There's got to be a commercial in this.

Posted by: Ace at 12:52 PM | Comments (62)
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This is a long, long article, and I should post excerpts, rather than saying "Oh, read this," but so far I'm still on all the background material and I haven't found the key quotes yet.

If you're interested, and skeptical of the FBI's claim (as I am), you'll probably want to read this.

Posted by: Ace at 12:13 PM | Comments (110)
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Good column.

President Obama is proud of how he put together the Libyan operation. A model of international cooperation. All the necessary paperwork. Arab League backing. A Security Council resolution. (Everything but a resolution from the Congress of the United States, a minor inconvenience for a citizen of the world.) It's war as designed by an Ivy League professor.

True, it took three weeks to put this together, during which time Moammar Gaddafi went from besieged, delusional (remember those youthful protesters on "hallucinogenic pills") thug losing support by the hour -- to resurgent tyrant who marshaled his forces, marched them to the gates of Benghazi and had the U.S. director of national intelligence predicting that "the regime will prevail."

But what is military initiative and opportunity compared with paper?

Here is the the best part:

Obama seems equally obsessed with handing off the lead role. Hand off to whom? NATO? Quarrelling amid Turkish resistance (see above), NATO still can't agree on taking over command of the airstrike campaign, which is what has kept the Libyan rebels alive. This confusion is purely the result of Obama's decision to get America into the war and then immediately relinquish American command. Never modest about himself, Obama is supremely modest about his country. America should be merely "one of the partners among many," he said Monday. No primus inter pares for him. Even the Clinton administration spoke of America as the indispensable nation. And it remains so. Yet at a time when the world is hungry for America to lead -- no one has anything near our capabilities, experience and resources -- America is led by a man determined that it should not.

One sentence in there jumps out at me as as a good a sum-up of any: "Never modest about himself, Obama is supremely modest about his country."

Most presidents will tell you that America is exceptional, and they are honored to have led it.

Obama believes that formulation to be exactly backwards.

Posted by: Ace at 11:53 AM | Comments (75)
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Okay, whatever.

Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay said Friday that Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard has been designated to lead the alliance's military campaign in Libya.

Bouchard is stationed in Naples, Italy, at the Allied Joint Force Command.

Bouchard's recent job was deputy commander of NORAD, reporting to an American general.

"He will be commander of the NATO operations, yet to be fully defined NATO operations," MacKay said.

Steven Harper's conservative government just got a no confidence vote so they'll have to have fresh elections.

Posted by: Ace at 11:19 AM | Comments (112)
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Do you remember that interview that Sheen gave Jones just as the Lorre-Sheen-WINNING! fight was beginning? The usual term is star-f***er, but that's not quite right, because that implies Alex Jones was getting some reciprocal nut out of it; star-fellater, I guess.

Well, whether you do or don't remember it, Glenn Beck does, and I gotta tell you this is a pretty darn funny impression of the Alex Jones/Charlie Sheen non-relationship relationship.

I swear to God, if Glenn Beck did this sort of a show at 5:00 on Fox I'd watch every single day.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (65)
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Can I repeat, again, all they mean is France joined this time?

And can I say further again that France didn't "join" the coalition, they created it (along with co-founder Britain) and induced the hesitant ditherer Obama to join?

Jeffrey Goldberg:

[Quoting "news" organization Reuters:] Obama is committed to partnering with other countries rather than going it alone as did his predecessor George W. Bush, which both broadens and complicates the decision-making process.

This, of course, is wildly inaccurate and misleading. Say what you will about the second Iraq war, but George W. Bush made partnerships with many nations in advance of the invasion, including and especially America's most valuable ally, Great Britain, as well as Australia, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, South Korea, the Czech Republic, and a couple of dozen others.

But apparently when we speak about international coalitions we're only speaking of France. No one else matters, it seems. The coalition put together by Bush and Blair is pretty much the same coalition put together now by Britain and France except France is now part of it, which again sort of makes sense, given that they created it in the first place.

So we're talking about France and that's all we're talking about.

I'd like the media to explain this unexamined assumption of theirs that only France matters and only France, alone, can confer "international community" respectability.

Oh, I know why France should believe that to be true. France has spent fifty years attempting to leverage themselves more sway on the world stage than their second-rate military and third-rate economy would recommend by always positioning itself as the hard-to-get swing vote that courts both sides equally and deliberately takes positions contrary to the US for the sake of being contrary in order to accrue credibility with the US's enemies.

They've been positioning themselves as the swing vote vis a vis NATO and the Warsaw Bloc and the West and the Muslim world for years.

