Ah, the Left. Arrogant, vindictive, vicious, and insulting in defeat, and arrogant, vindictive, vicious and insulting even in victory.

And emboldened: Embracing the fairy-tale politics of The West Wing, they're pretty damn sure that what America craves right now is full-on culture war from the left.

I hope Mary Katherine doesn't mind this extended quotation. If you like this, there's plenty more back at her site.

[Quoting the unhinged leftist Trex from the unhinged leftist site Firedoglake:] So after 12 years of tolerating lying, cheating and corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave with bipartisan manners.

Given Bush's record with the truth, this bipartisanship sounds like a bad idea on its face.

Yeah, not so much. TRex, Rangel, Kos, Pelosi. The left wing of the Democratic Party is going to keep letting the nasty peek through. It's not everyone in the Party, to be sure, but there is a significant chunk of the leadership and the left blogosphere for whom disdain for Southerners, Middle Americans, evangelicals, the military and pretty much anyone whose views are more conservative than theirs, is part of their philosophy. I'm not trying to be unfair, here. A lot of times they don't even know they're doing it, and often they don't realize it's a problem.

I grew up in a largely liberal town, and the condescension is palpable. Most folks don't try to hide it because it's just understood that conservatives are "less," and to treat the conservative political philosophy and its trappings with respect would be giving it much more credit than it deserves. It's not even meant to be mean-spirited most of the time. It's just the way things work.

That same attitude is written all over the Democrats' reactions to electoral losses since 2000. They haven't trusted the judgment of the people and worked to change their message to reach them. Instead they have blamed the American people for being clods and dullards who are inexplicably disinclined to vote "in their own self-interest." Remember "What's Wrong With Kansas?" and "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?"

The Republicans are their own worst enemies. Fortunately, the Democrats are also their own worst enemies, and, if recent history is any guide, worse enemies to themselves than the Republicans are.

And while the media can cover for and spin for and embargo information damaging to the left, their powers in this regard are not without limit.

Witness 1980. Witness 1994.

Greg Gutfeld On The Left/Al Qaeda Alliance: A 15 dice fireball. You can't compare American democrats to liberals, the host asserts. "Oh yes you can," Gutfeld says.

It's simply a fact that a large number of leftists view any American defeat as a victory for the "greater moral good," which requires a humbling of American power to make us morally purer. Even if that defeat comes at the hands of the worst psychopaths since Hitler (and perhaps they even edge him out).

Add this to the Democrats' political need for defeat in this war to buoy their electoral fortunes -- at the expense of American security interests -- and you have a truly toxic tacit alliance between those who want to murder Americans and those willing allow Americans to be murdered in the interest of the "greater moral good."

The Simpsons' Veterans Day Salute: Humor is, as they say, often a vehicle for expressing one's true beliefs through a socially-acceptable pose of "only kidding."

Al Franken had a useful term for this -- "kidding on the square." You're "kidding," supposedly, but "on the square" -- you mean every damn thing you say. You might use comic overstatement to insulate yourself from the charge of really believing toxic thoughts, but the basics of it -- the gist -- you believe wholeheartedly.

Been quite a while since anyone called The Simpsons "the most conservative show on television," eh?

It's also been quite a while since it's actually been very funny. I didn't turn off the Simpsons due to politics; I turned off to it because it just became pretty dumb, repetitive, and not funny.

I don't think I've realy watched it since 1996 or so. I've caught a repeat here or there, but gun to my head, I couldn't tell you three episodes from the past ten years.

Posted by: Ace at 12:30 PM | Comments (124)
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I'm not sure. My more optimistic side says that the American people didn't decide to run from a fight they can't afford to lose, but rather chose to express their lack of confidence in the manner in which the war was being fought. And perhaps they decided that Bush's stewardship on the war was simply not strong enough to overcome other considerations, such as scandal and overspending.

