It's A Moronic Argument, But With Greg

I've seen x-rays of terminal cancer patients that were funnier than Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld on Fox News and if you haven't, you should pay more attention. There's a reason the show's on at three in the goddamned morning. I guess that's not totally fair. Andy Levy is a good humorist, but he's only on the show for ten minutes a night and is in a different room than the unfunny master of ceremonies, most probably out of shame. Also, Red Eye regularly features attractive female guests with their titties half out.

But I'm constantly astounded that the asshole bloggers who go apeshit every time Jon Stewart says something remotely controversial are usually the biggest fans of Gutfeld. This despite the fact that Stewart is among the greatest comedians of his generation and Gutfeld is a failed magazine editor.

Moreover, the entire premise of Red Eye is flawed. It's supposed to be a "conservative comedy show." The only problem is that conservatism isn't funny, at least not intentionally, because it isn't supposed to be. I think it's hilarious, but that's only because it stopped being serious years ago. But the point is that you can't build a comedy show around something that isn't supposed to be funny and expect it to succeed. Red Eye is what making a comedy about a child pornography would look like if anyone was dumb enough to try.

As a failed magazine editor with no background in comedy, Greg misses the point about as regularly as you would expect him to, but without the wit that would allow you to overlook it. Gutfeld excels at nothing more than snide backbiting, and he doesn't even do it as well as I do.

Take the recent Red Eye discussion of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and Hollywood as just one example.

For the record, I always thought that DADT was staggeringly stupid, especially after 9/11 when America was plunged into eternal war. In previous multi-front, large-scale land wars, the United States could rely on the draft. Such a large pool of servicemen could allow you weed out "moral undesirables." But that isn't necessarily the case with a smaller volunteer force.

More importantly, you need to know who was discharged from the military under DADT. Among the 14,000, there were several Arabic and Farsi translators, who would otherwise seem sort of important in the current climate. In at least one case, an Air Force Lt. Colonel that the United States had spent nearly twenty million dollars training was booted.

The arguments for DADT are weak at best and ridiculous at worst. Take for example the premise that it would affect unit cohesion. That argues that the troops are really bad at following orders and little else. Also, if you look at the armies on the ground in Afghanistan, there are exactly two that don't allow openly homosexual combatants: The United States and the jihadis.

Perhaps knowing that, Gutfeld brought Hollywood and, of all fucking people, Richard Chamberlain into the debate.

In an interview with the Advocate, actor Richard Chamberlain recently discussed the danger for young leading male actors to come out of the closet and advised that in today’s culture it’s still better for their career to keep their sexuality a secret. This got Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld wondering “how hilarious is it, that as the military now dumps [Don't Ask, Don't Tell] a Hollywood icon is imploring actors to embrace it. Anyway, why don’t we demand from Hollywood what Hollywood demands from the military?”

You're shittin' me, right? Richard Chamberlain hasn't been relevant to anything in over thirty years, but Red Eye is trotting him out as an authority on something? Christ, couldn't Fox News find a slightly more recent example of everybody in Hollywood being hypocritical assholes? There are plenty of them out there.

But in connecting Hollywood with the military, Gutfeld merely demonstrates that he doesn't know very much about either. The American people, for example, don't ask their celebrities to do anything of consequence. To my knowledge, not a single death has resulted from Shit My Dad Says, although it often feels otherwise. When was the last time you heard about the heroism of Tony Danza or the valor of Ray Romano?

The military is also different from Hollywood in that they are driven by different factors. Celebrities are a product of capitalist enterprise in ways that standing armies never can be. Sandra Bullock lives and dies by the whims of the market. The military, on the other hand, is taxpayer financed and its deployments are not subject to cancellation or revision by focus groups or test screenings.

Yes, you can argue that the market discriminates against gay actors. But it doesn't necessarily follow that this means that the government should be allowed to discriminate against gay soldiers, sailors and airmen, particularly if their service is desperately needed in a time of national crisis, and it's silly to suggest otherwise.

The market is democratic and national security policy is not. If it were, the United States would have withdrawn from Iraq in the summer of 2005, when a majority of the country disapproved of the war. But there are still ten of thousands of combat troops still there.

Gutfeld does, however, have a point. The market can dictate that Hollywood embrace what Hollywood demands of Hollywood. The only problem is that the market doesn't want to, which is why actors are closeted in the first fucking place.

The market has spoken on Red Eye, which is why it is where it is, competing with infomercials and MSNBC's prison rape shows.

The Truest Christmas Song You'll Ever Hear. NSFW

Submitted by a reader who knows the real meaning of Christmas

Merry Christmas, Rhianna-Style

In Defense of Brett Favre

I'm not much of a sports fan, having given up on it when they stopped throwing Christians to lions and boxing started to suck. I try to keep on developments in the world of professional athletics insofar as they almost always wind up involving the criminal justice system.

I had no idea who Brett Favre was until a couple of months ago, other than he's a really old guy who gets paid a lot to play a child's game and retires a lot. I also figured that he might be a drooling retard, given that playing professional football is among the surest ways to wind up like that. Other than that, he couldn't have been more anonymous to me.

That should go to show you just how wrong I can be sometimes. In recent weeks, I've learned that Mr. Favre and I are kindred spirits and old-fashioned romantics with a love of modern technology.

My younger readers might not know this, but there was a time when a comely young lass wouldn't automatically know whether or not a gentleman caller had gorgeous genitals upon their first meeting. Well, I suppose that you could've resorted to flashing, but broads don't tend to react well to that and the law has more than a few things to say about it, too. Life was so dark and horrible before the Internet that I prefer not to think about it at all. It was just a hard time to love they way we were meant to.

Anyhow, Favre met Jenn Sterger a couple of years ago and took a fancy to her. As you can see from the picture above, she's the picture of loveliness, although her head is exactly 15% too big for the rest of her body. But what a body it is. It is not only a work of art, it's a playground for a man to release his inner child in and on.

So Brett did what any modern gentleman would do, he texted her pictures of his cock. What else can you expect from a man fully in grasp of l'amour with all of that wonderful technology at his fingertips? If that isn't what Al Gore was thinking when he invented the Internet, I just don't know what to believe anymore. I can't tell you how many times that's worked for me. On the other hand, my putz is a wonderful thing to behold. If you saw it, it would just take your breath away and women can't help but fall in love with it. I try not to talk too much about it, on account of how modest I am.

But Ms. Sterger decided to make a "thing" out of it, mostly because Favre wore Crocks when he filmed himself jerking off. Guys, you should never wear Crocks. Chicks hate those fucking things on a man. And they aren't wrong. Plastic slip-on shoes were designed for infants, special-needs adults and no one else. Women are very attentive creatures and even the most beautiful of wangs won't distract them enough that they won't notice that you're wearing them, at which point you're doomed.

Brett was therefore destined to be disappointed when he asked for a video of Jenn masturbating in return. It's tragic, I know, but most broads are just too fashion-conscious to overlook a texted pledge of devotion. Thankfuly, I don't own a cell-phone, so I don't tend to be as impulsive as Favre apparently was. I plan these things accordingly, including even my footware. But that's just me, I'm a romantic.

I guess the moral of the story is this; Don't wear Crocks. Ever.

Rudy's Return?

One of the greatest joys of the 2008 presidential campaign was writing about the hilarious decline and fall of Rudolph Giuliani. Watching Rudy go from being the prohibitive front-runner to becoming the guy who spent even more money for a single delegate than John Connally was a thing of beauty and not something I'll soon forget.

I was always doubtful that Giuliani could win the nomination, if only because that's not how the Republican primaries work. The next guy in line almost always gets the nod. The only exceptions to that rule since the Age of Eisenhower were Nelson Rockefeller and Steve Forbes. McCain was the next guy in line and he would have had to do something truly brutal and chilling to lose. But Rudy thought he could be nominated, which was the most adorable thing on earth.

Most journalists are little more than amateur revisionist historians, so I'm not at all surprised that they're peddling the moronic narrative that Giuliani lost two years ago because of his liberal-libertarian social positions. That's almost laughably false. Hizzoner repudiated his firmly held beliefs on social issues years earlier, when he thought it could get him elected president. Rudy lost because he's an idiot and didn't think that the rules of politics applied to him.

