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I’m pretty sure he died laughing when he read Carrie’s comment:

No, I’m perfectly willing to believe you are a typical male, with a typical male ego that needs typical male crutches. You need to feel superior to women and you need to “prove” yourself to the world at large.

I’m fairly sure that crutches, stroking or any other form of assistance for my oversized ego is close to the absolute last thing that any of my friends, family and acquaintances believe I need. The fact that there are no shortage of arrogant posers out there does not mean that the real thing does not exist.

Big Chilly’s wife just called, apparently they had to call the paramedics for him. They’ve got him on sedatives and are reading from Bill Clinton’s MY LIFE in order to stabilize the chortling; fortunately he built up a partial resistance to attacks of lethal amusement by attending a performance of Wodehouse’s THE PLAY’S THE THING at the Guthrie few years back.

If it were not for the knowledge that pride goes before a fall and that God hates it, I have no doubt that I’d be entirely insufferable. Indeed, I am told that prior to learning, as Bono says so well, how to kneel, I was entirely insufferable. But I don’t believe that God values false modesty, nor do I believe there is anything to be gained from such deceit.

An Aussiesums up the answer to an oft-heard question:

You women might be disgusted by our reasoning and try brow beating us or shaming us into thinking that we are doing something wrong but it won’t work. Commitment for men in Australia is like playing Russian Roulette with three bullets in a six round revolver. Would any woman be willing to play that game?

Don’t waste your time attacking us guys, we can’t change the way women are behaving. If women want us guys to commit then you women need to change your own behaviour, government policy and laws so that commitment is not longer so dangerous. Your feminist sisters have created the problem so stop blaming men and tell the women who have made commitment a life threatening condition for men to BACK OFF.

By the way, the Federal Government is concerned about the drop in the number of children us Australians are having. Hmmm, do you think the reason behind the drop in children might have something to do with men not taking the risk of losing everything to a woman he gets pregnant??? Is it because every young man in Australia has a close friend or relative who has lost everything to a woman who took his children from him???

I found the overall discussion to be both funny and telling. As usual, it follows the typical format:

WOMAN: Why are men so afraid of commitment?
MAN #1: Because we’re not crazy. Look at how the deck is stacked against us.
WOMAN: Well, that’s only because we’ve been oppressed for 10,000 years. It’s payback time.
MAN #1: I never oppressed anyone.
WOMAN: Well, someone did. And who? Men! And you’re a man, so obviously you’re an immature, controlling would-be rapist at heart, so you’ll oppress me and my sisters again unless we make sure the government keeps you chained down. We have to protect ourselves, you know.
MAN #1: Ooookay… gotta go.
WOMAN: Hey, where are you going? Look, I’ve got a diploma! What’s the matter with you? Yeah, well, no one wants you anyway! You just can’t handle a smart, sexy, successful woman.
MAN #2: What’s going on? I heard some shouting.
WOMAN: Oh, nothing. (deep sigh) Why are men so afraid of commitment?

In this, as in all things, if you don’t know the answer and are asking the question, then don’t argue when the answer is provided. If you understood what was happening, then you wouldn’t have asked the question in the first place.

Feminists are wedded to an irrational unreality. They have to believe that I’m a bitter little man, sexually and socially unsuccessful, in order to write what I write, because the alternative is that their worldview is unaligned with objective reality. They must cling to this notion, even in the face of the copious evidence to the contrary, or face the fact that they must change their ways.

Why do I continue to hammer on this boring topic? Perhaps because it is one that so many people care about so deeply, (as the massive number of comments on that Sydney blog indicates), but also because winning the battle is about the social culture, not changing the law. Feminists are now learning how the law is impotent in the face of male self-interest, men are learning that there are a plethora of options available to them.

People need to learn to live life. Women need to stop thinking of the government as a protector against her potential husband and see it for the devil’s tool of marital destruction that it is. They need to stop looking for external reasons for their own failures and begin asking why anyone would want to be with them.

American men, on the other hand, need to remember their heritage. Our forefathers were explorers, adventurers and pioneers, remember? Don’t whine about indoctrinated, maleducated American women, go out and find others more to your liking in the Ukraine or the Phillipines. Why sit around being hateful, bitter and impoverished when there is a wide world before you? Go work in Brazil or Slovakia. Find a job in England or Morocco. Have a margarita with Fred… I doubt the Mexican authorities care much about what the Family Court in Cleveland said you had to pay for the rest of your ex-wife’s life.

