Author: VD

From the noise emanating from the sportsjabbersphere, McNabb really was injured earlier in the season, as I had speculated. But the Eagles’ recent success notwithstanding, it’s not as if he’s been lighting it up for the last three weeks, though they have been an order of magnitude better than before. A 61 percent completion rate can’t be considered exceptional when it results in only 217 yards and 1 TD per game. Not when your three opponents have been Green Bay, Atlanta and the Jets, with a total of 9 wins between them.

Meanwhile, unheralded black quarterback Daunte Culpepper has lost the last three games, while exceeding McNabb’s performance by 4 percent completions, 54 yards and 1.66 TD’s per game. Guess which quarterback is paired with a defense that served up 42 points on a platter last week, and which one only had to rack up more than 14?

Which pretty much gets us back to Rush Limbaugh’s original point, if you think about it.

WEEK 11 POSTSCRIPT – McNabb looked pretty good today, though. Got to give credit where credit is due. And, I fear, the Vikings collapse is complete. I knew they were doing it with smoke and mirrors, but I thought Michael Bennet’s return would make it easier to keep up the act, not harder. No one deserves to win the NFC North at this point.

Charles Stross lists a few of the president’s requests to Her Majesty’s Government for his upcoming trip.

1. The entire London underground railway system to be shut down for the duration of the visit (apparently in response to fears that suicide bombers might hijack a tube train and blow it up under the President’s feet)

2. That US military aircraft, including helicopters and ground attack aircraft, be allowed to patrol London’s airspace

3. That 250 Secret Service agents, including snipers, who will be travelling with the President be granted diplomatic immunity from prosecution in the event they shoot and kill civilians (whether deliberately or by accident)

4. That the Presidential security detachment should include units armed with miniguns (read: high cyclic rate machine guns)

5. Closure of a large chunk of central London (to the point where Cabinet staff are being advised to “work from home” for the duration of the visit, if possible)

I wouldn’t blame the Brits if they took one look at this list and decided, you know, maybe we can get this done by phone.

In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson submits that a knowledgeable government eavesdropper – hi guys! (wave to the camera) – noting the use of a 4096-bit key, will conclude one of the following:

1) The encryptor doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

2) The encryptor is clinically paranoid.

3) The encryptor is extremely

a) …optimistic about the future development of computer technology

b) …pessimistic about the political climate

c) …both

4) The encryptor has a planning horizon that extends over a period of at least a century.

File me as 3c, gentlemen.

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I’d like to make fun of Britney Spears. She can’t sing, and while she’s cute, she’s nowhere nearly as pretty as the media seem to think her. But some people are so gifted with self-parody that there’s nothing you can do but quote them. From NRO’s Corner, an excerpt from the Diane Sawyer interview. She’s apparently talking about what she considers to be the sacrosanct nature of self-gratification.

Diane: “Sacred?”

Britney: “No, the song, ‘Touch of My Hand’ talking about indulging in yourself.”

Diane: “And that’s sacred?”

Britney: “It is sacred to me, but in a way, explaining, um, okay, I’m confusing myself right now.”

My guess is that using an esoteric word such as “indulging” must have put her brain into synaptic overload. If nothing is required for pop stars but looks these days, can’t somebody hook Adriana Lima up with a producer and some forgettable electro-pop?

The president threw overboard the course that he and his aides had insisted for months was the only way to a stable Iraq: writing a new Iraqi constitution first, followed by nationwide elections. Instead, political power will be transferred to an interim Iraqi government of some type.

The change was prompted in part by the failure of the current 24-member Iraqi Governing Council to act effectively and by eroding Iraqi approval of the U.S. presence. A leaked CIA report concluded that Iraqis increasingly support resistance to the U.S. occupation.

I’ve written before that I don’t believe in universal democracy. Nor, I submit, do most people who claim to believe in democracy. We already know that the EU doesn’t, since it’s fighting tooth and nail against allowing the people of Europe to vote on their new so-called constitution. Now, it’s become clear that the president and his aides don’t have much faith in it either. After all, what good is democracy when people don’t vote the way you want them to?

Forget Bremer. Send Dean to run Iraq. This attitude sounds right up his alley.

Of course, the short-sighted lunatics at the Anti-Defamation League are more concerned about a Mel Gibson movie which is NOT antisemitic than the judenhassen of the second richest and third most powerful government in the world. Ealier today, I happened to glance at a friend’s copy of the latest Panorama, one of the leading Italian cultural magazines, which featured an editorial titled “Si, l’Europa e’ antisemita”.

