The Black Republican

I strongly suggest this piece by Michael Barnicle as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by John Yoo as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Stephen F. Hayes as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Donald Lambro as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Daniel Henninger as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Bonnelle R. Baerman    via Note-It Posts as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by The Wall Street Journal as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Dr. Warren Throckmorton as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Jay Bryant as "Recommended Reading".

Tony Blankley recalls the days of the nation's pubescence:

War weariness was spreading, and demands for negotiations to end the killing were becoming strident. In the Middle West the Copperhead movement was strong, and there were rumors of an insurrection intended to bring about an independent Northwest Confederation. The Democrats were organizing for their national convention to be held in Chicago at the end of August, and they were likely to adopt a peace platform. The Republicans were badly divided, and Lincoln was whipsawed between those who thought him too lenient toward the South and those who thought him too severe. Worst of all, the Union armies appeared stalemated. Sherman at the head of the Western Armies was approaching Atlanta but was not, apparently, nearer victory over Joseph E. Johnson. In the East, the Army of the Potomac was bogged down in a siege of Petersburg.

By August of 1864, Lincoln wrote to a friend; "You think I don't know I am going to be beaten. But I do and unless some great change takes place badly beaten — then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards."

Don't be.

As Blankley later observed, Lincoln did not only win that same election that he doubted so much, but he won it handily. It might have been helpful to our perspective if we could pull up polling data to explain how Lincoln did it, but there's a slight problem: "Right-track/Wrong-track" and "Job performance" have never been polled during a wartime for survival, because the science was only developed well after World War II. The Boomer elite now running the media newsrooms think that it's still Vietnam and they can still kill a Presidency. Consequently, conventional wisdom is measuring inches with a meter stick, and if you listen closely you can hear the pundits worrying why their boots don't fit right.

I trust the American people more. Most Americans know the best way to buy new boots is to try on the pair you like, and to walk out with the ones that fit best. Style may be important for some people and on some occasions, but if the boots will be on your feet while you're working every day, they'd better be comfortable or there'll be hell to pay later.

We've been lucky to have a man in the President's shoes for the last three years who knows how to walk the walk, so now that we're at the toughest part of the trail, it's not the time to change shoes and break a new pair in. I trust the American people more, but they still need our help to counter the distortions of the media.

Every Wednesday I ask my readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush campaign if they haven't done so already. And if you have volunteered and donated, then get a friend to join you to help re-elect the Commander-in-Chief and maintain the War Presidency that the news media are so eager to dismantle.

If you're a blogger, you can join Wictory Wednesday simply by putting up a post like this every Wednesday, asking your readers to volunteer and/or donate to the president's re-election campaign. And don't forget to e-mail PoliPundit so that you can be added to the Wictory Wednesday blogroll, which is part of the Wictory Wednesday post on all participating blogs:

I strongly suggest this piece by The Wall Street Journal as "Recommended Reading".

Sorry for the abrupt disruption in the blog, and any mess you may find around here. We've changed to Movable Type software for the blog structure, and it's proving to be difficult wrestling the old data out of the previous incarnations. Over the coming days, you may notice archives and comments backfilling as I migrate data. With apologies to ESPN, I'll just say, "Pardon the Interruption".

UPDATE: I've corrected most of the import errors, and now just have to go back and publish all the entries. Since this will take looking at each one (from over the course of almost two years) looking for information in the archives may require patience as I filter through them.

Incidentally, in the process of fixing the bugs, I found I can edit the guts of any entry or comment much more easily with the SQL database Movable Type uses than I ever could with Pivot (as I found out to my regret one day). This came in handy when I found there were comments posted after I'd created the backup that I used to migrate the data. I ended up having to post the comments myself, and though I could enter the poster's name and email without a problem, the IP and timestamp were wrong. Using myPHPAdmin, correcting that information was a snap.

