I’ve done exactly one post on Ward Churchill since the fake indian, fake combat vet, fake scholar, and fake American burst on the scene early this year. The reason I’ve pretty much ignored the guy isn’t that he hasn’t supplied us with a wealth of material. Let’s face it; he’s as daffy as a dik-dik. The reason I haven’t written anything is the same reason I don’t blog NASCAR. Watching slow motion replays of traffic accidents just doesn’t do it for me. Trying to absorb the rapid fire incantations of lies, distortions, false analogies, and jaw dropping misstatements of fact is like seeing a stock car hit the wall at Daytona and roll over and over and over until, after coming to rest on the infield, you wonder how anyone can walk away from such a horrible scene.

I’ve seen the Nutty Professor on C-Span twice since his January coming out party. Both times, my head was killing me about halfway through his presentation due to my brain being overburdened by trying to make sense out of the nonsensical. Churchill appears to be a man in love not only with himself and his own voice, but also in love with a technique commonly used by people who really don’t have anything to say but just can’t keep their mouths shut.

It’s called “bullshitting.”

All of this being said, this article by Matt Labash, senior writer for The Weekly Standard is a real eye opener. Labash has a profile of the Rocky Mountain Moonbat that’s reveals Churchill is much more than your average America hating lefty. The profile of the Mad Professor that emerges is one of an image conscious charlatan.; a money grubbing mountebank who accepts $5000 per speaking engagement while apparently trying to milk his 15 minutes of fame for everything its worth.

I pity Mr. Labash his assignment. According to Churchill’s ex wives, he can be a difficult man indeed to get along with. But Labash doesn’t shy away from the tough questions. It’s just a pity Churchill didn’t see fit to answer them:

Seeing he’s a wee bit sensitive about his Indian identity, I go right for it, asking just how Indian he is. “I am not going to get into pet poodle pedigree,” he says. “I’ve done this twice and I’m not doing it again. It is absolutely racially affrontive.” But everybody wants to know, including his university, I respond. “And everybody can go f—themselves,” he snaps.

What this type of rationale reminds me of is the musings of Hitler’s favorite philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who, after penning the overly verbose and stunningly ignorant treatise on racial purity entitled Foundations of the 19th Century, Mr. H. realized that by writing that “teutons” were superior to other “races,” he had neglected to include himself in that illustrious company of supreme beings. Accordingly, he simply altered the definition to fit; he said that “anyone who believes or acts like a Teuton, is a Teuton.”

Similarly, according to Churchill “Anyone who believes or acts like an indian is an indian.” This is true even if native Americans themselves deny your heritage.

This is a good indication of how Churchill uses words to trivialize the important and complicate the obvious. It’s not the work of a scholar. It’s what bunko artists do.

Then there’s the little matter of Churchill’s combat experience in which Mr. Labash, who is asking these questions as he and the good professor are getting progressively more inebriated, tries to get a straight answer from the increasingly tipsy professor:

MOVING ON TO LESS CONTROVERSIAL FARE, I ask him about the discrepancies in his Vietnam record, in which he’s made himself sound like a ground-pounding trigger-puller, while records suggest he drove a truck, and a résumé claims he worked as a public information specialist. “I performed infantry functions, I ended up in a transportation battalion,” he rolls, before abruptly stopping. “Actually, I said I wasn’t going to do this with anybody, and I’m not.”

Why—it’s under question? I ask.

“I don’t care. Show me some possible relevance to it. . . . I’m not running for f—ing office. I don’t have to vet my life back to potty training stage in order to be entitled.”

I suggest that since people are alleging deception in several areas of his life, doesn’t that go to his credibility as a scholar? “My academic work is subject to being assessed like any other academic work, and it doesn’t matter if I think I’m goddamned Napoleon Bonaparte,” he says. “This is not the National F—ing Enquirer, though it’s been turned into that.” He says no one contests that he’s been in Vietnam, and no one contests that he’s decorated (with a Cross of Gallantry and “this and that,” he adds).

Actually, the good professor has a point of sorts. His Viet Nam experience, or lack thereof, shouldn’t be counted when trying to judge his academic record. What should be counted and indeed, looked into, are the charges of plagerism, shoddy research, and barefaced falsehoods that other scholars have leveled against him and for which he has failed to address in any other manner except by accusing his accusers of being jealous academics with various axes to grind.

All of these questions about Churchill’s past are relevant only in that they reveal him to be the grifter that he is, a lefty fakir of such eminence that even his scholarly tomfoolery is excused by his supporters as just a misunderstanding. The real problem with Churchill is his core philosophy. It springs from the eternal well of victimhood’s identity politics:

Churchill, to his credit, doesn’t subscribe to any meaningless “praxis of personal purity,” so he takes his coffee (black) with a shrug and lights a Pall Mall. I ask if he’s an anarchist, and though they have an affinity, he says no. He’s an Indigenist. Not quite sure what that entails, I ask him to explain. He’s a wordy bugger, and goes on for a good while about a “consciously synchronous level of population” and a “latitude of action that is governed in a self-regulating manner” and a “unity in the differentiation that’s consonant with natural order.” I figure this would all go down a lot easier if I’d first eaten peyote.

Later, on my own, I explore his philosophy in a manifesto conveniently titled “I am an Indigenist.” While Churchill generally shies from being prescriptive—much more fun to talk about what others have done wrong—this essay is the exception. The “highest priority of my political life,” he writes, is “the rights of indigenous peoples,” for whom he foresees the restoration of land. He envisions a “North American Union of Indigenous Nations” that would comprise “roughly one third of the continental U.S.” Ever the pragmatist, Churchill says the region would enjoy as much autonomy as it wanted, and that with Indians controlling all those natural resources, much-needed conservation will prevail in a land now completely overpopulated. (He cites an ecological demographer’s estimate that North America was “thoroughly saturated with humans by 1840,” and figures we’re due for a good dose of population control, possibly through “voluntary sterilization” and “voluntary abortion.”)

