Sep 14, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
AP reports: Insurgents Target Iraqi Police; 59 Dead .The Tawhid and Jihad group, headed by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, posted a Web statement claiming responsibility for Tuesday's car bombing. The al-Qaida-linked group launched a surprise assault in Baghdad on Sunday, killing dozens, and boasted it had the upper hand in the fight against the Americans.
Sep 13, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From the UK Telegraph:
The president does have his share of celebrity supporters, though they are not as vocal or active as their Democratic counterparts. Bush supporters include the actors Kelsey Grammer, star of Frasier, Lara Flynn Boyle, Bruce Willis, Charlton Heston and Mel Gibson. Younger supporters include the Friends star Matt Le Blanc and the singers Jessica Simpson, Ricky Martin and Britney Spears. But there is also concern in Hollywood that coming out as a conservative can cost a performer his livelihood. "I think there are more conservatives in Hollywood than you would think, but I don't think they're going to come out because you never know why you don't get your next job," the pro-Bush comedian Dennis Miller said last year.
And let's also not forget The Terminator.
From The Philadelphia Enquirer:
Other actors who've been in Bush's corner include Freddie Prinze Jr., Jason Priestley, Bo Derek, Shannen Doherty, Kelsey Grammer and bohemian right-winger Vincent Gallo, who once called left-wing author and radio talker Al Franken a "commie crawfish."
...But Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kid Rock, Britney Spears, Ted Nugent, and Steve Tyler of Aerosmith are fans of the President. So is punk-rock guitarist Johnny Ramone of the Ramones, who urges musician pals to donate to Bush's campaign. "I try to make a dent in people when I can," he said in a March interview with the Washington Times. "I figure people drift toward liberalism at a young age, and I always hope that they change when they see how the world really is."
Sep 13, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
We know. Two Dan Rather cartoons in a row. But with Rather still defending the fake memos, we couldn't resist.
As for North Korean mushroom clouds ... FoxNews reports: Report: N. Korea Says Blast Was Planned. They claim the explosion was related to a "hydroelectric project" that involved the demolition of a mountain. Perhaps. But it also happened on the 56th anniversary of the founding of North Korea, so a celebratory weapons test of some sort wouldn't be surprising. Why else would the North Koreans respond by complaining about South Korea's tests? Secretary of State Colin Powell said there's no indication the explosion was part of a nuclear test.
UPDATE I -- September 17: The cartoon appears in today's (Friday's) The Detroit News.
UPDATE II: The mushroom cloud story has taken a bizarre turn. FoxNews reports: S. Korea: No Blast in N. Korea.The mushroom-shaped cloud -- initially detected by South Korean intelligence authorities and widely reported from an explosion -- is believed to have been a natural cloud, said Deputy Unification Minister Lee Bong-jo during a weekly news briefing.
Sep 12, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
From today's Los Angeles Times: No Disputing It: Blogs Are Major Players.Soon Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles musician-turned-conservative-blogger who hosts the site LittleGreenFootballs.com, posted the results of his own investigation [of the CBS Bush memos]. He wrote that he had opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Times New Roman and used the program's default settings to retype a purported Killian memo from August 1973.
"My Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as 'authentic,' " Johnson wrote, posting images of his creation and the CBS document. (The Times New Roman font itself predates computers; it was designed in 1932.)
Within 90 minutes of that post, the Power Line site was linked to perhaps the best-known conservative site of all -- the Drudge Report, made famous when Matt Drudge took a lead role in the first reports on the relationship between then-President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
"That was a quantum jump in awareness," said [Power Line's] Scott Johnson. "It was wildly circulating in the blogosphere until Drudge linked us. Then it was instantly known to a million people, and it was all of a sudden a legitimate story."
The article is very grudging in giving credit to blogs, going as far as to cast doubt on their legitimacy, but bloggers Scott Johnson (Power Line) and Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs) are acknowledged for their breakthroughs in the faked memos story. (Power Line analyzes the article.)
Other bloggers closely following the story include: INDC Journal, RatherBiased.com and InstaPundit.
Mark Steyn ponders media bias (and bloggers Power Line and LGF get more national credit): CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo.The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.
Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter identification experts.
Sep 12, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Fine words from Robert Tracinski at TIA Daily:
Throughout this week, I have urged readers of TIA Daily to be "anti-Bushites for Bush." On Tuesday, I wrote:
"Both parts of the slogan 'anti-Bushites for Bush' imply the need for vigorous action. By being 'for Bush,' I meant that we should actively advocate and promote Bush's re-election, but do so on specific, narrow grounds: that it is necessary to fight an offensive war against terrorism and to fundamentally reform the political system of the Middle East. But we should also be prepared, after the election, to immediately and vigorously oppose everything that is wrong with the Bush agenda--to demand that he live up to his fierce rhetoric in prosecuting the war, and to oppose his attempts to expand the welfare state and inject religion into politics."
I would like to offer more specific advice on how we should achieve these goals.
First, a bit of advice on how to be for Bush: don't oversell him. Don't promote him as a strong and unyielding opponent of terrorist states. Explain to people that we need to be even stronger, that we need to stop making compromises and concessions, and that going on the offensive against terrorism means turning our attention to Iran, the main threat to the civilized world today. Then say that you support Bush because he is the only candidate who has even a prayer (so to speak) of going halfway in this direction.
And that leads me to the question of how to be an anti-Bushite.
