WHY IS THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE SO INCOMPETENT AT EXPLAINING THE TRUTH?
In Sunday's Washington Post Dafna Linzer and Barton Gellman provide their gullible readers with a reprise of one of the great myths of the runup to the Iraq war: that President Bush used blatantly false information to justify the war.
The story revolves around various claims by several intelligence services that Saddam's agents were trying to buy uranium in Africa. At least three European services - the French, the Italian, and the British - told Washington about the reported Iraqi efforts.
Linzer and Gellman are wrong, indeed so clearly wrong that it takes one's breath away. The British government did indeed have information about Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Africa. The definitive British parliamentary inquiry - the Butler Commission Report of July, 2004 - totally endorsed the position of British intelligence.
Nonetheless, the conventional media spin is that "Bush lied." How can that be? Part of the answer - the other part being the malevolence of the press - is that the White House made a total hash of the whole thing, as is their wont.
BUSH NEEDS REAGAN IN IRAN
Ronald Reagan won the Cold War against the Soviet Union by supporting anti-Soviet liberation freedom fighters in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan with arms and money, and in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself with money and communications technology.
Ronald Reagan realized there was no need to militarily attack the Soviet Union to defeat it. All he had to do was support people oppressed by Soviet tyranny who were willing to fight for their own freedom.
George Bush needs to have the same realization with Iran. The opportunity to give the Tehran regime more trouble than it can handle internally so it can no longer trouble its neighbors is being handed to him on a silver platter. It is not Iraq that is about to split apart - it is Iran.
RIGHT ROCK AND ROLL
Want to turn your kids on to some great rock and roll? To right rock and roll, pro-American rock and roll, not the left-wing anti-American trashy sleaze they've overloaded their iPod with because they never heard anything else?
Then turn them on to The Right Brothers. They're a young, hip conservative trio out of Nashville whose hit song Bush Was Right is driving the left crazy. The music is hard driving rock, the beat is foot stomping, and the lyrics... well, just imagine your kids singing along to them:
Bush Was Right by The Right Brothers Lyrics by Frank Highland
Freedom in Afghanistan, say goodbye Taliban Free elections in Iraq, Saddam Hussein locked up Osama's staying underground, Al Qaeda now is finding out America won't turn and run once the fighting has begun Libya turns over nukes, Lebanese want freedom, too Syria is forced to leave, don't you know that all this means
Bush was right! Bush was right! Bush was right!
THE NIGHTMARE OF CONDI
Please sit down. Pour yourself a stiff drink. You're going to need it.
Something is being whispered on Capitol Hill that is so radioactive sweat breaks out on staffers' brows at its slightest mention. Here's the context.
For a long time now, we've been telling you in To The Point that Dick Cheney will step down, Bush will appoint and the Senate will confirm Condi Rice as Vice President, that this will catapult her into being the Republican presidential nominee, and that she will be elected President of the United States in November 2008.
A Rice Presidency will destroy the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party depends on blacks living on the Victim Plantation. A Rice Presidency obliterates the myth of Racist America, and it is upon this myth the modern Democrat Party is built.
Democrats cannot get elected without 90% of the black vote. Rice would deny them this 90% and more. At most they would get 50-60% if that. Any and all chance of Democrats regaining substantial political power in America would be over. The entire power structure of the Democrat Party would be in ruins.
Any chance of the Clintons being back in the White House would be over. A Condi vs. Hillary presidential race in 2008 is a fantasy. Hillary, the most hated woman in America, wouldn't stand a chance against Condimania. If Rice runs, Hillary won't.
WHY WAIT FOR MICROSOFT?
Vista delay, schmista delay. You may not be able to upgrade to the official next version of Microsoft's Windows for months, but you don't have to wait a day to add many of the new OS's security, performance, and interface improvements to your current XP setup. And to top it off, many of these advances cost little or no money.
Vista will introduce new techniques to help speed Windows' startup and shutdown times, and to accelerate application launches. But why wait?
SystemBoosterXP claims to use a technology similar to Vista's prefetching, which anticipates the files you're likely to request next and revs up your file loading and app starts. The program sits quietly in your system tray (the area near the clock) and needs little if any configuring. You can try it for 30 days before forking over the $20 registration fee.
