Sadly, No!

Never let it be said that Reagan’s Children aren’t a clever bunch:

Now before the guy over at the aptly named World O’Crap blog loses his composure–which, if his latest vitriolic rant correctly represents his understanding of normal intellectual discourse, might be a good thing–let me state the obvious.

Those are not Cheetoh stains! But wait, Ryan has more (to say, not stains. Well.):

Although many have claimed that Saddam abandoned his WMD programs after 1991, recent tape recordings demonstrate that, as early as 1995, Saddam had concealed from the UN the true extent of his biological weapons program.

And what was the true extent of his biological weapons program when the US decided to “disarm” him? Somewhere between zero and nil?

A tape from 2000 even records a discussion between Saddam and Iraqi scientists in which the dictator indicates his interests in pursuing a nuclear weapon.

Brad R. is interested* in having sex with Angeline Jolie — should she go out and buy condoms now, or can it wait?

In the tapes, Saddam also talks about his clandestine plasma uranium program, which was probably news to weapons officials at the UN.

Yeah, and why would anyone think for even a second Saddam couldn’t pull that off? Oh:

The plasma separation process (PSP) has been studied as a potentially more efficient uranium-enrichment technique that makes use of the advancing technologies in superconducting magnets and plasma physics. […] The only countries known to have had serious PSP experimental programs are the United States and France. PSP became a part of DOE’s Advanced Isotope Separation research and development program in 1976, but development was dropped in 1982 when AVLIS was chosen as the advanced technology of choice. The French developed their own version of PSP, which they called RCI. Funding for RCI was drastically reduced in 1986, and the program was suspended around 1990, although RCI is still used for stable isotope separation.

If you need Ryan, he’ll be conducting further experiments in his polyester-Cheetos separation program.

* Theoretically.

Bradrocket adds: My desire to get it on with Angelina Jolie is more than just a theory.

Also, Seb left out the very best part of Ryan’s post (my emphasis):
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Thanks to Jade for the tip. Apparently Der Spiegel edited an interview with Karen Hughes so that it’s different in the English-language and German-language versions — and translated a sentence that originally read, “[George W. Bush is] a very warm person, he’s a very thoughtful person, he’s a very decent person. He cares deeply about people, he’s a wonderful leader,” into…this:

[Cue foreboding trumpets, crashing cymbals, oompahing tubas.]

‘Führer’ is the German word for ‘leader.’

That’s Davids Medienkritik playing the tubas. We know them from awhile back. They’ve got one of these proudly waving in the tuba-breeze on the site:

That’s the award that the Euro-expat wingnut site No Pasaran! wanted to win (see below), except they were busy clattering down the stairs in a grocery cart, which is what they do over there from day to day.

The charges are as follows:

1) No German would innocently use the word, führer, in such a way. It is practically a curse-word, it is so tied to Hitler — and Spiegel knows this and is attempting to besmirch America with sneaky code-words, which is…Oooh, liberals! Gah, traitors, treason, seize-them!

2) Spiegel edited the interview, taking out certain phrases from the English original.

The second charge is true, and Spiegel seems to have merely dumped the raw interview into the online, English-language article, while editing it for the German-language version — which needed to be set in type for the print magazine. This is a necessary practice, done whenever a piece of text must be made to fit into a certain physical space in a magazine or newspaper. It’s possible to minutely parse what was left in and what was taken out (and the Euro-WingNet is currently doing that with bulging foreheads), but the resulting German-language article is in fact very favorable to Karen Hughes. The title, for instance, is “Mein Job ist die Wahrheit,” when in fact, Hughes’s job is not ‘the truth,’ because she’s an offical White House spin-doctor: Her official job is lying like a big, huge lie-foghorn that constantly blows giant ah-ooga blasts of amazing lies all over the place — and everyone knows it. Nearly all the redacted bits can reasonably be divided into two categories: redundancies, and false statements meant to fool people.

As for the first charge, Sadly, No. And even if the word, ‘führer,’ can have unpleasant connotations (which it certainly can), and even if the editors of Der Spiegel sneakily used the word in a secret attempt to subliminally brainwash its readers into disliking George W. Bush even more than they already do (and that idea, when you think about it, is a wee bit tinfoil-paranoid to say the least) — then, well, who cares? How effective is that technique? If a bunch of us went around pretending to sneeze, but sneakily going, “Bushitler!” would that also be a threat to the geopolitical status quo? Honestly: What’s wrong with you people?

Davids Medienkritik: “It iss ze duty uff ze media uff all countries to zupport ze Amerrrican gufferment.”