It seems that these days the liberal mind control machine can no longer tolerate having a Republican teaching our young people. In this example a college professor is fired on the weakest of reasons.  (hat tip- Chapin Nation)

“She is a Republican and an objective scholar who takes a dim view of the political correctness scourge, and of those who use the classroom to indoctrinate students into radical (Marxist/black separatist) politics,” her friend, Dr. Carey Stronach, said recently. “For this she should be applauded, but instead, it has been the undoing of her career.”

What's wrong with this clip art?

This was part of an announcement for a Memorial Day observation where I work. Gotta love that patriotic spirit, dontcha?

Sean Hannity says this is race-baiting. I disagree. Mr. Hannity sees a black face and assumes that the intent is to inflame the passions of blacks. But, if we are going to promote a color-blind society don't we have to reject an argument based solely on skin color? The individual pictured is not only a black, but also a male, and an adult. Why then does he not claim gender-baiting? Or, Ageism? On his Fox News show, Hannity and Colmes, this evening Mr. Hannity cited past racially offensive advertisements by the Missouri Democratic Party as proof of the intent in this work, but, his reach exceeds his grasp. The past behavior is reprehensible, and inspires an emotional response, but it does not logically prove the present intent!

The real crime associated with this billboard (and the five others planned to follow) would be for someone to recognize themselves in the people pictured and then based solely on that similarity come to believe that they are being disadvantaged. My counsel is; appraise the premise, ignore the symbolism. When the premise does not stand up to scrutiny, don't be swayed by a picture. Think, don't go all Michael Moore on me folks!

Bill Cosby has another lesson he wants families to hear. (While some reports have Mr. Cosby speaking of Black families, I believe that he would allow that his advise is not color specific). (hat tip- Rush Limbaugh)

"I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. ... You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"

If you are against Gay "Marriage", and want to be heard go here.

Earlier today, James Taranto posted a link to a news article: "Kerry-Nader Meeting Unlikely to Alter Race". After his usual fashion, Taranto "reinterpreted" the meaning of the headline with a pithy quip as the linked text. "Sure Enough, They're Both Still White".

Well, sure enough - so are we! But it's our neverending hope at the Black Republican that our "meetings" here will alter American attitides, despite the neverending drumbeat from the left that we have no right to comment on the subject of race and prejudice. With that in mind, I've been working hard recently to improve the blogging utilities we use to bring you The Black Republican. With the improvements, I hope it will be both easier for us to bring you the view from the balcony of the political theatre, as well as more engaging and enlightening how our readers are feeling. Within a week or so, I hope to have the renovations complete, but until then, I may continue to post as sparsely as I have been lately. I apologize for that, but know that even when I'm not so prolific my devotion to the causes we discuss does not waver.

And foremost among those causes at the moment is the reelection of our Commander-in-Chief.

Every Wednesday I ask my readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush campaign if they haven't done so already. And if you have volunteered and donated, then get a friend to join you.

If you're a blogger, you can join Wictory Wednesday simply by putting up a post like this every Wednesday, asking your readers to volunteer and/or donate to the president's re-election campaign. And don't forget to e-mail PoliPundit so that you can be added to the Wictory Wednesday blogroll, which is part of the Wictory Wednesday post on all participating blogs:

I strongly suggest this piece by Gary Kasparov as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Steve Sailer as "Recommended Reading".

Today it was announced that American forces discovered an artillery shell containing Sarin gas and rigged as an IED. It exploded before they could reach it and defuse it. The shell contained a two part solution designed to mix when the shell was fired from a cannon, the explosive attached to the shell did not cause the parts to mix, it is reported that little Sarin escaped.

Former UN Weapons inspector David Kay calls the discovery insignificant.

However, it was deemed important enough for even CNN to report the news.

OK... this is turning in to quite a kerfuffle! But what is really telling is what Mr. Doonesbury had to say on the matter:

I regret the poor timing, and apologize to anyone who was offended by an image that is now clearly inappropriate.

Only now is such a thing "clearly inappropriate"!

