30 December 2006

Wilbur is sad

Live from the KOSian dystopia:

I have just read that Saddam Hussein is dead. Hung by the neck until dead – isn’t that the phrase they always use on television?
When, how, and under what context do they “always use that phrase on television”? Oh yeah! Now I remember! In something Wilbur would rather confuse reality with called fiction!
And I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness. Everybody has to start by saying that it isn’t bad that Saddam Hussein is dead – he was an evil man. But what is evil? It is a religious denunciation, a way to set a person apart from humanity. We need to do this I suppose. And if we say that Saddam Hussein is an evil man, don’t we then have to say that other men are good? Who is good I wonder? Where do we find these men of goodness? To say Saddam Hussein was evil is too easy, it lets us off the hook. Saddam Hussein was a cruel man, a selfish man, a desperate man, a sad man.
Minimize his deeds, pity him through things we can never really know about him (but can contrive), and lento, lento... make him another hero in the great pantheon of politically useful victims. Why don’t the two of them just get a room, and put a heroic misrepresentation of him on a t-shirt, already. He was merely a... a... something I think, but could never know:
He was a bully I think. He was a man who never knew happiness I think. He rationalized his actions I’m sure by saying that he did what had to be done. He called his own enemies evil, and tortured them completely. Saddam Hussein was all too human. He walked among us. In this moment of spiritual limbo between Christmas and the start of a new year I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.

I feel sadness because we repaid cruelty with cruelty. We did it because we allowed an emotionally disturbed man to lead us, to direct our actions. We destroyed Saddam Hussein’s life. This was perhaps justified. Do we destroy every cruel man’s life? Is it our duty to destroy every cruel man’s life? Still, it was not less than he deserved. Take away his livelihood. What will we do to the war profiteers who had a hand in murdering our own children for a few dollars? Will we be as angry, as cruel?
yes, we will. Note too, that part of being a post-modern, decadent, screaming and bedwetting leftist is to emotionalize everything, even to find an emotional angle which isn’t even there. It is to make a feelies’ feelings matter more than trying to cure the disease that’s poisoned the Arab mind for decades, and leaving most Arabs themselves hopeless. A feelies’ feelings felt in Gentleman-Farmtopia, Connecticut matter far more than the hopelessness of any struggling society in the less-than developed world.
We killed his children while he was still alive.
Indeed, they were just poor little children. Just like the ‘children’ we send unwillingly to war under the duress to their mommies and daddies or their two-mommies under that horrible draft...

When Wilbur is sad, I’m sad. ‘Cause ya know what? It’s all about Wilbur being sad. That whole ‘war’ thing was about Wilbur being sad. Nations do things to make Wilbur sad. The press reports things to make Wilbur sad.

I’m sad that Wilbur is sad. I’m even sadder that he’s so abject in his moral confusion and cowardice that his only way to confront an evil man is to feign some notion of ethical evenhandedness and universal humanistic empathy by shedding a tear for a mass-murder.

How do you like your insurgent?

Roasted or Extra Crispy?

This Is What Lefty Likes to Call a Miserable Failure

28 December 2006

Greedy Socialism


Me-memememe!!!:
When Caroline De Gruyter, a journalist from the Netherlands, visited Wallonia five years ago she was amazed to meet several families that had been on the dole for three generations and did not have a single relative who was officially employed. The families liked it that way. They all voted for the Socialist Party, because it guaranteed that Flemish money would keep flowing to Wallonia. They described the attitude of Flemish nationalists “who do not want to pay taxes to support the Walloon jobless” as “unsocial behaviour!”

Who Knew that Peacekeeping was that Bad?



Pancho offers a curious perspective on things like the murderously long-avoided International Darfur deployment and UNIFIL. He must be very proud of his pacifistic sentiments, and perhaps especially its’ consequences.

19 December 2006

A smell of Sulfur in the Room

This is the meaning of that term “solidarity” that they keep throwing around.

Look who’s drooling for affirmation.

18 December 2006

Justifiable Ségonoia

Imagine a nation which is already a bête noire of international relations electing another socialist that even another lefty wouldn’t want to be seen standing next to.

An unnamed advisor to Mrs Clinton told the newspaper Le Parisien that appearing next to a French Socialist who recently met an official of the Hizbollah movement in Lebanon could be construed as condoning the beliefs of the militant Shia group. The Democrats also have little in common with French Socialism, which supports massive state intervention, a huge civil service, and regularly lambasts "US world hegemony".
Garsh Pa, why would THAT be a PR problem?

It gets even better in headline-land. The confused agit-propers at the SMH whom one would imagine otherwise being generally opposed to monarchies and dynasties calls Hillary Rodham Clinton the “Queen” of the Democrats.

16 December 2006

Religious Pilgrimages and Fetishes

This weekend’s features travel destinations highlighted New York Times this weekend are Nicaragua and Venezuela. I'd say it's an illumination insight into the minds of the paper's staff, but it isn't.

Accept no substitutes

Have an Innocuous and blasé “Holiday” sort of thing.

Just as long as it’s “green” somehow, that you aren’t getting too many evil artificial chemicals in your diet, and that you can parade your love of Gaia if for no other reason than to prop up your career.

