604

So I'm talking to this friend and she happens to mention the embargo against Cuba and I say "What embargo?" and she says "The economic embargo that we've had on them since like I don't know forever — Where you been?"

Well, I've been busy.

I do remember hearing about an embargo, but that was hell years ago. You mean it's still going on? Castro's still in power, right?

Hello...it's been over forty years...it's not work-ing.

I don't get it. In Saudi Arabia women aren't allowed to vote. Can't even drive. Flash a little ankle and risk a beating by the morality police — or worse. But we just put off imposing sanctions on them over a minor issue like religious freedom. Giving them more time to think it over.

So what's up with Cuba then? We've made the lives of a couple of generations of people absolutely miserable — for what? Castro's old, fat, and doesn't lack for anything, I'm sure.

Must be something I'm missing. Our government knows what it's doing.

Oh well gotta run . . .

Posted on 09/30/05 by Faith Hope | Link | Comments?

You Americans are such a forgiving people — to a fault.

I may be just a fictional character, but I am not so forgiving. And I want you all to know that I am holding each and every one of you personally responsible for letting that two-bit imitator impersonate me.

I'm talking about your president. Or do you forget this little routine that he so blatantly stole:

Bush: I happen to know that, right now, the Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given.

Skeptic: I find that hard to believe.

Bush: Oh. We'll how about this: As we speak, Saddam Hussein has biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax — enough doses to kill several million people. He also has 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin — enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. And if that isn't enough to scare the life out of you, he also has 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent.

Skeptic: I don't think —

Bush: I'm not finished. What about his 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, and his mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ warfare agents? And let's not forget his advanced nuclear weapons program. He has five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb, and he recently sought large quantities of weapons-grade uranium from Africa.

Skeptic: I'm sorry, but I find all of this extremely difficult to believe.

Bush: Would you believe...two different methods for making a bomb?

Skeptic: I don't think so.

Bush: How about a very nice color drawing of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and J. Robert Oppenheimer's autograph?

Why am I holding you responsible, the American people? Because not nearly enough of you played the role of the Skeptic in Bush's little skit. Because instead of asking the hard questions, you allowed this pretender to invade Iraq, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, including almost 2,000 American troops.

And what was Bush's response to these needless deaths, the widespread destruction, the upheaval of an entire country, and the unimaginable suffering of innocent people?

Sorry about that, Chief...

Posted on 09/27/05 by Maxwell Smart | Link | Comments?

We Americans love to congratulate ourselves on our freedoms. Yet we suffer from a frustrating reluctance to exercise those freedoms, at least when it comes to bringing about needed change.

It may be because doing things the way we've always done them is comfortable, and change can be uncomfortable. A more troubling possibility is that we've convinced ourselves that our way of doing things must necessarily be the best way of doing them.

America's resistance to change is reflected in the Report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, published this month. The privately funded Commission on Federal Election Reform was was co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

The commission's 87 recommendations are largely mechanical in nature and timid in scope. Even their plan to reorganize the presidential primary elections falls far short of real change. They recognize the need to change the order of the primaries each election, so that the same states don't always vote at the end of the primary period. But they inexplicably want to retain the New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucuses as the first contests. They also want to retain an overly long, three- to four-month primary period.

The commission largely ignored the most serious problems with our electoral process — for example:

• Money. Politics might not be the world's oldest profession, but it is arguably the most debased. There is a reason that politicians are so universally mistrusted, and that reason is money.

  We have to minimize the influence of money on politics. For starters, we should shorten election periods and put limits on campaign spending as well as campaign contributions. Let's stop pretending that spending money is free speech.

• The Electoral College. Dump it. Let's try something radical instead — the person with the most votes wins.

  George Bush didn't steal the election of 2000, as liberals like to charge. But he didn't really win it, either.

• The rigid two-party system. In this country, you're either a democrat or you're a republican, or you're out in the cold.

