Right Wing Nut House

I will make an hour long appearance on The Kathleen Dunne Show on Wisconsin Public Radio beginning at 11:00 AM Eastern (10:00 AM Central). The topic is “Will Obama Survive Reverend Wright’s Remarks?”

There will also be a discussion of the 2008 race for president.

You can access a live on line stream of the broadcast here.

If you believe the crackdown by Chinese authorities on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tibet that have killed as many as 100 and injured dozens more are the result of the oppressive and thuggish nature of the Communist government, you’re wrong.

At least, according to the Chinese government:

China accused the Dalai Lama on Sunday of orchestrating the recent anti-government riots in Tibet in a bid to mar the Beijing Olympics and overthrow the area’s communist leaders.

The accusations came as Tibetan areas were swarming with troops and closed to scrutiny from the outside world. With foreign media banned, information barely trickled out of the Tibetan capital Lhasa and other far-flung communities.

The Chinese government was attempting to fill the information vacuum with its own message, saying through official media that formerly restive areas were under control. It accused the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, of trying to harm China’s image ahead of the summer games.

That Lama guy is one fantastic magician. It’s amazing how he can “orchestrate” the beating, clubbing, and shooting, of his own followers by Chinese police.

“The evil motive of the Dalai clique is to stir up troubles at a sensitive time and deliberately make it bigger and even cause bloodshed so as to damage the Beijing Olympics,” said the Tibet Times, calling it “a life-and-death struggle between ourselves and the enemy.”

The attack on the Dalai Lama — who advocates non-violence and denies being behind the March 14 riots in Lhasa — is an attempt to further demonize him in the eyes of the Chinese public, which is strongly supportive of the Olympics.

Most of those injured and killed in the original protests in Llahsa were monks. And we know all about those bloodthirsty, safron eating, sand sculpturing religious fanatics. How dare they march peacefully to commemorate the Chinese crackdown of 1959. What were they trying to prove? That the Chinese government are a bunch of goons?

Yep:

“The Dalai clique is scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese government to make concessions to Tibet independence,” said the People’s Daily, the main mouthpiece of the Communist Party.

China raised its death toll by six, to 22, with its official Xinhua News Agency reporting Saturday that the charred remains of an 8-month-old boy and four adults were pulled from a garage burned down in Lhasa last Sunday — two days after the city erupted in anti-Chinese rioting. The Dalai Lama’s exiled government says 99 Tibetans have been killed, 80 in Lhasa, 19 in Gansu province.

The violence has become a public relations disaster for China ahead of the August Olympics, which it has been hoping to use to bolster its international image.

The “rioting” was a direct response to police beating and clubbing thousands of monks who were marching and chanting peacefully. There is also quite a bit of resentment that has been building up against the ethnic Han Chinese who dominate the economic and political landscape of Tibet. Native Tibetans are second class citizens in their own country.

Not all westerners are blaming China. Where else but the New York Times would we find the victim being blamed because their tactics are putting pressure on the thugs:

It has been clear since the mid-1990s that the popular internationalization of the Tibet issue has had no positive effect on the Beijing government. The leadership is not amenable to “moral pressure,” over the Olympics or anything else, particularly by the nations that invaded Iraq.

The Dalai Lama should have closed down the Hollywood strategy a decade ago and focused on back-channel diplomacy with Beijing. He should have publicly renounced the claim to a so-called Greater Tibet, which demands territory that was never under the control of the Lhasa government. Sending his envoys to talk about talks with the Chinese while simultaneously encouraging the global pro-Tibet lobby has achieved nothing.

When Beijing attacks the “Dalai clique,” it is referring to the various groups that make Chinese leaders lose face each time they visit a Western country. The International Campaign for Tibet, based in Washington, is now a more powerful and effective force on global opinion than the Dalai Lama’s outfit in northern India. The European and American pro-Tibet organizations are the tail that wags the dog of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

I can’t begin to tell you how upset I am with the Chinese losing face because they murder protestors.

And it isn’t just the Times, it is the curious detatchment of the Bush State Department which seemingly is sending the signal “Can’t you handle this problem with a little less noise?”