On the other hand, it's possible that the American people do want to cut and run -- they just don't want to call it that. A lot of times voters wish to be deceived. There's really no way to simulataneously cut taxes, increase spending, and still balance the budget, for example, and yet in many elections the public seems to want precisely that -- and they reward whichever party is better at pretending all three can be had together. They reward whichever party, in other words, is more credible in promising the incredible to the willingly credulous.

So perhaps the American people really do simply want to give up on confronting global terrorism -- they just needed a party to tell them that doing so was honorable (when in fact it was dishonorable), courageous (when in fact it was cowardly), and wise (when in fact it is incredibly dangerous and ill-advised).

In the past, politics largely did stop at the water's edge. Not this time. The Democrats have decided that a military defeat that endangers America for decades to come may not be in America's national-security interest, but it is definitely in their own political interest, and so have campaigned to undermine the war and the very idea of the use of American power in a way scarcely seen before.

True enough, many Democratic appeals were, superficially, made upon the question of the competence of the war's management, not the necessity or nobleness of the war's mission. But many more appeals were made upon precisely that latter ground, and even those who claimed they still had victory as a priority did so equivocally.

Cutting and running is not necessarily an irrational choice, depending on one's beliefs. If one simply believes the war to be essentially unwinnable, then it makes sense to no longer waste American soldiers' lives to win what cannot be won. If some believe that being in Iraq ties us down too much and prevents us from taking necessary action (or at least offering a credible threat) against Iran, abandoning a difficult war of secondary importance may make some sense.

However, it seems to me that whatever the wisdom or folly of attempting to rebuild Iraq and impose order through American patrols, the consequences of losing will be, if not catastrophic, at least in the general neighborhood of catastrophe. The notion that the nation will be more emboldened to take out the core of evil -- Iran -- after a disasterous defeat and retreat from Iraq strikes me as borderline insane. More likely will be another 30 years of the Vietnam syndrome -- American self-doubt and reluctance to act in its interests, the encouraging of enemies from Tehran to Islamabad -- at perhaps the moment when American resolve is most necessary.

We did in fact survive the loss of Vietnam. But that was because Vietnam was never truly vital to American interests. Communist domination of Southeast Asia was disadvantageous to America, but not truly threatening to the lives and liberties of Americans, as the Al Qaedists and their millions of Islamist supporters most decidedly are. The "dominoes" never really fell as was long claimed should Saigon fall.

In the current war, there will be dominos falling aplenty should America lose. Or simply decide it's no longer much interested in violent confrontation with the apocalyptically psychpathic.

Even a frustrating and bloody stalemate in Iraq is preferrable, I think, to an actual military defeat. For we will not just lose in Iraq. We will lose in Syria, and Gaza, and Lebanon, and Pakistan, and dozens of other Muslim nations as well, including, of course, in Iran.

There is chatter that Bush, now chastened and perhaps seeking to improve his own legacy, will acquiesce easily in all of this. If he does so, he will in fact go down as one of the worst Presidents in history, by nearly universal reckoning. The liberals will despise him for getting into Iraq and the conservatives and many moderates will despise him for so willingly getting out.

I hope that isn't the case. But I have a bad feeling about all of this. Before I viewed the Global War on Terror as being much more difficult than I'd hoped. Now I view it all as a likely defeat -- on all fronts -- unless something in the American temperament changes quickly, or unless some bold new strategy changes the facts on the ground.

Posted by: Ace at 11:46 AM | Comments (73)
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Sorry I didn't announce that I was taking off. I didn't really plan it. I figured I'd blogged through the elections and all the fallout and just needed to get away from it a little bit.

I did nothing particularly different or interesting with my time off. Just watched the Giants get whupped on. Watched ten Arrested Development repeats.

I did see the Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror. Which I haven't seen since I was a kid. Always fun.

Laura was a trooper. Thanks, Laura!

Posted by: Ace at 10:40 AM | Comments (74)
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Rove's secret plan for defeating the Democrats in 2008? Give them poweri in 2006, and let them just go crazy with it.

