Krauthammer on Clintoon

There's a comment on the above at DailyPundit. It's about North Korea but it could be about the election:

The main thing that should be remembered here is that, once again, Clinton's chickens have come home to roost - and they're looking a lot like vultures, circling above.

If Slick Willie and his able handyman, Mr. Peanut, had been a little less concerned with creating a "legacy" of "statesmanship", and just a scosh more on-the-ball about useful and enforceable tactics, the outcome MIGHT have been different.

comment on VodkaPundit's analysis

I haven't found it--yet,-- but here's the headline I'm waiting for:

"Democratic Campaign Rally Turns Into Memorial Service."

Posted by Warren Cheney at November 6, 2002 05:54 AM

Daily Pundit lists losers:

The Donk party leadership, especially the Clintons and Terry McAuliffe: Since 1992 the Donks have been following the Clinton siren song, and it has been nearly an unrelieved disaster for them. Nobody doubts that Bill Clinton is the eminence grise behind the Donk party, or that Terry McAuliffe is his hand puppet. In a single decade, the Donks have moved from control of the House, the Senate, the White House, to the loss of all three - even worse, in a mid-term election the challenging party traditionally picks up seats in. Make no mistake: this is an unmitigated disaster for the Donks, and somebody will pay. The Donk's traditional reason for putting up with Bill Clinton has been that he is a "winner." Well, now he is marked with the stench of the loser, his estranged wife's Presidential hopes are toast[*], and McAuliffe, his disgusting surrogate, is dead meat.

*I'm not sure I agree with this, but I hope Bill is right.

...
James Jeffords: I really, really enjoy this one. The turncoat Vermont RINO who traded Pack control of the Senate to advance his own personal greed is now well and totally screwed. I expect when Trent Lott gets around to assigning him his new office space, it will consist of a suite of cardboard boxes at the far edge of the Senate parking lot. And I expect he'll enjoy his new slots as the junior member of the Subcommittee on Sewage and Solid Waste, the Subcommittee on Junkets to Miserable, Filthy Fifth World Nations, and the Subcommittee on Suppurating Venereal Disease. Even his home state elected a Pack Senator, and may well elect a Pack governor as well. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

John Frum:

Instead of making Americans nostalgic for the prosperity of the 1990s, the sight of Clinton’s face seems to have reminded Americans of the irresponsibility that left the country unsafe and unprepared against terror..
...
Americans did not blame Bush or the Republicans for their troubles, or at any rate, not enough of them did to deliver Congress to the Democrats. I remember a GOP poll taken about a year ago. Back then, Americans blamed the recession first on Osama bin Laden, second on Bill Clinton (under whom it started after all), and only third on George Bush. I wonder whether that feeling doesn’t last--whether Americans don’t see this recession as one of the costs of a war they support. At the beginning of the war, Dems called for “sacrifices.” For them that was code for taxes of course. But Americans took them at their word, and voted for the party they trust on foreign affairs despite the pain at home.

Whigging Out was close.

Via Pagan, Dilbert letter #43 names the Weaseliest Awards:

Organization
-----------------------
Democratic Party 5,727
Major League Baseball 4,118
White House 3,700
Congress 2,702
Republican Party 2,333
FBI 872

Weaseliest Country
------------------
France 6,684
Saudi Arabia 4,488
Pakistan 3,601
Iraq 3,453
North Korea 669
Iran 285

Weaseliest Company
------------------
Microsoft 7,661
Arthur Andersen 3,908
Enron 3,621
WorldCom 1,381
Rite Aid 1,255
Merrill Lynch 576
Tyco 535
Qwest 486

Weaseliest Profession
---------------------
News reporters 4,875
Lawyers 4,447
Politicians 3,539
Tobacco executives 3,484
Oil executives 1,159
Accountants 1,098
Advertising executives 926

Weaseliest Individual
---------------------
Martha Stewart 4,734
Gary Condit 3,810
Marie Reine Le Gougne 3,475
(French Ice Skating
Olympic Judge)
Kenneth Lay (Enron) 3,284
Michael Jackson 2,009
Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco) 810
Gary Winnick (Glob. Cross.) 483
"Chainsaw" Al Dunlap 342
Sam Waksal (ImClone) 255*

Weaseliest Religion
-------------------
Islam 6,112
Catholicism 5,227
Atheism 4,221
Protestantism 1,710
Judaism 1,147
Buddhism 239
Hinduism 233

What, no Tom Daschle??

