nuke
vimto
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Robert D
Murder of Ravens
Beto OchoaThe last best hope
Harry Reid was despondent after the all-night Senate session produced yet another defeat for the Democrats.
“We did the very best we could,” he said. “I strongly believe we should have a bipartisan foreign policy…We need to do something to change the course of the war.”
“We need to do something to change the course of the war.”
What that “something” is has been and remains a mystery.
After his pre-emptive declaration of defeat in April, the majority leader has nothing to offer. His plaintive cry for “bipartisanship” may play well with the blue-state ponytails, but the fact is, to compromise with Reid means to accept defeat in an arena that just two years ago was described as “not an option.”
It also plays well with AQ, and Baathist elements in Iraq who have only to hold out and continue to murder civilians with the knowledge that Reid will deliver to them a victory that they are unable to win themselves.
I do hope you take the opportunity to read Mike Yon’s latest dispatch from Baqubah, 7 Rules: 1 Oath. Yon’s dispatches from Operation Arrowhead Ripper have provided some of his most compelling writing since Mosul. And, given the fact that the western media has largely decided to sit the war out, Yon’s on-line magazine has become one of the very few outlets for real journalism in this difficult, and often brutal struggle.
His closing paragraph gave me more reason for optimism than I’ve had since the surge began.
Seeing “God is Great” written on the Iraqi flag might provoke some to protest “Why did we come here just to stand up a country who would write such things on their flag?” But I sat there in that meeting, which was completely civil and professional, and I thought about another flag, the one flying over South Carolina. Some people call that flag “heritage,” while others call it “hateful,” “painful” and “demeaning.” And today in that meeting, I thought about the descendants of slaves who are now top military commanders in the American Army, and in that moment I knew that Iraq could make it.
Reconstruction officially took twelve years in the US, and unofficially took one hundred years. It’s going to take the Iraqis a while as well. And, just as the Democrat party has become the last best hope for an AQ victory in Iraq, it is the US Military’s leadership of the counterinsurgency that is providing the last best opportunity for the Iraqis to make it.
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Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Perri Nelson’s Website, Right Truth, Big Dog’s Weblog, The Pet Haven Blog, Shadowscope, Stuck On Stupid, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Pursuing Holiness, third world county, Right Celebrity, Woman Honor Thyself, stikNstein… has no mercy, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, CommonSenseAmerica, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, Church and State, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, DeMediacratic Nation, 123beta, Jeanette’s Celebrity Corner, Adam’s Blog, Maggie’s Notebook, Webloggin, Phastidio.net, The Bullwinkle Blog, Cao’s Blog, Conservative Cat, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Allie Is Wired, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, and High Desert Wanderer, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Filed under: 'War on Terrorism', News and politics, iraq, military
To Reid bipartisan action means —> you vote my partyline way because I am right, anyone whom disagrees with my decisions are wrong, and besides I have many of you over a next years election barrel.
He knew nothing was going to happen to push through his agenda. The whole allnighter was a dog and pony show to help control the Cindy Sheehans of the Democratic Party.
“Reconstruction officially took twelve years in the US, and unofficially took one hundred years. It’s going to take the Iraqis a while as well.”
The South, indeed, the whole of the U.S., has yet to recover from Mr. Lincoln’s War Upon the Constitution (it was, after all, first and foremost–in Mr. Lincoln’s mind–a war to assert Federal supremacy over the States, a goal more in line with Hamiltonian royalist views than with the Jeffersonian republican views reflected in the Constitution).
Still, the core of your comment is crucial to success in “Iraq”–that geopolitical fiction forcing people groups who’ve been at enmity for millennia into one notional “country”. (And yeh, the creation of “Iraq” by Britain–with a compelled nod from France–in the 1920s was about as stupid as its act setting up the Saudis, Lawrence’s favorite bandits, as rulers of Arabia.) It will take at least a generation to forge a working, stable nation state from such generational enemies as the Shia, Sunni and various tribal groups including the Kurds (whose version of Islam is so heretical as almost to be Bahai–*heh*–and almost be civilized!). And it could easily be argued that the tribal rivalries and generational blood feuds are even more savage than the religious feuds.