  How can we encourage a true multi-party democracy? We can start by dropping the winner-take-all system of electing members of congress, and replacing it with a system of proportional representation. There are several variations of this system, but basically, you vote for a party as well as a person. A party that wins, say, 10% of the vote for the House of Representatives will thus have a 10% representation in the House. And the people who subscribe to that party's ideals thus have a voice in congress, where today they do not.

  Many European and other countries around the world use some form of proportional representation. Why not us? The only thing we have to lose is the stranglehold that the two entrenched parties have on the entire political process.

• Selection of presidential candidates. We select presidential candidates through the primaries. But the primaries are too long, too expensive, and they give too much influence to the contests that come at the beginning — especially the mostly white states of New Hampshire and Iowa.

  But how do we ensure that the best and brightest candidates percolate up to the top of their party for the November election? This may be the toughest question of all — how best to narrow the field. A single-day primary would be a start, coupled with the other reforms noted above.

  One thing I am sure of — presidential candidates should not be selected on the basis of how good they are at raising money. That is the weeding-out process we use today. For the most part, it seems to attract the wrong people and discourage the best ones.

We have real problems with our electoral process. Many if not most people don't bother to vote. And many who do vote end up voting for "the lesser of two evils," because voting for anyone but a democrat or a republican is, they are told, "wasting" their vote. Our presidential election "season" can last up to two years, and people naturally lose interest. Worst of all, we've allowed money to thoroughly corrupt the entire process.

The changes I am suggesting are dramatic. But as President Clinton said in his first inaugural address:

Thomas Jefferson believed that to preserve the very foundations of our nation we would need dramatic change from time to time. Well, my fellow Americans, this is our time. Let us embrace it.

Clinton never rose to the level of his own words, but Jefferson was, in fact, exactly right. Unfortunately, Jefferson's legacy has been left in the care of the world's second oldest profession.

Posted on 09/23/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

The communist dupes in the media have had a field day publishing stories about Castro's scheme to send medical aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina — sixteen hundred "doctors" and 34 tons of medical supplies, no strings attached. Don't make me laugh, Fidel.

This is nothing but a transparent plot put together by Castro and his American collaborators — I have a list of their names right here in my hand. The conspirators devised what they thought was a foolproof, win-win game-plan: Accept Castro's offer and America looks weak. Reject Castro's offer and America looks heartless.

But thanks to some insightful speculative journalism by the moderate online journal Human Events, the truth behind Castro's "offer" can now be told:

While the White House and the State Department offered no concrete explanations for refusing aid from Cuba, one very good reason for saying, "Thanks, but no thanks, Fidel," is the Communist dictator’s history of offering disaster-plagued countries the services of so-called doctors who are actually subversives.

That's right. Castro and his un-American fellow travelers intended to plant sixteen hundred communist subversives up and down the troubled Gulf Coast, for the purpose of indoctrinating the sick and weakened refugees with communist ideology.

And this would not be the first time Castro sent this band of white-frocked infiltrators out to do his bidding:

The Cuban doctors...are "Fidel’s foot soldiers," with "the potential for soft indoctrination, a kind of tilling the soil in the poor countryside so that it is ready when political opportunity presents itself as it has in Venezuela of late."

There you have it — incontrovertible evidence of Castro's deceit.

Never one to miss an opportunity for propaganda, Castro just announced that he is forming an "international medical brigade to assist countries affected by natural disasters or serious epidemics." The "brigade" will initially be made up of the subversives that Castro wanted to send to the US.

Regarding the unanswered offer itself, the unscrupulous dictator had this to say:

The Cuban president said the US had not replied to his offer to send 1,500 doctors to the US. "It hurts to think about it, but maybe some of those desperate people, surrounded by water and on the verge of death, could have been saved," he said.

Save the phony tears, Fidel. It isn't going to work. What real American wouldn't rather risk death than allow a horde of communist missionaries on American soil?

Posted on 09/20/05 by Tail Gunner Joe | Link | Comments?

Ann Coulter must be so proud.

Jillian Bandes is a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also writes a column for the student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel — at least she did, until last week. Bandes was fired, allegedly for misleading some of the people she interviewed for a column about racial profiling of Arabs.