As impossible as it is, let's just for argument's sake imagine that Nick Berg had not been brutally butchered by the same enemy that killed over 3000 Americans on 9-11. Would this "cartoon" be any less "inappropriate" to the friends and family of Daniel Pearl? And what about the Iraqi families who had their loved ones (mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, brother and sisters... and children) raped and murdered, or worse (and yes... there is worse) right before their eyes, at the hands of Saddam and his demon sons? What of them? And if I'm not mistaken, four Americans were burned to death and had their bodies defiled - what of them? In Gary Trudeau's view, their families must not rate any consideration at all - after all, those guys were just working for Haliburton, right? And Daniel Pearl was working for Mosad of course... must have been, right? And the Iraqis... well they just needed to stand up for themselves - RIGHT GARY???

The fact is that Mr. Trudeau is only troubled by the timing of this editorial cartoon - not the content. I don't believe he would have had an ounce of regret were Nick Berg killed six months or a year ago. For all his elitist, feel-good rhetoric about how he cares about freedom of speech - he retains that caring only for himself and his ilk. For all his liberal compassion, he reserves that only for those who suffer and die for a cause he supports. As evidence, where is his cartoon depicting someone crushed by a bulldozer?

Just a word of advice to Gary Trudeau, Ted Rall, Al Franken, et al: I wouldn't suggest travel to Iraq any time soon... or anywhere in the Middle East for that matter! I don't think the fact that you hate President Bush will obfuscate the fact that you support same-sex marrage, abortion, and the abolition of religion... nor will it protect your necks from the hatred and cold steel of OUR common enemy!

I have long contended that Americans have become too focused on the wrongs in our country, and have taken too few opportunites to claim victory for the progress that has been achieved. Not that I am opposed to identifying and tackling the next challenge, just that it is important to pat ourselves on the back for the hard won achievements of this great experiment.

So, it was with both pride and curiosity that I read the headline in today's paper:

Brown v. Board of Education
A rocky road to equality
Ruling integrating schools didn't solve racial issues

I strongly suggest this piece by Joseph Loconte as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Joseph I. Lieberman as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Thomas Sowell as "Recommended Reading".

Leave it to Marvin Olasky to say the one pithy thing that's eluded every commentary yet on the dueling news stories of Abu Ghraib (championed by the traditional press) and Nick Berg (which continues to resonate around the blogosphere).

The photo of an Iraqi man with a leash around his neck showed shameful perversity, but at least the man still had a neck.

I strongly suggest this piece by John Podhoretz as "Recommended Reading".

I was interrupted yesterday in the middle of my Wictory Wednesday post, and never got back to it. Rather than let it slip by (as I've done on occasion), I thought I'd throw something up despite the lateness.

This week, in honor of my lateness, I'd like to point out that it's not too late to support the President. Heck, this has barely begun, but I've heard some doubters and grumbling from some who look at poll numbers and get discouraged. Don't. The numbers are wrong. As James Taranto pointed out yesterday in quotes from several of his readers, the right track/wrong track and job performance numbers are terribly misleading because many Republicans are giving a conservative negative spin to many of the questions, while still supporting the war and the President 100%. (I should state I've been saying this for months because I'm one of those who would answer negatively.)

The polls are also skewed by the strange nature of today's electorate. Pollsters have never been exposed to these kinds of reactions from people quite like this. Modern polling techniques have only been around since the 1950's, which means we have no data to explain what people say and think about during a popularly conducted war for our survival. I also predict that this war will also bring many new voters to the polls, shattering all concepts of what a "likely voter" is. In some cases, like some of the New Jersey polls, registered voters may better reflect the mood of the voters who will eventually turn up at the polls.

If all of this doesn't cheer you up, know that liberalism is very close to its death throes, and sad and disgusting stories like the tale of the suicides of the Reimer twins proves it. The buzz on Fox News last night was concern among the press corps that they had, in effect, killed Nick Berg themselves. Congratulations, guys, you're starting to get the hint. You can add millions to that list from the former communist bloc, Vietnam, and more recently Iraq. And now you can add Bruce and Brian Reimer, too.

