Sadly, No!

EconoPundit (who has a review of Mel Gibson’s movie here,) posts scans of John Kerry’s 1984 Senate campaign material. Apparently, these support Republican contentions that Kerry is “weak on defense.” Yet we have to wonder just how bad Kerry’s positions were. Transcribed from a Kerry document:

The Reagan administration has no rational plan for our military. Instead, it acts on misinformed assumptions about the strength of the Soviet military and a presumed “window of vulnerability”, which we now know not to exist.

Just how bad was that exactly?

Intelligence collection from satellites eventually convinced policymakers that there was no “missile gap” in the 1960s and no “window of vulnerability” in the 1980s.

Compare the above with a) what we found in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism, and b) Reagan’s claims in 1982:

I have to tell you that I am as firm in my conviction that the very safety of this nation requires that we go forward with the defense spending program as we’ve laid it out. The difference in potential and what the Soviet Union has built up to in the rate at which it is increasing, building is going to leave us still a number of years before we even begin to close the window of vulnerability that has been opened between us and the Soviet Union.

The first item Kerry proposed cutting from Reagan’s defense budget was the MX-1 missile. From Fred Kaplan (writing for the Cato Institute):

The conclusion, then, seems clear. The rationale for the MX has been that the nation needs a “survivable” land-based missile that also has counterforce capability. Yet if President Reagan and Secretary Weinberger are just putting the MX in a fixed silo, if the plan to harden the silos to 5000-psi is unworkable, if Soviet and American missiles are not accurate–and all of this says nothing of the thousands of warheads that will, in any case, survive on board mobile submarines and bombers–then the question must be posed: Why build the MX missile at all?

An administration that can suggest with a straight face that the US spend tens of billion of dollars in a war against Iraq, and pull resources out of Afghanistan in order to do so, has little business telling anyone else they are “soft on defense.”

Last week, we reported on Dennis Prager’s nipple exposing obsession:

By showing more of their bodies, women can announce that they are women. There are other ways young women can publicly demonstrate their distinct female identity — for example, by wearing feminine clothing and other feminine behavior, being a wife, being pregnant and being a mother.

Today we learn that Dennis has more — oh great:

As much as feminists may disdain the roles of mother or wife, those roles have bestowed power as well as meaning and satisfaction on the vast majority of women in history.

Does that sound like a pile of crap to you? Don’t call now! Dennis continues:

When all is said and done, heading a home and being married to a good man are far more satisfying to most women than college teaching or corporate work. [Emphasis added]

Female readers of S,N! are asked to report for wife and motherhood duty at their earliest convenience. And remember that if you don’t, Dennis will be staring at you through powerful binoculars:

The more skin men see, the more they think sex, not love. And that includes guys your age, your male teachers, your clergyman, your mailman, and the old man next door.

You have been warned.

Fortunately for our sanity and blood pressure a few people have taken turns slapping Virginia Postrel around for her if you can’t see it that proves it’s real essay on the amazing Bush job recovery machine.

Brad DeLong takes a few swings here, and Max joins in here. We would just reiterate the point made by Max in response to this sentence:

It [the Labor Department] is much less adept at counting employees in small businesses, simply because there are too many small enterprises to representatively sample them.

Maybe Postrel lives in a world where public opinion surveys don’t exist, but we’d guess without bothering to look that the number of adults to be surveyed at any given time in the US is far greater than the number of small businesses. In any case, if you think that there is a point at which a population is too large to be sampled, you should not be writing about statistical analysis. Ever.

But please feel free to give us more on those magical keys.

We have to give Bill Safire credit. It’s not too often that someone can manage to suck at so many things. Whether it’s predictions about Hillary’s run for the White House, hunches about what the US will find in Iraq, or the speculations of Richard Nixon’s corpse, few have given the world so much. So what’s new today? Safire is back, intent on being the poor conservative’s Paul Krugman.

