Ryan's Numbers Expected to Surge When People Realize That Yes, He Really Was Banging That Jeri Ryan

There are sex scandals. There are steamy sex scandals. And then there are steamy sex scandals involving Borg-boobed actress Jeri Ryan, which for my money represent the Holy Grail of political sex scandals.

The allegations come amidst a child-custody fight -- never a good indication of credibility -- and I'm not even sure how terrible they are. He "pressured" her to have kinky sex in public places, including, she claims, in front of witnesses.

I gotta tell you, if I had Jeri Ryan, I'm pretty sure I'd both want and need witnesses. Sort of like the old joke:

Jack Ryan walks into a confessional at his Chicago church. "Father," he tells the priest, "last night I had savage carnal relations with actress Jeri Ryan."

"What is your sin, then?" the priest asks. "Did you simply engage in premarital sex, or did you commit the sin of adultery?"

"Neither, Father," Jack Ryan responds. "Jeri Ryan is my wife."

"Well that's not any sort of sin," the priest says. "Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm telling everybody," Jack Ryan says, and then hits the priest up for a campaign donation. The priest immediately writes out a check for $500.

Hat Tip: Enjoy Every Sandwich.

Posted by: Ace at 10:40 PM | Comments (5)
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I tried to think of a cute headline, but honestly, is it necessary?

The headline is accurate. A lollipop was thrown right into his eye, and the stick-end became lodged there.

It's not gory, but the picture is, believe it or not, not for the easily-rattled. You don't appreciate how ugly a sight it is to see a lollipop stuck in someone's eye until you've actually witnessed it.

This is interesting:

One fan said: “He grabbed a mike and called the person responsible a coward and bastard for hiding in the crowd.

Hmmmm... I know someone else who calls shadowy assailants who hide amidst a civilian population "cowards." And swells like David Bowie call him an idiot monster for doing so.

Not to politicize an apolitical event, but here goes: Why is it that liberal politics gives people the confidence to say that things they know in their gut are true -- murder is evil and murderers should be harshly punished; there is no "excuse" for violent crime; people who attack the innocent while hidden in crowds are cowards -- are in fact 100% false? And, indeed, anyone believing in such 100% false ideas is some sort of a racist thug?

Why do they imagine there's such a great divergence between micro-politics (what we say and do and believe in our own small personal lives) and macro-politics (what we say and do and believe about how our nation should behave)?

Hat tip: Right Wing News.

Posted by: Ace at 10:13 PM | Comments (13)
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Florida Cracker notices that Bill Clinton's chief defense continues to be "You can't prove it."

This is not a confidence-inspiring line of defense. It doesn't fill me with pride that a former president, questioned about his past, always answers, "What are you, some kind of narc?"

Remember all that crap I said about beginning to forgive Bill Clinton? Forget all that. I don't know what I was thinking when I said that. I think I was just trying to impress Ellen Ratner.

Related Thought: Drudge is once again blaring the Bill-Clinton-Came-Unhinged-Story.

I woudn't mind seeing him come unhinged -- it would at least be interesting reality television, nearly as good as Boston Rob screwing over Lex on Survivor -- but I seem to remember deliberately-false stories about Bill Clinton becoming "angry" and "purple-faced" during his grand jury testiomony.

Update: Clinton's book contradicts his sworn testimony regarding the Lewinsky-affair timeline.

Across the world, tens of millions of jaws are dropping slack at the realization that Bill Clinton may not have been entirely candid in his grand jury testimony.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 PM | Comments (2)
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"I don't want an economy where Americans are working, and working, and working, and working for the economy. As President, I will have an economy that works for Americans." -- Senator John Kerry, as reported on FoxNews today

Errrr... okay, but isn't that an admission that Americans are, in fact, "working, and working, and working, and working"?

Wasn't Kerry's complaint, a scant two months ago, that Americans were not working, and working, and working, and working?

Just checking.

Barely-Related Update: Son of Nixon's got a better description of Terezzzzzza than "sexy, cheeky, whatever."

