Here’s more proof, if you need it, that Bush is the fuel for the Dem machine. Without W to whine and rant about, the party without ideas, the party without huevos, would simply run out of gas.

When the results of the Prez’ recent physical were released, disclosing that he was treated successfully for Lyme Disease, Dem mouthpiece The Dem Daily, had this to say (and it wasn’t “We’re glad he’s better.”):

Thw [sic] White House could have used the opportunity to alert the public on Lyme Disease, it’s [sic] symptoms and treatment. Instead at the time they found it, they kept it secret. Color me perplexed… Just another little tick about the Bush Administration… Secrets.

Not concerned about the people, secretive: That’s quite a conclusion to draw from this episode.

I offer this alternative: Bush is a man. He doesn’t go around complaining of every little ache and pain, and despite being in the highest office on the planet, he doesn’t care all that much for celebrity.

But of course there are other explanations: Rove planted the tick to take the focus off Gonzales; Bush’s stubbornness on Iraq is the result of tick-caused retardation; John Edwards, who, as we know, is adept at profiting from medicine, planted the tick; Fox News knew about it but didn’t report it; he contracted it in Crawford … suspiciously close to Cindy Sheehan; Homeland Security dropped the ball by not raising the Lyme Disease alert from chartreuse to lime green …

… and on and on. We’re lucky we got away with one jibe.

hat-tip: memeorandum

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The weird world of the whacked out Left … reading the Yearly Kos Convention home page is even odd …

Noooo!!! It’s the last day of the Convention! But we’re ending on a higher-than-all-heck note with the Presidential Leadership Forum.

Can I get a wooo-hoooo??

Don’t forget your lanyards today! That would be very bad. And why not put on little bits of ritz while you’re at it? No pressure–just the whole world watching…

The Kos-sacks dressing up for the media with “ritz?” I thought they’d be dressing up in their best F*** Bush T-shirts.

Hillary’s speaking now, apparently. Here’s a lead-in from aging left-organ Mother Jones:

The secret service cars are out front and the mainstream media has shown up in force, so you know it’s time for the big boys. Hillary Clinton, who is up first, provides the most compelling story lines here at YearlyKos. As Kos himself admitted in a press conference a few moments ago, “Her negatives in this community are fairly high.” She isn’t seen as a true progressive, nor as someone willing to stand strong for her principles when it is politically inexpedient. But as Kos admitted, Clinton has moved strongly in the last year to engage the netroots and bring down those negatives.

Will she get hit for being the most moderate of all the candidates, or will she get kudos for trending in the right direction? Or, as has the case been throughout this convention, will the crowd be polite, respectful, and almost bland? Stay tuned…

Polite, respectful and bland? From the Kos-mopolitans? That would be newsworthy!

Meanwhile the big highlight of the day, the DC “Meet the Leaders” session, bombed out entirely:

I know, I know–what could possibly be more important than our annual gathering of the Netroots? That’s what I said!

We are officially listing Senator Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Rahm Emanuel as cancelled ….

The reason? No way they’d want to associate with this Kos-tic sorts. Just kidding. A vote on the energy bill is going on today … far too much pork at state to risk a trip to the Kos-modome.

Meanwhile, I was interested to see that right there on the very top tier of sponsors was a division of mainstream corporate Hollywood, Warner Independent Films. Why would Warner Bros have one of its divisions so visible among the rebels with a Kos? Two reasons that I can see:

• The 11th Hour, Leo’s follow-up to Al’s global warming fearfest, which we understand is even scarier than the first. Due out from Warner Independent on Aug. 17.
• In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones and the nuttier and nuttier Susan Sarandon as parents searching for their boy, who just returned from duty in Iraq but has gone missing.

Warner Bros. current mainstream offerings are Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, License to Wed, No Reservations and Oceans 13 — all films going after mainstream audiences that probably aren’t too keen to sit next to the smelly guys in the F*** Bush T-shirts.

Should we protest? Yawn.

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I may be a bit late to the party on this one (vacation and all), but it’s apparent the Left has been up to a game it plays quite well: infringing on others’ freedom of speech.

It’s going on at the incorrectly named Americablog, which apparently has a campaign going against Home Depot for (allegedly) advertising on the Bill O’Reilly show. Banging on the old drums of distrust and conspiracy, A’blog posts emails from Home Depot saying the don’t advertise on Fox, or any programs “that express strong opinions or political views,” then posts another saying they do, in fact, advertise on O’Reilly.