Before you burst out laughing at this kind of mountebankery, one should pause and consider that this voice from the “old left” is being married with the ideals of the anarchists, the anti-globalization loons, the “sustainable development” nazis, and others in the new coalition of luddites who seek to destroy western civilization. The fact that Churchill is getting this kind of noteriety gives these other wackos a huge boost in exposure. And the indications are that they intend to ride the Mad Prof’s coattails to semi-respectability and perhaps even an entry into the more “mainstream” leftist elements like Moveon.org.

It’s not enough to say that Ward Churchill is a fast-talking confidence man who continues to make outrageous statements about the country of his birth to simply get rich and get attention. One must recognize that it’s not what he says as much as what he’s coming to represent; the pinnacle of leftist thought synthesized for two generations and nurtured in the propoganda factories that pass for college campuses in America.

Churchill has become a hero to a ready made audience who’ve been conditioned to believe the worst about their own country without discovering where the truth lies themselves. The danger is that his influence will spawn another generation of like-minded nitwits whose worldview has been shaped by the cartoonish intellect of this faux indian, scholar, and activist.

It would be fascinating to revisit Churchill in 10 years to see what his inspiration has wrought. If it’s any more profound than a small cadre of ill clothed, ill fed, foul smelling galoots who rant on about “little Eichmann’s” I’ll be very surprised.

UPDATE

Giacomo at Joust the Facts links to another article on Churchill, this time one that dissects the Nutty Professor’s “scholarship” and shows how he uses deconstructionist techniques to tell tall tales of American History:

The fault, in what can charitably be called his analysis, is that he disassociates cause and effect, picks out bits of history, simply ignoring that which preceded or caused it. History, a la Churchill picks up at a starting point — any starting point — that supports his beliefs. For instance — Churchill whines about the Allies’ “strategic bombing campaign’ (the foregoing words, we suppose, put in quotes to emphasize that it was a cover-up phrase for wanton destruction) against Germany during World War II.” Of course there was indeed a bombing campaign against Germany and its cities from 1940 to 1945. But what was its cause? Who first began the bombings of populations?

His technique could have been lifted from the Jacques Derrida playbook. And Giacomo points out in his own post on the subject that taking things out of context – in this case as it relates to a quote by George Bush – is Churchill’s weapon of choice:

Churchill is upset that his comment about the “little Eichmanns” gets taken out of context, and seeks to defuse that bombshell (though he still calls the people in the towers by that epithet). Here he commits the same effrontery, taking the President’s words out of context to support his own thesis.

I guess in the Mad Prof’s world, what’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander.

Remember Mae Magouirk? You know, the grandma who was being starved by her loving granddaughter because “Grandmama is old and I think it is time she went home to Jesus.” It turns out that Mae had something of a different take on the subject:

It appears there will be a happy ending to the story of Ora Mae Magouirk, the 81-year-old Georgia widow whose family has been at loggerheads over her medical care, visitation privileges and whether she should be “allowed to die” but now is reaching agreements on key issues.

Today, attorneys on both sides agreed Magouirk’s brother and sister, A.B. McLeod, 64, of Anniston, Ala., and Lonnie Ruth Mullinax, 74, of Birmingham, will be allowed to visit their sister during regular visiting hours at the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical Center in Birmingham, where she is receiving treatment for an aortic dissection.

As reported by WND, when Magouirk was airlifted and admitted to UAB Medical Center on Saturday, her granddaughter and legal guardian, Beth Gaddy, 36, of LaGrange, Ga., left an oral order barring Magouirk’s siblings and her nephew, Ken Mullinax, 45, of Birmingham, from visiting the patient in the critical care unit.

In addition, Mr. Mullinax and Mae’s sister Ruth will be given regular updates on her condition, something that was also denied by Gaddy.

Here’s an account of Ruth’s first visit with her sister since Mae was admitted to UAB Medical Center suffering from severe dehydration as well as the untreated aortic dissection:

“I visited with Sister Mae last evening, and she looks so much better now,” Ruth Mullinax said. “Mae opened her eyes and when she saw me said, ‘Where you been, Lonnie?’”
“I asked her how she felt and she whispered, ‘I can’t buck dance.’”

“So I stayed with her for 30 minutes, and when I got ready to leave she grabbed my hand and said, ‘Bring me a brown sack and take me home.’ That was a saying of Momma’s that means pack up my stuff. I am so thankful to the Lord that Sister is doing so well now

Is Mae one tough old bird or what! Buck dancing is like “clogging” which has its origins in Appalachia and is characterized by very quick steps.

Yes, it certainly appears we should have just let this woman die of thirst in a hospice. After all, what did she have to live for? Any one who makes jokes while lying in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of her arm (IV fluids for the dehydration) and nose (temporary feeding tube) has to be so depressed, its better that we put her out of her misery. And, since she wants her sister to take her home, we must also assume she’s delirious. Why shouldn’t she want to go back to the hospice so she can die in peace?

THE PEOPLE WHO CRITICIZED THOSE OF US WHO TRIED TO PUBLICIZE THIS CASE SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES. HERE IS A WOMAN WHO WANTS TO LIVE! AND YOUR WERE PERFECTLY WILLING TO ALLOW HER TO BE MURDERED JUST SO YOU COULD MAKE A POLITICAL POINT ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT.

FOR SHAME!

And you don’t think bloggers made a difference?

Gaddy relaxed her position [on visitation]. She agreed to allow full visitation privileges, but only if Ken Mullinax promised never to talk to the media again or communicate in any way with Internet bloggers.

Mullinax refused and was on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” yesterday, where he provided a nationwide audience with details of the case. Hannity quoted from an exclusive story on WND, which was the first national news organization to investigate and report on the Magouirk case.

And another item of interest connected to the case involves the probate judge who originally gave the loving granddaughter custody of Mae:

In another twist, Troup County Probate Judge Donald Boyd, who has had charge of the case since April 1, voluntarily recused himself.

Kirby told WorldNetDaily that Boyd gave no reason for his decision.

My guess is that judge has learned a valuable lesson. It’s not good to fool with bloggers.

UPDATE:

Paul at Wizbang has a rather thoughtful and reasonable post asking why people on the “other side” of the Mae Magouirk matter are so, well…mad:

The simple mention of her name makes many people I formerly respected say the most irrational things. Not to belabor the point, but as I see it, the core problem is that this woman’s living will was being ignored….