How does he manage? Safire starts with a story about a woman who can only afford to buy cheap shoes, so isn’t it great that there are cheap shoes for her to buy?
Read the rest of this entry »

MensNewsDaily brings us an interview with R. Emmett Tyrrell, who fancies himself a Hillary Clinton observer, if by observer you mean “having a lot of kinky sexual fantasies about.” For extra bonus points the interview was conducted by Bernard Chapin, the man who kicked our precious Amber off the group blog some of the kids there have. So you know it has to be tr?s good. Tyrrell wanted to call his book Hillary Clinton makes Satan look like Jesus , but his publishers insisted on Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House instead.

We’d assumed that the use of a French word in the title was just another instance of the old all that is France-related sucks and is a major insult conservatives love, but it turns out it’s not:

The term Madame does not refer to a bordello but to Chairman Mao’s wife who was known in China as the “white-boned demon,” famed for changing shape and never so dangerous as when wearing the guise of innocence.

So there you go. It’s not that Hillary is a whore (she is, but it’s not about that,) but rather than the junior senator from New York is a “white-boned demon.” There is one dead horse that can never be left alone however:

I make the point in my book that she and Bill have been manipulating this race in various ways. Now that they see the President weakened I do believe she wishes she had gone for it on 2004, and who knows if Kerry wobbles she still might.

She still might! Emmett is going to make William Safire look sane at this rate.

Cut out the filler sentences in the middle of an Andrew Sullivan post and what do you get?

Chait blames the Bush tax cuts – and, to some extent, he’s right. He also cites vast new spending on defense and homeland security. Again, to some extent, he’s right. […] But if that’s all we talk about, we’re not confronting the real issue: the tax cuts and the military spending.

Chait is “to some extent” right to blame the tax cuts and defense and homeland security spending. Oh, and the real issue is tax cuts and military spending. 10-4 Captain.

Knight Ridder Newspapers report:

WASHINGTON ? The Department of Defense is continuing to pay millions of dollars for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced some of the exaggerated and fabricated intelligence President Bush used to argue his case for war.

The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for
the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC,
led by Ahmad Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense
official.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence programs are
classified.

In addition to the fact that those officials aren’t that eager to spend a few years in Cuba.

The decision not to shut off money for the INC’s information-gathering effort suggests that some within the administration are intent on securing a key role for Chalabi in Iraq’s political future.

Actually, it suggests that some within the administration either have shit for brains or assume everyone else does.

Thanks to Blair for the link.

Added: The Tooney Bin is just as impressed with this as we were.

For those with much patience and a high-speed internet connection, we offer an AEI webcast of David Frum and Richard Perle discussing their book, Funky Cold End to Evil.

We will offer our review of the book later this week.

Well, it’s the weekend and it means that Kyle Williams, yes, that Kyle (and this one as well,) gets a break from the rigors of home schooling and is allowed to use the internet:

Yesterday, I was white, but today I am no longer ? I am leaving the white race. I am redefining who I am. I was born a true Indian at heart and now is the time for me to go public, freeing myself and all others from the tyrannical rules of this society.

What? Oh wait, we know: there has to be some hidden lesson, some secret message to be discovered in there. Scroll down, scroll down, scroll down… Houston, we have contact:

Sure, I might be rewriting the rules, laws and ideas that have governed the world for thousands of years, but that doesn’t matter. This is what homosexuals are doing with marriage, so why can’t I do it with race?

B-i-n-g-o, b-i-n-g-o, b-i-n-g-o, and bingo was his name (o.) So that’s what this was about. Why didn’t we see that one coming? Unlike many of his colleagues, Kyle doesn’t predict the end of the universe because of gay marriage, but his argument boils down to there’s never been gay marriage so let’s not go there girlfriend. Our favorite part was actually Kyle’s next to next to last paragraph:

The point is this: There’s no such thing as a white Indian and, furthermore, there’s no such thing as a homosexual marriage ? it’s an oxymoron ? only men and women get married.

No such thing as a homosexual marriage? Happily, No!

World O’Crap’s invaluable TownHall summary returns, allowing all the little people to celebrate.