JunkYardBlog

WE NEED A MOLE

Some shrewd conservative with a little money to burn and who can stomach a week with the flamingest of flaming liberals needs to slip into the Salon Cruise.

Highlights:

Sept. 6th - Monday - At Sea 2:00-4:30pm Salon.com Panel Session - Queens Lounge The intelligence wars. Ambassador Joe Wilson, author of the bestselling book "The Politics of Truth," leads a special panel discussion on the Bush administration's dangerous assault on the U.S. intelligence community, and the growing civil war between the White House and the CIA.

We must get a tape recorder into that session...if Salon doesn't cancel it! Which they probably won't. They'll continue to carry Joe's water even at sea.

Sept. 7th - Tuesday - Cozumel, Mexico
4:30-6:30pm
Salon.com Panel Session - Queens Lounge
What makes George run? A special panel discussion on the down and dirty style of Bush campaigning, including the unique insights of former Texas governor Ann Richards who brawled with W during their 1994 gubernatorial duel.

I would love to hear that drunkard's tale on George W. Bush. I'm frankly surprised she can even remember campaigning against him. In case you're wondering what I'm talking about, in my press days I once interviewed Richards. It was at a dove hunt/campaign appearance (it's Texas, ok?), and she was sooooo snockered her poor press minion practically had to prop her up like a scarecrow. That inebriated state wasn't at all uncommon, and didn't make it into the press much (not even into my story about her, and I despised her).

Sept. 9th - Thursday - At Sea 9:00-11:30am Salon.com Panel Session - Queens Lounge Why are we in Iraq? Salon columnist Joe Conason leads a special panel discussion on the real roots of the Iraq war, the ideological factions and corporate interests that are benefiting from the Middle East adventure, and how the Bush administration has kept the full truth from the American people.

And now, pinch-hitting for Michael Moore...Joe Conason!

Please, some of you wealthy conservatives with a strong stomach for moonbat guano, please go on this cruise and report to us less fortunate types. You'd make for some rich blog fodder.

WILSON, PLAME AND THE QUESTION OF WHY?

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson has been publicly discredited. He lied about his wife's role in his trip to Niger. He lied about what he found during that trip. He lied to reporters about the forged documents purporting to demonstrate an Iraqi attempt to procure yellowcake from Niger, when he said he had seen those documents though they had not become part of the public war debate yet and would not for another eight months after his trip.

That last is an interesting point, though, isn't it? Here's an account of the relevant testimony he delivered before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents—purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq—were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

I'm going to go out on a limb a bit here and suppose that when Wilson was talking about those forged documents, he wasn't lying. He simply slipped. He had seen them, prior to his tea-sipping trip and before the US got them (according to what has been told to the press, which very likely isn't entirely accurate--this would hardly be the first time the CIA has run a public story that is something less than a reflection of the real story). How might that have happened?

He could have seen them earlier if documents were in US hands prior to his trip, in the possession of the CIA, and someone within the CIA let him see them.

We know that contrary to his public assertions Wilson's wife, the CIA's Valerie Plame, suggested him for the Niger trip, based on his connections in the region. We also know that she believed the story to be investigated was "crazy," and that his trip would have the effect of shooting down the Iraq/Niger yellowcake story. It's therefore reasonable to conclude that Plame was involved in vetting the Iraq/Niger story; why else would she convene a meeting to suggest Wilson for the trip, and why would her suggestion be accepted by anyone else inside that task group if she wasn't in that group herself?

Follow me a little further out on this limb. Plame was working in the group that was investigating the Iraq/Niger question. In that position she had access to relevant documents, including the forgeries. We know from Wilson's account of their courtship, which she has not disputed, that she was a security risk because she told Wilson very early in their relationship that she was a CIA spook working undercover. She barely knew him at the time; her actions amounted to disclosing classified information to a near stranger. Wilson could have been working for anybody--Saddam, the Saudis, the Dutch or the French, anyone--and she would have at that time had no way of knowing about it. Yet she told him she was an undercover spook. There are many undercover agents who work an entire career without ever telling their spouse that they are undercover CIA agents, yet Plame apparently told Wilson during a makeout session just a couple of dates into their relationship. That's odd, to say the least.

So suppose she had access to the forgeries. She was a security risk. And, further out on the limb, she let Wilson see them even though he was outside the security loop. Maybe it was a pillow briefing.

So perhaps he had seen the forgeries prior to his trip, and knew they were forgeries. Therefore he was telling the truth when he told reporters about it, and therefore inadvertently let slip the fact that his wife had committed a crime in disclosing classified information improperly. That's why he backtracked when the Intel Committee redirected its questioning regarding those forgeries. And in so doing, he skated pretty close to perjury. But he covered for Ms. Plame.

Now, still further out on the limb, we must ask Why? Put aside the forgeries question for a minute, and just ask why these two people participated so publicly in a grand lie? What's the motivation?

Well, it turns out that Wilson is a fairly wealthy man, and it's not easy to get wealthy as a third-string member of the diplomatic corps assigned to such high-profile countries as Gabon. But it is easy to become wealthy if you have the right friends, and Wilson apparently does have the right friends.

According to National Review's Clifford May, Wilson is associated with the pro-Saddam Middle East Institute. Prior to the war he also associated himself with the Win Without War Coalition and a handful of other anti-war groups. Politically he had set himself on the far left of the discussion prior to the war, even with groups that opposed the entire Iraqi pre-war sanctions regime designed to keep Saddam and nuclear weapons as far apart as possible. All of this is interesting, but doesn't shed much light on his finances. But it does portray his politics; he associated himself with just about anyone working to preserve the Saddamite regime.

But. Wilson listed as his affiliation at several events Rock Creek Corp. What is Rock Creek Corp? Beats me, and no one has bothered to ask the dashing Mr. Wilson. But it is probably the source of his money. Or at least it's one of the sources of his money.

The question remains, what did he do to earn that money, and from whom was it earned? And did his public campaign of lying about the war have anything to do with it?

