Unbelievable quote on Matthews last night. Matthews committed a gaffe as defined by Mike Kinsley-- accidentally revealing what you really believe.

VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT-- ACE OF SPADES EXCLUSIVE (as far as I know)

Speaking to Col. Ken Allard, Ret., about the shooting of the playing-dead terrorist, Matthews calls a terrorist an "enemy soldier," and is immediately uncomfortable with his belligerent, warmongering terminology. He thus begins to walk back the cat from the hateful term "enemy," employing a series of increasingly-charitable euphemisms for "enemy terrorist killer":

MATTHEWS: Well let me ask you about this. If this were on the other side, and we were watching an enemy soldier-- a rival, I mean, they're not bad guys especially, they're just people who diagree with you; they are in fact the insurgents figthing us in their country -- if we saw one of them do what we saw our guy did to that guy [the playing-dead terrorist], would that be worthy of a war-crime charge?

Kind of a leftwad variation of Glenn Reynolds' "They're not anti-war, they're just on the other side." Now terrorist murderers are "just people who disagree with you," sort of like the guy at the end of the bar who claims that Steven Young was better than Joe Montana.

Let us sum up.

The terrorists who hide among civilians, murder civilians, behead civilians, hang civilian contractors trying to get the power running, etc., are, in Chris Matthews estimation:

1) mere "rival"

2) "not bad guys especially"

3) "just people who disagree with you"

Has any prominent commentator on the left so clearly given away their worldview, despite their best efforts to hide it?

They simply do not accept that terrorists are necessarily "enemies" or even "bad guys." They're just people "who disagree with you."

None of this is to defend what that Marine did. That's a separate issue. I'm only making a point here about the left's rather latitudinarian views on Third World murderers. If their skin is a little swarthier than the typical Anglo-Saxon, or they wear colorful native dress, they're to be given a pass on all that silly Rules of War/respect for human life stuff.

They're not killers. They're not terrorists. They're not monsters. They're always just "people who disagree with you." And it's our fault we haven't done a better job of "communicating" with them, so we can have some "closure" on our various "disagreements."

As Ann Coulter observed in a slightly different context: The heart of this disagreement seems to be that they want to slaughter us and we don't want to die. Thus our perpetual, mutual "cycle of violence."

I've said it before; I'll say it again. The left treats internal political opponents as enemies to be opposed with all tactics short of war (and sometimes even those), while external hostile enemies are treated as fellow-citizens with whom must resolve all issues peaceably.

Or else it's something close to murder.

Matthews isn't guilty of the first prong of that formulation -- that's Daily Kos territory -- but he's definitely a proponent of the second.

Thanks to JohnD.

Update: Over on Hugh Hewitt, Lawrence O'Donnell provides a defense for Matthews.

He claims that Matthews could have been speaking, hypothetically, about a more "normal" enemy, a law-abiding one, like, I don't know-- last enemy we faced that strictly observe the Rules of War when fighting us was the Nazis, oddly enough. So that his point wasn't to say that the terrorists were "not bad guys especially," but that if a Marine did plug a normal enemy who wasn't a "bad guy especially," it would be a war crime.

But check out the end of the quote. He finishes off, still apparently talking about the "enemy soldier," as an "insurgent fighting us in their country." So it seems to me he's talking about the Fallujah terrorists, not some hypothetical future Marquis de Queensbury opponent.

Posted by: Ace at 11:54 AM | Comments (42)
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Al Jazeera has a different theory: They were all poisoned by those cunning Israelis.

1,600 is a nice number. A nicer number is "10,000." Nice and round and voluptuous.

Posted by: Ace at 11:21 AM | Comments (6)
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It was between this or banging on pots while chanting "Please Pay Attention to Me!!!!":

DENVER (Reuters) - A Colorado high school talent show turned into a political hot potato after some parents said a trio of students planned to use a Bob Dylan song to say they wished for the death of President Bush, officials said on Friday.

