Sadly, No!

Defend Mitt Romney that is. God, I already feel filthy just saying that. But I have to do it. Blame the Cornertards, starting with Byron York, then again, then the Pod Person, then Romney’s paramour, the Wingnut Pork Genie. Gah.

Romney’s an idiot for announcing at America’s most flaming anti-semite of the 20th century, Henry Ford’s museum, but he’s absolutely right to announce in front of — indeed, to be proud of his familial connection with — a Rambler. First, York misidentifies the make of the car — it’s not a Ford Fairlane, it’s a Rambler Classic in what looks like 660 trim. But why does this kar krap even matter? Because the only good thing George Romney, Mitt’s Daddy, ever did was save and vastly improve the American Motor Company, the last independent American carmaker; George Romney was a damn good businessman.

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People always ask questions like this: “If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book with you, what book would it be?”

It would be a book on how to survive on a desert island, okay? Jeez.

That established, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. It’s an ancient-tech fire-starting tool, used by tribes in Southeast Asia (and perhaps elsewhere), that ignites a little wad of tinder via the same principle as the Diesel engine. You whack it with your hand, and the air pressure inside produces heat up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

(Small vid file here.)

Diesel power! Talk about a car-go cult! [ha ha chuckle ahem]

Seriously though, don’t get me started on atlatls. I’m really digging the atlatl.

Atrios sez:

Schaller argues that Bush has pretty much destroyed everything the Republicans have spent the last few decades building. I think it might take a little bit longer for the damage to be lasting, but it looks like that little bit longer will continue to happen. None of the Republican presidential candidates are really breaking from Bush. The Republicans in Congress aren’t either. It’s actually weird. There’s this sense that at any moment the damn will burst and they’ll all be fighting over who hates Bush the most, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t think it’ll ever happen. Sure it would, if they were normal people. But they’re not; they’re wingnuts. And it’s not in the wingnut character to abandon Bush and the Iraq Crusade. They’re zealots and the Bush administration is their Masada.

I think history’s behind me on this point: think of the masses of dumbfucks who voted Republican in 1976. Of all times for a voting bloc to give up the ghost — what with Carter being a centrist Democrat on top of the Nixon/Ford disgrace — it was then. But it didn’t happen; they made what should have been an anti-Republican landslide a fairly close election.

Bush cannot be the Republican LBJ because of the nature of the Republican mindset. When we disapprove of our guys, we turn on them, as we did Johnson. When wingnuts disapprove of their guy, they try to reform him to the bitter end.

They’ll never give up and they’ll never stay home from the polls (whatever their threats to that effect). Two generations of them have been radicalized. Bushism — by which I especially mean jingoism in general and Middle East mayhem in particular, along with hardcore Jesus Freakery on the domestic front — is now a permanent part of their identity politics. They’re dead-enders.

Where Max Boot, a clever jingo, has said ‘pass’ to the Reichwing‘s ongoing Teutonification Project:

The media aren’t the enemy in Iraq
Blaming the press for the problems in Iraq deflects the blame from where it belongs.
January 10, 2007

IF WE WIND UP losing the war in Iraq, as now appears likely (though not inevitable), many conservatives know who to blame: the press, or, in blogger-speak, the MSM (mainstream news media). Just as it did during the Vietnam War, a myth is likely to develop in which America’s valiant fighting men and women were stabbed in the back by unpatriotic, even treasonous, reporters.

[…]

If we fail to achieve our goals in Iraq — which the administration defines as a “unified, stable, democratic and secure nation” — it won’t be the fault of the ink-stained wretches or even their blow-dried TV counterparts. To argue otherwise deflects blame from those who deserve it, in the upper echelons of the administration and the armed forces. Perhaps that’s the point.

Above: Reading material for Yoshi.

Adam Yoshida triumphantly cuts to the front of the line:

The Knife and the Back
From the very beginning what has frightened me most about the Global War on Terrorism is this: that the United States and the West simply do not, in their present condition, have the stomach to bring this war to a successful conclusion. I have never really been given a satisfactory answer to the question, “how do you win a war against the enemy in front of you while ignoring the knife-wielding enemy behind you?�

At every step, the left – and its many allies on the rest of the political spectrum – have sought to obstruct all efforts to win this war. At every turn they’ve handcuffed our forces and circumscribed our options.

