Been away. Decided to go and take in "The Speech" on YouTube before reading anyone else's opinions about it. Straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. It was a lot like listening to a Bill Clinton speech back in the day. Both men are gifted orators who can make you believe whatever they say while they're saying it. It's only afterward when you start thinking...wait a minute!

In this case, it really does take some audacity to liken a preacher claiming AIDS is a white conspiracy from the pulpit to one's own grandmother expressing her quite rational apprehension of passing black men on the street.

Obama showcased his considerable oratorical skills. He's great at framing a problem or relating a touching anecdote. What's less clear is how his candidacy really does anything about these age-old divisions of race, other than making the old brothers in the barber shop feel good. The subliminal suggestion is, "Elect me, and America's troubles with race will come to an end." Really?

All I could think as I watched him was, "I really like this guy. It's too bad he's wrong about everything. It's such a shame that he's never given a moment's thought as to what we should actually do about failing schools. He's right. Failing inner city schools are a great scandal in this country. And what party has been carrying the water of the teacher's unions for sixty years?

Who fights tooth and nail against any innovation that might help poor kids? At the end of the day, what does Obama propose other than pouring more money into the same failed system?

George W. Bush, of all people, actually proposed actual legislation that has brought real money into education and imposed accountability on educators. W actually thought more about the real problems and solutions in education than the great and mighty Obama. What about vouchers? Where's reform?

As for race, I think the simple fact is simply that there is nothing more government can do about the subject, other than enforcing existing laws, and getting rid of affirmative action. It's just going to take time.

More hackneyed, class warfare rhetoric about "corporations", and "outsourcing". Why not be honest? You want to make it in America? Get hired by a big corporation. Don't look to Barack Obama or the Rev. Wright to help you out. Go flip hamburgers at McDonald's. In ten years, if you work hard, you can easily be making $100,000 as a store manager.

Let's face facts. There's no shortage of opportunity in America. There's a shortage of people willing to do what it takes to succeed. We've got free education in America, yet today I see that 67% of high school students in big cities drop out.

Why? I don't know. Maybe too many of them have listened to hate-mongers like Jeremiah Wright, who want to fill their heads with reasons why they can't make it. It's the United Sates of KKKA. The government invented AIDS to kill black men.

Here's a truism about Americans. We're all a little tribal. Italians root for Italians. Irish guys root for fellow Micks. Jews stick together. Blacks stick together. Want to know the most successful integrated organization in the world? It's the US military. Want to know why it works? Simple. No special treatment for anyone. Everyone has a job to do and everyone is expected to do it. America will be over race when we stop paying attention to race.

Show up every day, do your part and you'll be treated fairly.

The Democrat system of assembling various greivance groups (women, minorities) into a coalition has the effect of causing people to jockey for preferences based on race or gender, rather than by competing on merit. Hence, you get the utterly predictable outcome of a Democratic race completely polarized by race and gender.

Create a level playing field and take race and gender out of it. Voila! The best people will rise to the top.

And You Want to Be My Latex Salesman....

By any reasonable measure, this was an exceedingly bad week for Democrats. First, Geraldine. My take? Of course she's right. His entire political career is built upon his blackness. We now have Congressional districts that are racially apportioned. His run for the Senate was to fill the Carol Mosely Braun seat (vacated by scandal). He ran against Alan Keyes. Picking up a pattern here? Part of this is just business as usual, particularly in the Democratic party. You run the Catholic, or the Jew or the Irishman or the African-American where you think that will help. People tend to stick with their own. Obama has been a big beneficiary of that. It should be pointed out that he had the talent and the skill to parlay that into a legitimate (perhaps until now) run for the presidency and that he vanquished far more experienced white guys to get there. But at the end of the day, if Obama hadn't been the first black chairman of the Harvard Law Review, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If he was white, no one would have ever heard of him.

Then, Reverend Wright. With this, one can hear the air rushing out of Obama's balloon every time the good reverend comes on TV. "God Damn America!"... Kind of makes one nostalgic for the Mormon, doesn't it?

Speaking of deviant sexual practices, there's Eliot. Speaking for all of Wall St., I give you Ken Langone, "We all have our private hells. I just hope his burns hotter than everyone else's." How do you really feel, Ken?

Finally, you have the train wreck that is the Democratic nominating process. Of course, the last thing anyone wants is for superdelegates to decide a nomination. So why have superdelegates? Oh, and, what about Florida and Michigan? This process is so stupid, convoluted, and frankly undemocratic that I cannot conceive why anyone in his right mind would want this bunch running the show.

We're witnessing, by the way, the politics of personal destruction. The Clintons are annihilating Barack Obama. My guess is, they haven't used the really bad stuff yet. Geraldine and the minister are just the warmup act. In any case, they're putting extreme pressure on the superdelegates as they define Obama as unelectable.

We're approaching an unavoidable showdown over which group of victims is more deserving of being moved to the front of the line. Meanwhile, America is watching and thinking, "Neither."

Love is Hate, War is Peace



This references this, which would seem to be directly contradicted by this.

It's one of the perplexing features of this divided era we live in. We can't even agree on the facts. Where's Walter Cronkite when you need him?

It's astounding that two different news organizations looked at the same report and reached virtually opposite conclusions . Who's right?

The McClatchy article relies on anonymous sources and no direct references to the actual Pentagon report. The Sun piece is jam-packed with on the record quotes, and lots of direct references to the actual report.