Perhaps Home Depot is doing “run of network” ads that appear across the FOX networks, with FOX choosing which shows the ads run on.

A thoughtful explanation, but don’t expect the Left to play nice.

A lot of companies like to use this kind of advertising to claim that they don’t advertise on particular shows – it’s a smoke screen and a lie. If this is the case here, then Home Depot needs to specifically inform us that they have asked FOX not to run any Home Depot ads on The O’Reilly Factor.

Having said that, Home Depot has some explaining to do if it thinks Hannity is any better than O’Reilly. FOX, across the board, smears gays, blacks, attacks the environment, and more. Home Depot needs to dump the hate network now, across the board.

What gives this pig the authority to tell a corporation where to advertise? Has he not realized that Fox has trounced all other cable news networks and therefore can hardly be the hate-mongers he tries to dismiss them as?

If A’blog (which, come to think of it, is a nice moniker, reminding me of another A abbreviation) really thinks Fox “smears gays, blacks, attacks the environment, and more,” then why not provide some links with each of the allegations?

Is providing debate on gay marriage “smearing gays?” No, it is free speech on topical issues.

Is questioning the motives of Jackson and Sharpton “smearing blacks?” No, it is free speech on topical issues.

Is running stories that raise issues about global warming or the economic viability of alternative fuels “attacking the environment?” No, it is free speech on topical issues.

It is clear that A’blog’s big fight is with free speech, differences of opinion, and anyone that isn’t bullied into goose-stepping along with A-blog and the party line. Were it not so, wouldn’t A-blog be demanding that Home Depot not advertise on Keith Olbermann and MSNBC because he “smears Christians, the military, Capitalism, and more?” Wouldn’t A’blog be demanding fairness from the networks, with their milquetoast anti-conservatism? Wouldn’t A’blog be chiding the NYT, WaPo and the rest of print for their bias?

No, of course not. It’s OK to be biased left, but it’s not OK to be biased fair or conservative.

Home Depot has a right to advertise anywhere it wants to. If the rabid readers of A’blog decide to take their (probably scant) dollars elsewhere, let them. That’s a free market, not the sort of bullying the Left is prone to do when facing something that dissatisfies them.

If you’d like to encourage Home Depot to continue to support free speech and their right to advertise wherever they feel is best, A’blog was kind enough to provide us with some email addresses:

Ron Jarvis, Vice President of Environmental Innovation
ron_jarvis@homedepot.com

Frank Blake, Chief Executive Officer
francis_blake@homedepot.com

Carol Tome, Chief Financial Officer
carol_tome@homedepot.com

hat-tip: memeorandum

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It seems Wonkette, the popular, foul Leftyblog, has become quite openly antisemitic, dropping all pretense of typical leftist cover-up of the movement’s anti-Israel and increasingly Jew-hostile thinking. Here’s its lead on a post a couple days back authored by Alex Pareen:

In a stunning rocket, Rudy Jew-liani basically admitted that he doesn’t know anything at all about foreign policy — or maybe that he knows too much. In an interview with the Jew York Times …

That’s enough; I won’t bother you with the rest of the blathering drivel.

Hold up your hand if you think there’s a defense that could be raised for Pareen. Anyone think the use of “Jew-liani” and “Jew York Times” somehow isn’t blatantly and unquestionably indicative of antisemitic thinking? Anyone? Anyone?

Seeing none, I would rest my case, except Pareen refuses to do so.

Yisrael at the blog called My Right Word spotted this and posted on it yesterday. Here’s that post in its entirety:

Is “Wonkette” Antisemitic?

Wonkette, that foul-mouthed but titilating blogger of Washington foibles, seems to have gone anti-semitic.

Editor Alex Pareene and Interns Nick Mueller and Lauren Spohrer may be responsibl;e for this post which refers to someone they call “Rudy-Jew-liani” who gave an interview to the “Jew York Times“.

Anybody for bonking Wonkette?

A fine example of free speech, right? Yisrael found something interesting in the public forum and posted his thoughts about it in a way far more respectful than the typical “Kill Bush!” “Kill Cheney” rhetoric of the Left.

