Right Wing Nut House

In the past, I have commemorated the anniversary of D-Day by trying to relate the courage and bravery of those men who stormed the beaches of France with our current military and their effort in the Middle East. It seemed to me at the time to be vitally important that we recalled that heroism exhibited by our “Citizen Soldiers” from so many years ago in order to steel ourselves for the challenges we face on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as future battlefields as yet unnamed.

But the road I’ve travelled these past months has caused me to see the conflicts in which we are currently engaged on a more personal level. A young man falls on a grenade and saves the lives of his comrades. Who was he? What was he like? Or perhaps the story of a mother serving her country while her husband and children try to make do at home, missing her terribly with the children not understanding why their mom can’t be with them.

The fact is, we can talk all we want to about the grand strategy in this war and the political fights at home to end it. But the truth is, it all comes down to the guys with the guns who volunteered to serve the larger purposes of their government. No matter what side of the war you are on or what you think about the government that is prosecuting it, you are a small minded person indeed if you can’t see past your boosterism or denigration of the war itself and recognize that individual American citizens, trained and equipped better than any army in the history of civilization, are placing themselves in harms way every day to fulfill a private compact they made with we, the people of the United States. Quite simply, they took an oath to protect us. They promised to take up arms and fight when our freely elected government determined that it was necessary for them to do so.

It is obvious that a sizable majority of them in Iraq believe quite firmly that their efforts are worth the price they are paying. When more than 70% of them re-enlist in order to return despite the extended tours, the hardship the war is causing their families, the personal discomfort of serving in a war zone, and the dangers of combat, even the densest among us must realize that the desire to serve a cause greater than themselves outweighs all else.

You may disagree vehemently with that cause. But who are we - any of us - be we supporters or opponents of our involvement in Iraq to tell these people that they are either right or wrong in what they believe? It seems to me that they have more than earned the right to follow their own lights and don’t require our pity or thanks for that matter. But their actions and sacrifices demand our respect. And that they will have from me until my dying day.

I’ll leave you this D-Day Anniversary with an extended excerpt from one of the participants. Felix Branham was a demolitions expert in the 29th division who went ashore in the second wave at Omaha Beach. His compelling story is told in its entirety here.

We didn’t talk of dying, unless it was a joke. We used to kid a guy named Gino because he carried a big wad of money, $700 or $800, and he had a beautiful ring.

I would say, “Ferrari, when you hit that beach and you fall, man, I’m going to be getting your wallet out.” And another guy would say, “Yep, I’m going to have that ring of yours.”

And we sat around and thought about that, never thinking it would really happen. But what else did we have to talk about?

[...]

We wanted to go. This sounds crazy, but we had come this far and we’d been sitting in England so long, we wanted to get this thing over with and get the hell home. Well, as it was, we had to settle for another day. We loaded again on Monday afternoon. The rain was letting up some and we started to move out about 10:30 or 11:00 that night. It was still light.

We got twelve miles from Normandy and stopped. We had been told there was a sand bar about 50 yards off shore. [We were also told] if our coxswain on our landing craft let that ramp down, don’t let him do that. Make him go over sideways, but don’t let him let the ramp down because people will drown. Well, that came to pass. A lot of people drowned that way.

We were in the second wave. When we got to the beach, there were 2nd and 5th Rangers piling in with us at the same time. We had a regimental commander named Charles D. Canham and he went in leading us. He was our colonel. There he was firing. He got his rifle shot out of his hand and he reached down and used his .45. He was about 55 years old and was the bravest guy and one of the finest leader. We had lots of leaders. Our platoon leaders, our platoon sergeants, we had good leaders. There’s no question. If we hadn’t had good leaders, we would have never made it off of Omaha Beach.

My boat team was the first one to go over the sea wall; I saw some of my friends die. In my boat team of thirty men we had only lost about five or six men. We were lucky. God knows we were. We followed the line that the engineers had laid out and we got through. We went up the hill then went parallel to Omaha Beach through this little town. Mingled in with us were the 2nd and 5th Rangers. They were scattered about and so forth. Of course, there was a lot of scattering about on Omaha Beach.

[...]

The first man I saw from my company to die was a guy named Gene Ferrara. He was little Italian boy out of Jersey City. He was the kid we teased about carrying $700-$800 in his wallet. I landed and told him to move up. He moved up and then I got ready to move up, too. We were going leaps and bounds, trying to get cover and get behind the sea wall. I moved up ahead of him and happened to look back. The tide was beginning to take him back; he had been killed.

It was chaotic. No one can realize it until they were right there to see it. But you hear so many tales about it. Each one of us had our own little battle field. D-Day was D-Day, and it was awful.

That’s all I can tell you. When we landed on Omaha Beach, we were well trained, we had good leaders, and the Lord God Almighty was with us, and that’s all I can say. That was D-Day, June 6th, 1944.

I have never been back there, but I would love to go. I can’t think of anything that I would rather do right now than to go back to Normandy and see it. I have a little bottle sitting in my living room with sand from Omaha Beach in it. I would love to go and shovel some up in my hand myself and see what I saw on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Ordinary men exhibiting extraordinary courage. And there were 30,000 stories from the beaches that day, all of them equally poignant but all of them different.

