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Perhaps Mr. Joseph Farah has been in close proximity to Washington DC for too long, because his usually sound judgment appears to be slipping a little, as exemplified by his column yesterday that the US needs to get its hands dirty in order to win the peace in Iraq.

Seriously, sometimes I wonder if there’s a single columnist other than Victor Davis Hanson and me who knows anything about military history. (VDH knows approximately 1000x more than I do, by the way.)

No matter what happens, we aren’t going to get as murderously violent as the Russians did in Afghanistan. We aren’t going to get as lethally brutal as the French did in Algeria. We may not even be willing to get as harsh as the British did in Egypt. Are you noticing a pattern here? All three of those occupying powers eventually wearied of the constant and bloody struggle inherent in remaining top dog in an Arab land and withdrew. Americans, who have rather less staying power, will not last as long as did any of our three predecessors in the region, and furthermore, the use of torture and other unpleasant tactics directly contradicts the “hearts and minds” approach that the world democratic revolution sorts admitted was the base of their strategy.

There are two possibilities now. Widen the war or end it. While it would have been far wiser to withdraw after toppling Saddam’s regime, better late than never. Pat Buchanan suggests that Bush’s move away from the neocons in his administration indicates the latter, while Debka claims that noises on the Syrian border indicate the former. I’m hoping that Mr. Buchanan is correct, as in this case, the best defense is not a good offense.

Vox spots a WND headline:

This column isn’t for sale

Right, when I think integrity, Me-So’s always the first who springs to mind, the lying little would-be Coulterette. I swear, I could write her columns a week ahead of time. Was there ANY chance that she wasn’t going to turn the Williams scandal into personal posturing? That column about how she’s not going to be afraid to TELL HER DADDY if she sees any scary Arabs on the plane still makes me laugh when I think about it.

Or the pilot, whatever it was. Has she written her requisite pro-torture column yet? I don’t know, I don’t bother reading her. I think someone wrote something about ladies who protest too much….

Top 11 Ways to Console a Despondent Packers Fan

11. Even if Brett Favre does retire, it’s hard to imagine J.T. O’Sullivan throwing more than four interceptions against the Vikings secondary.

10. They can’t take away your 2004 NFC North Division Title.

9. Mike Tice will probably keep his job making it easier to beat the Vikings next year.

8. You still won the season series against the Vikings 2-1.

7. None of your players left the sidelines with two seconds left.

And as long as we’re speaking of the Packers’ loss, the Fraters Libertas pointed out the fact that the fake moon on Sunday wasn’t even the most egregiously tasteless Vikings celebration. Antoine Winfield was likely (clearly, I would say), making reference to Najeh Davenport’s little laundry incident with his actions subsequent to his first interception.

Furthermore, Tony Dungy not only explains why he took no exception to Randy Moss, but even explains the significance behind the behind.

Miss O’Hara rips Madison Avenue a new one:

I just saw one of the worst spots of 2004, a Chrysler spot. It shows a rugged, dusty man standing in the desert, his motorcycle broken down along the side of an empty highway. A minivan pulls up, and a sweatpants-wearing, ponytailed woman asks, “Out of gas?” After a nod to the affirmative, the woman opens the back door of her minivan, pushes all of the seats down, puts the motorcycle into the car, straps it down, and they prepare to drive off.

Which is when we get the kicker. In a moment apparently intended to elicit laughs from viewers, our grungy heroine turns to the crumb-cruncher in the backseat and says, with a viciously Hillary-like snidely sneering look and tone, “Daddy just haaaaaad to get a motorcycle – didn’t he….”

I, for one, am sick of this crap. Because if the men aren’t whipped fools, they are homicidal maniacs and/or horomonally driven lechers. Long gone are the days where men in our entertainment were actually men (this probably explains why I like old movies so much). Their women are more mother than lover, apparently unable to distinguish between their dependent children and their grown-up husband, who is perfectly capable of becoming independent very quickly (these days). And even if they aren’t doing the “mother” thing, they are rude, snotty, condescending, and unappreciative of their husbands. You want to know why we have a DINS* epidemic? Because no man alive in his right mind would want to touch that woman, that’s why. If she didn’t shut him down, she’d either ridicule him or bark out orders. Blech.

