Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

…if, as do I, you believe global warming is a complete crock of shit, is CO₂ Science Magazine. This is a publication of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

Stupid site: http://www.dubyadubyadubya.com
I won’t even link it, it’s so full of shit. “Shooting first” being one of the many misstatements of fact.

Columbia has revoked Michael Bellesiles’ Bancroft Prize.
They’ve asked him to return the prize money, $4000.
(Via Melissa Seckora at the Corner.)

We should have sunk the damn ship. We certainly had every right to do so; a non-flag carrier smuggling SCUD missiles has no protection under international law.
So here’s a big
FUCK YOU
to Dear Leader.

An interesting article (via LGF) on what’s being called “fourth generation warfare” talks about things that we’ve really known since the Civil War.
The report in question was written in 1989. It defines “fourth generation warfare” like this:

According to these tacticians, the purpose of their analysis was to predict the next generation of combat U.S. forces would encounter — the so-called “fourth generation.” As they saw it, this type of warfare has “a goal of collapsing the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him. Targets will include such things as the population’s support for the war and the enemy’s culture.” The authors predicted that armies of the future would “be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts.”
If this description of fourth-generation warfare seems familiar it is because that is how al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups conduct business against Israel, the United States and other Western nations.

It also seems familiar if you have read anything at all about the campaigns of Grant and Sherman.

Lind says that effectively combating fourth-generation warfare will present conflicts for American culture. The 1989 report states: “If we bomb an enemy city, the pictures of enemy civilian dead brought into every living room in the country on the evening news can easily turn what may have been a military success — assuming we also hit the military target — into a serious defeat.” Lind says that as the war continues, and U.S. forces pursue terrorist forces, Americans must get used to casualties among the civilians in whose midst the terrorist jihadists and their supporters will hide. Lind says Muslims who support terrorist attacks know and expect that. “As we weep even over their casualties,” he says, “they will be cheering over ours.”

The problem here is that we need to quit weeping over them at all. It’s amazing how relevant our Civil War is to the war on terrorism, because at least a couple of our generals understood immediately how to defeat the South: Pound on them repeatedly until they are utterly vanquished and tired of war. And don’t worry too much about what happens to them in the process; they started it and we’re going to finish it. Shelby Foote, in his wonderful trilogy, has put a lot of this in perspective:

“If the North design to conquer the South [wrote Tecumseh Sherman in 1862], we must begin at Kentucky and reconquer the country from there as we did from the Indians. It was this conviction then as plainly as now that made men think I was insane. A good many flatterers now want to make me a prophet.”
Prophet or not, he could speak like one in an early October letter to his senator brother: “I rather think you now agree with me that this is no common war…. You must now see that I was right in not seeking prominence at the outset. I knew and know yet that the northern people have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years and be born again before they will see the truth.” None of it had been easy thus far, nor was it going to be easy in the future. The prow of the ship might pierce the wave, yet once it was clear of the vessel’s stern the wave was whole again: “Though our armies pass across and through the land, the war closes in behind and leaves the same enemy behind…. I don’t see the end,” he concluded, “or the beginning of the end, but suppose we must prevail and persist or perish.” He saw only one solution, an outgrowth of his statement to his wife that the Federal armies would have to “reconquer the country . . . as we did from the Indians.” What was required from here on was harshness. “We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South,” he told his friend and superior Grant; “but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”

A colonel from Massachusetts was even more direct and blunt as to what he saw as the only solution to the problem:

“Vindicating the majesty of an insulted Government, by extirpating all rebels, and fumigating their nests with the brimstone of unmitigated Hell, I conceive to be the holy purpose of our further efforts,” a Massachusetts colonel wrote home to his governor from Beaufort, South Carolina, and being within fifty airline miles of the very birthplace of rebellion, he added: “I hope I shall . . . do something . . . in ‘The Great Fumigation,’ before the sulphur gives out.” Just what it was that he proposed to do, with regard to those he called “our Southern brethren,” he had announced while waiting at Annapolis for the ship that brought him down the coast. “Do we fight them to avenge . . . insult? No! The thing we seek is permanent dominion. And what instance is there of permanent dominion without changing, revolutionizing, absorbing, the institutions, life and manners of the conquered peoples? . . . They think we mean to take their Slaves. Bah! We must take their ports, their mines, their water power, the very soil they plough, and develop them by the hands of our artisan armies. . . . We are to be a regenerating, colonizing power or we are to be whipped. Schoolmasters, with howitzers, must instruct our Southern brethren that they are a set of d—-d fools in everything that relates to . . . modern civilization. . . . This army must not come back. Settlement, migration must put the seal on battle, or we gain nothing.”
(All quotes from Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, Fort Sumter to Perryville, pp. 800-801)

This last is a bit too Roman for my taste (and very non-American, although at the same time I understand the man’s frustration), but I wonder what Reconstruction would have been like if we had followed a plan like that? (Probably an even bigger failure than it was, but then Lincoln didn’t plan on getting assassinated.)
Anyway, it’s clear that as far back as 1862, we knew what to do about a threat like al-Qaeda: Stomp on it like a bug and fumigate its nest. The defeat of barbarians requires acts that may themselves seem barbaric; but the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Rome ultimately took the alternative way; we don’t have to follow in their footsteps.