It now seems likely that Bush will win the election, given the stunning incompetence of the Kerry campaign and the effectiveness of the Republican convention, which emphasized Bush's strongest issues and buried his weakest ones. So even those who do not plan to vote for Bush need to prepared with specific measures to oppose his worse policies during his second term.
How should we do it?
For the rest, email Mr. Tracinski at TIA Daily.Sep 10, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
We update this cartoon every year to highlight the latest distractions from the necessity to confront Islamic terrorism head-on, without compromise.
Though President Bush has at least taken the war to the terrorists and to some of their sponsors, as we've noted time again he's done so inconsistently (to put it nicely). Last year it was the push for a Palestinian State with the terrorist-supporting Palestinian Authority. This year it was halting, sensitive battles against Islamists who hid in mosques that our troops were not allowed to bomb. On top of that, the quick handover of sovereignty to Iraq has given the infant Iraqi government ultimate authority over our troops. And three years after 9/11, what are we doing about the world's worst sponsor of terrorism, Iran?
As bad as all that is, it is better than I would expect from presidential candidate John Kerry, who has stressed internationalism and multilateralism even more than Bush, who has condemned taking out Saddam as a "war of choice," as if Saddam and his ilk give us a choice, and who has criticized Bush's mere war of words with Iran as too confrontational.
The passengers of Flight 93 apparently knew there was no such thing as being too confrontational with Islamists bent on your destruction. Their reaction was not a matter of religious sensitivity, or diplomacy, or compromise, or nuance; it was a matter of going on the offensive and fighting for their lives.
Here's to their memory. May they forgive us for not fully living up to it.
UPDATE I -- September 10: This cartoon appears in today's edition of edition of Investor's Business Daily.
UPDATE II: From The Wall Street Journal: Kerry vs. Kerry; The way to attack Mr. Bush on Iraq is from the right.The great lost Democratic opportunity here is that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy is open to criticism: his under-estimation of the postwar insurgency, preventing the Army and Marines from dealing decisive blows to Moqtada al-Sadr in Najaf and the Baathists in Fallujah, failing to train enough Iraqi allies quickly enough, and prolonging the U.S. occupation. But all of these criticisms come from the prowar right, for not fighting in Iraq with the force and tenacity to win.
Other Democrats -- Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt -- could have made that critique with some credibility, but Mr. Kerry seems incapable of it. Now even if Iraq blows up in October, as it well might, Mr. Kerry will find it just about impossible to convince voters that he would prosecute the war with any more vigor than Mr. Bush.
More regarding how to handle the Islamist in Iraq from Investor's Business Daily.[T]he coalition must continue crushing the insurgency. That should not include offering rebels and terrorists a pass, as Maj. Gen. John Batiste did this week. The head of the 1st Infantry Division told insurgents they were free to leave Samarra or could remain inside the city if they stopped fighting — a poor idea, since that would let them live to fight another day.
The coalition, under the leadership of the U.S., will win the peace in Iraq only with the persistent application of deadly force.
We wish there were another way. Sadly, there isn't. The insurgents — who seek chaos, not peace — leave no other option.
AP reports: Insurgents Target Iraqi Police; 59 Dead .
We know. Two Dan Rather cartoons in a row. But with Rather still defending the fake memos, we couldn't resist.
As for North Korean mushroom clouds ... FoxNews reports: Report: N. Korea Says Blast Was Planned. They claim the explosion was related to a "hydroelectric project" that involved the demolition of a mountain. Perhaps. But it also happened on the 56th anniversary of the founding of North Korea, so a celebratory weapons test of some sort wouldn't be surprising. Why else would the North Koreans respond by complaining about South Korea's tests? Secretary of State Colin Powell said there's no indication the explosion was part of a nuclear test.
UPDATE I -- September 17: The cartoon appears in today's (Friday's) The Detroit News.
UPDATE II: The mushroom cloud story has taken a bizarre turn. FoxNews reports: S. Korea: No Blast in N. Korea.
We update this cartoon every year to highlight the latest distractions from the necessity to confront Islamic terrorism head-on, without compromise.
Though President Bush has at least taken the war to the terrorists and to some of their sponsors, as we've noted time again he's done so inconsistently (to put it nicely). Last year it was the push for a Palestinian State with the terrorist-supporting Palestinian Authority. This year it was halting, sensitive battles against Islamists who hid in mosques that our troops were not allowed to bomb. On top of that, the quick handover of sovereignty to Iraq has given the infant Iraqi government ultimate authority over our troops. And three years after 9/11, what are we doing about the world's worst sponsor of terrorism, Iran?
As bad as all that is, it is better than I would expect from presidential candidate John Kerry, who has stressed internationalism and multilateralism even more than Bush, who has condemned taking out Saddam as a "war of choice," as if Saddam and his ilk give us a choice, and who has criticized Bush's mere war of words with Iran as too confrontational.
The passengers of Flight 93 apparently knew there was no such thing as being too confrontational with Islamists bent on your destruction. Their reaction was not a matter of religious sensitivity, or diplomacy, or compromise, or nuance; it was a matter of going on the offensive and fighting for their lives.
Here's to their memory. May they forgive us for not fully living up to it.
UPDATE I -- September 10: This cartoon appears in today's edition of edition of Investor's Business Daily.
UPDATE II: From The Wall Street Journal: Kerry vs. Kerry; The way to attack Mr. Bush on Iraq is from the right.