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Ye cats, but that first half was an ugly one for the Vikings.

It seems a bit more prosecutorial than is Tim Russert’s normal style, but that’s to be expected.

MR. RUSSERT: Under President Paul, if North Korea invaded South Korea, would we respond?

REP. PAUL: I don’t–why should we unless the Congress declared war? I mean, why are we there? Could–South Korea, they’re begging and pleading to unify their country, and we get in their way. They want to build bridges and go back and forth. Vietnam, we left under the worst of circumstances. The country is unified. They have become Westernized. We trade with them. Their president comes here. And Korea, we stayed there and look at the mess. I mean, the problem still exists, and it’s drained trillion dollars over these last, you know, 50 years. So stop–we can’t afford it anymore. We’re going bankrupt. All empires end because the countries go bankrupt, and the, and the currency crashes. That’s what happening. And we need to come out of this sensibly rather than waiting for a financial crisis.

MR. RUSSERT: So if Iran invaded Israel, what do we do?

REP. PAUL: Well, they’re not going to. That is like saying “Iran is about to invade Mars.” I mean, they have nothing. They don’t have an army or navy or air force. And Israelis have 300 nuclear weapons. Nobody would touch them.

I’m always amused by people who worry about Iran attacking Israel. They have clearly never read Jane’s and have no idea about the comparative size and construction of the two militaries. It’s rather like worrying about 19th century India invading England based on the former’s greater population.

If you want to worry about someone attacking Israel, worry about Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Of course, if they ever do, they’ll be doing it with arms provided to them by the USA.

Yukonyon appears to have missed my sarcasm when I asked about what was “borderline inappropriate”:

Borderline inappropriate means that you unfairly cast conjecture at the Mormons, without scrutinizing the rest of the Christian mantra. And since you bring it up, let’s call it what it is; sacred, not secret. It is something that the Mormons consider to be very sacred, and you don’t hit any nerves with your conjecture, just infuriate them when you join the other hacks in desecrating what they consider to be so sacred that they don’t talk about it outside of the temple walls. It is nothing special or original, and it gives you no kudos.

One does not need to scrutinize every religious idiosyncracy in order to cast a skeptical eye on the abnormal rituals of any particular group. You’re conflating various commenters with me here, as I never made any reference to anything being secret; as for sacred, I think you know that I am rather well known for being a non-respecter of sacred cows of every kind, even my own. It’s always easy to laugh when someone else’s ox is getting gored; the strength of one’s convictions is revealed in one’s reaction when it’s one’s own ox that’s bleeding.

So, I don’t shy away from the various and occasionally inexplicable oddities of my faith nor do I expect others to do so. It is a testimony to Mormon insecurity that they are so sensitive, even secretive, about what is quite rightly regarded by them as an embarrassing matter. And I note that to talk about something, even in scorn, is not to desecrate it. I’m not a Soviet-style atheist, burning your underwear in front of you as proof that your Mormon god does not exist.

I must vehemently dispute the idea that “Captain Underoos” is neither special nor original. I think it’s almost perfectly appropriate, combining as it does divergent elements of truth, humor, offensivenes and contempt; if Mitt Romney doesn’t look like a figure straight out of Marvel Comics, I don’t know who does. Can’t you see him standing proudly in his temple garments, fists at his side as he juts out his jaw confidently towards the future? His superpower is one that allows him to retroactively change five seconds of the past when he slips on his magic gold spectacles.

Mormons are, for the most part, fine, upstanding people who believe some crazy things. Which is perfectly acceptable and we’d surely be better off with more of them around. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t have a right to laugh at the craziness, and it doesn’t speak well of their collective judgment that they would elect to line up behind a man I hope is a very poor example of Mormon integrity, or rather, the lack thereof, simply because he wears the same sacred underwear that they do.

Yet even if the point were conceded that MLK was a communist, you’d still have a man who was remarkably important for the stand he took against racism and institutional discrimination and for the way he rallied americans behind the cause of desegregation. We are talking about a true American hero.

So, a “true American hero” is one who dedicated his life to destroying the right to freedom of association? Forced desegregation is far more evil than voluntary segregation; while MLK may have only opposed forced segregation, it’s quite clear that the primary result of his cause has been the precise opposite of what it was supposed to achieve.

