understanding it.
In any event consider this in the context of your comments about Sullivan, Billy:
Not so very long ago the left in this country was all fired worried about those on the right moralizing about their sexual behavior. And that worrying goes on today. Witness the situation with Larry Flynt, just now. And of course, everything that comes from Sullivan’s keyboard.
And yet, what do we see the left doing with regards to transportation hear the United States? Overt moralizing. What are they calling for? Laws to match with their version of morality.

I suppose they figure it’s only valid when they do it.

Oh… And speaking of the cognitive dissonance of the left, I am reminded of the old joke about buttered toast always falling butter side down, and cats always landing on their feet.  If you were to take a piece of buttered toast and secure it to the back of a cat, you could toss the cat and the cat and the toast would rotate wildly approximately 3in. off the floor, thereby giving you a new power source.  So I envision the environ-wacko crowd over this one… Imagine with me, if you will, what happens, when as of next year, the H3 is available in a Hybrid. I’m willing to bet that the environ what goes eight nor it entirely.  Just as they have ignored the H1 Hummers that are currently getting around 24 to the gallon.

Getting serious, now… I will leave you with this thought; Not so long ago we were treated to endless months of additional power grabbing by various factions of the democratic party, under the guise of “it’s for the children”.  We are now seeing more of the same, with “it’s for the environment”.  Each are equally untrue.  Each have the same goal in mind, that which I stated earlier : political power.  Each will have the same result…

Does anybody truly think that even assuming they manage to cram all Americans into vehicles of the size and structural strength of an Altoids box, that they’re going to STOP there? and how many people are going to end up having to die along the way because of this nonsense?

The comparison that I made to brown shirts earlier is not an idle one.  The parallels between what laughingly passes for the environmental movement of today, and the NAZI movement of the late thirties and early forties, the Soviet Union before that and Marx and Engels are all there to see.  As I told a commenter elsewhere, this afternoon, The parallels are already there. I’m merely pointing them out. Failing to recognize those parallels, and react to them correctly, invites a repetition of the same problem.

The fact is, it’s already started up again.  Just ask the young man in northwest Washington DC.

Dogfighting is barbaric. But I wish more senators could get worked up about the enemy’s barbarism in this war we’re necessarily fighting.  So worked up, say, that retreat could not be considered an option. 

Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO.

?

I agree with the sentiment, if not the way it was released into the world:

RICHMOND, Va. —FOX- The Michael Vick dogfighting case made its way to the floor of the U.S. Senate Thursday when its most senior member publicly declared his outrage, saying he’s witnessed one execution but wouldn’t mind seeing another “if it involves this cruel, sadistic, cannibalistic business of training innocent, vulnerable creatures to kill.”

…

“Barbaric!,” he yelled. “Let that word resounding from hill to hill, and from mountain to mountain, and valley to valley across the broad land. Barbaric! Barbaric! May God help those poor souls who’d be so cruel. Barbaric! Hear me! Barbaric!”

Coming, as they do from the lips of a (Former?) member of the KKK, I must say, that I find these words a little.. well… awkward.

The general rule is that when somebody like that, says something that you are inclined to agree with, it should be enough to make you reassess your position. So I find my thought, here.
Out of the average old man, or one of any age, for that matter, one without a governmental position of power, I could understand and accept such comments, even if I didn’t fully endorse them. Admittedly, there’s an emotional part of me which agrees with the sentiments expressed.

However, when, as in this case, the comments come from a sitting senator, one with a past rather checkered with his own barbarisms, not as regards dogs, but as regards human beings, the comments take on an entirely new and distasteful dimension, as well as a few legal ones.
I suppose it will be argued, that human beings change, and that we should take the senators comments in light of that change. That argument will most often be floated by Democrats, no doubt. I have entertained such arguments before, and ultimately dismissed them, within these pages. Let’s just say I have my doubts that he has fully rejected the values of the Klan.
However, even absent Byrd’s baggage laden history the comments are very problematic. Perhaps it is in his advanced years, that he’s forgetting himself, and his station. One wonders what legal ramifications will occur because of comments of Senator Byrd. I think I can fairly well guarantee you that Vick will not face anything additional because of them. Which, logically speaking, only leaves the good senator as a target.

Since, in all candor, at age 92, the senator is not likely to be around to see those legal ramifications develop any teeth, it falls to the remainder of us, we the taxpayers, to bear the burden for those comments, if Vick’s lawyers decide to level a lawsuit on this.

Addendum: (David L)

Given Byrd’s vote to kill the John Doe provision, he seems to care more about dogs than he does American citizens.