Four new blogs and a new location for an old one:

Echo Zoe

The Token Hippie

Brain Sex

The Screeching Skraeling

The Lazy Half S Ranch

Check them out. Pretty Lady also has an amusing Date From Hell story well worth the read. I have to disagree with her on her assertion of inappropriate attire, however, as there are few things more beautiful than an ice-blonde in black sable, especially if that is all she is wearing.

One woman laments being duped out of motherhood:

What went wrong? How is it that the age-old business of having babies has suddenly become fraught with so many difficulties. An important clue can be found back in the late 1970s when I was in my teens. I was part of the generation of schoolgirls who, instead of being propelled towards childbirth by cultural and religious expectations, could balance motherhood against a career and good times.

The result is that my childless contemporaries and I are the fallout generation from the sexual revolution, the real-life Bridget Jones’s who spend their evenings getting drunk instead of reading bedtime stories. We were told we could have it all, but in reality we were sold a pipe dream. The reality is that we forgot that we are helpless in the face of our biological clocks. And now it is simply too late for a lot of us….

Looking back, I think I was suffering from delayed maturity syndrome. I was so used to acting like I was 27 that I had convinced myself I was in the prime of my life.

Delayed maturity is precisely how I’d diagnose these women. The thing that I have found most striking about the career women I know is how emotionally and developmentally immature they all are. They make me think of female Peter Pans, blithely assuming that they will have plenty of time to [fill in the blank] whenever they feel like getting around to it, when the reality is that the window of opportunity for anything, be it a job, an entrepeneurial opportunity or a chance at a happy marriage, is finite and often brief.

And the rage with which some of them react when they find out how “unfair” it is that men don’t value their pieces of paper, that they can’t compete with an uneducated yoga instructor and that there isn’t a husband and 2.4 children waiting to be summoned at the snap of their well-manicured fingers is simply infantile.

Unfortunately, men and women alike are very bad at thinking beyond tomorrow, much less knowing what they will want in ten years. About half of the stay-at-home mothers I know once vowed that they would NEVER want children and wouldn’t even dream of giving up their careers in the extremely unlikely event that they happened to have one. Of course, once out of college and realizing that the glamorous world of the office is actually a hellish stew of busy work, bad coffee, petty power struggles, ugly business-casual attire and hours of meaningless mind-numbing meetings, they not only were happy to get pregnant, but phoned their boss and quit about five seconds after seeing the plus sign.

Peter sends a link to Protein Wisdom’s post about a particularly dumb “rape victim”:

You might be asking yourself: Why would a woman claim rape if she knew a video existed that so thoroughly contradicts her story? If you can figure that out, please let us know. Even after police detectives told her they’d viewed the video, Moonier still refused to recant. She continued to demand that the men be prosecuted.

Next month an Orange County jury will hear the case against Moonier (now Kerr following her marriage). Interesting footnote: without the videotape, the men could have spent the rest of their lives in state prison if they were convicted of kidnapping and aggravated rape with a handgun. But the woman’s false accusation is a misdemeanor punishable by no more than six months in county jail. It’s only because she took several thousand dollars from a taxpayer-funded victims’ assistance program that she was charged with two felonies.

The thing that I find most amusing about this is that even a psycho-slut such as Mrs. Kerr can manage to find a husband, while the Maureen Dowdniks of the world are loudly bemoaning the fact that men completely fail to appreciate their glorious educations and impressive resumes. Of course, it’s fairly obvious that if nothing else, the former Miss Moonier is extraordinarily entertaining in the boudoir, although the futility of attempting to prevent her from enthusiastically sharing her charms with the police, the postman, the paperboy, the neighborhood pets and small woodland animals might prove burdensome in time.

Naturally, our occasional bait noir, la feminista found it impossible to allow this chauvinistic calumny to go unchallenged:

There is a balance: It’s the criminal justice system, and it evaluates rape like it does every other crime. Of course the concept that you mention extends to men accused of rape. Are they denied lawyers? Are any of their Constitutional rights taken away from them? Every crime report has the potential for abuse—and you can fake a robbery a whole lot easier than you can fake a rape. Why make the bar higher for rape? You haven’t given a good reason (and “women can cry rape” isn’t a good reason, given that people can—and do—“cry” nearly every other kind of crime).

Rape, like nearly every other crime, is sometimes falsely reported. It’s interesting that you choose to highlight this case, when I don’t remember seeing on your blog the many, many stories of people who commit insurance fraud.

