Ayn Clouter's Blog

FROM THE XY FILES.

TERRY'S CHANEL CAN'T COVER UP THIS.

SPLITTING VOTES WITH A SCALPEL.

A GRAIN OF SALT FOR POLLSTER'S TALES.

SHOW AND TELL:
In the Senate in Columbia, they're showing Frist the Cat and Bugsy Delay just how to get their way, by doing whatever it takes. This demonstration may prove useful, if we need to eliminate the two term limit here for Our Fearless Leader.

A bill that would allow popular Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to stand for a second term passed another legislative test on Friday after a raucus late-night session in which a senator thrust a scorpion at a rival. ... Uribe, an enthusiastic ally of the United States, has an approval rating of about 80 percent thanks to his tough policies against Marxist rebels.

Early in a session that started late Thursday and continued past midnight, a independent who supports the bill, Carlos Moreno, thrust a plastic box containing a scorpion at an opponent, who brushed it away. Pro-Uribe Sen. Claudia Blum jumped on a chair until a police officer stamped on the scorpion. ... "The scorpions should leave me alone, and let Uribe play!" repeated Moreno on Friday morning in his gravelly voice. He has previously enlivened debates by bringing skulls, rats and human organs into the chamber.

"VOTE AS YOU SHOT":
A reader of the item below anonymously points out that typography on textiles is not the only way the left is twisting trailer trash tupping instincts to a political end.

Strip club owners are putting a little bada-bing in the presidential campaign by asking patrons to turn their eyes away from the stage for a moment to fill out a voter registration form -- and then vote against President Bush.

But ballot box titillation may backfire on the panderers.

Customers listened politely in the dim light, and some said they already are registered. A few said they are Republicans and support the Bush administration. ... Christopher Ness, a 35-year-old patron, also filled out the registration form, although he hasn't voted in 10 years. He said if he goes to the polls in November, he'll probably vote Republican. "I like the way it is right now," Ness said.

DID THE CLENIS COME UP WITH THIS?:
Here's one more way liberals are trying to lock up the sex fiend vote, as though it was in doubt.

Elizabeth is part of Axis of Eve, a fledgling group of rabble-rousing feminists and anti-war activists who have taken to flashing their undies as a form of political dissent. The Eves, as they call themselves, are on a mission to sex up protest. They take to the streets wearing "protest panties" which come emblazoned with anti-Dubya double-entendres like "Expose Bush," "Lick Bush," "Give Bush the Finger" and "Drill Bush Not Oil." When the Eves flash them at rallies, the effect is somewhere between a 1970s' love-in and George Bush's worst, frat-addled nightmare of a panty raid gone awry. ...

The Republican National Convention -- which the Eves described bitterly, and biblically, as "when the snake comes to the Garden" -- will be a prime panty-flashing opportunity. ... the Axis has been doing a brisk business. The most popular model by far, said Tasha, is "Give Bush the Finger." And they've also designed panties for first-time voters that read "My Cherry for Kerry." "We think Kerry needs a little help in the sex-appeal department," said Tasha.

They're certainly right about that imported French prune. Not even dousing him with Terry's tomato ketchup has helped.

LIVING IN UNINTERESTING TIMES:
[For those who've been wondering where I've been this last week:]

Claiming that they have "shamefully bored pundits" with their tentative misconduct of the Presidential contest, blogscourge Ayn Clouter today called for top officials of the John Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party to resign, including DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe and Kerry manager Mary Beth Cahill. In a diatribe to cheering students at Basilides Bible College, she castigated all those "political hacks" for the sleep-inducing lack of fire in their struggle to defeat Bush. She also charged the party's preemptive nominee of "tiptoeing through the tulips of tremulous trepidation", thus making the campaign trail "almost as boring as Al Gore's puerile path to pathological play-it-safe pointlessness", and dramatically increasing the risk that "pro-Bush bloggers may just nod off, instead of pricking The Ketchup Consort to death with premeditated pixelcide."

Ms. Clouter's appearance was jointly sponsored by the Grover Cleveland Student Society for Reclaiming the Democratic Party, and by the GoBack.org PAC. She said that while she welcomed the "dreary, dull, Demo-yawn's" predictable result of lower turnout among the base ("very base", she added) Democratic voters, she resented the lack of blood in the water from the kind of viciousness leftist candidates provoked in earlier years. Her closing rant was "Where is this year's Willie Horton? The donkey brains haven't even spooked us enough to throw sand at them, much less mud pies with sharp rocks inside. Come on, Demo-fools, say something to really anger us. Keep hate alive."

PROVERBS 22:6: For evidence that Democrats indoctrinate their children with violent hatred of Republicans even at an early age, consider this traumatic story (via Hammerdown via blogAmy):

[Karl] Rove also shared how he persevered in politics from an early age.

"At the age of 9, I put a Nixon bumper sticker on the wire basket in the front of my bicycle. Unfortunately the little Catholic girl down the street was a couple years and about 20 pounds on me. She was for Kennedy.

"When she saw me on my bike with my bumper sticker for Nixon, she put me on the ground, flattened me out and gave me a bloody nose," he said.

IN EXTREMIS:
Amy Alkon of Advice Goddess points to a list by Luke Thompson which tells us all the things we fear about Kerry (or God forbid, Kucinich) winning:

If we had a president who is as far to the left as Bush is to the right, he would have done the following things:

-Given federal funding to the Nation of Islam, Church of Scientology, PETA, and the Madalyn Murray O'Hair foundation. Denied it to any organization that allowed open expression of Christianity. As a consolation prize, made a public speech declaring that Christianity is a religion of peace.

