Iran wants to play the tough-guy. With the second-most powerful navy in the region, at least.

What might account for this hostile action?

Mort Kondracke reported on the Beltway Boys on Saturday (can't find a link) that the US had agreed to sell Israel KC-135 Stratotankers. These massive aerial-refueling planes will allow heavily-armed Israeli F-15's to fly as far as, oh, who knows, let's say Teheran, and carry out strategic bombing missions against, oh, who can say what they'd be used against, let's say nuclear reactors and uranium-enrichment factories.

Posted by: Ace at 11:12 AM | Comments (6)
Post contains 99 words, total size 1 kb.

In 1942, we began a preemtive war against Nazi Germany, a nation that had not yet attacked us.

But what if we had not? What if we had allowed the Nazi regime to consolidate its gains in Europe, and allowed its scientists to continue developing horrifically advanced machines of war?

I have seen a glimpse of our alternative future-past, and it's not pretty.

Thanks to Dave, who tipped me to a Star Wars toy enthusiast who clearly has too much time on his hands.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (20)
Post contains 88 words, total size 1 kb.

Bill from INDC lands an interview with everyone's favorite courageously-independent Kerry partisan:

AS: ...ThereÂ’s plenty of hope, but we need courageous leaders with the will and dogged determination to strategically understand and attack the threat.

INDC: Like George Bush?

AS: No, George Bush is a homophobic poopie-head.

Anne tips me to check out a new children's book, Andrew Sullivan's Big Book of Gay Occupations, and wonders if the great range of careers listed therein aren't evidence that, in fact, there's rather less Nazi-esque discrimination against homosexuals than Sullivan contends.

I'd make another point: What a ridiculous waste of time. Sullivan's so obsessed over this issue he spends his time collating a list of occupations of "married" couples. What on earth could this possibly prove?

Oh yes: that we should not "discriminate" against a "soil scientist," or a "special education advocate," or a "recycling coordinator."

Sure, we're all in favor of discriminating against homosexuals, but we have to draw the line when this laudable effort crosses the line into discrimination against a "Krispy Kreme manager." That would be invidious discrimination.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (8)
Post contains 195 words, total size 1 kb.

Since Andrew Sullivan is quite clearly in a steep decline, I'll take it upon myself to begin giving out various awards for stupidity in public life.

My first award is the Bill Clinton Award. I will give this award to public figures who obnoxiously and solipsistically cast life-and-death, or at least extraodinarily important, public policy issues in terms of how those issues might affect them personally. This award is nicknamed "It's All About Me" prize.

Envolope please...? Ah. A surprise. The first winner of the Bill Clinton Award for Insufferable Narcissism as Regards an Important National Issue is...

Andrew Sullivan.

How fitting.

Andrew Sullivan wins this award for stopping in mid-thought to explain to us how extraordinarily courageous he is, and how much additional "heart-ache" he will suffer for that courage. Here's a little clip of his award-winning statement:

Time reports on the deepening mystery of what really happened at Abu Ghraib. We are getting information that electrocution of genitals, rape and murder are also part of the "coercive interrogation techniques" allowed at Saddam's former torture-palace. All the more reason to find out if these methods were approved by higher-ups, all the way to the secretary of defense. I will be harangued for continuing to write about this. But it is a huge deal if torture has been sanctioned by this administration in secret and on the authority of only the president, against U.S. and international law.

Emphasis added, of course.

But I'm giving out a second award tonight. The second award is the Howard Dean Award for the Most Credulous Repetition of an Inflammatory and Patently Ludicrous Anti-Bush Allegation.

And the winner is...

Why, look at this! It's Andrew Sullivan again, winning his second award tonight, and for the very same post.

That Time article Andrew places such stock in? That Time article with unskeptically repeats uncorroborated and utterly ridiculous charges from an anonymous terrorist?

Check out this key charge. The charge that Andy vaguely reports as "rape":

One plaintiff, identified only as Neisef, claims that after he was taken from his home on the outskirts of Baghdad last November and sent to Abu Ghraib, Americans made him disrobe and attached electrical wires to his genitals. He claims he was shocked three times. Although a vein in his penis ruptured and he had blood in his urine, he says, he was refused medical attention. In another session, Neisef claims, he was held down by two men while a uniformed woman forced him to have sex with her. "I was crying," said Neisef, 28. "I felt like my whole manhood was gone."