Remember them all today…

I first read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s searing account of US government depredations against Native Americans, the summer before my senior year in high school. The book hit me like a ton of bricks. At that age, such knowledge is like a cold splash of ice water in the face, an eye opening bracer that fosters a certainty in the righteousness of a young person’s point of view.

I must have been insufferable, telling anyone who would listen that the US government was worse than the Nazis and that all whites had blood on their hands. Of course, Viet Nam was tearing the country apart at the time and trust in government had hit an all time low. Placed in that perspective, Brown’s account of government misdealings and misdeeds seemed to amplify already deeply held beliefs about the evil nature of our government and the lie that was America.

Slowly, over many years, I gained more perspective on the extraordinarily complex and tragic history of Native Americans and their contact with white Europeans and Americans. It is a perspective that doesn’t lessen the severity of the crimes committed against Indians but does allow for the recognition that other factors were at work over the 500 years of contact between the two cultures. Most notably that what was happening between the two races and cultures had occurred many times before in many different places on earth as one society moved in to displace another.

This is a story best told by Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond attempts to answer the question “[W]hy history unfolded differently on the different continents over the last 13 thousand years.” Where early Americans believed that the reason they had guns and steel (and not incidentally, more potent germs) was because they were superior human beings to native Americans, Diamond shows that the reason for the disparity had much more to do with the shape of continents and the subsequent development of agriculture based on indigenous crops and livestock.

Simply put, Eurasia had many times more wild food sources and wild animals conducive to being domesticated by man than anywhere else in the world. The early onset of organized agriculture forced people to form ever more complex social entities which eventually led to nation states and the conquering of indigenous people.

But the drama of displacing native peoples was an old one by the time whites arrived on the North American continent. On every continent as wave after wave of the peopling of our world occurred, more advanced cultures with better weapons, better organization, and sheer numbers overtook and threw out the original inhabitants. And when whites first arrived on our shores, the fate of Native Americans was sealed thanks largely to the power politics of Europe and the zealotry of missionaries.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee wasn’t about perspective. It was an indictment. In that, it succeeded beyond the author’s imaginings. And while the movie concentrated only on the history of the Lakota people from Little Big Horn in 1876 to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the book chronicled the equally tragic history of most of the plains Indians as the US government forced Native Americans on to reservations, cutting them off from their culture, their ancestral homes, and most importantly, their spiritual core.

As the movie made crystal clear thanks to a fine acting turn by Aidan Quinn as Senator Henry Dawes, the “do-gooders” actually contributed in no small way to this tragedy. In a classical sense, those who wished to “help” the Indians by tearing them from their land and forcing them to assimilate committed the sin of overarching hubris. This attitude was not as uncommon in America as one might think. Every President from Washington to Teddy Roosevelt spoke of treating the Indians with respect and dignity while showing them the error of their savage ways and turning them into farmers or ranchers. But the reality was much darker, bloodier. In the name of commerce, or settlement (to fulfill Manifest Destiny) or to grab valuable resources, treaties were broken, wars were begun, massacres occurred, and sickness and death descended on the tribes thinning their ranks until the survivors were herded onto barren, desolate parcels of land that the whites didn’t want.

The film brings out this conflict in stark relief. And what makes it so compelling is that the movie resists the temptation to portray most whites as one dimensional evil doers hell bent on blood and destruction of native Americans. The violence done to the Indian is more subtle and concentrates on how forcing Native Americans to subsume their culture and heritage to fit in to white society was every bit as damaging as any war ever fought to subdue them.

The character of Sitting Bull - a powerful performance by veteran actor August Schellenberg - is pitch perfect. What we know of the historical person was that he was a proud resistance fighter against white encroachment who in some ways ended up the very caricature of a cigar store Indian only to redeem himself at the end of his life in the eyes of his people. Schellenberg did not flinch from portraying some of the more unattractive qualities exhibited by Sitting Bull which made his strength and determination all the more evocative. A sure fire Emmy nomination is in the offing for Schellenberg’s outstanding performance.

The final major character of Charles Eastman was perhaps one of the weaker links in the narrative. Part of the reason was the impossibility of trying to show the inner turmoil that Eastman - a Native American ripped from his boyhood home by his assimilated father - must have felt as he made the transition to his own assimilation as a college graduate and doctor. Adam Beach was more than adequate in the role of the Lakota doctor who goes to the Pine Ridge reservation to minister to his people only to end up disillusioned with his own role in forcing the Indians to assimilate while witnessing the atrocity at Wounded Knee.

And that horrible tragedy was portrayed quite well in the film. The story of the Ghost Dance and the role it played in the massacre at Wounded Knee has always touched me to the very depths of my heart. To be so desperate for spiritual comfort to believe that by dancing you can bring back the buffalo, make the white man disappear, and become immune to their bullets sums up the helplessness and hopelessness of tribal people who never could quite come to grips with the destruction of their culture. It is tragedy piled on top of tragedy. And its portrayal on the screen was extremely well done.

No doubt this production will be nominated for numerous Emmy awards. The photography is gorgeous. The script is spare and realistic. The direction is crisp and clean. And the acting is uniformly excellent. My guess is that it will receive numerous nominations next month and sweep the awards in September.

And deservedly so. It’s the best movie of its genre to be made in a while and shows once again that HBO has the best original movies of any network on television.

The Rick Moran Show on Blogtalk radio will go live today from 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here.