[…]

rather than join in the effort to defeat this enemy, certain treasonous elements within lurking here at home have seized the opportunity for their own petty political advantage – or, in certain cases, out of genuinely-felt but nonetheless objectively evil moral principles.

The enemy within acts as a form of heavy artillery on behalf of the wider enemy conspiracy.

[..]

When liberals betrayed us during Vietnam and stabbed our soldiers and our allies in the back, the result was millions of dead. Not that many people noticed because it happened in a far away land about which we know little. But, if we let them pull off their betrayal this time, the millions of dead will be in our own cities. They will come from our own towns and our own homes.

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Hugh Hewitt, in an effort to defend the “fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth“, offers the following:

Let A Thousand Team Bs Bloom: Douglas Feith Deserves Our Thanks
There is No Category of “Inappropriate� Activities

[…]

Team B members, all approved by the CIA, included Harvard political scientist Richard Pipes; Gen. Daniel Graham, who had headed the Defense Intelligence Agency; Paul Nitze, a former deputy secretary of defense; Gen. John Vogt, the former Air Force chief of staff; Thomas Wolfe, a top Rand Corp. executive; Gen. Jasper Welsh, the head of the Air Force’s system analysis; and Paul Wolfowitz, who was at the Arms Control Agency.

The three topics selected by the National Security Council were:

* Soviet missile accuracy
* The ability of low-flying U.S. bombers to penetrate Soviet defenses
* Overall Soviet strategic capabilities and intentions

[…]

The same data produced two startlingly different results. On the issue of Soviet missile accuracy, for example, Team A concluded that Soviet missiles were relatively inaccurate (¼ of a nautical mile), and therefore did not pose a major threat to U.S. silos; whereas Team B concluded that Soviet missiles may have attained sufficient accuracy (1/15th of a nautical mile) to threaten these same silos. ( As Soviet missile testing later revealed. Team B turned out to be correct on this issue.)

The lesson of this extraordinary disputation was not that the Soviet Union had a greater or lesser capacity but that intelligence estimates, no matter how objective they may seem, are an inherently uncertain enterprise, based on questionable assumptions and selective exploitation of sources.

[…]

With this background we turn to the report of the interim inspector general of the Department of Defense who is not a fan of independent analysis of the intelligence community’s work product by the Department of Defense. The Defense Department undertook just such an analysis in 2002 when the Bush administration wanted to know whether or not Iraq was cooperating with al Qaeda.

“It’s healthy to criticize the CIA’s intelligence,” said former Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith on “Fox News Sunday.” “What the people in the Pentagon were doing was right. It was good government.”

It was indeed “good government” to push for a Team B approach to the question of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda[.]

Good one, Hugh! Everyone should agree that propaganda, manufactured in an ideological meth-lab by retards raised on wingnut welfare, which turns out to not only be wholly inaccurate but disasterously so, is ‘good government’.

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Two blegs, back to back! You can call me Doughy Pantload now. But I have to ask: Does anyone know who David Frum is trying to smear here in this crappy piece of neocon magical-realism?

I mean, obviously it’s a ‘Realist’ — someone who, since they’re not a neocon like Frum, doesn’t find their reputation automatically in the toilet where it belongs because of the bloodbath disaster that is Iraq, but I wonder who, specifically, he has in mind? Frum really hates ‘Realists’. They inspire the best in him. Spite, bitterness; ‘for hate’s sake, he stabs at thee’. Plus a heavy dose of self-pity. You know the litany. Google ‘Frum’ and ‘Colin Powell’ and you’ll see what I mean; ‘Realists’ are the only people he hates more than Arabs and Leftists. Well, okay, maybe not more than Arabs. But Frum’s really outdone himself with the bile this time, and the specifics don’t seem right to be about Powell.

I bet Steve Clemons would know.

***
Bonus blast from the past: Frum’s attempt at blogiterature pales in comparison to this classic, majesterial flurry of creativity by ‘Richard Perle’, Frum’s sometime writing partner. I think I know who’s responsible for some of the more purpley passages in An End To Evil, and it ain’t the Wingnutien.

Bradford Plumer is worried:

[W]henever I start talking about how I think a war with Iran is a very real possibility in the near future. [People reply to the effect that] “Bush isn’t that crazy,” etc., etc. An apparently “exasperated” Robert Gates made his own denials this weekend: “I don’t know how many times the president, Secretary Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran.”

