Sitemeter reports...

Wow. Based on the sitemeter results for my site, I made the right choice in switching to Blogger. Traffic - both in visits and site views - has spiked a lot. I'd encourage any serious tBloggers to make the move if you haven't done so already.

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Military insignia

Need military unit insignia, clip art, or avatars? Check out The Patriotic Avatar & Document site. They've been kind enough to list me among their Military Blogs roundup, which is pretty extensive.

Here's my old unit patch, from the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea:

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Update: The Mudville Gazette's latest Open Post.

Baseball, Tuesday, Al Franken writes a letter

Uhg. It's 10 a.m. and I'm exhausted. I was up covering the first round of the District 17 varsity baseball championships until about 11:30 last night (Knox dropped to Elizabethtown, 10-3, which is actually an improvement from the regular season).

I'm still tweaking the layout here, so bear with while I continue to settle in. The new Star Wars flick is continuing to generate headlines, and I continue to survive without having rushed out to go see it. There was a time in my life where I would have thought that going was very important, but now is definitely not that time.

What else, what else... ah yes. The judicial nominee filibuster business. I would have tried to treat this earlier, but the topic is so boring that my eyes cross whenever I think about it for more than three seconds, which basically precludes writing anything about it. The only way I've been able to get this paragraph out has been to keenly concentrate on the letterhead of the letter I received from Al Franken ("Dear person I haven't met...") asking me to contribute to Free Press.

Which I don't think I'm going to do. Not because of the fact I think Al Franken is an arrogant blowhard, and not because of the fact that I want Clear Channel to burn, but because I don't have a whole lot of extra cash floating around.

Anyway, I should get back to work. Hopefully the coffee will cut this fatigue down a bit.

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Update: Check out the Mudville Gazette's "Zell Miller" post.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the new home of A Healthy Alternative to Work. This space was at one time used for Smokin' News, but I've decided to merge the two projects, and since Smokin' News was getting no attention whatsoever, I figured the best way to do this would be to just move the tBlog site over here.

It'll take a little while to get all the stuff here set up, but Haloscan comments are now back on, so feel free to make suggestions. Meanwhile, give me a couple days to make the move.

Thanks for reading!

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The Middle East must be held accountable

I think the clearest thing that this Newsweek fiasco has put into perspective is that the anti-American sentiment in the Middle East is not founded on any sort of civilized basis. We're dealing with pure, unadulterated religious fanaticism.

Here's a ThisisLondon piece from earlier today. A quote:

Led by a man on a megaphone, they chanted, "USA watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush". A small detail of police watched as they shouted: "Bomb, bomb New York" and "George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head."

Demonstrators in Grosvenor Square, some with their faces covered with scarves, waved placards which included the message: "Desecrate today and see another 9/11 tomorrow."

This is a demonstration protesting an event that didn't happen, let's not forget. But even if it had happened, the last phrase - "Desecrate today and see another 9/11 tomorrow" is telling.

Take a look at this piece by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, titled "Why Islam is Disrespected."

It's strange that in the wake of 17 deaths resulting from riots that were supposedly sparked by this Newsweek piece that the most intense finger-pointing has been aimed at either the Bush administration or American journalism, and not toward the society that breeds the kind of hatred and psychosis that allows murder to happen when an unsavory paragraph is published in a foreign magazine.

Certainly, journalism's standards and practices need a good, hard examination, and it's a shame that the media's Old Guard has been so hesitant to take constructive criticism from any outside source. Trying to excuse Newsweek's gaffe by accusing the Bush administration of deceit is ludicrous on its face, not because of innocence on the part of the administration, but because journalism, as a political entity, has never supposed to have taken its cue - or been granted any kind of ultimate license - from either the goodness or badness of the government and society in which it operates.

But that isn't the point. What's happened is, as the editors of USA Today pointed out in one of the more insightful commentaries published on the issue, a systemic misunderstanding of the Arab world that is now prevalent in western society.What USA Today fails to point out, though, is that the Arab world must be held accountable for its culture.

