Sadly, No!

The original target of the shorter form — accept no imitations!

Some Wrongly Call It Treason

The US Constitution guarantees the right of free speech.

Shorter concept inspired by busy, busy, busy from an idea by D-Squared.

Adam Yoshida, the world’s favorite crazy Canadian, writes about life in a post-nuclear attack world:

Faced with disorder, the President will have little choice but to, citing the Lincoln president, suspend the writ of habeas corpus and round up everyone with suspected links to terror. Second, they?ll probably have to declare Marital Law: the exact letter of the Constitution be damned, for the moment at least. [Emphasis added]

Paging Dr. Freud to the courtesy phone. Dr. Freud please.

Sure, the pre-war intelligence has, so far, turned out to be way, way off. Just don’t go shaking your head Mr. Young Person:

Powell was recalling for the panel his review of the prewar intelligence. “I went and lived at the CIA for about four days to make sure that nothing was,” he began, when he paused and glared at a staffer seated behind the members of Congress.

“Are you shaking your head for something, young man, back there?” Powell asked. “Are you part of these proceedings?”

Dear Mr. Secretary:

You want to know why people shake their heads? Here you go:

The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. Some are U.S. sources and some are those of other countries. Some are the sources are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations and photos taken by satellites. Other sources are people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to. …

My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. …

Ladies and gentlemen, these are sophisticated facilities. For example, they can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin. In fact, they can produce enough dry, biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. A dry agent of this type is the most lethal form for human beings. …

If we consider just one category of missing weaponry, 6500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq War, UNMOVIC says the amount of chemical agent in them would be on the order of a thousand tons.

And so on and on and on. Any questions? [Thanks to Blair for the link.]

In pondering Andrew Sullivan’s reaction to Al Gore’s speech earlier, we speculated that our non-native English speakers selves were simply too daft to understand the nature of Sullivan’s characterization. We had hoped this wasn’t the case of course — we do after all write this blog in some variant of English, so understanding it at least a little bit would be helpful. Yet K-Lo makes us realize we obviously do not speak, nor understand, the language real good:

OOPS [KJL]
I’m a Massachusetts liberal! John Kerry signs letter in favor of gay marriage.
Posted at 08:19 PM

Should you click on the link and all that stuff, you can read this:

WASHINGTON – Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry (news – web sites), who opposes gay marriage and hints he might support a limited ban, just two years ago signed a letter with other congressional colleagues urging the Massachusetts legislature to drop a constitutional amendment outlawing homosexual nuptials. [Emphasis added]

Is opposing a constitutional amendment really equivalent to supporting the creation of gay marriage? Representative Barney Frank is also quoted in the article:

Frank said Kerry has always been clear to him that he opposes gay marriage but wants homosexuals to have equal protection under the law through civil unions, and other legislation.

We wish Kerry would go further, but opposing a constitutional amendment to bar the mere possibility of gay marriage isn’t the same as supporting gay marriage. Kerry’s has said, on several occasions if the AP article is to be trusted, that he is against gay marriage (but supports civil unions,) while also arguing that legislative attempts to outlaw gay marriage (and similar efforts, i.e. Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act) are:

…a thinly veiled attempt to score political debating points by scapegoating gay and lesbian Americans[.]

We don’t know what the language of the Massachusetts proposed amendment was, but if it was anything like some current federal efforts, the language is sufficiently vague to raise the possibility that it will be more than just marriage that will be outlawed. (On this point, and perhaps this point alone, we agree with Andrew Sullivan.)

You might think that having several contributors would The Corner much better than a blog with a single author. Instead, it seems as though every additional person only brings the quality down, like some sort of self-reproducing homosexual cabal of idiocy. [How long had we been waiting to use this nonsensical line? A really long time.]

We didn’t fly close to 5,000 miles to get to the US for nothing you know. In fact, we flew all that distance with one special purpose: to get our hands on George Bush’s “autobiography” (if by “autobiography” you mean “written by Karen Hughes”) A Charge to Keep. Over the next several days, the Sadly, No! editors will offer their favorite quotes from ACTK. Many of them, as you might guess, need no comment, because they are just that funny. Don’t believe us?

I don’t know whether that means members of the Bush family are stubborn or merely persistent. I’m joking. [p. 167]

I learned the value of personal diplomacy as I watched my dad build friendships and relationships with foreign leaders that helped improve America’s stature in the world. [p. 185]

More to come…

The President gets tough and all that:

Bush to WMD Owners: ‘We Will Find You’

… “We expect other regimes to follow his example,” Bush said, referring to Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi (search), promising that countries that do, will enjoy “better relations with the United States” but those who don’t will endure “political isolation, economic hardship and other unwelcome consequences.” [snip]

“The key here is not just to deal with rogue states but to deal with these shadowy networks … to make sure we know the full story, to make sure we root out all the tentacles,” Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Wednesday before the speech. [Emphasis added]

Where can one start with this? We will find the owners of WMD? Have we found any so far? The countries attacked so far (Afghanistan and Iraq) had precious few, while many of the “allies” in the War on Terror have many. What was the White House reaction when Pakistan decided to pardon one Abdul Qadeer Khan? [Now dependent on an investigation according to FoxNews.]