But my guess is that she was really fired for her column's opening sentence:

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

It was Bandes who tapped out these words on her keyboard, but it was Coulter who wrote them.

Ann Coulter is a cartoon character. Her talent for outlandish overstatement may sell books and make for lively talking head debate, but in the end she is all glitter and no gold.

No one takes Coulter's outrageous rants seriously — except, apparently, the young and impressionable, like Jillian Bandes.

Bandes' column is well crafted, and there is certainly intelligence underlying it. But like Coulter, whom Bandes' short column refers to twice, Bandes mistakes sensationalism for convincing argument. A delight in outrageous overstatement for its own sake ends up overtaking and distorting thought process — as we see in Bandes column and in so much of Coulter's writing.

Coulter's ravings appeal to our baser instincts, giving them an appearance of legitimacy simply because her rabid words appear in print or on TV. Unfortunately, Coulter's mean-spiritedness has leaked through into Bandes' column.

Hopefully Bandes has learned a lesson from all this. But I wonder about all the other Coulter wannabes out there who, thanks to Coulter and others like her, think simplistic bombast is cool.

Posted on 09/17/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

George H. W. Bush must have cringed when he heard it.

The senior Bush effectively won and then lost his presidency by uttering those infamous words, Read my lips – no new taxes. Millions of hard-line me-firsters never forgave him for going back on his word.

So today, when the junior Bush made essentially the same promise, it must have seemed to Bush-the-elder as if a large, black cloud had stalled over Kennebunkport.

In last night's speech to the nation from New Orleans, President Bush announced a massive federal relief effort for the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast. While the president didn't put a price tag on the cost, estimates have run as high as $200 billion.

This is real money, even for the spendthrift US Congress, considering that it approaches two-thirds of the $333 billion deficit that was budgeted for 2005, long before Katrina struck.

But it is money well spent, and money that must be spent. But where is this huge pile of cash going to come from?

In his press conference today, President Bush was clear on where the money would come from — and more importantly, where it would not come from:

"It means we're going to have to make sure we cut unnecessary spending," he said. "It's going to mean that we maintain economic growth and we should not raise taxes."

Read my lips...

Cut unnecessary spending? Projections for the 2006 federal budget already plan cuts for Education, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, the Corps of Engineers (!), and the Environment, among others.

It makes you wonder. Does this president mean anything he says, or is he just blowing smoke with Category 5 force?

Let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he's sincere. Maybe he just doesn't understand what all those 0s after the $200 mean. So let's help him out and do the math for him. Here's where the disaster relief money can come from:

• The $11.5 billion in farm commodity subsidies that we spent in 2003. Let the marketplace determine price, in the true spirit of capitalism.

• The $19 billion planned increase in the 2006 defense budget. Giving the White House gunslingers more money for "defense" only encourages them to go destroy some other small country.

• The $67 billion for the war in Iraq. Let's Support Our Troops by bringing them home — now. Let the UN manage Iraq's transition. The UN just celebrated its 60th birthday. It's about time we allowed it to grow up.

• The $125 billion we spend each year on corporate welfare. According to Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, that's how much it costs taxpayers for corporate tax breaks, subsidies, and other giveaways.

That comes to $222.5 billion for the Gulf Coast recovery.

Or, we can simply add this staggering sum to our federal credit card and let someone else worry about paying it off.

But come hell or high water — in this case, literally — we won't raise taxes. The me-firsters simply won't allow it.

Posted on 09/16/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

Back in my day, before political correctness made cowards of us all, we had a pretty good response to liberal hand-wringers and their endless whining about Vietnam — My country, right or wrong.

That proud old phrase was once the mantra of the Great Silent Majority. And I think it needs to be so again.

So when the newest generation of hand-wringers points its crooked, accusing finger at the invasion of Iraq, and all the deaths, and all the devastation, and all the unspeakable misery and hardships that we brought to that land, without any justification whatsoever, true American patriots just smile and repeat after me — My country, right or wrong.

Oh, how that ticks those liberals off...

We used to have another pretty good piece of advice for all the long-haired, draft-dodging America haters back then: America – Love it or leave it.