But there's one sure way to speed up this process: Wictory!

Every Wednesday I ask my readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush campaign if they haven't done so already. And if you have volunteered and donated, then get a friend to join you in opposition to the liberal media and its inhumane bias.

If you're a blogger, you can join Wictory Wednesday simply by putting up a post like this every Wednesday, asking your readers to volunteer and/or donate to the president's re-election campaign. And don't forget to e-mail PoliPundit so that you can be added to the Wictory Wednesday blogroll, which is part of the Wictory Wednesday post on all participating blogs:

I strongly suggest this piece by Peggy Noonan as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Jose Ramos-Horta    Nobel Laureate, 1996 as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Ken Adelman as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Michael Goodwin as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by New York Post as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Wall Street Journal as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Bruce Bartlett as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Thomas Sowell as "Recommended Reading".

I'll see your humiliating peep show and raise you a torturous beheading.I was going to say, "I hate to do this..." but frankly I'm beyond that point. This war has been a silly rollercoaster ride, with brief portions of days or weeks when the liberals devolve into partisan, pre-war-style sniping, and we Republicans cower in fear that the American people might actually listen to them. But then they are again humiliated by the utter barbarity of their partners in anti-Americanism, the islamofascists. Each time this lull occurs, something new and even more disgusting, revolting, upsetting, or just plain scary happens to remind us that we have to eradicate these alien vermin from the face of the earth.

Sean Hannity said the video of an American being murdered by the al Qaeda pigs needed to be seen, and he posted it at his website. Like so many times before, I said to myself, "I don't need to see this to know how much they need to die." But the demoralization I've been trying to fend off from the Abu Ghraib affair was gnawing at me, and something told me this would help, in some bizarre and despicable way.

I was right. My dinner nearly came up, but I was right. This is no made-for-TV movie, ladies and gents. This is no R or even NC-17 rated horror flick at the movie house. This isn't the face of an NFL hero that we hear third-hand got sniped in a firefight for some otherwise-meaningless mud hovel half a world away. This isn't the somber and stately procession of flag-draped coffins at Dover that the DoD don't want sullied by the exploitation of the Leftist press. It's not even a still picture in the Washington Post of my cousin-in-law kissing the coffin of her husband - a coffin that barely has a uniform in it, nevermind what's left of his charred corpse. And this certainly isn't a few pictures of butcherous madmen being made fun of by a bunch of over-stressed kids trying to pry the information out of them that will save the lives of fellow Americans, or maybe even their own.

This is real blood, in real time. And those screams are the last thing you'll hear tonight before you fall away to sleep in your warm, comfy bed with your sweetheart safely next to you. This is what the fell bastards are going to do to her in your dreams, and in your dreams it won't be on a tiny Windows Media Player screen. They're going to do it to her in front of you, then those will be your screams as they do it to you. As Mort Kondrake said on Fox News, "they cut the guy's head off, they sawed his head off, shouting God is great."

And the horror will be made even more manifest when you realize it's not going to be just a dream if we don't kill every last one of these blood-sucking devils. WATCH THIS and know that they're coming for you. We are fighting ONE WAR for our very lives. (Link is a VERY graphic .EXE file. It has no virus I know of, but don't trust me if you don't have decent virus protection running, because I don't want to be responsible.)

UPDATE: Charles Johnson posts something that sounds like I plagiarized him, but I honestly hadn't read him yet. In deference to the example he set, I'll give a warning I didn't want to make. I WANT YOU TO WATCH THIS. But know that my description above isn't mere rhetoric, and probably doesn't even due proper justice to the gore. This will leave you awake for many a night to come. Fair warning given.

Perhaps it was my Catholic faith and its devotion to penance to overcome the guilt of sin. Whatever the reason, my scant few days of having any sympathy for the butchers and madmen that were abused in the Abu Ghraib prison is over. And the Left can thank Evan Thomas for my final conversion.