Hmmmm... two men forced this poor man down, while a woman forced him to have sex with her.

This is a Penthouse Forum fantasy, not a credible fucking charge. This is the sort of fantasy concocted by a sexually-repressed Islamoretard who believes such things are possible in the decadent US

We should be so lucky.

Dear Penthouse Forum,

My name is Neisef, and I am a student at a large Middle-Eastern university. I never thought these letters were real, until something happened to me to make me believe all these stories were true.

I had been unjustly taken prisoner for attempting to give chocolates and flowers to an infidel occupier. On my third day of captivity, a woman interrogator demanded I strip off my clothes and begin caressing her breasts. She called herself "Sasha," and she seemed to be a Jew kaffir. Although she was the degenerate offspring of pigs and apes, Allah have mercy, she also had the juiciest 38DD Kasabah melons and an ass like a two-year-old colt donkey...

Riiiiiiight.

How many forcible genital rapes of men -- by women -- occur each year?

How about each fucking decade?

How about in all of recorded human history?

Woman occasionally, but rarely, commit sex offenses at all. They commit statutory rape on rare occasions. On even rarer occasions, they might sodomize another person -- male or female -- with a digit or object.

But forcing a man to have actual genital-to-genital sex-- against his will? How many women are so hard-up they need to rape a dirty, filthy terrorist prisoner?

Let me get this straight: This woman couldn't get voluntary sex from a man... in the United States Armed Forces.

Talk about not being able to get laid in women's prison with a fistful of pardons. Talk about not being able to get your leg humped in a kennel with your pockets filled with lunchmeat and chew-toys.

If it's true that this woman couldn't manage to get voluntary sex from 135,000 horny, sexually-deprived soldiers and therfore raped a dirty, stinking prisoner, then I'd say right there is your reason why we can't allow any additional gay men in the military.

Why, look at the tragic results! If only one man stationed in Iraq had been attracted to the female sex, all of this ugliness might have been avoided.

And how the hell does the man maintain an erection during this "violation"?

I don't say this is impossible. I will say it is so unlikely to be laugh-out-loud ludicrous, especially without serious corroborating evidence.

But I'm not surprised that the very objective Time magazine reports this, nor that the very independent, still-deciding-between-Bush-and-Kerry Randy Andy cites this article as a damning indictment.

PS: While I was away at the beatuiful Mount Airy Lodge, I was abducted and chain-raped by a gang of buxom Catholic high-school cheerleaders.

And yes, I know I will be harrangued for continuing to write about my violation.

But I won't let that stop me. I will soldier on bravely, and see if I can't interest Cinemax in filming my sordid story, which I've tentatively titled Man-Handled: The Greatest Fucking Thing That Ever Fucking Happened to Me In My Entire Fucking Life.

The Next Story Andrew Sullivan Will Trumpet: Since Andrew's taken to reporting wildly-implausible hot woman-on-man rape tales, I'm sure he'll be interested in this Ace of Spades HQ flashback, The Story the Rightwing Media Refuses to Report!

Content warning. But what isn't on this site lately? Like Leopold "Butters" Scotch, I've really got to get my behavior under control.

Posted by: Ace at 09:44 PM | Comments (30)
Post contains 1051 words, total size 7 kb.

So, Clinton got all angry and heated when vigorously questioned about Monica Lewinsky on BBC.

Here's the thing:

The Democrats and their liberal media Spirit Squad claimed for years that the impeachment effort was "all about sex." No matter how many times we retorted, "No, it's all about the perjury and obstruction of justice; sex is just the subject matter of that perjury and obstruction," the Democrats and the liberal media Spirit Squad asserted that we were lying, that in fact it was the sex, and only the sex, we cared about.

But here's the thing: When Bill Clinton goes on to do these dopey interviews/advertisements, what does the liberal media ask him about?

The sex. And only the sex.

That's not what I'm interested in. To the extent I care anymore at all about Bill Clinton (and I care less and less everyday; I've even begun to forgive him), I care only about the lawbreaking. Not the sex.

If you're going to ask him questions, ask him about his decision to commit perjury.

Not the sex.