Taking that roiling mass of suspicion, hatred and greed and turning it into a nation will take either or both of an iron hand (the “Reconstruction” of the South is a good example) or many, many years of a strong hand in a velvet glove–as we are attempting now.
Until now, historically only the iron fist of a tyrant has ruled that geographical region with any success in quelling the strife. The adventure in nation building we’re engaged in now is an adventure in seeing whether a view of the Noble Savage yearning for freedom (and supposedly democracy) is an utopian fiction or not.
I’m guessing not, but I could be wrong, and it is a grand adventure… for those of us here playing armchair philosopher-king. *sigh*
Democracy in the Middle East may work. It may not. The opportunity to have a representative government among people who have traditionally lived under kings and dictators with a religion that mandates submission or death and has no room for free choice sounds like a recipe for failure. The alternative, though, is a war costing millions to billions of lives. Some people scoff at this and say it is “Bush’s policies” that are to blame, or some such nonsense. I’m not sure exactly how “Bush’s policies” are fueling the attacks on the mainland Chinese in Pakistan by the jihadists, or against the South Koreans, or against the Thais, or the Africans.
My suspicion is that we may only be delaying the inevitable because the religious leaders will not let go of their power voluntarily and as we have seen, the fanatics in Europe that are willing to die to kill nonbelievers are people of means, education, and way more freedom of choice than your average goat herder.
Harry Reid being despondent does warm the cockles of my heart. Or maybe that’s the tricuspid valve. Hard to say.
He’s faking being despondent. It’s his hang-dog act that is generating all of the campaign dollars for the quitters, as he is doing all he can…so says he. He’s just milking the loons, while counting the cash. If he can pin the loss/defeat/surrender on the GOP, he will go for it. As long as he can just divert attention away from the successes, and continue to ignore the quantifiable data that disputes his sloganeering, all is coolness with him. He doesn’t care about this country, indeed he doesn’t care about anyone or thing, except to the extent he can use them for his and his parties acquisition of power.
Well, my Kurdish bud and I were to have lunch today, but he stayed up late playing poker last night, and can’t get moving. So I’m typing here, sore wrist and all, after being put on hold for twenty minutes, trying to order a new phone from ATT. The internet offer is for a Razr v3xx for free. I was at Wally World earlier and they had the same phone for $28.74. I’ll see y’all later, going back to Wally World, and get my new phone, so I will have the rest of the day and night to get used to it.
Oh…my bud is home on medical leave from Iraq. As you know he’s been serving as a translator for the MNF since before the invasion, and has been wounded twice. Well, a few weeks ago, he experienced blindness in one eye, just all of a sudden. It came back, but freaked him a little, and he went to the medics to get checked. They couldn’t find anything wrong, so they sent him to Germany for more tests. They couldn’t find anything, so they sent him back to Dallas to see an opthamologist. He checked him out, and referred him to a neurologist. He examined him, ran CAT scans and MRI’s, but couldn’t find anything. They think, like M.J. Totten said, the sun may have been frying his brain. He has sent his info in to return to duty.
Hope you’re enjoying that new Razr phone. I kinda like the old huge kind that we used to have in the early 90s because they were a lot harder to lose.
I’ve been “helping” change spark plugs. Apparently all mechanics are anorexic contortionists; I could barely get my hands into some places that SwampMan’s big hands wouldn’t fit at ALL. I was putting the last plug wire on one side, the old one was REALLY stuck so I had to give it a mighty heave, and accidentally dislodged all of them off the distributor as I hadn’t put them on securely because I was in a hurry to get everything in place before the storm arrived. Then SwampMan got out from underneath the truck and was staring at what I had done, speechless, (speechless is good) and the rain started pouring down.
