Posted 2/14/2003 03:08:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
LEAVING THEM BEHIND: Andrew Sullivan writes:

The lesson from this is a simple one: we have to abandon the U.N. as an instrument in world affairs. I'm not saying complete U.S. withdrawal, although I'm beginning to think that now makes a lot of sense. I mean temporary U.S. disengagement. The body is now a joke of immense proportions. If it cannot enforce a resolution it passed only a couple of months ago, it cannot enforce anything. If it cannot read the plain meaning of its own words, it is an absurdist theater piece, not a genuine international body. It isn't in danger of becoming the League of Nations. It now is the League of Nations.

I actually watched a couple of minutes of the UN's Kabuki theater while visiting a friend in New York this morning. When the ambassador from Syria used the discussion regarding Iraq as a launching point against "Israeli racism", it was even more obvious than before that this is a sham. One advantage of Bush working the UN however, rather than attacking Iraq immediately after Afghanistan, is of course that it allowed the UN, along with France and Germany to be shown as the charlatans they truly are. And--assuming victory in Iraq--that's an incredible quadruple play for Bush. Speaking of which, as a great man once said..."Let's roll"--and (now that we're done with the UN) the sooner the better.

Posted 2/14/2003 01:52:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
"WE ARE NOW AT WAR WITH FRANCE", Steven Deste Beste writes. Read the whole thing (to coin a phrase).

Posted 2/14/2003 06:47:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
HEADLINES OF MASS DESTRUCTION: How many keyboards did the Associated Press ruin, when they caused people to spew, Danny Thomas-style over this one:

"Iraq Bans Weapons of Mass Destruction" But since they were supposed to that 12 years ago, didn't they just admit that they're in material breach? Or, like Santa Cruz declaring themselves "a nuclear-free zone", is Saddam simply saying--in only the heartfelt and earnest way that he can--that WMDs are bad for children and other living things?

Posted 2/13/2003 10:01:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
AXIS OF EVIL: THE NEXT GENERATION: Beijing signs up Albert Speer's son to revamp China's capital for the Olympics. I'm willing to believe that Albert Speer Sr. was a naive young man who was seduced by an artist gone terribly astray. What's his son's excuse? Robert Harris, call your office!

Posted 2/13/2003 10:34:46 AM by Edward Driscoll
WITH APOLOGIES TO DAVE BARRY: Blogging has moved to a safe, undisclosed location code named "Foo Fork". Seriously though, we had arranged this trip to visit friends and relatives several months ago, and decided, despite the shock headlines and wall-to-wall coverage of the cable networks, to go. I can't say I noticed any different tone from the passengers on our flight in, or the people in the mid-town Manhattan restaurant where we had dinner last night (or on the subway to my mother-in-law's appartment this morning).

Posted 2/11/2003 03:10:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
LES PAUL MEETS BOB METCALFE: Gibson's latest electric guitar has an Ethernet jack. I gotta do a product review of this! (Link via Group Captain Mandrake, currently taking part in the Officer Exchange Program with the USAF. I think he's visiting Gen. Turgidson (and maybe even Miss Scott!) in the Pentagon, even as we speak.)

Posted 2/11/2003 03:02:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
MEET THE NEW COACH OF THE 49ERS: Dennis Erickson, former Seattle Seahawks and Oregon State head coach.

Posted 2/11/2003 12:51:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
GENTLEMEN, START YOUR FISKINGS: Laura Billings, a columnist with Twin Cities.com has written a piece titled "Stars' views shouldn't be so easily written off". I'm not an accomplished Fisker, but some of these paragraphs are so easy to refute, with only a minimum of searching on Google, that I figured I'd take a whack at them:

Take for instance the shellacking that singer Sheryl Crow recently got after appearing at the American Music Awards in a T-shirt sequined with the message "War is not the answer.'' As she told reporters, "I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies." Though Jesus Christ, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. all expressed similar thoughts, they didn't have the misfortune of living in a world with FOX News. Conservative critics were worse to her than music critics, referring to her as a "noted geopolitical strategist" who "probably thinks Saddam Hussein is a New York City cabdriver.''