As I'd indicated yesterday, my opinion was that the crimes committed against the prisoners were atrocious, and (though I thought there were too many of us saying so already) I thought America could only get past it by showing due remorse emblematic of our principles. But Newsweek has decided they won't be satisfied until they fulfill the embodiment of Hillary Clinton's "politics of personal destruction" with a full-on hit piece on Donald Rumsfeld.

No non-partisan, objective journalism here - Newsweek and MSNBC have apparently decided they can't sit back and let Fox News do all the yellow journalism. "Donald Rumsfeld likes to be in total control," it begins. The cover proclaims: "Is He To Blame?" A picture highlighting a video feed shows a snarling Rumsfeld frozen with a face only Saddam could love. One of the most awful pictures of the abuse - the one with the prisoner wired up and with a black cape and hood, looking for all the world like the negative image of a young Robert Byrd. The lead-ins to the following pages are "Rumsfeld's Strengths Are His Weaknesses" and "Is Anyone Really in Charge?"

To be honest, I've only skimmed page one. But I'm so ready to retch, there's no point in really giving it more than my passing phlegm.

I strongly suggest this piece by Jay Ambrose as "Recommended Reading".

With a tip of the hat to the blog Begging To Differ, I bring this news, that the Democrats have been fooled for years by a survey that purportedly shows that the states which voted for Gore had a population with a higher average IQ than did the states that voted for Bush.

One might conclude that the Dems were too dumb to know that they aren't as smart as they want to believe they are! Raise your hand if you have ever tried (unsucessfully) to help them understand their mental limits.

The exploitation of the Abu Ghraib issue is contained in so many news reports and commentaries today, it's almost pointless to say it. "Feeding frenzy" doesn't begin to describe it. I'm almost tempted to ignore the whole thing in protest, but I'll make this point.

When you're playing the card game rummy (famously recreated using domino-style tiles when I was a kid, and still the way I prefer to play today), the least hand you can match together has three cards - either three of a kind, or in a straight. People in the media today have been playing a new-fangled game of Rummy with three kinds of talkers, all intent on fighting amongst ourselves: the appeasers, the inquisitors, and the apologists.

The appeasers are that portion of the left that screams, "VIETNAM!" whenever American blood is spilled. They will stop at nothing to turn any military action (by a Republican president) into Vietnam. Abu Ghraib is a godsend for them, because it lets them tar the military for a change, and allows them to drop all pretense at "support the troops". These people should be shot on principle.

Some commentators are performing an important function by wagging serious pro-military fingers at anyone who proposed, aided, or accomplished the heinous acts going on in the Iraq prison. By saying how horrible these crimes were, these inquisitors are proving to the world that we really believe in our values, and the perpetrators are just a disgusting aberration who were not properly supervised. There are way too many of these people in our society today for me to be comfortable - and I'm one of them.

The apologists are saying everything from, "We have to understand what they were going through," to "Anything it takes to win." There aren't enough of these people. Why, and isn't this hypocrisy? It sounds so much like what liberals say about criminals in the former case, and so much like the foreign enemy in the latter. Yes, those are both true. But this group of people is willing to be labelled "hypocrite" so the rest of us can continue to live under the Constitution. And because there are so few of them, we are like the pacifist who owns a gun, but won't use it - we are in danger of letting our principles hamstring our efforts to defend ourselves. And contrary to the idealist who would have us reverse the concept, without our country to defend us our principles mean nothing.

War is hell, as one legend says. And as another goes: democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Both are equally true, especially when they are used together to refer to the same society. Such are the sad ironies of an imperfect world.

I strongly suggest this piece by Terence P. Jeffrey as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Victor Davis Hanson as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Michael Barone as "Recommended Reading".

