…and the rest of their kind, like the MSM and your general purpose liberal, as we know are still actively campaigning against the big Dubya, despite the fact that he’s not running for anything.

This is pretty much a mainstay of the liberal mindset. That is, they substitute platitudinal input for proactive tangible action — they have to know that their efforts to do whatever it is they want to do to George W. Bush is undoable, that they are merely making foolish noise in the process of burning up the contributions gleaned from their faithful followers, and more often than not making preadolescent style spectacles of themselves at the same time. I entertain no doubts as to the resentment the Three Stooges would feel had they been able to see these folks attempting to upstage them in the lunacy department.

When the Berkeley kerfuffle commenced (the peoples’ and city government’s war on the Marines recruiters there), I received a bunch of emails from Move America Forward on the issue and on their response to it, and have of course read of it in numerous other places. The backlash from around the country was sufficiently intense as to cause a couple of the Kommie San Francisco suburb’s city legislators to back pedal somewhat.

They say they support the troops but oppose Bush policies. In the same breath that they tell us they have nothing against the Marines, they tell us that the same Marines are murderers and torturers who mercenary themselves to Big Oil.

The U.S. Marines, meanwhile, are but one of several elements that comprise a community whose mission is to insure that those dizzy people in Berkeley remain free to speak out against the government and even…even against the Marines!

Please pardon me, but when the issue hit the news, and when I received the outraged emails from MAF, I hardly raised an eyebrow. I mean, this is Berkeley we’re talking about. These are the same varmints who, before the fires had even been put out on 9/11, were declaring that our country had deserved the terrorist attack. That we’d earned it. That it was our fault. How could anybody actually be shocked at anything of a treasonous nature that comes out of that lefty hell-hole?

If I were suddenly appointed king of America, I would certainly deny any voter in Berkeley, the city government included, even a dime of federal funds for anything, anything at all — this would be right before I had a large, unbroken “keep ‘em in” wall built around that leftist hell hole and then had it declared a nuclear waste dump. From then on, all people convicted of treason would be sentenced to life in Berkeley.

Radioactive Cows? In Berkeley? Mooooo!

However, I didn’t come here to talk about Berkeley. Screw Berkeley. Knock knock knockin’ on treason’s door…

A projected nine inches of snow is in the process of being dumped on Chicago, even as we speak (they’re so lucky in the Burbs, where the snow will stick, covering trees, rooftops and everything else, making for a beautiful morning after), so I’ve spent the day at home, catching up on professional stuff.

There’s a deli here called Ashkenaz that delivers a pleasing variety of Jewish fare, though I have to say that their knishes wouldn’t sell in New York — they lack every single attribute of a genuine knish, from seasoning to filling. But then, Chicago isn’t called the Second City for nothing. However, they do produce lox in all its glory, belly lox, Nova (Nova Scotia lox), etc, and deliver by the pound. They’re rather costly in this endeavor, but as far as I’m concerned, the quality of the product inspires the overlooking of their $40.00+ per pound price for cut lox. To me, salmon rules in its every form from smoked to poached in the seafood category, surpassed only by those big, meaty langostas one finds in the Caribbean.

So I’m spending this particular segment of my evening munching, in leisurely fashion, on lox and cream cheese sandwiches with ultra-thin sliced red onion and, having blown the dust off my old Enya albums (just kidding, I actually downloaded them from Yahoo! Music Jukebox), am listening to Watermark and Shepherd Moons. Celtic music with New Age overtones, good stuff.

However, I actually came here to make reference to yet another portside idiocy, one which, excluding all the above, will not take up all that much of your time. That is, the Waterboarding thing.

The left has villified it on a mega-scale, even the RINO, John McCain, has opposed it, and the tone of the arguments against it has been one that suggests it to be one of many horrible, unconscionable tortures our government employs to wrench, brutally and unmercifully, for days on end, even the most trivial, useless information from captured terrorists. It is business as usual for the fascistic, nazi Bush regime, etc, etc…

And the liberal media plays it up conjure nightmarish thoughts of the torture chambers at Prinz Albrechtstrasse or 2 Dzerzhinski Square.

