No, not in the sense that they give different audiences different speeches.

In the sense that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Rightly or wrongly (and of course it's rightly) Democrats are perceived as always taking the UN's or France's side in any dispute with the US.

Well, we have a dispute with the UN, and of course with France, right now. And yet even in this situation, the Democrats can't speak plainly and clearly on the US's behalf.

For years the Democrats have been telling us we need to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, to reach out with aid and money.

There is, of course, a dispute over whether US soldiers distributing aid and helping the stricken should wear the US flag or the symbol of the UN, and whether our aid packages should similarly be emblazoned with the red white and blue or just the UN blue.

Seems to me that this is a perfect opportunity for the US to win some of those hearts and minds, letting our aid packages and soldiers be our ambassadors, all marked with or proudly wearing the flag.

And yet on debate shows I don't see any Democrats forcefully taking this position. I always see Republicans arguing with UN-types-- and Democratic politicians.

Why can't Democrats argue on the US's side against those UN-types? Why can't they make it clear that while it's nice enough to distribute aid through the UN, it's not the UN that much of the Muslim world hates, and it's not the UN that much of the Muslim world hopes will be bloodied in our war against terrorism.

It's the US's image that needs repairing in the eyes of the Muslim world, as Democrats and liberals have been instructing us for three long years.

Why, then, are they so reluctant to advocate for us in this situation?

At some point, the Democrats are going to have to try winning the hearts and minds of the American voters, too.

If this keeps up, the Republicans will have to cede their richly-earned monicker of "The Stupid Party" and bequeath it to the Democrats.

Update: Be sure to check out these pre-tsunami pics from Indonesia; Osam t-shirts and burning American flags seem to be popular fashion accessories.

I don't say that we shouldn't necessarily help these people because of the actions of a few bad apples. ("Few" here means hundreds of thousands, possibly millions.)

But I think it might be helpful for such people to know precisely whose helicopters and military personnel are saving their lives and reconstucting their villages.

And oddly enough, I don't see anyone burning the UN flag, making me think that perhaps the UN doesn't need the PR as badly as we do.

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 AM | Comments (1)
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I guess Nader didn't publicize this much, and I don't blame him.

It's not very presidential to debate Abu Ghraib with Lambchop.

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Comments (5)
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For some of our more liberal Jewish citizens, George Bush's America has begun to resemble Nazi Germany, from which some of them fled.

So, to escape this dire situation, some are taking advantage of a law allowing a right of return and emigrating to the one country which would never devolve into a thuggish anti-semitic fascist police state... Germany.

Germany. Where the conversation never takes too long to get back to, "Vell, please explain to me vhat ve did in de var that vas so bad, and vhy ve have to keep pretending to feel guilty about it."

Can't make this stuff up.

Posted by: Ace at 09:32 AM | Comments (46)
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Thanks to the notice about Yahoo's cheap domain registry I found at Alarming News, and thanks to a good friend who was nice enough to let me use his/her name and stuff for registration purposes, you can now just enter the URL

www.aceofspadeshq.com

into your address bar to get here.

Finally-- a dot-com domain. I just couldn't be prouder.

Well, I guess I could be a lot prouder. But, on a boring Wednesday night, this will do.

Oh-- and I guess if this Mu.nu site goes down, I can just redirect traffic to the blogspot address. That's kinda cool too.

Update: Okay, the address is now hyperlinked, so you can see if it works.

It does.

It's fun.

Posted by: Ace at 06:28 PM | Comments (10)
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Man of Substance sends along this picture of Mr. Paul Anka's band in full integrity swing, taken from his vantage by by the lighting board:

There's only one important one on that stage. Can you spot him?

Posted by: Ace at 02:01 PM | Comments (24)
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Marine Sniper scores longest-ranged confirmed kill in Iraq.