Those words leaped to mind when I read this <expletive-deleted>, no doubt from some disgruntled and ungrateful so-called American with not enough to do:

We're not No. 1. We're not even close.

By which measures, precisely, do we lead the world? Caring for our countrymen? You jest. A first-class physical infrastructure? Tell that to New Orleans. Throwing so much money at the rich that we've got nothing left over to promote the general welfare? Now you're talking...

As a matter of social policy, the catastrophic lack of response in New Orleans is exceptional only in its scale and immediacy. When it comes to caring for our fellow countrymen, we all know that America has never ranked very high. We are, of course, the only democracy in the developed world that doesn't offer health care to its citizens as a matter of right. We rank 34th among nations in infant mortality rates, behind such rival superpowers as Cyprus, Andorra and Brunei.

When you hear this kind of talk, don't be shy about saying what needs to be said: America is a great nation. If you don't like the way we do things here, try Brunei. I hear it's very nice this time of year.

My country, right or wrong... Love it or leave it... Oh, we could get away with just about anything back then.

Until that <expletive-deleted> Woodward and Bernstein ruined everything.

Posted on 09/15/05 by Richard M. Nixon | Link | Comments?

We might be spreading on the freedom in Iraq a little too thick.

First it was Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who had the audacity to express an opinion about American troop withdrawals from his country before getting the OK from the White House:

Talabani said he would discuss reductions in US forces during a private meeting with President George W. Bush and said he thought the US could pull some troops out immediately.

"We think that America has the full right to move some forces from Iraq to their country because I think we can replace them [with] our forces," Talabani said. "In my opinion, at least from 40,000 to 50,000 American troops can be [withdrawn] by the end of this year."

That's what Talabani went into the meeting intending to tell President Bush. But by the time Talabani came out of the White House woodshed, he had a somewhat different view:

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said on Tuesday that Iraq will not set a timetable for a withdrawal of U.S. troops, backing away from his published remarks that the United States could withdraw as many as 50,000 troops by the end of the year...

"We don‘t want to do anything without the agreement with the Americans because we don‘t want to give any signal to the terrorists that our will to defeat them is weakened," Talabani said.

Thus spoke the president of the free and sovereign state of Iraq.

But while the Iraqi president was having his puppet's strings abruptly yanked taut, another Iraqi, Justice Minister Abdul Hussein Shandal, was teaching his American liberators a thing or two about freedom and democracy:

• "No citizen should be arrested without a court order," he said this week [regarding the thousands of Iraqis imprisoned by the U.S. without charges], complaining that U.S. suggestions that his ministry has an equal say on detentions were misleading.
  
  

• Killings and unjustified arrests of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops risked going unpunished, he said, [due to a U.N. resolution shielding occupying troops from Iraqi law].

  "We're hoping to make more efforts with the Security Council and the whole United Nations to end this resolution or amend it so that anyone who violates Iraqi law or assaults any citizen is held accountable," he said. "This is a matter of sovereignty."

Hold Americans accountable? Clearly, Shandal is taking his title of Justice Minister a little too seriously. But he wasn't quite finished:

"Full freedom should be given to journalists to take pictures and film in the field," he said. "Without images what would we know of history? ... We would know nothing."

Exactly, Justice Minister. Exactly...

Posted on 09/14/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

George Wallace would have been proud.

In 1963, George Wallace stood defiantly in the doorway of the University of Alabama, refusing to let two black students enroll there.

In 2005, during the days of chaos that engulfed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a chain of police officers stood at the entrance to the Crescent City Connection bridge on the New Orleans side of the Mississippi River. The armed officers were from suburban Gretna, Louisiana, on the other side of the river, and from two other suburban forces.

The police turned away anyone who tried to pass on foot across the bridge into Gretna, even though New Orleans police and the media were directing the frightened and hungry and homeless citizens of New Orleans to use the bridge as an escape route.

Two California paramedics, Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, who were in New Orleans for a conference, tell a harrowing story of their search for refuge in the surreal days after the hurricane. Their ordeal includes this encounter with the Gretna police:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions...