Meanwhile, only three prisoners, major terrorists all, have been subjected to the actually non-harmful interrogation technique, and the longest duration involved was that of Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, a terrible minute and a half! All three subjects revealed information that saved a lot of innocent lives while leading to the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and their plans for further butchery of Americans and others.

Our intelligence pros aren’t electrocuting the functionality out of their testicles, beating them to a bloody pulp or decimating their minds with lysergic acid and amatol, they’re merely creating non-damaging discomfort for what amounts to mere seconds (while SKM, an abnormally tough customer, held out for some 90 seconds, the average is 1/3 of that time).

Yet our political left, who have just as much access to information as the rest of us, have chosen to ignore the facts and use waterboarding as an anti-Bush soap box, transforming the truth into exaggerations and bald faced lies in order to promote their false doctrines — in truth, given their desperation to strip us of our Constitutional system of government and quagmire us in socialism, I can’t say as I blame them: if you want to screw an entire electorate, you have to lie to them in a convincing manner. You have to promote your intended back-door entry as a pleasurable experience, one the entire family will enjoy, knowing that once they’ve let you in, the merciless shishkabobbing, weeping and gnashing of teeth will be beyond their control.

It doesn’t matter whether the sodomist is John McCain, Barak Hussein Obama or Hillary Klinton, the results will be the same.

Speaking for myself, when it comes to interrogating terrorists, I’d just as soon we refer to the Jack Bauer manual. Our misplaced sympathy for “ill-treated” terrorists is well defined in the old song about the gentle woman (for goodness sake) who saved the snake.

We’ve watched our politicians, justices and media intentionally misinterpret the Geneva Convention to “humanize” and redefine the status of the inmates at GITMO, and heard “certain parties” strongly suggest that we bring these terrorists into the American legal system for prosecution.

What it all boils down to, I think, is that these misguided souls are so secure in their illusion that certain bizarre things could never happen to them that they are confident that they’ll be safe, even if they eliminate the very safeguards that keep them safe.

What a bunch of maroons!

The last few days have found yours truly in a bit of a funk — while I haven’t felt much like posting, I have been making the rounds of other blogs, just commenting sparsely because I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with the current state of affairs and what it may all mean for our country’s not so distant future. Expressing my feelings on the subject in too many forums just now might only serve to intensify what I can only describe as a budding rage.

That John RINO McCain will get the Republican nomination is all but a foregone conclusion, which just goes to show that the liberal media still wields a lot of clout among Republicans who are too obtuse to have yet caught on to the fact that that the MSM is no longer about fair, accurate and balanced news, but that they have become a propaganda unit for the political left. Therefore, it strikes none of these fools as significant that the NYT and their ilk endorse McCain.

Next up, Israel.

Bar Kochba did a post over at Goat’s a few days ago that mirrored my own thoughts on the situation in Israel and what needs to be done about it, but in attempting to comment, I found myself just too frustrated and angry to type the things going through my own mind into a comment box.

I used to post a lot more on Israeli/”Palestinian” affairs, but more recently have realized that most of the problems the Israeli people continue to face regarding terrorism are largely a product of their own making — they allow a veritable menace to their society such as Ehud Olmert represents to remain in office (I recently read that among the Israeli population, the split between those who want Olmert to step down or be otherwise removed from office hovers right around an even split, a little over 50% for getting rid of the mutt, a little under 50% for allowing him to remain in office) and continue to give away the store. As a Jew, the existence and well-being of Israel are of profound importance to me, but it is up to the people who live there to decide how badly they want their nation (and themselves) to survive, and act accordingly. So far, there’s a lot of rhetoric over there, but Olmert is still in office and more confident daily that he will remain there.

So, I’ve been doing more watching than blogging where Israel is concerned, the old “hold your breath and cross your fingers” routine.

Moving right along…

Those of us who are more aware of what is happening around us than, say, a box of rocks is aware, understand that Islam is in the process, both militantly and judicially, of making its move toward subjugating the free world under the freedom-devoid umbrella of Sharia law. The United States and numerous allies are fighting a global war on terror. Our brave troops are battling terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While our involvement in these two countries, Israel, Iran, North Korea and our own homeland security issues are considered matters of grave concern and are discussed “hither and yon” (I’ve longed for years for an excuse to use that phrase, by gum!), we almost completely ignore — and by this, I include the “news” media — the ongoing situation in the Balkans.

