Pious Agnostic

If I saw the man below throwing that very sharp chunk of concrete at me, I'd feel pretty threatened.

But, as Charles Johnson points out, AP routinely describes these thugs as "youths throwing stones," a phrase designed to intentionally downplay the deadliness of such a missile.

And, what the hell is that little troll in the lower left doing?

Just for the sake of comparison, this is what the phrase generally describes:

THE THEOCONS ARE COMING!

More and more, I wonder whether lefties mean it, any of it. Take Rosie O’Donnell. The other day, one of her co-hosts on “The View” was musing on current events and opined, “If you take radical Islam and you want to talk about what is going on there you have to…”

And at this point Rosie interrupted. “One second. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state.”

Does she really believe that? That “radical Christianity” is “just as threatening” as “radical Islam”? These terms are imprecisely defined. You get the feeling that to Rosie O’Donnell “radical Christianity” is pretty much Christianity – or at any rate any Christian denomination without an openly gay bishop. Still, it’s hard to imagine even Rosie would feel “just as threatened” by an evangelical Protestant church opening up next door as by, say, a Wahhabi madrassah.

But who knows? The left’s preference for phantom enemies over real ones is such a feature of the current scene one assumes that for a few of them at least it has to be genuine.

Apparently, Theoconophobes fear that their adversaries have been

...waging a “stealth campaign” to inflict upon the US “a future in which American politics and culture have been systematically purged of secularism,” and in which the Constitution will be rewritten to bring it into line with “the moral and sexual worldview of the Vatican”. That’s quite the ambition. American religiosity is for the most part strikingly unRoman and Father Neuhaus himself finds the evangelicals a bit of a bore, what with their “forced happiness and joy” and “awful music”. But so far the conspiracy seems to be going swimmingly, with the Supreme Court claiming to have discovered a constitutional right to sodomy and its fellow jurists in Massachusetts having legalized gay marriage. That’s exactly the kind of cunning distraction you’d expect these theocons to come up with to throw the rest of us off the scent.

To repeat myself: Read the rest!

Assassination: So cool, it's the new black!

Saddam Hussein got the death penalty in a two-year-and-change trial that the organization Human Rights Watch has deemed "fundamentally unfair" and "unsound." I suppose we may have the wrong Iraqi dictator; perhaps it was some other Saddam Hussein who slaughtered all those people.

And the last time a great butcher faced an international tribunal, Slobodan Milosevic, he died in the midst of a trial that was stretching into its fifth year.

In other news, the Germans wanted to put Donald Rumsfeld on trial for war crimes. Because if there's any country that has the moral authority to judge American actions in war, it's Germany.

There's a reason Americans are generally skeptical of international institutions and their laws, rules, and regulations. They generally stink.

Read it all. It's important.

The New York Times gets Thanksgiving wrong.

Don't hold your breath waiting for a correction.

Blame: The Anchoress who is also Kyle.

Now that Democrats are in the House and Senate, the economy finally looks good!

Urban Students Do Worse In Science

WASHINGTON -- Children in major U.S. cities perform worse than other students around the country on science tests given in elementary and middle school, a snapshot released by the government Wednesday shows.

But...but...I thought that all the rural rednecks were stoopid and were destined to get stuck in Iraq!

Will global warming cause the flat Earth to curl up at the edges?

Stories like this one make me want to pull out what little hair I have left:

This caption clearly says that there is no proof that an Israeli jet had been shot down and that the objective was indeed to destroy a legitimate military target.

...A week later TIME published this image shot at the same time as the first...

They choose to caption it this way (I had NO control in this matter), they HAD my original caption: “The wreckage of a downed Israeli jet that was targeting Hizballah trucks billows smoke behind a Hizballah gunman in Kfar Chima, near Beirut. Jet fuel set the surrounding area ablaze.”

Combine this total lack of truthfulness in the media with regard to important events with the expected 8-12 year Democrat control of the House and their concomitant lack of seriesness with regard to important events, and we're in serious trouble, folks.

When Iran nukes Isreal, what will the headlines say?