It is time to ask these questions, I think. Wilson constructed out of thin air the scandal of the 16 words, a non-scandal that has done a great deal of damage to the war effort in Iraq and to potential conflicts yet to be fought. We now know beyond doubt that he built that scandal on an edifice of lies, and it's apparent that he did so on purpose. Why would he do this? Self-promotion and the glory of a book deal, for a book that will be heading to the cut-out bins in short order now that he has been discredited, isn't a satisfying answer, at least not to me.

There very likely is much more to his story, and to his wife's story too.

(Chris Regan contributed greatly to this report)

UPDATE: Courtesy the always enlightening AOG, we have the following from a story about Wilson, by John Dean:

Some have charged that Wilson is a political partisan - a stalking horse for Democrats. But the charges don't ring true. The Washington Times reported that Wilson said, "Neoconservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both."

We may have a motive for Wilson's campaign of lies, and a glimpse of the credulous nature of the fawning journalists who promote it and him. How can one not be both a partisan and a stalking horse for the Democrats, which is Dean's claim, if Wilson himself claims to be on a personal mission to destroy the neoconservatives and religious conservatives? That is a partisan mission to its core, is it not? Yet Dean writes in a wall of cover for Wilson by saying the charges of partisanship "don't ring true." They sure ring true to me, and to any fair-minded reader.

Dean goes on to say that Wilson was working toward some "greater good," which can be seen as one more attempt to cover for Wilson's rabid partisanship (Wilson was at the time writing anti-Bush articles for The Nation, which isn't exactly Reader's Digest on the partisanship scale), and an end-vs-means justification of Wilson's actions.

John Dean, Josh Marshall, Maureen Dowd and a host of lefty journalists have a lot of explaining--and apologizing--to do. They were wind beneath Wilson's wings.

UPDATE: We seem to have opened up the floodgates. There's more Wilson speculation here and here. Roger Simon observes:

The CIA, or the part of the CIA that sent him, knew full well in advance that he would find nothing or say that he found nothing, nothing of sinificance anyway. In fact, if you were actually serious about finding out information about yellowcake sales, it seems the least likely way to go about it.

Indeed. Of course, the part of the CIA that sent him to Niger apparently includes his own wife. What were those two up to?

(via InstaPundit)

MORE: Nice try, Salon. Just another show of support from the lib media for Joe Wilson's perfidy.

MORE: Here is Wilson's letter of response to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It is unconvincing.

First conclusion: "The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee."

That is not true. The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo Valerie Plame, my wife, sent to her superiors that says, "My husband has good relations with the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip.

Balderdash. That's clearly a set of recommendations touting the reasons Wilson should be sent. He's being deceptive.

The rest is similary lame. He says his wife left the meeting in which his trip was first discussed to avoid appearances of conflict of interest, when she'd already written a memo touting the virtues of Joe Wilson, thereby introducing such an appearance prior to the meeting. He says the first time he saw the forgeries he wasn't wearing his glasses and couldn't read them. He plays word games around Niger, uranium and Iraq but never gets to the heart of the matter, which is whether or not the 16 words that Wilson himself turned into a scandal were in fact true or not. They were true, and he lied about them in saying they were false. The 16 words were about intelligence the UK had developed and which they stand by to this day.

Wilson is a fraud. Case closed.

But there is a massive black hole in this story that we on the outside cannot peer into, at least not yet. Why on earth would the CIA, in the middle of one shooting war and the run-up to what looked like and turned out to be another, send an unqualified diplomat on a mission that required some level of investigative skill, knowledge of weapons proliferation and a knack for finding out things that people want to hide? Why would it act on the recommendation of the man's wife, when that is sure to create--not diminish--all sorts of downstream problems. Is the CIA really this sloppy, or was its sloppiness in the Wilson case a feature rather than a bug?

This story has more stink than a Maldivian fish market.

KIDDIE INFOBOT BLASTS BUSH

The bias and Bush hatred out there have even infected an online robot:

Internet instant messaging is one of the most popular methods for teens and even adults to stay in touch with friends and family. One of the better known messenger programs, AIM, offers the feature called Smarter Child, a robot programmed to provide automated responses to those with whom it chats.

Built and programmed by Conversagent, Inc., a privately held firm that develops technology for creating and operating interactive agents, Smarter Child is able to dispense facts and figures, movie times, or just plain conversation with AIM users.

But when Erin told the robot that "George Bush is awesome," she was shocked by the response. "No way. George W. Bush is way uncool," the reply stated. She asked, "Do you like George W. Bush?" and the program replied, "I'm a Kerry supporter myself."

Testing the waters, she typed in "John Kerry rocks." The robot's response: "Absolutely. John Kerry rocks."

When Erin asked Smarter Child what it thought of Bush, it replied, "If u don't have anything good 2 say about someone, don't say anything at all." Smarter Child added a wink in addition to the computer short-hand language.

Not satisfied with that answer, Erin persisted in getting the robot to open up. "I have my reasons, believe me. I really, really don't like George W. Bush," the robot explained.

Whoever programmed that robot to mess with kids' heads like that is evil. Just plain evil.

Stephen Klein, CEO of Conversagent, said his firm received many complaints from users about Smarter Child's political bias. Although the robot was originally programmed to oppose Bush, Klein said it was being changed to adhere to the views of the users with whom it interacted. He conceded that Smarter Child had become "too anti-Bush."

"It got ridiculous. We realized criticizing political figures was out of bounds," Klein said.

Now, instead of disagreeing with users who state, "I like George Bush," or agreeing with those who say, "I like John Kerry," the robot mostly stays on the political sidelines. "Robots don't get involved in politics," the Smarter Child program replies, before asking users to make their choice for president.

It is still possible to get the robot to reveal its true feelings however. When told that "John Kerry rocks," Smarter Child still responds "Right on!" with a wink. When told that "John Kerry is awesome," it responds "Absolutely. John Kerry rocks." And when users tell Smarter Child that "George Bush is awesome," it replies, "I'll remember that. It's interesting especially since other people I've talked to say they don't like George W. Bush."