Well! I'm not too pleased with California (can't stand Gov. Gray, didn't want to spend all that money for all those programs) but the rest of the country is making me feel a lot better. Apart from Lautenburg and Pile-of-Dung Harkin, all the Dems I wanted defeated were. And Oregon had the sense to vote against their "free" universal health care. How did Wyoming end up with a Democrat for Governor??

If only Minnesota and South Dakota do the right thing... Chaffee can whistle, it won't help. Yay.

Jay Caruso makes Terry McAuliffe eat crow.

The Corner:

END OF THE CLINTON ERA [Jim Robbins]
Remember a few months back when the buzz was about all the Clinton Administration alumni who were seeking office, how we were going to see some kind of referendum on the Clinton years in the wake of the "stolen" election? Reno and Reich never made it to the general election. Bowles lost. Richardson won, but he was a congressman before his service to Clinton, so he wasn't particularly beholdent. A few other lower level Clinton admin. has-beens also lost. Yet Jeb Bush won handily, as did Catherine Harris, and the generally pro-GOP drift of the evening speaks for itself. Just wanted to do a little reality check on that "Clinton wing resurgent" thesis. And there is of course Clinton's hand picked DNC chief Terry McAuliffe, whom I hope will continue in his job for years to come.

He didn't mention how well Lindsey Graham did...

Heee heee heee heee heeeeeeee......

Kristof calls the Left a "cesspool of outraged incoherence."

Balloon Juice, what were the Haitians thinking?

Well, He Didn't Drool.

Kim duToit on Democrats.

ELECTION DAY

The Safety Valve, Gray Davis Alert. A list of all the reasons to fire Gray.
Ben Shapiro, why Gray Davis wants to sue me.
Joshua Ferguson:

What is better, to have no experience in corruption or to be a proven destroyer of our State?
You think that Davis has more experience? You're right, but go check out what type of experience that is.

Indepundit, Scott Koenig with more.

And the rest of them:
The American Prowler on A Gore-Mondale Ticket.

Bill Bennett:

Nothing is too monumental, nothing is too important, nothing is too serious not to become a cause political for the Democrats.
...
I did not think about the foregoing examples as of a piece until I watched the spectacle in Minnesota and realized there was almost nothing the Democrats would not do to win an election. I was a Democrat until my forties — and I changed parties over policy differences with the party of my birth. But, starting with President Clinton's scandals and the willingness of Democrats to defend them, I have become increasingly worried about the soul and ethics of the Democratic party.
...
Abuse of law, cynicism, a win-at-any-cost approach, and lying are not healthy for a democratic politics, or a democratic polity. I am not alone; in a conversation about President Clinton in 1999, it was Senator Paul Wellstone who said, "I think Democrats run a real danger of being a party that doesn't seem to be concerned about values, and doesn't seem to be concerned about morality if, at a personal level, we don't make it crystal clear how disapproving we are of the conduct — the president's conduct. And we don't talk about character."
...
. And their political contretemps — abuse of law, cynicism, a win-at-any-cost approach, lying — have turned the Democratic party into a Nixon party, a pre-1978 Nixon party. It is nothing to be proud of. There is, however, one distinction that Nixon marked that the current Democratic party has not, and that is shame — Nixon knew shame, finally, which is why he resigned and knew he had to rehabilitate himself. We are waiting to see some level of shame from the current Democratic party because today it is, above all, shameless.

John Bono comments on that:

When the party refused to oust Clinton in 1998, it set the groundwork for all the sleaze you are seeing now. So long as the Clintons continue to dominate the party, I believe the Dems are doomed to permanent minority status.

We can but hope.

Jonathan Last:

And so it may be for the Democratic party today. For two generations Democrats have coasted on the caricatures established by FDR and JFK. The Democrat from Central Casting was a slightly corrupt, slightly dopey do-gooder with stars in his eyes and gold in his heart. But a new Democratic caricature emerged this fall: One of the power-obsessed politician who will do anything to win.
...
Democrats haven't just become Nixon, they've become the exaggerated liberal nightmare version of Nixon: Today Democrats are what they believe Nixon was.