China’s violent crackdown on protesters in Tibet is having powerful political reverberations in Washington, where the White House is weighing how far to go in condemning the Chinese government, even as it defends President Bush’s decision to attend the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Mr. Bush has long said the United States and China have “a complex relationship,” and that complexity was on full display this week. While his administration has called for an end to the violence, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, phoned her Chinese counterpart to urge restraint, Mr. Bush himself has remained silent.

In the meantime, the presidential candidates are speaking out, as is the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. On Friday, Ms. Pelosi visited the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, at his headquarters in Dharamsala, India — and poked a finger in the eye of Beijing.

Rather than a poke in the eye, the Bush State Department delivers a nudge in the ribs and a wink. The President wants that photo-op with other world leaders who will similarly ignore the beastly treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese government so that the games can go on unimpeded by any silly, moralistic issues like killing demonstrators.

Somewhere, someone has got to have a backbone and speak a little truth to the powers in Beijing. Bit given China’s up and coming status as a world player, it seems no one wants to take the chance of offending the Commissars lest they retaliate by downgrading your hotel accommodations.

The United States number one ally in the War on Terror appears ready to negotiate with the terrorists in Pakistan and clear the way for what will almost certainly be an entirely different relationship between the government and the Taliban-AQ forces in the Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

This should be an interesting test of President Bush’s “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” foreign policy:

Speaking in separate interviews, the leaders of Pakistan’s new government coalition — Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples Party and Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N — tried to strike a more independent stance from Washington and repackage the conflict in a more palatable way for Pakistanis.

They said they were determined to set a different course from that of President Musharraf, who has received generous military financial help of more than $10 billion from Washington for his support.

“We are dealing with our own people,” said Mr. Sharif, who was twice prime minister in the 1990s. “We will deal with them very sensibly. And when you have a problem in your own family, you don’t kill your own family. You sit and talk. After all, Britain also got the solution of the problem of Ireland. So what’s the harm in conducting negotiations?”

Mr. Zardari said: “Obviously what they have been doing for the last eight years has not been working. Even a fool knows that.”

The war against the insurgents has to be redefined, he said, as “Pakistan’s war” for a public that has come to resent the conflict as being pushed on the country as part of an American agenda. It should be dealt with by talks and the use of a beefed-up police force rather than the army, he said.

Like Musharraf before them, the new Pakistani government is coming to the realization that surrendering to the Taliban and AQ is a lot easier and more popular than fighting them. By allowing the tribes backing the Taliban virtual autonomy in the border areas with Afghanistan, they will stop the suicide bombings that have been plauging major cities like Peshwar for the last few months. This will be especially interesting considering that the individual responsible for most of those bombings has been fingered by the US and Scotland Yard investigators as behind the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhuttto:

Neither Mr. Zardari nor Mr. Sharif was specific about whom among the militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas they favored talking to. Nor was it clear what kind of formula or quid pro quo the two political leaders had in mind for the talks.

Mr. Sharif, whose Islamic religious background is conservative, refused to say whether he would negotiate with Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader whom the government blames for many if not most of the recent suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan.

American and Pakistani terrorism experts have said they believe that Mr. Mehsud was behind the assassination of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December, and that he works in tandem with Al Qaeda. “Nobody gave me any presentation on this subject,” Mr. Sharif said.

Asked whom the negotiations would be held with, Mr. Sharif replied: “With all the concerned elements. I don’t think guns and bullets have so far produced any positive results.”

If the negotiations hold true to form, there will be several fig leaf agreements that will forbid the Taliban from using the tribal areas as a base to launch attacks against Afghanistan as well as strictures against foreign fighters operating in the area.

Perhaps this time, the terrorists will throw in a bridge in Brooklyn and see if the government will buy it.

Such agreements will almost certainly buy some time for the Pakistani government - just as they did for Musharraf - as the political leaders will seek to curry favor with the anti-American population by ostensibly distancing themselves from Washington.

Meanwhile, it may doom Afghanistan. The United States has been begging NATO to commit more combat troops to Afghanistan to help the beleaguered Canadians in Kandahar province who are facing the brunt of Taliban incursions. That will change if agreements in the NWFP with Taliban backed tribes are negotiated. If Pakistan were to withdraw troops from the border area and replace them with the ill trained Frontier Militia, the Taliban will have little trouble opening another front in Afghanistan farther north:

For instance, one element of the stepped-up American aid effort is a $400 million plan to train the Frontier Corps, an underfinanced paramilitary force that is used to patrol the border with Afghanistan.