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge...They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans...

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.

Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson claims he closed the bridge to foot traffic in order to protect his city from a flood of refugees:

Gretna is a predominantly white suburban town of around 18,000 inhabitants. In the aftermath of Katrina, three quarters of the inhabitants still had electricity and running water. But, Chief Lawson told UPI news agency: "There was no food, water or shelter in Gretna City. We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people. If we had opened the bridge our city would have looked like New Orleans does now - looted, burned and pillaged."

In all likelihood, the suburban police acted out of a sense of self-preservation, not racism. But if that sense is an irrational one, it is a distinction without much of a difference. Both motivations reside in a dark and chilling side of human nature — one which George Wallace knew and understood intimately.

Posted on 09/11/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

I don't like what I've been hearing. Not one bit.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina, the loony left has been clamoring for "shared sacrifice," which is nothing more than barely-disguised code for raising t-t-t-t-taxes. But I agree with Henry David Thoreau, who said in Civil Disobedience: "That government is best which taxes least." (Ok. That's not literally what he said, but that's what he meant.)

To these incurable taxaholics, whose sole aim in life is to take more money out of my pocket and give it to someone else, the Katrina catastrophe has inspired a major change in the American mindset. Suddenly, just because Katrina washed away the veneer that covered up some uncomfortable facts about American life, you're supposed to feel obligated to spend more of your money in taxes. And more importantly, I would then be expected to spend more of my money in taxes.

Don't let these opportunistic thieves fool you. They'll shamelessly exploit any situation for a chance to take your money — even the unimaginable human misery caused by Katrina.

Here's a typical beggar's pitch from Marianne Williamson:

We are raised in the United States of America to believe our government is the strongest in the world, that as Americans we are basically protected, and that our country is basically good. It is cognitive dissonance for us to be confronted with evidence to the contrary, and yet such evidence has been piling up fast and furiously during this odd and potentially catastrophic phase of American history.

There is nothing strong about rushing into a unilateral war based on faulty intelligence, squandering the resources necessary with which to take care of your own people; there is nothing protective about a government that apparently didn't monitor events on the ground in New Orleans any better -- in fact, less well -- than the average viewer of CNN; and there is nothing good about taking care of the rich at the expense of the poor.

If it took a Category 5 hurricane and the huge suffering of thousands to bring those facts to light, then at least it can be said there is value in this horror. If enough Americans are beginning to wake up and face the awful fact that our country's basic functioning has become infected by a soulless sensibility, then perhaps the suffering on the Gulf Coast will not have been in vain.

She might as well have come at you with a squeegee and paper cup. She doesn't even have to say the word "taxes." You know what she meant.

And if you want to be considered "good," and don't want to be accused of being "soulless," you'll ante up.

Posted on 09/10/05 by Farleigh B. Fox | Link | Comments?

Recent scientific research raises the possibility that the human brain may still be evolving. However, I humbly offer indisputable evidence to the contrary — the California state legislature.

This week, the state Assembly and Senate approved a bill that allows illegal immigrants to be issued valid driver's licenses.

What part of "illegal" don't these lawmakers understand?

The only way this bill makes sense is if it's some kind of cruel scam. Lure illegals into a DMV on the pretense of giving them a license, and then — wham, deport their asses back to their home country.

But in fact, the bill is absolutely in earnest:

"It's vital that we all take responsibility for ensuring that all drivers are educated, tested and licensed," said Assemblyman Ron Calderon, D-Montebello. "Trained, tested and insured drivers enhance public safety for all of us."

I suggest we train, test, and insure our politicians instead.

Posted on 09/09/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

If there was ever any question of whether George W. Bush would go down in history as America's worst president, that question was definitively answered by Hurricane Katrina.

It would be difficult for any president to match Bush's record of "accomplishment," such as his failure to make a credible case for invading Iraq, the mismanaged occupation of Iraq, his attempt to dismantle the Social Security System, his managing to alienate much of the world, and his mantra of tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, regardless of the strain on infrastructure and human services.

