Monday, February 27, 2006

A round up from around the web

Pussy-boy Rall: First squall, then stall is a great article on the Cato the Elder blog.
Trouble is, the weak-chinned, thinning-haired former boy wonder's stones seem to have shrunk since he first threatened legal action.

First he put it to a vote, saying that if enough of his loyal readers emailed him encouragement and money, he would hire a lawyer. That's right: crybaby Rall wants others to pay for his day in court.

The Latest Bleat from James Lileks is a keeper:
TiVo gave me “Air Force One,” which I saw but mostly forgot – what’s to remember, really? But it’s fun. “A roller coaster ride,” as they say. (What blurb will they use when someone sets a movie on a roller coaster?) It has Harrison Ford as the President, which seems natural; Gary Oldmam as a bad guy: ditto. Direction by Wolfgang Peterson, who’s good, and music by Jerry Goldsmith, who would later recycle a few cues for “Star Trek: Nemesis,” but that’s next week’s Diner. It was shot in 1997. It opens with a joint American / Russian spec-ops kidnapping of a head of state, who is one of those super-nationalist Russians we were all twitchy about in the late 90s; he is sent to a very bad and smelly prison. Cut to President Solo, giving a speech that puts forth a new American policy towards terrorists and terror-enabling states:

Peace isn't merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice. Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid.

He is also quite physically fit AND he can fly a plane. This was the sort of person Hollywood wanted for President in 1997. Then they get one, and they completely wigged out. Ah well.
Too funny! I liked Bush in his flight suit. Beats Kerry in the bunny suit any day of the week.

Strategic Exigencies from Gates of Vienna speculates on the port deal.
Iran is overtly bellicose, and the regime appears to be fundamentally irrational, acting out a Shiite millenarian fantasy. Since they may be using or exporting nuclear weapons at any moment, our President is stuck with a deadly and imminent threat that he has to deal with.

He can’t leave it for Hillary to figure out in January of 2009; it has to be dealt with now. By whatever means necessary.


Borders Policy and "Portgate" linked via Michelle Malkin to David Limbaugh
President Bush is in trouble with much of his base for approving the sale of a British shipping firm that runs commercial container operations at six major U.S. ports to a United Arab Emirates (UAE) company. I believe the main reason he is under fire from the right is that he has a nagging credibility problem concerning his inscrutable immigration policy.

To be sure, Bush is under fire from the left as well, but their opposition has little to do with national security concerns and everything to do with partisan politics.

Most conservatives, I think, see Bush as enormously committed to America's national security and the Global War on Terror (GWOT). But many find themselves scratching their heads over his perceived "open borders" policy.

Why, they wonder, is he so genuinely clear-sighted about the evil of terrorists and the global threat they pose to the point of fashioning his legacy-making foreign policy doctrine around an unprecedented preemption strategy, yet seemingly oblivious to the potential threat in our back, front and side yards? Why the disconnect?

Actually, to call it a disconnect is a major understatement. It's more like a gargantuan gap in an otherwise fully coherent policy. If his driving ambition is to make America safer from our terrorist enemies, why does he risk sabotaging that objective by making us more vulnerable right at home?
Why indeed?

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