In addition to the usual tomfoolery, we’ll take a good look at the controversy surrounding Barry Bonds and his quest to break the all-time home run record currently held by Hank Aaron. I’ll have plenty to say about whether Bonds, an almost certain user of steroids and other banned substances, deserves to be honored for this achievement.

You can call into the show and yell at me by dialing (718) 664-9764.

A podcast will be available after the show ends.

Keith Olbermann took time out from making the world safe for Edward R. Murrow impersonators on his show Monday night to offer some interesting thoughts on the connection between bad news about the Bush Administration (and the proximity to elections) and the exposure of terror plots, the issuance of terror alerts, and government advice on how to prepare for a terrorist assault.

Showing how every time there was a terror plot uncovered or when the old Homeland Security Threat level was bumped up it seemed to coincide with what Olbermann saw as a bad news day for the Administration, the Anti-Murrow sought to prove that there is no such thing as a serious terror threat to the United States, that it is all a case of political smoke and mirrors by an evil and manipulative White House.

No, really. For instance, when the Phoenix FBI agent testified before Congress about her superiors ignoring her warnings about terrorists training in flight schools, Senator Graham remarked that her testimony had inspired other pre-9/11 “whistleblowers” to come forward.

“Just” 4 days later, Keith informs us ominously, then Attorney General Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla for the dirty bomb plot - even though he had already been in custody for a month! (Cue Darth Vader theme.)

What Keith failed to mention is that if we had announced the arrest of Padilla before assuring ourselves that such information would not alert any of Padilla’s co-conspirators, he would have been all over the Administration for blowing an intelligence bonanza. And what is the significance of this happening “just” 4 days after the testimony of the Phoenix FBI agent? Why, none of course - unless you live in the topsy turvy, upside down world of Keith Olbermann and his drooling conspiracy minded netnuts. Why not make the announcement the day after the testimony? Or the next day? Why wait 4 days? Only a blithering idiot wouldn’t see the 4 day gap as totally disproving the idea that the Administration used the announcement to deflect attention from their pre-9/11 failures.

This idea of a political basis for announcing terror threats and raising the level of concern about an attack is a remix of an old recording that was last played all throughout the election of 2004. The netnuts went positively ballistic every time that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge showed his face on TV.

The beauty of this critique is obvious; the left gets to have it both ways. If the Administration hadn’t said anything and an attack occurred, they would be all over the Bushies for not only failing to prevent the attack but for not warning the American people. And since the Administration did get out front in raising the threat level and warning of an attack, the left can claim that it was driven by partisan politics.

Simple. Elegant. And monumentally stupid.

Olbermann’s idea of “bad news” for the Administration is so obtuse as to be beyond belief. He cites Secretary Powell’s speech before the UN on February 5, 2003 where claims of WMD in Iraq were disproven “months later.” But just two days later, amidst the news of anti-war demonstrations around the world, Secretary Ridge raises the threat level to orange.

Excuse me but does anyone else see that particular example of the Administration playing politics with terror alerts to be out and out idiocy? What does Powell’s speech (not disproven for months) have to do with raising the threat level a few days later? And does anyone seriously believe that the Administration could have cared one whit about anti-war demonstrators in Amsterdam? Or the pitifully few 60’s holdovers who turned out in this country? So much so that they went to the trouble and huge expense of raising the threat level?

Keith Olbermann is a loon. And while he made mention of the logical fallacy argument - that just because event A and event B happen to occur at the same time, it doesn’t mean there is a connection between the two - he then descends into the outer darkness to make his point. He states the danger of logical fallacies and then goes ahead and engages in them. This kind of breathtaking stupidity is what Olbermann does best and it’s why the netnuts love him so. His thoughts mirror their paranoid worldview - that terrorism is vastly overblown as a threat to our security and that the Bushies have used the issue to convince Americans “to fear fear itself” according to Keith.

” …from the mind-bending idea that four guys dressed as Pizza Delivery men were going to out-gun all the soldiers at Fort Dix…to the not-too-thought-out plan to blow-up J-F-K Airport… here we go again…”

Yeah…and the idea that 19 guys with box cutters planning to hijack planes and fly them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center is just plain kooky. (Note: For the record, the soldiers at Fort Dix were unarmed. Their weapons were locked up.)

It isn’t just the idea that there is always a political angle to terrorism threats in this country that makes Olbermann’s fantasies so destructive. Anyone so naive as to believe that there isn’t any political calculation in some of the things done by the FBI or DHS doesn’t know government very well. High profile investigations and raids always seem to get wrapped up around budget request time. The same goes, I’m sure, for some terrorism related investigations as well. This is the nature of the beast and trying to change it would be like trying to stop the rain.

But the thought that the Administration systematically used terrorism as a political club to blunt bad news is so outrageous as to reveal Olbermann and those who agree with him to be blissfully ignorant of reality. There is little doubt that Secretary Ridge wanted to be less aggressive in raising the threat level than the White House - not because he didn’t think the threat was bogus but because he thought that the constant yo-yoing of the color coded threat board lessened its impact. But can you chalk that up to politics? Or is there perhaps a more mundane reason such as the Administration wanting to be safe rather than sorry? CYA is a much more realistic - dare I say “reality based” - reason for the threat level rising than any Master Plan by the Bush Administration to use fear as a political weapon.

