Irony of the day

Lifted wholesale from Insty:

AL GORE WON'T ENDORSE JOE LIEBERMAN. Comment: "I guess Lieberman would have been good enough to run the government if something bad happened to Gore. But he's not obviously the best qualified to be the junior senator from Connecticut, even though he had the same job when Gore tapped him in 2000."

Wow.  Either being POTUS has lower requirements than I thought, or Algore has just reinvented the internet...  Who needs Algore anyway?  I love Joe, and I'd vote for him in a heartbeat!

Posted by: caltechgirl at 12:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Cluck off, Chickie!

Last week, the Dixie Chicks ruffled a few feathers when singer Natalie Maines dismissed her ENTIRE fan base, saying,

"I'd rather have a smaller following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith," she told Time. "We don't want those kinds of fans. They limit what you can do."

This week, she's back, and served up her other foot for another tasty meal:

"The entire country may disagree with me, but I don't understand the necessity for patriotism," Maines resumes, through gritted teeth. "Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why? You can like where you live and like your life, but as for loving the whole country… I don't see why people care about patriotism."--emphasis mine, ed.

No wonder the Clucks are having a hard time selling out arenas in places like Memphis, Indianapolis, and Fresno.  Yeah, their album debuted at #1, but anyone in the biz will tell you that album sales mean nothing to the artist.  They make all of their money touring.  Cancelling concerts is bad  news on the pocketbook.  Especially the new Louis Vuitton ones, right, Natalie?

All the snark aside, I'd like to remind Ms. Maines and her colleagues that the SINGLE, ONLY, UNIQUE, UNITARY, etc. reason that she has this soapbox, that she's made all the money in her bank account, that she can fly to France or the UK whenever she wants and spout off about this country is that she is a CITIZEN OF THE US.

Don't love your country, Natalie, it's ok.   Really, The rest of us could give a shit.  But don't tell us we're stupid for caring.  Don't tell us that you like your life and then spit in the face of those people who have died or sacrificed much so that you can live the way you do.

Why should people care about patriotism, Natalie?  Well, because patriotism created this country, it sacrificed to preserve out way of life, and continues to do so over and over again every day.  Patriotism is why you can stand on your soapbox and denounce the President.  Patriotism is why you speak English, not German or Japanese.  Patriotism provides you with the security to go about your business and raise your children as you see fit.

The truth is, see, that in the long run, it is the patriot whose contributions will matter.  The small effort of each individual to preserve and prolong the grand experiment in democracy started more than 200 years ago by another group of patriots whose motives were questioned by ignorant fools like you.  Your contributions, your songs, your rabble rousing, your chicken feet tatoos; they'll all be gone with the proverbial wind.  But this country, and the patriots who protect her, will still be here.

What was the most popular song/singer of 1776?  You don't know?  Well, in 2206 I can assure you the same answer will be spoken in response to "Who were the Dixie Chicks?"

Posted by: caltechgirl at 10:05 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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Spin it!

Two headlines, same story:

1) "Bush May Meet Vow To Halve The Deficit Three Years Early" --Investors Business Daily

2) "Bush Deficit Reduction Plan Falls Off-Schedule." -- Guess who (acc. to Insty, but I can't find the headline anywhere on their site anymore)

Posted by: caltechgirl at 02:57 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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I'm dreaming of a white Fitzmas.....

A holiday that will never be...

Suck it, conspiracy moonbats, Rove didn't break the law, and hence WILL NOT BE CHARGED in the CIA leak case.

Why on earth would the President want to bury good news about Rove under his trip to Baghdad?


The day just keeps getting better.

Posted by: caltechgirl at 02:36 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Did they or didn't they?

Much buzz in the b'sphere over whether or not Zarqawi may have been "assaulted" by US troops when they recovered his still-smoking, almost-dead carcass.

To paraphrase Bob Uecker's classic line from Major League, "Who gives a sh*t?  [he]'s gone."

