25 July 2005

Doomsday Post

Some bloggers randomly post throughout the day, to assure their readers they are in fact alive, I suppose. Some will post a link every hour. Usually, I'll just sit quiet if I have nothing to say.

Rant-in-Brief (I can always rant a little)
So the Italian police are going to try to arrest some CIA agents. And Hillary is playing her stupid "look like a conservative" game, which is so transparent I'm expecting a member of her party to use it against her in the primary, and it will definitely be apparent in the New York Senate race next year. What else... an American has won France's biggest contest for the 7th year in a row. China is still making noise and should be watched, even if it looks like they won't get UNOCAL. Roberts should be confirmed fairly easily.



Doomsday (the important part)
That's enough ranting. The real reason I'm here is to quote this:

So one morning, the Dayak people heard the droning of a slow-flying aircraft. Soon the sky was littered with parachutes bearing pussycats to earth. OperationCat Drop delivered 14,000 felines to Borneo. They hit the ground -- feet first,I suppose -- and began taking care of the rats.
I think you can find the rest of the story here. I don't have a point this time, in case anyone is waiting for it. They should print that quote on t-shirts, like the one about the lion who wakes up in Africa and has to outrun the slowest gazelle, and conversely the gazelle has to outrun the fastest lion. But instead of being a lesson, or inspirational, it's just that: airborne feline infantry.

20 July 2005

Bush granted my request!

(Read my last post). So far, the President hasn't failed to meet many of my expectations. I am rather proud to call him my commander-in-chief.

I find myself tending to be a bit leery as to how Justice Roberts will perform. But I will resist this temptation and trust that President Bush has made the right decision. No more suprises...

And although I think Ann Coulter could stand to learn a little of the same trust, that doesn't mean Wonkette gets any credit for basically snapping her fingers and copping an attitude, regardless of what Andrew Sullivan might characterize as a "classic diss". I suppose it is classic in much the same sense as "your momma" is classic.

At any rate, we have a fine nomination to the supreme court. Now we can only cross our fingers and hope the democrats split their vote on it, effectively confirming Roberts (70-30 or higher will do) and dividing their party even further. Schumer and Durbin should be a little concerned about their upcoming elections.

19 July 2005

Court Supremacy

The President is scheduled to announce his nomination to the Supreme Court at S2100 (9:00 PM EDT).

Some people expect it will be Edith Clement, from the New Orleans federal court. Seems reasonable, from what I've read about her. The court certainly needs a few women on it - as does any council of collective wisdom of such magnitude.

The President is keeping true to form by making his decision and making announcing it soon thereafter. Clement would be a fine choice, but might be a bit too much of a concession. This is one of those "political capital" moments. The President has an obligation to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice: however, he has NO obligation to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. What I mean by this is he is not bound, morally, legally, or pragmatically, to appoint someone who shares her approach, her ideology, or her background. Nor her gender.

I hope the President's nomination is a complete surprise. I'll be very disappointed if the media isn't clamoring over it tomorrow. I hope we can even get the New York Times to run a headline like "Bush Shows Partisan Favoritism in Court Pick" or something equally ridiculous. It's still not news, but at least it breaks up the monotony of the usual lack of news reporting we've come to expect from the mainstream outlets.

Secret Agent Woman: Chapter II

The American media... sigh...

I guess they used to get away with reporting one thing to the public, and another to the courts. After all, in the past, who was going to report it? Now that the nexus of power has shifted out of their hands (although they will not admit it), and independent and responsible news reporting can be conducted by any private citizen with a computer and 15 minutes a day, this kind of thing will not go unnoticed anymore.

We're all familiar with the media shark frenzy over Karl Rove. You know, the one in which they confuse the president's statement "if the person has violated law" with "I will fire Karl Rove if you ask me to do so, blatantly disregarding my principles in exchange for appeasing the ailing mainstream media powerhouses". And the one in which we are relying on shady, half-baked claims from a shady, attention-hungry former ambassador who has contributed to democrat campaigns and been basically outed as a democrat operative. (To the mainstream press: contrary to the your belief, it is not a crime to out a democrat operative, even if he is masquerading as an objective source to accomplish your political agenda.)

Now, what most people don't realize, and should, is that the press has already admitted that we're right (and by we I mean Americans with at least half a brain). As Bill O'Reilly so eloquently stated, most people just don't care, but for those that do, this is interesting reading.