Can she get an amen? What’s amazing to me is that some of these “men are idiots” commercials are actually shown DURING FOOTBALL GAMES! Yeah, if you want to be sure that young men will avoid marriage like the black plague, just make sure that they’re exposed to plenty of this sort of garbage.

I saw a commercial featuring two kids talking about their parents’ minivans and before an adult even entered the picture I knew that the Dad would be an idiot. Sure enough, the father no sooner buckles himself in than he realizes he has to go to the bathroom. He rushes out of the car as the child rolls his eyes and says “typical”. HA HA HA HA HA… er, wait a minute, that’s just stupid. MESSAGE: fathers are so stupid, you’re fortunate if they don’t urinate on themselves. Buy a minivan.

The irony is that the first commercial is predicated on the target audience’s ignorance of motorcycles. My immediate thought upon reading this was: “since when does anyone run out of gas on a motorcycle?” Space Bunny said her first thought was that maybe the guy was trying to escape the bitch.

I just wonder why on Earth women are so desperate to get married and to turn every casual dating affair into a serious monogamous relationship if they believe men are such drooling fools. (Note the “if”, the statement doesn’t apply to women who actually like men.) The sentiment isn’t that uncommon, as I’ve heard even married Christian women dismissing their highly intelligent, highly paid husbands as incompetents because they don’t know the proper way to stack the tupperware.

“You know how it goes. You’ve seen me put it away a hundred times!” Yeah, well, she may have seen him install device drivers or change the oil a hundred times, but that doesn’t mean she knows how to do it.

The TV culture is really a cancer on society. I watched part of the first Desperate Housewives episode, and I saw a woman poison her allergic husband, another woman punch hers, and a third cheat on hers then successfully fool him about whether the grass had been cut all in about five minutes. If I was a young guy exposed to that as my primary conception of marriage, you’d need a platoon of Force Recon Marines, handcuffs, leg irons, a gag and a voice synthesizer to ever get me married. The show Sex in the City may have led to Desperate Housewives, but in the real world, it’s going to work the other way around.

*DINS=Double Income No Sex. I had to look that one up.

Cologne Archbishop Cardinal Joachim Meisner has issued an apology for remarks made in a sermon comparing abortion to the mass-murder crimes of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Meisner, under pressure after his remarks stirred sharp criticism by the Central Council of Jews in Germany and other groups, said he regretted that his words could be misunderstood and had he thought they would be, then he would not have made them.

“I am sorry that it has come to this,” the Catholic archbishop said about the controversy surrounding his 6 January Epiphany Day sermon in the Cologne Cathedral.

In his sermon, Meisner said “first it was Herod who had the children of Bethlehem killed, then Hitler and Stalin let millions of people be destroyed, and today, in our times, millions of unborn children are being killed”.

Paul Spiegel, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, sharply criticised the sermon, saying that equating abortion to the genocide carried out by the Nazis was an insult to the millions of Holocaust victims. He called on Meisner to apologize.

Let’s see… preaching against the murder of hundreds of millions of unborn children worldwide and comparing it to several historical mass murders is somehow an INSULT? Isn’t using the memory of the Holocaust to prevent future atrocities that the whole freaking point of the phrase NEVER AGAIN? Are you freaking kidding me? I made precisely the same comparison in my column yesterday and if Herr Spiegel wishes to call on me to apologize, I’ll definitely have some words for him.

And while “sorry” might be among them, it will only be an adjective referring to the state of Herr Spiegel’s posterior.

The Jews are far from the only historical victims of genocide. They are not even the most recent victims. Now some of them seem to wish to make make a profession out of running around screaming “never forget” while simultaneously ignoring or even supporting the very same sort of evil being unleashed in places like the Sudan and the abortion clinics around the world.