-Introduced the following acts: The "Meat is Tasty" act, to promote a vegan lifestyle; The "More Profits for Businessmen" act that would in fact cut CEO salaries in half; The "I Love Jesus" act, making it legal to bulldoze churches; and the "No Gun Left Behind" act, which would confiscate the guns from all Americans except Arabs who could show that they need guns because of their religion. ...

-Given one press conference a year, and insisted in talking in Ebonics at each.

-Passed legislation banning cigarettes from everywhere unless they're filled with pot, in which case smoking would be encouraged, especially by drivers and airline pilots.

There's more. Go shudder at all the prospects at "Bush League".

APAISER LA BÊTE SAUVAGE:

Recently I helped a member of Our Noble Leader's administration rediscover her muse. To preserve her deniability, I'll call her here, after another performer who turned from her true calling, "Sally Ann Blainey". She told me that she felt empty these days, as though there were just no new worlds to conquer, at least until after this November. I thought she needed a new pastime. "Doctor," I asked, "what gave you joy before you got into this work?" She surprised me by revealing it had been music.

She had been aiming at a career as a pianist, until in college a good teacher inspired her to change to foreign relations. It had been decades since she had practiced daily. She tried playing again for one music loving diplomat she knew, but "'Es demasiado tarde, Con,' dijo gentilmente." I dug further to see why she had been attracted to music in the first place. Psychoanalysts will not be surprised that it was because of a traumatic incident in her youth. A kindergarten classmate of hers was killed by some domestic terrorists. (Considering when and where this happened, they were almost certainly Democrats.) She was motivated to help others with music, because she got emotional relief after the tragedy from one particular song about it, that began:

Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.

I recognized that as one of several gushy leftist political propaganda songs from the sixties, and that gave me the opening needed. I told her that Richard Farina had written all those lyrics, but that he didn't compose the tune. It was just an old folk song he set new words to. That was something easy enough that she could do it herself, without even quitting her day job. To provoke her to try, I showed her how some liberals were still doing that kind of thing. My example was a parody by Mad Kane, that began:

Condoleezza, Condoleezza, Dub adores you.
You're so fine at saying falsehoods with a smile.
Is it cause you're female, Condi, that they've blamed you
For your fabulosa fakery and guile?

As I expected, she was personally outraged by this. When I told her that leftist mocker was, like her, a former musician, and had based those lyrics on the old hit "Mona Lisa", written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, she decided she would try this. I suggested she begin simply, like Farina, with an old folk song. I gave her one of the many, many variants of the lyrics to perhaps the best anonymous American tune, a great tribute to our brave pioneers stealing away women from rustic redskins, that begins:

Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you
Away, you rollin' river
Oh Shenandoah, I can't get near you
Away, I'm called away
'Cross the wide Missouri

It took her several days of false starts before she returned with a good hawkish take on this, based on material from her current career:

Saddam Hussein, your regime must go
Away, you Ba'athist butcher.
If you don't flee, our missles will blow
Away your palaces
'Cross the wide Euphrates.

I told her this was adequate for a first attempt. Now she should try something more serious, like a musical. To keep it easy, she could use the Gershwin and Heyward lullaby from Porgy and Bess, "Summertime". She dashed off to write, and came back with this political hymn:

Terror time,
And the winnin' is easy
Folks are tremblin'
And the polls are so high

Your Prez is rich
And your Veep's giving contracts
If you'll vote for us
We won't lie

Some other leap year
You're going to rise in anger
You'll take your country back
And hang us up to dry

Until that day comes
We'll make all your decisions
And we'll keep you scared so you won't try

Once again, music therapy has helped bring fulfillment to a lonely career woman. She's found a hobby that gives her a new interest in life. And it will be a refreshing change not to have the song parody market monopolized by those beastly liberals.

THE LATHE OF HEAVEN:
It can't be just a coincidence that so many religions, living and dead, emerged from the cauldron of the Middle East. Perhaps that empty sky and blank desert cause more than just mirages. Something about the place inspires heresies, or at least very original theologies, like that ancient Persian idea of a universal war between a good and a bad God. Even thinking about the area seems to have that effect. A recent example is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who seems to have bought into that old Persian dualism in a brand new way:

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., a key Democratic supporter of President Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq, said the president must demonstrate that he understands the "nature of the damage" caused by the abuse incident by "determining who is responsible, no matter how far up the chain of command this goes." Once those people are identified, Biden said, Bush must "demand the resignations for whoever is involved in this policy, and that includes Lord God Almighty himself."

Perhaps this is a compromise with Nietzsche's view that God is dead. Biden only wants him to quit. Is he thinking of vengeance for The Clenis by planning the impeachment of the Deity? A more frightening question is, whom does Biden, with his known Presidential ambitions, have in mind for a replacement, if he convinces God to pull a Nixon and walk off the job?

The Dover Demo-gogue isn't the only one driven over the edge by the sands of Saddam:

The father of Nick Berg, the American beheaded in Iraq, directly blamed President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday for his son's death. "My son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld."

This seems more like a specifically Christian heresy, but a brand new one. Berg senior seems to think that the death of Jesus was not enough to atone for everyone's sins, and new sacrifices are constantly needed, or possibly that the particular sins of George and Donald were so vast that not even that Crucifixion could cover these new horrors. Either view would astonish two thousand years of theologians. Perhaps he is really saying in a subtle way that he thinks Our Noble Leader is himself the Anti-Christ. That would amaze the folks at Rapture Ready, whose list of candidates for that position includes Saddam Hussein and a host of European possibles, like Silvio Berlusconi and Javier Solana, but not Bush (father or son).

Our demand for democratizing the Desert of Dementia does damage to domestic dissent, as well. Collective Sigh reports in "Something evil this way comes":

But according to the office of Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Denison Unitarian church isn't really a religious organization -- at least for tax purposes. Its reasoning: the organization "does not have one system of belief."