The press dispatched an amici curiae brief to the D.C. Federal Appeals Court, in which they insisted that no crime was committed in the revealing of the name of Valerie Plame, in addition to other ridiculous claims about the press being a 4th unofficial branch of the government designed to check the other three. (Apparently, the electorate gets shafted in such considerations). Some of the highlights of this brief:

...the explanation by a White House official to Robert Novak that Joseph Wilson had been sent by the CIA to Niger because his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA represents a single fact which has been an enduring and crucial news story for the past two years - i.e., did the Bush Administration invade Iraq with a reasonable, if mistaken, belief that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction? As that story unfolded, the nation's focus migrated from questions about the failure of America's intelligence operations, to "leaks" from the intelligence community that embarassed the Bush Administration during a presidential election, to the President's housecleaning of the CIA after the election.


We'll go for this one first, although it isn't really related to the Wilson debacle. I just thought it interesting that, while most of the nation seemed more interested in fighting terror and protecting our borders and freedom, the press still claims to speak for the nation with absurdities. They might as well say the nation's focus shifted to quantum electrodynamics after the apparent failures of string theory. What they mean by "the nation's focus migrated" is really "our attacks shifted".

Another bit of gold from the brief is the section in which it rattles off 9 conditions of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, including "the person disclosing the identity knows that the information so identifies the covert agent" and "the disclosure is intentional", among others. Immediately following is the real gem, though. The brief points out that the law offers exclusion in the case that the agent's identity has previously been exposed, and that "Congress intended to criminalize only disclosures that 'clearly represent a conscious and pernicious effort to identify and expose agents with the intent to impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States".

Andrew McCarthy in an article for National Review Online, points out that Plame/Wilson's "cover" has been blown for decades. I will not attempt to steal his analysis, but will instead direct any readers I might have to read his article. It is very well written and I actually printed a copy to tote around with me, so useful is the commentary.

The brief is priceless in light of what the press is now saying. Watching the news really does leave a bad taste in your mouth for republicans, but then you find out the facts and realize that the press is, well, just lying.

18 July 2005

Secret Agent Woman: Chapter I

With Michael Jackson a free man, and Saddam not quite arraigned just yet, the media is making up another grand story. I guess with two of their favorite people in trials where their guilt stinks up the court room, and where the outcomes are known far in advance, the media has to concoct a trial for their most hated enemy, Karl Rove.

We'll get back to the media in a bit. We have a much bigger problem with the focus of the situation. The outcry should be over Joseph Wilson IV's derangement. After watching him on Meet the Press going toe to toe with Ken Mehlman (chairman of the RNC), and saying pretty much nothing that made any sense - despite the fact that Russert was clearly on his side, I am convinced of his derangement. Let's take a little review of the facts:

Before we start with the Wilson mess, In September 2003, President Bush said the following:


"And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of. "

So then this chain of nonsense begins, mostly thanks to Joseph Wilson's actions as a democratic operative:

1. The CIA needs someone to go to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had purchased heavy uranium from the African nation.

2. A CIA agent named Valerie Plame, whose identity was no longer secret, recommends her husband be sent.

3. Joseph Wilson IV, the husband of Valerie Plame, travels to Niger on an unpaid mission and apparently finds that the nation did not sell uranium to Saddam.

4. British Intelligence indicates that Saddam sought uranium from Niger.

5. President Bush relays this information to the American people in his State of the Union address.

6. Joe Wilson writes an op-ed for the New York Times, apparently conflating the term "British intelligence" with "Joe Wilson" and "bought" with "sought". He also indicates in this op-ed that the Vice President sent him.

7. Columnist Robert Novak wrote indicating that CIA operative Valerie Plame had sent her husband on an unpaid trip, apparently publicly releasing her name.

8. Matt Cooper has a super secret email conversation with Karl Rove, who suggest he has also heard that it was Wilson's wife who sent him.

9. Michael Isikoff (of riot-inciting Newsweek fame) finds out that Matt Cooper heard this from Rove.

10. The media smells Karl Rove's blood and goes for it, insisting Bush fire him, claiming that he originally claimed don't have access to the super secret White House transcript, available worldwide here.

The argument from the left (for the purposes of this posting, the left includes democrats, the print media, and broadcast media minus the Fox News Channel, and Hollywood) is that Karl Rove leaked the name of a CIA operative and should be fired, because the President said he would fire anyone who leaked information...

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is, I'm sure, a little confused as to whether the mainstream media has been assigned to take his place in investigating the matter.

Especially considering the Amici Curiae brief filed by 36 major news organizations - but this deserves a post all its own.


Thanks to JustOneMinute for leading me to the White House transcript.

16 July 2005

Good Stuff

Read this. Just read it, it's hilarious. I thought it was a news piece at first, but then it delved straight into the editorializing with "The Clinton administration's national security efforts involved the right blend of 'experience' and 'strength,' Begala said, an assertion with which the 9/11 Commission apparently disagreed."

Good stuff.