I’d never understood how the medieval kings found it so easy to get the common people to hate the Jews in their midst. But if those medieval Jewish leaders were anything like the idiots running the ADL, the ACLU and the Council of Jews, one can see where the idea of persecuting them would have held some appeal.

The Jan. 20 presidential inauguration is causing controversy—and religion is at the heart of the strife. Not only is the phrase “under God” in the president’s oath under attack from an atheist who has filed suit to stop any prayers from being said during the ceremony, now crosses have been banned from the inaugural parade.

Critics are calling it religious discrimination and censorship.

The Rev. Patrick Mahoney and the Christian Defense Coalition were granted a permit to hold a prayer vigil and demonstration during the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day. In that permit the list of prohibited “structures” includes crosses—along with bicycles, crates, coffins, cages and statues.

Mahoney is outraged. “Why were crosses singled out over any other religious symbol—the Star of David, Islamic symbols?” Mahoney asked. “This is offensive. It’s, in my view, religious bigotry.”

Apparently there would be no prohibition against a picture of a cross. A Secret Service spokeswoman, who would not consent to a formal interview, nevertheless said the ban is only against “structures” of a cross.

My theory is that the president is merely a vampire. Has he been seen in daylight recently? Oh, sure, I’ve seen the Rose Garden photo ops, but everyone knows that’s just an indoor sound stage.

David Corn of The Nation talks to Armstrong Williams:

“This happens all the time,” he [Williams] told me. “There are others.” Really? I said. Other conservative commentators accept money from the Bush administration? I asked Williams for names. “I’m not going to defend myself that way,” he said. The issue right now, he explained, was his own mistake. Well, I said, what if I call you up in a few weeks, after this blows over, and then ask you? No, he said.

The Elliott Wave GMP predicted less than two weeks ago that there would be a serious second-term scandal for the Bush administration as the bear market resumes. I wonder if we may have just seen the tip of the iceberg with Mr. Williams’ propaganda debacle.

And there’s nothing conservative about someone who takes federal money to commit propaganda. I’m no fan of The Nation, but here’s hoping they smoke out all the secret shills for strong government.

From Sports Illustrated

After Sunday’s game, one intrepid Milwaukee reporter tried to extract a few comments from Moss in the Vikings locker room.

He might as well have been playing the state lottery, because his chances would have been better. The transcript of the colorful exchange is as follows:

Reporter: “Randy, would you take a question?”

Moss: “Everybody but Green Bay, homey. If you’re from Green Bay, the hell with you.”

Reporter: “What about Milwaukee?”

Moss: “Nope. You’re part of Wisconsin, homey.”

The only thing that would improve that interview is if Moss had called the reporter a damn cheesehead and followed it up with another mooning. I don’t know how people can still try to assert that Green Bay’s primary rival is the Bears. The all-time record is practically even, the games are a HUGE deal at every office in Minnesota,

As for the cheeseballs in the media suffering fainting spells over the fake moon on Sunday, get a life, please. That was absolutely hilarious, as most Green Bay fans will readily agree. The Viking-Packer rivalry is intense but is better-natured than most since so many families are split on the matter, and Moss not only took it well but openly cracked up when the UW marching band ragged on him with their WHERE YOU AT MOSS horn section.

Besides, Daunte is so mellow that the Purple need the lunatic distraction that is Randy Moss. A model citizen he isn’t, but he’s an excellent receiver and has a sense of humor and, yes, team spirit* that his evil twin, Terrell Owens, doesn’t.

Speaking of Daunte, I can’t possibly go without commenting on this: 3 games against Green Bay. 12 TD passes. 0 interceptions. Step back! I won’t say that we’re going to beat the Eagles, but I will say that we have a better shot than most people think. Our defense is no match for theirs, but I’ll take Daunte over Donovan every day and twice on Sundays.

*A failure to go 100 percent when the game is all but over does not necessarily indicate a selfish individual. Moss plays hurt and doesn’t throw hissy fits about playing decoy or not getting enough balls like Owens, Rice or even good guy Priest Holmes. If he wasn’t a good teammate, he wouldn’t enjoy the support of players like Nate Burleson, Moe Williams and other solid role players.