Look: cheating on a spouse with a young girl in a very subordinate position is bad. It's blameworthy. It may even be, in the liberals' favorite formulation, "indefensible and reprehensible."

It is also none of my fucking business. And I think most conservatives agree that it's none of our fucking business. And of course most Americans agree that it's none of our fucking business.

Cheating on a spouse is blameworthy and a betrayal, but it's a betrayal of the spouse. I may say that it's shabby behavior, but I'm not the one to whom an apology is owed.

The wife is, although we don't know what sort of an arrangement these two had. And, certainly, the daughter is owed an apology.

But I'm not owed an apology over the sex itself, and I never fucking asked for one. And conservatives have never maintained otherwise.

So please, please, please liberal media: Don't demand that Clinton apologize for schtupping an intern on my behalf. We're all grown-ups-- we understand, as we always have understood, that infidelity is selfish, hurtful, and regretably all too common. Clinton isn't the first famous, rich, powerful man to chase a little tail, and he won't be the last.

If you want to press Clinton, press him on the stuff for which he really does owe the country an apology: For committing crimes while President of the United States in order to conceal a sordid affair and thus plunge the country into partisan warfare and political paralysis for two long years.

The sex I forgive him for. No, I don't even forgive him-- I forgive trespasses against me, and his affair with Lewinsky was not a trespass against me. I have nothing to forgive on this particular score.

But note the effect of the media's focus on the sex:

1) It gets them ratings;

2) It stokes interest in Clinton's book;

3) It allows the media to claim they're "asking the tough questions, " when in fact they're hitting Clinton hard on sex to avoid the real tough questions; by asking Clinton about a very common and human lapse they use up the time that would otherwise be spent asking him about his criminal lapses;

4) It makes Clinton appear to be a more sympathetic figure, as the media pummels him with intrusive, personal questions about a subject matter they actually have little right to ask, thus casting him in the role of "victim;"

5) It continues the myth that this was "all about sex."

It wasn't then, it isn't now.

You know, if I should ever be caught committing crimes, I can only wish the media chooses to ask me about my various sexual peccadiloes while avoiding the dicey subject of my lawbreaking.

Let's all agree, once and for all: As regards the actual sex, it is time to move on.

Afterthought: Plus, we've got bigger issues to focus on. No matter how "big" Clinton's various crimes -- including taking money from the Chinese -- seemed at the time, they don't seem particularly urgent now. There are simply bigger issues to contend with, and besides, all of this really is in the past. All we can do now is argue about it, and I wonder what the point of that could be.

The impeachment effort failed. Maybe Bill Clinton deserved to be removed from office, but consider: Had we removed him from office, Al Gore would have become Commander in Chief.

Think about that.

Clinton was feckless and arguably negligent regarding national security, but consider what Al "They betrayed this country!!!" Gore would have been like.

In a way, Clinton did us all an enormous favor.

100 years from now historians may note that the most enduring part of his legacy was his courageous cock-blocking of Al Gore from the Presidency.

Hell, perhaps 100 years from now, given the fact that Al Gore was thankfully relegated to obscurity and, King Lear-like, howling like a wounded animal, people will say of Bill Clinton: "In a way, he really did save the Constitution. The sonofabitch's dick was smarter than all of us put together."

Posted by: Ace at 08:49 PM | Comments (14)
Post contains 880 words, total size 5 kb.

Let me tell you something: I never expected this story to go anywhere. It was too good to be true.

As police say when a man with a mistress winds up finding his wife "accidentally" drowned in the pool: No one gets that lucky.

But maybe Kerry is Unelectable was right.

If this story is true -- and it's starting to look as if it might be -- then Kerry is unelectable.

Hare-Brained Update: The Smoke 'Em Out of Their Caves Strategy? For a long while, George Bush has been contending against a shadowy, evasive figure for whom no actionable intelligence exists by which to fix his position.

That opponent, of course, is John Kerry.

John Kerry has the perfect position on the War in Iraq: When things are going well, he's for it; when things are going poorly, he's vigorously against it.

Obviously, George Bush would rather he took a single position on the war. It does Bush no political good if, supposing the war goes well, Kerry can say in October, "Oh, yes, I was all in favor of that war myself."