While the courts have already ruled twice against that ambitious candidate for Governor's welcome new concept of "taxation if without deification", she is appealing to the Supreme Court. According to Opinions You Should Have, the evil agnostics she has ousted from the exemption lists are not praying for forgiveness:

The Unitarian Church, which was denied tax-exempt status by the Texas State Comptroller for not having "one system of belief," repudiated all of its prior teachings today in exchange for the sole doctrine that Texas should be sawed off the United States and pushed into the Gulf of Mexico. "Is that belief system enough for ya?" said Unitarian Minister Obiah P. Dowd....

ANOINT IN TIME:
"What have you done for the Lord, lately?" asks Jesus' General in pointing to this story:

A woman is accused of pouring boiling oil on her boyfriend's face in an argument over a Bible verse. ... Her 31-year-old boyfriend ... was hospitalized with severe burns on his face, neck and chest. The two were reading the Bible at the boyfriend's apartment May 13 when Morris went to the kitchen to prepare french fries, police said.

Unfortunately, we are not told which verse. Perhaps this is the answer to those of us bothered by liberal claims that the Preoccupation Of Iraq was really driven by oil, considering the ominous Micah 6:7, which reads:

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?

This should be seen in light of the growing number of cases of rape and sexual assault of our women in uniform, as reported in "One Hundred Twelve Women Assaulted in Iraq, Afghanistan". This is your solution, gentles. Keep a pan of oil handy on the stove at all times. If it's hot enough it may even help the personal hygiene of any soldiers with rape on their mind, by stripping off all that public hair that desert parasites could hide in. Our petroleum was put under that pathetic place for a purpose, and now we know what it is.

ON THE ROCKS:
The words of "Deep Throat" in Watergate still ring true. Why this big push for same sex marriages? It's the profits, stupid. The divorce rate for straight couples is sky high, and in Scandinavia (always ahead of us in social trends) their marriage rate is itself falling.

Several national chains, including Macy's, use gender-neutral terms like "spouse" and "registrant" in their wedding registries to accommodate same-sex couples. ... Shreve, Crump & Low has been aggressively advertising gold, platinum, and white gold bands, hoping to boost sales among both gay and straight couples. Its first ad for a commitment ring in 2002 proclaimed that "Not all the good ones are gay or taken. Some are both."

The Clenis himself gave us an early clue in his 1992 acceptance speech:

As a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest country in the history of the world....

That teacher's name sent shivers down the spines of anyone familiar with his notorious book, which revealed the hideous schemes of the international corporate plotters for socialism, first organized by Cecil Rhodes, who made his fortune from diamonds. How can they sell more stones, to keep subsidizing their collectivist conspiracies? It's all so clear now....

ONE KNEELS, ONE STANDS:

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!

Apparently one of The Four Hearsemen has fallen. Empty Days reports that Sullie has lived up to his nickname:

Well, it's official - Andrew Sullivan is going to vote for Kerry - chatting ostensibly about finances while his real reason is of course that gay-marriage "problem" - boo, how typically unstraightforward.

Now Akim's post may be premature, as this possible Judas may yet come to his senses. Pray that he was only speaking ironically in this comment (since he may be going over to the dark side, I'll quote instead of linking to him):

If you take seriously the fact that this country is headed toward fiscal catastrophe in the next decade, then restraining spending and raising some taxes in the next four years is almost as essential as tackling the entitlement crunch. Neither Bush nor Kerry wants to help. They're both cowards (although Kerry seems to have a better grip on fiscal reality than Bush does). So gridlock is the best option. The combination of Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress was great for the country's fiscal standing. Independents and anyone under 40 concerned with the deficit don't need a Perot. They just need to vote for Kerry and hope the GOP retains control of at least one half of Congress.

It sounds suspiciously like Rove's Folly, the HMO Amendment (for Homogeneous Marriages Only) has indeed proved a wedge issue, driving one of our own to treachery. It's not like anyone was going to propose to him anytime soon, anyway. The liberals seem to agree that they've split him off, since they have now turned their guns on The Blogfather himself. Without an Achilles Heel such as Sullie's, he will prove to be sterner stuff. Their gall knowing no bounds, they have begun attacking him as lazy. World O'Crap started spreading the meme with "The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations", which includes sniping like this:

See, Andrew, that's how he does it. The above took me less than twenty minutes to research and write (they don't call him "InstaPundit" for nothing). Anyway, Glenn announced last week that he had bronchitis or something similar. James Lilleks urged him to knock off the grueling blogging for a while.... We'd sure hate to lose him to cut 'n paste fatigue. So he too should take off a year or so, to rest up. You know, for the good of the world.

Intelligent bloggers should see through this as easily as Kerry's daughter's dress at Cannes, but apparently it is catching on. Even Don Typo's "friends" seem to be believing it. Sortapundit points out, with nervous laughter, an interview with the Poohbah himself. I can't see the joke, myself. It looks like they captured him perfectly, and he very wisely followed the words of our first Republican President, "Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.":

INDC: …do you have any current thoughts on the matter?
GR: I guess.
INDC: And, those would be …
GR: Heh.
INDC: Um … … forgive me if I’m not making much sense here, this is my first interview, and I’m a little nervous. In no way do I intend any ... disrespect, but the interview might be a bit more informative if you could, uh, expand on some of your answers.
GR: So noted.

SOME PEOPLE ARE NEVER HAPPY:
AWolf at alone says that he is made ill by the "wallowing in negativity" of the media, and points to some very good news about Iraq at the site of the USAID. Their long list of accomplishments includes many things you would expect liberals to be cheering on, such as "Vaccinated 3 million children through monthly national immunization days."

