I just asked, in the post below, if Andrew Sullivan would call the UK a rogue nation because they're holding the SkyBomb terorists in custody without charges.

Turns out, he already pretty much did.

Delicious. Such sweet, sweet crazy I can already feel it going straight to my thighs.

The Alleged UK Terror Plot

16 Aug 2006 09:58 am

So far, no one has been charged in the alleged terror plot to blow up several airplanes across the Atlantic. No evidence has been produced supporting the contention that such a plot was indeed in the works. Forgive me if my skepticism just ratcheted up a little notch. Under a law that the Tories helped weaken, the suspects can be held without charges for up to 28 days. Those days are ticking by. Remember: the British authorities had all these people under surveillance; they did not want to act last week; there was no imminent threat of anything but a possible "dummy-run," whatever deranged guest-bloggers at Malkin say. (Correction, please.) Bush and Blair discussed whether to throw Britain's airports into chaos over the weekend before the crackdown occurred. [!!?!!]
...

I'd be interested in the number of plotters who had passports. How could they even stage a dummy-run with no passports? And what bomb-making materials did they actually have? These seem like legitimate questions to me; the British authorities have produced no evidence so far. If the only evidence they have was from torturing someone in Pakistan, then they have nothing that can stand up in anything like a court. I wonder if this story is going to get more interesting. I wonder if Lieberman's defeat, the resilience of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the emergence of a Hezbollah-style government in Iraq had any bearing on the decision by Bush and Blair to pre-empt the British police and order this alleged plot disabled. I wish I didn't find these questions popping into my head. But the alternative is to trust the Bush administration.

Been there. Done that. Learned my lesson.

Hell hath no fury like a man-bitch spurned.

PS, Andrew: Coming by passports is no difficult trick for a terrorist. A lot of them will have ten passports. See, they're forged.

I continue to be both intrigued and delighted by this notion the hard left has that the British are verrrrry concerned about Joe Fucking Lieberman's electoral fate.

Bonus: I was just writing the left needs there to never be a coercive interrogation that results in useful intelligence if they are to maintain their absurd stance that avoiding coercion costs us nothing, as it's not useful anyway.

If coercion or outright torture are sometimes useful, they have to retreat from that childish position and answer the more adult question, "How many innocent lives will you sacrifice to spare a terrorist pain and discomfort?"

They don't want to answer that, of course. They'd prefer to insist that such a trade-off is purely hypothetical.

Thus, Andrew Sullivan needs the SkyBomb plot to be essentially a hoax if he is to avoid recanting his last two years' worth of screeching about coercion and "rogue nations."

There are two things Andrew Sullivan wants:

1) Gay marriage; and

2) To always be able to claim he's right and to never confess major error.

Note those two goals of Sullivan's are definitely not ranked in order of importance.

Sweetie adds...

Why are the UK and US authorities taking so long to brief Andrew on the investigation details? It's almost as if he's not part of either country's law enforcement groups.

She suggests appeasing him by giving him a big shiny Anti-Torture Police badge purchased from a Spencer's gifts.

Hello, Michelle Readers: If you're reading this because you don't much like Andrew Sullivan, you'll probably enjoy this.

Evidence For St. Andrew of the Sacred Heart-Ache's Readers: Try here.

Nope, no evidence there. All just a confabulation of Bush and Blair to, ummmmm, help Joe Lieberman. Yeah. The Brits are all queer for Joe Lieberman. He's like the fucking BEATLES, man, only without the baggage of Ringo.

Sullivan, you crazy fuck, you've really gone off the rails this time. You've been getting closer and closer to the Townhouse/Kos crowd, and your reputation -- such that it is -- will be forever marred by this.

You've stepped over the edge and become a virtual 9/11 "Truth"er, seeing dark conspiracies everywhere.

You friggin' narcissistic tool. Postulating a cooked-up conspiracy just so you wouldn't be forced to admit you might have been wrong about torture never being useful or warranted?