Posted by: Ace at 08:54 PM | Comments (5)
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Cathy Seipp deals with this jackassery in the last paragraph of this post.

Thanks to Way Off Base, who considers this photo as about as gay as you can possibly get, despite the fact it depicts a pregnant straight couple.

The dividing line between liberal and conservative as regards sexual mores has less and less to do with actual sexual practices. It's more about taste and dignity and simple ludicrousness.

Can pregnant women be beautiful? Probably, especially as regards one's own wife. But do they have to be beautiful in the Los Angeles Times? There's a very creepy evangelistic aspect to these people. They have a very weird need to share their sexuality with you, no matter how much we all encourage them to "share amongst themselves."

Nudists are more eager to convince you of the beauty of their bodies (despite the often-compelling visual evidence to the contrary) than weed-enthusiasts are to convince you that we can build space shuttles out of hemp.

Posted by: Ace at 03:12 PM | Comments (28)
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I don't think there's much to add to this lucid, detailed missive.

Hat Tip: White Pebble.

Posted by: Ace at 02:36 PM | Comments (1)
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While the media's been busy boycotting the boom, it turns out that industrial activity has now zoomed past the highest point achieved during Clinton's "Miracle Economy":

The industrial production index, which measures the physical output of the nationÂ’s mines, factories, and utilities, has surpassed the Clinton-era peak of June 2000, according to a Federal Reserve report released this week. The index topped at 116.373 under Clinton. The May 2004 reading (116.947) was the 20th monthly increase since the index hit its trough (109.10 in December 2001.

Terrific news-- our burgeoning industrial output has actually helped eased the price of cowbells. Although I've had to wait weeks for it (there is a large back-order), I can finally offer some small cowbell.

The cowbell should be big based on this news, but this is the best I can manage. Cowbell factories are currently more overworked than the world-famous Nog mines of Pennsylvania during the high-demand Christmas eggnog season.

Posted by: Ace at 02:09 PM | Comments (5)
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It's an altogether obvious point, but let us not quibble. When a horse adds 2 + 1 together and gets 3, you don't carp that he didn't precisely solve Fermat's Last Theorem or split an atom.

Laurence Simon unfairly compares the South Korean hostage begging for his life with the Italian hostage who told his captors Iiet u sangua.

Two points:

1) The Italian hostage was about to be killed, and he knew it. His bravery in the face of death is laudable, but a man who knows he's about to die may become liberated from fear when he comprehends his unavoidable fate.

On the other hand, the South Korean hostage does not yet know he's definitely going to die, and someone can and should be sympathetic to a man trying to appease his captors and thereby find a way to survive.

2) What Fabrizio Quattrocchi did and said is laudable not because he exhibited commonplace courage, but because he displayed uncommon valor. Quattrocchie set a high bar for dignity and defiance in the face of death; let us not pretend that all men are capable of such. His death is laudable precisely because few men have such outsized balls.

You would praise a man for risking his life to enter a burning building four times to save people trapped therein. You certainly wouldn't praise other men for not doing so -- indeed, you'd probably denigrate them -- but you also wouldn't taunt them as sissies.

We might all like to imagine we'd respond as Quattrocchi did, but until we're faced with that situation, imagining is very cheap and also very safe. And by suggesting that that's the sort of thing that any man could or should do in that situation, we denigrate Quattrocchi's defiance as run-of-the-mill and mundane.

Update: I don't want to pick a fight with Laurence Simon, although I stand by my (now modified) statement that this comparison was unfair.

He seems to be saying that he didn't intend this comment to denigrate the South Korean hostage. I'll take him at his word; no one wants to get into that tedious "But you saaaaaaid" crap.

But, if he only intended to point out the exceptional courage of Quattrocchi, there were clearer ways of doing so. He might have said, "Watching the spectacle of the South Korean hostage -- an average man with average courage -- being forced to plead for his very life highlights the courage of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, who told his captors in no uncertain terms what they could do with themselves and how vigorously they ought to do so."