The Giuliani campaign would dump a few million dollars into Iowa or New Hampshire, and when the polls didn't immediately go into the stratosphere, they abandoned the state. That's no way to win the delegates you need for a nomination. Rudy then made his last stand in the impossibly late Florida primary and was promptly stabbed in the back by Governor Charlie Crist, killing him off once and for all.

Or not. You see, The Hill has a staggering stupid article online suggesting that Giuliani could be a force in 2012 contest.

As a 2008 primary front-runner, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani tanked. But as a 2012 dark horse, he could do surprisingly well.

It’s not because Giuliani has shifted; it’s because the Republican Party has. The 2010 election was less about social conservatism than it was fiscal conservatism, and that aligns with Giuliani’s socially moderate and fiscally conservative ideology.

That would be a great, but it's based on a fundamentally flawed premise. The former mayor had his ass handed to him because his campaign sucked, not because of any stands on the issues that he took. In fact, Christian Haize's article makes a much stronger case for a Romney candidacy than it does a Giuliani one.

More importantly, the GOP hasn't changed. There have been any number of recent polls that show that the Tea Party base self-identifies as Christian conservatives more than anything else. They just chose not to campaign on social issues because, in this economic climate, they would look silly doing so.

And I don't expect that to change in two years because I'm of the opinion that the United States is in a structural recession. Unemployment might drop to nine percent, but that isn't going to make a difference as a political matter. Barring a disastrous terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 (which, frankly, isn't likely), the economy isn't going to be the big issue, it's going to be the only issue. Terrorism and the war were barely mentioned in the '08 general election, not at all this year, and I don't expect that to change two years from now.

Make no mistake, Rudy is stuffed with enough crazed hubris to run. The only problem is that nobody in their right mind is going to give to him money. Serious Republican donors are going to look for whoever they think has the best shot at beating Obama (which none of them realistically do) and dump all their money there. The guy who thought becoming the King of Florida was a pathway to being elected president of the United States is not going to get anywhere near Obama.

More importantly, there's no evidence that Giuliani has been building a national organization or visiting key early states, like Iowa, where Mike Huckabee practically lives. Like Sarah Palin, Rudy hasn't signed up any of the campaign talent that you need to be taken seriously.

In my opinion, Giuliani is keeping his name out there as a possible "white knight" that will jump in late if there's no clear frontrunner that polls decently against President Obama. Right now speculation about Palin is sucking the oxygen out of the room. When she announces that she isn't running, the picture might change. But it won't change in Giuliani's favor. The reason that no one runs on a white knight strategy is because it hasn't worked since Wendell Willkie pulled it off in 1940.

Lindsay Lohan Saves Christmas

Some people think that Lindsay Lohan is just like Jesus, which only proves that some people are awfully fucking stupid. Lindsay is clearly better! Anyone who knows the story of the Passion knows that Jesus couldn't get away with shit. If being the Son of God means crucifixion instead of having to say that you're sorry, that's a job you can keep.

La Lohan, on the other hand, gets away with everything. It's a beautiful thing to witness and reaffirms my belief that redheads with giant hooters are just above the law. I've seen it before, but sometimes you just need to have your faith reaffirmed.

The law thinks that just because Lindsay has a history of bizarre drunk-driving incidents and a tendency of being photographed with cocaine that she should go to jail. That's obviously bullshit for two reasons: First, the cocaine pictures were taken in France, which makes it okay. Second, no rational person thinks that redheads with great knockers should ever be sober.

Knowing that my case is bulletproof, the wrongheaded California courts sent my girl back to rehab before I could fully vindicate her. While I might not actually support terrorism, I certainly understand it a whole lot better than I did before the persecution of Lindsay Lohan.

But even in rehab, people can't stop fucking with her. For example, did you know that the Betty Ford Center frowns upon your going to a bar while in treatment? Well, I didn't and I can pretty much guarantee you that Ozzy Osbourne didn't, either. It seems perfectly natural to want to take the edge off of something as harrowing as rehab, at least if you're me, which is to say, right.

Even if I'm wrong, there's no need for the goddamned help to get all combative about it. Look, if someone wants a pee test, I'm pretty sure that the pee will still be there in the morning, after I've slept it off. Lindsay had exactly the right idea earlier this week. You know it, I know it, and most importantly, Jesus knows it. And it's His birthday, isn't it?

Lookee, if some Betty Ford busybody is going to get all up in your grill, you have the right to defend yourself. The bitch should consider herself lucky that the Second Amendment doesn't yet apply to rehab, which I believe violates the Founder's intent and the principle of judicial originalism. I'll have to get my best friend, Antonin Scalia, on that.

But nooooooooo, she had to go to the cops and TMZ. It turns out that one of the above is heavily frowned upon by the Betty Ford Center, and it isn't the part about the cops. As it happens, rehab values things like anonymity and confidentiality, even though everyone knows that Lindsay's been there for three months. So her antagonist got shitcanned today.

And that's how Lindsay Lohan saved Christmas.


Exciting Editorial Update: Now you can watch this post animated (and in slightly amended form) at my friend Skippy-san's place. You'll love it, although I'm not sure how I feel about being called a douchebag.

Shut Up And Sing: Just How Stupid Is Jon Voight?

I always smile when Republicans and their blogging tools whimper and pout about liberal celebrities. I do this not because I sympathize with them. I don't. In fact, I'm convinced that celebrities are all virtually retarded. They're a lot like race horses in that they've spent their lives being trained to do one thing exceptionally well. And those skill sets almost never translates well into anything else, especially things like foreign and military policy analysis.

No, I get a giggle out Republicans when they write books like "Shut Up And Sing" because I know as a virtual fucking certainty that they'll be the first to cheer when they find they odd, washed-up media whore that agrees with them. They're hypocrites and should be thrown down a well. Or pushed into the sea. It's Christmas, so I'll let you decide.

From what I've been able to tell, those assholes love Jon Voight best of all, despite his not having done anything interesting since Coming Home in 1978. I guess that's fair, someone should love him since his daughter, the achingly sexy Angelina Jolie, doesn't.

I'll give Voight credit for one thing: Most celebrities are at least self-aware enough to only spout off on easy political issues, such as the impoliteness of racism, or the all-around inconvenience of HIV. Old Jon is attacking strategic arms limitation. Don't get me wrong, he does it exceptionally poorly, but I'll give him credit for at least trying. And, joy of joys, he did it on Hannity this week. Because Sean refuses to appear on any show with anyone more ignorant than himself, Mark Steyn filled in.

To begin, let's look at the two sides of the START debate. On one side, you have every living former Republican secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Condolezza Rice ands 73% of the American people. On other, there's a motley collection of Tea Party fuckheads and Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck. What position Ratso Rizzo would have taken remains a tragic mystery.

Let's go to the video, shall we?



For those of you who want to sing along at home, the lyrics are here. And you're going to want to, because the weapons-grade stupidity here is almost mesmerizing.

In my lifetime, Mark, and I'm a little order than you, I have seen America go through five wars. And if America weren't the strongest nation in the world, we could have seen ourselves being taken over by evil regimes many times.

Really? Can you name just one, please? The Nazis couldn't take Britain when they were practically unopposed and was basically across a creek from them. You think they were going to cross the Atlantic? How about the North Koreans? Saddam Hussein? The unbelievably silly New Jewel Movement that ran Grenada for about 15 minutes? Voight starts off with an intellectually and historically indefensible premise and only gets dumber from there.

And now I hear Obama trying to convince the American people that if we give up our nuclear weapons, this will set a fine example and all other countries will follow suit. What a dangerous and naive notion that is. If President Reagan wasn't such a powerful force of strength, we never would have seen Premier Gorbachev take down the Berlin Wall.

Ahhh, the greatest of Republican myths: That Reagan won the Cold War all by himself. I love that one the best because anyone who knows their history knows that Reagan was merely following the policies of Harry Truman, the only difference being that he threw a truly awesome amount of money that America didn't have at them.

