Boortz Nails the Obvious

 Any discussion of the president’s veto of the Democrats surrender bill must begin with the realization of one simple, basic, incontrovertible fact. The Democrat leadership of this country awakes every single day with one desire on their mind: They want a day of bad news from Iraq. Those Democrat leaders who actually pray are praying for our defeat in Iraq. Every bit of bad news from Iraq brings smiles to Democrat faces. Every bit of good news brings sadness.

Democrats are totally invested in our defeat in Iraq. They believe that their chances of taking the White House and keeping the congress in the 2008 elections is to nurture the idea that many American voters have that what they call the “Iraq War”, but what is really the Iraqi front in the war against terrorism, is absolutely lost and is only being further pursued by George Bush to achieve some nefarious anti-American and ungodly goals. Democrats know that Americans love winners, and that Americans want to win. If Americans begin to believe that that the achievement of our goals in Iraq is, in fact, possible; that a victory can be won, they will turn against the Democrat’s … and there goes the Democrat majority and a Democrat in the White House.

The Democrat — and media — hatred of George Bush has its genesis in the 2000 elections. Democrats did everything they could to bring about a recount in Florida — but only in those areas which vote Democrat. They worked extra hours to try to disqualify votes from American citizens serving in our armed forces overseas. They pulled out all of the stops to change the outcome in Florida. They held hearings about intimidation of black voters in Florida, but could not come up with one single voter willing to appear before a Congressional hearing to tell his or her sad tale of being turned away from the polls. They tried it all, folks .. and still Bush was certified the winner.

From that moment on Democrats were dedicated to doing everything and anything the could do to destroy the Bush presidency … and that includes working for a defeat of our country and our troops in Iraq. In pursuit of this goal the Democrats have had the willing help of two other powerful entities. The mainstream media and the Republican Party. The New York and Washington press corps, always supportive of Democrats at the polls, was more than willing to do whatever they could to join in the demonization of Bush. 

 Not to take anything away from Neal Boortz, he’s right on the money with this stuff; this is what I’ve been saying in this blog for years, now. But, then again, it’s about as obviously correct as anyone could get. Which of course doesn’t mean the Democrats are going to admit any of it anytime soon.

Isn’t it time we press Dirty Harry and Mrs Pelosi about why they want America to lose the war in Iraq?

David Keene, the Hill, reports on a corrupt senator.

The problems stem from her subcommittee activities from 2001 to late 2005, when she quit. During that period the public record suggests she knowingly took part in decisions that eventually put millions of dollars into her husband’s pocket — the classic conflict of interest that exploited her position and power to channel money to her husband’s companies.

In other words, it appears Sen. Feinstein was up to her ears in the same sort of shenanigans that landed California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R) in the slammer. Indeed, it may be that the primary difference between the two is basically that Cunningham was a minor leaguer and a lot dumber than his state’s senior senator.

Feinstein is corrupt and must resign.

(H/T photo:  Michelle Malkin)

LOS ANGELES — FOX- Tom Poston, the tall, pasty-faced comic who found fame and fortune playing a clueless everyman on such hit television shows as “Newhart” and “Mork and Mindy,” has died. He was 85.

The Music:

The Buckinghams’ Time and Changes

Back in 1967, before Chicago, before Blood Sweat and Tears, there was The Buckinghams.

Produced by James William Guercio who produced BS&T’s self-titled LP,and won a Grammy for it.  as well as 11 of Chicago’s works, (as well as some Firesign Theatre stuff, if I’m not mistaken)…  the album is apparently more attributable to its producer, then to the talent being recorded. That’s not to say the Buckinghams were not a formidable musical talent. One gets the feeling and listening to them, however, that they were more interested in creating AM pop than the kind of sound Guercio wanted. He managed to squeeze some interesting sounds out of them anyway, and they managed to score a few hits along the way, too.

I should point out that Guercio was the founder of the Caribou Ranch, which was one of the best studios of the time… Chicago recorded there as did another of his horn sound projects, Girard, and of course, Elton John, Stphen Stills, Waylon Jennings, Supertramp and so on and so on.

Anyway… The saddest part of this album is that while most of the tunes are nice ones, you want to strangle Guercio for imposing that sound on places that didn’t need it; the arrangements at times were downright horrendous.  Still, this album gives us a look at one of the best producers in the business in his day, as he finds his feet.