Par for the course, the Democrats are all to happy to tinker with young skulls full of mush in devious ways:

When asked about Smarter Child's support of Kerry, Jano Cabrera, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee said: "Clearly this is a smart robot. This shows that we've made great advances in artificial intelligence. The "smarter" in Smarter Child speaks for itself."

Evil. It's a little digital madrassah, meant to teach kids a poisonous little lie.

Because John Kerry manifestly does not rock. He flips. And he flops. But he does not rock.

"BUILDING A FENCE IS NOT THE ANSWER"

I'm sure at some point, someone will co-opt the famous Reagan line, aim it at Israel and declare "Mr. Sharon, tear down this wall!" It won't be long. The left loves to take good things and misuse them.

For an example, watch what will happen to marriage in the next few years. But I digress.

When the United States decided to invade Afghanistan, yard signs began to pop up like daisies bearing the flat and uninteresting phrase "War Is Not The Answer." Those erecting such signs never bothered to add what their answer to mass murdering Islamofascist terrorism might be.

When the United States decided to invade Iraq a little more than a year later, those same signs were still there, and a few new ones popped up: "War Is Not The Answer." All over the place. Fine. Tell us what is the answer, then. But on that, they were silent as the grave.

So war isn't the answer.

Up until very recently, Israel was plagued with terrorists. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Al Aqsa Martyrs, and so forth and so on would brainwash young kids and adults into wearing bombs into crowds of Jews and detonating themselves, killing many if not most of those Jews around them. Time and time again, they would do this. Israel got tired of this repetition--terrorists kill Jews, Israeli soldiers kill terrorist masterminds with missiles, terrorists kill Jews, ad infinitum--and decided what was needed was some sort of physical security that would impede the brainwashed terrorists trying to enter its land to kill its people. Israel decided that while effective in the short term, perhaps war wasn't the answer in the long term.

So it built a fence. And behold, terrorism almost immediately plunged to the point that it barely exists.

The fence is only a problem if you're a terrorist. It keeps you from doing your bloody work. If you're not a terrorist, the fence isn't much of an issue. Unlike the Berlin Wall Reagan rightly decried, Israel's fence wasn't built to keep innocent people in, but to keep murderers out.

Did any of this make the left happy?

No.

Building a fence isn't the answer either, apparently.

So actively engaging and killing terrorists isn't the answer. Building a passive defensive barrier isn't even the answer. The Philippines will soon find out that turning yourself into a Manila folder isn't the answer either.

So to the left, those that believe neither war nor constructing a physical security barrier is the answer, I ask--What is?

You folks have been telling us since 9-12-01 that war isn't the answer. Then what is? You folks have been preaching to the rest of us long enough, without ever offering a single solution. All you do it attack us psychologically and morally while the terrorists attack us physically.

I don't want to hear "War Is Not The Answer." I don't want to hear that even building a harmless fence isn't the answer either. That's empty, juvenile and useless. If you know what isn't the answer, you must step up and tell us what you think is the answer, or we are entitled to ignore you. And that is what we will do.

ORSON SCOTT CARD

Typically brilliant today.

Except:

I mean, they're still ripping into President Bush as if he were the anti-Christ -- no, as if he were Mel Gibson -- because they hate this war that has closed down two terrorist-sponsoring governments and liberated millions from tyranny.

The Mel Gibson line is perfect, but let's see...Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. That's three terrorist-sponsoring governments shut down by Bush's prosecution of the war, not two. Three.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. I'm going to start drilling this meme until it catches on. Bush has ended three governments' state sponsorship of terrorism, not two. Three. And one without even having to attack it. He just scared 'em straight.

Pass it on, people. Start mentioning the fact that war wasn't the answer with Libya only because it was the answer in Iraq. And President Bush got Ghaddafi to mail us his nuclear program through interdiction and intimidation. One more terrorist kingpin is off the board.

Three, people. Not two. Three.

Oh, and Letterman is on CBS, not NBC.

Other than that, it's a terrific column. Do yourself a favor and read it all.

(thanks to JG)

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ENDANGERS CHINA'S FUTURE

Unborn women, that is.

They should have seen this coming:

Thanks to abortion, the one-child policy of China's communist dictatorship is causing a wholesale slaughter of females.

"Researchers say China has millions fewer girls than it normally should, suggesting that many were aborted or killed after birth," the Associated Press reported today.

---

"Government figures show 117 boys are born in China for every 100 girls - a gap blamed largely on a policy limiting most couples to one child. In a society that values sons, many parents abort baby girls, hoping to try again for a boy," AP reported.

They also kill baby girls after birth. Yet liberals like Hillary Clinton think one-child is just peachy. Call it full-birth abortion.

"The gap has led to warnings that millions of men won't find wives in coming years, fueling social tensions and a black market in baby girls and abducted women."

Translation: state-sanctioned gender-cide will make China a very unhappy and aggressive place in a decade or two. Its neighborhood will be a bad one to live in. People around the world unfairly call us bullies now--just want until a heavily male and militarily modernized Communist China casts about looking for women. It will not be pretty, and the Reds who run the place (and those outside China who support the policy) are fools for not seeing this obvious consequence to the barbaric one-child policy.

"PAID FOR BY JOHN KERRY FOR PRESIDENT, INC."

When you lie down with lying dogs...

See also. File Wilson's book under "historical fiction."

Iceberg! Dead ahead!

Where have you gone, Joe Wilson? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you...and for once you're not mugging for half a dozen cameras.

(thanks to Hanks)

SWEET JUSTICE

Saddam Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Now, thousands of Iraqis want to kill him. And they get to take to the streets to demand it. They'll probably get their wish.

Enjoy your new freedom, Iraq. And do everything you can to keep it.

A (MILD) FISKING OF JONAH GOLDBERG

Pundits of both the right and left are infected with some kind of virus. Each and every single time they talk about success in the war, they fail to mention one critical battle that we have won without firing a direct shot: Libya.

Today's example is a gentleman and a scholar, but an omitter of salient facts. Jonah Golberg:

On this I agree with the Bush bashers: I don't think it's true that we're safer today.