Strangely enough, the left isn't praising these foreign experiments in socialized medicine that they would love to see here at home. Why? Is it just because it's being done by a Republican President? If that were true, then they would not have condemned their own Democratic Lyndon Beagle-abuser Johnson. No, it's a typical leftist "cut off your nose to spite your face" attitude. To them it's not enough to just do the right thing. It has to be done in just the right way. The wimpy swords into plowshares crowd has a horror of any use of force, even to impose public programs they drool for. This fastidiousness defeats them again and again, as we've delighted to watch with candidates such as Michael "So what if my wife is raped" Dukakis. One of their own icons condemned this attitude way back before the first JFK was elected in The Best Man:

...power is not a toy we give to good children; it is a weapon and the strong man takes it and he uses it ... and if you don't go down there and beat Cantwell to the floor with this very dirty stick, then you got no business in this big league....

The continuing decline in voter turnout should give them a clue. The general public prefers not to worry about politics, as long as the trains run on time. Liberals need to learn from another book, published the very same year their hypocritical hero Thomas "Of course I'll free you if you drop your panties" Jefferson penned that de facto anarchist Declaration of his. It remains the classic depiction of a contented society, happy to avoid electoral strife:

In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. ...

The obedient provinces of Trajan and the Antonines were united by laws, and adorned by arts. They might occasionally suffer from the partial abuse of delegated authority; but the general principle of government was wise, simple, and beneficent. ...

The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquillity, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom.

FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY:
The media are all in a dither about those vile claims of higher-ups authorizing torture by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Already Our Noble Leader's many MINIONS are denouncing these, and properly so. The very idea that anyone in this cabinet would actually authorize any form of masturbation is absurd. That's why we nearly lynched The Clenis's Surgeon General.

This isn't the first time that Hersh has raked muck to embarrass the only President we've got. He also let the cat o'nine tails out of the bag about the 504 civilians slaughtered at MY LAI. It's just more evidence that this country needs a British-style Official Secrets Act, so that such leaks won't reduce the pressure in the fire hoses we need to wash clean the Iraqi soil of Saddam's torture chambers. But he's not the only one who can do "investigative reporting", so here's my small contribution.

Hersh says in this week's "The Gray Zone":

...the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.

Rummy's Division of Cognomeny was criticized for their lack of creativity over Gulf Preemption II, after an outsider, that infamous leftist snarker TBogg, coined the best name for it, "Operation Inigo Montoya". How did they manage to come up with such a colorful title as "Copper Green"? Does it refer to the way oxidation turns brass that old corrupt hue? No, too technical for the humanities-schooled NeoCons. Is it an attempt to scare the prisoners by making them think we had Hannibal Lecter in those cells, assuming that Iraqi corpses might give a brownish tint to his diet of Baghdad Soylent Green? No, too scary even for them.

Here's the real truth. The "green" refers to the green light for using intense methods of interrogation. And the "copper"? As always, follow the money -- and consider the age of the architects. Who benefits from this invasion and occupation? My source in his office (whom I'll call "Deep Cloaca") reports that name was chosen in honor of one of Donny's youthful comic strip role models. Just to show how modern he is, the character was a woman. She was both a seductress and a powerful industrialist, known as "The Dragon Lady of Wall Street", and was the villain in the first episode of that ultra-hawkish newspaper comic "Steve Canyon" (and made repeat appearances for years). That episode, presaging the serpentine titles of the assassins in Kill Bill, was called "Copperhead". Her name, now to be memorialized in reports of Abu Ghraib, was Copper Calhoun. (She's in her usual slinky garb in the background of this cover.) Life does imitate art. In fact, Rummy may soon hang over the Pentagon an update of that line from Horace, Halliburtona longa, vita brevis.

FOLLOW THE MONEY:
We are supposed to assume it's just one more liberal rant against Our Noble Leader, blaming his administration for the "torture" scandal in Iraq.

Out of one side of its mouth -- the public, rhetorical side -- it condemns all forms of torture regardless of the need to secure intelligence. Out of the other -- the discreet wink and nod side -- it tells intelligence officials the gloves are off and they should do what they have to do to obtain life-saving information.

But look more closely. This isn't just political rhetoric. This is laying a carefully constructed groundwork for an argument before a judge.

The fact that photographs were widely circulated suggests a belief that superiors would not disapprove of what they saw. ... apparently decent soldiers believed they were doing what was expected of them. After all, the administration did approve rough interrogation methods for some high valued detainees.

This should be no surprise, since the article, "Covering up the coverup", was written by Alan Dershowitz, attorney for such upstanding citizens as Mike Tyson, Claus von Bulow, and O.J. Simpson. This "opinion piece" is really just his way of publicizing the case he wants to make in court -- defending the torturers by that old standby of blaming the higher-ups. He doesn't care if he has to tar the fine name of our most compassionate President in almost thirty years, just so that he can get his clients off. Anything for a fee, eh, Alan? "...we know who's the King of Lawyers, as the Good Book tells us...." --Stephen Vincent Benét, "The Devil and Daniel Webster"

APPEASERS APPLAUD WHILE WE WIMP OUT:

Under a barrage of international and domestic criticism, the top U.S. commander in Iraq has barred virtually all coercive interrogation practices, such as forcing prisoners to crouch for long periods or depriving them of sleep, the Pentagon announced on Friday.

The timid critics have seen too many episodes of "The Prisoner". We don't want any information. Those so-called "abuses" are intentional, not to soften up captives for questioning, but to soften up resistance by the masses of the public. "Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow."

But the official said that Sanchez would deny requests to use harsher methods. "Simply, we will not even entertain a request, so don't even send it up for a review," a senior Central Command official said at the Pentagon on Friday.

This sounds like a hopeful sign of realism to me, if you read between the lines. Can you spell "Don't ask, don't tell?"