Essentially, the Clinton Administration got us involved over there with shouts of “ethnic cleansing!” The pro-Slick Willy MSM echoed the cry: “Ethnic Cleansing!” Forthwith, we went to war on behalf of the Muslims, who were doing a great deal of their own ethnic cleansing: Cleansing, wherever the opportunity presented itself, infidels. Somehow, we didn’t hear a peep from the media about the brigades of militant Muslims who were doing pretty much what Hezbollah and friends were doing in Lebanon a quarter century ago. We went after Milosevic on behalf of Obama Osama and his merry men, or fellow travellers thereof.

Basically, we were assisting Islamists in their loving chore of killing off or otherwise subjugating unbelievers. Exit Clinton (or should I be so Roman messengerly as to say, with great trepidation nonetheless, Clinton I?), enter George Dubya Bush.

The song remains the same: We still support the fine folks in the Balkans who want to abolish freedom and administer a high Koranic to all infidels everywhere.

“Wheah ya’ frum?”

“Me? Ah’m from Bendover, Massachusettes.”

Julia Gorin is probably the most expert blogger/columnist I read on the Balkans and she doesn’t pause in her reporting for such items as pulling punches or any pretense at political correctness.

Recently, she posted this excellent and majorly on-top-of-things article at JWR’s Political Mavens. It’s a lengthy piece, in terms of links and so forth, but is worth every second of the read for anyone who wishes to know the truth of what’s happening under the auspices of western governments, while the MSM ignores what amounts to our own government aiding and abetting the same enemy we’re at war with in other parts of the world, in fact helping that enemy’s rise to power in a strategically significant part of Europe.

No, Billy Bob, Albania is not a brand of Melba toast.

Back to the U.S.A.

Are our Second Amendment rights being taken seriously enough?

If you want a gun permit in Pasquotank, you can go to the new Pasquotank Public Service Building in Elizabeth City, but you must stand in line. The only problem is that you, a law-abiding citizen, may have to stand in that line with convicted sex offenders. That’s because if you’re there to get a gun permit, there’s only one line you’re allowed to stand in; and the sign at the head of that line reads, “Gun Permits/Sex Offender Registration.”

W, as they say, TF!!!!????

That’s right. In the county’s public service building, law-abiding citizens are forced to mingle and wait with some of the worst criminals in our society. As Bob Halbert, a 26-year retired Navy officer who was recently humiliated by standing in the line said, “I feel they’re putting me or a person coming in for a gun permit in the same category as sex offenders. If someone comes by who knows you and sees you, all it takes is one bad rumor and bam, you’re marked for life.”

Halbert went on to say, “A close friend of mine’s son recently visited us after his return home from Iraq, where he served for 15 months as a military policeman. And yes, he did put himself in harm’s way as I did numerous times in my career … with 26 years of honorable service to this great country of ours. But in Elizabeth City, we are grouped with sex offenders if we want to apply for a gun permit.”

Commenting on the sign that requires that the two groups mingle, Pasquotank Sheriff Randy Cartwright said, “I don’t know where (else) we would put it.”

Did they ever consider having two lines?

I don’t know how many readers receive and read NRA emailings entailing the anti-Second Amendment legislation they are battling against, state-by-state, on a never-ending basis as the anti-gun lobby never sleeps, but it’s nothing nice.

What the dedicated people at the NRA have committed themselves to makes the 12 Labors of Hercules look pretty easy. As fast as they address one anti-gun law proposal in one state, sixteen more pop up in a dozen other states.

And the rich?

What can we say about a guy who became the richest man in the world thanks, in major part, to our capitalist system, then, once untouchably rich, decided to denigrate capitalism?

Free-market advocates say the world’s richest man doesn’t seem to understand that the same system that made him wealthy can make life better for the poor around the world.

Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that under pure capitalism, “the great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy see the least.”

Gates said he was “impatient” with capitalism.