A battle is shaping up between Democrats and the White House over the Military Commissions Act, signed into law last month by President George W. Bush.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is expected to take over as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and The (Calif.) Daily Journal reports that Leahy is drafting a bill to undo portions of the new law in an effort to restore habeas corpus rights for enemy combatants.

A spokeswoman for Leahy told the newspaper the bill would be intended to repeal portions of the law that prevent some detainees from pursuing federal court challenges to the governmentÂ’s authority to hold them indefinitely.

Spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler told the newspaper the goal is to “try and do something to reverse the damage.”

That's smart. Hit the ground running by trying to enact the most unpopular parts of your program first. That will give you the momentum you want for further popular rejections.

More... At Instapundit, who notes the media is just getting around to reporting on the Democrats' actual "plan" which for some reason they didn't see fit reporting before the election.

They're also pushing for troop withdrawals to begin in 4-6 months.

Horrible. If you're going to withdraw, withdraw them all immediately. This "phased withdrawal" is just a half-assed way to get more troops killed -- and while pursuing a strategy of defeat and surrender to boot.

But an immediate withdrawal would be too politically unpopular. Better to kill some more troops in a war you've decided to surrender on than risk losing too much party approval rating.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (22)
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Many thanks to all who participated in The New Age contest. I never had so much fun reviewing contest entries. Hilarious.

To reiterate my admiration for you people:

When life hands you lemons, do you crumble?
No.

Do you blame everybody but yourself when things go wrong?
Nuh-uh.

When your team loses, do so many of you go shrieking to therapists about it, that a bullshit mental disorder is coined for your whiny ass?
Oh HELLS NO.

You spew black smoke into the atmosphere for about...oh, 48 hours, until the absurdity of whole thing sinks in. Setbacks happen.

And in a snap, you're over yourself.
Life handed you lemons. And this was your response: more...

Posted by: LauraW. at 02:15 PM | Comments (87)
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This story was on NBC a while ago. What a great kid.

The 15-year-old Palmer High School sophomore never met Pierce, an 80-year-old widower when he died Aug. 13 in Anchorage. She only knew he was a military veteran and thus deserved to have the traditional "lights out" signal played at his funeral and to have it played by a living, breathing human being.

"I feel our servicemen should be buried with an actual bugler," she said, "not a recording."

A few years ago, she watched a televised veteran's service at which taps was sounded from a boombox. The mechanical music offended her, so she found a battered Civil War-era bugle, taught herself to play it and, at age 11, became the youngest member of Bugles Across America.

ARE YOU A BUGLER?

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT BUGLES ACROSS AMERICA, CONTACT STATE DIRECTOR GENE HORNER AT 1-907-376-3716.

Let us commend with great praise our fallen heroes, those who Serve, and those who attend to them with a selfless heart.

Posted by: LauraW. at 04:49 PM | Comments (176)
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Retired Geezer over at Blog Idaho makes a nice catch.

Follow his link to the Telegraph Article.

It's a doozy:

In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.

This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Long and worth it.

Posted by: LauraW. at 11:12 AM | Comments (119)
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...is summarized quickly by Powerline:

There's no reason to doubt that Steele would do a capable job. But Steele would have to be an aggressive defender of his party's position and of the president. That role might well guarantee that he never will be elected to public office in Maryland. And that would be too bad.

I suppose it's worth asking if Steele is likely to win in Maryland anyway. True, this was a bad cycle for Republicans. But he ran a good campaign against a zero and still lost.

Posted by: Ace at 01:36 PM | Comments (96)
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How sad is it that we have to acknowlege this guy at all?

Ah, well. As usual, he's in fight-fight-fight tough, strong mode.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (69)
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They've got to proect their intellectual property.

That joke was from token commenting at HotAir, via Blacksheep.

Allah reads closely and finds that a prosecutor is petitioning the German state to begin such a prosecution, which is not really a huge story. Sort of dog bites man.

More at Stop the ACLU.

Posted by: Ace at 01:21 PM | Comments (31)
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