I'm reading this article about how Teresa Heinz Kerry nearly had an abortion, and I get to the nut of the story:

During her first marriage, Heinz Kerry said she wanted a fourth child after the birth of her son Christopher in March 1973. She said she had a "severe reaction to something," was taking heavy cortisone medicine and did not realize she was pregnant.

"I told my doctor I think I'm pregnant and ... he said well then if you're pregnant, you have to abort that baby ... and I was very upset ... I didn't want to have an abortion, but they gave me 15 days because it was early and the night before I was due to go in, I miscarried it. So God was very kind," she said.

Heinz Kerry stressed that she favors abortion rights "because I'd like to have that choice myself."

As someone who never had any interest in the TV show "Friends", today is one of those "rest of my life" moments. Tomorrow I will have an ever-so-slightly better chance of getting people to discuss important matters ("Did you know there was a war on?") than I did yesterday. What astounds me is that USA Today actually comes close to understanding that time had run out.

OK... I know I'm a partisan Republican hack, but this is why I will be voting for GWBush... he's a real person, with real emotions!!! I just cannot imagine stuff like this happening with any Democrat positioned left of Joe Lieberman (which excludes very few!). For that matter, I'm sure that something like this would only occur to the Kerry people (and if were left up to the JFK wannabe himself, possible not happen at all) in campaign strategy meetings as something "to do" to make him look more like a regular guy... like kissing a baby, or flipping a flapjack!

But without even trying (which makes this even more powerful) George Bush make John Kerry look even more phoney and elitist than even we believe him to be!

I strongly suggest this piece by DeWayne Wickham as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Fred Barnes as "Recommended Reading".

I don't know where Washington Monthly dug up Chuck Todd, but the man needs serious counseling. His piece "A Kerry Landslide?" is an excellent example (as Steve would say) of the old expression, "But nobody I know voted for Nixon...." But it is also riddled with self-deceptions and more than a few manipulations of facts.

"There are perfectly understandable reasons why we expect 2004 to be close," he admits, before veering into tinfoil-hat land. "But there's another possibility, one only now being floated by a few political operatives: 2004 could be a decisive victory for Kerry." I'd love to know who these operatives are. I certainly haven't heard anyone suggest it before. In fact, just the opposite: the only thing keeping Republicans from becoming outright cocky is the ever-present reminder that our leaders have been depriving us of a true majority since 1994 by failing to adopt an appropriate "majority mentality". (A concept Rush Limbaugh has lamented before, and renewed recently.)

Some of Todd's worst delusions:

In the last 25 years, there have been four elections which pitted an incumbent against a challenger--1980, 1984, 1992, and 1996. In all four, the victor won by a substantial margin in the electoral college. The circumstances of one election hold particular relevance for today: 1980. That year, the country was weathering both tough economic times (the era of "stagflation"--high inflation concurrent with a recession) and frightening foreign policy crises (the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Indeed, this year Bush is looking unexpectedly like Carter.

And while Bush still retains a loyal base, he has provoked--both by his policies and his partisanship--an extremely strong reaction among Democrats. One indication is that turnout in this year's early Democratic primaries was way up. Nearly twice as many Democrats turned out for the 2004 Iowa caucuses as they had for those held in 2000. The turnout in New Hampshire for the Democratic primary was also extraordinarily high, up 29 percent from the previous turnout record set in 1992--the year Bush's father lost his reelection bid.

Republican turnout in the New Hampshire primary was lower than in 2000, but that isn't surprising considering that Bush's nomination was never in question this year. A fairer way to gauge the eagerness of the president's base to rally behind him is to compare this GOP primary to the last one that featured an incumbent running for reelection with no real primary opposition: Bill Clinton in 1996. That year in New Hampshire, 76,874 Democrats cast ballots for Clinton. This year, 53,749 Republicans cast ballots for Bush. This is especially astonishing, considering that, in New Hampshire, there are more registered Republicans than Democrats.