A certain amount of respect for other cultures is, of course, necessary in any international relations. However, when social policy is driven by fanaticism, there is a failure much more systemic than the one America is experiencing.

As Jacoby points out in his Boston Globe piece, there have never, in recent history, been stories of Christians or Bhuddists rising up en masse, rioting and killing, over perceived "desecrations" to either sect's "Holy Books." There haven't been stories because such things simply do not happen.

On the other hand, because exactly the same thing has happened in the Middle East due to an alleged - and debunked - incident of desecration to the Koran, westerners are wringing their hands and pointing fingers, all the while wondering why we haven't been "sensitive" enough to the "Arab experience."

I don't want to beat this point to death - although that's probably literally what would happen to me if I were to give voice to this opinion in, say, Riyadh - but what needs to happen in the Middle East is a very fundamental change. We can talk about double standards, cultural norms, and the rest until we are blue in the face, but two facts remain: The Middle East, and its supporters, need to extricate themselves from the self-imposed Dark Age they are currently in; and if democracy and/or freedom is going to take root in Iraq or anywhere else in the countries that lie between Egypt and Pakistan, then they must take accountability for the ideology of hatred that is not only supported by the government, it's a packaged product they export.

And let's not forget that the protestors outside the U.S. embassy in London are calling for another 9/11 - another massacre of innocent civilians, despite what Ward Churchill might claim - over a "desecration" that didn't even happen.

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Update: Head over to the Mudville Gazette's Open Post when you're through here.

Update: Michael Jericho has photos over at Odysseus.

Norman Mailer advertises the fact that he's cracked

We're back in the land of idiots again, and I'm going to have to point the finger this time at renowned novelist Norman Mailer, who is currently on the staff - such as it is - of the Huffington Post.

Mailer suggests that what's happened to Newsweek could be an example of "Intelligence 101A," a discreditation of a source by means of feeding them false information:

If you want to discredit a Dan Rather or a Newsweek crew, just feed them false information from a hitherto reliable source. You learn that in Intelligence 101A.

Norm, I'm sorry, but your 82-year-old brain (remember to use numerals, Norm, if the number is 10 or greater) may need a checkup. Mailer writes that this whole thing wound up being too neat and tidy for "one side" - the U.S. government's - to have been a coincidence, and that the entire thing stinks of conspiracy.But even he realizes his accusations are ridiculous, except perhaps as a sequel to Harlot's Ghost:

Obviously, I can offer no proof of any of the above. There still resides, however, under my aging novelist's pate a volunteer intelligence agent, sadly manque.

Well. When someone basically calls himself senile, there's not much left for me to do, I suppose. Is anyone, other than the kids over at The Nation, taking this seriously? Fictional tales - from a novelist, I might add - about "our agents in Pakistan" inciting riots to smear the reputation of an innocent news magazine that acted on intelligence received in good faith from a formerly-reliable source turned federal spy?

Come on, Norman! The only person this could possibly benefit is you, when you come up with the plot of your next anti-American paperweight.

But by all means, keep posting stuff like this up at Arianna's place. Between Norman Mailer and Al Franken, I think they've got a great team together there to punch holes in the hull of a ship that was doomed before she set sail.

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Looking at the Newsweek fiasco

It's about damn time I got heavily into this Newsweek business, since I think I've got a couple valid points to bring up. I know the story has been done to death in the blogosphere, but I think this is a great opportunity to mention a couple glaring inconsistencies, point a couple fingers, and also rip on the Huffington Post to boot.

Let's look at the facts of the case so far. Newsweek publishes a story by Mike Isikoff alleging that U.S. troops had disgraced Muslim prisoners by flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet.The story was met with outrage across the Muslim world, and 17 people were killed in the resultant riots.

After a rather awkward pause, Newsweek retracted the story, but remained under pressure from the White House (at least Scott McClellan) to go further than simply retract the article, suggesting that Newsweek run a piece detailing the rather extensive list of standards and practices the U.S. military has in place to ensure cultural sensitivity.