However I did manage to get 1082 words in today, not counting this post.

Would you for Christ’s sake retire?
Does anyone else think this used-up old woman is a disgrace (if it’s possible for them to be any more disgraced than they are) to the Fourth Estate?
Ari Fleischer is a saint for putting up with her “get Bush at all costs” attitude. This press briefing today was a case in point. She asked if the White House had seen a Congressional intelligence committee report that apparently bashes current administrations figures pretty hard. Ari just smiled and said, “We haven’t seen that yet.” She pressed on, asking about how they felt about what it said. Ari said, “Have you read it?” She said no. Ari said something to the effect of, if you haven’t read it, how do you know what it says? She said she had sources who said that it said blah blah blah. Ari pretty much gave up on her then and moved on to the next question.
And I said, good for Ari. The President ought to have the Press Office declare Helen Thomas persona non grata and revoke her White House press credentials. Of course he probably figures she’ll just die of a conniption fit one of these days when Ari smiles and diplomatically tells her to go to hell, which might be a quicker way to get rid of her (and much easier on him in the press).
Hmm. I didn’t know this; I thought Helen retired, I mean, really retired, and then came back after Gore lost because she wanted to be a thorn in Bush’s side. Apparently she quit — really quit — when UPI was bought by the parent company of the Good Times in May 2002; I assume she didn’t want to work for conservative management (who probably would have eased her out anyway).
The interesting thing is that she was perfectly willing to shill, er, report for UPI when it was owned by Saudis:

UPI’s sale was the latest in a series of changes of ownership of the wire service.
The company was sold to News World Communications Inc. by Worldwide News Inc., a consortium of Saudi Arabian investors that had bought it in 1992 for about $4 million.

(News World Communications Inc. is the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s consortium that also owns the Washington Times.) Isn’t that interesting. She’ll work for terror-mongering Saudis but not for right-leaning Americans. And now she works for Hearst Newspapers, yellow journalism at its best.
Typical.

cs242226-195.houston.rr.com asks: “tom daschle freemason”
God, I hope not.
202.146.241.12 says: “one man smart many stupid quote”
Why, thank you. I think.
202.96.16.2 asks: “julia carson voter fraud”
That would be my opinion, yes.
202.84.96.36 asks: “great philippine orators”
Hmm, Magsaysay, maybe? Rachel would probably know better than me 🙂
And more Linda Vester hits. Yes, morons, she’s pregnant. And like the ladies on the Weather Channel in similar situations, she’s trying to not let it get in the way of her job.

Best of the Web from yesterday reproduces this letter from Salon. Taranto says it needs no comment. I disagree; it’s so stupid that it MUST be commented on.

Wow. I thought there was no good news anymore until I read your article about the McDonald’s bombings. If extremists–or even just people with healthy taste buds–could torch every McDonald’s in existence without hurting any personnel, and blow up all the KFCs to boot, the world could only become a better place.

I agree about the world being a better place without fast food, but only from the standpoint that I can’t stand Mcdonalds’ food and KFC, while tasty, is a bit on the greasy side for me. Perhaps that’s why I withhold my trade from McDonalds and rarely eat KFC. But I see no particular reason to torch McDonalds because I don’t like their food, or blow up KFC because I get a tummyache after I eat their chicken. That seems a bit, well, extreme.
Oh, wait. That’s not what this moron is on about! He doesn’t like the fact that McDonalds and KFC are huge capitalist corporate entities that represent him to the rest of the world!

The only thing that irks me, as an American, is that McDonald’s and Americanism are considered synonymous.

Not in my neck of the woods. Steak n Shake, on the other hand…

I’ve lived in America all my 47 years,

Making you an expert on what constitutes “America”, I’m sure, at least in your own mind, even though you probably haven’t got a clue what the Constitution or the Declaration or any of our most important founding documents say about what this country is supposed to be about,

and I never gave that corporation permission to represent my culture.

I didn’t either…but the fact is that it doesn’t represent my culture. And I doubt it does yours.

I haven’t even eaten at a McDonald’s since I became old enough to know better.

Know better what? Know better than to be an America-bashing left wing moron, or know better than not to eat McDonalds every day of your worthless life like…well…these two fatties?

Let the world know that many of us Americans

Unproven assertion.

consider corporations like McDonald’s oppressive alien entities.

Hmm. Older McDonalds restaurants do look a bit like alien spacecraft, but I don’t see exactly how you can call a corporation “American” in one breath and “alien” in another. And I also can’t see how you can call a corporation “oppressive” since you admit that you are not forced to patronize its restaurants or eat its food. Whom, exactly, does McDonalds “oppress”?
And now for the money quote:

And pass the gasoline!

Refined from oil imported from terrorist Arab nations by a huge repressive capitalist corporate entity that hoovers the wallets of the poor and prods our President to fight wars to keep its tanks full — right?
Oh. You mean you didn’t think that far ahead when you were doing this bit of free-associative writing?
Lefties. Morons. Same difference.

Watch your ass, Saddam. Now you’ve really got us mad.