What will Nancy Pelosi say?

Democratic lawmakers will seek a phased withdrawal from Iraq

WASHINGTON — Democrats poised to take control of Congress said Sunday that they would press to begin a phased U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq within four to six months, part of an agenda aimed at overhauling key aspects of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

"First order of business is to change the direction of Iraq policy," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who is in line to become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee next year when Democrats become the majority party in both chambers of Congress.

Honestly, it was what they were elected to do, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

The resulting bloodbath in Iraq will be upon our heads.

You know, I hope it turns out this way.

Update:  This is fun too

Pious gratitude to: Instapundit

As Charles Johnson predicted, celebrations over the Democrat's victory in the House and Senate are breaking out all over the Middle East.

He writes: "Has any Democrat leader come out and repudiated this show of support from people who hate America? President Bush said yesterday that the enemy should not mistake the elections as a sign of weakness. Did any Democrat echo him?"

In among the Root Beer and Apple Store anecdotes, Lileks says:

Trolled around some radio and websites today, and noted something interesting: no rancor. Well, you say, this reflects the circles in which you choose to move, and I suppose it does, but the places I haunt were not brimming with outrage and fury and tales of Diebold deviltry or voter suppression. If anything, mixed among the rue and worry, there was something unexpected:

Relief.

I’m serious: no one said as much, but I have the feeling that many on the right & center-right are relieved to have this Congress repudiated, as much as they dislike the potential effect of the alternative. Two more years of the same would have been two more years of tentative dithering, culminating in another appeal to hit the polls lest the Republic crumble. But we haven’t seen an innovation in policy or rhetoric since the last election. It is the adult thing to expect you will get half of what you want in politics, but this is not an excuse for making an lackluster attempt to get one-quarter and serving it up as one-hundred percent.

It's an interesting comment, and I think it has some merit, certainly in my own heart.

But I'm still a bit bummed by how it turned out. Mostly, though, I'm bummed by a conversation I had with some coworkers. That they are not Republicans is fine, that they have different ideas about how the Iraq war is/should go is fine too.

What I found depressing is the extent that they relied on the long-debunked arguments and talking points of the anti-war, anti-Bush left. Ideas I had found wanting and discarded months and years ago are the cornerstones of their arguments.

I think the worst, though, is when a normally sensible woman told me that "we'd killed 650,000 Iraqis," in an obvious parroting of The Lancet's disputed estimate, released on October 11th of this year in an obvious attempt to effect the US Elections. Did they succeed?

Bill Whittle has some words of encouragement, and rebuke:

My friends, this is time to make a choice. We have suffered a very large defeat tonight, and there is nothing now that we can do about that except decide on how we wish to face it. We have been given an opportunity to show what losing with honor should look like. Do not wail and cry. Do not shout CHEATERS! or whine about media coverage. And most especially do not blame the American people. They are not idiots and they are not sheep. Iraq is not lost, the War on Terror goes on and despite what you may be feeling right now, there will not be any US helicopters evacuating stragglers off the roof of the US embassy in Baghdad...not tomorrow or any other day. That war was won on a November night two years ago. Trust me on this one, if you can, and if you cannot then at least do not despair. Maybe now we will realize that selling this war is as important as fighting it. In that regard I've been AWOL and I am ashamed.

We have to accept the fact that the conservatives we sent to Congress in 1994 became the bloated, earmarking, tone-deaf toads of 2006. They thought they could do whatever they wanted, regardless of what their constituents think, and now they have been reminded of just who is working for whom. Remedying that sense of isolation and disconnect and unchecked power is why we have elections in the first place, and as to the consequences of it, we have no one to blame but ourselves. That imperial attitude is not unique to Republicans or Democrats. That is human nature, and correcting the excesses of human nature only becomes more costly and painful the longer it is allowed to go on. Democracy is error-correcting. Ask John Kerry

Read it all.

Disappointing news to wake up to, but somehow I think we'll muddle through....

I pity the poor Iraqis, though, now that their fate is in Nancy Pelosi's hands.

But today, we should be mindful of the real winners in this election.

