Month: December 2003

So Senator John Kerry has launched the f-bomb:

“I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, ‘I’m against everything’? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to f – – – it up as badly as he did? I don’t think anybody did,” Kerry told the youth-oriented magazine.

Oooh. He’s young, hip, and aggrieved, and has used this word undoubtedly only after his advisors told him it was okay. Some people might disagree with the leader of the free world using the f-word, but I got no problem with it; I’m from the North Side, wherein the f-word was a part of my vocabulary in the third grade and in frequent rotation therein (much to the disgust of Danny H, my sophisticated fourth grade friend).

No, what bothers me is that Kerry deploys it against a sitting president. I expect that’s how he would be as a president, too, a stretch just inside the limit of my vast and fertile imagination. He’d save his wrath for internal opponents, and people who disagreed with his policies. Not against external threats or the pompous politicos and despots who would like to lay low our very civilization.

So if a leader’s going to display controlled psychopathy with the f-word, I’d rather he use it in appropriate places. In the imperative tense, such as to the United Nations, to Little Kim, to Jack Chirac. Or as an alternate pronunciation for the unvoiced labiodental fricative in the names of Arafat or Kofi. These uses of the f-word I could support.

But for JFK the lesser, I would offer the word in its imperative reflexive, but he prompts me to a North Side Stream of Cussingness, which is a stream of common swear words, grouped and repeated, not in a particularly clever fashion, but with feeling.

Neil Steinberg, in his Friday column, examines how nations review their own histories and concludes that the United States owes no apology for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

He begins:

There is a museum in Tokyo dedicated to Japan’s ample history of warfare. But if you visit the plainly named Military Museum, you will find no reference to the grotesque medical experiments the Japanese army conducted in World War II or the sex slaves it kidnapped. The Rape of Nanking, when rampaging Japanese troops raped and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese, is airbrushed into the “Nanking Incident” and the facts are said to be uncertain. Civilian deaths aren’t mentioned at all until the Americans begin firebombing Tokyo in 1944.

This is par for the course. In Japanese textbooks the relentless quest of military domination that so marked that nation’s conduct in the 20th century gently morphs into a brave struggle for independence against a hostile world.

Nor is the museum a relic of the equivocating past. It opened just last year. “The museum’s jingoism begins in the very first room,” wrote Howard French in the New York Times. “There, a saber adorned with gold braid, an ancient relic from the Imperial Palace guard, hangs, dramatically lit, above a block of text glorifying 2,600 years of independence, secured by valiant warriors against unnamed invaders.”

Click the link and consume the entire column.

Drudge links to a story that Cracks in Earth’s Defenses Let Space Storms In.

Time to start a pool: what industry will the environmentalists target for this one?

The obvious answer, all, is not allowed, since that represents kind of a metaopponent for environmentalists. No fair choosing civilization, either.

I was going to fisk Robert Cohen’s latest column, but it’s too time consuming to refute this bad Santa’s columns for no pay. However, I do want to snark about this bit:

The use of George W. Bush as a role model for a Democratic presidential aspirant is both novel and troubling. Bush, after all, is Mr. Secrecy. His White House — actually, it’s ours — is virtually hermetically sealed. We still do not know who Vice President Cheney consulted in drawing up the administration’s leave-no-energy-company-behind energy bill, and there is the little matter of our still not knowing why the administration went to war to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons he did not have. It is — shhh — a secret.

My snarkage:

• Leave-no-energy-company-behind energy bill? Come on, Dicky, this administration left their oil buddies at Enron behind, didn’t they? Oh, never mind. I cannot talk sense into you. I better just call you Dicky again to elevate this conversation to its proper depth.
• not knowing why the administration went to war to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons he did not have? Come on, that’s so cliché, and a lying cliché at that. Are you (a) really that simplistic in your analysis of foreign policy, or (b) dumbing it down because you think your readers are that simplistic about foreign policy? Which is worse?

  Actually, I’d like to point out that “administration” and “weapons” still have more than one syllable. Just in case you think the American public disagrees with you and yours because they just don’t understand! You can still make it dumberer for them.

I keep asking myself why I bother to try to read things with which I disagree since they make me so angry. Life’s too short. I should stick to pulp fiction.

In his latest six-columns-for-the-price-of-one, which would also seem to be six-columns-with-the-forethought-of-one, Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times spends a little time between the asterisks to ding Bush for not attending soldier funerals:

In the meantime, our current president Punk’d the world with his stealth visit to Baghdad last week — proving that even in this day and age, it’s possible for POTUS to make a safe, quick visit to almost any event in the world.

Sure would like to see President Bush try a similar mission and show up at a memorial service for one of those American soldiers who keep getting killed in Iraq, even though the war is over.

Hey, Rick. You pick one. The single soldier to be so honored. The one who’s more important than the others.

Pretty easy for a newspaper columnist, wot?