Mr. Sharif said he had heard about the plan, expected to begin in October, but had no details.

Mr. Zardari favored employing such a force over relying on the army, which he said was the “wrong instrument” to use against the militants. “We need to use the police force,” he said. “They had few guns, made in 1952. You have to upgrade them. You have got to give them modern technology, and they will stand better than anybody else.”

Mr. Sharif, who is regarded as a nationalist — he gave the go-ahead for the explosion of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb in 1998 — said he was not in favor of foreign aid. “I think frankly we should rely less on aid,” he said. “It makes us, you see, lazy. We should generate our own resources.”

The US saw the paramilitaries the same way they viewed the Sunni Awakening in Iraq; as a way for the young men of the tribes who are currently being hired to fight by the Taliban to be employed instead in defense of the Pakistani government. That may still be an option for the government but I would place little faith in their desire or ability to interdict the Taliban’s infiltration into Afghanistan.

There will be many defenders of Pakistan’s new policy here in the United States. After all, talking with the enemy is always preferable to shooting at him, right? And the negotiations may very well accomplish what the government seeks to achieve - a respite from the bombings and less opposition to the government in the tribal areas.

To try and see this as anything less than a total, unmitigated disaster for the United States is to practice self delusion. This too, will probably sit well with those in the US who see any setback for the Bush Administration in a positive light.

But the agreements signed by President Musharraf in the Waziristans in the last 3 years have proven to be little more than green lights for the Taliban to send as many fighters across the border into Afghanistan as they believe necessary to carry out operations against NATO forces. And the strictures against al-Qaeda foreign fighters leaving Pakistan were honored in the breach.

The immediate problem will be Afghanistan. But in the long term, any agreement signed by the government will only strengthen the extremists and bring them closer to Osama Bin Laden’s goal of taking over the Pakistani government - a government that possesses the ultimate weapon against cartoons that insult Islam and those who publish them.

OFF TO THE DEATH CAMPS

We already knew the Chinese government were a bunch of freedom denying, liberty hating, collectivist scumbag Communist sons of bitches. But it is still shocking to realize how deep their cruelty truly goes.

For years, the Chinese government turned a blind eye to the infanticide of female children - a direct result of the forced “one child per family” (OCPF) that the benighted savages in Beijing forced upon the populace. A sample of “scientific socialism” at work:

The one-child policy is criticized as violating basic human rights. Many are concerned with the practices used to implement this policy. China has been meeting its population requirements through bribery, coercion, forced sterilization, forced abortion, and possibly infanticide, with most reports coming from rural areas.[attribution needed]

Some examples include:

1. a former administrator of a Chinese Planned Birth Control Office had stated his experience of execution forced abortion on a 9 month pregnant woman. [31]

2. A former Chinese population control administrator named Gao Xiao Duan testified before a United States House subcommittee in 1998, regarding her participation in forced sterilizations and abortions.[32]

3. A 2001 report exposed in Guangdong a quota of 20,000 abortions and sterilisations was set for Huaiji County in the same year due to reported disregard of the one-child policy. The effort included using portable ultrasound devices to identify abortion candidates in remote villages.

Earlier reports also show that women as far along as 8.5 months pregnant were forced to abort by injection of saline solution.[33] Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute announced that the One child policy is “an ongoing genocide”. He argued that free market capitalism will solve the overpopulation and overconsumption problems of developing nations. [34]

Whether Moore is correct is not the point. The problem is with an ideology that sees life as a statistic rather than a precious entity, born with the right to life, liberty, and other natural rights that the Chinese government neither celebrates nor acknowledges.

It is easy to oppress when you’ve lost your humanity.

So it should come as absolutely no surprise that this same government that sees nothing wrong with parents murdering their own children (until international pressure forced them to do something about it in 2001), should see the problem of controlling the feline population in such beastly and inhumane terms:

Thousands of pet cats in Beijing are being abandoned by their owners and sent to die in secretive government pounds as China mounts an aggressive drive to clean up the capital in preparation for the Olympic Games.

Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around.

Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city.

The cull comes in the wake of a government campaign warning of the diseases cats carry and ordering residents to help clear the streets of them.

Cat owners, terrified by the disease warning, are dumping their pets in the streets to be picked up by special collection teams.

Paranoia is so intense that six stray cats -including two pregnant females - were beaten to death with sticks by teachers at a Beijing kindergarten, who feared they might pass illnesses to the children.

China’s leaders are convinced that animals pose a serious urban health risk and may have contributed to the outbreak of SARS - a deadly respiratory virus - in 2003.

Even if you despise cats - and I know that there are many of you out there - you cannot help but be struck dumb with outrage over this completely unnecessary, draconian, and positively medieval method of controlling the cat population. Any western nation could have helped the Chinese with this problem and it could have been done much more humanely and without the government using deliberate scare tactics to jack up the citizenry and turn them against cats.

When I wrote of the medieval methods used against cats by the Chinese I was not using allegory. Whipping up a frenzy of emotion against cats was a favorite ploy of the church in the middle ages. In something of a delicious irony (from the cat’s perspective) when our ancestors had killed off most of the cats in Europe, invading rats overran the continent. They bore fleas that carried bubonic plague that killed of a third of its population. In their frenzy to burn witches and murder their “familiars,” Europeans were unwittingly sealing their doom by eliminating their only salvation against the plague carrying rats - cats.

But the Chinese efforts at eliminating cats are not just being done for health reasons. These Communist bozos are so intent on making a good impression for the Olympics this year that they don’t want a bunch of stray cats wandering around the venues:

But the crackdown on cats is seen by animal campaigners as just one of a number of extreme measures being taken by communist leaders to ensure that its capital appears clean, green and welcoming during the Olympics.

Polluting factories in and around the city are being ordered to shut down or relocate during the Games to ease Beijing’s choking smog and drivers are allowed out on to the roads only three times a week.

Fares on the city’s underground network have been cut to just two yuan (14p) for any journey - a six-fold reduction on some routes - to keep people off buses, and beggars and street sleepers are being moved to out-of-town camps or given train fares back to their home provinces.

Meanwhile, taxi drivers have been made to attend lessons in how to greet passengers politely in English and a city-wide courtesy campaign has been launched to teach Beijing’s notoriously dour and grumpy citizens how to smile and be pleasant to foreigners.

The cull of Beijing’s estimated 500,000 cat population is certain to provoke international outrage as it comes just over a year after the Chinese were criticised for rounding up and killing stray dogs across the country.

I apologize to you dog lovers out there. If I had known of that barbarism, I would have been just as outraged I assure you.

You might ask are there no cat lovers in China? Of course there are. Here’s an example of what they are up against:

Animal welfare groups in China are already protesting, but their members fear punishment from the authorities.

Officials say people can adopt animals from the 12 cat pounds set up around the city, but welfare groups say they are almost impossible to get inside and believe few cats survive.

One cat lovers’ group negotiated the release of 30 pets from one of the compounds in Shahe, north-west Beijing, but said they were in such a pitiful condition that half of them died within days of their release.

“These cats are being left to die. It is very

It gets worse.

“People don’t want to keep cats in Beijing any more so they abandon them or send them to the compounds.

“When we went inside, we saw about 70 cats being kept in cages stacked one on top of the other in two tiny rooms.

“Disease spreads quickly among them and they die slowly in agony and distress. The government won’t even do the cats the kindness of giving them lethal injections when they become sick. They just wait for them to die.

“It is the abandoned pets that suffer the most and die the soonest. They relied so much on their owners that they can’t cope with the new environment.

“Most refuse to eat or drink and get sick more quickly than the feral cats.”

Ms Yan’s group has now been denied access to the pounds. “We do not believe any of the cats that go in there survive,” she said. “They are like death camps.”

If you are a cat lover, the more you read of this article in the Daily Mail the more you will feel like organizing a military expedition to free the animals from their confinement.

The cat lovers are up against the cruelest of human institutions; dead ass communist bureaucracy. They have begged the government to offer cut rate spaying and neutering all to no avail. Indeed, the government has mandated spaying and neutering but few can afford the 200 yuan pricetag. (Most American cities and towns also require spaying and neutering but with many clinics offering cut rate or installment payment plans it is relatively easy to comply with the laws.) Couple that with a dearth of no-kill shelters or shelters of any kind and you have the makings of this man made holocaust.