It’s no big thang, I suppose, just annoying that we have to go back and trace wires. In the meantime, I smell like orange cleaner and grease, so I think I better hit the shower before I head to the feed store.
I would like to take this opportunity to inform everybody that my ponytail is of the redneck variety.
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I don’t know if I ever actually enjoyed any phone, or if I ever will. At this point, the new v3xx is one big pain. The SIM card in my old phone was turned over to the Smithsonian, so I have to enter all of my contacts in this phone, one name and number at the time. After a few hours, several breaks, and dinner, I am now almost finished with the R’s. I also think I know what’s going on with my wrist and this computer…the keyboard tray is too low…or my seat is too high…either way.
Hunh. Well, that would be easy to check by putting something underneath your keyboard to raise the level to see if you get any relief. Do you normally have your wrists resting on the surface of the desk (or whatever) while you type, or keep them in the air above the keyboard?
(I don’t rest the wrists myself; however, some people that have developed wrist problems do. Not sure if that may be a cause, just curious.)
My working theory is still remote control injury or telephone injury.
/Disclaimer: Mostly because I never get to use the one and hate the other.
Ponytails on women need not be defended. In fact, I encourage them. On men however…..
On men, it’s most associated with lack of hair on top.
And LLL thinking. And I think most men bald with grace, not ponytails.
“But one element we tend to forget is that Connery was already sporting a hairpiece by this time. Wouldn’t it have been nice if the most visible male sex symbol alive had saved the world from Goldfinger while sporting a gleaming chrome-dome? What a difference it might have made for baldies the world over.”
http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story/0,,2131390,00.html
“Connery’s hairpiece”
Well, got all the contacts entered. Mercifully, there were a bunch of names and numbers that I no longer needed. I got the voice mail message set up. Don’t know how to use the internet or send and receive emails on it yet, but there are only so many hours in a Saturday.
No, I noticed that my hands are unsupported, and about a forty degree bend in my right wrist, while I tend to keep my left wrist straight. Go figure.
What I need to do is, put the keyboard on the tabletop with the monitor, and not use the pull out keyboard tray, and see if that will help.
In the mean time, I need to clean up a messy kitchen, and head to the bunk early tonight, as I need to get up early.
SwampMan’s got the male pattern baldness thang (and he tells me ever so often he’s going to grow his hair long in the back and do a spectacular comb over OR grow a ponytail, to which my reaction is eeeeeeew). Maybe it’s just me, but give me a Rudy Giuliani or a Fred Thompson coiffure any day to John Edwards or John Kerry.
What I should have added is, business has been very good, for this time of year. I’m not complaining, just commenting on how unusual it is historically, to be so busy in the middle of summer. My business is not predictive of the economy, but reactive, so from my perspective, and based on what I know and am seeing, the economy is doing very well. I even got a call from some long ago clients today, that went away when the dot com boom and bust occurred, and they have reorganized their old software business, and are growing fast.
Yeah, I used to use the keyboard tray but it was very uncomfortable for me, felt too low. I have the keyboard on top my desk. Maybe wear a (right) wrist splint while you’re typing to remind you to keep it straight?
Good news indeed, n2l.
Good for YOU! So happy to hear that business is booming. If I ever have to live under a bridge, I’ll try to find one on your commute so you can toss me a McDonald’s burger in my “will beg for food” cup.
/Heh.
I used to have a way better feel for the economy than I do now. I need to get out more. I have noticed, however, that the restaurants tend to be crowded and so do the shopping centers, so things must be going okay here as well.
/Just not in my particular field.
Dang, I just read about some of the flooding that happened out in Texas again today. Incredible! Usually only see totals like that in a tropical storm or hurricane.
I see that Tammy Faye Baker Messner died yesterday. I wonder what she really looked like?
Oh, watched the CNN film on “Shadow Wolves” about tracking smugglers across the Tohono O’Odham rez. I loved that place and smell the dust and creosote bushes in memory now. That’s where I used to go hiking at dawn and find my way back to my truck at dusk.