...

Even if there was a misunderstanding over whether the students -- some of whom called themselves the "Talibanned" -- meant to wish harm to the president, they learned how offended people can get.

...

The problem started after rumors circulated that a trio of students planned a poetry reading at the talent show using lyrics from the Bob Dylan anti-war song "Masters of War." But some parents got the impression that the students wanted to alter the words to say they wanted to see the president dead while a slide on a curtain displayed Bush's picture.

Ummm, where's the possible misunderstanding?

Usually Secret Service agents, responsible for keeping the president safe, do not visit high schools to check on threats to the president.

Shut up, really?!

"We're very sensitive about First Amendment rights," [the principal] added.

And the Secret Service is very sensitive about incitement to murder the President. They're real bears on the issue. Indeed, one could say that it's sort of their job.

"It's a tempest in a teapot. "It apparently began with a misunderstanding of a parent who was told about a rehearsal," Denver attorney and local talk show host Craig Silverman said.

Ah. There's the m-word again-- "misunderstanding."

Whenever people like this get into trouble, they claim that 1) it was a misunderstanding or 2) that they were being "ironic," or just "doing a character," like Ice-T and other thugs claim when they urge people to kill cops.

It's ironic except it's that sort of ironic where you really mean it, and plainly state so. Kind of like Spinal Tap irony-- "I think the message of our music is love your fellow man.'" "I mean, we don't literally say that." "We don't literally mean it." "But I think it should be obvious to anyone who listens."

Boulder, Colorado, has long been known as a bastion of liberalism and is often referred to by locals as "the Republic of Boulder."

Ummm, I've never been there, but usually they say "the People's Republic of ___________." I'd bet real money that that's what it is.

So is this reporter just a doofus, or what? Maybe there was a "misunderstanding" about Boulder's nickname.

Last week, Boulder high School students staged an overnight sleep-in at the school to protest Bush's re-election.

These people really have got to get over the sixties. I mean, these dopey lefties in training weren't even born then. Heck, these snot-nosed little twacks were just barely born in the eighties.

Thanks to GregS, who is now the Ace of Spades HQ Official Finder of Cool Crap to Blog.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (13)
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The Times article:

Ms. Simonetti has operated a Web log since January, calling it Diary of a Flight Attendant, and she says she did not hear from Delta about the site, http://queenofsky.journalspace.com, until after she posted a set of provocative photos of herself in her Delta uniform. In one photograph, her skirt is hiked to mid-thigh as she perches along a seatback on an empty airliner. In another, she is leaning over the seats, her blouse unbuttoned, exposing part of her bra. Ms. Simonetti said she posted those photographs because she thought they made her look pretty.

"Gosh, it's a little tiny sliver of my bra, it's not like a bright red push-up bra," she said. "It's not like I worked the flight like that."

But Ms. Simonetti said her supervisor called her on Oct. 29 and said she was being terminated for "inappropriate photos in a Delta uniform." Since then, Ms. Simonetti has filed a sex-discrimination complaint against Delta with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is threatening to sue Delta for $10 million, claiming other employees, primarily men, have their photographs posted on the Web in uniform and are not fired for it. The airline declined to comment on the case.

...

The women's movement played a large role in the elimination of the overt sexualization of flight attendants like those portrayed in National Airlines' 1974 television ad featuring attractive stewardesses beckoning mostly male business travelers to "Fly Me" and Continental Airlines' similar invitation to ogle the flight attendants, with its promise, "We Really Move Our Tail For You."

"Airlines discovered they were on the wrong side of that issue 20 years ago," Mr. Verkerke said. "They've gotten religion. And deeply ingrained in their corporate culture and human relations practices is an aversion to that kind of sexualization."