The change didn't happen overnight. For a couple years now--since 1992ish, to be more exact--Democrats have been showing signs of a desperate, win-at-any-cost mentality. It started with Clinton's women and then his fund-raising and impeachment. It carried over to Gore's challenge to the 2000 election and Tom Daschle's unprecedented obstruction of George W. Bush's judicial nominees.
...
None of this has been lost on the public. And the angry chants and rabid cheering from the Wellstone "memorial" may have provided the Democrats with a new defining moment. Once the party of JFK and FDR, the Democrats are now the party of dirty tricks.

Robert Bartley:

I sat with a onetime Democratic White House aide over after-dinner drinks and cigars; he confessed, "I keep trying to figure out what the Democratic Party stands for anymore."

That, rather than the immediate outcome, seems to me the real story of tomorrow's elections. An establishment, policy-oriented Democratic Party dominated American politics over my lifetime, but it is no more.
...
The Democrats have lost the intellectual glue that held together their imposing political coalition, at one time combining Southern segregationists and northern blacks, urban ethnics and Harvard dons. Their claims of unique expertise in foreign policy, built with World War II and the greatest generation, sank in the rice paddies of Vietnam. Their commendable civil rights accomplishments turned away from individual opportunity and into group entitlements. Their agenda of using the government to uplift the poor reduced itself to absurdity with the Great Society. Their economic policy, based on Keynesian demand management, dissolved in the stagflation of the 1970s. Under Bill Clinton, their onetime moral authority became a sick joke.

Christopher Caldwell

The late senator was treated as little more than one broken egg in a great get-out-the-vote omelet. The pilots and aides who died with him were barely treated at all. This Machiavellian glibness in the face of death was what left viewers most uneasy. One of our major political parties, or at least a sizable wing of it, appeared to be dancing a jig on the grave of a particularly beloved fallen comrade. What must they think of the rest of us?

And, today Lileks comments on yesterday's debate:

Mondale was a cranky old nasty man who dropped big clanging pieces of boilerplate on the stage, most of which were forged in 1978. How I tire of hearing how everything is going to hell, and how not a jot of progress has been made since Bobby Kennedy slumped over in the Ambassador ballroom. I did learn something about the Constitution, though. As Mondale said:

I'm opposed to late-term abortion, but I also know that the Constitution says that you must protect the life and the health of the mother.

I have the old original version; Mondale is dancing to the remix, so I will grant him that the Constitution does indeed explicitly state this, right between the provisions that grant gun ownership only to redheads and the amendment that permits quartering of troops in private houses if they keep the stereo down after ten. But for me the great fault line ran through this question:

Mr. Mondale, this is for you. This is from Peggy. ``As a businesswoman in southern Minnesota, I'm concerned about technology reaching our businesses and our homes. What is your vision for keeping all of Minnesota on the cutting edge of technology?''

Mondale’s response:

Growing economy, leadership that builds trust. I think right now there should be a reduction in the interest rates.

I’m not kidding. Pitched a question about getting broadband to rural areas, that’s what he says. One word was noticeably absent in Mondale’s reply: INTERNET. Or, for that matter, Fiber, or broadband, or any other aspect of that amusing diversion we call the Web. High-speed internet access in the rural portions of the state is an issue here, because many small towns are served by independent phone companies that can’t afford the upgrades.
...
Here’s Coleman:

What we have to do is have to make a firm commitment to make sure that all of Minnesota is wired, and going beyond wired now, now we're talking about wireless. I had an opportunity to visit with the folks over at Minnesota Wireless in Mankato. Wonderful cutting-edge operation, a tentative conference on technology about six months ago, in that same area.

It is our future.
...
To me, this was the most important moment of the debate - not because it concerned a particular issue, but because it showed who inhabits the current century.
...
I’m not saying Coleman is a bulwark against this scenario - only that Mondale obviously hasn’t a clue. When it comes to the computer, to the Internet, he’s truly Grandpa, the guy who thinks he broke the machine when he accidentally minimized a window.

And this is the guy who will vote on digital issues.
...
It’s interesting to see Mondale go smash-mouth at his age, at this point in his career. Before he entered the race he was regarded by most Minnesotans as That Old Guy Who Lost That Thing. He had receded into the background, earned the statesman’s halo, and eventually come to represent the state of Minnesota for better or for ill. He was one of our own, on his way to a statewide eulogy. But it turns out he’s willing to hold out his wrists for the strings and twitch to the DNC’s script - if they say Norm Coleman channels Satan, then that’s what he’ll proclaim. I always had a hometown admiration for him as a fellow who knew when to leave the stage and make his way in the real world. But now he strikes me as a man who lies for the sake of power with vigor and enthusiasm - and it’s power he never sought to wield again.