Gee, I don't remember Christ or Dr. King telling anyone that "the best way to solve problems is to not have enemies", as if by simply being nice, you'll never have enemies along the way. (Besides, by attacking Bush, Crow has made enemies of her own. Shouldn't she have simply been nice and kept her thoughts to herself? And then there's Billings' sidepocket shot at Fox News. Is CNN really that pacificist? I don't recall their cries of horror when Clinton bombed Kosovo, torched Waco, or snatched Elián Gonzalez at gunpoint. And as the following paragraph from a 1983 review of the film Ghandi indicates, its title subject was once a guy even Fox News could admire:

It is something of an anomaly that Gandhi, held in popular myth to be a pure pacifist (a myth which governments of India have always been at great pains to sustain in the belief that it will reflect credit on India itself, and to which the present movie adheres slavishly), was until fifty not ill-disposed to war at all. As I have already noted, in three wars, no sooner had the bugles sounded than Gandhi not only gave his support, but was clamoring for arms. To form new regiments! To fight! To destroy the enemies of the empire! Regular Indian army units fought in both the Boer War and World War I, but this was not enough for Gandhi. He wanted to raise new troops, even, in the case of the Boer and Kaffir Wars, from the tiny Indian colony in South Africa. British military authorities thought it not really worth the trouble to train such a small body of Indians as soldiers, and were even resistant to training them as an auxiliary medical corps ("stretcher bearers"), but finally yielded to Gandhi's relentless importuning.As first instructed, the Indian Volunteer Corps was not supposed actually to go into combat, but Gandhi, adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of battle. When the British commanding officer was mortally wounded during an engagement in the Kaffir War, Gandhi--though his corps' deputy commander--carried the officer's stretcher himself from the battlefield and for miles over the sun-baked veldt. The British empire's War Medal did not have its name for nothing, and it was generally earned.

Getting back to Ms. Billings, she also writes:

[Barbra] Streisand is continually derided for mixing up Iran and Iraq, and yet no one complains when the president says Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Does anyone remember al-Qaida?

Why yes, we do--probably far more often than Ms. Billings. Where do they get their money? Where do they get their training? Is it that far fetched a connection for Ms. Billings? Besides, even if there's no connection whatsoever, wouldn't removing one murderous dictator from the Middle East make al-Qaida think twice before striking the US again? This quote is also fun:

But when it comes to understanding the spin doctoring and cynical manipulations that go on in D.C., [Dustin] Hoffman may have more expert standing than he lets on. Did you ever see him in "Wag the Dog"?

Yes. His character was murdered by the Carville-esque fixer played by Robert DeNiro, precisely because he was a clueless Hollywood producer who didn't understand "the spin doctoring and cynical manipulations that go on in D.C." As I said, I'm not a veteran Fisker. But those folks who are should have lots of fun marking up Ms. Billings' babble.

Posted 2/11/2003 09:40:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE TAPE: Glenn Reynolds writes, "Personally, I think this is evidence that Osama is dead, and that the CIA is supplying these tapes for purposes of its own. (Not that there's anything wrong with that)." But it seams that either way, Bush wins. Osama's dead? Then Bush must be doing a pretty good fighting terrorism. After all, Clinton never bothered to kill him. Osama's alive and in cahoots with Iraq? Yet another reason for regime change there.

Posted 2/11/2003 08:19:54 AM by Edward Driscoll
REDRUM! REDRUM! Happy Fun Pundit examines what's written on Hans Blix's notes.

Posted 2/10/2003 09:55:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
MAYBE I SHOULD RETHINK THIS WHOLE REMODELING IDEA: Tim Cavanaugh writes, "you can get a four-bedroom house in Baghdad for $70,000."

Posted 2/10/2003 08:42:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
PROFILES IN COURAGE: Remember VISA's ad featuring identical NFL twins Tiki and Ronde Barber, and the vacuous blonde salesclerk whose eyes bobbed from left to right to left to left to right to right to left like a Cylon warrior two circuits short of a CPU trying to figure out who was who? That's what the Times' position on liberating Iraq sounds a bit like, as enunciated by Sulzberger Jr, and explained by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan notes, "If the president were a Democrat, however, I have few doubts they would have come to some kind of decision by now." You think?