Now I (apparently foolishly) thought universally everyone would agree that was a bad thing. Who would want their own living will ignored??? Not me.

I think that the Magouirk matter coming so close on the heels of the Terri Schiavo imbroglio is one reason. I think another reason is that perhaps some on the “other side” (who Paul rightly says are tough to label “conservative” or “liberal” ) may genuinely be in intellectual distress over the entire debate. Maybe they’re genuinely torn and are unable to verbalize their uncertainty except by lashing out at people who seem to have staked out a clear moral position.

Maybe…just maybe…the ultimate consequences of their position are starting to hit home, that each incremental movement toward out and out euthanasia brings us closer to the unthinkable; humans having to justify their own existence to stay alive.

As I mention in the post above, it’s obvious that Mae Magouirk wants to live. And to deny her medical care or even basic hydration because her prognosis at age 81 is poor or, as her granddaughter said, it’s time for her to “go home to Jesus” is just plain feel-it-in-your-gut, out and out wrong. Could the part of the brain that some scientists believe controls our “conscience” be trying to tell our friends on the other side something?

I sincerely hope so.

Marvin is in the House!

MY GUIDE ON HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL PROTESTER (By Marvin Moonbat)

Protesting is a very serious business. You have to really want it to be successful. And by successful, I mean carrying out your protest so that you’re able to look in a mirror and say “Wow…I really made a difference today! What I did was important! I’m changing the world!

And let me tell you, changing the world can be a lot of work.

For instance, last weekend our campus chapter of PAWPER (People Against War, Profits, and Environmental Rape) held a protest against the Iraq war. Or maybe it was against Iraq war profiteers. Or maybe it was against war profiteers who are raping the environment. I kinda wasn’t paying attention at the strategy session we held the night before because I was too busy making my sign for the protest.

That’s one of the first rules of being a good protester. You’ve got to have a decent sign. Bells, whistles, drums, horns, and other noisemakers are important. But if you don’t have a good sign, you might as well turn in your membership card for the Reality Based Community.

First, you have to start with a theme. My theme at the protest was “No blood for Oil.” So Chloe (who’s really a good artist) drew this picture of an Iraqi getting shot by one of our “heroic” soldiers with blood kind of spurting out of his head and the soldier with a big grin on his face saying “HALIBURTON SAYS HELLO!” with the letters in “Haliburton” dripping blood. Blood is very important in protests. The protest leader, my friend and mentor Jacques (he’s a foreign student from France) says that all the good European protests show a lot of blood. He says whenever they make a sign using a picture of Bushitler, they always show blood dripping from his mouth. Pretty cool, huh? And since the Europeans are always right and know things that we Americans don’t have a clue about, it just stands to reason that we should copy them whenever possible.

So to really make our sign stand out, Chloe drew a picture of the American flag with blood dripping from the red stripes. And for the stars, she drew tiny pictures of naked Iraqis like the ones from the Abu Gharaib thing. It was a masterpiece! Chloe got mad when some huffy woman from the Girls Against Guns (GAG) group complained that all the blood would encourage violence. She told her to bugger off, in so many words. And then some gay guy complained that the stars with the naked Iraqis weren’t big enough, that he couldn’t see them. I told him it wasn’t important that people see the naked Iraqis it was important that we knew they were on there! After all, protesting is as much about making a statement about yourself as it is about trying to change people’s minds. So what if people can’t see naked men, piled on top of each other. The point is that it reinforces your belief that torture is bad, unlike the wingnuts who believe that torture is good and our faux President who likes to torture people.

I mentioned noisemakers before. It’s important that you choose a noisemaker that matches your personality. Kind of like a zen thing; you must become the noisemaker. Chloe prefers more subtle noisemakers like wind chimes or banging two pieces of wood together. She says it helps her commune with the forest spirits. For myself, I wanted to use a drum but Chloe wouldn’t let me. She said since indigenous people thought that drums were sacred that I couldn’t defame their religion by using them, even for a good cause. So I ended up using a kazoo. It sounded pretty good too. The only thing was by the end of the protest I was so out of breath from humming I almost fainted.

Next time, I think I’ll use a cowbell.

One guy had a glockenspiel. The problem was, he couldn’t play a note so he ended up just banging away like crazy on the damn thing making quite a discordant racket. One of the protest leaders finally couldn’t stand it any longer and told him to put the stupid thing down and just yell a lot. Pretty embarrassing.

So anyway, there were about 50 of us that showed up for the protest in front of the campus administration building. There were quite a few professors who joined us. I hear one prof actually made it part of a class assignment and that he’d fail anyone who didn’t show up. I wish he had a bigger class. As it was, we had a good group. There were a few members of “Code Pink” who showed up in pink underwear. I was kind of disappointed because, no offense to those people, but none of them looked good enough that they should have been dressed only in underwear. I mean there was this really enormous hairy guy with a beard and weighing close to 300 pounds. He was dressed in pink tights and a pink bra. It kind of distracted from the point they were trying to make.

The highlight of the protest was the “die-in.” About 20 of us lay on the ground while a couple of people poured red stuff all over us. The media ate it up! The local TV station sent a camera crew and they took pictures of us lying on the ground with this fake blood and it was great. They even had a shot of me lying there. It was only for a couple of seconds but I got on TV! I got a tape of the program. I’m the one lying on my stomach, face down 3rd from the right in the second row. I looked pretty good too except all of that fake blood was really messy. And I wish they’d told us it wouldn’t come out in the wash. I ended up ruining my best Bruce Springsteen tee shirt.

After the die in, Jacques got up and made a speech. He talked about how the war was bad and that Haliburton and other big corporations were making a fortune. I couldn’t understand a lot of what Jacques was saying because he really doesn’t speak English very well and my French could use some work. I think he said something about we should try and be more like the French and other European countries by letting the United Nations run the world. I agreed with that 100%. Considering what the UN has been able to accomplish in places like Darfur, the Congo, and other trouble spots around the world, it just makes sense to have the UN run things.