As for the band, musically speaking, we find them being torn between wanting to be pop stars and wanting to be experimental, and having a producer more interested in getting his sound than theirs to the tape… all in a world being overrun with stuff like the Jefferson Airplane and Iron Butterfly and so on… (Take for example the extended psycho trip on “Susan” which never made it to the single version as a prime example), and mix it all up and you have a band, sadly that would not survive the attempt to bridge all that into an album.
In fairness, it should be said that had the Buckinghams come along a few years later, say, 72 or 73, they would ironically have been considered a Chicago sound alike, and not been taken seriously.  And they suddenly dropped on the scene in 1969, well, who knows?  The point is, that whatever else that whole scene might have been, the Buckinghams were a bit ahead of their time, and suffered for it.

* A nod to Rodney Dill’s Caption Contest. Your Bitmaster took first AND an honorable mention, in this week’s contest. I suppose you could attribute it to a Bit of horse sense.

* Raining in Rochester. Bad light=No truck photos.

* No goal? Who ya kidding, NHL? The whole world saw the puck cross the line. Why didn’t Toronto? All that expensive equipment and all those people on the payroll up and Toronto, and you can’t it right?

And by the way, Lindy, I’m not sure benching Maxim Afinogenov had the desired effect. Certainly a bold move, and a serious one, but it’s unclear it’s what we needed.

* The President has vetoed the supposed Iraq War Spending Bill… which spent on EVERYTHING BUT, and also tried to usurp commend of a war from the Military, and set up a defeat in absentia.

Good.  It’s about time.  The democrats are going to end up paying a large price for this one at the next election.  Assuming, of course, that the republicans are intelligent enough to saddle the Democrats with their own actions.  And from what I’m seeing, the Democrats ahve already signaled that they’re ready to pass a straight funding bill, without the surrender timetable added.

So, the obvious question is, what have they gained?  Well, for one thing, my sense is that it’s going to be loaded down with as much pork spending as this vetoed version was.

* So, Romey likes “Battlefield Earth”?

“I’m not in favor of his religion by any means,” Mr. Romney, a Mormon, said. “But he wrote a book called ‘Battlefield Earth’ that was a very fun science-fiction book.”

Oh, please. I have entire shelves full of SCI Fi material .  Some of that massively popular on the bestseller charts, and some of it not.  Every single one of them was better than that piece of trash.  The only people reading that nonsense is Hubbard’s followers, whose judgment is already in serious question. I read about a quarter of it once… it was downright terrible. The best description I can give his fifties movie SCI Fi serials, transcribed by somebody on an acid trip.  Good thing I only paid 50 cents for it at a garage sale… from someone else who had obviously come to the same conclusion.

The guy is toasted… and so are his presidential chances, fortunately.

* Will someone please be so kind as to explain to me why ANYONE take Kevin Drum seriously? I mean, past that he’s an echo chamber for Move ON, of course.

* An interesting comment on Hume, tonight:

Just as Democratic congressional leaders are confronting President Bush on Iraq as never before, a top editor at the liberal New Republic magazine says they are illiterate on the issue.

Senior editor Lawrence Kaplan cites an article by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman — and presidential candidate — Joe Biden — where the senator asserted that U.S. and Iraqi troops pacified the city of Tal Afar — then left. Kaplan reports that not only have the troops not left the city, their numbers have recently increased.

Also cited was Congressman John Murtha’s suggestion that it would be easy for American forces to redeploy from Iraq to Okinawa — which is 5,000 miles away.

And House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes’s ignorance of whether Sunni or Shia populate the ranks of Al Qaeda.

Kaplan also mentions that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants a “new strategy” limiting U.S. forces to the training of Iraqis and counter-terror operations so as to reduce the “combat footprint” — the very strategy in fact tried and discarded under former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

See, here’s the problem; the left knows their leadership is the largest bunch of screw ups ever assembled. But it’s THEIR group of screw ups. And, if their leadership is a little hazy on the facts, so what?

Bit wrote:

* It amazes me that we have a presidential candidate who still can’t figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.

Names are to Mrs. Clinton as suits are to Al Gore, for much the same reason.

Academic Elephant, Red State, is reporting that Abu Ayyub al Masri has assumed room temperature.  Surge on.   Dirty Harry Reid was not available for comment.

Michelle Malkin on the O’Reilly TV show is like Lou Gehrig following Wally Pipp.