Martin Riggs? Pussy!:

AR RAMADI, Iraq (Jan. 02, 2005) -- Seen through a twenty-power spot scope, terrorists scrambled to deliver another mortar round into the tube. Across the Euphrates River from a concealed rooftop, the Marine sniper breathed gently and then squeezed a few pounds of pressure to the delicate trigger of the M40A3 sniper rifle in his grasp.

The rifle's crack froze the booming Fallujah battle like a photograph. As he moved the bolt back to load another round of 7.62mm ammunition, the sniper's spotter confirmed the terrorist went down from the shot mere seconds before the next crack of the rifle dropped another.

It wasn't the sniper's first kill in Iraq, but it was one for the history books.

...

"From the information we have, our chief scout sniper has the longest confirmed kill in Iraq so far," said Capt. Shayne McGinty, weapons platoon commander for "Bravo" Co. "In Fallujah there were some bad guys firing mortars at us and he took them out from more than 1,000 yards."

...

"After we had called in indirect fire and after all the adjustments from our mortars, I got the final 8-digit grid coordinates for the enemy mortar position, looked at our own position using GPS and figured out the distance to the targets we dropped to be 1,050 yards," said Flowers with a grin. "This time we were killing terrorism from more than 1,000 yards."

Read the whole thing. Frankly, I've been surprised we haven't been able to take better advantage of our awesome advantages in sniper-skills.

Thanks to NickS.

Posted by: Ace at 12:22 PM | Comments (21)
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Geraghty's blog remains a first-read for many, including myself, but the title "Kerry Spot" has long been inappropriate. Even when Kerry was a candidate for office, he spent most of his time covering other issues.

Now that Kerry has gone the way of the dodo (by which I mean Al Gore), it makes even less sense.

Finally twigging on to that, he's taken the half-step of calling his blog "TKS," which is, frankly, a stupid name, and not even as fun to say as KFC. (Mmmm... extra crispy.)

Help Geraghty out by suggesting a new name for his blog. "Like a Viking," sadly, has already been taken.

I propose "The Other NRO Blog Which is Not About Marmite, Mathematical Puzzles and Puns, Star Trek, and Jonah Goldberg's Couch."

A bit wordy, I guess, but it sums things up.

Posted by: Ace at 11:56 AM | Comments (26)
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CBSNews still hasn't released its report on Rathergate. I'm beginning to believe they think the heat is off of them now, and that they can just bury the issue.

Is it time to re-apply that heat? I doubt that we can cook them as we did when these crude forgeries were first exposed for what they were, but we could manage to let them know that we have not forgotten. We are expecting a full and fair accounting of this scandal, unredacted, uncensored, and promptly.

It would not take much to get all those affiliate phone numbers back into current postings.

Update: Allah, who, thankfully, still posts here at least, points me to this Kerry Spot piece (um, now called "TKS," because, I guess, he began to realize "Kerry Spot" was a bit dated; but I don't know if "TKS" is really much of an improvement) reporting a rumor that the report will be released this Friday.

Trouble is, we've sort of heard these rumors before. And we also know that the report may be heavily redacted; many at CBS are campaigning for a whitewash version of the report.

Let us wait until Friday, then. But if the full report is not released then -- unredacted, and clearly laying blame where it so clearly deserves to be laid -- then I think it might be time to remind CBS that it depends on viewers to remain a viable business.

Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (8)
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Report: Provisional ballots, which are only supposed to be counted after the purported voter's right to vote has been established, were instead fed into voting machines without any checking, in the counties that go most heavily Democratic.

Miscast provisional votes could be one reason the number of ballots counted in King County outnumbered the list of voters who voted by 3,539.

I would say so.

Meanwhile, Pull On Superman's Cape reports that King County was exposed as fraud-friendly as far back as 1998:

Friend 'Shark' Sharkansky over at Sound Politics has been doing yeoman's work with King County data - discovering certain precincts with large numbers of voters whose addresses are at the elections office (our state law requires registration at a residence), apparent multiple voters, apparent dead voters, and at minimum: gross incompetence on King County's part in getting precincts, voters, and ballots all mixed up. Shark originally broke the story about the 3,539 less voters than there are ballots currently reported by King County (they are working on an 'update').