I can only repeat: I don't think it's fair to apparently denigrate this South Korean hostage, who is probably only doing what 95% of the population would do in his stead.

And I think that Simon's post also unintentionally denigrates Quattrocchi, at least as written (if not as intended). We praise exceptional courage because it is, in fact, exceptional. If we choose our words poorly and suggest that it is not exceptional courage at all, but rather the normal default-level of courage that we all should have and be judged against, we denigrate that courage.

Ace Backs Off Update: Laurence, I'm not so much "backing off" as generously affording you a dignified path of retreat and re-statement.

I'm a big believer in helping someone to untangle his own ego-driven impulse to prove himself blameless from the more-important need to correct and re-state what has been wrongly or badly written previously.

I'm good like that. Ask anyone. I'm all fuckin' heart.

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (34)
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Brilliant.

James Taranto teases the notion:

Writing in The Weekly Standard, James Piereson offers a useful addition to the American political glossary: "punitive liberalism." This "bizarre doctrine," which found its fullest expression in the presidency of Jimmy Carter, holds that "America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement." Those who disagree "were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past."

This makes so much sense I am physically angered that I didn't think of it first. I am beating the stuffings out of my therapist-prescribed "Anger Puppets." My Anger Puppets are supposed to teach me the difference between "good touching" and "criminal assault." But I've stripped the clothes off them and I'm now arranging them in a naked puppet pyramid.

I may force one puppet to have sex with a Kenner(TM) Jabba's Prisoner Princess Leia figure. That'll show him.

Why do liberals always support military action when there is no national security threat implicated (Kosovo, Haiti, etc.) but start preaching pacificism when there is (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea)?

Because we have sinned. We have to send troops to Haiti as pennance for our sins. We have to bomb Serbia for 77 days because we stole this country from the Indians.

But when a country actually threatens us?

Heavens! We daren't take military action. That would inure to our national-security self-interests, and we're not deserving of acting in our own best interests.

Perhaps, one day, after we've transferred one half of the country's wealth to Africa and the Middle East, then the ledger will be evened-up and we will be able to occasionally act in our own interests, as non-sinful countries like France are allowed to do.

But until that day-- we can act only in order to vindicate someone else's interests. Never, never, never our own.

Posted by: Ace at 12:50 PM | Comments (14)
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These numbers don't lie:

While no one was looking, something historic happened in the Middle East. The Palestinian intifada is over, and the Palestinians have lost.

For Israel, the victory is bitter. The past four years of terrorism have killed almost 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. But Israel has won strategically. The intent of the intifada was to demoralize Israel, destroy its economy, bring it to its knees, and thus force it to withdraw and surrender to Palestinian demands, just as Israel withdrew in defeat from southern Lebanon in May 2000.

...

The end of the intifada does not mean the end of terrorism. There was terrorism before the intifada and there will be terrorism to come. What has happened, however, is an end to systematic, regular, debilitating, unstoppable terror -- terror as a reliable weapon. At the height of the intifada, there were nine suicide attacks in Israel killing 85 Israelis in just one month (March 2002). In the past three months there have been none.

The overall level of violence has been reduced by more than 70 percent. How did Israel do it? By ignoring its critics and launching a two-pronged campaign of self-defense.

First, Israel targeted terrorist leaders -- attacks so hypocritically denounced by Westerners who, at the same time, cheer the hunt for, and demand the head of, Osama bin Laden....

Second, the fence. Only about a quarter of the separation fence has been built, but its effect is unmistakable. The northern part is already complete, and attacks in northern Israel have dwindled to almost nothing.

Krauthammer has more.

The left thinks it's very important that Israel pursue a strategy of peaceful appeasement towards those who want to kill its citizens.

How many additional Jews are they willing to see murdered to vindicate this abstract goal, exactly? They're never willing to put a number to it.

Hat Tip to Mr. Michael J. Totten, a brave independent voice among all this ignorant partisan cacaphony. Just ask him.

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (1)
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