Mr. Voight is also too dishonest or too ignorant to note that President Reagan also signed and ratified the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. There are pictures of him doing it and everything, should the more paranoid among you not feel inclined to take my word for it. And, just because I'm such a fan of complete records and all, the INF Treaty was signed 23 months before Voight's beloved Berlin Wall came down.

STEYN: Right.

VOIGHT: And are we so foolish to think -- are we all so foolish to think that President Ahmadinejad is going to start building a bomb as he is killing his own people for simply wanting their freedom.

STEYN: Well, that's the point, isn't it? I mean, we are not talking about the bipolar cold war world of Reagan and Gorbachev. We are talking about a world now where every nickel and dime psycho state like North Korea can go nuclear. North Korea, I think has a lower G.D.P. per capita than Zimbabwe. It's down there at subbasement level 5. But it's a nuclear power. Iran wants to share its nuclear technology with Sudan. Iran reached a missile deal with Venezuela. Why is -- why does Obama want to mortgage America's ability to react to those threats to some bilateral deal with Russia? It doesn't make any sense, does it?

VOIGHT: No. It doesn't. And every American citizen should be up in arms and calling their senators to reject this Obama's START Treaty. It's, you know, without our nuclear might, we would be subject to becoming a weak nation and what would follow would be much more severe than what we are currently going through with 9.6 unemployment, add that to the idea that our allies are very concerned about their safety and they are warning us not to reduce our nuclear power because their very protection is dependent on our strength.

For the record, I should point out that I love nuclear weapons and think pretty much everyone should have them. They have a magnificent record of preventing conventional wars, which we know tends to kill a lot of folks. I oppose reduction treaties and non-proliferation on those very grounds. More importantly, their absence would allow America's allies to defend themselves and let the United States concentrate on having an economy again. Remember, if everyone has nukes, expensive standing armies become redundant and wholly unnecessary.

Having said that, stating a belief that fucking Venezuela and Sudan are undeterrable evidences a rather shallow faith in America itself. Besides, it's an awesomely dishonest argument to begin with. Nobody is suggesting that START is going to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely. The superpowers are still going to have enough to vaporize shitheels like Hugo Chavez several times over, so don't worry your psychopathic little heads about it.

STEYN: Yes. But the president's view on this Jon is that, you know, if America is just a base of itself before the world. If it shows that it doesn't want to be the super power, if it just wants to be -- and if it wants to put its might up for grabs and foreswear its great strength, the rest of the world will love us. He came into office saying that, he seems to still believe that two years later, despite everything.

VOIGHT: Well, our President Kennedy in September of 1961 and by the way, of course he served in the World War II nearly losing his life and he stated that American military might is the only way to keep our freedom. Of course, President Reagan was of the same point of view. And thank God he had the foresight not to sign away our national missile defense when he saw the world full of presidents and future threats from multiple nuclear powers.

Voight's right, Reagan never signed away national missile defense. He just couldn't get it funded, mostly because it violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Besides, the Russians know as well as anyone that SDI can simply be overwhelmed by a large number of missiles, so it stands to reason that you want to minimize the number of missiles the Russians have, which START does.

But if you believe that missile defense is made entirely of wonderful, and none of the testing to this point suggests that it is, why are you so worried about everybody else's missiles?You'll have the world's greatest umbrella, won't you?

VOIGHT: Well, I certainly hope, so. And I think, again, a lot of it has to do with the American people. Get on the phones, folks, and make sure that we encourage our senators to reject this thing. You know, I don't -- we have seen this before. We have seen it coming towards Christmas as well. This idea that we push something through and people are thinking about, you know, presents for their grandchildren and wanting to get out of town, they come in and no one is thorough in their questioning or their reading of the materials. And they push something through. I don't know how many more wrong Obama policies we need to see before we wake up to the possibility that this man is capable of destroying our country.

STEYN: Don't even joke about that. I think there is no end to the number of wrong policies he would like to ram through in a lame duck session. But you are right. I think this is the first time there has ever been a treaty rammed through in a lame duck session which is extraordinary. Why would an international treaty being rammed through during a lame duck session?

VOIGHT: Exactly. And you know, his distorted ambitions of bringing world peace about without American nuclear mite is a very dangerous, dangerous proposition. And we have seen over the past two years that he is not qualified to keep America safe and strong.

One of my greatest entertainments of recent years is the dichotomy of Republican views on Obama. He's ineffective and weak - an assessment I largely agree with - yet capable of single-handedly destroying the United States or turning it into Chad. one of these things, as the saying goes, is not like the other.

I'm always sickened by being forced to defend the current president, but he has the ultimate qualification to "keep America safe and strong": He was fucking well elected, and rather decisively so. In fact, he was elected by a rather higher proportion of the American people than the most recent President Bush was. What, for example, would point to as Sarah Palin's qualifications? To suggest that the American people are idiots is something that I'm fine with, but I don't think Jon Voight is.

Oh, and wasn't the Tea Party supposed to save America, God, Mom and apple pie from Obama by now? I can't possibly be hearing that life is more complicated than John Boehner's campaign rhetoric suggests that it is, can I?

I'm rather fond of the idea that celebrities should shut up and sing. I just wish that everybody else was as consistent as I am about it. Especially about things that they know nothing about.

In closing, wanna see Angelina's ass? It's so perfect that I nearly cry every time I see it.

Simpleton Sarah Says Nothing Of Importance About Iran

Look, I get why people like Sarah Palin. Really, I do. She's hot, fairly dumb, yet successful beyond her wildest dreams. In this she perfectly represents everything the American Midwest aspires to be. I'd really like to fuck her, although I like to pretend that I wouldn't enjoy it very much.

But one thing I don't do is take her particularly seriously. She's a simpleton and her chances of becoming president are about as a good as mine are. I've spent two years trying to map out a Republican nomination for Palin, and I can't do it. I can't see her beating Mike Huckabee in Iowa or Mitt Romney in New Hampshire or Michigan. That leaves Nevada and South Carolina for her to win in the early GOP primaries. If she loses either, her money dries up and she goes back to doing whatever the fuck it is that she does for a living.

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite sure that she's stupid enough to actually run (although I doubt that she will because she prefers making tons of money. White trash always does), but she'll wind up like John Connally or Rudy Giuliani if she does. Besides, it's not like that would be the first time that Palin has spent a shitload of other people's money to advance her popularity. Ask Alaska's oil companies. Or John McCain's 2008 donors.

For that reason, I give the Governor's views exactly the same weight that I would give those of any other Facebook blogger or reality TV show star, which is to say none. And on foreign and military policy matters, I think that she might have less gravitas than, say, Snooki.

I also know that she doesn't write any of the missives from her Facebook government-in-exile page. I know this because I've seen her try to talk, which always has, shall we say, mixed results. It's funny, to be sure, but it hardly helps her in her quest to be seen as a Serious Person by anyone other than Sean Hannity.

I can tell you without any doubt that Palin doesn't even bother thinking about foreign policy. That's what she keeps Randy Scheunemann around for. Mr. Scheunemann was responsible for John McCain's underwhelming "George Bush is a pussy! We need to bomb everybody more!" messaging a couple of years ago.

There are any number of reasons that I love this op-ed that Scheunemann wrote, had Palin sign in fucking crayon and sent off to USA Today, whose editors read about well as she does. In it, Sarah manages to be factually incorrect, makes insane statements without any supporting evidence, invoke the Holocaust, chide the Obama administration and still not say anything worth remembering or even offer a practical suggestion. It's a fucking scream to read.

Let's examine it at length, shall we? Since I'm not Gawker, I'm pretty sure that I can quote it at length and not be sued and equated with Wikileaks.

Iran continues to defy the international community in its drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Arab leaders in the region rightly fear a nuclear-armed Iran. We suspected this before, but now we know for sure because of leaked diplomatic cables. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia "frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program," according to these communications. Officials from Jordan said the Iranian nuclear program should be stopped by any means necessary. Officials from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt saw Iran as evil, an "existential threat" and a sponsor of terrorism. If Iran isn't stopped from obtaining nuclear weapons, it could trigger a regional nuclear arms race in which these countries would seek their own nuclear weapons to protect themselves.