Pull on Superman's Cape has 1998 news report videos exposing the shoddy and fraud-friendly practices in King's County. Worth checking out.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (5)
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Power Line, of course.

I found this particularly interesting:

Pein tries to argue that the mainstream media talked to various friends and associates of President Bush after the CBS scandal broke, and identified them as such, but somehow did not sufficiently portray them as "right wing," etc. For example:

Joe Allbaugh was usually identified in press accounts — in The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and USA Today, to name a few — as Bush’s old chief of staff. He is much more. In 1999 Allbaugh, the self-described “heavy” of the Bush campaign, told The Washington Post, “There isn’t anything more important than protecting [Bush] and the first lady.”

Wow, there's a failing. Only describing Allbaugh as President Bush's former chief of staff wasn't enough to alert the audience to the fact that he was a dreaded Republican, whose knowledge should be disregarded.

Liberal reporters believe passionately in disclosing all possible credibility-eroding partisan biases of Republican sources. As for liberal sources-- well, they're content to identify them only by their job-- "Havard law professor," "budgetary expert," etc.

And as for themselves-- no disclosure about their own leanings.

Why is this? One would think that if the public were served by disclosing the possible biases and agendas of sources, that rule should extend to practically everyone, including liberals' favorite liberal go-to sources, and of course to liberal reporters themselves. If the public would be served, as Corey Pein maintains, by examining Joe Allbaugh's partisan leanings, why would it not equally be served by disclosing his own partisan leanings?

And of course he does have them. The Wardrobe Door does a small amount of checking and finds that Pein doesn't pass the same test of maximum disclosure he's advocated for Joe Allbaugh:

So what about Pein himself? Where do you think his politics fall? Well it turns out he was an editorial intern for the liberal magazine The American Prospect [an avowedly liberal advocacy magazine; the blogger quotes the mag's mission statement as evidence for its admitted liberal activism-- ed.]

Pein was also an assistant editor for Environmental Practice, a professional journal for the National Association of Environmental Professionals (NAEP). Anybody want to argue that Environmental Practice is a pro-Bush publication or even neutral?

Now, were these "shadowy links" of Pein's disclosed in his piece?

Take a wild freaking guess.

By the Way: Sorry for late start on blogging. The Mu.Nu posting site was down for a bit, and then the actual site was briefly down as well.]

Update: Blaster notes:

[Quoting from the Pein hackery:] It classifies Burkett as a member of the “loony left,” based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and “Adolf,” and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper’s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign.

[Blaster:] Isn't that the whole problem?

Corey Pein just doesn't see it that way, Blaster.

Michael Wolff, a confirmed idiot, has already been quite clear on the liberal position on Rathergate: We all know it's true, so who cares if we have evidence for it? He's stated this nearly explicitly. When a veteran journalist informed him, patiently, that journalism wasn't about what "we all know" but what we can actually verify, Wolff pooh-poohed him as if he were calling some ticky-tack holding call.

Which would seem to be Andrew Sullivan's position on Susan Sontag's assumed homosexuality-- We all know she was a lesbian. Since we all know it, can't we dispense with confirmation or authoriatative citation and the like? Look, we know it. Shouldn't that be enough?

Alas, no. It shouldn't be enough. Partisans -- particularly liberal partisans posing as reporters -- "know" an awful lot of things that they either cannot prove or are flat-out provably false.

Hey, look, gun to my head-- sure, I'm thinking that Sontag was a lesbian. I think most rumors are true. But just because I think that most rumors are true doesn't mean I think the press should be permitted to traffic in them, citing them as genuine, just because four out of five liberals agree that they're true.

Posted by: Ace at 10:40 AM | Comments (4)
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