Even Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, acknowledged at a Senate hearing on Thursday that hooding prisoners or forcing them to crouch naked for 45 minutes -- tactics available to interrogators with Sanchez's approval under the old policy -- were inhumane.

But notice he didn't say "inhumane" was a bad thing. Remember, you can't spell "dehumanizing" without all the letters from "inhumane".

The Central Command official also said that until last fall, commanders did not have an interrogation policy specific to Iraq, relying instead on basic principles in an Army field manual.

"Yes, sir, we were using this manual we found right here, issued by some General named "Erwin" somebody...."

The official said, for instance, there were harsher approaches, now barred by Sanchez, that in his view did not violate the [Geneva] conventions.

That's because those utterly unimaginative Swiss just didn't think of some very original techniques we have in mind.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats who had accused the Pentagon this week of employing practices that violated the conventions applauded the policy changes. "Pressure works," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

The usual liberal hypocrisy. Of course "pressure works". That's why we were using it there. Why is pressure okay for Democrats in D.C., but not for our army in Iraq?

MEET THE NEW MEME:

The Supreme Court refused Friday to block the nation's first state-sanctioned gay marriages from taking place next week. The justices declined without comment to intervene and block clerks from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in Massachusetts.

One of my loyal readers emailed me denouncing this failure of the Justices to stop these Masses of Connubial Deconstruction. Fear not, fellow foes of Friscoism. Just like the Republican majority on the Taxachusetts high court, our good Republicans on the national high bench are doing this to help. They know full well that Our Noble Leader's poll numbers are down on Iraq and the economy, so we need to stir up voters on some other issue. The designated receivers of the flame fanning are those who live in fear of makeovers. The failure of the Netherlands and Belgium to collapse since allowing Ms.-unions won't matter, since our target audience can't read Netherlandic or Belgish. To rile up the righteous, we need those marriages to take place here.

However, we can't Plame-out our own robe wearers. Even someone as intellectually challenged as The Ketchup Consort might catch on if we applaud these decisions for inciting our base vote. What we have to do is denounce all those judges for furthering The Galebits Agenda. What's that? Just like other issues where we try to control the politics by seizing control of the terminology, we need to refuse to use the Acronyms of Evil. Our excuse will be the impossibility of pronouncing "GLBT", even for the chronically vowel challenged of Eastern Europe. Instead, we will combine the first two letters of the first three words. This new coinage will have the added advantage of creating in our listeners' minds subliminal connotations of scary things like "blowing" and "chomping".

The leftists feel witty making ironic references to the "SCLM", or "so-called liberal media". We'll show those Democratic dilettantes what serious irony is like. For the rest of this campaign year, let's all refer to the judicial authors of these decisions as the "SCCC" (or the "S-triple-C"), for the "so-called conservative courts". We should publicly picket any speeches they make, with suitable signs like "Lock up gays, not guns". Visibly rally at any duck hunts they go on, with banners like "Let them say I PLEDGE, not I DO". The clueless chroniclers will snark about the silly extremists, and their every denunciation of us will help distract the liberals from our quiet organizing of the homophobes. On the night of November 2, the justices who have done so much to help us, by letting lavender wedding bells peal an alarm to summon our voters to the polls, can quietly attend our victory parties (just like Sandy did last time). If we do our job right, then this year they won't even have to order any recounts halted.

WHEN I GROW UP, I WANT TO BE AN ITALIAN COP:

Italy's state police presented a sleek new addition to their fleet today: a Lamborghini Gallardo, with a top speed of 192 mph. The car is ready for service, fitted with a siren and painted blue-and-white with the word "POLIZIA" -- "police" -- stenciled on the side. ... The six-speed, two-door luxury vehicle can go from zero to 60 mph in four seconds, and has a list price of $165,000.

WASH THEIR MOUTHS OUT WITH SOAP:
Here's more evidence of intellectual irresponsibility from the idiots of Ingsoc:

Encouraging schoolchildren to experiment with oral sex could prove the most effective way of curbing teenage pregnancy rates, a government study has found. Pupils under 16 who were taught to consider other forms of 'intimacy' such as oral sex were significantly less likely to engage in full intercourse ...

Sensible people will reject this nightmare vision of our kids being "obscene and not heard". Those ivory tower idealists with their New Age jargon about "fulfillment" are missing the point of Free Education. Profligate hedonism should not be an option. We don't want schools where children even know how to pleasure each other at will. Paraphrasing one expert on authority, we just want the wards of pedagogy to get up and eat and move and stop and do homework when they are told to, and obey, and take orders. How else can they develop the self-control to ignore the liberal propaganda they will be exposed to in college?

Maybe those Marxist mind molders misread the meaning of their meddling. That article on "Oral sex lessons to cut rates of teenage pregnancy" doesn't say there was a lot more licking, just that "sexual intercourse among 16-year-olds fell by up to 20 per cent". Perhaps descriptions of such practices so repulsed good churchgoing young people that they stopped even petting, out of fear of being led on to do such revolting things. Possibly they read ahead of their lessons about "safe sex" and noticed ominous warnings like this one:

Q: What are these little squares of latex and what am I going to do with them?
A: Please realize that dental dams were not originally designed for what you have in mind.

KERRY'S KINE:
Recently I was referred to as "l'étrangement eurocentrique Frau Clouter" by Phersu. I keep an eye on the appeasing vacillations of Old Europe for the same reason those old war posters said "Know Your Enemy". If you want a real example of the sort of national identity confusion which leads liberals to support people like the Ketchup Consort, consider this pathetic rant:

...if it weren't for the French, we'd all be cheering for Manchester United or some shithead cricket team and looking forward to the House of Windsor's annual visit with plummy enthusiasm. Not that there's anything wrong with Blighty, mind you, but just a teensy reminder to you semi-elected idiots out there ordering liberty fries, and uh ... egalitarian toast, and ... er, fraternity-kissing your fellow Congressmen in the cloakroom before heading back to legislatively bomb our nation's poor back into the stone age, that maybe going after La Belle is, if not the stupidest waste of the taxpayer's money that you've ever engaged in (that being renaming National Airport after a shitty actor), close enough up there in the myopic format that only those with heads firmly lodged in rectums can attain to register in the top five.