That's a fascinating paragraph and it follows a pattern that I've seen any number of Republicans and Republican asshole bloggers follow.

You see, the "leaked diplomatic cables" Governor Palin refers to came from WikiLeaks. Palin and others have called for WikiLeaks to be "stopped" by means up to and including official government censorship of American media and even assassination. Of course, the highly sensitive nature of the material doesn't stop them from endlessly repeating it to score points where they think that they can.

As to Arab diplomatic opinion, that goes to what countries say in private and what they say in private. The reason that Palin is touting the views of the Saudis, Jordanians and the U.A.E is that all of them have said quite the opposite in public. This becomes important later.

That wouldn't be the only catastrophic consequence for American interests in the Middle East. Our credibility and reputation would suffer a serious blow if Iran succeeds in producing its own nuclear weapons after we've been claiming for years that such an event could not and would not be tolerated. A nuclear-armed and violently anti-American Iran would be an enormous threat to us and to our allies. Israel in particular would face the gravest threat to its existence since its creation. Iran's leaders have repeatedly called for Israel's destruction, and Iran already possesses missiles that can reach Israel. Once these missiles are armed with nuclear warheads, nothing could stop the mullahs from launching a second Holocaust. It's only a matter of time before Iran develops missiles that could reach U.S. territory.

Actually no, a nuclear Iran would not pose any threat to the United States itself. This is because the likelihood of Tehran developing ICBM technology is virtually nil. China, a vastly more prosperous country than Iran, has had nuclear weapons for 46 years and still can't hit anything deeper than the western U.S with a ballistic missile. And it is thought to have a grand total of maybe 30 missiles that can do it.

A nuclear Iran would, on the other hand, be problematic to Washington's imposition of its will on the Middle East. That's true. But that's a diplomatic challenge, not an existential one and the distinction is sort of important. More problematic to American foreign policy is the light useage of phrases like "could not and would not be tolerated", which seems to imply that you would do something to prevent it when you can't or won't. That makes everyone take you less seriously. Remember how George Bush couldn't live with a North Korean nuclear test? He seems to be doing just fine, four years after the fact.

Israel is perfectly capable of defending itself and, more importantly, Iran knows it. Tehran could have hit Jerusalem with missile-based chemical weapons years ago if they were that determined to commit suicide. Notice how they didn't?

I'm not going to deny that "Iran's leaders have repeatedly called for Israel's destruction" because the evidence is there for anyone interested enough to look for it. But didn't we just learn that the Arabs are saying things in private very different than what they've said in public? Oh, and haven't all of America's "friends and allies" in the Middle East actually acted affirmatively to destroy Israel in the past? Say what you will about Iranian attitudes towards the Jewish State, but they've never invaded it, like, I dunno, Jordan.

Let's say that Iran develops one nuclear-capable missile (and developing the delivery system is much harder than developing the weapon), or even ten. Israel has well over a hundred. I keep hearing about Tehran being part of a suicidal death cult, but I have yet to see any evidence of it. Iran has had any number of opportunities to provoke ruinous wars with the United States and Israel. Why haven't they?

Even without nuclear weapons, Iran has provided arms used to kill American soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran is also the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. It has shielded al-Qaeda leaders, including one of Osama bin Laden's sons. Imagine how much worse it would be for us if this regime acquired nuclear weapons.

This is the argument I love most of all because it's so hypocritical and stupid.

Once upon a time, the United States provided arms to kill foreign invaders in Afghanistan, in this case the Soviet Union. Since stinger missiles don't just build and deploy themselves, Moscow was probably pretty sure that they came from Washington. Would that have been a casus belli for the Soviets to do the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China to ... do whatever Sarah Palin is suggesting Obama do to Iran? Strategic destabilization of rival powers in foreign lands is sort of what countries do.

Does anyone really think that the Shi'ite mullahs in Q'om would pass nuclear weapons along to the Sunni terrorist group that considers the Sh'ia apostates and even worst than the Americans and Jews? If so, are you fucking serious, or just powerfully ignorant? On the other hand, imagination is a powerful thing, especially if you're Randy Scheunemann.

President Obama once said a nuclear-armed Iran would be "unacceptable." Yet, Iran's nuclear progress still continues unchecked. Russia continues to support Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors. It also continues to sell arms to Iran — despite the Obama administration's much-touted "reset" policy with Russia. The administration trumpets the United Nations sanctions passed earlier this year, but those sanctions are not the " crippling" ones we were promised. Much more can be done, such as banning insurance for shipments to Iran, banning all military sales to Iran, ending all trade credits, banning all financial dealings with Iranian banks, limiting Iran's access to international capital markets and banking services, closing air space and waters to Iran's national air and shipping lines, and, especially, ending Iran's ability to import refined petroleum. These would be truly "crippling" sanctions. They would work if implemented.

Yeah! If only George W. Bush or John McCain thought of things! And only the last one constitutes an actual act of war, since you would need a blockade to pull it off. On the other hand, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the completely illegal Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, which criminally imposed secondary sanctions against corporations and individuals that did business with Iran and weren't Dick Cheney's Halliburton. I would have the fair governor do the math on how long ago 1996 was.

Some have said the Israelis should undertake military action on their own if they are convinced the Iranian program is approaching the point of no return. But Iran's nuclear weapons program is not just Israel's problem; it is the world's problem. I agree with the former British prime minister Tony Blair, who said recently that the West must be willing to use force "if necessary" if that is the only alternative.

Yeah, because it isn't a pernicious anti-Semitic slur that Washington is controlled by Jerusalem, so what could fighting Israel's wars hurt? It's also very easy for Tony Blair to get back on the war train, since he can't get elected to anything after Iraq going so horribly wrong. Remember, ol' Tony was shived by his own finance minister and party.

Who precisely Palin means by "the West" is an open question. Britain and Europe? Not likely. The United States? The American people have already tired of a war fought in the place that launched an attack that killed 3,000 of them. Basically, you have a "West" that is comprised almost entirely of the GOP and the Likud Party. Neither of which has much of standing army.

Given the size, population and topography of Iran, I figure that you'd need about a million troops for that. It took 550,000 just to get Iraq out of Kuwait, which was a tiny geographical area. The removal of Saddam from Baghdad was done with about 130,000 and that ... didn't work out so well. Iran is three times as big as Iraq, has three times the population, is three times as hostile to foreign invasion, and is full of mountains and other challenging shit.

Don't for a second that the Iranians are as dopey as Saddam was, and put their whole program in one easy-to-bomb building in the middle of nothing. Assume that it's spread out, has built-in redundancies, and is in hardened underground bunkers in populated areas. You can try to take those out with bombing, but you'll fail and be faced with an Iran with a reason to give nuclear material to terrorists and the capability to do it. Remember how it took six months of staging before the two previous Gulf Wars? I'm pretty sure Tehran does, too.

Is the United States going to commit a million men to deal with Iranian nukes? No, because they don't have that many. Neither does Israel. And no one else is willing to go, even if you could persuade Russia and China to not veto such an action in the U.N Security Council.

Let's get real, Sugar Tits. If military action was going to happen, it would've already. It's not and anyone who knows anything about anything - including the Iranians - already know it.

So what's your plan, Sarah-Randy?

But we also need to encourage a positive vision for Iran. Iran is not condemned to live under the totalitarian inheritance of the Ayatollah Khomeini forever. There is an alternative — an Iran where human rights are respected, where women are not subjugated, where terrorist groups are not supported and neighbors are not threatened. A peaceful, democratic Iran should be everyone's goal. There are many hopeful signs inside Iran that reveal the Iranian people's desire for this peaceful, democratic future. We must encourage their voices.

Great. Regime change. That's only been U.S foreign policy since the fucking Carter administration. It's worked out beautifully, 30 years and billions of dollars later. Maybe you can try selling anti-tank weapons to the "moderate elements" ... y'know, again.

By the way, how many Middle Eastern countries are there - including "America's friends and allies" - where "human rights are respected, where women are not subjugated, where terrorist groups are not supported and neighbors are not threatened." Can you name five? Four? Three? How do you impose Western values on your Middle Eastern enemies that you can't - or won't - impose on your fucking friends? There are currently 50,000 U.S troops in a democratic Iraq that won't recognize Israel or denounce Hezbollah.