I’ve written this before half in jest but it bears repeating: Perhaps the best thing that could happen to this country’s preparedness for a terrorist attack is if we elected a Democrat as President. Not because he would do a better job than a Republican. It’s just that Republicans are far less likely to deliberately undermine our battle here at home to stay safe by positing wild, unprovable, paranoid conspiracy theories about the seriousness of the terror threat than the Democrats and their loony netnuts. I doubt very much that the left will disbelieve a Democratic Administration that announces the foiling of a terrorist plot. Nor will there be a whisper about using fear of terrorism as a political weapon.

At the very least, a Democratic Administration will keep the paranoid loons spouting their conspiracy theories relatively quiet for four years. It might be worth it just to enjoy that particular blessing.

UPDATE

Speaking of pooh-poohing the terrorist threat, Michelle has a “Gathering of Ostriches” who prove that Keith Olbermann isn’t the only one who thinks denial is just a river in Egypt.

UPDATE II

If I’d read Allah first, I wouldn’t have bothered:

You’ll note, I hope, that even Olby recognizes how dishonest he’s being. That’s why he feels obliged to mention not once but twice that coincidences do happen and, in his words, “we could probably construct a similar timeline of terror events and their relationship to the haircuts of popular politicians.” Why do it, then? Because, as the Truthers are wont to say, he’s “just asking questions.” Just “airing it,” Sullivan style. Make up your own mind.

What he doesn’t note is that 9 of the 13 terror alerts he cites were issued prior to Katrina’s assault on New Orleans, widely accepted as the beginning of the steep decline of the Bush presidency. It stands to reason that if terror warnings were deliberately timed to “distract,” we’d find them congregated around the administration’s true crisis moments. Instead, Olby’s forced to link the JFK plot to the U.S. Attorneys scandal, which had long since reached critical mass. Where were the terror alerts during the battle over Iraq funding? When Bush first announced the surge? After the Hamdan decision? Even by his own absurd non-logic, it makes more sense to claim that the JFK plot was timed to distract from the amnesty uproar. But Olby can’t claim that because Bush is on the left’s side on that one, so he’s forced to feebly tie it back to Gonzalesgate and the Democratic debate.

He also doesn’t seem to grasp that just because the pipeline plot wasn’t feasible doesn’t mean no attack would have occurred. You’ve got a group of men with homicidal intent willing to travel internationally to bring off their plan. If they’re game for that, they’re probably game for walking into a crowd of people and opening up with automatic weapons and grenades. It won’t take out an airport, but you might very well top the body count from the London bombings two years ago.

Read the whole thing.

In the early days of American politics, no man would dare openly run for President of the United States, zig zagging across the country trying to drum up support. It was considered unseemly and self-aggrandizing for a politician to be seen grasping for power in such a naked way.

So the putative candidate would run what was commonly known as a “Front Porch Campaign” where party leaders and supporters from across the country would show up at the candidate’s home and appear to plead with him to accept their support. The candidate, humble and diffident, would gratefully acknowledge their activities on his behalf and usually mouth some platitudes about some issue or give a stem winding, patriotic oration about America . Of course, the more important the party leader (or his representative), the bigger what passed for a 19th century feeding frenzy by the press. It was in this way that the American people became acquainted with the major candidates.

It was all a political Kabuki dance. Everyone knew that the candidate was dying to be President. The 1896 race between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan was a case in point.

While Bryan was on the hustings, making more than 600 speeches (If there was a man in American political history more in love with his own voice, I am unaware of him.), McKinley, after locking up the nomination appeared dormant, sitting at home entertaining Republican party luminaries looking for all the world as if he couldn’t really care if he became President. Meanwhile, a shady operator by the name of Mark Hanna was generously spreading money around he raised from his big business friends who were absolutely terrified of Bryan’s populist campaign and most especially his advocacy of basing the dollar on both a gold and silver standard (”You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”).

McKinley ended up winning the election by allowing Bryan an open field to scare the beejeebees out of just about everyone except his farm/labor base. And that points up one of the oddities in politics; a sitting target is harder to hit than a moving one.

Senator Fred Thompson has developed a strategy so at odds with that of his rivals in the Republican race for President that it may be studied very carefully by future campaigns for lessons in how to win a nomination. At the moment, Thompson is third in national polls trailing Mayor Rudy Guiliani and Senator McCain and leading former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. But the former Tennessee Senator isn’t even an official candidate yet. Just this past Friday, he formed a finance committee to raise money for his campaign. But he has yet to spend any money on advertising. He has precious few paid staff members. And his organization is light years behind those of his main rivals.

While the front runners and also-rans have been criss crossing the country and frantically working the phones trying to raise money, Thompson has set himself down on his ole’ front porch, relaxing on the settee writing a bit, blogging some, and occasionally venturing out to give a speech to the faithful. He has used the internet to generate a “buzz” about his campaign - much like sophisticated marketers today use the net to spread the word about a new product. He has no official website. But articles like this one, talking about the Senator and his campaign serve the purpose of circulating his name and getting people to think about him.

Of course, it helps that Thompson has been appearing on television for years as the no nonsense DA in NBC’s Law and Order. But in establishing a presence on the web and fleshing out his ideas through some very well placed op-eds designed to give him maximum exposure to conservative audiences, Thompson has emerged as bona fide conservative alternative to the front runners.

