Politics Blog

Okay, folks, who uttered the phrase quoted immediately above?

Karl Marx?

No.

Vladimir Lenin??

Um, no.

Josef Stalin???

Nope.

Mao Zedong????

Uh, nyet.

Pol Pot?????

Not.

Ho Chi Mihn??????

No.

Well, who, then?

It happened two days ago, Jack, and it was New York Senator Hillary . . . Rodham . . . Clinton.

Note: Hat tips - Eagle-eyed and large-brained commentator, Charles, and The Hedgehog Report (www.davidwissing.com).

-- Jayson

Sometimes my stream of thoughts becomes so convoluted that I can’t remember how I ever got to the subject I am pondering. Today, however, I can trace the progression of thoughts, but it still seems a little surreal.

I spent most of the day at my mom’s house where conversation turned to the helicopters continuously flying overhead. My mom tensed up every time she heard the choppers because she said she suspected they were looking for a 17-year-old girl who went missing last night. We found out an hour or so later from a friend who knew someone in the family that the girl’s body was found in a field behind an apartment complex about a mile from my mother’s house.

My thoughts turned to the other recent horrors of the terrorists kidnapping and beheading Americans in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. I wondered how long they would continue the tactic. Besides the fact that the shock value of the beheadings diminished somewhat with each new occurrence, I wondered how the fear of an American being snatched and murdered halfway around the world could be any more terrifying than one being snatched and murdered a mile from my mother’s home.

The crimes were equally heinous and horrifying, and except for the political element and video “ransom” demand, would be indistinguishable in terms of the way they were investigated and prosecuted. I thought of all the true crime shows (A&E and Court TV alone air dozens of hours of them a week) and news coverage of crimes on television, and wondered how long it would take before the shock felt by Americans in response to the latest method of terrorism waned. When I got home and checked the news on the web, I found this NYT article and couldn’t help but wonder whether that time had already come.

UPDATE: Lest I leave the impression that I think the beheadings are all of a sudden going to stop, I want to make clear that I don’t. I do believe that the terrorists will become more selective in their use of this particular method of terror. I also fear that the upcoming political conventions and the Olympics, with their large audiences and heavy media coverage, present the potential for a spectacular 9/11 style attack that terrorists will find hard to resist. I personally will be holding my breath and saying quite a few prayers between now and November.

-- Lorie Byrd

Instapundit reports this new book about Michael Moore is #20 at Amazon.com. It will be interesting to see how many copies it sells without the benefit of all the publicity the Moore and Franken books get at Today, GMA, Larry King, etc.

Can any of Polipundit’s readers tell me which places of purchase get counted for sales on the NYT bestseller list and which don’t?

-- Lorie Byrd

One reason to hate the end of June:

I’ve come to loathe late June

Mainstream Americans are so livid at George Bush over his domestic and especially his foreign policies, so nervous about“record high” gas prices, and so skittish about the “jobless recovery,” that . . . THAT . . . THAT!!!. . .

that the Conference Board’s closely-watched Index of Consumer Confidence rose sharply in June, and reached, in fact, a two-year high.

Brother, can ya’ spare a dime?

-- Jayson

The Liberal Party of Canada, which has been in power for the past 11 years and plagued by various scandals and allegations of corruption, managed to pull off aminor upset and narrowly retain power. The big losers in this election were the pollsters who had projected that the newly revitalized Conservative Party would win a plurality of seats and enough to form a minority government. As it stands currently, the Liberal Party will have 135 out of 308 seats, a big loss from their previous position but enough to hold on to power. The Conservatives won 99 seats, enough to provide a strong opposition but not nearly as good as the projected 120 seats most pollsters had them at. The Liberals will likely work closely with the New Democrat Party, which is the hard left wing party in Canada, who won 19 seats, to provide Canada with an even more left wing government then they do currently.
What does this mean for the United States? Probably not too much, though as we have learned many political ideas, like objects drop downwards. Paul Martin, the Liberal leader besieged by scandal, seems to have successfully played the social issue card as soon as he fell behind in the polls, accusing Stephen Harper and the Conservatives of wanting to criminalize abortion although Harper has a pro-choice stance. The Liberals also implied that Harper was too pro-American running commercials criticizing his moderately pro-Iraq War stance. Perhaps the biggest lesson is how totally wrong polls can be. But Canada is a very different country from the US and nothing highlighted this more then the absence of a serious discussion on the War on Terror, the single most important issue facing the Western world, but Canada with its left wing mindset has demonstrated its isolation and continued decline with this election.