Posted 2/10/2003 08:23:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH (and we mean it): The New York Post links to this transcript obtained by The Smoking Gun, graphically detailing Michael Jackson's alleged sexual trysts with a 13-year-old boy. This is truly horrifying stuff, not the least of which is a quote of Jackson telling the poor kid, "because most people believe something is wrong, doesn't make it so." This qualifies in my book as the very definition of wrong.

Posted 2/10/2003 08:12:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE PICTURE WAS NOT LOST: Rand Simberg notes that Petr Ginz’s Moon Landscape drawing "was not destroyed in last weekend's Shuttle disaster. Ramon didn't take the original--it was a copy."

Posted 2/10/2003 08:03:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
RUDY GIULIANI WRITES of an ugly stall by Democrats in the the US Senate.

Posted 2/10/2003 01:31:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE SHARPTON FACTOR: Howard Kurtz writes that Democrats are in a damned-if they-do, damned-if-they-don't position with Al Sharpton:

For a guy who has no chance of winning, Sharpton is having a sizable impact on the calculations of every other Democrat, all of whom will be hunting for minority votes. (Although many middle-class blacks are wary of Sharpton as well. How he does outside New York, especially among blacks, will determine whether he's the next Jesse Jackson or more of a gadfly candidate.) Sharpton is a smarter politician than most people realize, but he's also a symbol of the kind of divisive racial politics that the Republicans would like to wrap around the neck of the eventual Democratic nominee. So maybe tip-toeing around him isn't the smartest strategy. One GOP strategist says privately that a Democrat with chutzpah could really help himself by pulling a Sister Souljah moment and ripping Reverend Al. (Ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani never gave Sharpton the time of day, but then he wasn't running in any Democratic primaries.)

Orrin Judd also has some thoughts.

Posted 2/10/2003 12:49:04 PM by Edward Driscoll
I SWEAR I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP! Found via Best of the Web, this is a riot:

Mikhail Gorbachev is teaming up with former US president Bill Clinton and actress Sophia Loren to record a new version of the classic children's musical "Peter and the Wolf." Retitled "The Wolf and Peter", the remake of Sergei Prokoviev's tale will tell the story from the point of view of the wolf, faced with the encroachments of urbanisation on his dwindling forest habitat.

Why was Gorbachev hired?

Nagano and RNO general director Sergei Markov said they had chosen Gorbachev because, like Clinton, he "has a great ability to communicate." The remark drew wry comment in the Russian media, which recalled Gorbachev was often derided in office for his southern accent and long, indecipherable sentences stuffed with Communist party jargon. Asked whether Gorbachev was rehearsing, Polyakov said "Mikhail Sergeyevich does everything impromptu."

Scrappleface, call your office!

Posted 2/10/2003 12:21:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
NOW THIS IS A BUDGET I'D LIKE TO SEE. Won't happen in my lifetime, though.

Posted 2/10/2003 12:13:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
FINISHING THE JOB: Great, unexpected line in the middle of Jay Nordlinger's latest Impromptu:

As you undoubtedly know by now, the Israeli astronaut who was killed on the Columbia — Ilan Ramon — was one of the pilots who daringly and bravely took out the Osirak reactor. At his funeral, President Bush reportedly told his children, “I’m going to finish the job your dad started.” That is especially interesting in light of the fact that the U.S. government joined the rest of the world in condemning the Israeli raid — a raid that almost certainly saved the lives of many.

Maybe it shouldn't have been that unexpected, actually.

Posted 2/10/2003 09:59:59 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE THEME SONG OF THE UN INSPECTION TEAM: As spotted by Joanne Jacobs. UPDATE: Scott Ott seams to agree.

Posted 2/10/2003 09:43:09 AM by Edward Driscoll
DUDE--YOU'RE GETTING BUSTED! The "dude, you're getting a Dell!" dude was arrested recently for possession of marijuana. No word yet if he was also carrying these matches. UPDATE: Heard in an online forum: "Hey, I thought pot was considered a Gateway drug..."

