I really don’t have anything to add to this piece discussing the shameful display of behavior during Giuliani’s testimony before the odious 9/11 commission.
Radio’s and Rudy killed those people, don’t you see? Disgusting.
Archives for 2004
What a Gas!
You know the Democrats have to be really full of shit when even the NY Times is bludgeoning them:
With the election season moving into full swing as Americans start thinking about their summer travel plans, it’s sadly predictable that politicians will try to curry favor with voters by playing silly blame games and proposing simplistic quick fixes for rising gasoline prices, which are averaging more than $2 a gallon. A case in point is the demand made yesterday by 20 Senate Democrats that the government release as much as 60 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next two months.
President Bush is rightly resisting the call. Since 9/11, the administration has been adding to the reserve in a disciplined manner, and it is closing in on its goal of filling up the reserve’s capacity, 700 million barrels. Tapping the reserve to assuage motorists at a time of increasing security threats to already tight fuel supplies would be foolish…
Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, knows this, of course, and he demeans the seriousness of his own candidacy when he suggests that President Bush could single-handedly bring down fuel costs. Senator Kerry has urged the administration to stop buying oil for the reserve, as if that would make a difference. Fortunately, some residue of shame has kept him from joining the other Democrats calling for the reserve to be raided. The government’s oil purchases have taken place at a time of higher prices, but they are not a major cause of the increase.
Some residue of shame…
Bush, The Economy, and The Media
From Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball:
Here’s where President Bush and his campaign have a legitimate beef. The economy has clearly started to roar. New jobs are being created by the hundreds of thousands each month, almost every economic statistic is improving beautifully, and interest rates remain at historically low levels. Yet a large majority of the American public thinks the economy ranges from bad to terrible–far worse than they saw it a couple months ago. Some might say that this is just a reflection of the electorate’s bad mood, induced by the prisoner abuse scandal. That may be part of it, but the national news media–especially the major TV networks–bear great responsibility. Since the economy started its sharp climb upward, the only economic stories consistently covered have been the price increases in gasoline and milk.
Doesn’t President Bush deserve some credit for economic success, having passed his central economic package/tax cut in 2001? Wouldn’t he be taking it on the chin if the story were the reverse? It was, and he did, for three years of his term. Ah, but the media say, “bad news is news; good news isn’t news,” to explain away the lack of positive coverage. Go back to 1996, as the Crystal Ball did prior to writing this e-mail, when another President facing a shaky reelection got a lift from the economy just in time. You’ll find that Bill Clinton secured Big Media’s praise in story after story, talk show after talk show, for his “courageous” 1993 economic package/tax increase–which was frequently and directly tied by reporters to the economic upturn of ’96. Can the media understand why so many conservatives see an anti-Republican double standard at work, especially on the network TV evening news programs? (The Crystal Ball fully acknowledges that neither the Clinton package of ’93 nor the Bush package of ’01 may have had anything to do with economic recovery in ’96 and ’04. But viewers and readers have a right to expect consistency and fairness, regardless of the media’s partisan and ideological leanings.)
Of course we are just imagining it.
Kerryism
I could have sworn I wrote this post yesterday, but now it is gone. Weird.
At any rate, I am not thrilled at all by Slate’s decision to have a daily ‘Kerryism’, just as they have had a daily ‘Bushism’ for the last several years. Some may say this is only fair, but I have to wonder how being unfair to a Democrat and being unfair to a Republican somehow balances out to neutrality.
For the past three years, the idiot Weiskopf has contorted, distorted, and willfuly misinterpreted and misrepresented Bush’s comments to make him look like and idiot and a fool. Now the Slate buffoons intend to do the same thing to Kerry, with the idea that he exaggerates and is a liar.
Color me unimpressed. If they really want to do a public service, fire the idiots doing the Bushisms and Kerryisms and hire someone to check their new stories for factual errors and institutional bias.
Congrats, Randy
I just saw Randy Johnson pitch a perfect game (his second no-hitter), made doubly special that it was against the Braves.
Awesome.
Good Luck and Godspeed
Via the Calpundit, I see that my old unit may be deploying to Afghanistan:
Rumors are now swirling that one of two maneuver squadrons (battalions) of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment will soon deploy from Fort Irwin, California, to Afghanistan, and two of the three companies of the 1st Battalion of the 509th Infantry Regiment will travel from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Iraq. These units are the permanent “opposing forces,” or OPFOR, at the National Training Center and the Joint Readiness Training Center respectively.
Allons!
BTW- Someone go explain to Kevin what IRR means and that it is not a draft or conscription. I would, but I can not suffer through his comments section anymore.
Their Own Worst Enemy
Tacitus is right– every time I have my doubts about the Republican party and Bush, one of the ‘moderate’ Democrats pipes up and reminds me why I have a hard time embracing the Democratic party.