Friday, July 23, 2004
Chains for Allah
Well, perhaps Michael Moore should rethink the idea that the Arab world is rising up to take on the U.S Led Coalition in Iraq, this seems like a twist.
“What we’ve found in a number of places are hands chained to a steering wheel,” he said. “Up in Irbil, we found a foot roped into the car, unable to escape. Their children were kidnapped and held — they were forced. We’ve seen faces blown off and been able to identify the perpetrator.”
This kind of flies in the face of the notion of the brave Islamic terrorists dying for Allah. If you’re forced to do it and are unable to escape, it’s not exactly free will. And you’re probably not worrying about those 72 virgins either.
“The big myth is that the foreign fighters are everywhere, that there are thousands,” Custer said. “My feeling is that that’s largely that Arab street [spreading the myth]. That’s the story everybody wants to hear, and Iraqis don’t want to admit that some of [the bombers] might be Iraqis.”
Or it’s the people who don’t want to see anything resembling freedom in the Middle East, grasping and clawing, in their attempts to bring Iraq back to the Mesolithic Age. The sad thing is that a lot of Americans, mostly on the left, don’t want to see freedom there either. Unless of course the U.N. is involved....
Depends on the Definition
From today’s USA Today:
How does one define the word, “legitimate”?Kerry said Bush promised “to build a legitimate international coalition, to go to war as a last resort.” It appears “more and more evident ... that they intended to go no matter what,” Kerry said. “The president broke his word. That’s why I say he misled America. ...
Well dictionary.com defines legitimate thusly:
1. Being in compliance with the law; lawful: a legitimate business.
2. Being in accordance with established or accepted patterns and standards: legitimate advertising practices.
3. Based on logical reasoning; reasonable: a legitimate solution to the problem.
4. Authentic; genuine: a legitimate complaint.
5. Born of legally married parents: legitimate issue.
6. Of, relating to, or ruling by hereditary right: a legitimate monarch.
7. Of or relating to drama of high professional quality that excludes burlesque, vaudeville, and some forms of musical comedy: the legitimate theater.
John Kerry’s definition of legitimate:
Kerry cannot possibly say that the President acted “unilaterally” anymore, since that is in direct contradiction of the established facts—not saying he will not change his tune and say the President acted unilaterally in the future, which he has done in the past. Now he has to attack the coalition as illegitimate.Any multinational coalition which includes France and presumably Germany, Russia, and the United Nations.
Kerry has rountinely said he will repair the United States’ reputation world-wide, if he is elected president (that is not to say, of course, our reputation is in need of any repairing). In the event of such a calamity happening, I propose he start with Great Britian instead of france, since they, by virtue of being in the current coalition, are illegitimate in Kerry’s eyes.
I’m gonna be busy for the next day or so
I’ve been catching aome of these blogger-spammers coming through, and they leave advertisements for various commercial product and personal services in the comments, hoping for some free traffic.
The problem isn’t that they hit the current event threads. They hit the threads that are months old, and if I don’t catch them immediately, I might miss them altogether.
So what I’m going to be doing is starting from the very first entry and working my way forward, deleting their spam whenever I find it, and closing the comments for all of the old threads. I’ll leave any active thread open, but once it drops off the main screen, comments are subject to be closed without notice. That way, I don’t have to keep going back and clearing the spamming out of the comments threads.
Hey, if they want advertising, I’m happy to accomodate them, but they should pay for it, just like the Sports Ticket company did (and checking them out if you’re in the market isn’t such a bad idea). I’m a capitalist, after all…