Rape is also one of the most under-reported crimes out there. There’s a ton of shame and stigma still attached to it. I know many women who have been raped and assaulted, and none who have reported it. So no, I’m not going to dedicate space on my blog to highlighting one of the very few false rape reports. It’s a slap in the face to rape victims. It’s a further reminder that no one will believe them.

First, rape isn’t treated like “every other crime”. There is no such thing as a murder shield law, and those accused of rape are sometimes denied their right to confront their accuser. The assertion is wildly absurd; if theft was treated like rape, people would be getting convicted without the accuser having to demonstrate that any money had been stolen in the first place. Murderers would be convicted despite there being no body.

As for the under-reporting of rape, we’ve already settled that one. It’s clearly the unicorns. No one believes most “rape victims” because most of them are lying, or at the very least, wildly exaggerating. It’s telling to note that in every country where actual evidence is required – including otherwise feminist strongholds such as the Scandinavian countries – the reporting, arrest and conviction rates for rape are signficantly lower than in the United States. There are three possibilities:

1. American men are significantly more prone to commit rape than anywhere else on the planet.
2. Rape is even more underreported in every country from Singapore to Sweden.
3. The feminization of the US justice system combined with the sexual revolution has caused a dramatic increase in false rape reports.

Since la feminista is likely a typically parochial, untravelled American, she is probably unaware that the American culture of hooking up is completely foreign to Europe or Asia, with the partial exception of the UK. This strongly suggests that the reason for the USA’s inordinately high incidence of reported rape is number three, a conclusion which is supported by all of the available evidence that does not simply consist of asking a woman a) has she ever been raped? b) did she report it? c) what color was the unicorn?

Rape victims haven’t been stigmatized in the USA for decades. They are beatified, idolized and made the center of attention by every group of feminist sob sisters on every college campus in the country. Women love being victims and they love attention, so fake rape is inevitable. Best just to relax and enjoy it.

Rex Little is incredulous:

Most “rape” and “abuse” of women in the United States is completely fictitious.

MOST?? What do you base that on, Vox? Seems to me if false accusations were so common that they outnumbered real rapes, they wouldn’t make the news.

I like to start with an informative little document that the FBI likes to call the 2004 Uniform Crime Report.

Forcible Rapes Reported: 94,635
Forcible Rapes Cleared: 39,557 (it basically means arrested)

Murders Reported: 16,137
Murders Cleared: 10,101

So, percentage-wise, one-third more murderers were arrested despite the fact that there is, obviously, no victim around to help identify the murderer and the likelihood of DNA evidence is lower. Furthermore, excluded from the report counts are the “unfounded” reports, which for forcible rape was four times higher (8 percent) than the average for all Crime Index crimes (2 percent.) This means that the actual percentage arrested is only 38.7 percent, so already we’re dealing with a minority of the rapes reported resulting in arrest and we’re not even to the conviction rate yet.

According to the US Department of Justice, 48 percent of those arrested are convicted, so 18.6 percent of reported rapes are deemed genuine by the justice system. However, the USA conviction rate is extraordinarily high compared with every other country in the world, for example, in England, (which is also on the high side), only 5.6 percent of reported rapes result in convictions. That number has been plunging, down from 32 percent in 1977, possibly due to the introduction of DNA evidence making false accusations more difficult in countries where corroborative evidence is required, unlike in the United States where it is only necessary that a jury take a woman’s word for it.

Now, it is possible to simply assume that there are millions of rapes going unreported, but it is equally valid to assert that those millions of rapes are being committed by rainbow-tailed unicorns. For those who prefer logic and evidence to emotion and imagination, all of the available evidence around the world points the vast majority of rape reports being false.

Finally, note that all of this relates only to “forcible rape”. The FBI doesn’t track “statutory rape” or other sexual offenses, many of which your average rape hysterist likely considers to be rape, near-rape, unicorn rape, whatever. What little evidence I have seen suggests that the false report rates are higher and the arrest and conviction rates are lower than the forcible rape statistics.

I know I’m shocked:

A 23-year-old Central Florida woman has been charged with making false statements about a rape that left Rollins College students scared to walk the campus, according to WKMG-TV in Orlando. In November, Desiree Nall told Winter Park police that she was raped by two men in a Rollins College bathroom.