SIX DEGREES OF UMA THURMAN:
Now that we've viewed the final part of Kill Bill, let's just see if this actor linking stuff really works. Uma Thurman's role in that movie is very similar to [#1] Jeanne Moreau's in La Mariée était en noir. That classic by Francois Truffaut was based on Cornell Woolrich's novel. Trauffaut filmed another of Woolrich's noir thrillers, Waltz Into Darkness, as La Sirène du Mississipi, with [#2] Catherine Deneuve. That actress adopted her mother's maiden name for the screen because her sister, [#3] Françoise Dorléac, was already an actress. The two of them starred together in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (the answer to the trivia question, did George Chakiris ever do anything worth mentioning after West Side Story?), but that film was hardly noted here. Most Americans who noticed Dorléac at all saw only her last movie, The Billion Dollar Brain. That was a terrible misadaptation of a pretty good spy novel by Len Deighton, by producers misled by the popularity of James Bond films. It was not alone. An even better spy novel of that day was also mismade as The Quiller Memorandum, which miscast [#4] George Segal as the hero. Like Leslie Nielsen, he showed later he was best at comedy, not drama. Segal's skittish animal expressions did work as the brain implant victim in The Terminal Man. That was another film of a sci-fi novel by Michael Crichton, whose biggest hit was the misnamed Jurassic Park. (It should have been "Cretaceous"). In that movie, Dr. Ellie Sattler was played by [#5] Laura Dern. That actress later played the catalyst in the notorious "coming out" episode of the TV sitcom starring [#6] Ellen DeGeneres. That Sapphic comedienne later went on to host her own talk show, where one of her guests in December, there promoting Part 1 of Kill Bill, was its star, Uma Thurman. Sounds good enough for government work to me.

IN CAMERA:
Mississippi is the latest front in the liberal war on intellectual property. Newsday reports:

The Associated Press and the Hattiesburg American filed a lawsuit Monday against the U.S. Marshals Service over an incident in April in which a federal marshal erased reporters' recordings of a speech Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave to high school students. ... "It is ironic this seizure took place while Justice Scalia was making a speech about preserving the Constitution," Watson said.

Those cotton pickers just don't understand the ownership of ideas. Why, they're probably illegally downloading music all the time. I'd check on them, but my browser doesn't read shape notes.

OSAMA THE ENVIRONMENTALIST:
Opposing Western industrial civilization has always been given lip service by Bin Laden, making Al Queda's highjacking of jets symbolic of their hatred of technology. Now it seems he may have just been one more liberal tree hugger trying to save the planet. According to "Climate Change Out of the Blue":

A new NASA study claims man-made cirrus clouds formed by commercial jet engine exhaust may be responsible for the increased surface temperatures detected in the United States between 1975 and 1994.

The drastic falloff in airplane traffic after 9-11 probably preserved lots of polar bears, or at least lowered his air conditioning bills in those caves. Who knew?

OUR NOBLE LEADER TAKES A QUIZ:
Actually, I confess that since he is too busy right now discovering who outed Valerie Plame so that he can move on to pinpointing blame for Abu Ghraib, I volunteered to take the test for him. Here are his results:



Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

ANOTHER HOPE DASHED:
I thought I had good news to report, but it turned out to be just one more case of a fatuously prevaricating Francophone. A blogging professor named Michael Bérubé announced on Wednesday, in "Wingnuts induce satire crisis", that "liberal and progressive bloggers" were "at a loss to respond" to the statements of "conservative commentators" about the alleged possible torture related program activities at Abu Ghraib. He reported that the speechless leftist satirists felt they were being outdone by such rightists as Limbaugh and Chavez, whose comments (which he quoted from) were cribbing their material.

Well, I should have known better than to trust anyone who writes his name with two acute accent marks, and who on May Day quoted -- in French -- that commie anthem L'internationale. Sure enough, the next day he proved his hopeful story was just a joke itself, by posting a mocking attack on the Christian right in "It's not like it's the Pledge of Allegiance", where he claimed that we don't care about the Iraqi prison incidents because they did not involve exhibitionism, abortionists, gay marriages, or Darwinism. (Well, they didn't, did they?)

He then sneered that he didn't know "of a passage in Leviticus or Deuteronomy according to which it actually pleases the Lord when you stack naked heathen into human pyramids." Of course not. God doesn't toy with unbelievers. When His patience is exhausted, He just orders us to slaughter them, as with the Midianites in Numbers 31:7-18, or does it Himself, as with Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:24-28. Both those incidents, this man in the ivory tower should remember, happened in that very same part of the world, as did the attack by bears on forty-two children, cursed by Elisha for mocking his baldness in II Kings 2:23-24.

A DIRGE FOR OCHLOCRACY:
In Old Europe the Green Party has actually made their opposition to Bush a plank of their platform. One of their "thinkers", Daniel Cohn Bendit, says:

"Wir müssen als Europäer alles ermöglichen, damit diese Bush-Administration im November abgewählt wird".

It's on their own site HERE. They've gone farther and mocked Our Fearless Leader in a campaign poster, which uses multiple images of him as an argument against cloning. (See it for yourself HERE.)

Not content with hoping to beat Bush this fall, they object to letting him exercise power for the rest of his term. Danny-boy goes on to say:

"Im Grunde müsste man US-Präsidenten verbieten, im Wahlkampf irgendeine Entscheidung zum Nahen Osten zu treffen."