Now, it might be true. Bush's critics insist that if we hadn't gone to war with Saddam, he would still be "in his box" and we would have declared an unrelenting, "undistracted" war against al Qaeda, with the full and complete support of this magical, wonderful, all-powerful entity called "the international community" whose mystical fairy dust can make French soldiers willing to take bullets for American ones.

The same fairy dust, alas, seems to induce forgetfulness on those who would wield it, insofar as they seem to imagine that if the United States had simply stayed the pre-9/11 course after the towers fell no bad or inconvenient things could possibly have developed. Maybe it's not fairy dust so much as Parmenides' dust. In any case, they forget that Saddam's regime was the only one in the world to celebrate the 9/11 attacks, and that Saddam's "box" was falling apart like a Haitian barge made out of supermarket cartons of Charmin — and was about as airtight. They wax amnesiac about the fact that the tyrant made billions of dollars under the table and bribed so many "international community" aristocrats that if they all got together for a group photo they'd look like a re-staging of the Sgt. Pepper's album cover with better suits.

Yes, yes, lots of pop culture references. Jonah's style is to be funny while making a serious point (unlike, say, Maureen Dowd, who uses pop culture refs to disquise the fact that she's just prattling on about nothing). But not a word about disarming Ghaddafi. Not a word about the patient use of multilateral diplomacy, interdiction, intelligence sharing and military action to disarm a very real and growing threat.

We also now know that Saddam really did look for uranium from Africa and that the half-life of the "Bush lied" nonsense nonsense has rundown to where it is safe to talk to Bush-bashers without a hazmat suit.

Still, I think critics such as Richard Cohen are right when they say that we aren't in fact safer today than we would have been had we left Saddam in his box to murder and torture his own people. If we found the weapons of mass destruction, then I think the "we're safer" argument would be a "slam dunk," as it were. But we didn't. Then again, if we found the WMDs then we'd no doubt be hearing some other complaint from the irreducible, unappeasable cadre of Bush haters (of whom I don't think Cohen is one, by the way).

But we disarmed two dictators for the price of one, Jonah. And Ghaddafi was much closer to building a nuke than anyone outside his own programs knew. We dodged a nuclear bullet there. Would it kill ya to mention it?

So, we aren't safer today than we would have been had we left Saddam there to continue subsidizing the suicide bombers who blow up Israelis.

Yes, we are. Libya shipped its nuke program to Tennessee. We're safer because of it, and it did that in part because we took down Saddam while Ghaddafi had nightmares about Ronald Reagan circa 1986.

(Though I do love how those who say we can't solve our problems in the Middle East until we get peace between Israelis and Palestinians also say that things were better when Saddam was buying suicide bombers by the six pack. Great peace plan, fellas.) And yep, we aren't safer today because we are making good on a promise delayed to the millions of Shia we betrayed after the first Gulf War. We aren't safer today now that the "Marsh Arabs" have seen their lands restored and the ecological devastation there ameliorated. We aren't safer today because we're building hospitals, schools, and soccer fields in Iraq.

Yes, I get the point he is making: We may not be safer because we freed lots of people and righted lots of wrongs, the very kinds of wrongs the left in any other context would demand the United States right unilaterally if need be. But we are demonstrably safer--and the Bush administration must make this case--because of the main ripple effect of the Iraq war, which was the disarmament of Libya. Just make that point and then get to your pop culture refs and discussion of the plight of the Marsh Arabs and I'll be happy.

He goes on to make some good points about how there aren't any rules that dictate a military action must make us safer on a presidential timetable, and he's right about that. But he is conceding too much. We are safer now because we in invaded Iraq, because that invasion combined with solid police work and cooperative intelligence sharing led to the turn of Libya, not to mention the disarmanent of Iraq itself and the first birth of freedom in the Middle East since the handing down of the Ten Commandments. Ghaddafi was once one of the worst blights on the planet, sponsoring the murder of innocents flying over Scotland and of Americans at a disco in Berlin, among other sordid activities. He won't be sponsoring that any more. His nuclear program benefited from two very serious proliferation concerns, the A.Q. Khan smuggling network and Chinese backchannel nuclear proliferation, not to mention a cooperative relationship between Ghaddafi and Saddam and the mullahcracy in Iran. But Ghaddafi is now telling us all he knows and is no longer within a few months of setting up a nuclear weapons factory. The turn of Libya has already put the screws on the Khan network, which in turn has hindered Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs.

So does that make us safer? You bet. And Bush-friendly pundits should do a little homework and point it out once in a while.

FIREFLIES

As I pulled the car into the driveway upon returning home from work, my son came running across the yard to greet me: "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!"

We played catch--by which I mean he would run to the one side of the yard while I stood on the other, then run as fast as he could at me and at the last second JUMP into my arms--for a few minutes, and then had to go. For me Wednesday night is band practice night. I play the drums in my church's praise band; Mrs. JYB also had to go to church to get things ready for Vacation Bible School which starts next week. In between home and church we stopped in at Quiznos for dinner. Best subs on earth, and the jalapeno chips are just hot enough to make the eyes sweat. Delish.

Oddly enough, this year's Vacation Bible School theme (there's always a theme) is Japan. Not too surprisingly, almost everything about the Southern Baptist Convention's literature on Japan is wrong. We know because, well, I used to live there and Mrs. JYB is from there. Anyway. It would have helped if they had had someone with at least a passing knowledge of Japanese culture to vet the materials. But they didn't. So all across America next week, kids will be learning about rickshaws and other things that have nothing to do with Japan, and haven't for at least a hundred years.

So while Mrs. JYB and the little guy went to the church's ground floor to decorate, I went to band practice. It went well. We'll be playing quite a bit of uptempo stuff Sunday, which I enjoy. One song, "Rise Up and Praise Him," has a drum lick I just can quite get. It's a little off-rhythm thing the drummer does on the cd that usually causes me to drop a stick or get myself crossed up. Truth be told, I'm not that good a drummer, but I'm all the church has for the moment, so the gig is mine. And I love it. And if I keep at it, I'll be pretty good by the time I'm 50 or so.