This change is welcomed by many in the profession, said Tim Kirkwood, a flight attendant for 27 years and author of "The Flight Attendant Job Finder and Career Guide" (Planning/Communications, 2003)." Flight attendants over the years have fought hard to get rid of the image of the sexy stewardess," he said after reviewing Diary of a Flight Attendant, "and it does tend to regress back to that a bit."

Oh, grow up. As the Diceman said, they're flyin' whores.

Okay, just kidding. But come on. The left seems to be gung-ho evangelists for sex until a chick wants to show off her bra a little. And then it's some sort of federal offense.

I mean, on one hand they simply will not stop with telling us we have to be more open sexually. On the other hand, if a woman acts a little sexy, they scream about sexism and the like. Just who is it we're supposed to be more open sexually with, exactly, if not for a woman acting sexy?

Oh.... Right. Gotcha.

Here's her site.

Here are the photos that started the commotion. They're pretty tame.

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 AM | Comments (16)
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This is worse than the "wilding" incident at last year's Nickolodeon Kid's Choice Awards:

Dozens of people sitting near the stage Monday inside a hangar at the Santa Monica Municipal Airport began shoving each other as the show wound down about 7:30 p.m., a photographer who covered the event for The Associated Press said.

News video showed chairs being thrown, punches flying, people chasing one another and some being restrained.

It was unclear if the stabbing preceded or followed the fight. The victim, a 26-year-old man, was taken to a hospital and was listed in stable condition.

No arrests were made.

Witness Frank Williams told KCAL-TV that Dr. Dre was involved in the brawl.

"I saw Dr. Dre fighting somebody," Williams said. "I don't know if he was fighting back. But there was a guy taken out basically bloodied."

Fighting? At the Vibe Awards? With Dr. Dre involved? I just will not believe this outrageous nonsense until I see the videotape. Next thing you'll be telling me that someone smelled marijuana smoke somewhere in the auditorium.

In related news, the CIA is said to be "in a state of shock" over the event. "We just never saw this one coming," said one high-ranking Clinton appointee. "I mean, what are the odds? Must be something astronomical, like, I don't know, one in three."

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 AM | Comments (5)
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What could this mean? Maybe nothing. But it sure seems like it could be something. Kim Jong deathly ill, maybe?

Captain's Quarters makes the catch:

The BBC speculates that Kim may have ordered the removal of the portraits in an attempt to reduce the country's focus on him, although in the past Kim has certainly promoted the personality cult purposefully. Others wonder if the change means that something has happened to Kim and Pyongyang might be keeping it quiet. The removals aren't happenstance; an unnamed diplomat told the Russian news service Itar-Tass that orders had been given to take the portraits down.

Thanks to Sharp as a Marble, who commits the greivous blog-sin of tipping another blogger to a catch before blogging it yourself.

He mentions his traffic is falling faster than a monkey on a surfboard. Hey, you're not the only one, Sharp as a Marble.

Can't we have a presidential election every couple of weeks?

Pretty funny-- he's got a "Glenndex" in his sidebar, tracking the Instapundit's uses of "Heh," "Indeed," and "Read the Whole Thing." So far today, "Heh" is winning by a nose. But "Indeed" is always a comer in the final furlong.

Posted by: Ace at 10:19 AM | Comments (14)
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US News & World report has a ten-page report. I've only begun reading it, but it seems good enough to blog after the first paragraph:

In the summer of last year, Iranian intelligence agents in Tehran began planning something quite spectacular for September 11, the two-year anniversary of al Qaeda's attack on the United States, according to a classified American intelligence report. Iranian agents disbursed $20,000 to a team of assassins, the report said, to kill Paul Bremer, then the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq. The information was specific: The team, said a well-placed source quoted in the intelligence document, would use a Toyota Corona taxi and a second car, driven by suicide bombers, to take out Bremer and destroy two hotels in downtown Baghdad. The source even named one of the planners, Himin Bani Shari, a high-ranking member of the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group and a known associate of Iranian intelligence agents.