Okay. In addition to these facts, I think there are a few things we can agree on:

1) Newsweek was hasty and slipshod in rushing this piece to press without fact-checking. Isikoff's source is "unnamed," and whatever information he had should have been backed up by corroborating accounts from people willing to go on the record.

2) The story caused significant damage to the already shaky reputation of the U.S. government and military in the Middle East.

3) It's impossible to flush a Koran - or even a pocket-sized Gideon's Bible - down the toilet.

Here's what I've found in terms of the spectrum of reactions online:

1) The Newsweek-should-burn theory: Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths of the 17 people killed in the riots that occurred after the article's publication.

2) The Why-the-hell-should-anyone-think-that-people-are-going-to-be-killed-over-a-Newsweek-story theory: Newsweek may indeed have rushed their story to publication, but how were they supposed to know that the reaction would be death and mayhem?

3) The Newsweek-may-be-bad-but-Bush-is-worse theory: 17 deaths based on false information is much "less bad" than the thousands who have died due to the president's decision to go to war in Iraq in the first place.

The third view is laughable, and it's the one being trumpeted by Arianna Huffington and her super-celeb-blog-friends at the Huffington Post. Let's get something straight here. Whatever your position on the White House's policies is, there is no instance in which the government's actions serve as an excuse for lesser wrongdoing by the press.

Here's how it works. We elect slimy cash-whores to represent us at the state and federal levels, mostly because we only have the choice between one or more slimy cash-whores. They tend to be the only ones willing to do it. We know they're willing to sell each and every one of us out if the worm turns, and it's the press' job to let us know when that's happening, or when the slimy cash-whores become slimier, greedier, or sluttier.

The first perspective is tempting, but even if Newsweek slandered the United States intentionally, I don't know if they could have predicted the actual reaction from the radical Muslim world.

So there's the second perspective, which basically blames the Middle East for overreacting to something that clearly isn't worth killing anyone over. I like that idea, because we tend to get away from the idea that there is a certain level of psychosis required to saw someone's head off on a video camera, or to fly airliners full of people into skyscrapers full of people, and there seems to be plenty to go around.

But the press ought to have a better sensitivity to what they're doing, as explained by Wretchard inthis post at The Belmont Club.

Times have changed, Wretchard says, and as the military has had to alter their understanding of the acceptability of "collateral damage," so too should the press.

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Who decides whether Terri Schiavo lives?

U.S. District Judge James Whittemore, the federal judge appointed by congress to determine whether Terri Schiavo, a 41-year-old brain-damaged woman who has been in an unconscious state since 1990, should have her feeding tube reinserted, said today that he would not order the tube be reinserted.

This story has been one of the leading headlines across both the blogosphere and network media outlets. I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I’m not exactly sure where I stand.

Schiavo is currently in what is described as a permanent vegetative state by neurologists. “No one has ever come back from such a condition, according to the American Academy of Neurology,” the MSNBC story reads.

However, she is alive, and the feeding tube is the only artificial process used to keep her that way. She is able to breathe on her own, from what I understand.

Therefore, removing the feeding tube to “let her die” is literally starving her to death. Not exactly the painless “just letting her go” process some are making it out to be.

National Review Online’s editors say that the case demonstrates that existing safeguards against “assisting suicides” of those who do not want assisted suicide are insufficient, since, they write, the evidence that Schiavo would have wanted to be deprived of food and water if unconscious is “sketchy at best.”

Does anyone have the right to make this determination? There is certainly an element in me that understands the desire to remove the tube – if I were in the same state, I’m certain I’d hope that someone would do that for me. But who could rightly make that determination?

Would it be my spouse, who had legal guardianship, but remarried and had children by someone else in the interim? Would it be my parents, who might disagree with my legal guardian? Would it be Congress, the president, or a U.S. District Court judge?