When the brave people of Iran take to the streets in defiance of their unelected dictatorship, they must know that we in the free world stand with them. When the women of Iran rise up to demand their rights, they must know that we women of the free world who enjoy the rights won for us by our suffragist foremothers stand with our sisters there. When Iranians demand freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and freedom to simply live their lives as they choose without persecution, we in the free world must stand with them.

We can start by supporting them with diplomacy and things such as radio broadcasting, just as we did with those who suffered under the former Soviet Empire. Most of all, we should support them with confidence in the rightness of the ideals of liberty and justice.

Just as Ronald Reagan once denounced an "evil empire" and looked forward to a time when communism was left on the "ash heap of history," we should look forward to a future where the twisted ideology and aggressive will to dominate of Khomeini and his successors are consigned to history's dustbin.

If you ever wondered why I get scared when idiots are allowed near history, now you know. There's just no evidence that Reagan believed that the Berlin Wall would be torn down in his lifetime when spoke there in 1987. But Sarah Palin, being Sarah Palin, thinks that something like Iran, with it's complicated history and unimaginable security situation, can be reversed within Barack Obama's presidential term. That's not just ridiculous, that's fucking retarded.

On Iran in particular, I think that Obama has been doing exactly the right thing. The Cairo speech, where he admitted the unforgivable overthrow of Mossedeq, was the best place to start. Imagine if Britain violently overthrew James Madison and trained vicious secret police to torture Americans. Do you really think that Andrew Jackson would just forgive them? If you do, you really don't know your American history.

Yes, the Tehran is paranoid, but it has every reason to be. It has a quarter of a million troops on its borders visiting from a country that has threatened to overthrow their government for thirty years and had already done so before. Remember when there were a few Russian troops and missiles in Cuba? Remember how the United States reacted? Explain to me how the Iranians should react differently.

Most importantly, we're never going to change the neighborhood that Iran lives in. Israel has nukes, and is suspicious of Iran. Most of the Arab states, who hate Persians even more than they hate the Jews, could get them quickly. Pakistan - a completely unstable and potentially jihadi Sunni state - already has over a hundred of them. Oh, and there are nearly a quarter of a million American troops covering a significant portion of Iran's borders.

Iran's opposition movement is mostly urban and largely already crushed. I didn't turn my Internet presence entirely green two years ago because I didn't want to encourage kids to die for nothing. There will be a second Iranian revolution, but it will be a slow and gradual one. The Soviet Union took seventy years to topple and China may take another century. These things take time.

And it might not make a difference. Iran will still be a Shi'a island in a Sunni sea surrounded with potential nuclear enemies. The fact that it's democratic doesn't necessarily mean that Iran will like Israel any better than it does now. Iraq certainly doesn't. And as India proved during it's first fifty years, there's no rule that a democracy has to act in American interests.

Palin doesn't get that, which is fine because she'll never be president. It's Randy I'm worried about. That dumb prick could easily be National Security Adviser soon.

"We're Sending Our Love Down The Well"

I mentioned earlier this week that my friend Andrew Lawton is seriously ill. His condition remains unchanged, but Wendy regularly speaks to his brother and I can tell you that his friends and family deeply appreciate your kind thoughts. I'm sure that you understand what a hard time this is for the Lawton family, particularly at this time of year. Having lost my father four years ago this past Friday, I'd like to express to them my deepest sympathies for what they're going through.

The good folks at Brass Balls Radio have put up a podcast in tribute to our fallen friend (media link, click to listen, right click to download), featuring Wendy Sullivan, Jimmie Bise and the world renowned Kathy Shaidle. Listening to it, you really get a sense of how much people really love and admire Andrew. The kid has made a hell of a impact with some pretty serious people.

It's a good listen and one that I recommend to you all. Hopefully, you'll continue to keep Andrew in your thoughts and prayers over the holiday season. I know how much it means to his family, just as it did when you kids thought of me when I lost my dad at this time of year.

It's hard not to be maudlin under circumstances like these, but the Brass Balls crew pulled it off beautifully, celebrating Andrew and expressing their very best wishes for the speediest of recoveries. I hope that you can spare an hour to listen and appreciate just how much everybody loves Andrew.

Because Mr. Lawton is in intensive care, he cannot receive flowers, but if you'd like to send a card, you address it to;

Andrew Lawton, Patient
Victoria Hospital, Critical Care Unit
800 Commissioners Road East
London, Ontario
Canada N6A 5W9

I can speak from experience as to how much his family would thank you for it.

This Is Going To Be Funny: The Reinvention of Michael Ignatieff

It's not often that you see a politician without a soul. Sure, there are lots of them that are such douchebags that they look like they don't have one, but they usually do. They just happen to be douchebags.

Michael Ignatieff has no soul. More exactly, he has no central belief system. He built a career as an academic by playing to cheap seats, saying or doing whatever it took to demonstrate that he was "just like us", overlooking the fact that most of us aren't descended from Russian royalty.

After 9/11, and during his tenure at Harvard, he wanted to prove that he was tougher on terrorism that Bush, so he went about about justifying torture, the invasion of Iraq, and all other manner of dumb shit.

Then he got a visit in Cambridge from Alf Apps and Ian Davey, who explained to him that he had an opportunity to become prime minister of Canada. Not having lived here for 34 years, the good professor had a lot to learn about his home and native land, specifically that there aren't many Bush Republicans up here. In short order he renounced virtually everything that he had said in public over the previous five years.

And the best part? He still lost. At the 2006 Liberal leadership convention, he got his ass handed to him by the Mr. Magoo-like personage of Stephane Dion. Dion, while a good and decent man, was the single most ineffective politician in my lifetime, and he brought the Liberals to their lowest percentage of the popular vote in the party's history. Were it not for dopey mistakes on the part of Stephen Harper and the September collapse of the economy, the Grits might have been voted right into extinction in October, 2008.

Dion was subsequently thrown right out of the leadership and Ignatieff was installed. "At long last", the conventional wisdom in Liberaland went, "we have a winner."

Except they didn't. Ignatieff continued Dion's insane practice of supporting the Harper Conservatives when they were weak and opposing them when they were strong. Ignatieff's best shot at deposing Harper came and went with the 2009 budget and, when he decided to prop the Tories up then, any chance of his ever living in 24 Sussex Drive vanished, probably forever. For all of the Conservative bitching about the evils of a coalition government, there already is one - a Grit-Tory coalition that has been running the country for almost five years.

In keeping with his practice of making exactly the wrong threat at exactly the wrong time, Ignatieff this week warned anyone that would listen that he would defeat Harper on next year's budget, which will force an election. This in the face of a raft of polls (which I don't necessarily believe) that show the Conservatives inching toward a majority government.

The best part is that this isn't the first time that Iggy has done something this crazy. In September of '09 he told Harper that "your time is up", and promptly lost 16 points in five weeks, putting even their Toronto stronghold in jeopardy. The NDP saved the day on a confidence vote, an election was avoided, but Ignatieff was mortally wounded. The only way that he'll ever become prime minister is by accident.

Nearly half of Liberal voters want the Crown Prince of Cambridge gone, so he's desperate. Ignatieff is therefore reverting to form and promising to be whatever he thinks people want him to be, which in this case is apparently Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

Mayor Rob Ford’s victory in Toronto this fall is good news for the federal Liberals and the kind of election campaign they intend to wage against the Conservatives, says leader Michael Ignatieff.

“I’m proud to represent a riding in Etobicoke. The same people who elected Rob Ford elected me,” Ignatieff said in a year-end interview with the Star on Thursday.

When a federal election does happen — possibly as soon as a few months from now — Ignatieff believes he and his Liberals will have a campaign appeal that taps into the concerns and worries of the kind of voters who threw their support behind Ford.
“These are very sophisticated voters and what they seem to be saying with Rob Ford is: we want good government. We want value for money from our taxes. It’s not a message that’s anti-Liberal,” Ignatieff said.

Not only is that the craziest fucking thing I've ever heard, it sets a new record for Iggy stuffing so much wrong in so few paragraphs.