Yeah, he and George Soros, both. Read the entire article, some good points are imparted therein.

…And the global warming maroons have begun researching the enviro-perils of cow burps, which, in the Utopian world of the liberal, might lead to the vanquishment of steers and therefore the mandatory deprivation of beef — vegetarians shout it out! I can just picture me now, without legal access to a juicy, delicious, rare ribeye, going through perspiration-laced, spasmodic withdrawals as I chomp on a leek.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I promise I won’t become afflicted by McCain/Hussein/Billary Derangement Syndrome or anything like that, but I think I’m entitled, as a free thinking, conservative American, to be at least a little pissed off at and to feel somewhat betrayed by the very people we’ve elected to govern our nation. To that end, I blame both major political parties.

In a comment on one of my recent posts, Old Soldier made an excellent point: The GOP is now soliciting contributions by invoking the evils of a Hillary Clinton Presidency.

What, I ask myself with much chagrin, is the difference whether we have John McCain or Hillary Clinton in the White House?

Sure, the Republicans in Congress would be much more likely to fight the liberal espousements of a President Hillary than the same drivel emitted by a so-called Republican John McCain, but at the end of the day, we will surely see changes that we, as conservatives, will not like, even a little. The changes, because of our nation’s status in the world, will have global ramifications that will, as well, not be good for America or our friends and allies.

Not if we, as a people who enjoy the right to vote, continue to do so irresponsibly, thereby continuing to let the bad guys win…

The GOP now appears to have the same low degree of respect for the intelligence of its constituency that its Democrat opposite numbers do for their proponents.

John McCain, if he is elected POTUS, will change the course of U.S. politics: His doctrines will combine port and starboard so that both parties end up drawing our water from the same well, and it will be water polluted with the same socialism causing, sovereignty surrendering, lie-rich bacteria that the Democrats have been drinking for several years running.

…nobody managed to “slip” through on purpose with a lethal souvenir letter opener or a deadly disposable cigarette lighter…

The TSA spokesman said testing shows that the agency has a “very high success rate” in detecting firearms.

…for Rudolph Giuliani.

As I wrote in a couple or so comments here and elsewhere, while I’m most likely, at this point, going to vote for Mitt Romney, I am still considering going with Giuliani. There are a few things I have yet to consider.

For the most part, Julia Gorin is in lockstep with some of my own foremost thoughts in this column.

She is totally correct in her premise that Giuliani would be the first true friend of Israel to occupy the White House in a very long time. This is not to say that George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him don’t (and didn’t) have good intentions where Israel is concerned, it’s just that both, like Ehud Olmert, are extremely naive when it comes to addressing the sort of pure malevolence that dominates the “Palestinian” side of the equation over there. Rudy, on the other hand, is infinitely more capable of calling a terrorist a terrorist and taking him to task for it. The former mayor of New York would take a hard-nosed approach to dealing with both Fatah and Hamas, rather than kissing up to the likes of Abbas or, in Clinton’s case, the late, unlamented Arafat.

Julia also opines, accurately, that one of the issues that has driven away conservative voters is Giuliani’s being pro-choice, and she believes that we should compromise on this in order to avail ourselves of his more powerful assets. When you come right down to it, such issues are more in the purview of Congress than they are of POTUS, anyway — and that, friends, shouldn’t even be. It is, after all, a social issue when you come right down to it; Spiritual, moral, however you want to package it, it should be a state’s right to make such determinations, not the federal government’s.

For the record, I am pro-life to the max, and don’t even see where legalizing open season on human fetuses (as Dubya once said, and I agree with him, fetuses have souls, just like the rest of us) should have ever been a topic for consideration, much less an enacted “right”. I believe that most of the alienation of any pro-abortion Presidential candidate by conservatives because of his/her beliefs on abortion rights is more a resentment thing than a logical reason to reject everything else the candidate stands for.