After church, a stop for milk at the grocery store, then home. Dusk had just about settled to become night. As soon as I had pulled the car up, the little guy was out and off chasing hotaru--fireflies. After a stop in the basement to decide between a cigar and the pipe, I followed him out.

I'm not generally a fan of pre-fabbed tobaccos, but Captain Black makes a couple of fine blends for the pipe, so I filled the bowl, lit up and sat down on the steps of the deck. Its surface was a little rough to my hand, no doubt a result of the powerwash we had done Monday afternoon. Hopefully the thing will smooth out when it gets stained, which will happen once the tornadoes and thunderstorms leave us alone for a while.

The little guy ran all around the yard chasing hotaru while I sat and enjoyed the pipe. Me and Captain Black; the four-year-old boy and the fireflies. Yes, Mark, it's the same pipe you gave me more than ten years ago. It's one of the better traveled pipes in the world, I'd imagine. It went with me from northeast Texas to Japan and then to Maryland, with several stops in between. I think I took it to Europe with me back in 1997. I'm sure of it.

There's something about a pipe--the craft of packing it, of lighting it, the smell of the burning leaf, the warm feel of the bowl in your hand, the blue-gray smoke that rises from it--that beats a cigar hands down. A pipe is culture, an old and rich culture that produced Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, Frodo Baggins, Stephen Hawking, C.S. Lewis and Michael Jordan. It's a culture, a set of ideals, principles, traditions and rights and responsibilities worth preserving.

The hotaru chase continued, reminding me of a time several years ago in Japan. Mrs. JYB and myself accompanied another couple--mixed, like us--to a restaurant high up on a mountain in Japan, near Tokyo. Ukai Toriyama was the name, and it was beautiful. Each group of patrons had their own room in which to dine, which consisted of a tatami floor, a few cushions and a table, the center of which was a fire grill. Ukai Toriyama served the finest beef and vegatables, which we grilled to our taste before eating. We finished not long after nightfall, and not long after that the attendants called everyone out. Each room had a glass door that opened onto a courtyard, and as we stepped out we could see that all the other patrons were stepping out, and the attendants held little wooden boxes in their hands. Once everyone was assembled, at some silent signal the attendants opened the boxes and out poured clouds of fireflies, glittering as they rose in the summer air. Alighting on trees, on the buildings, on rocks and grasses and flowers, the hotaru looked like a little galaxy brought to earth for our entertainment.

Tonight's hotaru hunt was not so spectacular. We had come home a little late to see the best show.

After the hunt and once the mosquitoes had overtaken our air space, we decided to call it a night. As we entered the house through the deck door, the little guy looked up and asked me "Daddy, where were all the hotaru?"

"I don't know, son. Maybe they were already too high up in the trees for us to catch. Or maybe they were already asleep for the night. But we can look for them again tomorrow."

"Yeah, Dad. We can look for them again tomorrow."

And Lord willing, we will.

WHO SAID THIS?

"You know, I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over. I don't believe he went in there for oil. We didn't go in there for imperialist or financial reasons. We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis that the Iraqis would be better off, we could shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, and our leverage to make peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be increased.

At the moment the U.N. inspectors were kicked out in '98, this is the proper language: there were substantial quantities of botulinum and aflatoxin, as I recall, some bioagents, I believe there were those, and VX and ricin, chemical agents, unaccounted for. Keep in mind, that's all we ever had to work on. We also thought there were a few missiles, some warheads, and maybe a very limited amount of nuclear laboratory capacity.

After 9/11, let's be fair here, if you had been President, you'd think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? Arguably they were super-powerful chemical weapons. Think about it that way. So, you're sitting there as President, you're reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I've got to do that.

That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, "Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process." You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he'd [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he'd sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I've always been worried about North Korea's nuclear and missile capacity. I don't expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can't feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that's why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you're the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for."

Check the comments for the answer.

"HOW TO DISMANTLE AN ATOMIC BOMB"

That might be the title of U2's upcoming release. The other title floating around is Vertigo.

I lean toward the second, fwiw.

MAKING MORE BABY KILLERS

This time, at a mosque in Germany:

Police officers raided a mosque in Frankfurt on Monday after a 9-year-old girl told one of her teachers that children had been shown violent videos calling for "a holy war against unbelievers," a spokesman for the Frankfurt prosecutor said.

The police carried away computer hard drives and disks from the Taqwa Mosque, used mostly by Moroccan immigrants, in Frankfurt, Germany's financial center.

Michael Moore would be proud:

German television said the child, who has not been identified, had told a teacher that a beheading had been shown on one of the videotapes, but there was no confirmation of this from the prosecutor's office.

Moore's drive to reduce F*** 9-11's rating from R to PG-13 was in part so that it could be shown in schools without parental permission. As you probably already know, his film included video of a beheading. Just like the imam's jihadi video.

Jihadi teachings are not just offered at one Islamist school:

There have also been complaints in Germany that children attending at least one private Muslim school in Bonn are taught that Jews and Christians are waging a "crusade" against Islam and that it is the first duty of all Muslims to fight their enemies.

They are the REVOLUTION...and they will win. Right, Mikey?

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE WAR...

There appears to be a terrorist front operating within a few miles of the nation's capital:

United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), based in Springfield, Va., is publicly identified as a Muslim think tank but has multiple ties to the terrorism underworld, according to the CNSNews.com sources inside and outside government.

"UASR is a front organization for a terrorist group," said Peter Leitner, president of Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center. Leitner, who is also a professor at the National Center for Biodefense at George Mason University, called UASR "part of a shell game of international terrorism - phony organizations that are really terrorist cells [and] part of the international terrorist network."

And one just a bit further away, bit with the same aims:

Court documents filed in Virginia and obtained by CNSNews.com indicate that a government investigation of Alamoudi has uncovered evidence linking him to al-Qaida through a non-profit called Taibah International Aid Association, based in Falls Church, Va.