The protest ended with everyone singing the Internationale. Chloe and I both choked up at that point. Thinking of all the people who’d given their lives for socialism – voluntarily or not – made us feel part of a very special movement. It was truly inspiring.

So that was our protest for peace. I just wish more people had shown up to watch. I think there were more members of the media there than onlookers and protesters. It just goes to show how hard it is to be a member of the Reality Based Community.

What’s happening to the grandaddy of linkfests, the Carnival of the Vanities?

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about Eric Berlin choosing not to allow any posts for the Carnival that mentioned the Schiavo matter during a week in which literally thousands of bloggers were posting about precious little else.

A now this week, a dirty necked galoot who calls himself “Socialist Eurofag” and runs a site called “Yeah Whatever” has taken the idea of this friendly linkfest and turned it into a sneering, smirking, compilation of overheated rhetoric targeting points of view (those he bothers to read) he disagrees with. A few examples of Mr. Fag’s idea of “analysis:”

Watcher of Weasels watches weasels. No, not the furry, sharptoothed rodent-type things. Judging by this post on the differences between libertarians and conservatives, what he watches is rightwing politics. No shortage of weasels there.

This Blog is Full of Crap is a title that shows refreshing honesty. I won’t link the post: just make up your own racist shit that shows absolutely no imagination.

sigh Well, it was this or a long, equally ill-informed screed about Terri Schiavo, apparently, so I suppose I should be thankful.

And then this mountebank (who also goes by the pretentious nom de blog of Dr. Zen) has the temerity to write this of Christianity:

Mark thinks you will have a better life if you accept that two thousand years ago a man was hideously tortured because the omipotent, omniscient creator doesn’t like that you covet your neighbour’s ass.

Making fun of Christians has become the left’s number one sport; in Europe I hear it’s even become more popular than soccer hooliganism. But, shouldn’t Dr. Zen find it just a trifle, um, embarassing that he’s chosen to honor a philosophy where a large portion of adherents cling to the belief that the earth is flat and rests on the back of elephants? Or perhaps, this explanation of a Zen discussion forum will illuminate why only pretentious, egotistical nitwits with an inflated sense of self-worth could submit themselves to such outrageous tomfoolery:

One of the central points of Zen is intuitive understanding. As a result, words and sentences have no fixed meaning, and logic is often irrelevant. Words have meaning only in relation to who is using them, who they are talking to, and what situation they are used in. Some postings are indeed nonsense; other postings appear to be nonsense at first but this is because the meaning is all between the lines. Zen and poetry have gone hand in hand for centuries.

Only a charlatan or, more accurately, a bunko artist could sell a philosophy where “words and sentences have no fixed meaning and logic is often irrelevant.” Two more recent examples of this kind of nonesene are Foccault and Derrida, proponents of Deconstructionism, a philosphy that I believe has done more damage to the foundations of western civilization than even the socialist utopianism of Marx and Engels.

So what’s a blogger to do? Laurence at This Blog is Full of Crap took it upon himself to undo the harm caused by Mr. Fag’s hijacking of the COTV for his self aggrandizing purposes and with a herculean effort, posted and linked to each and every entry to make his own “counter-COTV” he calls “Carnival of the Vanities #134 – Avignon Edition. Avignon refers to a conclave of Bishops who, in 1080 CE overthew some apostates:

In 1080 a council was held under the presidency of Hugues de Dié, papal legate, in which Achard, usurper of the See of Arles, was deposed, and Gibelin put in his place.

And so, “Dr. Zen” is deposed…long live the counterrevelution!

Blogging is light today. I’ve written an article that I hope will be published in a major on-line conservative magazine and I’m absolutely drained. Been working on it since I got up this morning at 3:30 AM and finished about 10 hours later. I guess I’m just a writing wimp.

Anyway, rather than waste any more cleverness on an article that may not see the light of day for a while, I thought I’d give some quick takes on interesting items I pulled off various sources on the internet today.

CHINESE THREAT (CONTINUED)

I’ve posted several times in the past few months about the growing threat from the Chinese military. And while most of the upgrades to the Chinese armed forces is apparently directed toward Taiwan, there are indications that China may also be ready to challenge American military hegemony in Asia:

The US intelligence community has reported that since 2001, the Chinese shipbuilding industry has produced 23 new amphibious assault ships and 13 conventional attack submarines.

The current top priority for the PLAN is the replacement of its fleet of outdated Soviet-era conventional and nuclear submarines with five new advanced models of domestically developed and imported Russian vessels…

The long-awaited Type 093 nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) is also close to entering into service, with the lead vessel already undergoing sea trials and expected to be accepted by the navy this year. There are reports that three hulls of this new class have already been laid…

The Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, said to be an elongated version of the Type 093 and equipped with JL-2 sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, is reported to have been launched last July and could be operational within the next couple of years. This is well ahead of Pentagon forecasts, which had previously estimated that the Type 094 would not enter service until towards the end of this decade.

These improvements in the Chinese navy would not only allow for a massive amphibious assault on Taiwan, but the attack submarines would be used to threaten any fleet we send to their defense. Beijing has also converted two armored divisions into an amphibious corp to take advantage of their increased flexibility in the joint operations sphere.

What this adds up to, according to analysts, is that China is steadily increasing both its military spending and military capability to eventually challenge our interests – including Taiwan – in that part of the world. You can bet that Japan and South Korea are not only watching China very closely but gauging our response as well.

JUDGING THE JUDGES

Interesting hearing on Capitol Hill where Supreme Court justices responded directly to recent criticisms of the federal bench:

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas on Tuesday defended the independence of federal judges and suggested that criticism such as that directed at the federal bench recently by Republican leaders in Congress is simply part of the democratic process.

The justices’ comments came during a congressional hearing on the Supreme Court’s budget that turned into an unusually wide-ranging discussion of the role of judges. Thomas noted that federal judges are appointed for life, which means that although they might be criticized by politicians, the judges are insulated from real retribution.