What were you thinking?

Well, I hope you had a nice career. You had a nice run. I almost didn't mind your turning TNR into The Advocate for a year or a year and a half, whatever your tenure was.

Say goodbye to respectability.

Don't worry, though. Bill Maher will still have you on.

And that's what counts.

Posted by: Ace at 05:37 AM | Comments (191)
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Sorry to break up your hudna, boys.

Also On Matt Drubbs:

British Keep SkyBomb Terrorists in Custody-- Without Charges.

Hmmmm... torture, keeping suspects in jail without charge...?

UK = Rogue Nation watch for Andrew Sullivan, maybe?

Posted by: Ace at 05:23 AM | Comments (14)
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His readers aren't happy, but that's to be expected. You build an audience endorsing a certain point of view and then you change it, you're going to lose a lot of readers.

Ah, well. Maybe you'll also pick some up, too.

thereÂ’s no longer room for Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Party. And alas, tonightÂ’s result will reverberate through the November elections and into the 2008 presidential campaign. ItÂ’s really much more than just a single primary in a single state; itÂ’s a shot across the bow of moderate Democrats everywhere. And so, whatever further ramifications this result might have, thereÂ’s one thing it definitely means, one result that is officially cast in stone, as of today:

I am no longer a Democrat.

I’ve been calling myself a Democrat since I was ten years old... In recent years, I’ve seen the “base” of the Democratic Party drifting away from sense and sanity, and at the same time, I’ve felt my own ideological compass pulled somewhat to the right by world events.
...

Perhaps, I told myself, despite the ascendancy of Nancy Pelosi, the Deaniacs and the Kos Kidz, perhaps Lieberman’s side could still somehow win the struggle for the party’s soul. As long as that hope remained viable, I could continue to be a Democrat. A “Lieberman Democrat,” I called myself, and I was proud.

But now the voters have spoken....

Well, if thereÂ’s no room in the Democratic Party for Joe Lieberman, then thereÂ’s no room in it for me.

So IÂ’m done. IÂ’m out. See ya later. Sayonara.

This might seem like an overreaction to a single primary result in a single state, but really, it’s just the straw that broke the donkey’s back. As I said, the Democratic Party and I have been drifting apart for some time now. I believe it began on a Tuesday morning in the fall of 2001; I can’t exactly remember the date, but let’s just say a certain catastrophic event happened which changed the world in the eyes of most people — but not of many liberals and Democrats. Oh, they were sad and mad, just like everybody else. But as the weeks and months wore on, I learned to my dismay that the far left didn’t see 9/11 as a world-changing event or a paradigm shift, but rather, just a minor historical blip that didn’t require any adjustments whatsoever to their worldview or their policy ideas. And as the months turned to years, I watched with even greater dismay as the Democratic Party establishment concluded that the best way to win elections was to drift ever closer to the poisonous views of the far left.

Read the whole thing. For conservatives, how-I-stopped-being-a-Democrat stories are as exciting and interesting as how-I-lost-my-virginity stories.

Pretty similar in many respects, too. It's an event you anticipate/dread for almost all your whole younger life and then, in three seconds, it's over. And you're different.

And then you tell all your friends about it, of course.

I didn't have as big as a defining event as Loy did. After thinking of myself as a Democrat (and liberal) all through high school, and actually subscribing to The Nation freshman year of college to "get informed" with "the real facts" (don't worry-- I stiffed them on the bill), and after being a big booster of "flaming centrist" Al Gore in 1988, I began drifting pretty fast.

Mostly by watching liberals and conservatives argue.

One side seemed to make sense, even if I knew in my heart they were racist and backwards and just plain ol' wrong.

The other side seemed to screech and make things up on the fly and mostly spew out a lot of senseless twaddle. They seemed to have little comprehension of how these strange creatures called "human beings" actually thought, worked, and lived. They always seemed to be talking about some other, more angelic form of life, like High Elves or something. (Alternately, they were always talking about some far more demonic form of life, like, I don't know, Balrogs, or Fiendish Dire Gelatinous Cubes.)