It's a strategy that pays dividends for France, and plays to their national arrogance, and, despite disliking the strategy, I understand why a three-bit country with fantasies of national greatness would always play this game of the reluctant, sometimes backstabbing, "friend" who always needs special convincing and special deference.

Here's what I don't understand: Why any American or non-Frenchmen would be eager to puff up France's self-declared rule of permanent swing vote and veto-if-not-properly-appeased.

The liberals in America all rush to proclaim quietly assume the proposition that France is the Indispensable Country.

Again, let me restate the contrast of my feelings as regard's France's posture as the Indispensable Country: I understand why they do it, and even will concede to them a sort of grudging hate-respect for so skillfully parlaying a second-tier status into a first-tier influence.

But let me ask again: Why should a British or American or German national be so eager to agree that a country which is far, far less important than Brazil or Japan or South Korea be elevated to not only the top five of important powers, but in fact the top of the top five?

Why are so many Americans -- liberals, of course, like Barack Hussein Obama -- so in love with the idea of France As Foremost?

The answer is simple: Because they hate America, and so go casting about for a country that purports to be a wise check on American action, and as France has been positioning itself as the first-to-market first-in-sales distributor of such a product for a half century of course they have the greatest brand recognition and market saturation for their wares.

But for anyone who doesn't hate America (or his own country, if another): Why champion the wisdom and authority of France over your own nation's?

I'd like Reuters to explain the assumption packed into its statement that Bush "went it alone" when really they mean only "Bush went without France."

What makes France so special? Again, I don't want to hear from the French on this point; I know their answer.

Britain's got a better military and Germany's got a hell of a lot more money. Norway's got a more heroic tradition (that is to say, they didn't roll over for Hitler).

Australia's a better friend.

I'm looking for any measure, really, in which France tops any other European or Western-oriented power. I don't think they're even second in anything (even excluding America); I think they'd struggle for third or fourth.

I want to hear from the non-French who are so self-loathing they eagerly subcontract their nations' foreign policies to an aloof, arrogant, self-interested foreign power.

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (136)
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Here's the thing: Actually, when I dashed off that post, I did notice that I was hitting the sex-put-down button more times than I usually would want to, and did notice that several of the jokes about McCain were pretty damned lame and couldn't even be justified by the "You Can't Fight The Funny" standard.

So: Actually, I agree. The post had a single good joke in it. It was about her weight, and usually I stay about from fat jokes about women as below the belt and too harsh, but if I had to do it again, I'd keep it, because I thought it was funny:

"Incidentally, she goes after Sarah Palin as if the poor woman were a pork chop sauteed in Haagen-Dasz and Axe body spray."

I'd keep that. Mean or not I thought it was sort of funny. Not bring down the house funny, but funny enough to be mean.

Media Matters completely missed another line from the next post:

"In related news, Meghan McCain just got a new tattoo of a rack of spare ribs eating a burrito."

I really like that one, as it's so absurdist. So I'd keep that one -- even if mean and caddish.

On the other hand, there was a lot in the post that I would say just wasn't funny at all, just mean. I used to always criticize this lefty blogger I sparred with on Slate's Fray comment section: I would tell him "That's not funny, it's just flip."

I think bulk of this post was that -- flip, not funny.

"Less ha-ha and more ta-ta. Stick to what you're enhanced at."

Not funny and yeah, kind of brain-dead. Oh, everyone knows what I'm getting at (the notorious Twitter boob shot), but yeah, this is sexist, and it's not funny enough to justify.

Follow that up with this just completely lame attack, which Media Matters didn't even quote:

The more she fails at everything the more attractive she seems, because, come on, she's got to be good at something, right?

It's like the law of averages, right? Or just the idea that the universe is merciful?

If she's this bad at everything else -- come on, gotta be, right?

Not funny! Just flip! And just thoughtless "would you hit that" type stuff.

And that's particularly bad because here I was knocking her for not being funny, just putting together a brain-dead "this will get links" not-funny-but-flip attack on Palin, and the comedy hypocrisy is there.

Yeah, basically, I think that whole post sucked and descended into juvenile taunting and not even good juvenile taunting. And while a couple of the jokes were decent enough to justify breaking the typical rule against cheap shots, the whole thing, in total, with its mean-for-meanness'-sake unfunny jabs was in fact "sexist" (I just never really got off that, did?) and pretty brain-dead.

So I apologize to Meghan McCain, for what it's worth, and will say of Media Matters "It's a fair cop." It was a crappy post, and a very thoughtless post (in both meanings of the word), and sexist, and by and large "brain-dead," on vituperative autopilot, and if I'd given it five minutes to breathe before hitting "POST" I would have edited it down to almost nothing.

I screwed up. I was nastier than I would have liked to have been and I can't even claim the thing was so studded with comedy gems it was "worth it." It wasn't.