First, in polls that implicitly assume a higher turnout, Kerry performs better than he does in other polls. Most of the polls you hear about--and the ones that prognosticators trust the most--are surveys of "likely voters." Among the criteria pollsters typically use to identify likely voters is whether the subjects participated in the last election. These polls have proven more accurate in recent elections, like 2000, when voter turnout was relatively low--of the last nine presidential elections, only two showed lower turnout than 2000. But there are strong reasons to think that voters will turn out in larger numbers this year--especially among Democrats.

Of course, the tight polling data does reflect a fundamental reality: For all the fallout from his policies, Bush still appeals to many Americans because of his seeming decisiveness, straight talk, and regular-guy charm--not qualities that John Kerry prominently displays. The historical pattern may strongly suggest that if Kerry wins, it will be by large margins--but that is hardly fated. It will only happen if Kerry successfully highlights Bush's failings while showing himself to be an appealing alternative. Otherwise, the senator could see himself losing an electoral rout, not winning in one. In fact, the second most likely outcome of this election is a Bush landslide. With just one exception, every president to win a second consecutive term has done so with a larger electoral margin than his initial victory. The least likely result this November is another close election.

John McCaslin recounts a hilarious little tale of someone "Snubbing Bush":

As she prepared to deliver Saturday's commencement at Miami Dade College in Florida, first lady Laura Bush tried to recall the advice that her own graduation speaker gave her university class to prepare for the future.

"But I couldn't recall who gave the commencement address at the University of Texas in 1973," Mrs. Bush said. "Maybe because - and I hate to admit it - I skipped the ceremony.

"But I did look it up and I found out who gave that commencement address. And you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was some guy named George Bush. Four years after that speech, I married his son."

I strongly suggest this piece by Brent Bozell as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by Claudia Rosett as "Recommended Reading".

Reason has a decisive column parsing through the liberal fad-of-the-day, the draft. Much is recitation of the usual arguments, but one paragraph made me laugh, that I hadn't ever thought of it in that way.

(W)hile millionaire recruits like the late Pat Tillman are the exception rather than the rule, the military is not so grossly unrepresentative of America as is often supposed. African Americans are overrepresented—according to CBS News, they constitute twenty percent of the armed forces, compared to 12 percent of the general population—but Hispanics are underrepresented. High school graduates, on the other hand, are overrepresented. And as Northwestern University military sociologist Charles Moskos is fond of observing, the military is one of the few sectors of American society where large numbers of young white men routinely take orders from black superiors.

Brendan Miniter has an insightful and disturbing column today, describing the problems our soldiers and their leaders are encountering in the attempts to armor some of their lighter vehicles. Other reports describing the persistant lack of body armor for the troops have occasionally been fodder for the presidential campaign. Unfortunately, while these certainly are crimes committed by bureaucracy upon our own soldier-citizens, nothing is new in the struggle the American fighting man has with supply problems. In fact, our country was built on the improvisation around such a problem.

In the winter of 1775, George Washington knew that the Revolution needed the port of Boston to pursue the war effort. The occupation of the city by British redcoats could be broken with a siege, if only the rebels could find some cannon to use from the heights surrounding the city, which they still controlled. The inept and largely ineffectual Continental Congress barely had the money to fight any war at all, and its struggles with financing are legendary - Washington could not expect them to produce cannon from thin air. He had access to cannon already, but they were hundreds of miles away in northern New York, at the recently captured forts of Ticonderoga and Crown Point. So Washington dispatched Henry Knox to fetch the cannon and drag them all the way to Boston in the snow.

Washington's and Knox's experiences were merely the first of many supply problems our troops have endured in the course of our history, from the squabble over a shoe factory that became the battle of Gettysburg, to the slowdown of Patton's Third Army in Europe for lack of fuel. Being the economic superpower we are today, one would think that there should be ways around the paperwork in Iraq and the insanity in Washington D.C., but I expect no matter what success we have in acquiring and distributing body armor and armored vehicles in 2004, we'll continue to hear about such problems and the ingenuity of the American fighting man to overcome them.

I strongly suggest this piece by John O'Neill as "Recommended Reading".