Firstly, the voters who elected Ford mayor are anything but sophisticated. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with mathematics will tell you that. Mayor Ford is going to bankrupt Toronto as a right-wing populist, but he'll do it differently than David Miller's left-wing populism did, and that's all that seems to matter. Remember, Ford's first act as mayor was to bury several hundred million dollars into a hole that hasn't even been dug yet.

Secondly, the voters of Etobicoke didn't really have much of a vote on Ford or Ignatieff as much they exercised good, old-fashioned expediency. Ford inherited his ward, money and political operation from his daddy, a highly popular MPP in the Harris government. Meanwhile, Iggy was seen as being a future prime minister when he ran in 2006, and it's always best to get in at the ground floor where the gravy train is likeliest to make it's first stop.

Third, a populist message might not necessarily be anti-Liberal, but it'll almost certainly be anti-Ignatieff. Dressing a Russian nobleman Harvard professor up as William Jennings Bryan can only backfire in the most spectacular ways imaginable, but I guarantee you that it'll be the funniest thing that you've ever seen.

Mostly this is because Iggy is misreading the shift in populism over the last twenty years. Populism is a historically left-wing phenomenon, relying as it did on farmers, pitchforks and minting fucking silver. Since Pat Buchanan's 1992 primary challenge to the first President Bush, it has become a pseudo-conservative movement that wants to save Medicare, Social Security and giant standing armies, yet somehow save money. In that, it makes about as much sense as the leftist populism of yore.

He says the Liberals intend to present a campaign platform organized around delivering relief to the middle-class family — “practical stuff” — in five key areas: child care for parents; relief on the cost of post-secondary education; home care for people taking care of the sick and elderly; pension guarantees for seniors and money to help homeowners make their residences more energy efficient.

Ignatieff says these choices will stand in stark relief to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and the way they’ve been spending money during their five years in office, whether it’s billions invested in F-35 fighter jets, billions more in new correctional facilities in the law-and-order agenda or $6 billion in planned tax cuts to corporations.

“I think 2011 is likely to be a year of decision for Canadians, so they’ve got to have a very sharply defined sense that there are two choices,” Ignatieff said. “You can have four more years of this, or you can get a compassionate, moderate, responsible government that is focused relentlessly on maintaining the standard of living of the average middle-class family.”

Oh, that isn't going to end well.

You see, the rhetoric of modern pseudo-conservative populism isn't just anti-incumbent, it's anti-government. Ford succeeded only because he managed to convince an angry and stupid electorate that subway systems that stop in each and every basement in the city just build themselves. The Tea Party did as well as it did because it just ignored reality outright and the hopeless fucking Democrats let them.

Rob Ford and most of the Tea Party candidates succeeded to the extent that they did because they mouthed empty platitudes about the evils of government, which disguised the fact that their plans will bust the budget in ways that even the most ardent socialists couldn't pull off. The made the right noises about austerity, but none of their platforms reflect it in any serious way. It's an austerity that only hurts faceless bureaucrats and lets everyone else live it up. It won't work, but it sounds fantastic during a campaign.

Michael Ignatieff isn't even planning on running that kind of mindless campaign. It appears that he's seriously considering running on a message of "The government sucks, which is why you should vote to let it babysit your kids, send them college and nurse you at home when you're sick." It's schizophrenic and even the thickest voter is going to see right through it.

The major problem with that kind of platform is that Ignatieff has a fundamentally liberal base that is rather fond of government. Voters being as stupid and self-interested as they are are likely to focus on the rhetoric and ignore the platform. That worked for Ford because there was no "conservative" alternative to him. But that's not true of the left, who can vote for the NDP and Bloc Quebecois in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, which are the only places left that the Liberals still have seats.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the impending death of the Liberal Party of Canada and Michael Ignatieff has perfectly laid out how he's going to kill it. Iggy campaigning as a svelter, Ivy League version of Rob Ford is no campaign at all. On the other hand, it is the perfect monument to a party that has no ideas at all.

Granted, Ignatieff will probably change his mind 37 times between now and March, so don't hold me to these predictions. I'm just writing about what he said on Thursday, which is likely to change by Tuesday, which is Ignatieff's biggest problem of all.

Having no soul is more problematic in politics that it seems.

A Very NSFW Christmas!

I've hated music for years now, and I hate Christmas music most of all. There's just no message in it that speaks to me on a level I can relate to, which is usually anger and sexual frustration. Besides, I've worked something like 11 out of the last 16 Christmases, so my giant cock and I have usually been alone over the holidays. And you know what? I'm okay with that, because I'm my type.

Well, all of that changed about five minutes ago, when I discovered Majela ZeZe Diamond and her Christmas message of hope. It's so basic, yet so fundamental to the higher spiritual aspirations of each of us. "Father Christmas Fucked My Pussy" changed me, and I'm pretty sure that it'll change you, too. Unless you're Mel Gibson or something. Ms. Diamond knows the real meaning of Christmas, and if you're lucky, you will, too. It's all about chanting the word "vagina" over and over again until you're dizzy.

Thankfully, I can schedule posts so that they appear after most of you have left your offices. Odds are that your boss doesn't appreciate the majesty of Majela or pussy. And some of you are real fucking daredevils about reading this blog at work. So I took the choice out of your hands, just like all the best Christians do.

Besides, you don't want to be wandering around your office singing "Father Christmas, fuck my pussy/ Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck my pussy" to yourself like the hymn it was meant to be, do you? That's the kind of thing you want to save for the family!

Video ruthlessly stolen from DListed

A War Criminal and A Moron: Meet Allen West

I'd have a lot more respect for the Tea Party movement if two things were to occur. First, I'd like it if they had an economic platform wasn't as fantasy-based as the Obama administration's. You will not balance the budget by keeping ginormous, ineffective tax cuts and cutting only the spending that you find personally distasteful, okay? Math simply doesn't work that way.

Second, it would be fantastic if they stopped trying to elevate sociopathic idiots like Allen West to high government office. It only makes everybody look silly. Look, I'm as thrilled as anybody that West managed to move on from his career in Kid n' Play, but it used to be that government service had higher qualifications than simply being an inept bookend to Michael Steele.

The alleged "right" of the Republican Party loves Congressman-elect West for one reason, and one reason alone: He's a fucking war criminal.

While serving in Taji, Iraq on August 20, 2003, West was in charge of an interrogation of a civilian Iraqi police officer who was suspected of having pertinent information regarding attacks on American soldiers in the area. Interrogators had learned that the detainee had information about a planned ambush. When the interrogators were unable to extract the information from the detainee, West was asked to assist with the interrogation. When the detainee continued to withhold information, West was accused of firing his pistol past the detainee's head, frightening the detainee into revealing the requested information. According to West's sworn statement, the detainee informed West that:

“ [The attack] was to occur Friday morning in Saba al Boor vicinity of the police station by positioned snipers supposedly being brought in from Fallujah. [The detainee] was to ID my vehicle and myself for these rooftop firers. We took this information and the following day established flask CPs and used AH-64s overhead. There was no attack and no further attacks have emanated from the town since the apprehension of [the detainee] and his named associates. ”

At least one man was apprehended as a result of the information obtained through the detainee's interrogation. His home was searched, but no plans for attacks on Americans or weapons were found. West testified that he did not know whether "any corroboration" of a plot was ever found, adding: "At the time I had to base my decision on the intelligence I received. It's possible that I was wrong about [the detainee,] Mr. Hamoodi."

West, who at the time was just short of having 22 years of service, was charged with violating articles 128 (assault) and 134 (general article) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. West was processed through an Article 32 hearing in November 2003, where he admitted wrongdoing, was fined $5,000 . He then submitted his retirement paperwork and was allowed to retire with full benefits in the summer of 2004.

That's an astonishing example of undercharging by military prosecutors. At best, Lieutenant Colonel West threatened a prisoner with death. At worst, he conducted a mock execution. Both of those things are specifically classified as war crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and international law. Christ, Americans still bitch about those things being done to them by the Chinese and North Koreans in the 1950s.