UPDATE: Peter King of SI adds: “Tight end Jermaine Wiggins typified what this team was feeling about Moss, which is this: They don’t want him to be traded, under any circumstances. “Randy’s a player,” Wiggins said. “All I care about is he comes to play every Sunday. All the other stuff … if he does it, it’s a big deal. If someone else does it, it’s water under the bridge.””

And since King brought it up, yes, I thought John Randle crawling and lifting his leg like a dog after sacking Favre was funny too. It’s a sport, people, it’s a game. It’s supposed to be fun.

Doug Giles surfs the trend:

It’s been eleven months since we pulled our teenage daughters out of the public school system and started to home school them, and I could kick myself for waiting so long. The educational, emotional, spiritual and physical progress they have made has been amazing. Not that they were anti-intellectual psychologically teetering bloated decadent nut jobs before they started home schooling, it’s just that I’ve been ecstatically stunned at how they have aggressively embraced this new lease on their educational life….

My ClashPoint is this: parent … home schooling isn’t as tough as you think it is. With the advent of online virtual schools, plus the tens of thousands of people who have bailed out of the system, there are afforded to you, the home schooling parent and student, amazing resources, local networks of like-minded families and world-class curricula, to help you help yours be the leaders God intends for them to be.

Initially, I was a bit concerned about how home schooling was going to work within the insanity which is the Giles household, but it has been relatively painless. The adjustments my wife and I have had to make to our routine to accommodate our daughters for greatness are far less painful than the worry and concern we had sending them off to the monkey jungle which is the Public School system.

Good on him and his girls. It’s intriguing to see how conservatives are making a serious investment of time and effort in the future, while Republicans centralize, federalize and work towards ensuring that No Child is permitted to escape the educational gulag.

We’re not heading for a right-wing crackup per se, but it’s only a matter of time before people realize that the Republicans are actually 1960s Democrats. This will be interesting.

WM worries about the poor:

That’s all very nice, but there is some logic to the idea that every child should be a wanted child, isn’t there?

No, there isn’t. Western civilization is dying thanks to that “logic”. Do you really think importing third worlders is going to work in the long term? Here or in Europe?

There is also some logic in not forcing children on the poorest and most vulnerable in our society (the rich will be having abortions at need whether they are legal or not, as always) without providing the means to take care of them.

Yes, because everyone knows how law-abiding the poor are. Wait, I thought poverty caused crime? Anyway, it is one way to get rid of all those disgusting Negroes, isn’t it. Heil Sanger!

Yeah, sure, she shouldn’t have been having unprotected sex in the first place, but it’s a little late for that argument. And of course, conservatives don’t seem to believe in real education about birth control, which doesn’t help matters any.

Teaching children about sex tends to increase sexual activity, surprise, surprise. Why this is controversial puzzles me, since no one denies that teaching a child how to read tends to increase reading activity. By the way, the only place the battle against AIDS in Africa is being won is in Uganda, which is using the much-maligned abstinence approach. Oh, and I’m hardly a conservative. When even Communists are opposing unlimited abortion, the political spectrum becomes fairly useless in discussing the matter.

Forcing women to have children just forces that many further into poverty, and also forces a child to grow up in terrible conditions, often with a mother who is incapable of properly caring for a child.

We could just shoot all the poor people. That would work even better! Plus, they tend to be kind of ugly, too. Everyone wins! Well, everyone who counts, anyhow.

Conservatives love the idea of banning things they don’t like, but don’t always look at the consequences. Before we make such a change, how about we hear about conservatives’ plans to deal with the consequences of such a change. Let’s have an exit plan, please…

This idea that conservatives are the great lovers of social control has become ncreasingly ironic in light of left-liberal attempts to ban every private activity from harboring employee preferences to free speech and smoking. The last I checked, the world was functioning worked before abortion became legal. First world countries were even able to avoid importing third worlders in order to support their massive social infrastructures. I suggest re-reading your economic history and rethinking your assumptions.

Demographics, not democracy, is king.