Posted by: caltechgirl at 07:08 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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An Inconvenient Truth

Life's a bitch, War is Hell, and commitments are hard to keep.  We all know this, yet so many people believe that if we simply ignore these  truths, they might just go away.

As if

Cassandra of Villainous Company also nails it:

"If only we could go back to the good old days, when there was no news coming out of Iraq and we didn't have to confront the horror. When we could tell ourselves, even if it wasn't true, that our hands were clean.

I hope one of these smart people, who are so disturbed over our "failures" in Iraq and Afghanistan can tell me what they propose to do when we pull out? What do they think will happen? Why do they think a small minority of Iraqis are planting bombs and practicing terrorism against their fellow Muslims - innocent civilians - in order to prevent a democratic government from being formed?

The insurgents, too, long for the good old days. And right now, we are the only thing standing between them and their heart's desire. And that's an Inconvenient Truth we all too often forget when the media is parading an endless stream of sensationalized stories about Abu Ghuraib and Haditha before our eyes."

It's long, but well worth it. Read the whole thing!

Posted by: caltechgirl at 07:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The Intellectual Left

In an essay looking at the vitriol directed by the moonbats at Jeff Goldstein, Ace nails the core reason why the left is so unhinged:

"The left, to a man, considers itself to be educated and enlightened. It matters not how little actual schooling a particlular leftist may have had, nor how unintelligent the person might be. They all consider themselves intellectuals of sorts. If they dropped out of college after one semester, they just think of themselves as autodidacts whose genius could not be stimulated by the ossified and bourgeois teaching of the academy....

This conceit, usually wholly undeserved, of practically every leftist in the world is what makes leftism so intoxicating for the intellectually insecure, and what makes leftists so easily led and manipulated. It's an attractive doctrine for those who wish to conceive of themselves as intellectual and brilliant, for it provides an instant short-cut to the equivalent of an MIT education. If you simply believe these things we tell you to believe, you are one of Us, one of the Intellectually Elite, one of the Cultural Vanguard. Just as giving oneself to Christ, and believing in His power, and accepting the need for and gift of His redemption, instantly makes one "saved" and enters one's name in the Book of the Heaven, so too does accepting leftist tropes and core beliefs make one one of the Secular Elect.

Now, the things the left wants you to believe are not easy to believe. It's hard to believe that, for example, taxing work and investment will not reduce work and investment (especially when one simultaneously believes that taxing the use of gasoline or other energy will reduce the use of gasoline or other energy). Nevertheless, while it may be difficult to believe these things, it's certainly easier to simply give in and believe these things than to, say, earn a Ph. D. in literary theory or semiotics or even something stupid like science or engineering.

So, if one wants to conceive of oneself as an intellectual, one can either actually become an intellectual -- which frankly takes a lot of work and reading, much of it terribly boring -- or one can simply believe what Noam Chomsky tells one....

Leftism, and liberalism, and progressivism, and etc-ism. are not merely simple politics for most of these people. Their politics to them are a core part of their identity, and, more importantly, a central support propping up their egos. They are enlightened because they believe these things; someone who does not believe these things, and yet who, superficially at least, appears to be about as smart as they might be, represents a threat to their egos. The foundation upon which a crucial structure of their sense of self-worth is undermined if they discover that there may be people who can pass as normal and intelligent and yet do not believe as they do.

If one is smart, then one believes in progressivism.

If one believes in progressivism, then one is smart.

Those are the two assumptions that prop up their sense of self worth, and they are refuted by examples of smart people who don't believe in progressivism.

And because there is a great deal of personal psychological investment in progressivism, they react intemperately to rejections of it. It's not merely a tax cut that's being debated; it's their very sense of importance that's being attacked. It's not merely gay marriage which is being argued against; it's their value as human beings that is being uncouthly denigrated."

Emphasis mine.  I couldn't just excerpt a few sentences...  Now, for that rant: more...

Posted by: caltechgirl at 10:07 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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