Today this call to forbid Presidents from making decisions during elections may seem silly. George has proven, by ignoring the almost universal calls for Rummy to jump or be pushed, that he is perfectly capable of ignoring editorials. But what about some future day, if someone like the Clenis is in the White House, putting policy on a Procrustean bed of polls? He might precipitously pull out of Vietnam Iraq.

Those appeasing leftists are right about one thing. World security is too important to be left to the fleeting whims of elections. (They are just wrong about what the correct policy should be.) Their solitary insight is part of a growing trend across the world. In Asia:

"Beijing leaders told the people of Hong Kong - who thought they had a right to elect their chief executive - that universal suffrage is ruled out. ... Hong Kong's business leaders readily admit they fear that direct elections would just lead to higher taxes. ... Hong Kong's democrats walked out on Mr. Qiao as he made his announcement, while Hong Kong's tycoons cheered him on."

Of course, opposition by the rich to popular rule is nothing new, but even the middle class is giving up on that game. In Latin America:

"According to a new United Nations study, people here are losing faith in democracy - even as the region's economy grows. Political freedoms have not brought financial gain to the masses, half of whom say they would support an authoritarian regime if it resolved economic problems."

George's wonderful economic policies should ensure the full support of those who still have productive jobs. Soon only the poor, and a few ivory tower professors, will still believe in genuine free elections. Technology, in the form of voting machine software, can lessen their impact whenever the contest is close. To discourage enough of them to keep it that way, the results of a brilliant experiment in Indonesia are very good news for those of us who hate democrats (with either capital or small letters). This is a technique which we can use to keep lots of voters away from the polls:

"An independent investigation revealed on Thursday that the indelible ink used to mark the fingers of voters during the general election on April 5 could cause skin infections and even trigger cancer. ...some of them suffered from itching and a burning sensation that lasted for 20 days ...laboratory tests ... revealed that it contained a prohibited colorant, crystal violet. He said the United Nations had long prohibited the use of crystal violet. The colorant had also been banned in Singapore in 1992 and Malaysia in 1998."

(The article on this has been taken down, so no liberal alarmists can see it, but it's been excerpted at Hot Buttered Death.)

L'EAU GATE:
British traitors supporting the Stuart pretender to the throne, who was then in exile on the continent, used to toast "the King over the water". Today's liberals have now added a new twist on this aqueous advocacy. Frustrated by the Ketchup Consort's inability to best Our Noble Leader in the polls, World on Fire suggests that Heinz-Kerry can win by going overseas himself, staging a de facto coup. "Act as if you already are the president. Get off the stump and go visit Europe, sit down with Shroeder and Chirac, visit Israel and Eqypt. Go to China and talk about voting rights in Hong Kong and the nuclear threat in North Korea. Pull together a cabinet and start making policy now. Go visit the troops in Iraq as a fellow soldier - don't let the inevitable cawing of the Limbaugh brigade about 'politicizing the war' stop you - it can be framed successfully."

We hope Terry's Toy will return to the land of his co-linguists and try this. In the unlikely event that he actually won, this would give us an opportunity to carry out the original intent of Founders of our nation. The Adams administration not only gave us the invaluable Sedition Act, but also the Logan Act, passed to prevent bothersome peace-mongering by those pesky pacifist Quakers, which punishes any citizen who "directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States". It's still on the books. (See the U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 45, Section 953, "Private correspondence with foreign governments".)

Sadly, this weapon in the prosecutor's arsenal has never been used, not even against Jane Fondas or Jesse Jacksons. Letting them off was a small price to pay for avoiding the arrest of good Republicans who secretly met with the Vietnamese in 1968 and the Iranians in 1980, cutting deals to make sure the good guys would still win that year's elections here at home. But this time it's the liberals who are out of power and might talk to the furriners to beat us. That can't be allowed. Leftists condemned the impeachment of The Clenis over perjury about sex. Watch them squirm when we impeach John-boy over a crime with a three-year federal prison sentence. (The only possible impediment would be the even less likely election of someone pledged to repeal that law, like these radicals.)

[One personal note to "World on Fire": I shall continue to point out the hypocritical politicizing of the war, but I don't take orders from drug addicts on the radio, and I never "caw". I prefer to hiss.]

THE SILVER LINING:
The voices of the right are taking the wrong approach to the brouhaha over torture in a U.S military prison in Iraq. Claiming the system works because the crimes were uncovered, denying that the abuses were much worse than what happens in our civilian prisons, or saying this is to be expected after the Iraqi mob abused our civilian contractors, all sound defensive. Face it, our interrogators were careless and let the soldiers who softened up the prisoners for questioning get caught.

Talleyrand, praised for the wit of his remark about the Bourbons, "Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublié", is usually also given credit for the cynical comment about the killing of the Duc d'Enghien, "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute". Actually those words were from Joseph Fouché, who was Napoléon's Minister of Police. While the outrage across the Muslim world make that line apt for the current scandal, Talleyrand was even more brutally realistic. His true comment was "Is there any reason to make such a fuss? A conspirator is seized near the border, he is brought to Paris, and he is shot. What is extraordinary in that? Come on, d'Hauterives, that's business!"

To that diplomat, "business" meant power. It was the attitude of Michael Corleone when he was told that the attempt on his father's life "was business, not personal." He responded "It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. ... If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. ... He takes everything personal. ... And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult." As the Marxists say, it was "no accident" that this scandal blew up at this time.

