We finally got around to watching something TV captured for us last week: a PBS program profiling the Marines. What was amazing about the show, considering the source, was how laudatory both Mr. Bookworm and I thought it was. It could not emphasize enough the rigors of training, the camaraderie, the bravery, the history and the honesty and morality of the Marines. I truly enjoyed the show, especially because it dovetailed so perfectly with my understanding of the men who fought at Tripoli, who captured Iwo Jima and who cleaned out Fallujah.

What was really interesting was Mr. Bookworm’s reaction. As readers new to my blog don’t know, while I crossed the Rubicon from liberal to conservative (or, I prefer to think, as the parties’ ethos shifted, the parties rejiggered themselves around me), Mr. Bookworm remained a die-hard liberal. Just to give you an idea, the Times is his browser’s home page! Mr. Bookworm hated the show. While he is fascinated by things military, he thought it was just awful to have a show treating the Marines with such respect, and not dishing out any dirt. After going on for a while about the show’s failings (”it’s just a recruiting film”), his final statement was “and on public television, of all places.” I had to laugh.

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Because the Left is so exquisitely attuned to pejorative words, a Florida Democrat wants to ban the State government’s use of the phrase “illegal alien,” preferring the oh so much more polite and non-judgmental “undocumented immigrant.”

Please pass me the barf bag. This attempt to dress up illegal conduct in pretty words is making me sick. But it’s also giving me ideas. No more “murderers.” Instead, we’ll have “life relievers.” Forget “robbers.” We’ll have “unauthorized property attainers.” “Rapists” no more. I”m going to call them “non-consensual penetrators.” Hey, this is fun! Join me in the comments section.

Hat tip: Drudge

See Also: In Florida Alien is Offensive, Breaking the Law is Not

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What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. — William Shakespeare

Have you ever noticed that, while conservative publications refer to the “Left” and the “Right,” and to “Liberals” and “Conservatives,” liberal publications never do? They refer to the “Right,” but not the “Left,” and to “Conservatives,” but not to “Liberals.” In other words, they never apply a label to themselves. This NYT’s article, describing a negative documentary that liberals made about Michael Moore, perfectly demonstrates this verbal dance (emphasis mine):

MICHAEL MOORE, who carries around controversy the way Paul Bunyan toted an ax, has won legions of fans for being a ball-cap-wearing fly in the ointment of Republican politics. For tweaking the documentary form. Even for making millions of dollars in the traditionally poverty-stricken genre of nonfiction film.

Many despise him for the same reasons.

The Toronto-based documentary filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk started out in the first camp. But during the course of making an unauthorized film about Mr. Moore they wound up somewhere in between. In the process, their experience has added a twist to the long-running story of an abrasive social critic who has frequently been criticized from the right, but far less often, as is the case with Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine, from his own end of the political spectrum.

“What he’s done for documentaries is amazing,” said Ms. Melnyk, 48, a native of Toronto and a freelance TV producer, who even now expounds on the good he says Mr. Moore has done. “People go to see documentaries now and, as documentary makers, we’re grateful.”

But according to Mr. Caine, 46, an Ohio-born journalist and cameraman, the freewheeling persona cultivated by Mr. Moore, and the free-thinking rhetoric expounded by his friends and associates were not quite what they encountered when they decided to examine his work. “As investigative documentarists we always thought we could look at anything we wanted,” Mr. Caine said. “But when we turned the cameras on one of the leading figures in our own industry, the people we wanted to talk to were like: ‘What are you doing? Why are you throwing stones at the parade leader?’ ”

Ms. Melnyk added, “We were very lonely.”

***

That link contains a refutation of a number of complaints taken up by conservatives regarding “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but the Melnyk-Caine movie isn’t really about that. “We didn’t want to refute anything,” Ms. Melnyk said. “We just wanted to take a look at Michael Moore and his films. It was only by talking to people that we found out this other stuff.”

This is just one article, but I’ve been aware of it time after time when I read the Times or The New Yorker, or listen to an NPR story. Always, conservatives get labeled; always, the author or speaker, gracefully or awkwardly, works to avoid applying a political label to those who are not conservative.

Please tell me if you think I’m imagining this, or if you’ve seen the same pattern. If I’m right, I have my guesses as to why this is so, but I’d love to hear your guesses first.

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A Democrat in Florida, Sen. Frederica Wilson from Miami has introduced legislation to remove the word “Alien” from Illegal Alien on state documents. She thinks of an alien as something from outer space (though we have yet to contact such a being). Wilson said she finds the word alien offensive, especially when it is applied to children because with the Democrats it is all about the children.