So the question is, or perhaps was: How can we get Kerry to take a, let us say, less splendidly nuanced position and either declare his support (putting him shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush, come good or come ill) or declare his opposition (in which case Kerry may profit in the case of a catastrophe, but will himself suffer a catastrophe should the war be deemed a success-- or at least a necessary one, if less than a success)?

Perhaps the Bush Administration has sandbagged Kerry. They've induced him, little by little, to declare his true feelings about the war (of course, he's always been against it, and his sporadic statements which indicate some support for the effort are both ambiguous and cosmetic).

Perhaps they've decided to let Kerry get more solidly opposed to the war before releasing their best intelligence.

Now, a few caveats:

1) We've gotten our hopes up about this smoking gun or that one before. None of this may mean anything. Or perhaps this means something, but it can't be proved to the media's satisfaction. And the media, of course, are a panel of OJ jurors when it comes to Iraq; even videotape of this Fedayeen meeting with Mohammed Atta will be deemed "inconclusive" at best. ("Perhaps they were just discussing a Beirut time share.")

2) This is certainly a devious strategy. But deviousness isn't always a bad thing; in fact, it's often laudable. Kerry's strategy is fundamentally dishonest-- he wants to conceal his true opinion about the war until events clearly vindicate one position or another, and then he wants to claim he was on the right side of history all along. If it takes a little deviousness to unmask a liar-- who's the victim?

Well, Kerry's the victim, of course. Rather: Where is the innocent victim?

At any rate, I still don't expect this story to go anywhere. No one gets this lucky. I, like most people, have a tendency to believe the current situation will also be the future situation; while we all know, intellectually, that events may radically change the campaign, we have trouble accepting the possibility that any specific event may radically change the campaign.

Sure, Iran could have a counter-Islamist revolution; but who strongly believes that will happen?

It is starting to look, however, like maybe -- maybe -- this story has both legs and substance.

Will the media ignore it?

They'll try, of course.

But they wouldn't be able to ignore it should John Ashcroft issue a worldwide APB for a Mr. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, lieutenant colonel in Saddam's intelligence service and conspirator in the 9-11 attacks.

Were that to happen -- and, if this story is real, I have to guess that it will -- expect to see Dan Rather announcing a worldwide manhunt for a Saddam's agent in the 9-11 attacks but with his famous Kathryn Harris caveats: "as John Ascroft sees it and as John Ascroft believes it."

Posted by: Ace at 07:33 PM | Comments (3)
Post contains 688 words, total size 4 kb.

Frequent contibutor to Ace of Spades HQ Kerry is Unelectable tries to explain why Bush isn't making the Iraq-AQ case more strongly at his blog:

The President wants this to change and the best way to do this is to let the press undermine their own credibility over and over until no one believes them anymore. Remember, this is a hostile press. Most strongly disagree with the President's policies. They will continue to twist and spin and outright lie as we get closer to the election and people's trust in the media will continue to erode. We should also keep in mind that misreporting the news isn't just dishonest, it's unprofitable. In the end the sky will prove not to have been falling all along and the press will suffer the consequences.

There's more to it, but that's representative.

I'd like to say I agree, but I fear this is wishful thinking. I don't think Bush has some master plan.

Dick Morris said something that might bear on this. He felt that Bush's prime-time press conference at the beginning of the month was weak and without much new information. He said he knew exactly why-- the intelligence services heavily vet a President's speeches as regards his use of intelligence. If he attempts to say anything that differs from their consensus agreement -- even if he just wants to say it stronger and with fewer caveats -- they accuse him of politicizing the nation's intelligence.

He said that Clinton, and himself I'm guessing, were always frustrated by this process.

Based on this, I'm guessing -- and "guessing" is the operative word here -- the following:

The problem is basically that half the CIA doesn't believe the Iraq-AQ connection. Half does.

The agency's consensus view -- the compromise view between those who believe and those who don't -- is that there was a connection, but not a connection connection. It's a connection, yes, but not a connection.

This all stinks to high heaven of politics. It seems that there are liberals in the CIA who know there are connections between Iraq and AQ, but they refuse to call them "connections."

So the agency, as its consensus view, allows that there are connections, but they condemn the president when he says so. The official line is that there are connections (this part of the compromise satisfies the conservatives and also, coincidentally, the truth) but that these connections aren't quite connections (this is the sop to the liberals, who know that the CIA formally announcing "connections" would doom the Democrats to 20 years in the political wilderness).