Tammy Faye wasn’t a pretty sight. I saw her on Fox a couple of days ago and thought she didn’t have a lot of time left, but I didn’t think it would be days.
I didn’t think you did dawn, Swampie.
I didn’t say it was booming, just busy for this time of year.
Where was the flooding in Texas this time? It seemed that the storms stayed south of here, with some sudden outbursts of an inch of rain in 90 seconds.
Damnit, couldn’t the reporter even pronounce the friggin’ name of the tribe correctly? Sheesh. How hard is that? ASK THEM.
It is our coolest summer on record Swampy. So green. So very green.
But that would require actual work, and time away from the makeup, wardrobe, and hair people.
As for our summer weather, we still haven’t had a day with a temp of or above one hundred, and it was only about 88 today. Last July, fifteen of the thirty one days were above one hundred.
Same up here, Beto. It’s amazing! Everything is green and lush, except the crepe myrtle, they are boisterously loud with their vivid colors.
That’s sad, Robert D. I didn’t see her, but I could see on the pages of the tabloids at the check out stands in the grocery store for the last few months that she was on her way out.
Y’all Texans are screwing with Al Gore’s livelihood. Ought to be ashamed.
/San Antonio area with flooding today.
And I told Ann and Reaganite that West Texas was dry.
Henh…talked with them both for a moment, earlier. He said that the grass seed had caught on better than they had expected, and is actually getting his lawn to come in….but it’s still raining.
How’s he likin’ his job? How’s Ann doing? Do they still have the same phone numbers?
Dang…lots of news over at Gateway.
Just in case I decide to pick up a phone and actually talk on it, which I admit is unlikely.
I guess he likes his job okay. They both seem to be doing just fine, and getting all settled in.
His number is still the same, I don’t know about her’s. You should try it, if you have it.
I found a new flavor of Blue Bell today. Chocolate covered cherries…think I better satisfy my curiosity.
I’ve been watching the thing on Shock Troops with interest and much more than a soupcon of skepticism.
You want to give that knife another twist? There may be one or two vital organs that sucker didn’t rip out yet.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are nothing short of modern day Copperheads.
Beto! You’re in Texas. Can’t you go confiscate that ice cream from him to keep the sound of gloating and lip smacking at bay?
Hey, flagwaver! Grab a chair and sit a few.
I particularly like uncle Jimbo’s smackdown of the dumbass duo at blackfive.
Yeah, flagwaver, they might even be considered a new and unimproved version of an old gang.
Well dang, Swampie.
I thought you were into the vicarious pleasures of your pixel mates.
I don’t think Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi could even aspire to a height as glorious as a chancre on the genitalia of a copperhead.
Sorry, n2l. Chocolate deprivation brings out the mean streak in me.
So you are saying, that they are lower than a snake’s genitals in a wagon rut?
Why do you deprive yourself of chocolate?
There is a diet plan I hear advertised on the radio everyday, called Ten Days of Chocolate. There is no reason you can’t have some chocolate, just don’t binge.
BRB…where did all the other guys go?
No, I’m sayin’ that they’re lower than a giant squid’s genitals.
That is a diet plan that I have never heard advertised.
I’m eating fruits and veggies and grass and sticks. I expect to start mooing at any moment.
I seem to have misplaced the others. Maybe they’re with the keys. I’ll check under the sofa cushions.
Starring Don Knotts as Harry Reid?
via Instapundit It’s a bad idea to burglarize a place with a sign saying “K9 Training Facility”.
Celebratory gunfire kills 3 in Baghdad after soccer victory, 25 others wounded.
I expect they’ll get that whole cause and effect thing figured out any day now.
Oddly enough, those minority and low socioeconomic groups in the 1960s were underweight due to lack of food. But that wasn’t mentioned in the synopsis of the “study”. Nor was it mentioned that children are also taller as well as heavier than in the 1960s due to the aforementioned better nutritional status. Nothing was mentioned about the baby boomers being children in the 1960s (the young are lighter weight) and now are entering retirement age (older people are naturally heavier). I don’t remember reading about how obesity standards and ways of measuring obesity were also changed in that time period. In other words, just another scare article.
