Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

This is from PunditWatch, today:

Advice from Jim Lehrer
The News Hour host was asked on Capital Gang about the debate over Iraq:
Well, I think everybody should always remember that wars are fought by real people, eyeball to eyeball, and that they bleed and they scream and they die, and as long as everybody who’s making the decisions remembers that, then we’re going to be always OK.

Hey Jim…commanders of the Army of the Potomac being frightened of casualties is what kept the Army of Northern Virginia in the field for the better part of the Civil War. Lincoln called this an unwillingness to face “the arithmetic”, viz., the fact that casualties between North and South could rarely be considered 1 to 1. Every Confederate casualty was equivalent to two Union casualties, and sometimes more, right from the start, because the South didn’t have anywhere near the male population of the North to draw replacements from (especially since they wouldn’t consider arming slaves). While I’m sure Grant was no more happy about casualties per se than any of his predecessors, he understood that they were necessary in order to bleed the Confederates down to the point where they would have to surrender. And he still got elected President (which was McClellan’s failed ambition). If Grant had been in command of the Army of the Potomac from the start, First Manassas might have happened, but I sincerely doubt Second Manassas would have.
And now I must go pick my wife up at the airport. Ciao!

We need to add Scott Ritter to the fellow traveller list.
What the fuck is this guy doing in Baghdad? Surely he of all people knows better than the crap he’s spewing. He was the guy who briefed Congress about Saddam’s WMDs, for Chrissake.
Looks like another neck needs fittin’ for a rope when this is all over. Either that or it’s rope-a-dope squared and cubed and this is all an act. Which is the only other way I’d be able to explain it.

Read these links, from LGF, in order:
Above the Impact Zone
Palestinians Party on September 11
Bear Witness
If this doesn’t make you ready to shoulder arms and drop into Baghdad for a little regime-change necktie party for Saddam and his cronies, you are not an American and I don’t want to know you. Saddam may not have dirtied his hands on the actual events, but the likelihood is that if you follow the money, and the strings, they lead right back to his ugly mug. It’s time to lay a little sturm und drang on the Middle East that they won’t soon forget.
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Arabs would do well to be afraid.
Damn it, why didn’t this happen 10 years ago so I could have joined up?

Or so Thomas Roeser at the Chicago Sun-Times seems to be saying. There’s also quite a lot of frank truth here:

The media have spent much time pondering why we were caught unprepared on 9/11 when 3,000 of our fellow Americans were murdered. Our failure to ward off the terrorist attack was in part caused by what Herbert Romerstein told Human Events editor Terrence Jeffrey: It is the absurd restrictions clamped on the FBI by Attorney General Edward Levi (a Chicagoan), who served in the Gerald Ford administration, and by liberal Democratic Congresses in the 1970s.

The article makes a lot of sense. I have said all along and I will repeat myself: The administration currently in power is not interested in curtailing civil rights on a permanent basis. But in order to smoke out the traitors, fellow-travellers, and terrorists in our midst, it’s going to take a bit of inconvenience on the part of those of us who are good citizens. To those who would say otherwise, my only comment it: if you’re innocent, what have you got to worry about?
It goes without saying that I wouldn’t trust a Clinton or Gore administration with this sort of power. So thank God once again for the red states, where the common sense in this country lives.
Criminals don’t like cops nosing around because it usually means trouble — for them. To which I say, that’s the way it ought to be for those who hate this country and all it stands for. Like the women Michelle Malkin wrote about yesterday.

Anti-gravity may be around the corner. It may even be here now.

Or, how a word means exactly what one wants it to mean; nothing more, nothing less.

But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. xxxv (1956 preface)

which party is the true friend of American capitalism.

Without W.T. Sherman this time. It looks like Billy McKinney is in a world of hurt with the local Jewish community.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

The Greek government has banned all computer games. No really. Because they can’t tell the difference between electronic gambling and, say, “Duke Nukem”.
(Link via the RISKS mailing list)

Tim McVeigh that is.