It feels to me like the McClatchy report is trying to put one over on me. "Nothing to see here, folks, just move along."

In contrast, the Sun piece ends strong, with on-the-record quotes as well as direct references to the report:

" The report also undercuts the claim made by many on the left and many at the CIA that Saddam, as a national socialist, was incapable of supporting or collaborating with the Islamist al Qaeda. The report concludes that instead Iraq's relationship with Osama bin Laden's organization was similar to the relationship between the rival Colombian cocaine cartels in the 1990s. Both were rivals in some sense for market share, but also allies when it came to expanding the size of the overall market.
The Pentagon study finds, "Recognizing Iraq as a second, or parallel, 'terror cartel' that was simultaneously threatened by and somewhat aligned with its rival helps to explain the evidence emerging from the detritus of Saddam's regime."
A long time skeptic of the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq and a former CIA senior Iraq analyst, Judith Yaphe yesterday said, "I think the report indicates that Saddam was willing to work with almost any group be it nationalist or Islamic, that was willing to work for his objectives. But in the long term he did not trust many of the Islamist groups, especially those linked to Saudi Arabia or Iran." She added, "He really did want to get anti-American operations going. The fact that they had little success shows in part their incompetence and unwilling surrogates."
A former Bush administration official who was a member of the counter-terrorism evaluation group that analyzed terror networks and links between terrorists and states, David Wurmser, said he felt the report began to vindicate his point of view.
"This is the beginning of the process of exposing Saddam's involvement in Islamic terror. But it is only the beginning. Time and declassification I'm sure will reveal yet more," he said. "Even so, this report is damning to those who doubted Saddam Hussein's involvement with Jihadist terrorist groups. It devastates one of the central myths plaguing our government prior to 9-11, that a Jihadist group would not cooperate with a secular regime and vice versa."
The report concludes that Saddam until the final months of his regime was willing to attack America. Its conclusion asks "Is there anything in the captured archives to indicate that Saddam had the will to use his terrorist capabilities directly against the United States?" It goes on, "Judging from Saddam's statements before the 1991 Gulf War with the United States, the answer is yes." As for after the Gulf War, the report states, "The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam's 'coercion' tool box." It goes on, "Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces." The report does note that it is unclear whether Saddam would have authorized terrorism against American targets in the final months of his regime before Operation Iraqi Freedom five years ago. "The answer to the question of Saddam's will in the final months in power remains elusive," it says."

We don't have conclusive evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. No one from this administration has ever said we have. What this report shows conclusively is that Saddam was mixed up with all sorts of terror groups--Islamist and otherwise-- and he intended to attack America. He trained terrorists in the 90's, including working with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Zawahiri's group before al Qaeda.

It also strongly suggests that Saddam was connected to Ansar al Islam, which was al Qaeda.

The single most inexplicable failing of the Bush administration has been their failure to vigorously defend their decision to got to war. After awhile, they simply ceded the field to the Joe Wilson's of the world. Perhaps unnerved by the failure to find large stockpiles of WMD, they have never forcefully made their case on Saddam's terrror connections, which I always felt was the stronger argument.

On the other hand, perhaps they understood that many of their critics had no interest in fairly evaluating the case for war. They just hate Bush.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

This is beautiful.

It's cold outside. When will we come to the realization that there is little, if any causal connection between atmospheric CO2 levels and climate? And, while we're at it, when will we undo our disastrous foray into ethanol? We've got absolutely skyrocketing food prices, with little or no benefit to gas prices. Stop it. Now.

As I subtly suggested in "Uh Ohh", Barry Hussein is losing. Big time. I don't know why it took everyone so long to figure it out. If you attack the guy who has positioned himself as above it all, he can't win. If he fights back, bingo!, he's not above it all anymore.

Besides, Barry's got some serious hair on his Rezko connections.

Politics isn't about staying above the fray. It's about going into the fray and emerging victorious.

Now, it's time for the Clintons to appear above it all!

Uh Ohh

I'm pretty sure that Hillary's wins last night will unleash the dogs of hell within the Democrat party. Oh sure, everyone will try to make nice, but there is nothing like a contested election to tear people apart, and there is simply no way that this will end well for the party.

God truly does work in mysterious ways. Who'd have thunk, with all they had going for them, that the Demos would find a way to fuck it up, but fuck it up they have.

This thing will have to be decided by the superdelegates. There's no getting around that now. Whose idea was the superdelegates anyway? They're ultimately going to have to put the dagger in someone who's gotten roughly 50% of the vote.

Worse, I think it has dawned on many that the Obama thing was a flight of fantasy. You can just see it. He's over. He's going to put on the brave face and act like the frontrunner, but the grownups just showed up. Party's over.

Trouble is, he's got all those delegates. Now, we've got the Rezko trial heating up. What? An Iraqi Connection? Hoo boy. So soon, you'll have a fatally wounded Obama limping into the convention with an insurmountable, but not decisive, edge in delegates, and the mantle of divinity torn asunder. What's a superdelegate to do?

Wait a minute. What about Florida? And Michigan? Aww, who cares about them? It's not like Florida's likely to matter in the general, right?

And these guys think they should be running the country. My God, Obama even screwed up Canada! I get it. Change means we piss off our friends, and suck up to our enemies.

Meanwhile, did you catch McCain's speech? Not bad....