Don Surber 

First order of business: The new truck. I’m a little short on pics of it just now, but if the light behaves itself tomorrow night, I’ll fire off a series.

For now; It’s a Buick Rainer.

It’s kinda like the Chevy Trailblazer, except they’ve added a lot of quieting to this; It’s without question the quietest SUV I’ve ever driven.

Got the 4.2L inline 6, 24 valve. Kicks around 275hp, 275PF of torque. Tust me, this thing will hurt the tires, given the chance. That’s hooked to an uprated version of the 4L-60E tranny that I had in the van, and from there to the same all-wheel-drive system the van had.

With all that and the fulle body on ladder frame design, it rates for around 6000lbs of towing… more than enough for the trailer we tow.

All the toys… it’s a Buick, after all.. including automatically adjusted air ride, of all things. Black outside, Tan leather inside. Not as big as the van, but the creature comforts are all there. About the same gas consumption as the van… rated 17-21, though we got 18 around town and 23 on the open road over the weekend, which is about the best the van ever got…and I think I can improve that a bit.

What’s really going on here is that we went for the bumper to bumper 100,000 mile warranty, because much as we loved BitsBox, it was getting up in miles, and didn’t have the warranty.
As I say, I’ll post some better stuff tomorrow.
Yeah, yeah yeah, lots to catch up on. Let’s get to it.

* My initial reaction to the George Tenant thing was that Tenant was trying to sell books, but something didn’t ‘feel’ right about that, so I held my peace. For one thing, the press, always over-eager for something/anything to throw at this administration, seemed to me a little too willing to take Tenant at his word about some things.

Former CIA Chief George Tenet writes in his just-released book that on the day after 9/11 he met with Pentagon adviser Richard Perle.

“He said to me, ‘Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.'” But Bill Kristol notes in The Weekly Standard: “Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United States until September 15.”

That’s one sure sign of many that the press wasn’t doing it’s homework before making a move. Irony abounds; isn’t that exactly what they’ve been screaming that the Administration did?

However; for all of the screaming that the left has been doing with regards to “political manipulation of the Pre-war intel” George tenet makes it quite clear, that that was not the case. I’ve read the “referenced on radio once and TV once, but I haven’t seen it reported yet, where I can link it. Apparently, there is quite a bit in the book, which the press has passed right over in their efforts to hype any book that apparently takes a chunk out of the Bush administration, which paints a quite different picture from the one the hype paints…. even without the aforementioned credibility issues. But the people trying the hardest to sell this book have not been Tenant or his people, thusfar, but rather the press.
By the way, I see others wading into this one, incautiously, such as Hitchens, who of course, in his very first line says:

It’s difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm.

Apparently, Mr. Tenant isn’t the only one with a flair being incautious. I’ve been finding Hitch’s analytical skills increasingly suspect, since he started mouthing is nonsense about how religion is the root of all evil.

In this case, his judgement is well beyond the suspect, and into the maddeningly bizzare:

“This has bin Laden all over it,” Tenet told Boren. “I’ve got to go.” He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. “I wonder,” Tenet said, “if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone.

I find it improbable but that Tenant would have decided to leave Moussaoui alone, without some political direction, most likely in the form of a directive from Bill Clinton.

Hitchens needs to consider that we were still operating in a September the tenth environment, where PC is the run of the day. on what basis, does anyone suppose that we would have been able to pick up Moussaoui, on the tenth of September?

While Hitch would apparently like to think that Tenant had sole responsibility for the information that the United States, and indeed the world acted upon, it was in fact information gathered from all over the world, and from intelligence agencies from all over the world. This was not , repeat not, solely a CIA operation. Nor was the CIA alone in their conclusions.

George Tenant is not a totally unsympathetic character, but this is by no means to be considered a defense of Director Tenant. There is the as yet on answered question of that long line of trucks moving out of Iraq toward Syria just prior to the invasion. Clearly, that’s something the CIA already knew about. If there was a major screw up at the CIA, that one point qualifies as probably the biggest in 40 years. That one falls at the feet of George Tenant.

As for the rest, however, let’s consider the degree to which the CIA had been emasculated and by the Clinton administration, who, by the way, itself also acted on the same information that was provided to the Bush administration. To this day, the anti-war left praises Clinton for his military action, on the very same information that George Bush acted upon. Go figure.