Again, I would rest my case, but Pareen refuses to. Wonkette, this time in the person of a Ken Layne, contacted Yisrael and threatened to litigate:

You know, it’s kind of poor manners to go accusing people of being antisemitic based on nothing more than you being too lazy to read the site and know any of the references.

But since you don’t, and since you so thoughtlessly and wantonly libel our editors and the owners and stockholders of our company, I will direct you to the specific reference from the day before, which just happens to be a viral video on YouTube that everybody in politics is talking about:

Wonkette Post

You can go ahead and apologize on your site now. Send us the link when you do and I’ll send that to our lawyers and that will be the end of that.

Can you believe it? The left is so spineless, so thin-skinned, so easily affronted that merely asking the question, “Is ‘Wonkette’ Antisemitic?” is grounds for litigation! What a bunch of losers … of fascists … of censoring-mad, hypocritical lunatics. There, that should be enough for me to get a letter from Layne as well.

Go ahead, Kenny boy, give me your best shot … and let’s see if you can hold true to your “liberal” ideals as you do. Betcha can’t.

Interesting enough, despite the attention the post is getting and the “up yours” response Yisrael sent back to Layne, Wonkette hasn’t removed or changed the post. They’re proud of their* cute little wordplay, just like Hitler probably liked the design of those nice armbands he had designed for all the Jews.

* Wonkette likes “Jew-liani” a lot, but didn’t come up with it; it’s in the non-Wonkette YouTube clip Layne referenced in his response. The clip does not, however, mention the “Jew York Times,” and Wonkette mentioned both in a new, second post, because they thought them cute, not reprehensible.

hat-tip: Flopping Aces

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What’s so hard to get? Why is there such denial?

Russia fought proxy wars with us for decades, as did China. Now there’s a new enemy, Islamofascism, and many are doing the intellectual equivalent of gouging out their eyes to avoid seeing the obvious.

In a major WSJ opinion piece today (which also tops RCP and Memeorandum), Lieberman lays out the case:

• Iran is using Hezbollah to train terrorists to kill our troops in Iraq
• The Iranian Quds force is taking Iraqi insurgents to training camps in Iran, training them, then dispatching them back to Iraq
• Iran spends $3 million a month on its proxies in Iraq

Lieberman shares my view that diplomatic efforts must continue as an effort to tighten the screws on Tehran through means other than military — but to give our diplomacy some muscle by backing it with an ominous, powerful, intent military presence.

Kudos, as usual to Joe. He’s worth a hundred Pete Domenici’s, Richard Lugars and Crybaby Voinoviches. Too bad he doesn’t get a hundred votes to their one, because compare his quote above with this one from Domenici:

We cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress.

We can’t? Indefinitely? Not making progress? What a disgusting, cowardly line of reasoning. Domenici has to see that this has nothing to do with the Iraqi government’s progress, which is an excuse, a convenient cop-out. The threats to us are real. If Iraq is ready to stand beside us, fine. If not, then we must still protect ourselves.

So it is with sadness that I read this from Lieberman’s piece:

When Congress reconvenes next week, all of us who are privileged to serve there should set aside whatever partisan or ideological differences divide us to send a clear, strong and unified message to Tehran that it must stop everything it is doing to bring about the death of American service members in Iraq.

It seems like an obvious, unavoidable thing to do. But don’t count on it. The Senate is filling with men of no stomach, men of no vision, men who live and die by opinion polls instead of thinking about who wants to kill us. But as bad as they are, they’re infinitely superior to the human sump-sludge of the Leftyblogs, who greeted the op/ed like this:

Thank goodness you were there Joe to ensure their victory, for without this glorious cluster**** you love more than whining-itself Iran would not have won. In fact, our glorious stupidity, that you enabled, brought forth the crazy-man in the members only jacket. Naturally, your wisdom now is unimpeachable…just like your beloved Chimp.

Can’t these pathetic losers get over themselves and their petty egos and grand paranoid visions? There’s an enemy, and it’s not us. There’s a war, and it’s not fake. There are good people, and there’s them.

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This just in:

GLASGOW, Scotland (AP)- Two men stuntman operatives of Karl Rove rammed a flaming sport utility vehicle into the main terminal of Glasgow airport Saturday, crashing into the glass doors at the entrance and sparking a fire, witnesses said. Police said two suspects were arrested intent on deflecting media attention from President Bush’s failed foreign policy.