You can't even defend West with the ridiculous "unlawful combatant" argument, since A) West wasn't in a lawful position to make such a designation; B) Mistreatment of those so designated is carried out by the CIA, and not the uniform military; and C) It's illegal under UCMJ. Oh, and D) There's absolutely no evidence that the Iraqi cop was guilty of anything, and even West concedes the possibility that he "was wrong about [the detainee,] Mr. Hamoodi."

Yes, I know that Glenn Beck tells the story differently, but Glenn Beck is little more than Randy Quaid with a slightly better haircut. The fact is that under any reasonable legal standard, Lieutenant Colonel West should be spending the rest of his life in the brig at Leavenworth or shipped to the goddamned Hague. Instead, he's going to Congress, which I hope most Americans remember the next time they get all outraged about some African or Southeast Asian shithole putting a known torturer into political office.

On the other hand, electing West to Congress is a boon to me, if only because he'll splatter the Capitol with so much stupid that I won't be able to resist writing about it. He hasn't even taken his oath of office yet, and he's already started. He appears to be advocating the censorship of American news outlets.

There are different means by which you can be attacked. I mean it doesnt have to be a bomb or an airplane flying into a building. It doesn’t have to be a shooting. It can be through cyber attacks, it could be through leaking of very sensitive classified information. Regardless of whether you think it causes any harm, the fact that here is an individual that is not an American citizen first and foremost, for whatever reason gotten his hands on classified American material and put it out there in the public domain. And I think that we also should be censoring the American news agencies which enabled him to do this and also supported him and applauding him for the efforts. So that’s kind of aiding and abetting of a serious crime.

Actually, West is wrong on almost every count, but that's not unusual for Republicans these days. Right off the top, Bradley Manning almost certainly won't be charged with treason. The Constitution makes such a prosecution almost impossible. Allen West can't even get the most basic facts about this right.

What he's arguing for is legally known as "prior restraint", and that was specifically prohibited by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co v. United States, more commonly known as the Pentagon Papers case. Then there's the small matter of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press. You'd think that as someone who spent 22 years protecting the Constitution, he would've read at least that far into it.

There's virtually no binding legal precedent for the fantasies Teapublicans like Allen West want to pursue. For the most part, they're relying on the Section 793 of Espionage Act of 1917, vast parts of which were gutted by rulings like New York Times Co. More interestingly, for people who follow the Glenn Beck - Cleon Skousen line of despising Woodrow Wilson so uniformly, they're leaning awfully heavily on his most lasting legacy, the Espionage Act.

But if prior restraint can't legally happen, West wants the government to censor the press and Internet, preferably by cyber attack. That's fascinating insofar as people like him have spent the last six months relentlessly bitching about net neutrality, which they say will ... establish government censorship on the Internet.

Look, I long ago gave up on the idea of Republicans doing the right - or even the conservative - thing. But I can expect them to follow the law as the law is actually written. If they're so unhappy with the law, they are free to try to change it. But there's no "unless there's a war" clause in the Bill of Rights, and these assholes should stop pretending that there is.

Notes on the Nixon Remix

For a lot of people Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. On the other hand, it's often forgotten that a lot of people are assholes. The more sensible among us know that the yuletide season is not just a pain in the ass, it's an expensive and noisy pain in the ass.

The more reflective of us wait until the release of a new series of Nixon tapes. Few things bring as much joy to the historically-minded misanthrope than that. To sit in one's study wearing nothing but an ascot and a set of high-end headphones and letting ancient hatreds wash over you is something every modern gentleman should experience regularly.

The 37th President of the United States managed to fuck himself over twice with his tapes. First, they placed him directly in the center of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice that cost him his office and life's ambition. Then they were slowly released over the course of 35 years, unfairly ruining him in the eyes of history.

I use the word "unfairly" advisedly. Imagine if almost every word that you privately uttered over the course of two and a half years was recorded, but only the very worst parts were released to the public. I suspect that very few of us would fare well in the eyes of future generations under those circumstances. And Richard Nixon's utterances were regularly sparkling with his contempt for everything and everyone that surrounded him. One of the things that makes Nixon one of history's more fascinating characters is that he was a politician and statesman that actively and unmercifully despised the human condition.

More importantly, what the late Bill Safire called "those goddamned tapes" have obscured much of an admirable record, particularly in regards to race. For all of his much-publicized ranting about the Jews, Nixon appointed more of them to higher positions than any of his predecessors, naming both a Jewish Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Secretary of State.

Oh, and he single-handedly saved the State of Israel from being overrun during the Yom Kippur War. Without Nixon's resupply effort (sending "everything that would fly"), which no previous president had done for the Jewish state, the war could have gone either way. People forget that, focusing instead on the choicer parts of the goddamned tapes.

An indication of Nixon’s complex relationship with Jews came the afternoon Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, came to visit on March 1, 1973. The tapes capture Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.

But moments after she left, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were brutally dismissive in response to requests that the United States press the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate and escape persecution there.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

While invoking the gas chambers is a deeply unfortunate choice of words, Kissinger and Nixon were right if you look at the issue dispassionately. Fighting wars to stop genocides is a very recent phenomenon, and a wildly inconsistent one at that. Does anybody really think that anyone would risk nuclear annihilation to stop a genocide? Even Hitler's Holocaust was rarely mentioned as a war objective by the Allies and nothing was done to stop it as it occurred.

Moreover, Nixon and Kissinger were incredibly effective on the issue of the Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. They linked it to other things Moscow wanted, secretly, so that Moscow didn't lose face. And thousands of Soviet Jews were able to go to Israel until the political godfather of the neocons, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, decided to grandstand and demand that the Russians release Jews publicly - at which point it stopped.

In his discussion with Ms. Woods, Nixon laid down clear rules about who would be permitted to attend the state dinner for Meir — he called it “the Jewish dinner” — after learning that the White House was being besieged with requests to attend.

“I don’t want any Jew at that dinner who didn’t support us in that campaign,” he said. “Is that clear? No Jew who did not support us.”

Do you mean to tell me that Richard Nixon was actually a politician who privately noticed that a certain ethnic group supported Republicans at even lower levels than it does even today? Wherever is my fainting couch? I do believe I'm getting the vapours!

Then there's the blacks ...

At another point, in a long and wandering conversation with Rose Mary Woods, his personal secretary, that veered from whom to invite to a state dinner to whether Ms. Woods should get her hair done, Nixon offered sharp skepticism at the views of William P. Rogers, his secretary of state, about the future of black Africans.

“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on.

“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

I'll grant you that that rant is downright bizarre. But in focusing on Nixon shooting the shit with his secretary, it lacks the context of what he actually did as president.

This isn't something that Republicans don't tend to brag about because they're stupid, but Nixon created America's very first affirmative action program: the Philadelphia Plan.

Liberal horseshit aside, government contractors and northern labor unions were, in the late 60s and early 70s, made entirely of racism. Nixon and George Schultz's Philadelphia Plan forced anyone working on a federal construction contract to hire African American workers. After it was affirmed by the courts in Contractors' Association of Eastern Pennsylvania v. Schultz, et al., it remained the law of the land.

School segregation was common when Nixon took office in 1969, some 15 years after Brown v. Board Education. It was largely a bad memory when he resigned in 1974. While Nixon hated busing, he managed to uphold the Supreme Court's order and often worked around it and achieved even greater things.

Nixon said a lot of crazy shit in private that was directly repudiated by his public record. The Goddamned Liberal Media never points that out because, frankly, a bigoted and paranoid president ranting in the White House is more fun to write about. I get that, I just don't believe that I'm out of line for expecting better from them, especially renowned newspapers. If I wanted to be a mongoloid, I'd learn everything I discuss from cable news.

Having said all of that, the lines about the Irish and Italians are pretty funny.

On The Border: Of Red State and Mexican Madness

If you enjoy psychopathic nonsense that passes itself off as informed political analysis, I can't recommend Erick Erickson's blog Red State highly enough. Much like the great Kevin Smith's forthcoming movie of the same name, Red State is a place where religious zealots rampage (mostly about how you can't be a fiscal conservative unless you're also a social conservative) and not infrequently speak in tongues.

Tired of being regarded as a respected news source, CNN hired Mr. Erickson as a contributor because, hey, who's as credible as a fucking blogger? But ultimately, Red State is a hillbilly version of the Daily Kos, which makes it endlessly entertaining to read.