This may have been unintended, but it was absolutely predictable. And the chief accomplishments King’s campaign against “racism and institutional discrimination” have been to tear down the Bill of Rights and destroy fundamental American liberties while sentencing black Americans to a society full of men in jail and women dependent upon government largesse.

MLK was undeniably important, for much the same reason that Vladimir Putin is TIME’s 2007 Man of the Year. One can only imagine that one day John McCain will be celebrated as a member of the same heroic American pantheon to which MLK belongs, given McCain’s dedicated war against the right to free speech.

In which the New York Times reminds us that Romney has a Clintonian view of the truth being whatever he happens to wish it to be at the moment:

Mr. Romney’s office proposed legislation that would have toughened penalties on those in possession of the drug and chemicals to manufacture it, but the bill stalled in the state legislature. After The New York Times pointed out Mr. Romney’s misstatement in a posting on its politics blog, he made sure to correct himself before taking questions from reporters at his next campaign stop here.

“If I said this morning that we ‘got tough’ on methamphetamines, I proposed we get tough on methamphetamine and I’ve corrected that right here for all of you,” he said. “You don’t need to make any error of reporting that somehow Governor Romney actually got it done.”

His claim of being a lifelong hunter was similar. When asked at town hall forums about his stance on guns, Mr. Romney portrayed himself as a sportsman, a “hunter pretty much all my life,” who strongly supported the right to bear arms…. After the notion was challenged by The Associated Press, Mr. Romney’s campaign initially conceded that those were the only two instances he had really been hunting in his life, but later rushed to add that he had also gone pistol shooting for “varmints” at his vacation home in Utah, although he did not have a hunting license or own a gun.

On the National Rifle Association endorsement, Mr. Romney argued the group phone banked for him, but he conceded it did not formally endorse him.

Captain Underoos is a very strange man with an arms-length relationship with honesty. His religion may be unusual and his taste in literature execrable, but it’s his psychological construction that is far more troubling. It’s pretty clear that for Romney, the intention IS the deed. Those looking to him to nominate conservative Supreme Court justices should keep in mind that proposing to is equivalent to actually doing so for him, as the man is, quite literally, a deceiver.

I neither like nor support Huckabee. Nor do I trust him. But given that Giuliani, Romney and McCain all seem to be legitimately mentally unbalanced to a noticeable degree, it’s not hard to understand why people are gravitating to him based merely on the “probably not clinically insane” factor.

First round playoff results:

67 Masonville Marauders
38 Greenfield Grizzlies

45 Winston Reverends
42 Cranberry Bogs

Masonville looks like the favorite on paper, but the big game from Winston QB Big Ben may have pushed the odds in the Reverends’ favor.

And my interest therein. Yukonyon writes:

I always appreciate your criticism of Mitt, because I don’t like the guy, but your mockery of his underwear is borderline inappropriate; there are a lot of secrets that Catholics will never release, albeit they are keeping potential doctrine from being made available to the public, yet no mention is ever made about any politician’s avowed Catholicism. Your comments about john 3:16 is a non-sequiter in attempting to establish that there is no way that Jesus and Satan were both created by God, and therefore couldn’t be brothers in some sort of context. And equivocating this to something Clintonian makes you appear disingenuous, because frankly, I can’t see the comparison. You’re beginning to appear less and less like the cool, dispassionate rationalist, while making you appear more and more like an anti-Mormon hack…. This is just advice; you can take what you want, and throw out the rest, because it is your funeral.

Ah, so it’s Mormon tushies that we’re supposed to be kissing now to further our media careers. Got it… good think I don’t want one. But let me get this straight… you seriously think a national politician can get away with wearing holy underoos and NOT get mocked for it? If Hillary suddenly starts wearing a sacred snakeskin thong in public due to whatever bizarre reptilian religion she secretly practices, is everyone really expected to quietly respect that? Here’s the reality. If you do something, you don’t get to be the judge of whether it is weird or not. I consider myself to be the epicenter of normality; there appear to be in excess of six billion people who disagree. That’s fine, I deal. I’m not telling you not to wear your underwear on your head or whatever, I’m just telling you not to be shocked when people laugh at you. And they will.

Now, what is this “borderline inappropriate” concept of which you speak?

The idea that I’m an “anti-Mormon hack” is downright amusing, as I am demonstrably not a hack, (at least in the professional sense), and I don’t care enough about Mormonism one way or another to be anti-Mormon. One might as reasonably suggest that I’m anti-Scientologist or anti-Nzambi Mpunguist. Mormonism is totally irrelevant, in my opinion, except that it happily provides a fitting appellation for the ridiculous Mr. Romney. A snug, tight-fitting appellation, one might even say….