When I moved to New York in the second half of the 1990s (I had been living away from my home town since before Dinkins was elected to abuse the office of mayor, but friends living in New York had kept me abreast of the mess he was making of the city. Even under Ed Koch, during whose administration I did live in N.Y., the city was dirty and crime ridden), Giuliani was in his second term as mayor. The streets and subway stations were noticeably cleaner than I remembered, street crime was down by spectacular margin, as were the numbers of undesirables loitering about at all hours, city employees in positions of public contact were more polite, friendlier and more professional and as a whole, the city seemed healthier than it had previously. Rudy’s “quality of life” policies were working just fine, as was his overall management of the great metropolis.

“Giuliani supports same sex marriage” — I’m not sure where this story originated, but it is unfounded as the only comments the former mayor has made, on record, where the subject is concerned is that while he supports social unions (as does George W. Bush), he believes that all that is required for marriage is one man and one woman. Period. Another obnoxious rumor bites the dust…

There is, however, a single issue upon which will probably, ultimately hinge my “to vote for, or not to vote for” decision where Giuliani is concerned: Illegal immigration. He supported New York’s being a sanctuary city.

The excuses reasons he supplied in the above linked video were beyond flimsy: It would have cost little or no significant quantities of money and manpower for city and/or hospital employees to check the legal status of a questionable subject (a perfectly good use for a telephone or a computer network) and then, if said subject was found to be an illegal or a probable illegal, to call the immigration folks. We’re talking New York City here, where virtually every federal agency has an abundance of staffing! Granted, they’re all pretty busy, but by not investigating and reporting illegal aliens, the Giuliani mayoral administration was permitting ongoing felonies that have a direct negative impact upon both the U.S. economy and public safety.

New York City employees belong to unions. Most of them enjoy pay and benefits that the average working stiff would give his or her left (fill in the blank) for. As such, there are numerous people sitting around whose days contain more non-productive time than they do “nose to the grindstone” moments. I know this because I have several very old, very close friends who are employed by the City of New York whose boasts about the largesse of the agencies they work for are almost identical.

The Giuliani administration could have enforced immigration laws within the confines of their purview without making the fiscal and other sacrifices Rudy would have us believe this would have entailed.

Now…

Here’s the thing:

The candidate we nominate to run in the general election will almost certainly be facing Hillary, going toe-to-toe with the Clinton political machine. This will not be like playing checkers with Brother Juniper, it will be a no-holds-barred, back alley kind of fight facaded by a minimum of political niceties. The Clintons will also have the full and unmitigated support of the mainstream media.

I am of the opinion that Giuliani, who was toughened by years as a federal prosecutor and then District Attorney, City of New York — to say nothing of mayor of what is arguably the most intense city on earth — would have a better chance of beating Hillary than would any other Republican candidate.

Here is where the next question arises: The Republican nominee has won, now what will he do with the Presidency?

…weighs in on RINO McCain. She is spot-on, to the twentieth power.

No matter who those of us with a conservative point of view vote for to face Hillary in the general election, it is inconceivable that it be McCain!

“So who,” I find myself asking, “then?”

Truthfully, I haven’t a clue.

The only two true across-the-board conservatives have departed from the race, but McCain’s still there, and he seems to be garnering increasingly more support with his particular line of Bravo Sierra.

With eleven days left to decide, I can’t say that I’m all that thrilled at the prospect of selecting the “best” option from among the dubious pickings that remain. We are, after all, talking about electing the next President of The United States, not the next Dog Catcher General, and on a more immediate note, the candidate who has to face, debate and defeat Hillary Clinton (if Obama wins the Democratic nomination, I hope the devil and his retinue are dressed very warmly, indeed!) on a “no matter what” basis.

I hate to have to steal a line from my dear, profoundly missed late grandmother, but oy vey!

…along, evidently, with Marie’s.

I’ll accept it and “move on” (no relation to the communist dot org), but I will forever be mystefied.

I mean, everyone’s clamoring for another Gipper Administration, but those of uncompromising, across-the-board conservatism that come along are shunted aside in favor of candidates who cross the aisle on a lot of issues that are of major concern to most Republicans. The more we whittle away the more solidly conservative layers of the candidacy, the closer we get to a McCain nomination. Under less serious circumstances (by this I mean that electing a POTUS is anything but picayune), I would call McCain running in the general election unacceptable, but I would have no choice but to vote for him in an effort to prevent the Klinton Karamazov, along with their socialist agendas, criminal enterprises and Chi-Com friends from moving back into that big white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Looking at the remains of the pre-nomination Republican field, I don’t look forward to what comes after. The stretch to the general election will be both unpleasant and, going further(from a rhetoric point of view), an embarrassment to our country.