"According to TIAA's 2000 IRS Form 990, Abdurahman Alamoudi is the Vice President of TIAA," the court documents stated. TIAA, founded in 1991, also "lists Abdullah A. bin Laden, as founding officer." He is the nephew of Osama bin Laden, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

The court documents filed by the U.S. attorney's office in Virginia stated that Mohammed El-Nagmy, an employee of TIAA and its sister organization Taibah in Sarajevo, Bosnia, served simultaneously as the Bosnian representative for Global Relief Foundation.

GRF is also on the State Department's list of specially designated global terrorist groups.

In Minneapolis, a man was arrested carrying a suicide note and other suspect items onto an airline flight:

The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that Ali Mohamed Almosaleh is in federal custody in the Twin Cities. He was being detained on an immigration law violation, but federal sources confirmed there is much more than that to this investigation.

Sources confirm Almosaleh was carrying a suicide [note] when he was arrested. They say that note indicated a specific time and date for carrying out some sort of public suicide. He was also carrying CDs and DVDs, which federal sources say contained anti-American material. A source also confirms Almosaleh had something with him indicating a connection with at least one known terrorist.

The terrorists will not call a time-out, and will not respect one that a President Kerry would call. They would use the time-out to rebuild their training camps, plan new operations and kill innocent civilians.

TAKING THE FIGHT TO THE ENEMY

Scott Koenig is taking the fight for freedom to our enemies, foreign and domestic:

The reaction to our rally from the baseball fans was tremendous. Every time the light turned green, a cacophony of car horns would erupt as they passed the young ladies holding the “HONK if you LOVE FREEDOM” signs. Just like last week, we passed out small American flags to people waiting for the light, but this time with a sticker with our website address on each flagpole.

A sailor in uniform stopped to personally thank us for showing our support. Another man told me he was a Vietnam vet, and reflected that if only they had such support from the home front back then, maybe things would have turned out differently…

The enthusiastic horn-honking and cheering coming from the passers-by was a beautiful sound, like a symphony of patriotism. We had never received such a powerful response during our previous demonstrations, when we had been mixed in with the anti-military crowd.

But this time, our message was clear and undiluted – and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

“They love it!” I shouted to Sledge, over the car horns.

“Yeah,” he shouted back, “but just imagine how happy they would be if the Padres had actually WON!”

Read the whole thing.

THE NEW GROUPTHINK

Today's must-read:

Today, as Election Day approaches, groupthink has swung back again, to this: Saddam not only had no terror weapons, but he had little or nothing to do with Al Qaeda — therefore, our liberation of Iraq was a waste of lives and money.

Consider the official pressure to get with the latest groupthink: the 9/11 commission staff assured us recently that repeated contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda (including the presence in Baghdad and Kurdistan of the reigning terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), "did not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." This week, the Senate Intelligence Committee chimed in, saying these contacts "did not add up to an established formal relationship." (Italics mine.)

Think about that. Do today's groupthinkers believe that Osama bin Laden would sit down with Saddam in front of the world's cameras to sign a mutual assistance pact, establishing a formal relationship? Terrorists and rogue states don't work that way. Mass killers collaborate informally, without a photo op, even secretly.

But groupthinkers march lock step in election-season judgments. In contrast, we new iconoclasts hope that when the 9/11 commissioners release their findings on the eve of the Democratic convention, they will lay out in detail specific evidence of the Baghdad-terrorist links over the years before brushing it aside as informal. Let readers, not politicians and sound-biters, judge.

And while our Monday morning quarterbacks are dumping all over our intelligence agencies as a pack of inept sheep, we in the non-group might ask, with Juvenal, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who is to watch the watchers?

The Senate Intelligence Committee, with a staff of 30 and an annual budget of $3.5 million, exists to oversee our intelligence services, to note their shortcomings and to demand that they be fixed, on pain of withholding funds.

Where has this Senate committee (and its House counterpart, Porter Goss's "Hipsie") been for the past decade? Did any of its recent members — John Edwards, for one — or any staff members have the wit to ask the C.I.A., with its $40 billion a year to spend, how many American spies we had in Iraq? (Answer: not one.) If the intelligence agencies were as badly run for years as the Senate now says, then Congressional oversight has long been bleary-eyed.

Failures in the intel community are not the sole province of the George Tenets and lesser agents. Congress, especially the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (which the Democrats shamelessly politicized in the middle of a war), has oversight responsibility over the intel community, and in that mission it has spectacularly failed the American people.

(thanks to M)

IS KAUS SERIOUS?

So Mickey Kaus has had the good sense to back off his ill-conceived "time out" request. Good for him. But still...

If this is a war unlike other wars, the World War II analogies don't apply in every respect. It might be a war we win by being less grandiose, righteous and excited for a period, especially if we're already accomplishing what we want to accomplish in Iraq (i.e., giving democracy root in the Arab Middle East).

I could take such suggestions seriously, maybe, if the Democrats or pundits of Kaus' character and calibre even once mentioned either of two major initiatives that the administration is using to win the war and are neither exciting nor grandiose, and hardly full of self-righteousness. The Bush administration, completely under the radar it seems, has put two very serious multilateral alliances together aimed at winning the war on the strategic plane by caging two rogue states that are gearing up to produce and proliferate nuclear weapons. Against North Korea, the Bush team has set up the Proliferation Security Initiative, which to date has a dozen member states and another 48 states that are cooperating with it in some way. Against Iran, the administration has set up Caspian Shield, which is an alliance of Central Asian states who share our mistrust of Iran and who wish to work with us to help keep Iran from becoming a regional hegemon.

Both alliances took tremendous patience and toil to piece together, and both are doing yeoman's work in winning the war far from the headlines and cable shoutfests. Both alliances give lie to the notion that the Bush administration is some kind of unilateral bully.

A serious student of this war would know about those alliances, and would factor them into his calculus of how the administration is doing in winning it. A serious student of this war would then wonder, perhaps aloud on his blog, why the famously multilateral UN-loving left hadn't put such alliances together when they were in power just a few years ago. And a serious student of this war would have a more balanced view of the "grandiose" warfare favored by the Bush administration.