“The college was on high alert and the neighborhood was in confusion because there was a lot of fear,” Winter Park police spokesman Wayne Farrell said. Investigators told WKMG-TV that Nall confessed to making up the story.

Nall is the president of the Brevard Chapter of the National Organization for Women, Local 6 News reported. Police said she may have been trying to make a statement when she lied about the rape.

How is that possible? We have been assured by feminist leaders that women – especially educated feminist women – never lie about these things. Obviously she must have suffered a “near-rape” experience like Amandagon’s poor friend and was misunderstood by the authorities when she reported her harrowing ordeal.

“Lying about that story is absolutely horrible because women are victimized every day.,” Rollins student Elizabeth Humphrey said. “And if we get the reputation of lying, then people won’t start to believe us if it does happen.”

Won’t start? What is she talking about? Most “rape” and “abuse” of women in the United States is completely fictitious. If you want to see real rape and abuse, go to Bosnia or the Sudan, which is where we are headed if the feminists are allowed to take Western culture down with their suicidal ideology. Women don’t fare so well under the law of tooth and claw, which is the primary long-term alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“Oh, it was awful, he hit me?” So what, are you a china doll? Did you break? And if so, then how is it possible that you’re still here, yapping away?

Major CC continues the discussion:

As a third-generation professional Airman, I could not let your statement that “the history of strategic bombing is a history of complete failure” go unanswered. Additionally, your assertion that Airpower, while being “a crucial tactical element… is strategically toothless” could not be more wrong. I’ve read many of the responses posted on your website, many driven by some pretty strong emotion-driven bias and selective statistics on every side of the debate, so I hope to try a more “strategic” approach, although I may seem overly optimistic to some.

First Lesson: Weapons are not inherently tactical, operational or strategic in and of themselves.

Whether a mission is tactical, operational, or strategic is dictated by the target and the effect of destroying or degrading that target, and not by the weapon used. The rifle and solitary bullet used by an army sniper can have a tactical, operational, or strategic effect, based on whether the target is an enemy platoon leader, commanding General, or Prime Minister. In the same way, a 2000 pound GPS-guided bomb dropped from the wild blue can have a tactical, operational, or strategic effect, based on whether the target is a tank, a command bunker, or a key communications node.

Agreed. I thought it was fairly clear that the aspect of airpower I was dismissing was the Dohout/Mitchell view of Airpower uber alles, that favored view of bloodless war-enamored political columnists, which believes that mass bombing campaigns and pinpoint air strikes are capable of winning wars without risking the infantry. The target of my criticism is not the Air Force, but those who call for its misuse under misapprehensions of its capabilities.

I understand the confusion. My father served in a Cold War Air Force that systemically confused the word strategic with nuclear bombers and the word tactical with conventional fighters. Vietnam left the Air Force totally confused over its role in a non-nuclear strategic air campaign, and we actually adopted the Army’s myopic AirLand Battle Doctrine in the late 70s and 80s, so I wouldn’t necessarily consider “flyboys” or “grunts” who served even 5-15 years ago to be experts on this topic, either.

I hope some of the retired flyboys who are reading this will note that the major said that, not me….

While AirLand Battle Doctrine did help give us the venerable A-10, it looked at conventional Airpower in terms of tactical Close Air Support or long-range artillery based on a mystical epic future tank battle in the Fulda Gap. While you seem to agree with the idea that employing ground forces, with airplanes buzzing in tactical submission overhead, is the only truly effective way to achieve strategic results, let me point out that two-dimensional conventional ground forces must first maneuver against the two-dimensional tactical targets on the ground in front of them. Only when they are able to push back or break through the “front line” can they begin to slog their way overland to operational and strategic targets.

The early airpower theorists recognized that Airpower could operate simultaneously against tactical, operational, and strategic target sets and attack from any direction at any time (sometimes referred to as “parallel warfare”). This time factor actually adds a fourth-dimensional advantage to air assets that ground forces simply do not possess. It has taken time for the technology to catch up with the theory. Just wait until we start employing airborne lasers, which will have the capability to vaporize an Iranian ballistic missile in flight and then refocus to deep-tan Usama from 20 miles away without even scorching his brokeback buddies’ Al-Qaeda-regulation beards.

Being a science fiction writer, I’m entirely open to the possibilities, indeed, one of my short stories anticipated something very similar to today’s Predator, albeit one used in a more networked capacity than anything today. However, the major must admit that “just wait” has been the mantra of the Air Force for over sixty years now. And while it has done many impressive things, it has seldom delivered the results it promised beforehand.