Thompson will not participate in this Tuesday’s Republican debate in New Hampshire. A pity, that. But no matter how you look at it, Thompson is now ready to take his campaign from his front porch into the living rooms of the American people. How he handles that transition will say much about his abilities as well as how far he might go in the race for the nomination.

This post will remain on top until Friday. Scroll down for newer entries.

FINAL UPDATE: 6/8

There’s still time to contribute! If you haven’t done so, please consider it. Thank you.

Somehow, I missed my friend Bob Sikes over at the sports/politics/culture blog Getting Paid to Watch, who generously linked to this piece. Sorry ’bout that Bob. Barry Bonds made me do it.

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This is the third June in a row that I have forthrightly and without any qualms asked the readers of Right Wing Nuthouse to donate funds to this site. And it is the last time I will make such a request.

This is because by next June, I either won’t need the money or will have given up trying to write for a living.

Of course, you are not exactly donating to “this site.” You would be giving money to me, Rick Moran - someone who no doubt has made you laugh, angered you, made you think, or perhaps moved you with his writing. I make no pretense to having a corner on truth, being a superior writer, or even having any special insight. The one quality that I hope you agree I have is honesty. So here it is.

When Sue and I sat down in September of 2004 to decide whether or not I would try to make a living as a writer, we agreed that if I wasn’t contributing substantially to the household income by the end of 2007, I would give up the dream and return to the world of regular paychecks, health insurance, paid vacations, and in my case, 60 hour workweeks. To accomplish this, we recognized that we would have to live a spartan lifestyle, economize considerably, sacrifice many of the little pleasures in life we had come to take for granted, and pray that we both remained relatively healthy.

This we have done. I have made no attempt to exaggerate our financial situation in the past to elicit sympathy nor will I do so now. The money you, my gentle readers, have given us has helped enormously. It has kept our heads above water which, if nothing else, has allowed us to live with a certain peace of mind. There are many of you I’m sure who know what I’m talking about. Living paycheck to paycheck can take a toll on one’s well being as you are constantly worrying about what might happen.

The problem at this point is simple; events and circumstances have occurred over the last few months that have made it imperative that this particular request for donations succeed well beyond what we have been fortunate enough to receive in the past. Several unforeseen and unwelcome expenses have cropped up over the last few months that has us drowning in red ink.

Now we are in no danger of being evicted or filing for bankruptcy. Nor is the repo guy going to show up anytime soon. Creditors are always willing to work with you if you talk with them and let them know that you fully intend to pay what you owe. But the fact is, I made another promise to my Zsu Zsu when she so selflessly agreed to be the primary breadwinner in the house; that if we ever started to live the way we are living now, I would give it up and go back to what I had been doing previously.

So that’s where we are at the moment - totally and completely dependent on you, my friends, enemies, readers, lurkers, fellow bloggers and all the rest to help keep my hopes alive. I do love writing so. And I would hate to give it up without being able to tell myself I did everything I could - including asking for donations from strangers - to keep doing what I have discovered to be a boundless passion so late in life. Especially since in the last month, I have finally begun to sell some of my writing. It’s not much yet. But the promise of more is there.

If you have donated in the past, please consider doing so again.

If you haven’t, please give serious consideration to donating this time.

If you are a blogger, please consider linking to this post and sending some of your readers this way. I’ll be glad to give you a hat tip in an update with a link back.

For your convenience, I have included both an Amazon donation button and a Paypal button below.

No matter how this turns out, I want to thank you for your emails and comments. They have sometimes stopped and made me think. And for that, I am grateful.

UPDATE: 6/4

Sunday’s take exceeded my most optimistic expectations. We’ll see what happens today.

And a great big hat tip to a long, long time supporter of this site Tom over at Hamstermotor. If you’re hungry, he has the recipe for The One True Sandwich.

WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS! Many thanks, Glenn.

AHOY CAPTAINS QUARTERS READERS! Thanks for the kind words, Ed.

HELLO TO ALL MY GOOD FRIENDS AT AMERICAN THINKER! Tom Lifson’s support is, as always, most appreciated.

GREETINGS WIZBANG READERS! I’m a huge fan of Kim Priestap’s writing over there. You should be too. Thanks, Kim.

My old friend Wonder Woman at her new blog The Lassoo of Truth has some kind words. Hooray for the Justice League! (Gentlemen, your attention please.)

Some of my Blog Talk Radio buds link here from American Pundit. Thanks guys!

The whimsically named blog This Ain’t Hell But You Can See It From Here links here. Didn’t know I was a blog faddah. Thanks a million, John.

Mike at Lamplighter throws us a link. He says he has a “little blog.” I can guarantee you Mike, with stories like this - about a scam affecting the wives of our soldiers overseas - you won’t remain little for long.

Hoody at Nothing blog - long time reader - shoots and scores us a link. Agree with your “archetype” theory about teams designed to beat the Pistons.

Gentle Anchoress links to this post. She’s the only one on the internet whose site I comb my hair and button my shirt before visiting.

I regularly submit something from Varifrank to the Watchers Council weekly competition because Frank is a great writer, clear thinker, and I usually agree with him. Case in point.

The Oxford Medievalist - who goes by the nom de blog Angevin - seems like the perfect blogger; “Conservative American Anglophile medieval historian and intelligence scholar.” Thanks for the link, your highness.