One of the greatest joys in my life is when mouth breathing bloggers try to address foreign policy in a coherent way. In that those posts demonstrate the blogger's almost painful ignorance of both the world around them and history behind it, it really shouldn't be missed.

A few days ago, a RedStater improbably named LaborUnionReport posted an article called "Like it or Not: Mexico is America’s Next Afghanistan" which is so wrong as to be almost hallucinogenic. Ironically, it just happens to address what Red State thinks the American response to the Mexican drug war should be. It's just too magnificent to let it pass your attention.

I've always had problems with the American War on Drugs. There is no longer any credible reason for supporting it. The nicest thing that you can say about it is that it has been a colossal failure. There's also the libertarian philosophy of keeping the government, especially the federal government, out of the lives of the citizenry. Since crime is potentially infinite and prison space is not, mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders has had a nasty habit of releasing violent sex offenders onto the streets.

Finally and most importantly, the War on Drugs has gone a long way in destroying countries that aren't the United States. Americans, being Americans, think it perfectly natural that every other country on earth not only support, but actually enforce, American law and policy. Why other countries should do this is rarely, if ever, actually addressed, but that support often brings dreadful consequences for those countries.

The Mexican drug war has now been killing Mexican citizens at a faster rate than the Vietnam War killed Americans. Since one can reasonably assume that your average Juan and Pedro aren't doing legendary lines of blow or smoking bales of marijuana in single sittings, the war is being fought at Washington's behest. As some recent WikiLeaks cables - which Red State also thinks should be destroyed - reveal, the war isn't going well.

LaborUnionReport laughably takes it as a given that an American military intervention is going to be required in Mexico, sooner rather than later. This despite the fact that surprisingly little of the Mexican violence has spilled over into the United States.

It's a patently absurd assumption upon which to write a patently absurd article. The American military, for those of you who haven't been paying attention, has been rather busy of late. Quelling the insane levels of violence in Iraq nearly broke the armed forces and it bled political support for the Bush administration white. No matter what American and NATO forces do in Afghanistan, it is resisted by the Taliban insurgency. Yet the Red State party line is to begin a third war in a country with a, shall we say, complicated history with the United States.

Where the men and material come from is of course left unaddressed by LabourUnionReport. What Republicans (because these people are definitely not conservatives) forgot about 10 years ago is that war is a tricky business that requires overwhelming force. It also requires you to expect the worst. If Americans have learned anything at all from the Iraq debacle, it should be that the Mexican people might not like American soldiers occupying their country any better than they like the sociopathic drug cartels that are tearing it apart.

LaborUnionReport then introduces the most balls-out crazy idea of all: The outright annexation of Mexico.

First, this would be illegal under international law, no different than Iraq's attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1990. It would destroy U.S relations with Central and South America, probably forever, and could possibly be responded to with massive non-Islamic terrorism in the United States. Needless to say, it would also make the United States a pariah nation in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Second, even if the Mexican people begged for annexation, the U.S economy couldn't afford it. The German economy is still suffering from reunification, and that happened twenty years ago. Oh, and West Germany didn't begin that process on the verge of bankruptcy, which is exactly where America is now. Bringing Mexico up to the American standard of living would require vast investment. There would be 112,000,000 new Americans that would like comfy Nikes and flatscreen TVs too and wouldn't be afraid to vote themselves those things. Where do you suppose Congress would get the money? Does anybody think that America's Stalinist masters in Beijing are going bankroll that?

Third and most importantly, it isn't even very likely that the conquest of Mexico would be militarily attainable under current conditions. Nearly a quarter of a million troops are engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, which don't have half of Mexico's population between them or the same contentious history. The same Red Staters that want to "fix" Mexico are also demanding wars that will "fix" Iran and North Korea. Even with a World War II-size draft, I'm not certain that the American military could survive the experience. If there was any Mexican resistance at all, the army could collapse under the weight of the added commitment ... if it didn't destroy the American treasury first.

LaborUnionReport's arguments are so weapons-grade idiotic that I can't believe that I'm engaging them. But stupidity amuses me and Red State has a truly big and boneheaded audience, which could very well be dumb enough to take ideas like this seriously. More importantly, Republican politicians actually listen to these jackoffs.

I also love reading the analysis on Mexico by Republican blogs like Red State because, without exception, they ignore the twin elephants in the room that tell you why Mexico is disintegrating. This collapse is a completely "Made in the U.S.A" problem.

As I mentioned earlier, the drug traffic isn't happening to service the non-existent Mexican market. Since Americans consume about half of the world's illegal drugs, it's a reasonable assumption that the majority of the world's drugs are going to America, irrespective of where they come from. But in an incredibly idiotic example of supply-side law enforcement, the American government has had foreigners attempt to address a purely American demand for drugs for thirty years now. That hasn't worked out well for the countries that have cooperated.

Moreover, it's a challenge to have a war worth its salt without lots and lots of guns, and the Washington Post this week stated the obvious about where those guns are coming from. Texas. The drugs come in, the guns go out and everybody's happy, except of course for the Mexicans that are getting dead in truly horrific numbers. That also stands to reason. If the Mexican army needs to be supplied by the United States, it follows that Mexico's psychotic and murderous cartels would, too.

Don't expect to hear that from the paranoids at blogs like Red State, however. That would involve somehow interfering with their "Second Amendment remedies" to virtually everything. Never mind that there are already any number of laws barring the sale of weapons to non-resident foreigners and non-federally approved exports of weaponry, the American government is singularly unable or unwilling to enforce those laws.

LaborUnionReport's demented ramblings aside, this has nothing to do with "border control." If large quantities of Afghan heroin is getting into a closed society like Iran, Mexican cocaine and marijuana are always going to their way into the United States. Even awesomely retarded ideas like annexing Mexico would be ineffective, because the drugs would just come in from Guatemala and Costa Rica. And they'd be coming into a much larger and more lucrative market.

Let's forget the U.S for a second and concentrate on Mexico. The Americans can't sensibly address their own demand for drugs and they won't control the flow of their guns. It's foolish for anyone to think that the United States is going to save Mexico, more so if you take the dark fantasies of blogs like Red State seriously. And when Mexican citizens are being slaughtered by the ten of thousands, they shouldn't rely on anyone else to save them.

Having said that, it isn't the responsibility of Mexico to keep Americans away from drugs, especially when the United States won't keep its Second Amendment within its own borders. Mexico City could stop the violence - and the domestic demand for heavy weaponry - overnight.

All it needs to do is completely decriminalize the drug trade. If no one is opposing the traffic in Mexico, there's a reasonable chance that the brutalization of the Mexican military, police and people would stop. Moreover, private business could probably wipe out the cartels with the power of the free market in short order. Criminals will always monopolize a criminal market, but they wouldn't likely survive very long in a free one.

Would Washington like it? No, but could Washington make things any worse in Mexico than they are now?

The Assassination of Yogi Bear By The Coward BooBoo

This is brilliant!



Lovingly stolen from What Would Tyler Durden Do

Spare a Thought For Andrew

I met Andrew Lawton of Strictly Right at a dinner party this past spring and I like him a lot. He's smart, funny and a pleasure to be around. I consider him a friend. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of me when I was his age.

It has never been a huge secret that Andrew's health isn't the best. There aren't many folks who have a stroke at 21, after all. But he's a tenacious guy and keeps a busy schedule, much busier than most people's. Whatever you think of the man's politics, you have to admire that someone that young has accomplished what Andrew has, particularly with his heath issues.

Things took a dramatic turn for the worse over the weekend. I'm not going to go into the particulars because that's frankly nobody else's business but his family's. But it is very, very serious.

Andrew's a really good kid and, as I said, I like him a lot. I'd ask that you all take a minute today and send a thought to him and his family. That could be in the form of a prayer, or just your very best wishes. Everything else aside, a very young man is very ill and he could use your thoughts right now.


Comments on this post are closed. I've never done this before, but there are people out there who can't drop the politics or stupid blog feuds for a day. That's their right, I suppose. But I don't have to allow it here. Not under these circumstances.