I’m certain I’ll have more about this, as the days progress, but I have to tell you that this is both more and less than the initial press hype makes it.
* We’ve been hearing for years, now, about how a few thousand gallons of jet fuel, couldn’t have brought down the world trade center. Wrong. By way of Beck. …Who, by the way, I have got to be able to get down to see when the Coots are playing. I was busy with the new truck this weekend. Always something… and I get the feeling I’m missing something special.

* So Corzine is out of the hospital. OK, fellow human being, and all that. But I wonder if any of these new mobile grained inDUHviduals who are cheering his return, have really thought about the extraordinarily remote possibility that he’s going to bring about any positive changes for the state of New Jersey?

* On the other hand, nice to see Tony Snow back on the job. What stories I’ve seen about his progress, leave a little to be desired; and I can’t get rid of the nagging urge of comparison to Cathy’s situation. Obviously, that’s an unsettling comparison, but there it is.

* It amazes me that we have a presidential candidate who still can’t figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.

* I’ll resume posting music notes tomorrow…My mixer’s giving me problems at the moment so I’m not listening to anything tonight, anyway.

It is a leftard myth that law enforcement officers stop motorists based on the color of their skin.   As if you can acually identify skin color looking through the tinted glass of modern vehicles.  Oh well.

A federal study refutes the DwB myth, according to a story by Donna Leinwand, USA Today:

“People of all races and ethnicities are stopped at the same rate. It is after the stop that disparities appear.”

Police officers must feel a wee bit like Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and David Evans, they get no credit for being innocent of a concocted charge.   Welcome to the club.

“It’s a cruel hoax to say you’re gun-free but you’ve no way of enforcing it.”

David Kopel, Kansas City Star

Edit:  Corrected attribution, as per reader, McGehee, comment. ?

For The First Time In History, Fire Melts Steel

Ace.

The Gaineville Times, and others,  smears our military: 

It comes down to a question of trust.

For the most part, Americans trust the U.S. military. The question is, why doesn’t the military trust us?

Two incidents in our overseas conflicts, and the Pentagon’s spin of each, have us wondering.

First came Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the West Virginia soldier rescued from Iraq after she was injured in a 2003 firefight. The story first came out that she went down with guns blazing before she was captured, then heroically rescued.

Here what you need to know, about the story of Jessica Lynch, as a hero fighting to her last bullet, was connocted by the Washington Post, most likely to support the idea a females in combat arms.

The WaPo ran a story that was never confirmed by the Pentagon and with dubious, or maybe imagination, sourcing.   Ray Robison, American Thinker, explains the “Media Lynch Mob:”

The US media created this recounting of her exploits from vague, unofficial statements by “undisclosed officials” and having been revealed as rumor mongers started looking for someone to blame. Who else would they pin it on but the US military?

The leftards wanted a Mambo.   They didn’t have one.  So they concocted one.

You want someone to blame for the Lynch fiction, here they are Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb:

Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Dispite attributing their yarn to U.S. officials in the lede paragraph, Schmidt and Loeb indentify the source of their story, such as it was:

Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah

Being so easily duped, had Schmidt and Loeb  been reporting in 1938, I am confident they would have reported Martians landing in Grovers Mill, New Jersey,

Wry note, the WaPo editorializes on the Lynch bruhaha, notes the media frenzy, but totally omits her role in concocting the story in the first place.

The Gainesville Times is stupid enough to accept the Washington Post‘s story at face value, but somehow manages to blame their stupidity on the Pentagon.

Note Private Lynch was a real hero.   I salute her for her service to our country.

More, Allahpundit, Hot Air.

* Yes, I got the new truck, and yes that’s why I wasn’t writing, last night.

Pictures later. The light was terrible, today. Basically, this new one isn’t nearly as flashy as the old one.  Until you get inside.
* I didn’t participate in the caption contest at OTB, just recently, because the picture reminded me uncomfortably of the situation described by Dale Franks the other day with his dog.  The humans in the picture reminded me of Dale. I must say, I was very disappointed to see the way that situation developed for Dale.  And, for the dog. I guess, in the end, I wasn’t comfortable joking about it.
* Speaking of OTB, I see James linking a note from Kim Komando, who says that LG has a new, dual mode DVD player out:

There are two high-definition formats: HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The formats are incompatible; so many buyers have been hesitant to commit. Perhaps you remember the VHS and Betamax format war of the 1980s?

To get around this issue, some studios release movies on both formats. But many stick to one. More movies have been released on Blu-ray.