At no time did they ever seem to be talking about actual people. They always denied the simple and undeniable motor of the human psyche-- selfishness or self-interest, however you want to put it -- and were forever claiming that they themselves always acted purely out of altruistic motives and that all other people should, and could, do likewise.

A weird thing I've noticed. It's not, by any means, a 100% rule. Still, it is a general guideline.

Ask a conservative why he doesn't give more money to charity. At first, he will, as all people do, make excuses, and talk about people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, and the like. But cut through the excuses, and eventually he'll say, "Well, it's my money. I want to keep it."

If you ask a liberal this, be prepared for a very long series of rationalizations meant to make it seem as if the act of withholding money from those who need it more is somehow an act of even greater charity on the part of the liberal, that there are more important considerations, etc.

The difference between a sane liberal and an insane liberal is that a sane liberal will cop to actually having, get this, a self-interested instinct in a reasonable amount of time. It'll take a sane liberal a little longer to get there than a conservative, but keep pressing the question, and she'll eventually admit, "Okay, I do want to keep my own money. I have some greed. I didn't say I was perfect."

But the insane liberal, who doesn't have a political philosophy so much as a complex system of self-validation mechanisms, will never cop to self-interest, but just keep spinning more and more twaddle about how he's "doing good things" by keeping his money because he can then use it to, I don't know, "support independent music stores" by buying Aztec Camera original vinyl imports and Siouxsie Sioux concert posters.

I didn't want to be part of the screechers. I didn't want to be part of the true Holier Than Thou brigade.

After interning as a "radical indpendent" for a while I gave in to the Dark Side and then became a Sith Lord watching even more obnoxious people waste my time giving Oprah-esque speeches in class at blah-blah school.

My big theory: You are a member of whatever party whose bullshit and twaddle you find the least obnoxiously moronic.

Posted by: Ace at 04:38 AM | Comments (95)
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The new definition of "planet"? "Round and orbity," the LAT snarks.

There goes the solar system.

The elite society of nine lordly bodies of rock, ice and gas would grow to at least 12 and as many as 53 members under a new definition of "planet" proposed Tuesday by the International Astronomical Union.

The core of the definition? Planets are round. And they orbit a star.

Interesting. I'm glad we have astronomers to figure these things out for us.

The proposal was hammered out after two years of intense astronomical debate among leading experts of the Astronomical Union, the international authority for naming celestial objects.

"We now have a new way to put the solar system together," said MIT astronomer Richard Binzel, a member of the committee that drafted the proposal. "We think this definition is reasonable."

It will be voted on next week by the group's general assembly, which is now meeting in Prague, Czech Republic. Binzel said he was optimistic the definition would be approved.

The new list of planets would include UB313, which was recently discovered beyond Pluto's orbit, as well as two bodies that have previously been rejected for planetary status: Pluto's moon Charon and Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Charon and Pluto would become the solar system's first double planet, meaning they twirl around each other but neither dominates.

Awwwww... that's kind of cute.

So, okay: All these Big Fat Geniusheads knocking together and they've come up with a definition stating that planets are:

* round

* "orbity"

* may in fact be moons of other planets

* but not so much that they become "macaques"

A big convention, and this is what they've come up with?

I hope the hookers were good.

Pissing Me Off:

Ceres would also become the sole member of a subclass called "dwarf planets."

What? We're making up a subclass with precisely one member just to jam Ceres into there?

Who gives a rat's ass about Ceres? It doesn't have the spunk or charisma of a, oh, I don't know, Pluto for example.

It's a frickin' asteroid, man. Can't we leave it at that?

PS, I've seen pictures of this piece of shit liberal "dwarf planet" Ceres, and if I'm not mistaken, it ain't all that round. At best it's roundish or rounded.

