Trojan SUV’s

“In perhaps the boldest and most sophisticated attack in four years of warfare, gunmen speaking English, wearing U.S. military uniforms and carrying American weapons abducted four U.S. soldiers last week at the provincial headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala and then shot them to death. . . .”

“The military also said Iraqi police had found five SUVs, U.S. Army-type combat uniforms, boots, radios and a non-U.S. made rifle at the scene.”

Apparently two of the four soldiers were found hand-cuffed together and shot in the head in the back of one of the SUV’s. They were 25, 25, 22, and 20 years old, respectively.

Your Media at Work

Self-styled moderate pit-bull Chris Matthews is going to be a judge of this year’s Miss America pageant (along with fellow paragons of political insight Delta Burke and Debbie Allen).

I guess he couldn’t make the cut for Dancing With the Stars like Tucker Carlson did.

These are two of the guys who routinely lambaste bloggers as people who shouldn’t be taken seriously.  (And maybe we shouldn’t be.  But please spare us any debate over the “credibility” of the traditional media punditocracy.)

Wolves in a Row

Between Terry McAuliffe’s new memoir and Hillary Clinton asking me to “let the conversation begin,” I think I just threw up in my brain a little bit. (Favorite part of the WaPo article: “The effort to ‘humanize’ Clinton, as her advisers have put it, was in full swing just two days into her presidential campaign.”)

See, here’s how it goes — Tery McAuliffe was right about everything in 2004. Kerry’s problems had nothing to do with the painful triangulations suggested, nay, demanded by the McAuliffe/Carville/Shrum crowd (“I was before it before I was against it”), but simply with the windsurfing pic and not spending all of his war chest. Losing seats in Congress despite an increasingly unpopular war? That was someone else’s fault, apparently.

You’re So 2003

I put up a post on mefi regarding the brilliant perspicacity of the latest Dinesh D’souza book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. The problem with America, of course, isn’t just that we have too much of teh gay (Yahweh’s vengeance via Katrina was proof enough of that), but that we flaunt our teh gay and rub the face of the world in it. People forget that during the 1990’s, a Clinton-led CIA was busy exporting teh gay across the globe, in particular to the Muslim World.

As noted on mefi, Colbert had D’souza on to discuss the book (yt). Colbert’s point is sharp — if Islamic radicals hate America because of our socially liberal practices, wouldn’t it be cowardly to stop doing these things? Wouldn’t it be outright surrender if we stopped having gay sex, aborting fetuses, and melting down our handguns to make public parks at which our gay children could have gay play-dates with other gay children?

Of course, this type of bomb-chucking from the Conservative publishing world is nothing new. Indeed, in addition to graduating from Dartmouth, it seems as if publishing a hateful, incoherent screed attacking libruls is kind of a coming-of-age thing for neo-con shills. (If anything, let’s criticize D’souza for obviously not going far enough in attacking his fellow Americans for being traitors. I mean, Ramesh Ponnuru had the guts to call his book The Party of Death: The Democrats, The Media, The Courts, and The Disregard for Human Life. No pussy-footing from him, no sir. Anyone can see that homo-loving libruls like me don’t just hate America, but babies as well. Especially straight white male babies.)

What’s of passing interest though was that some Conservative bloggers actually took D’souza to task for once: Radical Islam hates a respectable Church-going Presbyterian family man every bit as much as it hates a spoiled libertine like Paris Hilton.

When Stephen Colbert and Hugh Hewitt agree that you’re an idiot, you know you’re in trouble.

Giving Them Far Too Much Credit

Not surprisingly, the botched hanging/beheading of Saddam’s half-brother Barzan didn’t make many American headlines. As Steve Gilliard notes, the Bush administration could “fuck up a hamburger.”

After Saddam himself was hanged to a chorus of “Moqtada! Moqtada!” by ostensibly pro-American Shia thugs of the Iraqi Stasi Interior Ministry, you’d think that someone in the White House would have learned his or her lesson. As bad as things are in Iraq, one way to make them worse would be to further inflame the passions of the Sunni minority. (Even Charles Krauthammer, of all people, was quick to condemn the utter folly of Saddam’s Keystone Kops-style execution.)

Thing is, I don’t think Steve gives hamburgers enough credit. Sure, they can be simple, and even when they cost 26$ there’s something inherently homely about them, but I’ve always found that to be the real charm of a good, home-made burger. In addition to the love that any good meal requires, you’ve got some relatively involved prep for a tasty burger — onions are a necessity, a little green pepper doesn’t hurt, some Worchestshire, some Tabasco. Also, the really important thing is to let your ground beef and seasonings sit for a while in the fridge. Let that mix percolate a bit (which leaves time to go get the charcoal started, if you’re a neanderthal like me who doesn’t have a propane rig). I realize it’s nothing that would grace the pages of Larousse Gastronomique, but simple pleasures and all that.

So let’s try to be more precise in our hypothetical conjectures, mkay? These guys could fuck up something a lot simpler than a hamburger.

Chomsky v. Buckley ca. 1969

About 20 minutes long, but even a few minutes into it, it’s striking. Two adults with political views as diametrically opposed as possible, calmly (for the most part) discussing the American involvement in Vietnam. Not once do they fall back on cliches or slogans — no “Why do you hate our troops?” or “Why do you hate America?” baiting. And a studio audience listening, as if some of them haven’t made up their minds yet, and are still open to new information and insight, or perhaps even willing to change their own personal positions on the issue at hand.

This Chomsky and Buckley fellow speak very good English for two guys who obviously must be French.