Instapundit comments on Wellstone's funeral/campaign rally.

Opinion Journal takes on Governor Gray: "The only power he understands is under the Dome."

Juan Gato:

The election of 2000 brought us fast and hard into the new world of Heisenberg Elections. The closer we come to declaring a winner, the more the other side will declare the count illegal or "unfair".

Orrin Judd:

Maybe Harry Belafonte was more right than we all realize: the pampered and preferred house slaves are all in the GOP. The Democrats certainly treat their blacks like field hands--they're happy to work them hard, but don't want to see them loitering around the big house. How else explain that next Tuesday the Democrats will likely hold the Senate or even pick up a couple seats, almost exclusively because blacks vote the Democrat line at a 90% clip, yet given two sure thing Senate seats--in MN and NJ--and capable black candidates, the Party instead turned to two white guys in their 70s, leaving the Senate the most segregated public space in America?

Meanwhile, black Republicans are given those mere token spots on the United States Supreme Court and running America's foreign affairs. What suckers...

Robert Bartley: Democrats still have Clintonian ethics.

Bill McBride doesn't want Gore's help. Hahahaha!

Heh. Tom Tomorrow doesn't think much of the Dems at the moment, either.

Steven denBeste on American honor.

Instantman quotes John Scalzi:

If you're going to do it, then you should make sure your opponent ends up as a grease spot on the wall, and that his country is reformulated so that it never ever bothers you again.

Lileks on the predictable "dissent."

Oprah favors war with Hussein.

denBeste:

Going into Afghanistan, the moaners talked about how it was no Iraq, and how our overwhelming victory in 1991 didn't prove that we could win in Afghanistan. But we totally changed our tactics, and won in Afghanistan so easily as to shock some people into (temporary) silence. Which is why it's amusing to see that the same moaners are now moaning that Iraq is no Afghanistan.

Dale.

Media Reality CheckBias in the Media!
ditto, on Algore III.

John Derbyshire takes on the NJ "poet laureate"

On the same logic, the state of New Jersey, with a current population of eight and a half million, should boast around 47 Aeschyluses, Socrateses, etc. If great artistic and literary talent were spread evenly across time and space, the Garden State would be teeming with dramatists, architects, and philosophers of the highest caliber. And the leading poet of the state would be a literary genius of such authority and power that his verses would be passed down the centuries with reverence, to be treasured by our remotest descendants.

Bill Quick writes about the Canadian who's been sentenced to beheading:

That said, my first, uncharitable reaction to this is, well, I think we just ought to let Jean "I Hate The United States" Chretien handle this all on his own, without any help from us.

Eh?

Fourteen things to know about the Middle East

Donald Sensing finds remarks from the President about Iraq. Comment:

Sean Hannity did this bit on his radio show yesterday. He (or his staff) dug up all of the Clinton speeches where he spoke about using force against Iraq.

If anything, it kept those nuts who think Clinton was the greatest president ever from calling in to the station for a while.

Hannity does a great Clinton impression, too.

Posted by michele at October 9, 2002 03:44 PM

Quick again:

Please please please please let Big Honest Al be the Donk candidate in 2004. Please please please please please....

Tony Pierce:

I don't want children to see and hear Bob Costas and think that it's okay to simultaneously nostalgize and sterilize popular sports and culture in such a way that you never want to look at it again for what it is: a child's game played by immigrants who wouldn't get a job wiping puke off of porcelain if it wasn't for an abnormal pituitary gland, or in the case of baseball, defection.

(and it gets better from there.) via Dailypundit.

The "Conscience of the Senate"
Juan Gato on Byrd

I've had no respect for Byrd since the Impeachment and this guy agrees:

Since when does Byrd command any respect? I saw him on one of those goofy Sunday shows ADMITTING that Clinton had committed impeachable offense and then said he would not vote to impeach.What a douche-bag.
Posted by: tim on October 10, 2002 09:42 PM

Lileks on Byrd

Dave Trowbridge, The real meaning of dictator:

Despite my disagreement with him, I felt a strange sympathy for Byrd, as for an treasured anachronism. Here was a Cicero for our times, a fierce advocate of what he sees as the mos maiorum, and doomed, like his Roman model, to failure. Fortunately, unlike Cicero, Byrd faces no danger of proscription and execution.

