Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

P.J. O’Rourke weighs in amongst the pages of The Weekly Standard:

In this period of gloom–with liberals seeking to make hay from capitalist foibles and our own capitalist foibles reduced in value to bales of ditto–it behooves us to look for a moment at the bright side of corporate corruption.
That is, assuming there’s any corruption. It may be semantics. When senators and representatives get together in Congress to fix prices on prescription drugs, they’re national heroes. When pharmaceutical company CEOs get together on the golf course to fix prices on prescription drugs, they’re indicted. . . .
One last cheering thought: Corporate corruption gives al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other Muslim radicals second thoughts about messing with the United States. If we’ll screw our own grandmothers in the stock market, God knows what we’ll do to them.

Methinks we ought to spend a little more time working on that Congressional corruption angle, P.J. You’re slowing down since you got married and had kids. But this is a pretty good piece, if a bit short.

This worries me. Muslim-based home schooling is all well and good, but let’s hope the American History component doesn’t teach that this country is the Great Satan. I somehow suspect that this is just another way to subvert the American education system and brainwash little Muslim children who don’t know any better.

Who is leaking this shit to the NYT?
Someone needs to be marched out in front of the newly-repaired section of the Pentagon, put up against the wall, and shot as a reminder of what happened on 9/11. Loose lips sink ships, damn it!

NY Times this morning via RealClearPolitics.
Well, Mr Bush…much as I hate to say it…you’re full of shit. As Mr Podhoretz clearly indicates here.

Which Peanuts Character Are You Quiz

I’m on vacation till next Monday. Blogging will be light if at all.
(I may have jury duty either Wednesday or Thursday.)

Zell, just switch parties. It’s obvious you aren’t really a Democrat.

A fine article by Melissa Seckora in NRO Online today about Radio Sawa, the alternative to al-Jazeera et al.

Consular officials liken visa critics to neo-Nazis
Son, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
How many more al-Qaeda terrorists do we need to admit to the country before the cookie pushers admit that maybe our visa policy is too lenient?

Mr. Burton, Indiana Republican and chairman of the Government Reform Committee, “slanders [ousted Consular Affairs chief] Mary Ryan, the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Civil and Foreign Service employees of the State in Washington and overseas through a litany of half-truths and outright canards that would have done [McCarthy lawyer] Roy Cohn proud,” Mr. Keil wrote.

I’d like to see Mr. Keil make that slander charge stand up in court.

Mr. Boucher, while critical of the e-mails, said there was within the consular service “a level of frustration and anger at press stories” accusing staff of lax policies in granting visas.

I’d be mad, too, if I wasn’t doing my job and got caught at it.

The senior State Department official said that before the use of new technologies, staff might have gotten away with sharing such sentiments. “People who spouted off on the phone now do it on e-mail,” the official said.

And I guess that made it right in those days. Right?
The big heads at the Department of State need some deflation, methinks.

So now Abu Sayyaf are getting into the “if you don’t leave us alone we’ll come after you” business so well executed by al-Qaeda since September 11.
Hope they do as well at it.

The Abu Sayyaf terrorist group called on God to help it punish the United States for working with the Philippines government in its drive to wipe out the Al Qaeda linked organization.

Somehow the example of Afghanistan tends to suggest that God isn’t on their side.

“Sooner or later, may Allah will it that you will get his punishments through us so that you may be tilted into your senses,” Abu Sayyaf spokesman Abu Sulaiman said Thursday in a statement addressed to the U.S. government.

Yeah, “tilt” us into our senses. Which in a just world would mean dropping thermonuclear weapons on your sorry ass. Those islands you hang out on are pretty small.

“The very things you hold dear in this world, your lives and your properties, are not safe from us.

Bring it on, Bubba. The Japanese made the same mistake in 1941. I’ll bet you think the US is just Hawaii and California, too.

For what is dear to you, we gladly dedicate for the sake of our creator so that there may be true peace and justice in real sense in this world,” said the statement, delivered in English on RMN radio.

Not very good English. What does that last sentence really mean?