If the President goes any further than this, the liberals begin leaking to the New York Times that he's "misrepresenting" and "distorting" the CIA position.

So, there you have it. There is a disagreement within the CIA, but the President is not allowed to take sides between those warring camps. The CIA has its consensus view, and he's supposed to stick to that.

I don't know how he can get out of this box. Perhaps he'll keep on muddling through, so long as he regains the lead in the polls. If he doesn't, he'll have to confront the CIA and risk the leaks from the Valerie Plame brigades.

By the way, Kerry is Unelectable also has a link to a good article on the Patriot Act. Just scroll down a bit.

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 PM | Comments (10)
Post contains 570 words, total size 3 kb.

As you are all well aware, I've been suffering "heart-ache" due to my continuing process of trying to figure out which candidate for president would be best for the next four years. Don't rush me; some of us haven't made up our minds already.

To that end, I am departing for my spiritual heartland and intellectual sanctum sanctorum, also known as the beautiful Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos.

I plan on doing some pony riding, taking long relaxing baths in valentine-shaped tubs, and consulting the in-house stylist about making myself pretty.

And I'll also devote several minutes to deciding between Bush and Kerry.

Hopefully, when I return, I will have decided, and I am sure I will get around to informing you of my decision sometime in late September.

Maybe.

Take care until Sunday night.

Posted by: Ace at 10:47 PM | Comments (6)
Post contains 142 words, total size 1 kb.

Doug, commenting upon something I said over at Allah's Paradise, actually attacks honesty as a virtue.

I'm always a big fan of 1) contrarianism 2) cynicism and 3) interesting writing generally. I don't know if I agree with any of the following, but damn, it sure sounds pretty smooth as you go through it.

"Again: Anger is his right. Dishonesty about that anger is not."

Nietzsche called honesty "the youngest virtue," which was his deft way of pointing out that it hadn't been considered a virtue for very long. Right, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," so the prohibition against lying in court has been around for thousands of years. But all that praise of "honesty," "sincerity," or "authenticity" is rather new.

So I'm going to sit here and speak honestly and say that if clever deceit--not Sullivan's kind, the clever kind--isn't a virtue, then it's at least virtuoso, which is better. On the other hand, my honesty may be a moral virtue, but it surely isn't virtuoso; it's a weakness born of my malicious enjoyment of wounding the weak-minded with the truth. And still I indulge my vice of honesty.

Really, I hope we win the "War on Terror" with every strategem of deceit (and violence) and I don't care whether we have a right to be dishonest. There are occasions when it's just lovely to be dishonest and we're in the middle of one.

In case it needs to be made clear, THIS post isn't about Sullivan. It's about the wussiness of going on about honesty as if it were just the greatest thing.

Praising honesty and sincerity a wussy value! Well! I'll give Doug one thing-- that position is, if nothing else, a novel one.

Posted by: Ace at 10:40 PM | Comments (6)
Post contains 317 words, total size 2 kb.

I haven't viewed them, which pretty much puts me in the same class as Our Patriotic Media.

I understand these videos are extraodinarily repellent, and contain the following heinous acts of barbaric cruelty:

-- Two (2) Arab men forced to wear women's lacy undergarments

-- One (1) such man forced to wear such garments on his head

-- Three (3) cases of canine-induced apprehension (C.I.A., for short)

-- Too many "behoodings" to count

-- Multiple cases of Gay Arab Naked Human Pyramid Construction

Yes, it's all there. All the horror of Saddam Hussein's torture -- err, I mean abuse -- chambers.

In all honesty: I hear this is just awful to watch. All kidding aside, make sure you've got the stomach for real torture before watching it.

From Spot On, who thinks it might be a good idea to try to trick snuff-film-loving Jihadists into watching the video.

I Watched It: Brutal. The beating-parts are merely scarifying. The use of swords to lop off hands and fingers is horrifying. But it is the semi-surgical amputations -- torturers dressed up like doctors sticking surgical instruments into wounds and playing with deep wounds in human flesh as if it were silly-putty-- that is actually enough to make you vomit.

Posted by: Ace at 03:25 PM | Comments (3)
Post contains 217 words, total size 1 kb.