Posted 2/10/2003 12:11:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
WOW--WHAT TIMING! No sooner did I post below comparing the US's upcoming war to liberate Iraq with our earlier efforts in Kosovo, and clicked through some of the links contained within it, did I find this post by Stefan Sharkansky comparing the media's coverage of a Democratic president waging war in 1999 with his Republican counterpart planning to do the same--and for far less shaky reasons--in 2003:

NATO's bombing of Serbia lasted less than three months, and ended with the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo and their replacement by NATO ground troops. Milosevic was ousted less than a year and a half later. Life in Serbia and Kosovo seems to be an improvement, at least, from what was there before the NATO campaign. The liberal media doesn't seem to have learned anything since then to overcome its near evangelical belief in unilateral pacifism. And the [San Francisco] Chronicle has taken a giant step backwards, toward the Progressive's fantasy view of the universe.

Read the whole thing.

Posted 2/10/2003 12:03:44 AM by Edward Driscoll
EMOTIONS, NOT FACTS: That's what Jonah Goldberg writes is behind the anti-war movement, using Mary McGrory's explanation as to why she's no longer anti-war as a springboard. "One gets the distinct sense that if Al Gore were in office, they'd have no problems with toppling Saddam", Jonah writes. Of course. I'll never forget the conversation I had back around 1999 with an attorney who was an acquaintance of my wife, while we had dinner at a Los Gatos restaurant with another couple and her. A sixty-something hyper-liberal, after she had brought up (God knows how we got on the subject) the importance of liberating Kosovo, I casually mentioned that I didn't see why it was in our national interest to get involved there. She erupted like a volcano with, "We've got to liberate those poor people suffering under Slobodan Milosevic!!!! Don't you understand!!???", Well, no. But I'll bet any amount of money she's against liberating the equally suffering people of Iraq, largely--if not entirely--because of who will get the credit for it.

Posted 2/9/2003 11:23:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
"BRUTAL IRAQI NEEDLES": Rand Simberg describes some of the unintended consequences slowing down the rush of American and European human shields to Baghdad.

Posted 2/9/2003 10:39:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE RESULTS ARE IN! The results of the First Annual Warblogger Awards, as hosted by Right Wing News, that is. We were honored that that John Hawkins, RWN's proprietor asked us to be a judge. Frankly, we're still pretty psyched that we were a site of the day there, not too long ago. Some of the results aren't too surprising. But a lot of them are, at least to me. So click on over, already!

Posted 2/9/2003 08:04:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
SORRY ABOUT THE LACK OF POSTING, but yesterday evening, I "attended" (it was in my home, but my wife and I did little of the actual planning or preparation) a wake for a close friend of mine. He was buried last week in Tennessee, where he was born, but yesterday was an opportunity for his wife and west coast friends to celebrate his life, and mourn his passing, all too soon at age 40, of a heart ailment and diabetes. Today, on the other hand, was much more fun. Did you ever read the John Cheever story, The Swimmer, or see the 1968 movie version, which starred a surprisingly buff Burt Lancaster as a middle-aged man reliving his life by swimming from pool to pool on a hot Sunday afternoon in his suburban neighborhood? If you didn't, I'm not surprised, but it's one of those offbeat 1960s films that Bravo reruns from time to time (the other is the Canadian film version of The Fox, with Keir Dullea, minus Gary Lockwood and HAL 9000). I did my own version of The Swimmer today, and I didn't even get wet. As part of our remodeling project, my wife and I are planning to put in a tub-sized Jacuzzi when we renovate our primary bathroom. Because at 6'2", I'm several inches taller than my wife, and 2/3rds of it are legs, I must have sat in 25 different models in a showroom in Fremont, California today. We think we've found a couple of winners, but we'll need to consult with our plumber. By the way, is this a great country, or what? Anyone making a middle class income can walk into a warehouse-sized operation filled with a hundred or so Jacuzzis, hot tubs, just plain tubs, and showers, and purchase whichever one strikes his fancy. Try doing that in Iraq, Afghanistan, China, or Cuba. Regular posting will resume later tonight, or tomorrow.