ROPE AND CEMENT
On July 26, The London Telegraph ran the absolutely positively most delicious story I have seen in many an al-ilah (the moon, worshipped by pre-Islamic Arabs, and contracted into allah by Mohammed).You know that famous quote of Lenin’s epitomizing his contempt for capitalism? “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will fight among themselves to sell us the rope.” You wonder what Lenin would say to fellow Marxist Yasser Arafat.It turns out that Palestinian businessmen with connections to Arafat and other officials in the “Palestinian Authority” are making millions of dollars selling cement to the Israeli Government to build the Security Wall. Is this too beautiful or what?
THE FALLUJAH FLY-TRAP
What the liberal press won’t tell you is the astoundingly good news coming out of Iraq now. An example is a series of raids by the Iraqi police in Baghdad last week that netted at least 525 criminals. Since Saddam Hussein emptied his jails of some 70,000 hard-core criminals on the eve of the war, the Iraqi police have a long way to go to restore law and order. But the skill with which the raids were pulled off, and the courage displayed by the cops indicate they are off to a very good start. But best of all is that foreign jihadi terrorists who have come to Iraq in response to al Qaeda's call are giving up and going home.
THE DISCOVERY OF IRAN
The organizers of the Council on Foreign Relations special task force to promote the appeasement of Iran must be cursing their uncommonly bad luck. They scheduled a meeting in Washington today to call for increasing normalization of relations between the United States and Iran. With a fine eye for dark comedy, the Council persuaded two relics of the catastrophic Carter years to appear: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates. The principal advocate of the policy, however, is undoubtedly the president of the Council, Richard Haas, who has long seen rapprochement with the mullahs as an "historic opportunity" for the United States. Haas was the head of Colin Powell's Policy Planning Staff.Whatever chances they had of successfully advancing appeasement were shattered over the weekend.
THE COMING NICOTINE MAFIA
If a libertarian genie granted me the power to eliminate one and only one agency of the federal government, I would choose the FDA - the Food and Drug Administration, which more properly should be named the Federal Death Agency. It would be a tough choice, I know - passing up the chance to get rid of such bureaucratic pestilences as the IRS or the EPA. The FDA, however, has caused the death of countless millions of people by preventing the development or approval of medicines that could have saved their lives - and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. That means you and I will die prematurely due to the FDA’s perverse blocking the path to medical progress.The FDA is the penultimate case of government having the uncanny ability to pose as the solution to society’s problems while in reality making them vastly worse. The US Senate’s current efforts to give the FDA regulatory authority over tobacco products provides a perfect example.What the Senate is attempting to do is enable the FDA to wage war upon nicotine - which it will do by ordering the amount of nicotine progressively reduced in tobacco products. This will create a black market for high nicotine content cigarettes smuggled from overseas. As government attempts to stop the smuggling escalate, the smugglers will look for ways to reduce the bulk of their illicit goods - and will soon discover the ideal value-to-volume ratio in an unbelievably dangerous form: crack nicotine.
HILLARY’S OCTOBER SURPRISE
There’s the coolest buzz making the rounds in Washington’s power watering holes, and let’s cross every finger we have that it’s true. To review the bidding, Hillary desperately wants to be POTUS. But if Hanoi John gets elected this November, he will obviously as the incumbent be the candidate in 2008. The earliest she could run would then be 2012, deep in her sixties and possibly ancient history. There is only one conclusion she can reach: Her only shot is to run in 2008 - which requires that George Bush be re-elected and John Kerry defeated in 2004.You’re familiar with the term “October Surprise.” Right at the last moment, in late October, the parties try to pull a rabbit out of the media hat. The Dems sprung a decades-old DUI bust of GW a week before the election in 2000, the Pogo Press went into a feeding frenzy right on cue, and it almost submarined him on election day.I wish Barbara Comstock running Oppo Research for the Republicans as much luck as it takes to figure out what dirty trick the Dems will try to spring this time. Yet while I’m sure they have an October Surprise planned - the buzz is that Hillary has one planned herself.No one knows what it is - but we know four things about it.
THE GREAT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT
Wow, more than 520 pages! As Dan Darling and I worked through it (and don't miss his more detailed analysis at www.windsofchange.net), we were constantly entertained by big blocks of "redacted" pages. Why don't they just put in ellipses instead of all those blacked-out paragraphs? Maybe the Government Printing Office gets paid by the page, and Congress wants the GPO to have more money?The other great mystery is how the authors expect us to read the report. It's terribly written, and talks breathlessly about "trade craft" when "logic" or "common sense" would do better. It takes multiple sentences to say things that should be reduced to one or two. Are there no editors around?
WILL THE ATTACK COME ON ELECTION DAY?
Everyone in America is holding his or her breath, sure that an Islamofascist terrorist attack will be perpetrated before the November election. Al Qaeda wants to pull off another Spain, it is thought. Blowing up the Madrid trains just before the Spanish election defeated the anti-terrorist Aznar government and put spineless Bambi Zapatero, in office.Al Qaeda’s greatest goal right now is to prevent the re-election of George Bush. That is why the safest place in the US this month will be Boston. There is no way anything will be perpetrated to attack the Democrat Convention. New York during the Republican Convention is another matter.But this is what is expected. Here is what worries me.
WHEN IT’S TIME TO REFORMAT YOUR HARD DISK
Sooner or later we all need to. Perhaps your hard disk fails. All hard disks fail sooner or later. Or you’ve installed too many programs and uninstalled too many trial programs. Your computer has slowed to a crawl because your registry is fractured, full of errors. Maybe your system’s been hit by numerous virii or other intruders that are impossible to get rid of. Perhaps you want to partition your hard disk or add or change operating systems.Are you prepared? How long will it take you to get back up?
NOTHING LEFT
Who are your heroes? Those of us on the right have plenty to choose from. Two who come first to my mind are Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. I’m sure it would be easy for you to list others.What about the heroes of the left? Remember when the left idolized Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas? That’s history now, sad and gone. Castro and Ortega are still around, but they’re has-beens just like the rest.What did all the heroes have in common - what was it that made them heroic in the eyes of the left? Not that they were Communists (which they were), but that they hated and were fighting against America. The left’s insuperable problem now is that the world’s primary America-haters can’t be their heroes. They can’t idolize Moslem terrorists. Not even Noam Chomsky can wear an I Love Osama t-shirt. No campus revolutionary can replace his passé Che poster with one of Osama. Such embracing of undeniable evil is too much even for them.Thus the lefties no longer have any heroes. All they have left is their hate, their hate for America, for Western Civilization, for white males - which is distilled into hate for one white male in particular: George W. Bush.
CONSTANTINE MENGES – IN MEMORIAM