I notice they don’t even brush up against behavioral patterns, either.
I was observing a fairly young couples behavior the other day…not willingly. They both exhibited behavior that suggested they were very needy emotionally. She was morbidly obese, he was slightly overweight, but they were both behaving inappropriately for their age, and for any age. When he walked up to her, they embraced(as best they could) and gave repeated kissy-kisses, not deeply affectionate kisses, and he interrupted their childish kissing, to take a bite of a candy bar, then resumed kissing.
I have noticed much inappropriate behavior, over the years from obese people, and in my opinion, it is far more determinate to their condition, than physiological ones.
Don’t researchers have any memory of events longer ago than last week?
/Yeah, I know. Resistance is futile, mouth the accepted meme if you want those grants to continue to flow.
Well, there are a lot of people out there entering their second, third, or fifth childhood.
/Hmmmm. Perhaps I should join them.
Not me!
I’ve worked long and hard to become a curmudgeon apprentice, and should be getting my journeyman license any year, now.
Came across this most excellent article the other day, but have just been too busy to give it the proper treatment, so I shall at least dump it here.
Do NOT talk to me about obesity, you chocolate ice cream eater. My indulgence is a freakin’ apple. And not fried or baked into a pie like the recipes God passed out in the garden of Eden. And I’m still losing the battle.
It is an interesting article, and does illustrate clearly the flawed thinking engaged in by the people caterwauling about “climate change” as though climate is in stasis.
Well, goodnight, n2l. I really should be getting some sleep because tomorrow is going to be a loooooooong day.
And it will begin at *shudder* dawn.
Check it out.
As for the ice cream I had, it was cherry flavored ice cream, with dark chocolate swirls, and these little bell shaped chocolate covered cherry chunks, a little larger than a big kernel of corn. Pretty good.
Night Swampie.
My day begins at pre-dawn.
“Celebratory gunfire kills 3 in Baghdad after soccer victory, 25 others wounded.
I expect they’ll get that whole cause and effect thing figured out any day now.
Comment by SwampWoman — July 21, 2007 @ 9:46 pm”
You can’t fix STUPID!
G’nite Swamps and n2l…. check with ya next week.
Hey, Robert D! Sorry I missed you.
In the meantime, here’s something interesting: Putting the radiation release in the Japanese nuclear plant in the proper perspective. Knowing that there are people right out walking around in public that have received many times that amount of radiation in medical treatment sort of changes things, doesn’t it?
Texas Tells FEMA “Don’t Mess!”
EXACTLY! I HATE the complacent people/places that think that they can just sit on their asses with no preparation and that FEMA will magically appear on behalf of the Great Bureaucracy in Washington to do all the work and make everything whole once again. It is not going to happen. You rely on local. And Wal-Mart and Home Depot.
And via Tim Blair comes this story in the Telegraph to be filed under the “you have GOT to be kidding me” category: A police force withdrew plans for a televised appeal to help catch an Afghan suspected of sexually assaulting women after a race watchdog warned that it might spark a violent backlash.
Is it still okay to say that the suspect is a male, or is that too specific as well?
The police are prevented from doing their jobs, and the citizenry are disarmed. What a nice set up for those that are criminally inclined, but only if they belong to a certain category that must not be named because it would be “racist” to do so.
Swampie, I refer you back up to #67.
Just had a major headbanging thunderstorm roll through, complete with power outage lightening strikes….and it’s late July in Texas.(?)
N2l, I saw that. I didn’t see anything about chocolate covered cherries, though.
We had 3 more fires in the county caused by lightning yesterday.
Well, chocolate in a diet, sure sounds a lot better than no chocolate in a diet.
We’re entirely too green and lush to burn right now, and for the foreseeable future.
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