Intern Michelle Malkin?

Not yet, but you had better keep an eye on me, she says:

    The safety of the president and the country was put at risk, and it may have been due in part to the blinders of political correctness and complacency. If it means now that the White House will be applying extra scrutiny to naturalized Americans of Filipino descent working at the top levels of government and in the military, well, yes, I support that. It’s obviously overdue. And, as I argued in my last book, it’s just one small step towards the kind of national security profiling we should have introduced aggressively after 9/11. But didn’t.

Emphasis and hyperlink mine. Pray tell, what would be a medium-sized step?

Arthur Chrenkoff Does the Weather

Tony Blair’s government, its mendacity slipping the surly bonds of earth, embarks on a campaign against meteorological defeatism:

    It is goodbye to those miserable showers and isolated storms. Prolonged sunshine is expected under new “positive” forecast guidelines issued by the Meteorological Office. …

    There is no need to dwell on a “small chance of showers” when “mainly dry” tells a better story. If there are “localised storms” then it must be “dry for most”. Clouds over Manchester mean generally clear visibility for motorway drivers. …

    In some cases forecasters should simply reverse the order of events, placing a “small chance of showers” at the end of the sentence if Britain is expected to be “mostly dry”.

    This is based on research suggesting that viewers with short attention spans are more likely to absorb the good news, if it is relevant to them, and filter out the bad. …

Who says the warbloggers haven’t left their mark on the world?

Via.

A Second Take On Scooter-gate

The original version of my Monday column, on what I’m calling “Scooter-gate,” contained a number of errors involving dates, which I have now corrected. I have also added a significant amount of new material — so much that it is, for all intents and purposes, quite a different piece from the original. My apologies for the errors. For those who have read the original, I would caution that the first half, except for the material about Ahmed Chalabi, is pretty much as I originally wrote it. It’s when we get to the timeline, however, that most of the new material comes in. My apologies, again, for not getting it right the first time, but I think that the new material at least partially makes up for it. I have to say that doing a timeline intermixing the events of disparate investigations now taking place in the Bush administration clarified, at least in my own mind, just what is going on.

At any rate, check out the new version: “A Second Take On Scooter-gate.”

McCain on Imus

This morning on the Imus radio show, John McCain made some comments regarding the progress of the Iraq war. McCain emphatically believes that the occupation should continue, because the US has made such a mess of Iraq, that it is now the America’s responsibility to clean that mess up. The one way McCain suggested that this goal could be accomplished was to train brigades of Iraqi police officers. McCain didn’t mention anything else specifically, but did use the words “win” and “winning” when describing the goal of the war. Thus, McCain has now become the 7489th consecutive US politician/commentator to call for victory without;
A) Being asked to define victory, or;
B) Offering an unsolicited definition of victory, thus insuring that;
C) The war can continue for as long as the US government wants, for any reasons it chooses to specify. A + B = C.
On the other hand, while suggesting that the training of the Iraqi police force was ‘making progress’, McCain admitted that the military now says that only one brigade is trained, where it previously had claimed three. Progress, in the wrong direction.
McCain’s original premise, unhindered by his shaky qualifications, is seductive. Why shouldn’t the one who caused the mess clean it up? That’s a good definition of justice, isn’t it? In fact, I agree with McCain on that point. McCain seems to think, however, that the situation would somehow be worse if the US military were to evacuate while there are still some people alive over there. The insurgency that McCain’s police force needs to be in place to neutralize is being caused by the US invasion and subsequent occupation. All that needs to be done to correct that problem is to remove the occupying forces. The training of a ‘police force’ is impossible. It will inevitably fail, and fail miserably. The Iraqis being trained have no loyalty to the US, and no desire to face a seething civilian population on the side of the occupation. Thus, infiltration by ‘the enemy’ is unavoidable. If McCain knows this, then he’s simply making excuses for the continuation of a war he knows is wrong. If not, then he’s too big an idiot to take seriously anymore. I think the former is true. McCain mentioned the recruiting problem, and Imus suggested that the way to meet recruiting goals was to “stop involving troops in these stupid wars”, while McCain giggled nonchalantly.

What Do You Call It?

1. What do you call it when a group of people take the law into their own hands and kill people without a fair trial?
~ A lynching
What do you call it when the United States takes the law into its own hands and kills people without a fair trial?
~ Operation Enduring Freedom

2. What do you call someone who explodes a bomb and kills innocent people?
~ A terrorist
What do you call someone who drops a bomb from a plane and kills innocent people?
~ A brave American pilot

3. What do you call a weapon that can kill thousands of people?
~ A weapon of mass destruction.
What do you call a weapon that has killed 1.5 million, including more than 500,000 children?
~ Sanctions

4. What do you call an attack on the Pentagon, a command and control center in the United States?
~ A cowardly attack
What do you call the destruction of an Afghan village by U.S. bombs?
~ An attack on a Taliban command and control center

5. What do you call it when about 3,000 people were killed in the September 11th attack?
~ An atrocity
What do you call it when about 5 million people were killed in the Vietnam war?
~ A mistake

6. What do you call someone who stands up in front of a crowd and tells stories?
~ An entertainer
What do you call someone who stands up in front of a crowd at the Pentagon and tells stories?
~ Donald Rumsfeld

I don’t remember where I got these so my apologies for not giving someone credit.