Thomas is right. Which why all this handwringing from libertarian and liberal bloggers about conservatives wishing to overthrow the federal judiciary is ludicrous. Powerline makes a great point:

Glenn Reynolds on “mau-mauing” the judiciary. I believe in full-throated criticism of judges (individually and generally) where warranted, but I have to agree that talk about impeaching Justice Kennedy is over-the-top. For one thing, there are at least three Supreme Court Justices who are considerably less restrained than Kennedy. Not that they should be impeached either, not even Justice Ginsburg who is now on record to the effect that judges should look to foreign law in order to improve U.S. relations with the rest of the world. If her jurisprudence continues down that path one could make a case for impeachment. But wouldn’t the energy and political capital be better spent focusing on the confirmation of qualified conservative nominees, as opposed to engaging in a quixotic battle to remove sitting Justices?

Spot on. And frankly, I’m getting sick and tired of lawyers and other legal advocates telling me I’m an ignoramous, that I don’t understand “the law,” that we should leave this kind of criticism to the smart people because we’re just open mouthed red state hicks who don’t know diddly about squat…

BALDREDASH!

The American people who are outraged at the federal judiciary are exercising a constitutional right called free speech…and that’s a pretty easy one to understand. The fact that we don’t “understand” the law should make even those with their heads up their rear ends sit up and take notice. THE LAW IS NOT A PRIESTHOOD! There are no mystical chants, no communing with dead people, no garish rituals. The law is for the people. And when the people feel the law has betrayed their interests or their most sacred values then THE LAW HAS FAILED. In the case of Terri Schiavo, people believed strongly that judges themselves failed the people.

I too feel it over the top to talk about impeaching anyone. But Justice Thomas made a great point at the hearing today:

“I think the reason we have lifetime appointments is that we are supposed to be criticized,” Thomas said.

I hope all the lawbloggers out there read that and lay off the insults to those of us who may be ignorant of precedent and procedure, but smart enough to know what we think is right and what we believe to be wrong.

“BEYOND RUTHLESS”

Here’s the Iraqi insurgents worst nightmare:

MOSUL, Iraq—From inside a vacant building, Sgt. 1st Class Domingo Ruiz watched through a rifle scope as three cars stopped on the other side of the road. A man carrying a machine gun got out and began to transfer weapons into the trunk of one of the cars.

“Take him down,” Ruiz told a sniper.

The sniper fired his powerful M-14 rifle and the man’s head exploded, several American soldiers recalled. As he fell, more soldiers opened fire, killing at least one other insurgent.

The March 12 attack—swift and brutally violent—bore the hallmarks of operations that have made Ruiz, 39, a former Brooklyn gang member, renowned among U.S. troops in Mosul and, in many ways, a symbol of the optimism that has pervaded the military since Iraq’s Jan. 30 elections.

Sgt. Ruiz knows his job and does it extremely well. Read the entire article for an eye opening look at our guys and how they’ve got the bad guys on the run.

Damn proud of all of ‘em.

NEW NASA CHIEF A “CAN-DO” MAN

I wish all our bureacrats had this kind of attitude:

WASHINGTON – The Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee said today that he would push for swift confirmation of NASA Administrator nominee Mike Griffin with the intent of clearing him to report for duty Monday April 18.

Griffin said during his confirmation hearing before the Commerce Committee this morning that his two top priorities would be safe return to flight of the space shuttle fleet and eliminating the lengthy gap between retiring the shuttle fleet in 2010 and fielding a replacement vehicle, the Crew Exploration Vehicle now scheduled for its initial piloted launch in 2014.

With regard to the Crew Exploration Vehicle, Griffin noted that in the 1960s the Gemini program took only three years and the development of the Apollo capsule only about 6 years from contract award to flight He said NASA’s current plan to fly astronauts aboard the Crew Exploration Vehicle for the first time in 2014 “unacceptable”.

“The program that NASA has outlined so far features a new Crew Exploration Vehicle. – call it what you will—- that nominally comes on line in 2014. I think that is too far out,” Griffin told members of the Commerce Committee. “President Bush said not later than 2014. He didn’t say we couldn’t be smart and do it early. And that would be my goal.”

Griffin is also in favor of working in the on again off again Hubble repair mission that would keep the space telescope in orbit another 3 years at least.

Now if this guy can fight through the trauma caused by the Columbia explosion and reestablish some morale at the agency, he’d have my vote for “Bureacrat of the Year.”

SOON TO BE CELLMATES?

If you’ve ever wondered how Al Sharpton can afford all those expensive suits and ritzy hotel suites, you’re not alone. Seems as though the FBI was wondering the same thing as they videotaped the good Reverend accepting tens of thousands of dollars in cash contributions to his ill-fated Presidential campaign and then saying “more please”...

WASHINGTON — The FBI, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Rev. Al Sharpton, secretly videotaped him pocketing campaign donations from two shady fund-raisers in a New York City hotel room and then asking for more, it was reported yesterday.

One of the donors was later recorded on a wiretap saying Sharpton may not have reported to the Federal Election Commission (search) tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash, as is required by the law, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Post confirmed the FBI investigation of Sharpton. The two dubious donors whom Sharpton met with in the hotel on May 9, 2003 — Democratic fund-raisers La-Van Hawkins and the late Ronald White — suggested that nearly $90,000 was missing from the official campaign report Sharpton filed with the FEC.

An FBI wiretap picked up Hawkins telling White he believed they had raised more than $140,000 for Sharpton in the previous quarter — but Hawkins fretted because Sharpton had reported only about $50,000 on his federal election filing.

A word of caution here: Just because the feds have the rascally Reverend on tape taking cash doesn’t mean diddly. Back in 1983, the G-Men thought they had Sharpton dead to rights in a drug sting. But the racist Rev proved too slippery by half and even though sounding intrigued with the idea of facilitating a drug deal that could have netted himself tens of thousands of dollars, eventually he turned down the offer.