When it comes down to it, I don’t think any of them have a say in the matter. In fact, not even I would, really. I don’t think the state should subsidize or support suicide, nor should it be left to the state to decide who “wants” to let themselves die.

But this is certainly a tough case.

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BRAC - Could it hit Knox?

My editor stopped by the sports desk today and gave me a present: "Everything You Know Is Wrong." He’s in the process of moving, and, as a newspaper editor of some tenure, has amassed what I can only guess is a huge library. He said more is on the way. Thanks!

A hot-button topic in military communities these days is the Base Realignment and Closure program (BRAC), which was instituted in the 1990s and aims to consolidate military assets – necessarily resulting in shutting some down.

Bases have significant impact on the surrounding community, not the least of which is financial. Federal dollars pour into the paychecks of the servicemembers and civilians who work there, and are in turn eagerly spent.

This article just appeared in the News-Enterprise: Study projects life after BRAC.Apparently, a federally-funded study is going on to examine what the impact on surrounding communities would be if Fort Knox were to, say, shut completely down (like Fort Dix, New Jersey, for example).

But here’s the official line:

Officials say that's not cause for alarm, insisting the study is entirely separate from the 2005 round of Base Realignment and Closure and in no way hints that Fort Knox could be on a list of closing installations.

Maybe... but the signs are ominous at best. Fort Knox Garrison is out of money and talks are underway to get the Fort Knox schools absorbed into the Hardin County district. Not exactly the kind of things that bespeak a flourishing installation.

There are other telltale signs, as well - last year, one of the big stories was the institution of the Warrior Transition Course, a program to retrain former servicemembers from other branches, or Army soldiers with a significant break in service, and enter them into the active-duty Army.

While the course is still running here, there won’t be many more cycles at Fort Knox. WTC is moving to Fort Bliss, Texas, in the near future.Rumors have a tendency to build their own momentum, but unfortunately, the Department of Defense has forbidden base commanders, public affairs shops, and any other representatives from commenting on BRAC.

So nothing on the subject will appear in tenant publications, and, I suppose, no constructive comments will appear in interviews for articles in independent civilian publications.Down the memory hole, as they say.

Now it’s time for the OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER:

The views expressed on this website do not necessarily represent the positions held by the United States government, the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, the Installation Management Agency, the Fort Knox Garrison, the Fort Knox Public Affairs Office, the Turret, or anyone else other than the author, who is a lower-enlisted soldier and ergo has no access to the Truth.

Hooah.

Cue up some more Toby Keith.

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Goodnight, Doctor Thompson.

I’ve been scrounging the wires and blogosphere for more on the death of Hunter S. Thompson, self-professed outlaw journalist, and the author of many strange and pointed commentaries on America and the "American Dream," and it’s hard to find anyone with the words to describe the impact he had on American writing, literature, and culture.

Tblogger juniperflux sent me this link to the Associated Press obituary.

James Lileks responds, somewhat coldly, but with some admiration as well: I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman – meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read "Hell's Angels." That was a man who could hit the keys right.

Sadly, Thompson’s latest writings, the column "Hey, Rube!" on ESPN.com fell depressingly short of his earlier work - Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, Songs of the Doomed, Generation of Swine, The Great Shark Hunt, and many others.

But it is that body of work that will be remembered, along with his legendary ability to project himself into a situation, usually while full of mind-altering chemicals, and become an important part of the story himself, and emerge eventually holding reams of scrawled notes and miles of audiotape that he would turn into a gripping commentary not only on what he’d set out to cover, but the state of American society itself – it was this that he eventually came to call "gonzo journalism."

I came to Thompson late in the game, and probably by one of the cheapest channels - Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. I was in college, at a friend’s house. A party was announced down at the riverside, but a friend and I had noticed the opening credits of the movie, with blood spattering across the black screen to form the title. From the first words - We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold - we were mesmerized. The rest of the crowd filtered away, but Joey and I stayed.