On the other hand...LIBERAL STUPIDITY AND COWARDICE
The "Protocols of the Elders of Harvard" is what Roger Simon elegantly calls the now-infamous "Israel Lobby" screed written by a professor/administrator from Harvard's Kennedy School, and another academic who holds an endowed chair in the political-science department at the University of Chicago.
It might finally disabuse people of the conventional nonsense that professors at our "elite" schools are really smart.
"The Israel Lobby" is really dumb, both intellectually and politically. It should dissuade rational Harvard and Chicago donors from giving any further money to the Kennedy School (where one author, Steven Walt, was, incredibly, the academic dean until his abrupt resignation following the publication of the unfortunate screed) or to the Chicago political-science department (where John Mearsheimer holds an endowed chair).
It should also help bright high-school students and their parents realize that a lot of "top" universities are living on largely undeserved reputations. If folks like Walt and Mearsheimer are the stars of that galaxy, it's best to send our children to a different solar system.
MEXICO’S GLASS HOUSE
The Congress has received lots of free advice lately from Mexican government officials and illegal aliens waving Mexico's flag in mass demonstrations coast-to-coast. Most of it takes the form of bitter complaints about our actual or prospective treatment of immigrants from that country who have gotten into this one illegally -- or who aspire to do so.
If you think these critics are mad about U.S. immigration policy now, imagine how upset they would be if we adopted an approach far more radical than the bill they rail against that was adopted last year by the House of Representatives -- namely, the way Mexico treats illegal aliens.
In fact, as a just-published paper by the Center for Security Policy's J. Michael Waller, Mexico's Glass House, points out, under a constitution first adopted in 1917 and subsequently amended, Mexico deals harshly not only with illegal immigrants. It treats even legal immigrants, naturalized citizens and foreign investors in ways that would, by the standards of those who carp about U.S. immigration policy, have to be called "racist" and "xenophobic."Chapter Twenty Four: THE JADE STEPS
The Jade Steps
Chapter Twenty Four: The Jade Steps
When the food arrived, turkeys and maize cakes in great abundance, Malinali ate quickly. She had no time for conversation with Bernal, eager to talk about the wonders of the palace. She cast a knowing glance at Cortez and fled from the room. She returned within the hour, Cortez inviting her to join the group of officers with whom he was conferring. Everyone looked at her expectantly.
"I heard no talk around this palace or out on the plaza of any trap. I overheard talk between guards, nobles, priests, and common people. They all talk of you using the word teotl (tay-ottle), which means wonder, awesome, terrifying power. They talk of how the strangers are men from another more powerful world, men they have never seen before. Montezuma, it seems, can talk of nothing else. There is no anger in what I heard, only teotl."
The men started to express their relief and appreciation to her when there was a commotion. Several jaguar warriors had entered, followed by a procession of grandly cloaked and feathered nobles, perhaps as many as a hundred. In their center was Montezuma.THE DEMOCRAT’S APRIL FOOLS’ NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY
The mood in Washington has been sour lately, so many were grateful when the Democrats in Congress provided a little levity Wednesday, March 29 by issuing their national security strategy.
It would have been more appropriate to delay its release until Saturday, April 1st - April Fools' Day.
On Feb. 3rd, the Defense Department issued its quadrennial report on defense strategy. It was 92 pages long. The "Democratic Plan to Protect America and Restore Our Leadership in the World" is six pages long. Half of these pages are in Spanish, saying what was said in English. And there is a cover page in each language.
So the actual "plan" is just two pages long, presented in bullet points in large type, with plenty of white space between them. It contains 833 words. Party elders must have burned the midnight oil for months to produce this magnum opus.BYE-BYE UPDATE
A year ago, in Bye-Bye Bolivia, you learned that if Evo Morales were to take over Bolivia, the country would split in two. Sure enough, after less than four months in office, Morales is well on his way.
Morales, recall, leads the Quechua and Aymara ethnic majorities up in the Andean highlands, and got elected by focusing their resentment on the Spanish and other European ethnic minorities in the eastern lowlands. Yet the lowlands have all the oil and gas reserves.
With Morales promising to nationalize - a euphemism for "steal" - the lowland resources, the governor of the lowland province of Tarija, Mario Cossio, has met with government officials of neighboring Paraguay and Argentina, asking their support in declaring Tarija's secession from Bolivia.
He is being joined by the governors of the lowlands' other three provinces, Santa Cruz, Pando, and Beni. The new country could be called after its nickname of Media Luna, "Half Moon," from the provinces' collective shape.