It was unfair and mean, and definitely not for the highlight reel.

The other thing was that it wasn't perfectly honest, because while McCain's post was a stack of FAIL and just your standard "people will link me if I slam Palin for the bazillionth time," it did have at least one sorta funny line which was better than half the stuff I wrote. Something like, when Palin (in McCain's skit) is asked to sum up her philosophy, she says "Freedom and Ronald Reagan and freedom," which isn't going to into the Comedy Hall of Fame or anything, but it was at least a decent joke, and better than most of the ones I was tossing in her direction.

So, yeah: Guilty. And not proud.

Oh: In building its case against me, Media Matters bizarrely fails to quote a part that is undeniably sexist and instead quotes this, which isn't:

This seems to be the go-to topic for un-bright women posing dishonestly as conservatives.

Sorry, you're wrong there. That's not sexist. It's also not funny, but it's not meant to be funny: It's just a true, declarative sentence. Meghan McCain annoys the right because, of course, like many I-Play-A-Republican-On-TV "Republicans" she is relentlessly promoted by a media always looking for the next fake Republican to interview about how bad all other Republicans are.

If Meghan McCain has written posts advancing any sort of Republican policy goal, apart from her breezy "I believe in limited government" prefatory nonsense before she starts in on "But here's why all those people who believe in limited government actually suck," well, I have not read it.

What I read from her again and again is how much I suck, and what makes that obnoxious is not that she's saying I suck (take a number, the media is full of such people eager to tell me I suck) but she does so under a false flag.

That's dishonest. I don't credit Meghan McCain with the savvy to understand that is the game being played here; nevertheless, that is the game, and she is an unwitting pawn in it.

Let me propose that Meghan McCain spend the next three months supporting what she likes about mainstream Republican positions in her columns and then report back to me about how often MSNBC asks her to appear on camera.

Posted by: Ace at 09:39 AM | Comments (382)
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That headline isn't supposed to be slam-Palin; it's supposed to be funny.

If you're going to go after Bill Maher, hit him where it hurts, which is in his very high heeled booties.

I mean, Bill Maher's just like Prince, except where Prince is just over five foot tall and isn't funny, Bill Maher is white.

He's also very short and hates women because of that.

Oh, and his face is so acne-pocked it looks like he blasted an Alien with a shotgun at close range. A short Alien, I mean. Because otherwise the acid-blood which just sail comfortably over his short head.

Palin didn't mention Maher by name and pledged not to waste time "responding to personal, vulgar, sexist venom spewed my way."

"Upon my return from an outstanding and productive trip to India and Israel, I've been inundated with requests to respond to petty comments made in the media the past few days, including one little fella's comment which decent people would find degrading," Palin wrote on her Facebook page Thursday night.

"I won't bother responding to it though, because it was made by he who reminds me of an annoying little mosquito found zipped up in your tent; he can't do any harm, but buzzes around annoyingly until it's time to give him the proverbial slap," she continued.

Suggestion for Palin: Work "dainty" into the next slam. Little fellas hate that word. It's yours, no charge.

Palin just announced that she wasn't going to "keep whining" (her words) about media bias but that vow is either short-lived or maybe it's more qualified than I first understood it.

A day after Sarah Palin suggested that she was done taking on the unfair "lamestream media," the former Alaska governor took to Facebook to say that she had no intention of retreating. Referring to one of her most inconic slogans, Palin signalled that she was, in fact, ready to "reload."

"Friends, too often conservatives or Republicans in general come across as having the fighting instinct of sheep. I don't," Palin wrote on Thursday. "I was raised to believe that you don't retreat when you're on solid ground; so even though it often seems like I'm armed with just a few stones and a sling against a media giant, I'll use those small resources to do what I can to set the record straight. The truth is always worth fighting for. Doing so isn't whining or 'playing the victim card'; it's defending the truth in fairness to those who seek accurate information. I'll keep attempting to correct misinformation and falsehoods about myself and my record, and I will certainly never shy from defending others who are unfairly attacked. This is in the name of justice."

Some had interpreted Palin's restrained demeanor in an interview with Fox News earlier this week as a sign she might be folding the so-called "victim card" that some conservatives had accused her of playing so frequently. In her Facebook post Thursday, the former Alaska governor appeared to try to reframe her battle with the 'liberal media' by using a different tone.

"We must always remember the big picture. The media has always been biased. Conservatives - and especially conservative women - have always been held to a different standard and attacked," Palin said. "Let's just acknowledge that commonsense conservatives must be stronger and work that much harder because of the obvious bias. And let's be encouraged with a sense of poetic justice by knowing that the 'mainstream' media isn't mainstream anymore. That's why I call it 'lamestream,' and the LSM is becoming quite irrelevant, as it is no longer the sole gatekeeper of information."