Best of the Web had four headings in a row:

Dont know much about history
Dont know much biology
Dont know much about a science book
Dont know much about the French I took

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Open letter to Russia

Steyn on Wellstone.

Will Warren

Bill Quick, Do you remember? The comments went off-track, but I sure remember. I'd gone into a children's museum to help with a project, and I knew the SCOfFLAws had handed the election to Gore. It was raining. When I left, it was still raining, but the SCOTUS had saved the Constitution. I turned on my car radio and I just got so excited! I was totally thrilled!

JACKASSES
Brendan Miniter, If Democrats are so popular, why can't they win an election fair and square?

Democrats, the Party of Pity

Boston Globe:

The Democrats will soon run out of 70-year-old issues and 70-year-old senators.

Robert Musil on McAuliffe.

Howard Kurtz:

How badly can a political party screw up a memorial service?

Just ask Minnesota's Democrats.

They staged a public farewell for Paul Wellstone that was so over the top, so blatantly partisan, that Jesse Ventura walked out. . . .

In effect, the service was hijacked in a small-minded way that detracted from the memory of Wellstone.

And Cold Fury lives up to his name on this:

I've said it before: these people have no principles whatever. None. They are all about power, plain and simple. It is so damned irritating to be smugly and continually lectured about the frightening lust for power and authoritarianism of the Bush bunch and Republicans generally by this collection of soulless, hypocritical, ethically-challenged head lice who can't even conduct themselves with the barest sense of good manners at a blasted funeral, for God's sake. Were these people spawned, hatched, and raised by lizards? Didn't their mothers teach them anything?
...
[comment] Bravo, Mike. At the silly "peace" rallies last Saturday liberals and lefties showed they have no brains. At the disgisting Wellstone "memorial" last night they showed they have no class.

Posted by: Tom Fagan on October 30, 2002 02:30 PM
...
[comment]How can anybody claim to be shocked? The Party has been spiraling down for a long time. All, and I mean ALL, the current vote fraud is Democratic; ALL the anti-gay campaigning is Democratic; ALL the racist campaigning is also Democratic (it's anti-White). So what do we expect from these people? Ethics?

It's the Al Davis Party: "Just Win, Baby".

Some things are just wrong. Don't explain it, it's just wrong; dating a nine year old, sodomizing a kitten, and the Wellstone Funeral Party.

Hope the Dems lose in MN but don't bet on it.

Posted by: Howard Veitv on October 30, 2002 04:46 PM

Jonah Goldberg:

Like some perverse "Where's Waldo" drawing, wherever large groups of Democrats congregate, you know if you can find Bill Clinton in the picture they will behave like jackasses.

That is what was so offensive about that rally: It shamelessly used Wellstone's death for partisan advantage while its organizers cynically accused their opponents of doing precisely that. Blaming others for something awful you've done is perhaps the defining attribute of Bill Clinton and his legacy on the Democratic party. Wellstone did many good things out of principle — including work with Jesse Helms, a man he grew to befriend, on human rights in China. But he will now be invoked by Democrats everywhere simply to get out the vote, beat up Republicans, and raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

In short, so long as they hold onto the Senate, the Clinton Democrats — who often found Wellstone's principles inconvenient — will find him more useful dead than alive.

Orrin Judd:

So, they can't mention foreign policy or the economy, which leaves them election-fixing in NJ, SD, & MN; gay-bashing in MT, HI, and SC; exploiting the barely cold corpse of Paul Wellstone; and at some point this weekend we should see them trot out their Old Faithful--the race card. This is what's left of the Party of FDR.

Finally, Sheila, whose website is wonderful -- it'll be on the left here Real Soon Now, comments on the Pep Rally.
OpenDocument complains that "Gephart Caves." I had this on the Dem. meltdown week 3, but the hits just kept coming and I lost track.

So, says Ron Rosenbaum, Goodbye to all that!

Lileks on Mondale, but read the whole thing, it's great!

Later, via Drudge, I found the text of an upcoming Mondale ad. It accused Norm Coleman of giving public money to two companies that had laid off 750 workers last year.

Oh, that’s rich. Coleman did indeed lend public money to Lawson Software to lure them to build a big new office building in St. Paul - an $84 million loan made possible by tax-increment financing. I abhor outright gifts to companies just to convince them to build pretty buildings, but using TIF to revitalize downtown St. Paul is a defensible position. Reasonable people can argue about it. And when they’re tired of arguing about it, because it’s boring, they can chew on this:

Northwest Airlines received $230 million from the Federal Government in bailout money after 9/11.