A solution is on the horizon. LG recently released a player that handles both HD DVD and Blu-ray. At $1,200, it is pricey; however, it won’t soon become obsolete. Samsung will also release a dual-format player this year.

Total Hi Def (THD) discs are also coming this year. These discs will contain both HD DVD and Blu-ray versions of a movie. Warner Bros. developed THD, but other studios may adopt it. The discs won’t be much more expensive than other high-definition discs. High-definition movies currently cost $30 to $40.

James comments that :

Dual-former discs and/or players would, obviously, render the format issue moot and should kick demand for players up several notches.

I doubt it.  mean, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s going to eliminate the reluctance to buy, altogether. Kim’s comparison of the Beta/VHS wars relates a concern that is still very much a given, for buyers expected to spend a not inconsequential amount of money on a player…

Think back a little bit, and you may remember that the eventual successor, VHS, was replaced by the DVD within ten years. By the time everybody had jumped on the VHS bandwagon, and spent enormous amounts of money on tape collections, the we were then expected to jump on the DVD bandwagon, replacing the entire collection that we’d spent hundreds of dollars on.

What are we going to be replacing at $1,200.00 players and $40 each media with, another seven years from now? It’s not surprising to see Kim Komando not mention that factor, since in the end, she’s a salesperson for technology…but I would have thought James would mention that at least once.

I am by no stretch playing the part of the neophyte here.  But the amount of money involved for a format change , where those changes are coming with increasing speed, I would think eventually is gonna cut into your sales.* I’m not sure what to think about this one over in Deleware country whch would be just east of Binghamton, NY.  I mean I can imagine what some would say… Beck, for example, (Who, come to think on it is from around there, more or less) but I guess my reaction would depend on what led up to this, and I’m not getting a good picture of that from what background info I’ve found.

* Nice to see the Sabres up by two games against the Rangers, thogh I’d have been a lot happier had they looked better in the first two periods.
* Hey, Roy…  If we’re going to be talking about hypocrisy, shall we address the issue of how much energy is being used by democratic presidential candidates, and democratic party hangers on such as Sheryl Crow, as they preach to us about how we should be saving energy?  Those private jets, as I recall, can get rather thirsty when they’re buying votes.  I suppose, however, that there is no level the Democrats won’t sink to, when they are desperate for some kind of a scandal to throw at the Republicans.

* Peggy Noonan has a piece in the Wall Street Journal, today, that I commend to your reading.  She makes the suggestion that were busy scaring our children to death.  No, by no means a mime urging that we increase the politics of “for the children”.  However our point is well taken in that there is an increasing emphasis on frightening the crap out of kids these days.  Some of the pictures she talks about, are clearly intended to frighten, with violence.  And yet we are busy telling our kids that they shouldn’t be violent under any circumstances.  That’s a contradiction that’s going to come back and bite us, eventually.

Imus called some nice, successful college student-athletes prostitutes. That was ugly and unseemly. Limbaugh, via Shanklin, suggested that a longtime public figure with a criminal past and presidential aspirations was inarticulate. That’s neither beyond the pale nor even untrue.

James Joyner, Outside the Beltway 

Much, way too much, has been written about the Rush Limbaugh/Paul Shanklin parody of the L.A. Times and Al Sharpton.  I echo what James says.

Barack Obama gave a less than sterling silver response to how he would deal with a terror attack.   Yet Mrs. Clinton, of all people, had the audacity to question Obama’s response, or lack thereof.   The Clinton campaign claimed,

“Hillary was the candidate who demonstrated that she would know how to respond if the country was attacked.”

To which I say bull.  At no point in the eight years of the Clinton co-presidency was a competent response to terrorism ever demonstrated.  The Clinton adminstration suffered some eight terror attacks in eight years, from WTC I to the USS Cole.   The Clintons never made an effective response to any terrorism attack, dispite repeated opportunity.   Mrs. Clinton hand picked stooges on the Justice Department persisted in treating terrorism as if it were some of criminal justice problem.  The Clintons’ greatest effect on the global war terror may been to erect the imfamous Gorelick Wall.

Mr. Clinton’s response to terrorism was totally impotent and Mrs. Clinton has never repudiated her husband’s foreign policy.   Until such time as she does, she is saddled with it.

Mrs. Clinton has plenty of experience is dealing with global terrorism, but sadly utterly no expertise.