Of course he’s that crazy; he’s on a mission from God, after all. Also, there are the political ramifications, or, rather, the lack thereof: freedom’s just another word for nothing political left to lose. It’s easy to imagine that when one’s approval rating gets so low, and one is a lame duck, one ceases to care about how the latest Crusade-To-Certainly-End-In-Disaster will play in Peoria. Or as (hold your nose) Niall Ferguson puts it:

It will clearly take more time for the Army and Marine Corps to master this new kind of [anti-insurgent] warfare, though they’re certainly trying. There is, however, an alternative option to this hard slog — and it is evidently an option that Bush finds tempting. Why not revert to fighting the easier kind of asymmetrical war the U.S. is equipped to fight by launching airstrikes against Iran?

You can see why the president might be contemplating such a course of action. Strategically, Iran is a threat: pressing on regardless of sanctions against its nuclear weapons program and lending support to Shiite militias in Iraq. Politically, Bush has nothing to lose. And, militarily, he can be sure that the Air Force will take out at least some Iranian nuclear installations.

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Ah, Michelle Malkin. Will you ever stop being a loon propagandist?

Obama: Soldier deaths = “Wasted” lives
By Michelle Malkin · February 12, 2007 04:39 PM

Sen. Barack Obama’s nutroots are showing. RedStateLady has the video of Obama arguing that each and every member of the military who volunteered to serve and died in Iraq wasted his/her life:

Transcript:

OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.

The audience roared with cheers and applause.

This is a neat little trick. Michelle and the Wingnet are trying to make it so that any statement opposing the war is interpreted as a slam on the troops.

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No Chickenhawks of the Sea here:

Navy may deploy anti-terrorism dolphins

By THOMAS WATKINS, Associated Press Writer 28 minutes ago

SAN DIEGO – Dozens of dolphins and sea lions trained to detect and apprehend waterborne attackers could be sent to patrol a military base in Washington state, the Navy said Monday. In a notice published in this week’s Federal Register, the Navy said it needs to bolster security at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, on the Puget Sound close to Seattle.

Plainly, any old Flipper can ‘rescue’ a kid for Jesus; these Flippers are somethin’ else, though. They can swim, eat fish, attempt to molest swimmers, and do cute little backflips for cheering throngs at Seaworld. With any luck, they’ve drowned Osama bin Laden already.

And if that’s not enough to scare the be-allah out of the average muslimoliberalhomocommiemexifascist, just wait til they get a load of the next generation of StarkistTroopers.

Hugh Hewitt reaches into his bag of straw men and finds some nicely made up bullshit to throw around — on the site of ABC News no less:

It was indeed “good government” to push for a Team B approach to the question of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, and given the CIA’s failure to understand the WMD situation in Iraq, or predict the civil unrest that has followed the overthrow of Saddam[.]

Hugh — you’re my baby girl, you know that you are, you’re my honeybunch, my sweet lucky star, So put your hand in mine, I will slap your sweet behind:

CIA’s Bleak Outlook On Iraq
Contrary To Bush Team’s Optimism, Civil War Seen As Possibility

Play that funky music white boy:

The Bush administration disregarded intelligence reports two months before the invasion of Iraq which warned that a war could unleash a violent insurgency and rising anti-US sentiment in the Middle East, it emerged yesterday. […] According to Mr Novak, details of the estimate were disclosed by Paul Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the near east and south Asia and one of the officials involved in preparing the report, at a private dinner on the west coast. Mr Pillar told his dinner companions that the White House had disregarded the warnings.

Troy, so troy*:

Yesterday, a government official confirmed that the two prewar reports had sounded clear warnings of a widening struggle for Iraq. The official also noted that the conclusions in the assessment were shared by the entire intelligence community, not just the CIA. [same link]

If you want to know who failed to predict the mess, Hugh, start with these guys.

In conclusion, Hugh reveals that he and Captain Crunch have something in common:

We need a permanent “Team B,” whether housed at the Department of Defense or somewhere else, and staffed by pros overseen by the smartest folks in the world of intelligence gathering. Perhaps it should be a group whose membership is dictated by past positions held — all former secretaries of defense, all former heads of CIA, all former heads of NSA etc. [Emphasis added]

Yes, those very same heads Hugh was returning.

* This is “funnier” if you know Die Fantastischen Vier.