The green SUV with U.S. government plates barreled toward the building at full speed before crashing into security barriers. Witnesses said two stuntmen jumped out, one of them engulfed in flames over what appeared to be a Nomex suit. Two stuntmen were arrested, Strathclyde Police spokeswoman Lisa O’Neil, an M15 operative, said.

The airport — Scotland’s largest — was evacuated and flights suspended. Smoke and black flames rose from the car in front of the main entrance.

“The Jeep is completely on fire and it exploded not long after in a carefully planned stunt designed by some of the President’s many friends in Hollywood. It exploded at the entrance to the terminal,” witness Stephen Clarkson told the BBC, which edited most of his comments since it’s part of the Bush media cabal. “It may have been an explosion of petrol in the tank because it was not a massive explosion.”

Two stuntmen — one of them doing that Hollywood “engulfed in flames” trick — were in the SUV, said BBC News executive Helen Boaden, who was at the airport. She said a traveler tried to restrain the man.

“Then the police came over and wrestled him to the ground — the fire was burning through his clothes — and finally put him out with a fire extinguisher,” she said.

Photo Credit: Just pretend it’s a Jeep, OK?

There. The story’s now appropriately edited for use on Leftyblogs.

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Yesterday, rather than cover the Ft. Dix arrests, the Leftyblogs stampeded into the I’m OK You’re OK Coral to flee from the true threat Islamofascism poses to America, and the resulting need for good intelligence, as provided by the Patriot Act.

I summarized the responses of some key Leftyblogs: Four of the largest ignored the event entirely, one protested the use of “Islamic militants,” and one of the foremost thinkers among the group, Joshua Micah Marshall, said in Talking Points Memo:

You’ve probably seen the reports out this morning of six New Jersey men (“Islamic radicals“)arrested for plotting to attack Fort Dix. We’ll have to see how this one pans out. But it’s worth remembering that we’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the raid on the headquarters of the ‘Seeds of David’ terror cult in Liberty City Florida.

It’s always hard for me to see how these aren’t as serious as they appear. But there is a record.

Maybe this afternoon’s report from AP will make it a bit easier for JMM to see fanatic Islamism for what it is. Maybe it’ll turn his thinking around so he gives some talking points worth talking about. Maybe not.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) – Federal authorities said Wednesday that six Muslim men suspected of plotting to massacre U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix were on the verge of carrying out the attack when they were arrested this week.

“I think they were in the last stage of planning,” U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said. “They had training, they had maps, and I think they were very close to moving on this.

“Our view was they had pretty much gotten to concluding the planning phase of this and were looking to obtain heavy weaponry — and if not from us, they were going to try to obtain it elsewhere.”

Of course he didn’t change his viewpoint one iota. There’s no mention whatsoever of Ft. Dix in his posts so far today. Rather than deal with the chance of terror on our shores, here’s what JMM thinks is important today, as told by the subjects of his 16 posts thus fartoday:

Fired U.S. attorneys, Green Zone security, attacking the White House on Iraq (as opposed to attacking terrorists), fired U.S. attorneys, Guantanamo (it must go!!!), Mark Penn, fired U.S. attorneys, GOP lies on CNN, fired U.S. attorneys, fired U.S. attorneys, fired U.S. attorneys, Gore campaign, fired U.S. attorneys, Abramoff, Romney, huffy Republicans.

Wow. Talk about a platform for victory in ’08! Talk about really speaking to the cares and concern of Everyman.

Somebody, anybody, answer me this: If this is the best the Left has to offer, then why are all the Dem candidates running hard to the Left?

And after the primaries, how hard do you suppose the winner will run back to the center?

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How filthy-mouthed are leftyblogs? Are they really that much worse than we on the right? The answers: Filthy, filthy, filthy and 41 times worse.

Patrick Ishmael at The News Buckit picked up an Instapunk challenge and scanned lefty and right blogs to assess their usage of George Carlin’s “Seven words you can never say on television.” The results:

And this is what I found, using what I deemed — through a mix of TTLB and 2006′s Weblog Award lists — to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. I couldn’t account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn’t make much of a difference.

So how much more does the Left use Carlin’s “seven words” versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1. …

Update @ 9:16am: Great point by reader Joe.