Wilson indicated that she can live with the word “illegal” but prefers undocumented. This is typical liberal prattle and it is designed to soften the attack on America. We have ILLEGALS coming in all the time but calling them that might make Americans take a tougher stance on ILLEGALS. So, Wilson likes the softened verbiage so that she can condition Americans to feel that these folks are victims of circumstance and, OK they broke the law, but they are nice people who do jobs that no American wants to do.

This is the kind of mindless stupidity that takes place in the Democratic Party. We are worried that ILLEGALS might have some stigma attached to them for breaking the law. What will this jackass want next? Perhaps we will call bank robbers undocumented account closers, or murderers undocumented late term abortion doctors. Maybe we can start calling all the ILLEGAL guns on the streets (probably in the possession of ILLEGAL aliens, undocumented weapons.

Perhaps we should start getting tougher on ILLEGALS instead of placating them. They broke the law to get here and that is really all we need to know. As I stated before, when your first act in this country is to break the law, you do not deserve freedom and you do not deserve to be rewarded with citizenship.

Source:
News-Press

See Also: Florida Democrat Seeks To Ban Use Of The Term “Illegal Alien”

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Governments now want to decide what we can eat, drink, read, watch, and probably soon, what we can wear. I want to know whatever happened to personal responsibility? It’s not the government’s place to decide these things for us, or for our children.

Take Connor McCreaddie, an 8 year old who weighs 99kg (217.8 pounds) and lives in London. The government has met with his parents to discuss his weight and what should be done about it. The government will make a decision ‘on whether to take the boy away from his mother‘. I wondered how long it would take for this to come to the United States. I heard on Fox News about a young girl in the same situation as Connor McDreaddie, but I can’t find a source to back it up.

Yesterday I heard about efforts to ban Girl Scout Cookies.

The Milburn-based organization National Action Against Obesity called for a boycott this year, claiming Do-Si-Dos and Samoas are contributing to the country’s obesity epidemic.

“Using young girls as a front to push millions of cookies onto an already bloated population further exacerbates an alarming crisis, no matter how cute the uniforms are,” says NAAO President MeMe Roth in a press release. (Courier Post Online)

Good grief Charlie Brown. What are these people thinking. One site offers advice on how to consume Girl Scout Cookies ‘moderately’. Girl Scouts is an excellent organization for girls, teaching them life skills and the cookie drive is considered a valuable “business leadership model for girls”.

Some restaurants and fast food places have negative images now because some of their food contains trans-fats and you might gain weight if you eat too much. Should the government be telling restaurants what they can and can’t serve to the public? Shouldn’t the public have the right to choose?

In the United States of America you can ‘choose’ to kill an unborn baby, but you can’t ‘choose’ to eat something greasy if you want?

I think parents should have the right to educate, feed, clothe, entertain their children without the government butting in. Just my opinion.

Yes there are health issues, the cost of health insurance, etc. But I think the government is getting way too big for it’s britches.

If one can describe the state of politics in the United States as encompassing one single theme, it would be theme of government intervention into the lives of its citizens. The debate has raged since the fiery genesis of this great experiment in self-government, it has been defined as the engine that drove the country to civil war, and it is a debate still raging. The irony, of course, is that today’s debate has turned topsy-turvy. Those who traditionally fought against government intrusion into their personal lives are now at the forefront of the movement defending that very intrusion, … (American Chronicle)

What say you?

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It is a fact that legal immigrants are required to have medical screening to ensure that they do not bring any contagious diseases into the United States. Illegal aliens are not screened and many are carrying horrific third world diseases that do not belong in the USA. Many of these diseases are highly contagious and will infect citizens that come in contact with an infected illegal alien.  (source)

HIV , Hepatitis A-E, Tuberculosis,  … Illegal immigrants were being blamed for all of the state’s economic problems. … for Salmonella and Campylobacter infections they got from tainted food. … 

 Our food source is in trouble from many different areas, and yet the Food and Drug Administration, whose job it is to warn the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter, is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.  (CNN)

In these countries the logic used in determining how to fertilize the soil is, “If it stinks it must be good.” Therefore the use of human fecal matter is not out of the question. There are supposedly federal guidelines requiring these exporting producers to adhere to our standards but again as in the case of Illegal Immigration, “We don’t care bout no stinkin laws.” –The Conservative Voice

Neurocysticercosis, THE WASHINGTON TIMES , February 8, 2007, via Americans for Legal Immigration

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The moonbats came out in droves today; apparently upset that the Taliban missed their mark in the murder attempt against Vice President Dick Cheney. This wasn’t to be unexpected as we have had plenty of examples of this kind of behavior in the past.