Update on Gatorland fire

The folks who run Gatorland want everyone to know this: They're not shutting down for good. President Mark McHugh says it could be a year before a new gift shop and ticket center is built, but he's planning to get the park open to tourists again in the near future.

It's been kind-of drizzly throughout Central Florida today, which will no doubt be characterized as "Voter Intimidation" in certain circles.

Fascist cloud cover!

Dem voter fraud in Philly?

Mark Steyn, brilliant, as usual:

[L]ike Kerry in 2004 deciding that the murderers and rapists were now his brave "band of brothers," the left often discover a sudden enthusiasm for the previous war once a new one's come along. Since Iraq, they've been all in favor of Afghanistan, though back in the fall of 2001 they were convinced it was a quagmire, graveyard of empire, unwinnable, another Vietnam, etc. Oh, and they also discovered a belated enthusiasm for the first President Bush's shrewd conduct of the 1991 Gulf War, though at the time Kerry and most other Democrats voted against that one, too. In this tedious shell game, no matter how frantically the left shuffles the cups, you never find the one shriveled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support When it Matters.

To be sure, the progressives deserve credit for having refined their view of the military: not murderers and rapists, just impoverished suckers too stupid for anything other than soldiering. The left still doesn't understand that it's the soldier who guarantees every other profession -- the defeatist New York Times journalist, the anti-American college professor, the insurgent-video-of-the-day host at CNN, the hollow preening blowhard senator. Kerry's gaffe isn't about one maladroit Marie Antoinette of the Senate but a glimpse into the mind-set of too many Americans.

Read the rest....

The Anchoress imagines a conversation at the NYT:

Times Peon #1: HOLY CRAP, Mr. Keller, did we just validate everything Dick Cheney and Colin Powell and stupid evil George Bush said to the UN? When we’re spilling secrets, we’re not supposed to do that!

Keller: OMG, WE DID! We DID validate these scheming nazi theocon bastards!!!

Times Peon #2: And…and…and what about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame and those sixteen words Bush said…you know, the impeachable 16 words about the Brit intelligence and the Yellowcake! Jim Geraghty at TKS says we might have freaking validated that story, too!

Keller: Ohhhhhh crap! And freaking bloggers! Okay, let’s spin this, baby, spin it! All hands on deck! Turn this ship around! Call Chris Matthews! Call MoDo - no, wait, don’t call her, she’ll make it worse by pretending to be Emma Peel, or something - call Bob Herbert! He’s a wiz at shifting the rudder! Spin, spin! Call Olbermann!

Peon #3: Aye, Aye, captain! Uh, sir, Olbermann is chewing floorboard and Matthews is crying, again. Should we call Judith Miller, sir?

Keller: Jesus God Almighty! No, no, just let her stay buried!

Heh...read the rest.

Republicans fail to reject support of Nazi group!

Oops, sorry. It's the other thing.

Long drop, short stop.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

I make no predictions, because I'm not smart enough to evaluate the political scene. But I've been around a few years and paid a little attention, and I've learned a few things.

I realize that, according to the polls as represented in the media, the Republicans are going to take a licking on Tuesday, and the Democrats are going to be high-fiving all over the place come Wednesday morning.

But the simple fact is, I don't remember a single national election where that exact same thing wasn't predicted. Every two years, I'm told that this time, the American people are going to express their anger against the evil Republicans and throw them out of office, lay palm branches in the path of the Democrats and welcome them with hosannas of praise.

It seems that this is always just about to happen, yet it doesn't happen. Every two years Republicans make modest gains, or the Democrats make modest gains, or (more recently) Republicans stomp all over their opponents in an upset that simply amazes all the analysts.

So, I'm not worried. This isn't the end of the world, even if Democrats take a few seats. I have faith in the wisdom of the American people; I also have faith in the inertia of the American Congress, such that even Speaker Pelosi can't screw things up too much before she's indicted.

Update:  More here. And here.

So, I guess Ted and Marshall should quit taking advice on girls from Barney...

This story is worth space on ABC news?

I mean, honestly, who cares about this stuff?