I read the book as soon as I could get my hands on it, and was amazed at Thompson’s almost crazed take on narrative. There are moments of hilarity, fear, and reckless use of drugs, but there was something else in there, too... something that strung it all together, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I went to a conservative Catholic college, but the library had one book by Thompson - his first, Hell’s Angels. Written before he had plunged headlong into the acid culture of ‘60s San Francisco, Hell’s Angels is a chronicle of time Thompson spent with the Angels, who were then a ferocious group of outlaws who claimed that no law enforcement agency in the country could contain them. Originally setting out to do a freelance newspaper piece on the gang, who had gained notoriety in California after allegations of a gang-rape arose, Thompson eventually wound up spending nearly a year with the Angels, buying a huge Triumph motorcycle himself to ride on with them as they cruised the West Coast striking fear into the hearts of citizens and lawmen wherever they went.

I could go on for ages about Thompson’s work, and how each piece somehow captures a weird, specific moment in time, from the minutiae of his hotel room’s furnishings to the greater conflicts plaguing society at the time, but I think this quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, thoughtfully transcribed at Tim Blair, sums it up well:

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—that kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run...

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was ... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ...

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

That was around 34 years ago, and now, on a rainy Presidents’ Day near his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, I offer The Good Doctor my fondest farewell, and sincerest thanks for the impact he’s had on me and, I’m sure, countless others.

He wasn’t understood by everyone, he was hated by some, but I know there are those of us who will miss him dearly.

R.I.P., Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005.

Jose Canseco: Stool pigeon, baseball hero

Well, it's been a while since I updated here, but I figured I'd provide a preview for the upcoming Turret sports commentary -- you know, for all you faithful readers out there.

Jose Canseco: Stool pigeon, baseball hero
By Spc. Ian Boudreau
Turret sports editor

At different points during the ‘80s, I spent time learning how to ride a bicycle, watching “Thundercats,” and reading “Boys Life.”

But for a couple years I devoted untold amounts of change found in the family sofa and my dad’s pockets to baseball cards. I wasn’t very good about keeping them in order or preserved, and I didn’t know a lot of the players. I do remember, however, opening a pack of Upper Deck cards and finding the coveted image of Jose Canseco.

This was in 1988, and Canseco earned the American League’s MVP award while playing for Oakland, and every kid in my third grade class was green with envy when I brought his card to school the next day.

I left the card in my desk that Friday, and found on Monday that someone – presumably from the weekend’s Sunday school class – had stolen it.

My Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame in third grade were up, and Canseco’s would end several years later. In his own words, he was “blackballed” from MLB following accusations of steroid use (as well as other erratic behavior, such as a penchant for handguns).

Well, Canseco is back now, peddling a “tell-all” book called “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big,” in which he calls several members of the 500-plus home run club out for using illegal steroids, including MLB-favorite Mark McGwire and self-professed juicer Jason Giambi.

Canseco’s expressed attitude toward steroid use is blasé at its most critical, and almost adulatory at its least, but he’s certainly aware that he’s adding even more fuel to the flames of the ongoing steroid controversy in the major leagues.

Now, folks may be scratching their heads wondering, “Where does Jose Canseco get off snitching on current baseball players? Isn’t this a case of sour grapes?”

Well, in a word, yes. But it’s a valuable case of sour grapes, if you ask me.
No one might have been willing to publish Canseco’s tale two years ago, but with the recent BALCO testimonies leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle, steroids use is a hot-button issue in professional sports now, and suddenly analysts across the country are wondering how to stem the tide of illicit drug use in sports.

The increases in testing and penalties haven’t as yet been very impressive, and it’s only effectively created a system where steroid-users have a couple more hoops to jump through to avoid getting caught.

But baseball is going to be hard-pressed to do anything else. Yet, reputations are still at stake, and the “Canseco Method” may prove to be a more effective deterrent than fines, suspensions, and additional testing.

The danger, of course, is that baseball could turn into a juiced version of bloody Renaissance revolutions in France and England, with accusations flying in one player’s word against another’s. But I’d say that the chance to eliminate performance-enhancing drugs from professional sports is well worth the risk.