I do not dispute the necessity to control the feline and canine populations - especially in big cities. And I might point out that our own efforts in this regard are not always the model of humane behavior. But we have made a vast improvement from even just 10 years ago. Controlling the feral cat population in US big cities now includes a wide range of actions including “trap, neuter, and release” as opposed to simply trapping and killing the animals.

Feral cats tend to congregate in the same area when the food supply is reliable. These “colonies” are made possible by legions of cat lovers across the country who volunteer to watch and care for their charges. New arrivals are immediately caught and, usually in cooperation with a kindly vet, fixed for free or a nominal cost. The colony manager also watches for outbreaks of disease and tries and keep track of any predations the cats might engage in - especially against birds. Kittens are removed from the colony and sent to adoption centers.

Such managed colonies could never occur in China, however. The movement began at the grass roots and demanded that government support them. If you start demanding anything from government in China, you will most likely end up in prison.

No matter. There are more humane ways to kill the animals than simply not feeding them and allowing them to die horribly. But to the Chinese bureaucrats intent on projecting a squeaky clean image to the rest of the world for the olympics, there is only a problem that needs to be solved as quickly and cheaply as possible.

May they rot and then burn in hell.

Conversation overheard this morning while Zsu-Zsu and I were drinking coffee and reading the paper.

ME: Hey! Looks like we missed “International Womens Day” yesterday.

SHE: (Sniffs) Didn’t miss anything.

ME: Really? Aren’t you even the least bit interested in the worldwide struggle for women’s rights?

SHE: I’m much more interested in you taking out the garbage this morning.

ME: But don’t you realize that billions of women around the world are being oppressed?

SHE: I’d settle for you making me dinner every once and a while.

ME: Are you telling me you feel no solidarity with your sisters who marched in the streets yesterday to improve the lot of women the world over?

SHE: Nope. Too busy shaving my legs.

ME: I’m surprised at you. This is a day that’s been celebrated since 1908. According to the IWD website: “IWD is now an official holiday in Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The tradition sees men honouring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues, etc with flowers and small gifts. In some countries IWD has the equivalent status of Mother’s Day where children give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.”

SHE: Heh. Just what we need. Another day that you forget to give me a card and flowers.

ME: No, you don’t get it. This is serious stuff. IWD could be called “Feminists Day.” Many from a younger generation feel that ‘all the battles have been won for women’ while many feminists from the 1970’s know only too well the longevity and ingrained complexity of patriarchy. With more women in the boardroom, greater equality in legislative rights, and an increased critical mass of women’s visibility as impressive role models in every aspect of life, one could think that women have gained true equality. The unfortunate fact is that women are still not paid equally to that of their male counterparts, women still are not present in equal numbers in business or politics, and globally women’s education, health and the violence against them is worse than that of men.

SHE: Pass the sugar, would ya?

ME: Doesn’t it concern you that the battle isn’t over, that the dominant white patriarchy is still oppressing your sisters here in the United States.

SHE: If you knew my sisters, you’d agree they need a little oppressing. Seriously, Ricky, what the hell brought on all this nonsense?

HE: I thought it would be an interesting way to introduce this hilarious video.

SHE: You and that blog, Rick…TO THE MOON…

UPDATE

Mostly unrelated to International Womens Day but perhaps one of the best sketches in years by Saturday Night Live, this video of the “3:00 AM Phone Call” is destined to be a classic.

The feds are saying flatly that the Vegas ricin case is not related to terrorism but I’m not so sure.

The man who was staying at the Vegas hotel and is in the hospital in critical condition, who almost certainly manufactured the ricin from raw castor beans by following instructions in what authorities described as an “a book on anarchy,” is apparently obsessed with domestic animals:

Neighbors in Utah described Mr. Von Bergendorff as a peculiar loner commonly seen in brown slacks and a brown shirt. Pauline and Grant Dansie, who live three doors down from Mr. Tholen, said Mr. Von Bergendorff spent six weeks last summer searching their backyard daily for a missing cat that he eventually said he found.