Basically it's an irregularly shaped piece of socialist macaque-rock that has the slightest roundish nature to it but did one time suck off Carl Sagan's lab assistant, so now we all have to bow down to mighty Ceres, King of the Planets That Aren't Really Planets.

I'm so angry.

Let's go over to this convention and kick all these dweebs' asses. And then take all their hookers.

Okay, So It's Round:

I guess I was thinking of other licentious perverts in this shit-rock gangbang of an asteroid belt, like the whore Ida or mincing pimp Eros.

So, fine, let's all bow down to our new master "Ceres." Because it's round.

Kind of.

Posted by: Ace at 03:25 AM | Comments (46)
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I'm not a particular fan of George Allen, and, if I'm being honest in my cynicism, I don't mind an opponent to my boy, Rudy Giuliani, being scuffed up a little.

Correction/Update: More than scuffed up a little, it turns out. It seems "macaca" has, according to several commenters, a fairly well-known usage as a racial slur.

Original post continues, unaltered, except for the update before the jump.

...

But a lot of idiocy is being currently generated by Allen's reference to a Democratic stooge as a "macaca," as it has been rendered phonetically, taken to be a mispronounciation of "macaque," a sort of small monkey from Borneo.

As the Democratic stooge was of Indian descent, this is being taken as evidence that "Republicans call anyone slightly darker than pale 'monkeys.'"

Here's the Washington Post's very literate editorial board having no idea what the word may mean, and suspecting racism:

"MY FRIENDS, we're going to run this campaign on positive, constructive ideas," Sen. George F. Allen told a rally of Republican supporters in Southwest Virginia last week. "And it's important that we motivate and inspire people for something." Whereupon Mr. Allen turned his attention to a young campaign aide working for his Democratic opponent -- a University of Virginia student from Fairfax County who was apparently the only person of color present -- and proceeded to ridicule him.

Let's consider which positive, constructive or inspirational ideas Mr. Allen had in mind when he chose to mock S.R. Sidarth of Dunn Loring, who was recording the event with a video camera on behalf of James Webb, the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat Mr. Allen holds. The idea that holding up minorities to public scorn in front of an all-white crowd will elicit chortles and guffaws? (It did.) The idea that a candidate for public office can say "Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!" to an American of Indian descent and really mean nothing offensive by it? (So insisted Mr. Allen's aides.) Or perhaps the idea that bullying your opponents and calling them strange names -- Mr. Allen twice referred to Mr. Sidarth as "Macaca" -- is within the bounds of decency on the campaign trail?

We have no inkling as to what Mr. Allen meant by "Macaca," though we rather doubt his campaign's imaginative explanation that it was somehow an allusion to Mr. Sidarth's hairstyle, a mullet. Mr. Allen said last night that no slur was intended, though he failed to explain what, exactly, he did have in mind. Macaca is the genus for macaques, a type of monkey found mainly in Asia. Mr. Allen, who as a young man had a fondness for Confederate flags and later staunchly opposed a state holiday in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has surely learned too much about racial sensitivities in public life to misspeak so offensively.

Well, I happen to know what he meant, because I've, well, read some books once in a while and happen to have a pretty good memory. It means "stooge" or "puppet" or "errand boy." That sort of thing. An operative in the pay of someone else is a "macaque."

Or Not: Several readers, including IreneFingIrene, agree with this definition provided by RiverRat:

Macaca (Portuguese), A short handled whip used by the cart of wagon drivers. It's also a used as a racial epithet in Brazil for negroes.

The French and Belgium colonialists in West Africa probably picked it up from their Portuguese predecessors.

Dog8myhomework adds:

t isn't made up racism. Macaca is used worldwide as a racial slur - thanks to the French in Africa. And guess what? Allen's mother is French and from Northern Africa, but it's entirely possible that he never heard the word in his life and this is just some very remarkable coincidence. Yeah, that's it.

Ummmm... I, uh, didn't know that.

Nevermind.

Look, the big news in this post was that I read a short story once. And actually it was kind of long, almost a novella. And I finished it.