But his utter failure to provide effective leadership and the immediate resources to aid the victims of a storm of Katrina's magnitude is almost beyond belief. While New Orleans and other Gulf cities were being devastated, Bush was strumming a guitar for the cameras and going about his normal routine.

And when the president finally did go into damage control mode, it was to control the damage to his own reputation.

But it's too late. History will remember George W. Bush as a pretender with a man's suit and a rich-boy's smirk. Lacking vision of his own, he was dominated by a handful of ideologues who had no interests other than their own self-interest.

The result is Iraq. More lives lost and more devastation caused along the Gulf than there had to be. America's reputation around the world at probably its lowest point ever.

But let's not be too hard on Mr. Bush. In 1999, he was the relatively unknown son of a past president who leveraged his daddy's name and influence into a presidency of his own.

In 2004, voters saw him for what he was during his first four years — an inarticulate ex-frat boy who never seemed to have grown up, who goaded the insurgents in Iraq to "bring it on," who made jokes about the missing WMDs that were, once upon a time, the justification for an invasion that has taken the lives of so many Americans, Iraqis, and others.

And in 2004, we voted for this pretender anyway. The responsibility and the shame for Katrina's staggering aftermath is therefore not the administration's alone. It is ours as well, each one of us — we who voted for him, and we who didn't work hard enough to defeat him — otherwise, democracy is just a fairytale.

Posted on 09/04/05 by Henry David Hernandez | Link | Comments?

They didn't call me Tricky Dick for nothing.

I knew how to convince people that white was black and down was up. It's an art, if I do say so myself.

Many people simply don't have what it takes to master this art. Some call it gall. I call it gonads.

That's why today, I'm surprised to see a woman, for Heaven's sake, becoming a master of the art. In my day, women in politics tended to be props, like the time I used my wife Pat, along with her respectable Republican cloth coat and my faithful dog Checkers, to save my career.

But Condoleezza Rice — now there's a woman with <expletive-deleted>

gonads. Who can ever forget that thrilling moment she gave us during
the 9/11 Commission hearings? That weasel Richard Ben-Veniste thought
he had her trapped during this exchange:

BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president, at any time prior to August 6, of the existence of al Qaeda cells in the United States?

RICE: First, let me just make certain...

BEN-VENISTE: If you could just answer that question, because I only have a very limited...

RICE: I understand, Commissioner, but it's important...

BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president...

...[snip]...

RICE: I remember very well that the president was aware that there were issues inside the United States. He talked to people about this. But I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

Ben-Veniste had her pinned, and they both knew it. He expected her to wilt right there in her high heels, maybe even break down in tears. But Condi looked him straight in the eye, and matter-of-factly, even proudly, told him the damning title of the report, as though it made him look bad rather than her:

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

Oh, you go girl.

Yesterday, Condi said something that made me even more proud. After Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, offers of help poured in from around the world, from friends and foe alike. Secretary Rice took the opportunity to say, "I hope that will remind Americans that we are all part of the same community."

Of course, it isn't ordinary Americans who need to be reminded of that fact. It's this administration that has gone out of its way to stick its thumb in the eye of the world community, whether over the environment, weapons control, help for the poor, the war in Iraq — you name it.

Taking an outpouring of good will for the victims of one of America's worst natural disasters, and turning it into an opportunity to scold the American people for this administration's own arrogance — now that takes gall.

Condi, you are absolutely without shame. Good girl.

But the artist was not through crafting this masterwork just yet. Rice went on to say that no offer of help has been refused, although some offers would be considered "somewhat later."

Falling into the "somewhat later" category, no doubt, is Castro's offer that "his nation was ready to send 1,100 doctors and 26 tons of medicine and equipment" to the disaster area. "Others have sent money; we are offering to save lives," he said.

Even Condi is not yet accomplished enough to say flat out what needs to be said here, so I'll say it for her:

Fidel — No <expletive-deleted>ing Way.

Saving lives is one thing. Saving face is quite another.

Posted on 09/03/05 by Richard M. Nixon | Link | Comments?