“He’s just a little bit different,” Mrs. Dansie said. “He was so obsessed with this cat; it was really strange. He didn’t really act like he wanted to be a friend. I remember one time he put a cat trap out in our field, and he caught our neighbor’s cat. We told him he had to give it back.”

Mr. Von Bergendorff, who is believed to be a computer graphic artist whose work has appeared on several science fiction novels, appears to have a lengthy history involving pets and animals. The police also found three cats and an emaciated dog in his hotel room; the local shelter took custody of the animals, but the dog was so starved and parched it had to be euthanized.

Public records show that Mr. Von Bergendorff lived for several years in the 1980s and 1990s with a relative, Fred Bergendorff, in La Mesa, Calif. Mr. Bergendorff, who died on Jan. 27, was the founder of the Pet Place, a charity focused on assisting homeless pets, and the host of the organization’s long-running TV and radio programs in Southern California.

The Pet Place appears to be on the up and up - an earnest and effective organization that saves thousands of discarded animals a year. The board members and officers are all upstanding citizens from what information I can gather on the web. There isn’t a hint of radicalism associated with this excellent and caring organization.

But Von Bergendorff may have taken it upon himself to avenge the helpless creatures he cares so deeply about. How is anyone’s guess. The amount of Ricin he made would seem to indicate several potential targets. And since a deadly dose of the toxin could fit on the head of the pin, I leave it to your imagination how many people he might have killed with a couple of vials of the stuff that were removed from his room.

The death of his pet-loving relative relative on January 27 may have tipped him over the edge of sanity. A little more than 2 weeks later, he checks into a Vegas hospital (February 15) with respiratory distress - one of the major symptoms of ricin poisoning:

Inhalation: Within a few hours of inhaling significant amounts of ricin, the likely symptoms would be respiratory distress (difficulty breathing), fever, cough, nausea, and tightness in the chest. Heavy sweating may follow as well as fluid building up in the lungs (pulmonary edema). This would make breathing even more difficult, and the skin might turn blue. Excess fluid in the lungs would be diagnosed by x-ray or by listening to the chest with a stethoscope. Finally, low blood pressure and respiratory failure may occur, leading to death.

CDC investigators are on the scene at the hospital trying to determine if, in fact Von Bergendorff inhaled the ricin.

Other neighbors had an even bleaker description of the life led by Von Bergendorff:

A down-on-his-luck Roger Von Bergendorff lived at his cousin’s home for more than a year before moving to Las Vegas about a year ago, said Tammy Ewell, who lives across the street from Thomas Tholen in Riverton, Utah, and described him and his wife, Ellen, as close friends.

“He was very much a loner. I would say more or less socially regressive. He just barely got by in life. He’d just barely make it,” Ewell said. “Tom was the last resort.”

No word on how Bergendorff made his living in Vegas. The rate at the Extended Stay Motel would run him at least $1200 a month.

The major media won’t speculate on this angle of the story for good reason - no proof. But we have some dots and they can easily be connected with a little intelligent speculation. A man who has exhibited unbalanced behavior in his devotion to animals to his neighbors loses a close relative, goes off the deep end, and envisions himself as perhaps some kind of avenging angel. He acquires a book on how to make ricin in order to exact revenge on those he sees as harming pets or animals. His ignorance in how to handle the deadly poison results in his exposure and subsequent hospitalization.

It is not impossible for such a scenario to have occurred. And it would be interesting to see if Von Bergendorff had made any connections to radical animal rights groups although that idea would be a huge stretch. More likely, he’s a sad, lonely, disturbed man who, if left to his own devices, might have brought tragedy to many people.

The Clinton campaign today apologized to Barack Obama for what it called “an inadvertent slip” in one of its ads that ran during the run up to Super Tuesday.

The ad portrayed Hillary Clinton walking and greeting voters on a street in a small New Hampshire town.

However, photo enhancement techniques employed by bloggers zeroed in on a house down the street shown in the background. Then, using similar technology developed by analysts at the National Reconnaissance Office for our spy satellites, it was discovered that the house in question had a racist lawn ornament - a small, black jockey known in the lawn ornament trade as “Jocko.”