Northwest has cut 10,000 jobs since 9/11.

Walter Mondale is on the Board of Directors of Northwest Airlines.

Oh: and Walter Mondale gets 24K in free airline travel a year from NWA.

...

I will fight for Americans who know it's not fair when a tax bill costs a trillion dollars, and they give 40 percent of it to the richest 1 percent.

Percentage of tax burden paid by top one percent: 36.2% (Source: IRS) Does this mean he’ll try to repeal the tax cuts? It’s not a hard one - yes, or no, Mr. Veep. Would he shift the tax cuts so the people who paid less got more, percentage-wise? Does he think that the top one percent burned the money, buried it in coffee cans, or spent it on Enron ashtrays?
...

And I will fight, as I always have, for minorities of all races and religions and sexual orientation, who deserve to share in the fullness of American life.

This clearly distinguishes him from his opponent, who is running on a platform to deny the fullness of American life to bisexual Asian Zoroastrians.
...
I got some steaks once from a company in Omaha; they were packed in dry ice. It took less than an afternoon to thaw. Mondale made this speech several days after he was unpacked and reanimated by the DFL, so he had the chance to catch up on current events. Surely he knows other nations are on board for Iraq. Which leads to one of three conclusions:

1. Mondale is a blatant racist. Arab allies don’t count. Turkish allies don’t count. He thinks we need more European - i.e., white allies. Is that what you mean, sir? No?

2. Then he believes that we should not go to war unless we have allies. If Germany, France, and other assorted puckermouths spit a nein and a non, then we ought to stand down. Our failure to secure their assent will mean our cause is wrong. This is perfectly in line with something a French gentlemen told me the other day, when I asked why China should have veto power over US military action: “Because they are one-quarter of the world’s population.” Ah. Of course.

Is that what you mean, Mr. Vice-President? No?

3. Then perhaps he believes in his heart that any excuse to avoid military action is a good one, as long as it results in a shiny medal doled out by Nordic bureaucrats.

It’s probably three.

Way to Go, Vlad (The anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler)

I hope Tom Ridge is reading this.

If he'd been in charge, the FBI would be busy trying to make it look like the work of Quaker Housewives, Right Wing Extremists, or Amish Buggymakers already.

And while we're on "homeland security":Ban Astro vans!, Am so a Pundit.

Ivory coast and chocolate.

Lest we forget, George Bush won in 2000.

VodkaPundit on recent history:

I don’t mean to gloss over Kissinger’s crimes. He’s a liar, a killer, and a cheat. But at least he was our liar, killer, and cheat.

Andrea Harris, people frightened by Blue Angels?

John Bono, the speech Jimmy Carter SHOULD have given.

The Color of Thieves on the Peace Prize.

And while I'm about it, in 1993 P.J. ORoarke wrote 50+ reasons why Carter was better than Clinton.

Jonah Goldberg calls Jimmeh "history's greatest monster."

Victor Davis Hansen on the recent unhappiness with Germany

A cynic would see the new German belligerency as particularly opportunistic, coming as it does only after the Soviet threat was gone, after the dream of unification was achieved, and after Berlin is emerging as the capital of a new "modern" Germany. A more jaded skeptic would see in contemporary Germany socialism, pacifism, and relativism shades of a weak and decadent Weimar — with all the attendant extreme reactions to it looming on the horizon. We sadly expect residual anti-Semitism in Germany, but when ex-officials there complain of the power of American Jewish constituencies in New York and Miami, the awful subtext is, of course, that there is no such problem now in Germany, because….
...
If I were a Frenchman, Pole, Greek, or Czech, I would reexamine very carefully the fashionable anti-Americanism of the continent, dissect it, and determine what, in fact, are its real undercurrents and repercussions — before the spooky German rhetoric is turned on them and we, in our disgust, are long gone from the scene.

Photodude, who recently married (and he doesn't look at all as I'd pictured him!) had a couple of posts a couple of weeks ago: this:

Those who question the need for war with Iraq call for more debate, a slower approach, more talk, and for the President to do a better job making his case.

So tonight at 8 the President was to give a 25 minute or so speech on just that topic.
...
So when you wonder why there's no debate, and think the President isn't doing a good job of making his case, keep open the possibility that these things are actually happening, it just isn't deemed worthy of being carried live in Prime Time.

and People don't want to, but regard Iraq as a necessity.