Unwelcome consequences? You and what army? How many Iraq-type wars could the US armed forces carry out in the near future? How many could the US treasury afford, what, with all those permanent tax cuts and all?

Condi: Please don’t get us started ok? First you said no one could ever have imagined planes as weapons, and then we found out some had thought of this. Then you told us no one had warned you about the yellow cake crap, and then we learned the CIA had. Just give it up already ok?

And now, a new Sadly, No! game! the FoxNews article continues thusly:

The Seven Steps to Combating WMD

Bush laid out seven steps he wants taken to combat proliferation.

Please offer your own ideas for the George Bush 7-step guide to combating WMD in the comments. Go!

The Real Scandal Pronouncement game? was advertised with a prize, i.e. a shrink wrapped copy of Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons. And so the time has come to award the CD before the natives (aka Frederick) get even more restless. Awarding the prize turned out to be very difficult, because there were a lot of entries and we are very lazy.
Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Sullivan refers to Al Gore’s “deranged rant” with a link to a Slate article on said speech. Listed below are all of the quoted parts of Gore’s address:

You know, there was a mood in ’76, a spirit of unity, a feeling of determination that we were going to win that race that year … President George W. Bush reminds me more of former President Richard Nixon than any of his other predecessors … They tried to make out like my dad was an atheist because he didn’t want a constitutional amendment putting the government in charge of telling children how they ought to worship God in the public schools. … They came out with accusations that he was unpatriotic because he was opposed to the Vietnam War and the mistaken policy that got us into that war. He [Gore’s father] took the old Confederate slogan about ‘The South shall rise again,’ and he stood it on its head. And he proudly proclaimed, ‘The truth shall rise again!’

We have seen an administration which in my view more closely resembles the Nixon-Agnew administration than any other previous administration. … There’s a reason I say that. I don’t offer that as simply a casual slur. … I’m not above a casual slur … But I’m biased, I didn’t vote for the guy.

But here’s the reason I say that President George W. Bush reminds me more of former President Richard Nixon than any of his other predecessors. Nixon was no more committed to principle than the man in the moon. He, as a conservative Republican, imposed wage and price controls. Hard to believe in this day and time. But he did. And he cared as little about what it meant to be really conservative as George W. Bush has cared in imposing $550 billion budget deficits and trillions in additions to the national debt. That has nothing to do with conservatism and everything to do with his effort to get re-elected!

[On the post-September 11 politics] I think there were millions just like me, who genuinely, in spite of whatever partisanship they may have felt prior to that time, genuinely felt like they wanted George W. Bush to lead all of us in America wisely and well…

And the reason I’m recalling those feelings now is because those are the feelings that were betrayed by this president! He betrayed this country! He played on our fears! He took America, he took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure that was preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place! … And so I say to you in closing my friends, in the year of 2004, the truth shall rise again.

Maybe we’re too daft. Maybe being non-native English speakers prevents us from seeing the truly deranged nature of this rant (we speak French you know!,) but what the fuck is Sullivan’s problem here? (Besides the obvious, non-Gore related issues.) The only deranged part of the article is Chris King of Irony Suellentrop’s “analysis,” a kind of poor man’s Dr. Krauthammer reading of Gore’s mind and soul.

Amber is back, oh yes! And she’s nuttier than ever:

[John Kerry’s book The New Soldier] is mostly filled with pictures (this is why liberals can never get a radio show; lots of pictures is a requirement for spreading liberal propaganda[.)]

The people of Sadly, No! require sleep, so Amber will have to wait another day… See you in the morning.

If we were John Lott, and we had been caught lying, misrepresenting, distorting, and cross-dressing as often as he has, we think we’d just serve ourselves a warm glass of shut the hell up and give it up already.

But John Lott is not us, nor we him, and from Tim Lambert’s latest post we think even Dr. Charles Krauthammer might conclude that Lott is a compulsive liar:

A while ago I wrote how Lott had seriously misrepresented NCVS data and given dangerous advice when he claimed that in robberies and assaults passive behaviour ?is by far the most likely to result in injury?. Lott has now posted a response where he falsifies a table in an attempt to prove his point.

Tim explains, you shake your head.