Supporters of this ongoing Crusade (don't fear the word!!) shouldn't be thinking about covering our rears, but about taking the initiative. Don't see problems, see opportunities. So, for misjudgment or mismanagement, someone's got to "take the fall", as Hammett put it? Great!! This is our chance to seize even more control over the remaking of the Middle East. Throw that moderate politician and druggist Rumsfeld to the Wolfs, and put a truly dedicated neo-conservative in charge of the Pentagon, so that we won't have to keep prodding him on to be more aggressive about Operation Inigo Montoya. Elevate Rummy's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to be the new Secretary of Defense.

Let the liberal media assume they have scored a great victory by driving Donald out of office, and while their attention is diverted by clapping themselves on the back, march an armored war elephant right up to the front lines. The next time the Ba'athists interfere with "business", by abusing bodies of our boys, Paul The Merciless will lead the Bu'ushists in rigidly applying the watchwords Hugo attributed to the two sides in his own novel of guerrilla warfare: "Pas de grace (mot d'ordre de la commune) -- Pas de quartier (mot d'ordre des princes)." Let any future Fallujahs forever be linked with Lidice.

PLAGIARISM FROM A PARALLEL PLANET:
The Washington Post has possibly become the latest victim of plagiarism in the press. Peruse their pompous opinion piece for Sunday, May 2, 2004, called "A Way Forward in Iraq". (Full of hubris, they may insist you register to read it.) Then ponder a few paragraphs published in a different paper. That is the London World Post of the same date, but from London on the planet Nemesis, orbiting the sun at a point precisely opposite to that of Earth.
Read the rest HERE.

IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU CREAM....:
"Dr Rachel Armstrong ... said the US space agency NASA was considering how to deal with the natural urges of astronauts travelling on long journeys such as a three-year trip to Mars, where the six-strong crew would be likely to include two women. "NASA is talking about the chemical sterilisation of astronauts on longer journeys...."" Well, that will certainly take the bloom off space travel for young geeks dreaming of interplanetary experiments in atmospheric fluid dispersal, inspired by their collections of images from pay per view sites.

I'm sure the Vatican will be denouncing this at once, as one more violation of Humanae Vitae. The government technocrats have been reduced to such heretical ideas by the liberal virus of "diversity". Back in the good old boy days before "political correctness", they would have had no problem just not allowing women in space. Now they're making their own zero gee beds and they have to worry about people lying in them together. The problem isn't just pregnancy, though Pro Life advocates should know that Our Noble Leader's executive orders have continued the ban on abortions in government institutions, which would include spacecraft.

"Douglas Powell, a psychology professor at Harvard University who was recruited in 1999 by NASA to investigate the behavioural needs of long-term space trips, ... noted the comments of one Russian cosmonaut about time spent cooped up in the Mir space station that "when you have two people locked up in a very small environment for months at a time, all the conditions for murder are met." Mix in sex, and you almost have the script of Othello in space."

I don't think that reporter was familiar with Othello. To replicate that story, you would need an Iago. I suggest someone like Dr. Zachary Smith. Powell's fear about crimes of passion may have been inspired by one notorious book, which depicted the first human born on Mars as the bastard child of adultery between the expedition captain and another crewman's wife, with her husband killing them both before committing suicide. We should not trust that author's foresight. In the same book , he wrote "Smith is also a citizen of the United States ...it's illegal to hold a citizen, even a convicted criminal, incommunicado ...." Obviously he totally failed to predict the advance in jurisprudence represented by the Patriot Act.

"Other scientists have suggested that the best way to ensure there is no interplanetary interplay is to crew the mission with astronauts over the age of 50." Maybe this was said by people who haven't reached 50 yet and "misunderestimate" the decline of sexual drive, as did the Bard himself in another play:
"HAMLET: You cannot call it love; for at your age
The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment...." --Act III, Scene IV
But perhaps these comments came from space geeks already past 50, dishonestly plotting to guarantee themselves a spot on the trip to the Red Planet.

"Peter Bond, a British expert on space matters ... [said] "the ideal Mars mission would have - in Star Trek terms - two Mr Scotts and two Mr Spocks, and definitely no Captain Kirks, or Mr Sulus, or Dr McCoys. You need the Scotts to do the engineering stuff, and the Spocks to do the science. You don't need a Kirk because all he does is issue orders - and kiss any woman in sight."" Have you ever read a better description of The Clenis? All this time we thought he was trying to imitate the infidelities of Kerry's initial-sake, when really he was just another Trekkie.

There are, of course, different opinions about Kirk and Spock, but things could be worse if Bond's fears are correct. As evidence mounts of possible life on Mars, we need to share the ongoing concern of Senator Santorum. There are plenty of literary depictions of the danger of interspecies miscegenation. What eggs may hatch from "man on Martian"?

Those who think more laws will solve all our problems will be concerned to read, near the end of "Sex, the final frontier", that "there is no NASA ban on sex between crew members." No wonder they are worried about musical mattresses. But eschew this utopian faith in legislation. Years of "abstinence only" programs in sex education classes have failed to reduce the illegitimate birth rate among students. Someday we may return to those good old days of putting offenders in stocks and making them wear scarlet letters (or perhaps other colors for different offenses). Until then, we need not a legal but a physical solution to preclude orgasms in space. (The classic example was the Will Rogers solution for naval disarmament. He said we should just drain the oceans; how to do that was a only a "technical problem".) It can't be chemicals, because the Catholic Church would condemn them.

What is the best proven way of discouraging sex? Obviously, we should send no one to Mars except long-married couples. But as the Grandmaster pointed out in that novel, on a long trip stimulation can still occur between different couples. The only practical solution is to have an entire crew of people who have all been married to each other for years. In short, we will need to train new astronauts from that splinter Mormon town of Colorado City, Arizona. One of those families of polygamists should have attained a state of such mutual boredom as to preclude any stimulation at all. Sanctioning their return to Old Testament marital customs is a small price to pay for avoiding a horrible bad example of hedonism over our heads.