“This was a clear and deliberate attempt to bring race into the campaign,” said blogger Ann Althouse.

“It’s almost as blatant as subliminally using part of the word N***er in an otherwise harmless ad.”

The Clinton camp’s apology was swift. “Frankly, I don’t see a damn thing,” said campaign aide Harold Ickes.

“But we’ve been beat up so much on this issue we may as well apologize now and get it over with before someone really decides to make an issue of it.”

Althouse said her next goal was to find clues to who really is behind 9/11 in John McCain’s commercials.

I hate days like this. There are a lot of things I’d like to write about but really don’t have anything to add to the blogospheric cacophony. Not that I’m necessarily above stealing from other bloggers. But do you really want to read your umpteenth post for the day on how Hillary is finished (or not), or Obama is a dangerous liberal cult figure (or not), or McCain is a lying sack of turd blossoms who will destroy the Republican party (or he’s worse than that).

I know I left The Huckster off that list but is anyone writing about him at all?

Then I could have blogged about the FISA fiasco. But it just seems of late I’m suffering from “Outrage Fatigue” (a term I take pride in coining. Well…if not coining the phrase I certainly popularized it. Um…perhaps not popularized, more like “used it to its best effect.”) Try as I might, I found it hard to rant and rail against liberals for their incredibly stupid, delibertately dishonest caterwauling about interrupting the Tom Lantos memorial service with a procedural motion on FISA when it was the Speaker’s admitted fault that the motion was unavoidable under the rules and that a scheduling snafu had occurred to boot.

Did that stop the “Republicans polticize the dead” crowd from throwing a tantrum worthy of any two year old? Of course not. And to make the criticism ascend to the level of sublime irony, it seems our lefty friends forget that Google has gone public and is actually making a little money now. If I typed in the name “Paul Wellstone” and added “Memorial Service” to the search, you would come across a story so profoundly disturbing that you would be forgiven for wretching while reading it.

It seems the Democrats wanted to honor the late great Senator from Minnesota who tragically died in a plane crash a few days before the 2002 election with a “memorial service.” I put the event in quotes because whatever Democrats tried to call it, it became a hot house political rally for the left. Republican friends of Wellstone - and there were many who respected his honesty, integrity, and sincere desire to take others views into account - found themselves the target of political barbs. The White House offered to send the Vice President of the United States - he was disinvited. One speaker went so far as to demand that Norm Coleman exit the race and allow a Democrat to win.

I guess when liberals politicize a memorial service, it’s “speaking truth to power” and is perfectly acceptable. Like when Jimmy Carter alluded to government spying on Martin Luther King at Coretta King’s funeral - a veiled reference to the wiretapping controversies of the day. And Joseph Lowrey, at the same memorial service, excoriated President Bush for the Iraq War.

There have been other examples of the left using dead people like political clubs. Accusing the GOP of doing so when a simple reading of the rules would have given the lie to that meme propelled the left wingosphere beyond contempt and into the stratosphere of malicious mischief.

You can see my dilemma. Unless you can summon the appropriate amount of outrage, simply listing the transgressions of liberals for exactly that which they are taking the right to task becomes an exercise in boredom killing. Everyone knows that lefties are a bunch of hypocritical bastards with the morals of an alley cat and the brains of a marmoset. How many times can you say that and remain interesting?

There were other topics I could have written about today. Pakistan is set to elect a parliament on Monday. Musharraf has been making deals with al-Qaeda and the Taliban so quickly, he’s running out of white flags to run up Pakistani flag poles. Perhaps in spite of this, he is easily the most unpopular man in Pakistan. He envies George Bush’s approval numbers.

And yet, given that he has forbidden much international monitoring of the election, it is probable he will try to monkey with the results. He will almost certainly not try to engineer a victory for his party but rather deny the opposition a 2/3 majority which would result in his immediate and well deserved retirement. The US should condemn this election before it happens just to get a head start on the mayhem that will probably follow.

Kenya has been in the news recently as well. Not only is Obama’s good buddy Raila Odinga of the Luo tribe still winking at the violence being carried out by his supporters against the corrupt, election stealing government of President Kibaki and his Kikuyu tribe, but it now appears that the Germans of all people are offering Kenyans the opportunity to use their own power sharing agreement as the basis for a rapproachment.