Al Sharpton has proven he has more lives than both of my cats put together. His involvement in race baiting controversies goes far beyond the Tawana Brawley affair where Sharpton accused an assistant DA of involvement in the kidnapping and rape of a 15 year old girl which was later proved a hoax for which Sharpton was sued and lost a $300 million dollar judgement. Almost forgotten is the incident at Freddy’s Fashion Mart where Sharpton’s racist rhetoric led to violence:

The murderous rampage was set in motion when the United House of Prayer, one of the largest black landlords on 125th Street, raised the rent on the Fashion Mart owned by a Jew, Freddy Harari, who then raised the rent on his subtenant, Sikhulu Shange, who ran a record store. Recognizing that the quickest way to gain support in a landlord-tenant dispute is to turn it into a racial issue, Mr. Shange went to Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network, which in turn knew that the quickest way to build a crowd in Harlem is to rouse racial hatreds. Mr. Sharpton and the daily picketers did their job brilliantly. He opened his public campaign against Freddy’s on WWRL radio, warning: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.”

After two months of rhetorical violence, protester Roland Smith ran into the store with guns blazing and burned it down. When it was over, Smith had killed himself and seven others. Armed with a .38-caliber revolver, he shot three whites and a Pakistani in cold blood—he had mistaken the light-skinned Pakistani for a Jew, and then set the fire that killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese, and one black, a security guard whom the protesters had taunted as a “cracker lover.”

Par for the course in the life of Reverend Sharpton. And then there was the incident where a young rabbinical student who accidentally hit a young black man with his car and was subsequently beaten to death by an angry mob of blacks. Here’s our great uniter in action at the young black man’s funeral:

Then, when a young rabbinical student was murdered by a racist mob in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Mr. Sharpton did his best to stoke the anger. At the funeral for Gavin Cato, the young boy whose death in a traffic accident set off the rampage, Mr. Sharpton eulogized in full Farrakhan mode about Jewish “diamond merchants” and “no compromise.”

If it were just the race baiting and anti-semitism, the good Reverend would go down as just another firebrand, a crackpot with a golden tongue. But the level of his personal and professional malfeasance is so profound as to defy description. An investigation by the Village Voice revealed that his “National Action Network” of which Sharpton is Founder/ Director, is a sham, a cardboard cutout of a social organization that apparently ran a fake voter registration campaign as it’s only obvious activity.

And Sharpton’s affair with his executive director, one Marjorie Harris (who Sharpton is pushing to be on the DNC) played out against the backdrop of his presidential campaign where he insisted that his wife Kathy was his “rock:”

Sharpton reveals that he has not lived with his wife and two daughters in their enormous Brooklyn mansion since April 2003, when the couple agreed to “terminate their marriage.” This flies in the face of repeated claims during his year and a half of presidential hoopla—especially one as recently as July 2004, when he rebutted a Daily News item about an alleged other woman by insisting that “Kathy has been my rock and always will be.” The self-described “grassroots activist” now says through lawyers that he “moved” to the luxurious Helmsley Carlton, though he told reporters who caught him there earlier this year that it was merely an easy place to lay his head while on the campaign trail.

And expensive hotels seem to be a habit with the good Reverend Al. Where all serious candidates for President try to stay in modest lodgings to save on expenses, Sharpton seemed to enjoy his campaigning by staying in some of the ritziest hotels in the country:

But while the campaign has struggled to raise money, collecting $284,000 by September, Mr. Sharpton chose to stay in luxury hotels like the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, a European-style hotel with antiques and private balconies, and the Mandarin Oriental in Miami, on Biscayne Bay. Most candidates stay in more modest hotels to hold expenses down.

Mr. Sharpton said he chose the Mansion on Turtle Creek because he was attending a Black Expo and other attendees were staying there. According to his filing to the commission, the bill came to $3,264.11 for one night for Mr. Sharpton; Eddie Harris, his personal filmmaker; and Mr. Harris’s sister, Marjorie Harris Smikle, the executive director of the National Action Network.

In July, Mr. Sharpton spent $7,343.20 at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles for a three-day stay that included campaign-related events at the hotel.

“If I was going to go and live the high life, I certainly wouldn’t be doing it one night or two nights at a time,” Mr. Sharpton said about his choice of accommodations.

This got him into trouble with the FEC. Predictably, Sharpton pleaded ignorance:

Mr. Sharpton tried to deflect blame for his financial record by suggesting that he and many of the people around him were not financial experts, but activists who should be given some leeway in such matters.

“We are an advocacy group,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview on Christmas morning, referring to his group, the National Action Network. “Your staff sometimes lets things slip through the cracks, probably.”

“This morning we are feeding the homeless,” he said. “I have no idea if they paid the guy that brings the truck, or tipped the guy that brings in the bread.”

He may as well have added “And I can’t keep track of every $50,000 I stuff in my pants pocket. I was never any good with numbers…”

Like a bad penny, Sharpton keeps showing up in New York politics. And despite this latest brush with the law, I have no doubt the Reverend Sharpton will land on his feet…after playing the race card, the conspiracy card, and the sympathy card to their fullest measure.

Just goes to show you can’t keep a good bunko man down.

Cross Posted at Blogger News network

In another excellent installment from Byron York’s “The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy,” (A book I’m awaiting anxiously to arrive) the author explodes the myth of popularity that surrounds Michael Moore’s excreable piece of propaganda “Farenheit 9/11.”

It’s a telling tale of what happens when the Hollywood Hype machine matches up with the liberal megaphones of the mainstream press. And the result was a fiction that could have tipped the election in favor of Kerry.

Using data supplied by a Hollywood insider, York shows how the pronouncements of Moore and his partisans of the film’s acceptance in “red state” theaters was a lie, that the film actually underperformed spectacularly in many key markets.

This didn’t stop the mainstream press from gleefully repeating the falsehoods and hype that Moore and his ideological friends were spouting to the public:

Press accounts added to the idea that Fahrenheit 9/11 was winning over Bush supporters. The day before Moore spoke to MoveOn, the Los Angeles Times ran a story headlined “‘Fahrenheit’ Is Casting a Wide Net at Theaters: Anti-Bush Sentiment Runs High at Showings of the Documentary, Which Has Opened with a Strong Box-Office from 868 Screens.” The story began with a woman, a supporter of the president, who had gotten into stinging political arguments with her anti-Bush college student son. The son urged her to see Fahrenheit 9/11, and she emerged from the movie with tears in her eyes. “My emotions are just…,” she said, unable to continue. “I feel like we haven’t seen the whole truth before.” The Times wrote of another man, a well-to-do retired insurance agent, who described himself as a lifelong Republican but who, after seeing the movie, vowed to leave the GOP. “I won’t be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time,” he told the Times.