New to me blog J’s Cafe Nette does me the honor of linking here.

Wide Awakes bud and one of my dearest friends on the net Raven of And Rightly So gives us a boost! Thanks gorgeous!

UPDATE: 6/5

Yesterday’s response was simply overwhelming. On behalf of my live-in lover (not, as some of you think, my wife) Zsu Zsu, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. So many thoughtful people with nice things to say about me. And then there are the few…

Mr. Nosepicker is just jealous, of course. Friendless people usually are.

Meanwhile, today is another day and I hope to match the 48 donations from yesterday if not exceed it! And here are some bloggers who are going to help me do it:

Frequent linker Doug Ross - always with the first link of the day to this site - includes me in his Google Street Views.

Adam of Adam’s Blog misses the Carnival of the Clueless. So do I. Thanks for the kind words, Adam.

Coffee Spy attributes superhero qualities to this site. This post is what blogging is all about. Many thanks…and I’ll take mine strong and black, please.

Another good friend Karen of Pondering Penguin gives us a shout out.

UPDATE: 6/6

Donations fell off yesterday - but that was to be expected. Nevertheless, we are closing in on my goal. (Perhaps if I reach it, I will tell you what that goal is.) A good day today and we might be able to put the tin cup away early. So if you’ve thought about giving but haven’t, I would very much be in your debt if you could see your way clear to donating today.

Meanwhile, another new to me blogger has joined the Hallelujah Chorus. Skal of Skalduggery waxes poetic about truth. I’m honored, sir.

And that eclectic yet very neighborly bunch at Maggie’s Farm link to this post. Eclectic, perhaps. But loads of yankee common sense too. “First they came for my cigarettes…”

UPDATE: 6/7

Just two days to go and we’re closing in on our goal. One big push today will put me over the top. Please consider donating today.

Meanwhile, Slublog thinks he’s late to the party. Yes, but fashionably late. And you look mahvalus!

Physics Geek almost went unnoticed as a linker here until I checked my Technorati links. Many thanks sir.

What’s this? Is the Commissar going soft? What, no withering blast at my purely capitalist method of raising money? No threats to be sent to the Lubyanka for trying to poison the minds of the proletariat? Ah well, I guess that proves that even Commies have a heart. Many thanks, my friend.

You’d never know it but we’re in the middle of another Iranian hostage crisis.

You may have heard about the 3 Iranian Americans kidnapped by the gangsters currently in charge in Tehran. Then again, you may not have heard about it. Our media apparently now views hostage taking by the Persians so routine that it’s not even worth reporting on. After all, be they innocent American academics, British or American soldiers, or American diplomats, it simply doesn’t matter. The lawless crumbums who weep about American interference in their affairs who then turn around and violate international law with impunity know that they will escape serious consequences for their outrageous behavior thanks to concern over the safety of our citizens at the hands of the uncivilized fanatics who hold them:

Rarely have so many journalists, politicians and commentators so totally missed a headline. There are now five American hostages in Iran. Each case has been largely treated by itself, almost as if it were an oddity, something requiring a special explanation, instead of another piece in a luminously clear pattern whose meaning should be intuitively obvious to us all.

The Americans were taken hostage for the same reasons the regime has routinely taken foreign hostages from the first year of its existence: to resolve internal power struggles, to demonstrate to the Iranian people the hopelessness of their condition by directly challenging the infidels to do anything about the humiliation of their countrymen, and to impose their will on a Western world the mullahs view as feckless and paralyzed. When the American embassy was overrun in the fall of 1979, Khomeini famously proclaimed that the Americans “can’t do a thing,” and today the regime is trying to show that neither the Americans nor the Brits (five more of whom were taken hostage in the past couple of days) can do anything to challenge the mullahcracy.

There are five Americans being held in Iran against their will:

* Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and the wife of the distinguished historian Shaul Bakash;

* Parnaz Azima, a journalist for radio Farda, the Farsi-language component of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty;

* Ali Shakeri, a founding board member at the University of California, Irvine’s Center for Citizen Peacebuilding;

* Kian Tajbakhsh, a consultant working for George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

* Robert A. Levinson, a former FBI officer reportedly investigating tobacco smuggling on behalf of a private client. He disappeared after he flew to Iran’s Kish Island in March.

It’s a shame that Sean Penn and his entourage couldn’t have dropped in on his buds in the Iranian government recently. He very well may have been able to experience first hand why Persian hospitality has become so justly famous.

One of the American hostages - Haleh Esfandiari - was also charged with the unforgivable crime of marrying a Jew. It speaks volumes about a nation’s rulers that they criminalize love based on someone’s heritage or religion. But don’t mention this to our domestic Iranian apologists. Their heads might explode. To them, this sort of thing - like “wiping Israel off the map” - is for domestic political consumption only and doesn’t really reflect the peace loving, freedom worshiping nature of the dirty necked galoots who are grinding the Iranian people under their jackboots as I write this.

Esfandiari and two others will also apparently go on trial for espionage. This is a curious charge to make against Americans who are in Iran trying to undermine the hard line policies of their government. But then, it’s not about espionage or America at all. The hostage taking serves other purposes.