Let's not get sidetracked with trivialities, okay?

Anyway, it should be said the WaPo are still illiterates, because, if this is the definition of the word that hangs him, they were still just making shit up with that "macaque" monkey-crap.

Original post continues past the jump. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:59 AM | Comments (58)
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It's time for liberals to stop dodging the question: What is worse -- for a terrorist to be made to suffer, or for thousands of innocent people, guilty of no more than conspiring to maximize air-miles, should be permitted to be murdered?

Why are the liberals always on the other side?" asks the fictional French military commander Colonel Mathieu when he is challenged, in The Battle for Algiers, for using torture to fight terror. The film suggests that torture works as a tool of immediate necessity, even if the consequences are a blurring of morality and so final defeat. Four decades on, Mathieu's charge against liberal scruples is still being raised, implicit in the defence of the means being used in a modern battle against Islamic terror.

...

Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week's arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had "broken" under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. "I don't deduce, I know - torture," she said. "There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all."

...

The defence [of using information gleaned from torture interrogations in foreign countries], to the extent that anything other than evasion has been offered, is no better than the one provided by Colonel Mathieu in Algiers: it works. But does it?

Why yes, as a matter of fact. Yes it does. (Bulk of post copied below the jump for convenience.)

Liberals really ought to stop insisting over and over that torture doesn't work and bother to read an expert's opinion on the matter.

Or ask any of the brave, strong, patriotic men tortured into giving vicious propaganda against America by the North Vietnamese.

Do liberals imagine these fine men said those hateful things simply because they were persuaded by the North Vietnamese's skillful rhetoric? Or their promises of bon-bons and chocolates?

Of course torture works. It always has and it always will.

Liberals repeatedly insist torture never works. If it works sometimes, however, and saves, as seems the case here, 2000-4000 innocent civilians, is it not worth trying with the right monster?

Liberals need torture to never work in order to claim that it is a zero-cost decision to not engage in the practice; that way they can claim we can act perfectly morally with absolutely no compromise in safety. A win-win situation.

Well, there's a thing called nuance liberals should look into. It turns out that in at least one case torture has worked spectacularly well, and, given that it directly led to the survival of 2000-4000 innocent civilians, seems to have been the moral course of action.

I don't know how your moral calculus works, but when I weigh the pain and misery of one creature made a monster by his own decisions versus the very lives of 2000 or more innocent men, woment, and children simply attempting to go on holiday -- well, one side of the scale slams the table pretty damn heavily.

Liberals are citing the "British model" as the one Bush should emulate (but won't, as he's so stupid-- a chimp, you see). Well, what was the British model for cracking the SkyBomb plot?

-- constant email and phone surveillance, assisted by the American NSA

-- bank records monitoring, probably also assisted by America

-- ethnically profiling, focusing only on those likely to be involved in the plot (i.e., Pakistani Muslims and their non-Pakistani Muslim associates)

-- "coercive interrogations" by Pakistan which yielded crucial information with only a short time left before the plot was set into action

Hmmm... pretty much all the techniques they're so agahst about.

And now that you mention it -- why are liberals always on the other side? Could it really be that we've just managed to get so unlucky we've been on the wrong side of things ever single time in history?

Or is there simply some narcissistic malice in the liberal mind that convinces them that is so?

Via Instapundit, who is less jazzed about the practice, but, frankly, he's a law professor. That's the sort of thing they say.

Karol, guest-blogging at Michelle's place (along with a couple of other girls you may have heard of, Mary Katherine Ham and Bryan Preston), agrees.

"Torture Works" post reprinted below the jump. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:24 PM | Comments (93)
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How else to explain this?

Gee it looks like VON TALON is trying to look nice AAAHH FALCON FALCON SOUND THE ALARM SOUND THE ALARM

Some poor bastard is about to get whacked and he'll never see it coming.

