Items in Passing

Photodude's Life and Times in a List with pix, of course.

A Day for Accounting - Anyone who really knows me also knows that lists, statistics, and “counting” are Things Reid Likes. The following was inspired by this from Crystal Lyn, and something that happened 45 years ago today.

Roger Simon's Sticking With Arnold.

So I guess I'm giving a rather apocalyptic vision of the California Recall Election... and yes it's probably excessive... but there are bigger issues than tax rates involved here (although not, I'm sure, to McClintock). Anyway, I'm sticking with Arnold because today, at least--it's the foreign policy, stupid!

DenBeste is at his best with an analysis of the Poster Girl for Human Shields.

The less-than-subtle message is that this is the beginning of the great Republicanazi crackdown on dissent. Fippinger is portrayed as being in legal peril because she opposed the war, and soon they'll come for all the other dissenters:
Supporters argue that she was simply exercising her right to freedom of travel and speech and accuse the Bush administration of trying to make an example of her.

And that, my friends, is baloney. It is not why she's in peril, and this doesn't represent the first stage of the long-rumored conversion of the US into a police state.

There's a deeper message in the BBC's article, and it's one which resonates in much leftist thinking: it's that intentions are more important that acts.

The Bush Lie is clear now to Donald Sensing:

"... when he did not say that Saddam was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, and in fact has denied Saddam’s complicity in the attacks, because 70 percent of Americans believe Saddam was complicit in the attacks and that’s Bush’s fault even though he never said Saddam was complicit and in fact has denied it, but his denial is a lie too, because we all know he misled the American people to believe Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks even though we can’t point to a single statement Bush made that even hints that Saddam was involved, but it doesn’t matter because Bush is a liar to begin with and even if he didn’t lie about this, he wanted to and would have if he’d gotten the chance and probably wishes he did because if he’s going to be called a liar no matter what he says he might as well have actually told a lie for once."

David Warren takes his usually lucid look at the Satanic Legacy of Canadian Politics Today:

I have called this attack -- on Canada, on our freedoms, on moral order, on human decency -- the "Trudeau legacy". And yet that describes it too narrowly. It does not really explain one of the mysteries of post-modern Canadian history: that this most conservative and cautious and civilized of countries is now leading the attack on Western civilization itself.

Lileks, as usual, has one short kicker that sums up our fellow citizens in 2003 at his weekend roundup:

Thought of this story again while reading about the soldiers who were offered the chance to leave their post because of Isabel. They were guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington; this would have been the first time the tomb was unguarded. They said, in essence, sir no thank you sir.

You can break down the entire country into two camps, two reactions to the story:
1. Bemusement.
2. Gratitude.

Totten continues to try and save the Democatic Pary from itself: An Open Letter to the Party of Wilson and Roosevelt

An old left-wing slogan says Fascism Means War. Slap it on a bumper sticker. Now is not the time to retire it. Our enemies in the Terror War are totalitarian religious fanatics, everything liberals and the left despise. They killed and enslaved millions on the other side of the world. Then they attacked our country. They are not, as Franz Fanon put it, the wretched of the earth. They are the murderers and oppressors of the wretched of the earth.

Posted by Vanderleun at September 22, 2003 12:52 PM