What? No Democratic Underground? No IndyMedia? No FreeRepublic? No Townhall? No FrontPageMag?

And thus, the numbers:

• Democratic Underground: 947,000
• IndyMedia: 206,000
• FreeRepublic: 4010
• TownHall.com (minus HH blog): 156
• FrontPageMag: 11,800

It only gets worse… 1537788 [Leftyblog filthies]-to-37285 [Rightyblog filthies]. 41-to-1. Holy mackeral.

Nastiest after Democratic Underground and IndyMedia were Kos with 146,000 and Huffpost with 78,200.

On the Right, the biggest blogs were pretty darn clean: The big three of LGF, Instapundit and Michelle Malkin had less than 500 between them. The milblogs tended to be the fetid ground on the right, but the spiciest of them, Ace of Spades, couldn’t even string together 10,000 nasties.

Why the gulf? On the Right, of course, there’s a respect for social norms that just doesn’t exist on the Left. There’s also faith (I miraculously quit swearing right after accepting Christ) and respect for others.

On the Left, there’s rebellion and the urge to shock, timeworn traditions that go way back (how many remember Country Joe & the Fish’s Vietnam Rag or Pearls Before Swine’s song complete with the Morse code lyric dit dit dah dit, dit dit dah, dah dit dah dit, dah dit dah?)

But that’s not enough to explain a million profanities. There is also in the swearing, I believe, an acknowledgment that their logic is weak, their history is weak, their policy is weak, and there’s nothing they can do to change any of that. Stuck with the belief system they’re stuck with, losing the logic arguments as they do, marginalized intellectually, their frustration rises.

Unencumbered as they are with religious outlets to ease their anger, or at least keep them from venting it publicly, out pours the filth.

Think of it this way: Each of their profanities is an admission of failure.

hat-tip: memeorandum

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If you didn’t catch the rabidly bad taste comments on HuffPost regarding the lame but fatal Taliban assassination attempt on the VEEP, you won’t find them there now.

(You can find a good representative sampling still at Amy Proctor’s blog. Don’t worry, Amy’s purged the ****-load of mindlessly obscene leftyspeak.)

There’s terrifying significance to the fact that so many Americans feel comfortable saying, and believing, comments like this:

You can never find a competent suicide bomber when you need one.

or

You can never find a competent suicide bomber when you need one.

But you know that, so let’s talk instead about blog ethics. Was it right for HuffPost to do this:

Over the last few hours, the more than 400 comments appended to the Huffington Post’s news item on the attack in Afghanistan on a base being visited by Vice-President Dick Cheney have been expunged from the site. At first the comments were closed, then gradually shrunken and for a short time completely expunged from The Huffington Post as the heat on the Cheney hate fest built up over the day. (Pajamas Media)

I would certainly have deleted the obscene ones myself, and edited some others, but HuffPost did something entirely different, deleting comments like “Cheney’s spokeswoman said he was fine. F***” and keeping comments like “glad the vp is ok.” PajamasMedia says:

The comments now visible are evidently cherry-picked out of the original thread to give some sort of “tone” to the thread that it did not originally possess. It is really amazing what you can do to history with just a few strokes of the keyboard.

Now it is one thing to close comments, another thing to erase them, but something else altogether different to actually “edit” the thread to give a false impression.

A conscious decision was made at HuffPost to allow comments to be posted without monitoring, then another conscious decision was made to delete offending comments only after the sickest of them had spread through the blogosphere and conservative radio.

Disgusting posts were going up as early as 8:15 a.m., but the comments weren’t deleted until around 2:50 p.m. — so the posts were there for about five and a half hours, and OK with HuffPost for at least four hours, assuming it would take the Huffies 90 minutes to hash out what they’d do and do it.

Their decision was a terrible one. First, it will really, really tick off HuffPost’s readers and will do longterm damage to the blog’s credibility among its primary readers.

It was hypocritical. You can’t blast the Bush admin day after day — right up to the original headline of the post, “Cheney ‘Targeted’ Deadly Afghan Blast,” — then purge the overly critical comments, creating a false impression of the blog and its readers.

And for that reason, HuffPost’s decision was terribly unethical.

As the PajamaMedia writer nicely pointed out, you can’t ask the 400 commenters what they think of being deleted: They’re not available for comment.

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