The fact is, the administration is working hard to bring as many countries as possible around to our way of thinking on Iran and North Korea. It is using patient diplomacy, incentives and the currency of American know-how and influence to put the Axis of Evil in a cage and keep it there. I can't take Kaus or any other pundit very seriously if they fail to acknowledge the existence and utility of the PSI and Caspian Shield. They're just not doing their homework.

UPDATE: Here's an example of why I can't take them seriously: Libya has disarmed, and sent dozens of crates full of nuclear bomb-making equipment and material to us to prove it. That equipment has now arrived in the US, where President Bush took a look at it in the course of making a campaign appearance.

The disarmament of Libya was probably a major turning point in the war. Libya we now know was cooperating actively in the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling ring, and was very far along in constructing a nuclear weapon. The Khan ring sought to spread the "Islamic bomb" further than Khan's native Pakistan, to Libya, North Korea, Iran, Iraq and to just about any other state or entity that was Islamic or terroristic in nature and hated the United States. The Khan network was probably the single most dangerous WMD development of the past several years, in that it was on a straight path to spreading nuclear weapons and technology across several states and probably to terrorist groups, if not directly, then certainly as those groups act as proxies for the Libyas, Irans and Iraqs of the world.

The Khan network was discovered during an inspection of a ship bound for Libya, a ship that investigators suspected of carrying WMD technology. It was--inspectors found centrifuges on board--and we had caught Libya's dictator Muammar Ghaddafi red-handed. His long record as a terrorist sponsor combined with this new finding that he was actively pursuing nuclear weapons made for an intolerable situation.

Hold that thought for a minute, and then combine it with this: To Lybia's southeast, the US had just toppled Saddam Hussein in a blinding military rout. The military defeat of the Iraqi regime had a strong effect on Ghaddafi, who reportedly told Italy's Prime Minister:

"I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

When on the one hand he had been caught in the act of smuggling nuclear technology and on the other hand the United States had just taken down a dictator not dissimilar to himself on the suspicion that he was pursuing and stockpiling WMDs, Ghaddafi experienced a teachable moment, and learned a hard lesson well: The United States will not tolerate threats, especially threats with terrorist connections and a known pursuit of WMDs. Ghaddafi undoubtedly remembered his unhappy experiences with President Reagan, and had heard that President Bush considered himself a Reaganite on foreign policy.

For Ghaddafi the die was cast, and he had rolled snake eyes. It was time to pick up his chips and leave the nuclear weapons high-stakes gamble. So he did. It's probably no exaggeration to posit that in that act, Ghaddafi not only saved himself, but his country and probably millions of Americans, British, Japanese, Italians, Canadians and others all around the world. Had he completed his nuclear weapon, and had it fallen into terrorist hands, the consequences would have been incredible.

It's very likely that Ghaddafi would never have chosen so wisely without the Proliferation Security Initiative. It was under the auspices of the PSI that the Libyan ship was boarded and the Khan network rolled up, and it was intel developed within the PSI that made it possible. Other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, creation of the PSI is probably the single most important development of the war. It was formed to do what the UN and IAEA have proven ineffective in doing, stopping the spread of WMDs, particularly nuclear weapons. Now, the PSI is even becoming a framework for military exercises among member states. It's a true alliance, and a likely counterweight to the UN in years to come.

Yet Bush critics never even acknowledge it exists or try and work it into their view of the war and his handling of it. I even asked Josh Marshall directly why in all of his writings on North Korea he had never even mentioned the PSI. He never gave me a straight answer, just mumbled something about not having the time to work it in. Yet PSI is the central strategic framework the Bush administration is using to cage North Korea, and was key to disarming Libya. Yet liberal Bush critics never mention it or let it factor into their thinking in any way. So I can't take them seriously.

MAKING BABY KILLERS

More Palestinian child abuse:

Children as young as 10 are being recruited to fight for the Palestinian cause.

Sky News has gained access to a young people's camp in Gaza, where the only lesson taught is how to kill Israelis.

---

The recruits, some of whom are dwarfed by their AK-47 assault rifles, are taught how to carry out ambushes.

They are also made to do an obstacle course, crawling under barbed wire and leaping through hoops of fire while their instructors fire live bullets overhead.

Hurd witnessed one training session in which a militant, dressed as a Jewish settler complete with yarmulke skull cap, was ambushed in his car. Gunmen pulled the "settler" from his vehicle and Hurd was told if this had been real he would have been killed.

I have a book at home that is a long and detailed chronolgy of the Middle East wars through the 20th Century. It has a picture from at least ten years ago, and maybe longer, of little Palestinian kids dressed in terrorist garb hoisting real machine guns. The kids in that picture are the terrorists who plague Israel today; the kids in the Gaza killing school camp today are the ones who will plague Israel tomorrow. In the Palestinian territories you have a culture that brainwashes its children, then sends them as human missiles to kill innocent civilians because of their race.

There will be no peace so long as such a people treats its children this way.

THE AP'S SCOTT LINDLAW WRITES ANOTHER DEMOCRAT PARTY PRESS RELEASE

Scott Lindlaw, reporter for the Associated Press, writes DNC press releases dressed up as news stories. When we last visited with reporter Lindlaw, he was using a trip to a NASCAR event to bash President Bush:

With his wife, Laura, trailing him, Bush walked the pit, mingling with drivers, shaking hands with fans. He peered into car No. 16, sponsored by the National Guard, and if the car reminded him of the tempest swirling around his own service in the Texas Air National Guard, he didn't show it.

That was back in February, when Bush was AWOL v2.0 was topping the charts. Nice work, Scott, working in a half-second nod into a race car to question Bush's military service.

Today, with the economy soaring, the Johns candidacy barely making a blip while Bush surges, with Dem panic everywhere and Dem pundits trying to call time-out in the middle of a shooting war, what do you suppose Mr. Lindlaw finds to write about? Why, conservative discontent with Bush, naturally.