I know there’s some really bad international relations joke in there but I can’t find it at the moment.

Other topics I could have written about were Lebanon (tipping toward civil war), Afghanistan (NATO is going to its grave with a whimper), Iraq (things aren’t as good or as bad as people are saying), GOP election prospects (where?), and the horrific tragedy at Northern Illinois University (talk about politicizing dead people…).

Any one of these topics I could have turned into one of my brilliant, penetrating, incisive essays, read by millions, and influencing the movers and shakers in government, bending them to my iron will.

But telling the world what to do gets boring sometimes so I’ll just sit here and shut up for the time being. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find something interesting to write about…

This blog post originally appears in The American Thinker

Hard to guess what Obama’s game is here but in an interview with the Reno-Gazette editorial board, the Democratic contender for the nomination praised Ronald Reagan and gave some decidedly un-progressive reasons for his admiration:

I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

(Transcription from video courtesy of Open Left)

Many heads exploding today on the left. Matt Stoller:

It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power. Lots of people don’t agree with this, of course, since it doesn’t fit a coherent narrative of GOP ascendancy. Masking Reagan’s true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement, with someone as powerful as Grover Norquist seeking to put Reagan’s name on as many monuments as possible and the Republican candidates themselves using Reagan’s name instead of George Bush’s in GOP debates as a mark of greatness. Why would the conservative movement create such idolatry around Reagan? Is is because they just want to honor a great man? Perhaps that is some of it. Or are they trying to escape the legacy of the conservative movement so that it can be rebuilt in a few years, as they did after Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I?

Mr. Stoller cannot be taken seriously if he actually believes that conservatives are trying to "escape the legacy of the conservative movement so that it can be rebuilt in a few years…" That’s the kind of shallow, vapid analysis one would expect from a partisan hack like Stoller but does not reflect the reality of what is happening on the right.

Indeed, others on the left have been pushing this notion that Reagan’s success as a politician was due almost entirely to his pandering to southern whites and playing the race card:

No, Ronald Reagan didn’t appeal to people’s optimism, he appealed to their petty, small minded bigotry and selfishness. Jimmy Carter told people to tighten their energy belts and act for the good of the country; Ronald Reagan told them they could guzzle gas with impunity and do whatever the hell they wanted. He kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about "state’s rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964’s Freedom Summer. He thus put up a welcome sign for Reagan Democrats, peeling off white voters who were unhappy with the multi-ethnic coalition within the Democratic Party.

Only those ignorant of the concept of federalism and Reagan’s commitment to turning back the tide of federal control - not in matters of civil rights - but in education and other areas where there was federal overreach. would posit the notion that Reagan was giving a “green light” to racists.

In fact, Obama’s analysis would seem to validate Reagan’s critique - that the government had “grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.” This disconent was fed by people like Carter who talked consistently about America’s better days being behind it and that we must learn to live with less. With that kind of attitude, there would still be a Soviet Union today and America would probably look a lot like it.

The hard left will never understand Reagan nor what his revolution was about or what it has wrought. Obama has made one of the more astute moves of the campaign - if he isn’t forced to backtrack and qualify his words about Reagan. By invoking The Gipper, he establishes a powerful connection with a true agent of change - despite the fact that his policies would serve to undermine most of what Reagan accomplished and represented. As long as he sticks with generalities and platitudes, he can obscure that part of his program.

Obama’s surprising words about Reagan won’t garner him too many GOP votes. But it will soften his image so that he doesn’t look like quite the progressive ogre many on the right would like to paint him.

ADDENDUM

Edwards may be able to get away with trashing Obama for these words of praise for Reagan but one wonders what the Great Triangulator is going to say about it.

Many moderates and independents are also fond of the The Gipper and in a general election, Hillary needs those votes to win. My guess is, if pressed, Hillary will say something like “I wouldn’t have put it quite that way…” and then acknowledge Reagan’s optimism and skill as a politician.

Meanwhile, the netnuts are beside themselves. I’ll have more reaction in a while as the wailing and gnashing of teeth continues.

Join me tonight from 8:00 PM - 10:00 PM Central time as results roll in from Iowa for a special two hour edition of The Rick Moran Show.

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