15 July 2005

Chinese Chess

This China situation is starting to get a little disturbing. It was first disturbing how many conversations about China's future contained the caveat "That's if we don't go to war with them by then", or something similar. This was only augmented by tensions over the Republic of China, which the People's Republic of China (PRC) and related entities (i.e., the American media) insist on calling "Taiwan", which is the name of the island the RoC occupies.

Let's take a minute on that. When the communists ran out the nationalists in the 40s, the nationalists fled to the island of Taiwain and established the Republic of China, never intending to be ruled by the Maoists in Beijing. Since then, PRC has been trying to convince the world that RoC is just a small internal problem that they will deal with in time. The small internal problem equates to a nation of almost 2 billion being ruled by a small minority of communist dictators seeking to spread their police state to a people who desire their independence.

Now they are building their military, in an apparent plot to invade the Republic of China and annex it to their nation. This is known as "conquering" and it is something of which the world has been accusing the United States ever since we started spending billions of dollars to free people across the world. Now that China is fairly well convinced of the American resolve, they have sent one of their crazies out to make it sound like an American involvement will set off a nuclear war. One of their loony generals:

“If the Americans are determined to interfere [then] we will be determined to respond,” said Gen Zhu, who is also a professor at China's National Defence University.
“We . . . will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds . . . of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.”
Not only is that foolish, as we control vastly more nuclear assets than the rest of the world, it is clearly bluster intended to make us think twice about defending freedom in the Pacific. So they move their queen's bishop to put our king in check. We could move to take out the bishop, and risk prolonged war, perhaps involving WMD. Or we could move our king and try to avoid the whole unpleasant mess, allowing China to impose communist rule on an otherwise free people.

What we're forgetting is the chessboard is much larger, and their side is cluttered with panws and no real king (our king can move anywhere on the board undetected, greatly reducing the chance for being put in check), whereas we have dozens of queens (division control), each with bishops (air support), rooks (artillery), and knights (yeah, the friggin cavalry). Not to mention the thousands of infantry pawns. Not to mention the carrier battle groups we operate off the chess board, some elements of which are under the table. We also have pieces operating far over the chessboard. Our pieces are better armored, better equipped, better trained, better paid, and better fed. We also have a God to whom we can pray for wisdom and support, which is more than their communist godless society provides them.

Now, no one wants millions of Chinamen to die in a war for their evil masters, but people need to stop talking like they have some secret to victory. Yeah, if they could land their 7 billion soldiers on our soil, we'd have a problem. But we can see all their boats, and the Navy can probably destroy most of them without redelploying any assets. Not to mention that if they started to get close, they'd have to deal with our actual homeland defenses. They would be moving within range of hundreds, maybe thousands, of aircraft. They would be met on the shore by armor and artillery the likes of which they've never seen. That's assuming they even try to come here. Otherwise, we'll just have the bomb the living hell out of them until they realize it just isn't going to work out for them.

Maybe we can convince the Chinese people that there is a better way to live. Maybe not.

Either way, freedom is something for which this nation, and its brave soldiers, will fight for years to come. And China is not exempt from what I consider the real Bush Doctrine.

10 July 2005

Last Word on Guantanamo

Just got back from Fort Knox after 4 weeks at the Leader's Training Course for ROTC. Sorry to my one or two readers who had to live without me for that duration.

Before, there were some questions about Gitmo. Now there aren't.

Some of you may have forgotten, but Amnesty International and some other folks were saying that detention camp in Cuba was akin to a Soviet Gulag. Some US Senators even said it was comparable to a concentration camp. They seemed upset not that we were detaining terrorists unfairly, but that we were detaining terrorists, at all, in the first place. They called for its closing and a bunch of other nonsense, all based on the ungrounded claims of a radical leftist organization that apparently seeks "amnesty" for terrorists.

Now the chief of the Senate Intelligence Committee has gone to Cuba himself, and seen the horrible living conditions. Ann Coulter wrote about this in one of her recent columns. A memorable quote is in my AIM profile right now:

It's not torture if:
- The same acts performed on a live stage have been favorably reviewed by Frank Rich of The New York Times;
- Andrew Sullivan has ever solicited it from total strangers on the Internet;
- You can pay someone in New York to do it to you;
- Karen Finley ever got a federal grant to do it;
- It's comparable to the treatment U.S. troops received in basic training;
- It's no worse than the way airlines treat little girls in pigtails flying to see Grandma.

... [a little later in the column] So they're not exactly raping the detainees with dogs at Guantanamo.


I'm not sure why congress wants to waste money moving the prisoners to another prison when they are living better than they ever have before as it is. Does anyone in the world have any further objections?

Michelle Malkin