We actually had a genuine Reagan conservative right there, before our very eyes and votable for, and we failed to take advantage of it.

Oh, well. In the Silver Lining Department, I’ll at least be able to witness certain events of January, 2009 with a clear conscience!

…Has A Dream.

H/T Times Watch

I bought a DVD set of the first season of Gunsmoke, and was presently ambushed: the first episode (and series) was introduced by the great John Wayne!

The show went twenty seasons — beginning with a Marshall Dillon, a Doc and a Kitty who were so young as to be hardly recognizable from the much later hour-long episodes. And Chester didn’t look anywhere near as old as McCloud!

Gunsmoke is one of my favorite TV series’ of all time, so I know I’m going to enjoy watching these DVDs.

I’ve been sort of avoiding posting on politics for the last few days, a short break as it were, but there seems to be an issue in the wood work that I feel a need to remark upon.

It’s this whole Obama-Clinton thing wherein the media and, to some extent, the concerned candidates themselves have brought up the color of the former and the gender of the latter in the course of their Presidential campaigns.

What causes me to take notice here is that the left, which includes the mainstream media (MSM), places so much emphasis on the minority status of one and the female status of the other.

The first black President, the first female President.

One result of this is the evident need of Hillary Clinton to shout from the rooftops of hers and her husband’s infinite and historical quest for equal rights and opportunities for blacks. Despite, of course, the former POTUS’ completely empty record in that regard.

Point being, we’re seeing the history of our political left repeat itself: For decades, they have demanded equality, for everybody else, to American born white males. I completely agree that all Americans should enjoy total equality in the marketplace, in the neighborhood and everywhere in between.

That said, those we select to represent us in government should be elected purely on the merits of their policies and their patriotism, their ideals and their courage, not because they are a certain color, a certain religion or a certain gender (I know that there are generally only two genders from which to choose, but I once lived in San Francisco and in that municipality, there may well be a third sex — I mean, I would not even consider personally investigating this from a field perspective, so I’ll leave it in the realm of uninvestigated conjecture).

But the liberals and their Democrat political domestic staff insist, as they always have, in making sure to hammer home the fact that Obama is black and that Hillary is a woman.

This is divisiveness at its highest order. Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton is a woman and that Barak Obama is black. Just look at a photograph of either. The media has a lot of influence upon questions asked and the issues involved — they do, after all, have the job of informing the public as to the above. So when they stress the genders and colors of the two Presidential candidates, what are they doing? They are disrespecting both, creating artificial wedges between them. Do we want a female or a black chief exec? For that matter, what about a Mormon?

Keeping bigotry alive is a primary objective of the left, its believers, its politicians, its media — the MSM. Without the ability to play the “race card”, liberal activists and Democrat politicians alike would lose a valuable propaganda tool — they could no longer blame a white, conservative Judeo-Christian society for “oppression” against all those who don’t belong to “the club”. They could no longer brand patriotic, conservative blacks “Oreos” or “Uncle Toms” (among others, Justice Clarence Thomas comes to mind) for succeeding on their own two feet rather than pursuing the victim agenda, and pit them against lesser achievers of the same minority status’.

They would be forced to confront the equality status for which they have purportedly fought (purportedly is the key word here) as the reality it has become, and concentrate on the true issues our politicians need to address in order to competently govern our country.

Well, at least they would have a few less distractions with which to razzle-dazzle the American people while, “behind the scenes”, they eased us into the adoption of socialism as a new platform for the distribution (allocation?) of our tax payments.

In summary, we need to ignore the ethnic prejudices projected by the MSM, and start looking at the candidates themselves. The media folks have pretty much demonstrated that they are too biased, racially and otherwise, to be acknowledged as an accurate source of information or political guidance…

…my friend Jeff sent me this awesome video.

It needs to be shared with all.

Enjoy the music and the fireworks!