And it's not just any kind of discontent, either. If the story was about discontent over Bush's spending, Lindlaw might have a point. If the story was about Bush's illegal alien amnesty-by-another-name, he might have a point there too. But no. Lindlaw's conservative discontent is a sweeping indictment of the Iraq war and Bush's handling of same.

When an influential group of conservatives gathers in downtown Washington each week, they often get a political pep talk from a senior Bush administration official or campaign aide. They don't expect a fellow Republican to deliver a blistering critique of President Bush's handling of the Iraq war.

But nearly 150 conservatives listened in silence recently as a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations ticked off a litany of missteps in Iraq by the Bush White House.

"This war is not going well," said Stefan Halper, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Reagan.

"It's costing us a lot of money, isolating us from our allies and friends," said Halper, who gave $1,000 to George W. Bush's campaign and more than $83,000 to other GOP causes in 2000. "This is not the cakewalk the neoconservatives predicted. We were not greeted with flowers in the streets."

Why doesn't Lindlaw spend a few minutes with, say, Senator Zell Miller or former NYC Mayor Ed Koch, Democrats who not only insist that the war is going well but that their own party's candidates and leadership are not serious enough to wage and win the war? Why don't reporters listen to what those two lifelong Democrats have to say about President Bush's courage, leadership, competence and resolve in the face of a two-front post-modern war against a stateless yet dangerous enemy?

Because they can drag out a long forgotten member of the Nixon administration to criticize George W. Bush.

Personally I've never heard of Stefan Halper, so I don't know what he thinks would be a solution to the terror problem. But I do know at least one reason he's out there taking speaking engagements:

"I don't think there's any question that there is growing restiveness in the Republican base about this war," said Halper, the co-author of a new book, "America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order."

A book to flog. How original. Like we haven't already been bombarded with anti-Bush books from Joe Wilson (now discredited), Richard Clarke (don't make me laugh), Ron Suskind (who misquoted his main source in order to bash Bush) and so on and so forth and so on. I'm sure Halper has already been invited to appear on 60 Minutes, too.

But back to the story. Lindlaw searched far and wide and finds a conservative who is mad at Bush about the war:

"I am bitterly disappointed in his actions with this war. It is a total travesty," said Tom Hutchinson, 69, a self-described conservative from Sturgeon, Mo., who posted yard signs and staffed campaign phone banks for the Republican in 2000. Hutchinson said he did not believe the administration's stated rationales for the war, in particular the argument that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had weapons of mass destruction.

"...did not believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." That's an odd belief to have held prior to the war, when even the French, the Russians, the UN, even Saddam Hussein himself believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The whole world, with the exception of Scott Ritter (and he was on the receiving end of a $400k stipend from an Iraqi-American who had received money from Saddam's oil-for-food slush fund, so let's just say his credibility is suspect) believed Saddam Hussein had WMDs. If Saddam didn't believe that he had those weapons, then why pray tell did he put his own troops in chem gear and order several units to use said weapons? So Lindlaw has found the one conservative who didn't believe what pretty much 6 billion other people did believe. Well bully for him. I wonder if Lindlaw asked Hutchinson what he thought about the dozen or so chemical shells, or the several tons of enriched uranium, or the advanced missile systems, we have found since the war and whether they may have changed his mind about the whole Iraqi WMD connection. Eh, evidently not.

So we continue. Not content to whack the WMD angle, Lindlaw next moves on to the left's favorite war (because they helped Communists win it): Vietnam. I kid you not:

Jack Walters, 59, a self-described "classical conservative" from Columbia, Mo., said he hadn't decided which candidate to vote for.

"Having been through Vietnam, I thought no, never again," Walters said. "But here comes the same thing again, and I'm old enough to recognize the lame reasons given for going into Iraq, and they made me ill."

Vietnam was a jungle state plagued with a Communist junta bent on subduing its freedom-loving southern half, was backed up by two Communist superpowers and was a little hot zone in the Cold War. Iraq is a desert, formerly run by a mad dictator with terrorist connections, and who had a tendency to develop weapons that he has sworn not to possess at the risk of losing his regime if we caught him lying. Other than that, and the media's insistence that Iraq is Vietnam, Iraq ain't Vietnam and never was. And how many "conservatives" do you know who immediately look at Iraq and think: Dadgummit, it's Vietnam all over again! There was evidently one, and Lindlaw found him.

So the picture Lindlaw is painting, with the three quoted sources and a few blind quotes, is that Bush is in danger of losing his base over the war. Lindlaw might want to look at a poll or two:

President Bush has maintained strong support among Republican voters even as bad news from Iraq has drowned out good economic news and driven down the president's overall standing in recent polls.

"It's clear that Bush's job-approval rating among Republicans has remained remarkably high during his entire administration," said Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll.

The Gallup Poll reported last week that 89 percent of Republicans give Mr. Bush high job-performance marks — four points higher than President Reagan had five months before his re-election in 1984.

In other words, George W. Bush is in every bit as much danger of losing the GOP base this year as Ronald Reagan was in 1984. Well, actually a bit less danger, since is four points up on the Gipper.

Reagan won 49 states in 1984. If that constitutes electoral trouble, I'm sure Bush would be content to take a few more pounds of it.

The fact is, there is no story here, so Scott Lindlaw made one up. Again. The panic on the right, of which I have been occassionally guilty myself, is not producing Kerry voters out of solid Bush voters. The panic stems from the administration's inability or reluctance to make its case, and from the apparently never-ending stream of lies coming from the Democrats and from made-up press reports like Lindlaws. And at least in my case, all the occassional panic serves to do is remind me that I need to make sure to keep making the case for Bush here and make sure I and everyone I know casts their vote for him in November. That's all part of my effort to stave off an even bigger reason to panic: President Kerry.

THE 59 DECEITS OF MICHAEL MOORE

Reader BB sends in a link to a great Dave Kopel site debunking F*** 9-11. Dig through it. It's an exhaustive resource to use when friends or neighbors express any sort of faith in Moore or his film.

Fight the lie!