Yeah I don't know the right play here. I do think she was a little over-eager to wrestle with the pig that is the media (as they say, you can't win that fight; you get dirty and the pig loves it) but obviously media bias is always at work and it should be mentioned.

Maybe she means she'll start responding more flippantly to the media, treating them as beneath her. Which would be a good take.

The important thing in all of this, however, is that Bill Maher is short, really believed at one point in his career that he could be a leading man actor, dates whores and seems like a petri dish for Herpes and just generally is so skivosa and seedy and nasty that if I my kids needed babysitting and my choices were 1) Bill Maher and 2) the guy on the park bench in "Aqualung" then I think I'll just have to teach my kids how to blow a rape whistle loud enough to be heard over a flute solo.

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (259)
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Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen (thanks for the reminder in the comments), Libya and now Syria.

At least 15 people were killed as thousands took to the streets in or made their way to the restive Syrian city of Daraa, where deadly clashes erupted over the last week between protesters and security forces.

Sources told CNN the slain people were trying to march to Daraa, where an eyewitness, Abdullah, also reported many casualties in the city.

"Thousands gathered and moved to the governor's building in Daraa and there, they burned a large picture of Bashar al-Assad, and then they toppled statue of Hafez al-Assad in the center of the square," he said, referring to the current president and his late father, the former president.

"After that, armed men came out from the roof of the officers' club in front of the governor's officer and started firing at the crowd," said Abdullah, who asked that his full name not be reported due to security concerns.

It's not just Daraa.

In Hama, hundreds of people were said to have gathered on the city streets to chant "freedom".

In 1982, the Syrian army put down an uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama. Rights groups believe that tens of thousands of civilians were killed when large parts of the city were destroyed in the military assault.

In Tall, witnesses quoted by the Reuters news agency said about 1,000 people had rallied to show their support for the Deraa protesters, and were chanting slogans denouncing members of the ruling Assad family.

If things get much more intense, I think we'll see just how much the son is really like the father. And then what will the UN, NATO and Obama do? Not much is my guess.

This is one of the problems with the Libyan adventure. In the long run, Libya's not that big of a deal. Yeah, getting Kadaffi would be good on principle (Berlin, Lockerbie) but it's not a game changer in the region. It's also what passes for low hanging fruit in the region.

France and the UK have puffed themselves up into what they conceive of as relevance but going after this 3rd string guy. They'll eventually win (probably), with the US doing the heavy lifting and spend the next decade patting themselves on the back. Meanwhile, Syria and the real root of the problem Iran, will be ignored because it's too hard and too dangerous..."Sure the Iranians have nukes but boy, didn't we kick Gadaffi in the nuts back in they day!"

Oh and not to be left out of all of this...Jordan!

Police forces interferred with water cannons on Friday to stop the clashes between government supporters and pro-reform demonstrators in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Government loyalists hurled large stones at demonstrators, injuring more than 100 protesters, Al Arabiya correspondent in Amman said.

About 200 people attacked the sit-in, in which around 2,000 youths from different movements, including the powerful Islamist opposition, took part to call for reforms to the current regime and more efforts to fight corruption.

It's simply amazing what's going on in the Mideast right now.

All I keep thinking about is Teh Fred in The Hunt for Red October, "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."

Posted by: DrewM at 08:24 AM | Comments (81)
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A few days ago, it was Richard Cohen. Now it's his fellow Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson:

Is it just me? Am I the only one who's utterly confused about the rationale, goals, tactics and strategy of the U.S.-led military intervention in Libya?

Thought not.

I call it a U.S.-led operation because, people, let's be real. Without U.S. diplomatic leadership, there would have been no U.N. Security Council resolution. Without U.S. military leadership, there would have been no coordinated shock-and-awe attack to put dictator Moammar Gaddafi's rampaging forces back on their heels. On Thursday, after days of bickering, we heard a grand announcement that NATO will take command of the operation. Don't believe it. The United States will be functionally in charge, and thus on the hook, until this ends.

So what the hell are we doing? I realize that President Obama and his advisers have answered this question many times, but I feel it's necessary to keep asking until the answers begin to make sense.

Yeah, pretty much sums up my own feelings. And Robinson, unlike Cohen, feels no need to throw in some cheap shots at Bush, probably because right now Bush is looking pretty good in how he handled Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, I think that Obama has done and is doing more to rehabilitate Bush's reputation and popularity than anything the Right could have done. But he has done so at a terrible cost to us, to our children, and to our country.

[update after the jump]
more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:10 AM | Comments (167)
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