And there’s no doubt that we’ll be in for some serious disappointments, whether the league decides to pursue accused juicers or not. McGwire, for example, and his many fans will have to give up his cherished record numbers, or at least learn to live with the dreaded asterisk in the books.

One way or another, baseball’s going to have to start working on a zero-tolerance basis when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs. Whether Canseco makes a few bucks off the controversy is immaterial. I’m just hoping that his book is able to put the fear of public opinion into potential steroid users in Major League Baseball.

And to whoever sat at my desk for Sunday school 16 years ago: I want my Jose Canseco card back.

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The people of Iraq have spoken

We, too, born to freedom, and believing in freedom, are willing to fight to maintain freedom. We, and all others who believe as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on receiving the degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford University, June 19, 1941

Millions of Iraqi citizens demonstrated their position on democracy and freedom yesterday, braving threats of car bombs, mortar attacks, and outright murder to travel - on foot - to polling centers across the country.

At present, precise turnout figures for the 14 million eligible Iraqi voters are unavailable, but the Associated Press reports that election officials said the turnout was higher than the anticipated 57 percent. That means that at least 8 million Iraqi citizens ignored not only the threats to their lives made by "freedom fighters," but also the messages sent by the insurgencies leaders.

"We declare a bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to enact it," Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said in a Jan. 23 Internet recording. "Democracy is also based on the right to choose your religion, [and that] is against the Rule of God."

Osama bin Laden declared that anyone who took part in the Iraqi elections "are apostates who should not be prayed over upon their deaths. They cannot inherit, and they must not be inherited from [after their deaths]. Their wives are divorced from them, and they must not be buried in Muslim cemeteries."

These leaders of the violent anti-American faction in Iraq - who have been called insurgents, freedom fighters, rebels, terrorists - have been disavowed by the citizens of Iraq. Regardless of the long struggle ahead required to nurture a democratic Iraq into stability, the people have spoken: theirs is a love of freedom, not fascism. No longer can bin Laden and Zarqawi be considered the heads of the "populist resistance" or the "minutemen" of Iraq. Instead, the people’s overwhelming support for the democratic elections has cast them into a very different - and much more accurate - light: they are terrorists.

Not grassroots organizers of a movement against American imperialism, not the voice of the people who want to throw off the yoke of American expansionism. Their goals are diametrically opposed to the goals of the Iraqi people.

And yet, there are still those who refuse to see the success of the Iraqi elections for what it is. Writers on our own shores feel the need to trivialize what so many Iraqis risked life and limb to accomplish yesterday, to turn it into yet another machination of the Big Bad Bush conspiracy theory.

Take The Nation's John Nichols, for example. In this article, he claims that the entire election has been a "charade." To wit:

That democracy has been denied in Iraq is beyond question. The charade of an election, played out against a backdrop of violence so unchecked that a substantial portion of the electorate-- particularly Sunni Muslims--avoided the polls for reasons of personal safety, featuring candidates who dared not speak their names and characterized by a debate so stilted that the electorate did not know who or what it is electing.

Nichols, of course, ignores the fact that an amazing number of Iraqi voters did turn out for the election, and in doing so slights the risks that they took in order to cast their vote for democracy.

A brief tour through the comments sections of the Democratic Underground reveals even more unconscionable defeatism (however, you've got to be fast, since site moderators are quick to delete "embarrassing" comments or anything from the "opposition"). Thanks to Instapundit for the tip.

For some, no outcome in Iraq will ever be good enough, and no step taken by the current administration will be above reproach.

But in the end, the crying and gnashing of teeth from the western left will amount only to a heap of wasted words and hot air, since the Iraqis themselves have told the world what they want. Every Iraqi citizen with a finger stained in indelible purple ink has stood up against the glorified insurgents and spoken in support of a new era of freedom in Iraq - freedom that has been a direct result of the United States' willingness to give people the ability to rise from their knees and shake off tyranny.