Thanks to GregS.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (4)
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Porter Goss is tossing out the riff-raff at the CIA, and from what everyone's saying, Condi Rice is at State in order to get that bureaucracy to actually try to advance our Commander-in-Chief's foreign policy. And it's going to be an "or else" sort of deal.

In fact, she's there to "clean house."

This of course won't go down well with the State Department suits.

And it certainly won't go down well with the liberal media.

The media has this odd habit of championing whatever bases of power Democrats control. When Reagan was President, they fretted about him riding roughshod over the Democrat-controlled Congress. But when Clinton was President, they savaged Newt Gingrich for his congressional "obstructionism," and hanged the unpopular government shut-down on him.

And they're always very big boosters of the purported right of our unelected, and largely liberal, judiciary to take the most difficult political questions out of our hands and impose a "constitutional" resolution on us all.

The Democrats have lost most of the institutions through which they once exerted power, and now they just may lose the judiciary, too.

But that still leaves the bureaucracy.

Over the coming months we will hear more and more from our neutral and objective media about how terribly important it is that we have an unelected corps of civil servants imposing their own policy preferences on the nation, because they're smarter and more knowlegeable than the idiots we actually elected to make such decisions.

It Goes Without Saying Update: Chris Matthews was all a-twitter last night over his fear that Bush will no longer have voices of dissent to counsel against his idiocy/lunacy.

I'm all in favor of hearing out voices of dissent. They're often right. Of course I want my President to hear from all sides and have a vigorous debate before making important national-security moves.

But the State Department and CIA have not merely advised the President and his staff against actions. They've undertaken a deliberate and pre-meditated campaign of undermining his decisions, both through chronic, and often illegal leaking, as well as simple insubordination-- refusing to comply with a legal order.

These people are employees. They would do well to remember that, even if Chris Matthews has forgotten.

David Brooks Update: AndrewF suggests this David Brooks column about the CIA's shadow war on Bush's policies:

Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.

White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.

The White House-C.I.A. relationship became dysfunctional, and while the blame was certainly not all on one side, Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

As the presidential race heated up, the C.I.A. permitted an analyst - who, we now know, is Michael Scheuer - to publish anonymously a book called "Imperial Hubris," which criticized the Iraq war. Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss. As Scheuer told The Washington Post this week, "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they [the C.I.A. honchos] gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."

I can't help but think that a right-leaning CIA, busy subverting the policies of a left-leaning President, would be termed insubordinate, dangerous, possibly insane and borderline treasonous by the left-wing press.

When the roles are reversed-- hey, they're just trying to inform the American people, right? Just trying to be necessary voices of dissent against an arrogant administration.

And By the Way: The CIA was betting on a Kerry victory?

Hm. Nailed another one, huh, CIA? Boy, you guys are good.

Posted by: Ace at 09:32 AM | Comments (10)
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Andrew "Less Than Zero" McCarthy sizes up the prospects for ending the fillibuster.

His conclusion: Umm, maybe. But here's something I didn't know (and I guess I should have): Arlen Specter is, at least as far as his previous statements go, an opponent of judicial fillibusters, and may vote with the Republican majority to end (or at least drastically weaken) the tactic.

If that's the case-- and if Specter promises to so vote -- maybe we ought to lighten up on the guy. Ending the fillibuster is more important than the Judiciary Committee chairmanship.

Posted by: Ace at 09:16 AM | Comments (3)
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Matt Howell's annoyed by theater folk:

These damned actors and directors and self-aggradizing self-labeled visionaries see it as their damned duty to confront their audience — not entertain it. Certainly not entertain it.

They subscribe to the Brechtian notion of theater as being a force for social change. That the purpose, once you get butts in the seats, is to shake them up! Wake them from their bourgeousie slumber! Show them that there's a world out there that's slummy and ugly and more powerful than you could ever imagine! Make them feel guilty! Make them hate themselves! Make them — and this is seriously not a joke — leave the theater feeling like CRAP.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (14)
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