Reviewing what occurred over the weekend while I slept (proverbially - I spent most of the time with quite a few Little Leaguers), Rambling's Journal reminds me of something I'd heard on Friday: John Kerry invited Al Sharpton to speak at the Democratic convention. The venue? BET, of course. Rambling's proprietor, Michael King, notes:

Now tell the truth -- do you really, honestly think "Waffles" Kerry would have made that statement if he wasn't on BET?

Naw, me either.

I'm  more than a bit ashamed that Blogs For Bush beat us to this one, but the analysis is right on. And how ironic that this election is turning out to be so like that of 1860. Or is it ironic? As Chris and I have pointed out before, messers Strauss and Howe have given many of us (and all those who take the time to read the book) the tools to get at least a fuzzy picture of what the future will be like... in general, and all open to interpretation, of course.

The real question is, and one that I know Chris at least has seriously pondered, will this crisis turn out to be as domestically fractious as the Civil War? I'm not sure that there will be actual shooting, but I do believe that many of the social issue that have divided this country for so long - abortion, single sex marriage, Church/State separation, judicial activism -  will be decided in what will be a cultural civil war. And like the Civil War, the result will shape not just where and how this county goes into the future, but whether it survives at all!

How do I think things will go? I don't know, but I'm keeping my powder dry!

Just in case someone else falls prey to the pituful reporting by our friends in the media, the reprimands handed down today by the U.S. military are not the final word on the Iraqi prisoner abuse controversy. As AP notes in their third paragraph, but fails to explain further:

Six other soldiers are already being criminally investigated for their involvement in the alleged abuse at a prison notorious in the Saddam Hussein era for its torture chambers where thousands of people are believed to have died.

Frequent readers of The Black Republican may look at today's "What we've read" contributions and think, "Not again..." Before I could link to a third column appearing at OpinionJournal.com, I figured it was time to make a confession, and offer Dow Jones & Co. a little free publicity (as if I haven't done enough for them already).

I receive the On the Editorial Page e-mail newsletter each morning. For fans of Rush Limbaugh, this is a little like having your alarm clock go off at 12:06 pm EDT every day, "telling you what to think" before you even get out of bed. There has seldom been a day when Paul Gigot and company are not in sync with what I've been thinking, so it's a little hard not to read their ideas upon first getting up and say, "That's going to be important today." (As if that's not enough, James Taranto sends me an update of what is the Best of the Web Today by 4 pm telling me what I might have missed since the editorial page was published.)

Take as an example Gorelick's Stonewall, today's featured editorial. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board has been leading the charge against the appearance of impropriety at the 9/11 Commission since Ms. Gorelick's memo first came to light with the Attorney General's testimony. It's a little hard to argue with the kind of laserlike logic you see in the columns calling for Ms. Gorelick's resignation - her situation will clearly be used as an example of "Conflict of Interest" in jornalism courses and in law schools for years to come. I only hope some day I'll be fortunate enough to blog the news with a link to OpinionJournal.com when it happens.

EDIT: I should add that, where OpinionJournal.com is "concise", the daily trolling of everything politcs at RealClearPolitics.com provides breadth. While most of what you see there is conservatism, they cover all the varieties, with some liberal counterpoint just for perspective. They don't tell you what to think, but whatever you do think will end up being said by someone linked from RealClearPolitics.

I strongly suggest this piece by Alan Bromley as "Recommended Reading".

I strongly suggest this piece by John Fund as "Recommended Reading".

Seventeen months ago, John Kerry started his campaign for president and made his distinguished service in Vietnam a focal point of that effort. (Did you know he served there?)

Well it seems that the war is a quagmire - but only for Kerry - and it's the Vietnam war, not the current one in Iraq.  Several famous phrases come to mind regarding the kerfuffle over this issue, like "Pandora's Box" and "...can of worms..." and something about "..made your bed, now sleep in it!" But I think a word my Dad likes to use works best - comeuppance!