Seymour Hersh - the Sluggard's Bob Woodward

It always warms my heart to hear the rantings of someone who's become so caught up in their own notoriety that they've become unable to say anything coherent.

Take Pulitzer Prize-winning "journalist" Seymour Hersh, who appeared on a Democracy Now! radio broadcast, raving about how the United States has been taken over by cultists.

Hersh never fails to disappoint, at least not when it comes to packing as much bias, innuendo, and uncheckable "facts" into his articles. The radio interview - it's really more of a monologue or diatribe - is no different. To wit:

I can tell you one thing. Let's all forget this word 'insurgency'. It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists.

This is wrong, of course. The people we began the war against were Iraq and the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard. America won that fight, and now the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard are being retrained and helping the United States in its efforts against Musab al-Zarqawi and his gang of thugs.

Michael Moore would call them "minutemen," but nothing could be further from the truth. Zarqawi, the bin Laden-appointed "prince" of al Qaeda in Iraq, recently had this to say: "We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology... Democracy is also based on the right to choose your religion against the rule of God."

It's clear even back here at Fort Knox, Ky., that the war has changed dramatically - shifted gears, so to speak, from a ground war to a house-to-house police action, with occasional flare-ups of activity.

Since Knox is the Army's home of cavalry and armor, the command likes to emphasize the role of the M1-series Abrams main battle tank in the Iraq theater. I spoke about it with the public affairs officer, who wondered what we could do to get more tank photos into the paper. I suggested that it seemed to me that we were past the point where the Abrams would typically be used - namely, making large-front pushes to take over territory.

Tacticians will cite exceptions, of course, and it's true that America's heaviest ground-based weapons platform has been used since operations shifted to counter-insurgency. But generally speaking, the blitzkrieg mode is over, and now the "war" has changed. It doesn't involve maps of entire countries, with broad red arrows sweeping over hundreds of miles of terrain anymore - instead, major activities are establishing security and stability.

What I'm getting at is that we're no longer at war with Iraq - we're at war with Zarqawi and those others who would seek to prevent democracy from taking root in a country that's been traditionally absolutist. I think it's crucial that when the word "war" is thrown around vis a vis operations in Iraq that this distinction is understood implicitly.

So back to our friend Hersh and his desire to eliminate the usage of the word "insurgents" when it comes to who we’re fighting in Iraq. Since the blitzkrieg is over, and we’re finished fighting the nation of Iraq, and since the only Iraq that exists right now is the one whose infrastructure is being administrated by the United States, and since we’re fighting groups that seek to drive the United States out of Iraq, I’d say that by Hersh’s own definition of the word, we are fighting insurgents.

Hersh also lists a couple "facts" in his Democracy Now! interview:

On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages.

Characteristic. To Hersh, "facts" are just whatever things he happens to believe.

And I’d venture to guess that it’s the same impulse that leads people to believe Hersh whenever he says anything: he makes statements that are convenient to believe if you’re in the Evil Government Conspiracy camp, so there’s no sense in checking facts – we wouldn’t want to weaken our belief system, would we?

Basically, Hersh is attractive to those who feel the need to believe in a dark corporate/cultists conspiracy that’s taking over our country. As Max Boot said in this commentary in the L.A. Times, speaking on comparisons of Hersh to Bob Woodward:

Hersh, on the other hand, is the journalistic equivalent of Oliver Stone: a hard-left zealot who subscribes to the old counterculture conceit that a deep, dark conspiracy is running the U.S. government. In the 1960s the boogeyman was
the ‘military- industrial complex.’ Now it's the ‘neoconservatives.’ ‘They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military!’ Hersh ranted at UC Berkeley on Oct. 8, 2004.

See, life is more exciting if there’s a Big Bad Wolf to be looking out for... and it’s also more convenient. When all problems can be blamed on a "neoconservative cabal" that’s overrun the government, well, not only can we group everyone who disagrees with us into that disparaging category, we can also paint ourselves to be the downtrodden and repressed – definitely an advantageous position to whine from.