I suggest that even though he doesn’t support Romney, Yukonyon’s instinctive desire to defend his religion may be blinding him to the way Romney revealed his fundamentally dishonest character in this little incident, in much the same way NRO’s endorsement and Hugh Hewitt’s unrequited man-love has. Romney was already known to be a horrendous flip-flopper and serial stretcher of the truth; what could easily pass for an innnocent and unintended exaggeration in the mouth of another candidate is simply not credible coming from him. Does Yukonyon also think my denigration of Romney’s literary taste stems from anti-Mormonism,* or is it possible that Battlefield Earth is the worst science fiction novel ever to see a bestseller’s list?

Considering that even the English papers see Romney’s attempted grammatical contortions as Clintonian, either there are a lot of political observers who are just as “disingenuous” about Romney as I am, or Yukonyon’s view of the matter is incorrect. The thing is, there’s no need for anyone to be disingenuous about it anyhow, as in my opinion, Romney has already fatally wounded himself with his own words. It will be interesting to see if the polls reflect this or not.

*It may amuse some of you to note that after I wrote my opinion of Romney’s favorite book, one scientologist emailed to complain of my obvious bias against Scientology.

Sometimes, being crazy is the only sane option:

The first vote I ever cast was for Ronald Reagan in 1984. Today, I look at the Huge Government Republican establishment in Washington D.C., and read its enablers … and I have no idea who these people are, or what happened to the GOP I signed on with.

I’m in construction and get paid by the hour, so a twenty five dollar donation to Dr. Paul is roughly one pre-tax hour of my labor.

So here’s the deal: for every two weeks that Ron Paul is in the race, he gets the fruit of an hour of my time and effort. And every time another member of the conservative intelligentsia disparages Dr. Paul’s campaign for a limited and constitutional government, it will just make hitting the send button that much sweeter.

Are those supporters crazy, as some colleagues tell me?

Perhaps they are, to be shouting for liberty in 2007, after decades of swelling federal power and arrogance, of proliferating taxes, rules, and interests, of gushing transfers of wealth to politically connected elites from working- and middle-class grunts, of the college and teacher-union scams, of the metastasizing tort-law rackets, of ever more numerous yet ever more clueless intelligence agencies, of open borders and visas for people who hate us, of widening cracks in our sense of nationhood (“Press one for English …”), of speech codes and race lobbies and judicial impositions.

If those people are crazy, though, I want to be crazy with them. I’m for liberty, too. That’s why I’m for Ron Paul.

I look at those people too, the Giulianis, McCains, Romneys and Huckabees of the world, and wonder how on Earth it is possible that they are able to convince anyone of their nonsense after nearly two decades of consistent betrayal of republican principles by Huge Government Republicans. Do you, does anyone, actually believe that there is a single candidate in the race who will seriously try to reduce the size of the federal government besides Ron Paul?

Because I can absolutely guarantee you, they will not.

The Northern Alliance’s big guns appear determined to join National Review in making themselves look irrelevant by defending the GOP’s Walter Mitty, especially in light of Romney’s own lame attempt to defend himself. It’s especially telling that none of his defenders dare to quote that defense due to how incredibly lame his foolish attempt to justify his previous statement is:

Mitt Romney has been drawing criticism for saying that he “saw” his father march with Martin Luther King, even though he did not witness the event. This strikes me as a non-story. It seems probable to me that Romney did not mean to say that he literally saw George Romney and Dr. King marching together. In that event, Romney likely would have said that he was with his father when he marched with King, or that he himself marched with King.

Here’s Romney’s actual words:

“If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term “saw” includes “being aware of” in the sense I described. It’s a figure of speech, and very familiar, and very common, and I saw my Dad marching with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort.”

You see that Mitt Romney is full of shit. In every sense of the words “see”, “is”, and “shit”.

Do remember Beau in your prayers. His daughter writes: He asked me to pass on to you and the Voxologisti that he suffered a heart attack and quadruple-bypass surgery. He is now out of the hospital and resting. He wishes you God’s blessing for Christmas.

My best wishes to Beau and his family. I hope he will make a full recovery with no complications and will soon be able to join us in discussing the fallout from the early primaries.