What a bunch of Deutschbags.

…Equals, good bands that are better known for the not-so-good stuff they did later.

This first one is personal, in the sense that Norbizness and I have absent-mindedly swatted in each other’s direction over The Damned, so far without evidence submitted to help exalt the wise (that’s me) and shame the foolish (that’s him). Briefly, my take is that they were a fun punk band for a couple of years, then a tremendous, world-class rock band for a few more, then later basically an annoying, pouffy Goth act with the occasional good song. The standard American analysis (which I believe Norb shares) is that they were a great punk band, then everyone over here stopped paying attention to them for awhile, and well, there must be a reason for that.

I’m not going to win this in a single stroke, but this is The Damned at the very tail end of the tremendous-rock-band period, when they still had Captain Sensible on guitar, but after the unfortunate Goth dealo had started to take hold. What I’d really like to post would be a version of ‘Plan 9 Channel 7’ or ‘Melody Lee’ from the Machine Gun Etiquette album, but there aren’t any good ones floating around. That’s the album to swear by, in any case. It’s got it all.

The Damned – ‘Nasty,’ clip from The Young Ones (2:44)

Then there’s the Pretenders. Sure, half the band died, but jeez: If you’re Chrissy Hynde, how do you go from this (and ‘Kid,’ ‘Talk of the Town,’ ‘Birds of Paradise,’ et al.) to ‘I’ll Stand By You’ without realizing that something is hollow? I mean.

The Pretenders – ‘Tattooed Love Boys’ (2:58)

I’m working from a single time-period here, and apologies for that, but most of my examples from later are chronicled all over the place. Like, ‘That second Strokes album wasn’t really all that good,’ and so forth. But Paul Weller — now that’s a career where disappointment lives. The Style Council had like three good songs, and everything Weller, for like the next ten million years, band and solo, was teh suxxor. Gah, but he was so good once.

The Jam – ‘Going Underground’ (3:04)

Dag.

Here’s Powerline.

Ah, it’s No Pasaran! again. We know those guys from awhile back. They have this image proudly displayed on their main page:

Startlingly, they’re even less well-respected than Sadly, No!, because we have one of these laid up for a rainy day, or for when we start to feel tragically unloved:

— and that should tell you something, by God. We’re not exactly at the glimmering pinnacle of sobriety and blogging-ethics.

So, this ditchwater blog full of bonk-headed loonies, No Pasaran! — which is down the ladder from us, even — says “some jackass” from an “umpteenth French human-rights group” said something unspecified on i-Tele. And aspiring ‘MSM’ pundit and Claremont Fellow John Hinderaker takes this hot tip and passes it on, adding a hardy-har dig at ‘human-rights groups.’

Dude, I was watching cable ten minutes ago, and this one jerk from like the millionth conservative group was saying he hopes there’s a really big terrorist attack on America so Bush can suspend the Constitution.

No, really, you can totally go check — it was on that one show, with the guy. You know, on cable.

“Yeah, I was sitting right here, why?”

SOME ADVICE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE

I have some more advice to give about the port deal.

[see below]

James S. Robbins, Corner Kid and senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council*

GOOD NEWS [Jim Robbins]
So much for Iraq’s civil war

Posted at 02:28 PM

[…]

*Surprisingly, the American Foreign Policy Council is a right-wing nonprofit entity.

If only there were some way to tell…

…here’s the Tony Blankley quote I was talking about the other day (my emphasis):

[W]e have a couple of choices, and everybody has been talking about being an honest broker, but there’s another choice, and that is to be a participant on one side, with the Shias and Kurds against the Sunnis. The Shias, while they are a bigger number of people, they don’t have the experience that the Sunnis have, but if you combine the Shia numbers with our technology and our support, technical support, we could in fact get a second best—not what we wanted, which was a government that was genuinely democratic, but perhaps a friendly, semi-theocratic Shia government that we had put in power by helping them win a civil war. That’s not a wonderful choice, but it’s a lot better than turning tail and leaving.

NOW that’s what I call fASScism, Vol. 2!

Ben Shapiro’s latest piece is a real doozy:

Last Sunday, former Vice President Al Gore spoke before the Jiddah Economic Forum. He told the mostly Saudi audience that the United States had committed “terrible atrocities” against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

What a fucking bastard. What so-called “abuses” is that crack-head Gore even talking about? I mean…

…oh, OK, so there’s that… but that still doesn’t excuse Gore saying that…
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While it lacks the cool display in browser quality of Gavin M.’ Friday Night specials, This is the German Coast Guard is well worth your time… (2.5MB MPEG file)