I’m not surprised when a civilian with a government school education thinks that war is only about “boots on the ground” with soldiers fighting hand-to-hand and door-to-door until we plant our flag on foreign soil. Any midgrade officer in today’s military should be able to explain that war, in a broader sense, is the application of various national instruments of power, including military, to make an enemy do what we want them to do (or kill them if they won’t). Our “national will” must be translated by civilian leaders into military objectives before military planners can determine how Airpower, or any other military capability, can be used to meet those objectives.

When have I ever stated anything about that? Indeed, I have written for the last two years about how “boots on the ground” will not suffice to accomplish our revised goals in Iraq. My skepticism with regards to Iran is not because I am setting up a strawman and arguing that air strikes won’t cause the mullahs to surrender – although Michael Ledeen did seem to think for a while that the mere threat of air strikes and special forces in support of Iranian insurrectionists would suffice a while back – it is because I doubt that a combination of air strikes and special forces ops are capable of shutting down a clandestine and distributed nuclear program run by smart people who watched what happened in Iraq. As Blackfive has mentioned, in war, the enemy gets a vote too.

With that in mind, our senior military leaders of all services must focus on meeting strategic objectives and the desired effects, rather than focusing on tactics and specific weapons. Contrary to your assertions, Airpower is actually most effective when used strategically, and is currently the most efficient means of achieving the quickest strategic effects with the least risk and cost – a bargain for the taxpayer, despite all the editorial comments regarding the cost of stealth-bombers, etc.

This is a naked assertion. I’d like to see some detailed evidence before I even consider conceding the point. Keep in mind, I have a whole catalog of information demonstrating how air power failed to even meet its stated strategic goals, much less proved to be more effective strategically than tactically.

Regardless of the Combined Bomber Offensive’s effect during WWII, the entire paradigm has changed. It has even changed exponentially since Operation DESERT STORM. The original Airpower theorists were way ahead of the technology, but it’s not really even about Airpower, but tactical, operational and strategic effects. It is true that 16 years after DESERT STORM, a single B-2 can launch from 3000 miles away, appear unannounced and unseen miles over enemy territory, destroy more than 60 targets on a single pass, at night, in bad weather, and depart without a trace, leaving behind a steel hailstorm precise enough to destroy diverse strategic, operational, and/or tactical targets simultaneously without even shattering the windows of adjacent buildings. More importantly, this B-2 can be data-linked with F-22 fighters or Navy radar cruisers, networked into US military data systems, retasked at a moment’s notice to fill priorities from a commander on the other side of the globe, coordinate operations with Army, Marine Corps, or Special Operations assets on the ground, receive updated and real-time intelligence from multiple sources, including drones, satellites, and intelligence sources, and share it’s own real-time situational information with everyone else. Obviously, the entire US military network is key to this process.

Trying to simplify the argument to “Air campaign” versus “B
oots on the Ground” is old-school and based on ignorance of modern capabilities. US Military personnel now have the capability to operate across the spectrum of military operations, including Cyberspace, to destroy strategic, operational, and tactical targets as necessary to fulfill a combatant commanders objectives. Any Airman, Soldier, Sailor, or Marine who thinks only in terms of their Service’s capabilities has probably not been deployed recently and the mainstream media is too confused to understand what’s really going on (or has a political agenda of their own). In this vein, denying the strategic value of Airpower is based on ignorance or emotional bias.

I think the major has forgotten that I not only commit the occasional crime of science fiction, but I’m also a game designer. The capabilities of current cross-service networking haven’t even caught up with what I’ve envisioned in the near term, much less some of the concepts designed into the never released Rebel Moon Revolution… which had several military advisors, albeit mostly from the Marines. What holds true of the average journalism major now engaged in punditry seldom applies to me.

I do not deny that there may well be strategic value to airpower, I merely insist that it is toothless acting alone as numerous columnists have advocated. While the major’s holistic and techno-ecumenical approach does not explicitly admit to this stand-alone toothlessness, it could logically be seen as a tacit admission of sorts.

The question now is “what is the objective and what military effect do we need accomplished, and how fast”. Fortunately, Joint force commanders, not arm-chair bloggers, will decide how to meet that objective and what weapons systems to use, based on what’s available to them at any given time. Don’t be surprised if Air assets continue to operate strategically and decisively, from time to time.