What wasn’t expected however was the attempt by some of the more mainstream left wing pundits to come to the rescue of the hateful commentators that crawl around on some of the nation’s biggest liberal blogs. Get this twisted sense of logic. Some of the defenders such as Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com are suggesting that the “right wing pundits” are moronic for pointing out the vile hate filled anti-American comments by a good segment of the people that make up the power base of the American left.

The smoke had barely cleared from the suicide bombing in Afghanistan this morning, near a base where Dick Cheney was located, when right-wing pundits — whose sole expertise seems to be in exploiting terrorism-related issues for political gain — began their attempt to politically exploit the attack on or near Cheney. Seemingly in unison, they all went digging deep into the comment sections of various liberal blogs, found inappropriate and hateful comments, and then began insisting that these isolated comments proved something.

[snip]

But stray, anonymous comments prove nothing. And those who rely on them to make an argument — especially without bothering to make any effort to prove that they are reflective of anything — should be presumed to have no argument at all. That is why they are relying upon such transparently flimsy and mislea ding methods to make a point. And the same principle applies to journalists — those who write articles about “the blogosphere” by using random, stray comments (or mean emails they receive), by definition, have nothing to say, no point worth making.

This is by far one of the stupidest and most idiotic of statements I have seen in years. The hole in the argument can be found by reminding Greenwald of various points.

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Two personal anecdotes and then I’ll get to my point.

1. When my first Little Bookworm was born, I went into a fairly deep funk. She was a lousy sleeper, and I’m generally not very good at handling change in my life. Between fatigue and my own personal inflexibility, all I could do — very vocally –was mourn the passing of my easy, well-ordered life before a baby came along. Mr. Bookworm put up with my whining quite and patiently for a long time, but he finally had it. One night, he turned to me and said words that completely rejiggered my thinking about motherhood: “This is your life now. Get used to it.” In other words, you can mourn the past as much as you want, but you live in the present. I operate with that philosophy on a regular basis now.
2. I can walk into a room and instantly tell you what’s wrong with it: the colors are ugly, the furniture doesn’t fit the room, the paintings are poor quality. Whatever. Just don’t ask me to fix it. My decorating talents are purely destructive, not constructive. I don’t have the slightest ability to make a room look good (which is why I turn to my mother, who is very talented in that direction).

Those are the anecdotes. This is my point: The press is making much of the fact that Barack Obama is one of the candidates who can boast to the base that he voted against the war. That’s all well and good, but it ignores the fact that, while he may have opposed it, we’re now in the midst of one. Anti-war people can mourn the 2003 votes as much as possible, wishing that they had gone otherwise, but the present is war.

Which gets me to my second point. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that Obama was right and the war is wrong, he hasn’t given any indication whatsoever that he has the ability to deal with the present reality. Like me with a room, it’s easy to point out errors, and much, much harder to provide solutions. Until Obama gives a sign that he’s functioning in the present and not trying to rewrite 2003, and until he shows that he can do more than complain about the situation, I continue to be unimpressed with him as a viable wartime candidate.

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The Taliban claim they were after United States Vice President Dick Cheney, but they missed their target killing as many as 20, according to an Afghan official. Vice President Cheney was at the U.S. base in Bagram, Afghanistan but according to reports is unharmed. NATO says three died, including a U.S. soldier, but AP reporters at the scene saw at least eight bodies. ABCNews

Cheney had been in Pakistan visiting with leaders there about their participation in the war on terror. After the Afghanistan attack, Cheney traveled on to Kabul for a meeting with Afghan President Karzai.

The VP had plane trouble that nearly aborted his original journey, according to MSNBC:

It was supposed to be a surprise trip. And it was, in more ways than Vice President Dick Cheney could have imagined. …

On Sunday, the highly secretive trip was nearly derailed when Cheney’s plane reported electrical problems shortly after leaving Australia—tipping news agencies off to a refueling stop in Singapore, a destination well off the route Air Force Two would normally take to get back to Washington. The small group of reporters traveling with Cheney were told of the secret stops more than 24 hours in advance but were warned not to divulge the information, out of concern for Cheney’s security, as well as their own.

The VP and his entourage left Sydney on Sunday morning, flying more than seven hours to Singapore. During the flight, his plane experienced what his staff described as a power surge prompting a slew of alarming headlines back in Australia.