The fact that this rogue regime now sees hostage taking as a way for one faction or another to gain an advantage in its own internal power struggles means that these kinds of outrages will continue for the foreseeable future:

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suffers from inoperable cancer and has already outlived his doctors’ prognosis. The political war over his successor has been raging for several months between partisans of the country’s two most prominent political figures: Ahmadinejad and former president Hashemi Rafsanjani. Two months ago Rafsanjani went to Qom, the city of the grand ayatollahs, in an attempt to gain the support of the leading clerics, at which time he tried to convince them to name a successor even before the Supreme Leader’s demise. Nothing came of it, nor did anything come of the much-ballyhooed efforts to “impeach” Ahmadinejad or shorten his term. The latest dustup came over the talks with the Americans in Baghdad, which were violently condemned by Ahmadinejad’s followers.

The wave of hostage-taking undoubtedly plays a role in this political war, for it demonstrates the great strength of the hardliners around Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, and weakens Rafsanjani’s standing with the clerical elite.

It would be tempting to root for Rafsanjani in this internal dust-up except for the fact that he’s no better than the crazies who are currently in power. Besides, it was he who made the first big investments in the Iranian nuclear program back in the early 90’s when he served as President. To believe that much would change with Rafsanjani in power is a chimerical hope. He’s just as anti-American as Ahmadinejad. He hates the west with equal passion as the so-called “hardliners” and is just as determined to see the destruction of Israel. The only difference is his rhetoric would lull the west to sleep. No mystical speeches before the UN for Rafsanjani. Known as one of the richest men in the world, his corrupt leadership is what eventually brought Ahmadinejad to power with a mandate to clean up the cesspool that is the Iranian bureaucracy.

But none of this matters to the five Americans currently in custody. At least Bush came out today and did his part; demanding their release “unconditionally:”

President Bush lashed out at Iran today for detaining American citizens and called for them to be freed “immediately and unconditionally.”

In a White House statement, Bush said the four detainees whose families have spoken out publicly had dedicated their lives to building bridges between Americans and Iranians, a goal that Tehran also claimed to share.

“Their presence in Iran — to visit their parents or to conduct humanitarian work — poses no threat,” the Bush statement said. “Indeed, their activities are typical of the abiding ties that Iranian-Americans have with their land of origin.”

Bush cited scholar Haleh Esfandiari of the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh, Radio Farda correspondent Parnaz Azima, and California businessman Ali Shakeri.

Bush also said he was “disturbed” by Tehran’s refusal to provide information on former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared after flying to Iran’s Kish Island on March 8. Tehran has failed to provide information or to respond to five messages channeled through the Swiss Embassy to the Iranian government about Levinson.

And, in what can only be considered typical State Department “closing the barn door after the horse has run away,” our brilliant Foggy Bottom bureaucrats issued a travel warning to Iran:

The State Department yesterday issued a formal travel warning to all U.S. citizens to consider the risks of travel to Iran. It cautioned dual Iranian-American citizens that they may face difficulties leaving Iran, noting the detention and imprisonment of dual nationals in recent weeks.

“Some elements of the Iranian regime and the population remain hostile to the United States. As a result, American citizens may be subject to harassment or arrest while traveling or residing in Iran,” the warning said. The government may even deny dual nationals access to the U.S. Interests Section in Tehran operated by the Swiss Embassy on ground that they are considered to be solely Iranian citizens, it said.

Duh.

The rest of the world remains sanguine about Iranian hostage taking. After all, most of them are safe from the wrath of the Persian thugs who take advantage of the fact that no one wants to do anything about their lawless behavior. They will continue to act with impunity, secure in the knowledge that any military move against them taken by the United States will bring the condemnation of the world down on top of our heads.

And that kind of irony is either too amusing for words or too painful to contemplate. You decide.

C: I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

O: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue…What’s,uh…What’s wrong with it?

C: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. ‘E’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!

O: No, no, ‘e’s uh,…he’s resting.

C: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

O: No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

C: The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

[...]

C: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

(pause)

O: Well, o’course it was nailed there! If I hadn’t nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent ‘em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!

C: “VOOM”?!? Mate, this bird wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it! ‘E’s bleedin’ demised!

O: No no! ‘E’s pining! [For the Fjords. Ed.]

C: ‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker!

‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!!

THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

Pardon the lengthy introduction, but The Dead Parrot Sketch is one of Monty Python’s most important contributions to the humor of western civilization. Or not. I suppose it depends on whether you like Monty Python.

Be that as it may, the sketch is also instructive regarding the imminent demise of what we used to call “The Grand Old Party” which became the nickname of Republicans back in the day when “The Grand Army of the Republic” - Union veterans of the Civil War - pretty much ran the party. Those 400,000 or so veterans elected every Republican president from Grant to McKinley. Their endorsement carried huge weight with a grateful electorate who recognized the veteran’s sacrifices and honored them even beyond the effective life of the GAR.

Now the party is run by cynical hacks and jackanapes who, despite all evidence to the contrary, insist that the parrot isn’t dead, it’s just resting. The plumage may still be pretty. But maggots have already begun to eat away at the insides.