These are the children of the original Jew-haters, and they are building a new fascist empire on the ashes of the old. And yet, even America’s Jews don’t seem to think its worth worrying about. I used to wonder how on Earth it was possible that so many Jews didn’t leave Germany when the writing was quite clearly on the wall long before 1941 marked the inauguration of the Final Solution. Now, I begin to understand.

For those who think that it can’t happen here – or in this particular case, there again – remember that it is always happening somewhere!

A high-ranking intelligence official recently told me something startling. Our “enemy” in Iraq doesn’t consist of just a few Baathist/Saddam remnants that can be easily rooted out, as Bush and our defense establishment have been constantly telling us. Rather, we are facing an actual guerrilla warfare effort being almost openly orchestrated against us by Syria, and in part by other Arab countries, including Iran. This official explained that almost half the guerrillas and terrorists entering Iraq come from Syria, where they are equipped with weapons and provided with the latest intelligence information, which is shared with them by Iran. Other militants are sent from Kuwait, Iran and even Saudi Arabia. There is little evidence that recent attacks against our troops are being orchestrated by remaining Saddam loyalists hiding in surrounding areas, he stated.

This is pretty substantial information. It changes everything about what lies ahead for our soldiers, and highlights a consistent mistake by the Bush administration of holding important things back from the American people. The picture being painted by the White House of a final resistance effort on the part of Saddam’s regime may be inaccurate and misleading. And this will likely haunt President Bush in the very near future.

It’s not only high-ranking intelligence officers who are saying this. The Coalition officer I spoke with this week told me the same thing; it’s not Iraqis that are attacking them, but the imported jihadists from other Arab countries. And as I already wrote, they’re not being aggressively pursued, for the most part, for fear of destabilizing the situation. This strategy is doomed to failure, as the entire goal of the foreign jihadists is to keep the situation unstable in order to keep US troops pinned down in Iraq and unable to open a new front in Syria, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. It appears that the strategists of the jihad learned something from Afghanistan, as their previous strategy of melting away into Pakistan and the mountains only freed up US forces to move onto Iraq.

I believe that the war must be fought, since it will be waged against us regardless of what we do. However, I am increasingly of the opinion that George Bush is the wrong man to lead the war effort. He has not publicly identified the enemy, followed the Constitution or told the American people the truth about the difficulties now facing the occupation. Kneejerk Republicans should note that President Bush has actually been worse in this regard than FDR, the worst President that America has ever known.

The man knoweth of what he speaketh ” (and to think, this used to be Page 2, where people like yours truly and the scurrilous, scandalous Hunter Thompson came for political and prosaic asylum)”

Now it’s whiny chicks, Hot or Not lists and gossip about Paris Hilton. As TMQ – formerly of ESPN Page 2 – would say, ye gods!

Since we’ve been on the topic of God, it’s a good time to mention this piece by Rod Dreher. Mr. Dreher, formerly of National Review and now an editor with the official favorite newspaper of VD – sounds a lot better when TMQ says that, doesn’t it – the Dallas Morning News, wrote this excellent article on why the Democratic party is becoming increasingly marginalized. It also explains why the Republican party is getting so many new members whose commitment to smaller government and traditional values is slim to nonexistent, as they’re basically Democrats at heart who simply can no longer stomach the militant atheism of the new and improved and purified Democrats.

I am very sympathetic to those fellow libertarians and lovers of freedom who suspect that we have been led by the nose into this war, primarily for the purposes of destroying more American liberties and weakening our national sovereignty. However, I am also aware that while it takes two to tango, it does not take two to fight.

The jihad was not declared by America or the West, it was declared on America and the West. This is not a propagandistic fiction any more than were the Islamic invasions of Spain, France, Italy and Austria imagined. The war will be fought, whether we engage or not. Since it will be fought, I would much prefer to see the West – even the globalist, socialist godless West – win instead of the Islamic jihad. Those who have not spent time in Europe probably cannot imagine how it could ever be possible that Islam could become a serious force in the USA, but no one who has lived in France, the Netherlands or the UK has any problem doing so.

One-world government or sharia. Not much of a choice, is it? And yet, we will persist in upholding freedom and liberty to the best of our ability.