The small group of journalists traveling with Cheney were waiting to board the plane en route to Kabul, when sirens suddenly erupted around the Bagram military base. Reporters saw plumes of smoke rise in the distance. A loudspeaker announced that the base was under attack—and Secret Service agents rushed the press to the plane. …

Instead of heading home, Cheney flew another seven hours to Oman, just across gulf waters from Iran. …

Early Monday morning, the motorcade ferried Cheney and his entourage back to the airport, where Air Force Two was parked on the Omani Royal airstrip. But instead of boarding his familiar blue and white Boeing C-10, the VP got on a massive military cargo plane usually used to transport presidential vehicles.

Inside the massive fuselage, Cheney was escorted to his private quarters for the day: A silver Airstream trailer parked right in the middle of the cargo hold. Held into place by massive chains, …

Two hours and 45 minutes later, the plane descended on its first stop, Islamabad, with Cheney’s secret still intact.

There, Cheney met for just over two hours with Pakistan President Pervez Musharaf, pressing him to clamp down on militant factions along his country’s border with Afghanistan. …

… When Cheney boarded the plane from the tarmac, he seemed calm and collected, …

… Cheney was supposed to have had a three-hour visit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai; the visit was cut to just an hour. …

According to news reports, the bomber struck outside a security gate at Bagram, which is located north of the capital city of Kabul. The bomber was reportedly on foot.

Go read the entire account of Cheney’s trip, very interesting details from a reporter’s viewpoint.

We are all thankful that the Vice President is safe. This incident serves to remind us that the situation in the Middle East must be taken seriously by the United States government. I would love to hear a plan for peace from the newly-elected Democrats.

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Other Reading:
Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Sister Toldjah

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Al Gore has made a name for himself by touting pseudo-science involving global warming and along the way his “documentary” picked up an Oscar. It has been pointed out in the past that Al Gore pollutes more than the average person he is targeting. Al jets all over the world, he rides in lots and lots of cars all over the place and the Academy Award ceremony that he applauded for being green had limousines lined up to ferry stars all over. After his two appearances in the Kodak Theatre, where he begged everyone to join the fight against global warming, it has been learned that Al Gore’s mansion uses more electricity in a month than most houses use in a year.

A counter to that was released today that points out that Gore has purchased a little over $400 a month in “green” energy. He also drives a hybrid car so, the article points out, we should not be focusing our sights on him:

Rather than attacking one man — Gore — Johnson and his group should be taking a larger view and trying to make a difference to reduce global warming, Krider [Gore spokeswoman] said. Tennessean

Ms. Krider informs us that Gore’s 10,000 square foot home is going to have a larger carbon footprint than the average home. I guess what she means is, rich people live in big houses (called mansions) and they are going to use more than everyone else but they are rich so we should do what they say and not what they do. I have to disagree with this woman and her assertion that we should not be attacking one person but should be looking at the larger picture. We have every right to attack that one person because he is the one who is preaching to everyone.

No one would mention that Al Gore uses more electricity or heating fuel than most people if he had not run around the country giving speeches about global warming. no one would pay attention to him if he had not drawn attention to himself. Now that his film won an award it makes it even more appropriate that we investigate him deeper than most. You see, most Americans are not running around telling others how to live their lives and how to consume goods. Gore is and that means that his own habits are open to scrutiny. The irony is that the people who are out supporting this whole global warming myth are those who use the most resources.

This is typical for the elitist among us. John Edwards discusses his two Americas where the wealthiest live one kind of life and all the rest of us live a lesser existence. What he fails to mention and what probably never occurs to him, is that he lives in that very wealthy America. When he makes the claims he does people are going to become skeptical when he buys a home that is the largest and most expensive in his county. Likewise, people will be skeptical of Gore when he tells us all how to reduce what we use when he uses twenty times as much as the average family.

Do as I say and not as I do is common among the elitists in America. We see it from the Hollywood crowd and we see it from our elected officials who make laws that they are exempted from following. There are few in the so called ruling class who follow their own words. Whether they own stock in companies they portray as evil or employ non-union workers while pandering to unions, they thumb their collective noses every step of the way.

It is time we got rid of them and replaced them with people who want to make America better. As for Gore, we can ignore him. He might not go away but it will be more peaceful. I would recommend to him though, that if he wants to convince people he is serious he should sell his mansion and buy a small place that is very energy efficient. Maybe Dicaprio can move in with him and shut down his mansion as well.

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Other Reading:
Wizbang

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