And this mentality is by no means confined to Sy Hersh and his disciples. If I hear the words "librul media’s agenda" one more time, I can’t promise I’ll be able to keep from becoming violent.

As I said, people create these groupings because it’s convenient. The only reason the word "agenda" exists in terms of politics is because of laziness.

Okay, that’s definitely enough for now. Stay tuned!

-30-

Geneva Conventions?

Hah... some perspective on the torture vs. Geneva Conventions debate from ScrappleFace:

Bin Laden Seeks Geneva Ruling on Beheadings

by Scott Ott

(2005-01-07) -- Al Qaeda chief executive Usama bin Laden today requested a formal ruling from the U.N. Human Rights Commission on how to conduct beheadings of civilian and military prisoners in ways that comply with the Geneva Conventions.

"Al Qaeda seeks the global credibility that comes only from adherence to the Geneva Conventions," Mr. Bin Laden wrote. "Specifically we want to know what kind of cutlery is permissible, guidelines for videotaping the beheading and any advice about dealing with crowds as they burn, hang and mutilate the corpses of the infidels."

Sen. Ted Kennedy, on the day after he sharply questioned Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, welcomed Mr. Bin Laden's gesture and suggested that the Bush administration would "do well to emulate Al Qaeda's respect for international protocols on prisoner treatment."

Flushing the Mets' budget

Hey folks. Again, I've neglected this blog in favor of insanity at work and the occasional screed on the tBlog site.

In any case, here's the sports commentary I did for this week's Turret.

The Mets are Flushing their payroll

In the great city of New York, right in downtown Queens at the foot of Long Island, there’s a place called Flushing. It’s a bit ironic, because the name is also a good word for what the township’s Major League team, the New York Mets, are doing to their payroll: flushing it down the toilet.

Their first great move this off-season was to sign Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez. When it happened, I questioned his ability to pass the physical examination administered by the Mets’ new doctor. Apparently, the $52 million they signed him for spoke louder than the bum shoulder that’s kept him off as much as on the active roster for the past several years.

If Martinez does anything worthwhile for the Mets, I’ll eat my beret. It isn’t going to happen.
Weighing in with a hefty seven year, $119 million contract is the former Astros center fielder Carlos Beltran, who’s getting a signing bonus of $11 million.

"I hope Houston fans understand, because I’m very grateful to them," Beltran told ESPN.
I almost got coffee up my nose when I read that today. Sure, Carlos. You sound grateful. Just not THAT grateful, right?

I guess being the toast of the town in Houston isn’t quite as valuable as being the tenth player ever to be worth over $100 million.

Beltran is also pegged to be the "face of the Mets" from now on... whatever that means.

But Beltran and old Pedro aren’t the only newcomers to the greater New York City area.

Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Randy Johnson is moving to the Bronx. This is probably much more upsetting for Red Sox fans than it is for me, but I find it worth noting that Johnson – who looks a bit like a country boy who’s just found himself in the Big City – is already running into "fitting in" problems.

On his way to a physical required for the trade, he grabbed the lens of a photographer who was taking his photo on a downtown Gotham sidewalk.

But we’ve got plenty of time to think about baseball. Right now, it’s really time to think about the NFL playoffs, right?

In the shocking and appalling section, we’ve got the Vikings’ Randy Moss being held to the flames over an end zone stunt in which he pretended to "moon" the audience. He’s probably going to receive a $5,000 fine, which is a little steep considering the fact that he didn’t actually do anything.

But of course, when you consider the fact that he’s making $5 million this season, I suppose it’s not a big deal.

So far, the Vikings have crushed Green Bay, the Colts humiliated the Broncos, and the Jets will be heading to Pittsburgh to take on the Steelers this Sunday. Meanwhile, I predict Peyton Manning will take the Colts to New England, where they’ll suffer a withering defeat.
Happy playoffs!