We have one “Moonray Soaring Dove”, to thank for this fit of holiday cheer. I just recommend staying away from the organic chicken at his “non-denominational holiday sort of thing” celebration. I’m told that it actually doesn’t taste like chicken.

14 December 2006

Nobody Does it Better

Postings like these are why Fausta is the ant’s pants. She notes too that there we can look forward to a political lightweight convention coming up shortly, complete with funny hats. Ségolène Royal will be visiting the US and will likely have a photo-op with Barack Obama, another potential national political figure whom leftists will vote in over the mere symbolism of their appearance.

Improbably, they will think to themselves that this makes one less prejudicial.

Silly humanoids. How amusing of them.

06 December 2006

Making civilization History

Here’s what Chavez’ Socialist revolution has to show for itself. Barely a dent taken out of poverty, GREATER dependency on foreign banks and governments, MASSIVE economic contraction. Adjusting for their rate of inflation, the economy is half the size it was 8 years ago, effectively making even those he’s “helping” poorer than they were a decade ago.

- In 1998 GDP was $185 billion (£93 billion); in 2006 it is $162 billion
- Inflation: 38 per cent (1998); 16 per cent (2006)
- Proportion in poverty: 44 per cent (1998); 34 per cent (2006)
- External debt: $27 billion (1998); $34 billion (2006)

Man of the people, the poor, etc. He loves the poor so much he wants to everyone else to join their fate. Unlike his young proponents, and even his old ones, most everyone else actually get the joke.

03 December 2006

Gal-Qaeda

Not only does the devil wear Prada, but she sounds like Pravda. To the fantasist crypto-Marxists at Marrianne, not only is Ségolène Royal not leftist enough, her politics otherwise doesn’t matter as much as Marianne’s own resent riddled class struggle bullshit.



Crossposted on ¡No Pasarán!
The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)

01 December 2006

AP: All the News That Fits the Script

The Iraqi Government is fed up with being lied about. They’re tired of a biased press that’s helping to incite violence. At the end of the day, a fabrication by AP is a step further and more cretinous than the filtering of reports to announce violence in Iraq in a one-sided manner: reporting the parties involved only when it serves the world-view of the press staff itself.

AP has resorted to buying any line if there is anything that seems like a source without vetting it to the standards it would have if the outcome didn’t support a preconceived notion of theirs’, in this case one that is provoking internecine violence in a young politically fragile Iraq which would otherwise have potential to grow into the kind of society these reporters want for themselves outside the middle east. When all else fails invent a source:

Khalaf explained the news monitoring unit at a weekly Ministry of Interior briefing. As an example, he cited coverage by The Associated Press of an attack Nov. 24 on a mosque in the Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad.

The AP reported that six Sunni Muslims there were burned alive during the attack. The story quoted witnesses and police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Khalaf said the ministry had no one on its staff by the name of Jamil Hussein.

"Maybe he wore an MOI (Ministry of Interior) uniform and gave a different name to the reporter for money," Khalaf said.

AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll rejected the accusation. "The implication that we may have given money to the captain is false. The AP does not pay for information," she said.

Khalaf said the ministry had dispatched a team to the Hurriyah neighborhood and to the morgue but found no witnesses or evidence of burned bodies.
The arrogance and selfishness is not alarming, but staggering nonetheless with large knock-on effects over the course of the past 3 years. BizzyBlog has an admission:
AP now admits that the part of the original story about four mosques burning is down to one that is “badly damaged by explosives and shows signs of scorching from fire.” I am not aware of any formal correctons sent out to AP subscribers to correct this stunning error.

No name identification of the remaining five alleged victims has been done. A person from AP who called me back in response to my phone request to speak with John Daniszewski, and my message left for him (my message was left with a person, not on his VoiceMail), confirmed this fact this afternoon. I informed this person that I was having a hard time believing that in roughly six days, some local Iraqi news outlet hadn’t published the names of the victims yet (that is, if there are really five other victims). I was told they’re “doing all they can.”
A brief look into a brief exchange between the CENTCOM’s press liason and an AP reacting like an adolescent says it all:
As is often the case, it's hard to sort out who's right. But Memmott does a public service by reproducing in full a letter to the AP from Lt. Michael Dean, U.S. Navy public affairs officer, and the response from the AP's international editor, John Daniszewski. Click on the link atop this item to read the letters in full, along with Memmott's more detailed account. But what got our attention was the tone of the two letters. Here's an excerpt from LT Dean's:

Unless you have a credible source to corroborate the story of the people being burned alive, we respectfully request that AP issue a retraction, or a correction at a minimum, acknowledging that the source named in the story is not who he claimed he was.

Here's part of the AP's response:

The Associated Press denounces unfounded attacks on its story about six Sunni worshipers burned to death outside their mosque on Friday, November 24. The attempt to question the existence of the known police officer who spoke to the AP is frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question.

So the military makes a "respectful request," to which the AP responds by "denouncing unfounded attacks" and calling criticism of its reporting "frankly ludicrous" and accusing its critics of "desperation."
Isn’t it charming how committed AP is to “truthiness” to support a stance on the facts?