The liberals in the press have honed this tactic of singling out one person to try and show that such sentiment is widespread to perfection. Witness just about any economic or health care story on the news and you’ll see some poor schlub who blames the President for the trying circumstances in which they find themselves. Conversely, try and remember how many “feel-good” economic stories there were during the Clinton administration. I can remember quite a few.

Even Time Magazine took Moore’s bait and started hyping the film’s potential impact on the election:

Summing up the emerging conventional wisdom, Time magazine wrote, “You would have expected Moore’s movie to play well in the liberal big cities, and it is doing so. But the film is also touching the heart of the heartland. In Bartlett, Tenn., a Memphis suburb, the rooms at Stage Road Cinema showing Fahrenheit 9/11 have been packed with viewers who clap, boo, laugh and cry nearly on cue. Even the dissenters are impressed. When the lights came up after a showing last week, one gent rose from his seat and said grudgingly, ‘It’s bulls**t, but I gotta admit it was done well.’” Calling Fahrenheit 9/11 “a shaping force in the presidential campaign,” Time wrote that the film was attracting “the curious, the hostile, the indifferent. . . . [Moore is] doing what he does best — pestering — to get them into theaters. And then to the polls.”

Moore, who bragged that the film “sold out” in Fayetteville, North Carolina (home of Fort Bragg) and they had “standing ovation” in Greensboro, NC was whistling past the graveyard. Here are some real numbers that Fat Mickey doesn’t want you to see:

Fahrenheit 9/11 also did well in Seattle, Montreal, Ottawa, Portland, Oregon, Monterey, California, and Burlington, Vermont. In all, two things stand out from those numbers. One is that the picture overperformed only in blue states, and even then only in the most urban parts of those blue states. And the second is that it did very well in Canada. Fahrenheit 9/11 consistently overperformed in Canadian cities; without that boffo business, the film’s gross would have been significantly smaller than it was.

That’s the upside of the story. The downside revealed by the Nielsen EDI numbers is that Fahrenheit 9/11, far from being the runaway nationwide hit that Moore claimed, underperformed in dozens of markets throughout red states and, most important — as far as the presidential election was concerned — swing states. Dallas/Fort Worth, the ninth-largest movie market, accounts for 2.07 percent of North American box office but made up just 1.21 percent of Fahrenheit 9/11 box office, for an underperformance of nearly 42 percent. In Phoenix, the tenth-largest market, Fahrenheit 9/11 underperformed by 29 percent. In Houston, ranked twelfth for movies, it underperformed by 38 percent. In Orlando, it underperformed by 38 percent; Tampa-St. Petersburg, by 41 percent; Salt Lake City, by 61 percent.

The list goes on for quite a while: Las Vegas, Raleigh-Durham, San Antonio, Norfolk, Charlotte, Nashville, Memphis, Jacksonville, Flint, Michigan (Michael Moore’s home turf), and many others. And in Fayetteville and Tulsa, where Moore boasted that his movie had sold out, Fahrenheit 9/11 underperformed by 41 percent and 50 percent, respectively

Note: When York writes of the film “underperforming” he means that the fim’s gross underperformed in relation to the total share of Hollywood’s take on a city by city basis. So that if a movie does spectacularly in blue states, overperforming by 50% or more, it could still do very poorly in red states as it underperforms by the same amount.

What these numbers show is that Moore and his allies in the media were trying to weave a narrative in which the “truth” in 9/11 was changing people’s minds about the President and the war and that this story would in fact swing the election. In the end, as with Michael Moore himself, the stories were proved to be full of hot air.

I still haven’t been able to fix the comments so that people with AOL browsers can comment. Since I reconfigured my spam plug in I keep getting that stupid message in the comments section accusing you, gentle readers, of being spammers. Fear not, it will be fixed sometime today as I’ve enlisted the services of my 5 year old nephew who knows far more about computers than I do.

Feel free to drop me an email by clicking the “Contact” link on the left top sidebar.

Trackbacks are still working fine.

ATTENTION AOL BLOG NEWS READERS

Welcome to the House! Feel free to browse the category section for some more goodies.

It’s official. Marwan is being assisted by our very own Department of Defense.

We’ve speculated many times in the past weeks about the presence of so many Americans helping Marwan with his nefarious plans. It now appears certain that someone in DoD has been aiding and abetting Marwan and is using either DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) personnel or hired mercs to assist the terrorist. Consider the following:

McGlennon-Forster Connection

The defense contractor hired Marwan. Tony mentioned that someone at the firm would have had to okay his security clearance. The someone was probably VP of Security Conlon who died at Jack’s hands in the sporting goods store after he shot Paul.

The Fake ID’s for Anderson

Anderson needed DoD help to penetrate our security to steal the Stealth. The false ID’s were made at Marwan’s headquarters.

Stealth Schematics and Flight Simulator

What? Do you think Anderson could have picked those up where he got his copy of “Grand Theft Auto?”

Transponder Frequency for Nuclear Football

This to me is what answers any lingering doubts about DoD involvement. Only someone very high up in the national security establishment would have access to that frequency. And Marwan had it.

Okay, so now the fun part begins. Who’s the traitor? Who would be connected to all those threads that point to DoD involvement?

Wild guess (and I do mean wild) centers on two people: Audrey Heller or her father the Secretary of Defense himself!

Yes they were both kidnapped. Secretary Heller even had a gun to his head when Jack rescued him. But did anyone check to see if that gun was loaded with anything but blanks? And Secretary Heller would be in a position to pull all of those threads above together plus his access to a large pool of current and/or former DIA agents and mercs.

As for Audrey, suspicion falls on her because of Paul’s peripheral involvement. And she would have access to all that information mentioned above. After all, who would suspect poor little Audrey? Maybe the writers loved their Nina surprise so much from season one they wanted a reprise.