I’ve tried to decipher the specific military objectives you and the other bloggers think would drive a war against Iran. When you comment that “precision air strikes launched in combination with special forces operating inside Iran… is only likely to succeed in Hollywood”, what objectives are you using to measure success? Degradation of Iran’s Military or Nuclear Capability? You allude to a possible invasion of Iran – to what end? Regime Change? Unconditional Surrender? If you let me know exactly what you think the objectives of a military action against Iran might be, we can begin to discuss which ones an Air Campaign could and could not achieve.

Keep up the great discussions! The truth always comes out eventually.

With regards to airstrikes (plus special forces), the public objective would be preventing Iran from obtaining a working nuclear-tipped missile. As I’ve already said, I am skeptical that this can be prevented regardless of what we do, short of the use of nuclear weapons or a massive boots-on-the-ground invasion. The quiet objective I suspect would be preventing the opening of the Iran Oil Bourse, or at least preventing oil being sold in Euros. This could theoretically be accomplished without violence, or merely with its threat. (That’s what I assume is going on.) An invasion would be meant to cause regime change, and presumably, the installation of a government in accordance with the principles of the world democratic revolutionaries.

Mr. Buckley finally admits to the limits of military power:

Three years ago (March 2003) I wrote in this space: “What Mr. Bush proposes to do is to unseat Saddam Hussein and to eliminate his investments in aggressive weaponry. We can devoutly hope that internecine tribal antagonisms will be subsumed in the fresh air of a despot removed, and that the restoration of freedom will be productive. But these concomitant developments can’t be either foreseen by the United States or implemented by us. What Mr. Bush can accomplish is the removal of a regime and its infrastructure. The Iraqi people will have to take it from there.”

Mr. Bush is entitled to maintain, doggedly and persuasively, that he took the right steps — up through the overthrow of Saddam and the exposure of an armory without weapons of mass destruction. From that point on, the challenge required more than his deployable resources. His political reputation will rest on his success in making that point and ceding realistically to realities we are not going to cope with, and ought not to attempt to cope with.

Mr. Buckley, appears to be attempting to cover up for the fact that he did not, as I and a very few other writers did, oppose the madness of “nation-building”. It was a foolish notion from the start as there was never any nation to be built, there were at least three separate nations all subject to the same repressive force. Keeping them together required the same sort of repression that was seen in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, as we are finally beginning to recognize some three years later.

I was willing to support an open and declared war on Iraq and other self-declared enemies of America as a means of ending this clash of civilizations that began in the 1970s – or 1950s if you view the post-independence violence that took place in India as the rebirth of jihad. War is the health of the state, true, but unlike the tango, it does not require two. However, it has become clear that the neoconservative utopians in the administration do not see this undeclared and unconstitutional war as a reactive strike in self-defense, but more as a means of reshaping the global order. I expect this attempt to work about as well as Woodrow Wilson’s did in 1918. February 2004

I was pleased to note, however, that Mr. Buckley did make reference to the WWII occupations, which I openly mocked back when they were being made as a means of attempting to rationalize the post-war violence.

The conquest of Iraq no more brought about an end to the global jihad than did the conquest of the Rhineland-Palatinate mean the end of World War II. Nor could it have. Berlin had to fall before the defeat of Nazi Germany could even be contemplated, and it’s bizarre to suggest that the occupation of a peripheral Arabic province could end the war while the Clausewitzian center of gravity remains unmolested. – April 2004

On a related, note, I found the Littlest Chickenhawk’s explanation of how he and other clever pundits derive their political positions to be more than a little telling:

Clever politicians and pundits, therefore, try to find a way of hedging their bets…. It is worthwhile arguing about strategy in Iraq and in the global war on terror. But honest strategic suggestions can be — and must be — distinguished from simple political positioning.

It appears that we can conclude from this that Mr. B. Shapiro, Esquire, will cease his crowing for imperial conquest now that empire has been declared to be officially declasse by the Confather. Look for future apologetics explaining how it is the fault of insufficiently martial Americans, most of them Democrats, that Sunni Iraqis and Shia Iraqis prefer killing each other in genuine power struggles to participating in farcical elections wherein a bi-factional elite pretends to pay attention to the Will of the People while ignoring it whenever it suits them.

SH has a problem:

I have an issue with teaching phonics to my child. She is deaf and was born
that way. So, considering phonics is based on hearing, would you have any
other suggestions?

Any ideas, folks? This is outside my range of experience.