Posted by: Ace at 07:22 PM | Comments (34)
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Allah tipped me to Gleen Grenwald, the Fagan of Brazillian Cabana Boys, penning a disingenuous little screed on Salon. I didn't have the energy to do anything with it. Plus, I figure that's the last thing you guys want.

But Patterico's like The Terminator.

I love how he claims he's not a liberal, endlessly bleats "You don't know what my politics are!," and yet seems to attack "rightwingers" constantly. And defend the liberal media, of course.

I know people like that.

We call them "liberals."

I mean, for God's sake, in this idiotic fart of an "article" he cites the highly-respected, thoughtful and substantive "moderate" blogger TBogg.

I wonder if he's staying away from the word "dishonest" lately.

When the Reuters story broke, I checked DU for responses. There were a lot of people, of course, claiming the Reuters photo was real, and that the "rightwingers" were at their "smears" again.

But there were a couple of liberals who were sane enough to realize right away the photo was faked, and that this was a pretty serious violation of journalistic ethics.

One of these liberals said something I loved, since I've said it a lot myself.

"For people who claim to hate the mainstream media and claim it's biased against you, you sure do seem to eager to defend them."

That's a paraphrase, but that was the gist.

I love how "Gleen" and his liberal "moderate" allies claim they're all so against the "biased rightwing" media, and yet defend their excesses at every turn.

Posted by: Ace at 05:34 PM | Comments (34)
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The next Prime Minister of Israel?

Posted by: Ace at 05:18 PM | Comments (7)
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Lifted from Jane Hamster. I can't find her website, though, and thus can't link her. See, I've never heard of Jane Hamster, and I don't know nothin' about these "Joe Bloggs" people keep telling me about.

So, sorry Ms. Hamster. I'm just clueless like your boss, Nebbishy Neddy Lamont.

IMUS: Â…and so did Dodd. But what I-I had decided to do, I think, Charles, is to ban everybodyÂ…every Democrat, of which unfortunately too many of our guests are any way. To ban themÂ…ahhh, from the program, for turning their back on Lieberman.

McCORD: Yeah, understood. ItÂ’s a shame.

IMUS: Uh, but now weÂ…

BERNARD McGUIRK: WeÂ’ll have to start taking phone calls from listeners, if we ban Democratic politicians. [laughter]Â…

IMUS: WellÂ….

McGUIRK: Â…that, that bailed on Lieberman. Like Harold Ford. Who hasnÂ’t bailed on him is the question.

IMUS: Well, they ALL bailed on him. But what we’ll also…I mean, we have a lot of information about—uh, and maybe we can even dig up some old footage on Chris Dodd, who’s trying to run for President, and a bunch of other people and uh, you know, this could get ugly.

McCORD: Oh, absolutely.

IMUS: CouldnÂ’t it?

McCORD: It could get brutal.

McGUIRK: Oh, DoddÂ’ll be back on board in no time flat.

IMUS: I mean, I think—trust me, I mean—you know, adhering to the will of the people…I mean, that STUPID August 8th primary in Connecticut in which a couple hundred thousand people voted…

McCORD: YeahÂ…

IMUS: Â…doesnÂ’tÂ…I mean, to just bail on Lieberman like that is Â…

McCORD: Based on thatÂ….

IMUS: Â….youÂ’d expect somebody like that BillÂ’s fat, evil wife, SatanÂ…

McCORD: Mmm hmmmÂ…

IMUS: Â…to bail or some of those other people. Um, IÂ’d be very disappointed if Harold Ford, Jr. bailed on him.

McGUIRK: Dodd will make Christie BrinkleyÂ’s husband seem like an altar boy if we startÂ…revealing all the stuff from his past.

IMUS: Uh, I mean the stuff we have on himÂ…heÂ’d better come to his senses quicklyÂ…

Thanks JackStraw, who salutes Ms. Hamster on her decision to take on one of the most influential talk-radio guys on the dial.

Tough. Smart.

Posted by: Ace at 04:31 PM | Comments (19)
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