Just a few thoughts to chew on as we head into the last 7 episodes.

SUMMARY

Air Force I’s forced landing in the desert is the least of our problems because as the plane decompressed after being “indirectly hit” by an air to air missile the nuclear “football” – a briefcase containing the codes to launch a nuclear strike – was sucked out and landed about 40 miles from the site where the President’s plane was forced down.

The idea that the football would be of value for anything after AF I crashed except the fact that it’s probably made out of fine Corinthian leather is ludicrous. Those codes don’t take “hours” to change as Audrey said later in the show. That would simply be unacceptable security wise. Although no one knows, my guess is those codes can be deleted and new ones substituted in a matter of minutes or perhaps even seconds. Any other scenario would be unthinkable given just such an eventuality as AF I going down.

I almost considered declaring that the show had “jumped the shark.” But, what the hell! It’s a TV show for God’s sake! Let’s suspend belief in reality and move on.

As teams move in to rescue any survivors at the crash site, Jack is ordered by Secretary Heller to head up the effort to retrieve the football. Before Jack can rush out to save the world, he’s got to confront Audrey over his failure to protect Paul. After Audrey muses that it’s her fault because she doubted Paul’s innocence, Jack reassures her:

Jack: You are not responsible for this. I and I alone made the decision on how to handle Paul. If you want to remain effective, if you want to be able to do your job, you have to let it go.

Audrey: Jack, that’s your gift. You’re able to black things out. I can’t do that.

Clearly, Jack’s in big trouble with Audrey. As she starts to weigh the pluses and minuses of her decision, there seem to be more and more minuses coming up where Jack is concerned.

Meanwhile, a couple of innocent civilians are about to be drawn into the vortex of crisis. Kelly and Jason Gerard are out in the middle of the desert camping where they discover the football amidst some wreckage of AF I. Like good citizens they contact their local police who immediately connect them to Jack. As they discover terrorists hot on the trail, Jack tells them to go hide in a reserve power station. Marwan, one step ahead of us as usual, knows exactly where to go and follows the Gerards to the power station.

Back at CTU, Bill Buchanan informs Tony that, although he’s very fond of Michelle, he never got to first base with her outside of work because she still cares for him. Will Tony try and patch things up with Michelle? Or will he wait until after they save the world together? Given that one of them is probably slated to die, it would make perfect sense to have them patch things up only to have one of them bite the dust.

And proving that old political operatives never die, they simply switch allegiances, former Chief of Staff to President Palmer Mike Novak (who engineered the cabinet vote that temporarily ousted the President last season) had occasion to put his skills to use getting the cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment again because of the President’s incapacity. This time, he’s an adviser to Vice President Logan, which begs the question; who would benefit most if the President was killed? The fact that Novak is on the VP’s staff brings immediate suspicion in that direction.

A short note on the oath the VP took. Since the 25th amendment has never been invoked, there’s no precedent for the VP taking another oath of office (he takes the same oath as the President at the Inauguration) for his “fill-in” role. And you may have noticed that the oath concluded without the customary “So help me God.” In fact, those words are not in the oath that’s written in the Constitution (Article II Section 1). However, Washington himself added the words when he took the first oath in 1789 and it’s been tradition ever since. I wonder if we should read any significance into the writers not including “So help me God” in this instance?

Back at the power station, Jason and Kelly try their best to elude Marwan and his thugs. Jack, pinned down outside the station by gunfire, advises Jason to split up with Kelly, each taking a component of the football. Great idea, bad execution. Jason gets caught and Marwan with cold efficiency shoots Jason first in the shoulder and then in the knee to try and get him to reveal where the control board is. Seeing her loved one suffer, Kelly appears and in sheer desperation, tries to bargain with Marwan by exchanging the board for her husband. Marwan smiles a little smile and points the gun at her husband’s head which ends Kelly’s doomed gambit right there.

Just in time (I wish I had a nickel for every time I wrote that about Jack in the last 17 weeks) Jack shows up and saves the Gerards who then pass out of the picture having performed bravely in the service of their country.

Resuming the chase for Marwan and the football, Jack calls on the helicopter to assist. The copter shines a light into the first jeep which goes off a bridge and crashes. Jack recovers the football only to discover that there are pages missing from the code book. Michelle informs him that the missing pages contain both launch codes and information on where the warheads are. And now the race is on to find Marwan before he can find a nuke and terrorize another American city.

Everything that’s happened to date – all the terrorists plans – may, in fact, have been geared toward this one supreme moment when Marwan gets control of a nuke. So many times in the last few hours either Tony or Jack have remarked that they’re just spread too thin to cover all the bases. The evacuation of people from the area of the nuclear plant has taxed the resources of our first responders so that the help CTU and DoD expect in a national crisis just isn’t there. And Marwan knows this which may mean that he engineered these attacks all to get his hands on the football.

BODY COUNT

We’re informed early in the episode that the fighter escort intercepted the Stealth being flown by Anderson and shot it down. Scratch Anderson. Another CTU back-up for Jack is killed. That makes 4 by my count so far. Wonder what the life expectancy is for being Jack’s back-up? Also Baldy, who we left unconscious at the offices where Marwan was directing the meltdowns finally gets it as Jack offs him before he can kill the Gerards. Jack takes care of him and 2 other terrorists:

Jack: 39

Show: 140

Unknown number of dead aboard Air Force I and we’re still waiting on a body count from last week’s attack on Marwan’s headquarters in the warehouse.

LOOSE END

Anyone else find it a little strange that Jack could get back to CTU headquarters so quickly after relaying the info about Anderson’s hard drive at the pilot’s apartment?

And who was that giving the oath of office to the Vice President? Traditionally, that job falls to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. If that was the CJ, I would say it’s fantastic that we finally have an African-American Chief Justice! If not, it’s baloney. As an example, Rehnquist got up out of his sickbed to make it to Bush’s Inaugural. Unless the CJ was out of town, there’s no way anyone else would administer the oath.

As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… per the Watcher’s instructions, I am submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.

Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

If you’d like to participate in this week’s linkfest, visit Watcher of Weasels and follow the instructions. Entries are due by Tuesday night.