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker–”At this point the break became final.” That’s not what’s happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

Peggy Noonan is not some turncoat, traitorous, weak kneed Republican pantywaist. She helped put Ronald Reagan’s ideas and thoughts to some of the most beautiful rhetorical music of 20th century politics. But she, along with many of us, are tired and dispirited. We have seen the Republican party run into the ground and then stepped on by an Administration and a President who have gone beyond taking most of us for granted and instead have declared war upon those who have sustained his presidency in the face of the most vicious and determined opposition to his policies. We have been slapped in the face, kicked in the teeth, stabbed in the back. And the smug, self-righteous mountebanks who are taking the party with them to oblivion could care less.

In fact, given all that has transpired since the 2004 election (which coincided with the last time the Bushies even paid lip service to the base) one could say that this President has seemed most determined to destroy the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Reagan leaving behind only a charred husk for the rest of us to live with. They have decided that Götterdämmerung is in order; if they can’t prevail, then they will destroy what is left of the grand coalition that changed the face of America and the world in the 1980’s and in a fit of either pique or ignorance, leave it for the next crew to cobble together something else.

I will say that it didn’t take much to destroy what was left of that coalition. Since the end of the cold war - the single uniting expedient of the Republican party for more than 30 years - the GOP has been adrift. Uniting against Clinton was fairly easy although that unity was a mile wide and an inch deep. It was based on the absolute worst of political bargains; the cold, calculus of how to get power and keep it. So for ten years Republicans played the special interest game, feeding the lobbyists a steady diet of earmarks and favors, reaping huge amounts of campaign contributions in return, while selling out their basic principles of smaller, less intrusive government and fiscal discipline.

And now, there’s precious little left. No ideology. Little loyalty. Less desire to help this gang of cynical galoots maintain what power and position they have remaining. Witness the news from the Republican National Committee:

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors’ rebellion over President Bush’s immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee’s chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times.

The national committee yesterday confirmed the firings that took place more than a week ago, but denied that the move was motivated by declining donor response to phone solicitations.

“The phone-bank employees were terminated,” RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail in response to questions sent by The Times. “This was not an easy decision. The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain. The RNC was advised that we would soon need an entire new system to remain viable.”

Fired employees acknowledged that the committee’s phone equipment was outdated, but said a sharp drop-off in donations “probably” hastened the end of the RNC’s in-house phone-bank operation.

“Last year, my solicitations totaled $164,000, and this year the way they were running for the first four months, they would total $100,000 by the end of 2007,” said one fired phone bank solicitor who asked not to be identified.

Not dead. Just resting.

The real danger, of course, is that come November next year GOP candidates simply won’t be able to compete in the 70 or so seats in the House that the Democrats are licking their chops to see change hands. With little available help from the national party and a base that will not only sit on their wallets but probably sit on their hands come election day, the chances are growing that a truly remarkable collapse will occur, an historic implosion that, like a tidal wave, will change the political contours of the country once it recedes. The stars are not quite aligned yet for such a disaster. But the tumblers are beginning to click into place and it remains to be seen whether anyone or any group in the GOP can alter history’s course.

Meanwhile, the Bushies continue to employ their scorched earth policy toward critics:

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they’re defensive, and they’re defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill–one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions–this is, always and on every issue, the administration’s default position–but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

Indeed. The President’s famous stubbornness - a quality that held him in good stead early in his Administration - has now morphed into a pathological, ego-centric belief that since he is always right, his critics are not only wrong but evil to boot. I guess six years of enduring the unhinged, BDS paranoia and conspiracy theories of the lickspittle left can do that to a man.

The fact that this self righteousness has permeated his entire Administration as well as most supporters of his Let’s-Not-Call-It-Amnesty-Even-Though-It-Is bill only makes many of his erstwhile supporters wonder is there anything left to expend the time and energy defending. Some would say the Administration’s policies in Iraq are worth going to bat for. But given recent news that the President is about to undercut even his Iraq War supporters by withdrawing a substantial number of troops for no more reason than the Democrats have given, it would appear the betrayal of even these, his most loyal and true acolytes, will eventually be complete.

Meanwhile, world events rush forward. Iran continues to thumb its nose at everyone. Pakistan becomes more unstable by the day - with its 60 nuclear weapons poised to possibly fall into the hands of Taliban lovers. Afghanistan still bleeds despite small successes. Lebanon is in danger from a desperate Syria who seeks to undermine its government to prevent an International Tribunal from declaring President Assad a common, murderous gangster. Chavez is taking Venezuela to hell. And the terrorists continue to plan murder on a cosmic scale.

A lame duck President without much of a base, a rabid dog opposition, and a party coming apart at the seams means a time of maximum danger for the United States. I wish it weren’t so. But the palpable feeling of impending disaster that I feel to the marrow of my bones requires me to cry out in anger and despair at those who have taken us down this road and who will now reap the whirlwind for what they have sown these past few years.

UPDATE

Allah channels the parrot:

The RNC spokesman denied that there has been a falloff at all. Yup, there’s nothing wrong in the GOP family these days. Nothing at all. Nothing to see here, move along.

UPDATE II: FROM THE “HOLY CHRIST!” FILES

Michelle links to a Mary Katherine Ham post on a verbatim transcript with an RNC solicitor:

Caller: “Well, that’s not Republicans. Just the President loves that immigration bill.”

Emily: “The President is head of the Republican Party.”

Caller: “Not for long.”

Emily: “And, Republican senators are supporting the bill. Why would I give you guys money to get them re-elected?”

Caller: “That’s ridiculous.”

Indeed. You lost me at “hello”…