Author: Matt Barganier

There’s one candidate on-stage in New Hampshire who believes that the free market – the real, honest-to-God free market, sans subsidies and global military intervention – should determine the price of energy resources. Guess who.

UPDATE: That godd**n fool John King just claimed that ALL of the Republicans said the troops must stay in Iraq or else there will be a disaster. Guess which one didn’t.

UPDATE 2: Ridiculous pandering to The Troops™ – except, again, from Ron Paul (who actually served in the military). McCain invokes the popular sunk-costs fallacy, claiming that we must stay so that all those Americans will not have died in vain. But Benito goose-steps around the diamond after hinting that the media is stabbing The Troops™ in the back with all the negative coverage. The crowd goes wild.

UPDATE 3: Rev. Huckabee: We’re the sh*t because we don’t strap bombs to our fetuses the way the jihadists do. Or something.

UPDATE 4: When asked what’s the most pressing moral issue today, Ron Paul answers that it’s our country’s policy on preemptive war, especially the potential of a nuclear attack on Iran. Hell yes.

Now back to the pro-life baloney from the Strangeloves.

UPDATE 5: Mitt Ronald Reagan Romney makes a play for McCain and Giuliani’s militarists by pledging more troops, more “defense” spending, more more more. Giuliani and McCain fight to win them back by playing the nobody’s-calling-it-ISLAMIC-turrrr card.

And now, thank Jeebus, it’s done.

Just in case Hillarycare doesn’t cover unlimited horse tranquilizers, anybody know a good back-alley lobotomist? I don’t know how I can tolerate such repugnant idiocy for so long with any capacity for logic or moral reasoning intact.

Whom to despise most? Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, the talking heads, or the whimpering audience of welfare-warfare half-wits? My mind changes as each opens his or her mouth.

UPDATE: Holy sh*t, Joe Biden just uttered a non-appalling sentiment! When asked how he’d deal with Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, Biden said (paraphrasing), The first thing I’d do is end this policy of regime-change. We’re saying to Iran: get rid of the only thing that keeps us from attacking you, then we’ll attack you.

He then followed up by grunting that he’d “take out” any weapon Iran may build. Ho-hum. Status quo ante.

UPDATE 2: Biden has since taken credit for the U.S. intervention in the Balkans and sworn to bomb Sudan real good.

FINAL: It’s too dispiriting to list and rebut every wrongheaded policy on sale tonight, so I won’t. Suffice to say that, despite the frequent references by CNN’s John King to the strength of the antiwar movement among Democratic voters, each of the candidates with a shot at becoming president or vice president is a committed imperialist. If this is how they play to their supposedly antiwar base, imagine what they’ll be saying when they turn right after the primaries.

Oprah’s going to Israel at Elie Wiesel’s invitation. Fine by me. But then there’s this:

Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Gillerman, who attended the event, said that a visit of a figure with such influence on the international media could help bring an end to the indifference towards the terror threat faced by Israelis.

Yeah, that’s some indifference.

(Ynet link via Jonathan Schwarz.)

Via Michael Ledeen’s blog, I see that the look-how-many-Iraqi-potholes-we’ve-filled meme lives on in the pro-war blogosphere, long after even Arthur Chrenkoff quit, um, “Chrenkin’ off”:

Glenn Reynolds has an email from Michael Yon, the great milblogger and photographer who may have been the first reporter to suggest that there was a “civil war” going on in Iraq. In short, he’s no apologist for W. His email to the Instapundit is quite dramatic, since he reports on the absence of violence. No shooting, no rockets, no mortars, every now and then an IED. Almost apologetically he says “I have no bad news to report today.”

And here’s the part that popped open my sleepy eyes:

In addition to basic services being restored, the city of Hit has rebuilt its library. Citizens had stored away the books during the war here. They are preparing to re-stock the library.

Just compare those three simple declarative sentences to the stereotype of Iraqi Arabs as unbeknighted, ignorant barbarians who could not possibly govern themselves.

Speaking of ignorance – since Ledeen is what passes for a brain among the warbots – there’s no such word as “unbeknighted,” or even “beknighted.” The word he’s looking for here is “benighted,” meaning unenlightened. Of course, if the Iraqis were stereotyped as “unbenighted,” that would be a compliment, so Ledeen, as usual, is peddling nonsense squared, wrapped in illiteracy.

First, Ron Paul on Bill Maher’s show.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEkjPkXHSEw[/youtube]

While Maher deserves props for giving Paul a chance to make his case, he doesn’t seem to get Paul’s fundamental point. Yes, Bush’s response to 9/11 has been horrible, but the policies that led to 9/11 didn’t begin when Bush took office. As Paul notes, American meddling in the Middle East goes back decades – and Bill Clinton’s eight years of bombing and sanctioning Iraq probably motivated more anti-Americanism than anything George W. Bush did in his first eight months of office.

Clip two, from Penn & Teller’s Bullsh*t, features Jacob Hornberger, whose commentaries frequently appear on this site.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDYTizsjbKw[/youtube]

(Both clips courtesy of LRC blog.)