-- Mark

So, John Kerry was supposed to give a speech the other day to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. And that Conference is being held in Boston, Mass., the same city, of course, in which the Democratic Party will hold its Presidential Nominating Convention, later this month.

But, Senator Kerry canceled his scheduled appearance at the Mayoral Conference.

Why, you ask?

Well, because unionized civil servants in Beantown are protesting and picketing the Conference, apparently as a rebuke of Boston’s Mayor, with whom the unions are engaged in a nasty contract dispute. And, as the multi-millionaire Senator put it: he doesn’t cross picket lines!

Um, is there even a word in the dictionary to describe this? It’s ironic, of course. But also a conundrum, right? An ironic-undrum?

What’s next? A sitting Democratic U.S. Senator from the “sophisticated” Northeast issuing a series of glowing praises, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, about a former KKK member and segregationist??? Oh, right. Never mind . . .

Note: Hat tip on the Mayoral Conference to Viking Pundit (www.vikingpundit.blogspot.com)

-- Jayson

I hope this guy’s 15 minutes is up soon, but until then, check out this and this for a chuckle.

-- Lorie Byrd

Hmm. Let’s see:

Iraqis being given sovereign responsibilities in connection with the formal transfer of power? Check.

Further multi-national assistance for the rebuilding of Iraq? Check.

Rapprochement with Libya? Check.

Progress in the war on terror? Check.

Progress on the Indian sub-continent? Check.

Sheesh.

At this rate, George Bush will wind up with the worst foreign policy record since, well, since Ronald Reagan. All Reagan did, of course, was: defeat communism, reunite Germany, and bring freedom and democracy to the former Warsaw pact nations of Eastern Europe.

-- Jayson

Does anyone besides me remember the point at which Democrats, silenced by the President’s support after 9/11, were finally able to attack him again and to declare hima liar? I recall it quite vividly because it makes me angry, because my memory of it involves my child. (You can mess with me all day long, but don’t mess with my kids or that Mama Bear comes to life.) My daughter asked me why the man on television was saying the President was lying. I decided to give her an easy answer. I told her he wanted the President’s job, so he was saying it so people would not want to vote for President Bush in the following year’s election. That was the truth.

I did not know how to explain to her that the President used 16 words in his State of the Union address saying British intelligence believed Saddam had sought to purchase uranium from Africa. If I had done that I would have had to say that the President, although he apologized for including it in his SOTU speech since it had not been corroborated by our intelligence services, still believed it to be true and British intelligence still maintained that it was true. Then I would have had to explain that a man named Joe Wilson, who had no CIA experience, but had a wife in the CIA, was sent over to investigate and since all those he asked about it denied it, he declared it to be false and therefore, Bush is a liar. Heck, she?s only 7 years old, and I had a hard enough time following it myself.

I remember the aftermath of that “apology” and for that reason, I believe the President will not, and should not, be apologizing for the failure to find significant quantities of WMD in Iraq. After Joe Wilson wrote his op/ed piece declaring the uranium story false, the President said he regretted it was included in the SOTU. The Democrats, like sharks in a sea of red, declared that Bush had admitted he lied. That was all it took. From that point on, the “Bush lied” mantra was repeated daily, and when WMD was not found in significant quantities in Iraq, the volume of those chanting it grew deafening.

When I saw this story headlined “Intelligence backs claim Iraq tried to buy uranium” linked to today at Betsy’s Page, I couldn’t help but wonder whether there will ever be enough stories like this one to convince the Democrats, and all they have fooled, that Bush wasn’t “lying".

Illicit sales of uranium from Niger were being negotiated with five states including Iraq at least three years before the US-led invasion, senior European intelligence officials have told the Financial Times.

Intelligence officers learned between 1999 and 2001 that uranium smugglers planned to sell illicitly mined Nigerien uranium ore, or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq.

At some point I guess I will have to explain to my daughter that the definition of lying that I have taught her is the correct, dictionary definition. If someone makes a statement they believe to be true, but it turns out the statement itself was false, they are mistaken, not lying. I will then have to explain that some politicians, with the help of an all too-willing media, have so perverted the language that in politics, sometimes it really does depend on what the meaning of “is” is.

-- Lorie Byrd