From Red Lipstick To Telling Some Punk What's-What

A Second Life for Seconds, the 1966 Cult Classic That Made Audiences Sick

Column: What the Clintons tell us about American democracy

Bodybuilders Think This Dude Is Too Ugly to Get Hot Girls

21 Must-See Documentaries & Interviews on Filmmaking

Sex tourism: Thought it was just men who flew abroad for squalid sexual kicks? Meet the middle-aged, middle-class women who are Britain's female sex tourists

On Forgetting the Obvious

CIA 'helped Saddam Hussein carry out chemical weapons attack on Iran' in 1988 under Ronald Reagan

Fleetwood Mac Guitarist Bob Welch Commits Suicide

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Conservative Prof. Has Awesome Response to Guy Who Called Him the ‘Biggest Embarrassment to Higher Education in America’

I Don't Care - Obama Is Awesome! (No, It's Not A Cult - What Could Make You Think Like That?)

Beware What You Want (You Just Might Get It)

Pity the poor liberals. It seems that everything they've ever said and believed about the Iraq war was wrong. Not that they care - the truth is arbitrary to them. Getting their way, getting their choice of president, was all that mattered:

While the media have been quick to run with WikiLeaks’ U.S. State Department cable releases to undermine Washington’s efforts to effect stability in unstable parts of the world, it is slow, if not silent, in giving credit where credit is due. Although other credible sources confirmed it before WikiLeaks did, in receiving similar disinterested responses from the media, it should be clear now that President Bush’s concerns about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program were well-founded.

The 2003 Iraq invasion by U.S. forces also launched a massive effort to find WMDs. By late 2003, as determined in a review by a Wired Magazine editor of WikiLeaks documents on the issue, the Administration was losing faith WMDs would be found. But, as Wired reports, the WikiLeaks documents clearly show "for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction. . . . Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam's toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."
 
A September 2004 New York Times op-ed by the former head of Saddam’s nuclear research program supported this, as well. He wrote:

"[T]he West never understood the delusional nature of Saddam Hussein’s mind . . . he lived in a fantasy world . . . .  giving lunatic orders . . . he kept the country’s Atomic Energy Commission alive . . . Saddam fooled  . . .  the world . . . . [O]ur nuclear program could have been reinstituted at the snap of Saddam Hussein’s fingers."
 
Of note too is a January 2004 revelation by Syrian journalist defector Nizar Nayuf. He reported there were three locations in Syria where Iraqi WMDs had been transported prior to the 2003 invasion and were being stored. He also revealed some of these sites were being built with North Korean cooperation. This explained why three years later Israel attacked a nuclear facility being built in Syria by Pyongyang — and Syria’s subsequent failure to criticize Israel for fear of drawing further international attention to what Damascus had been doing.

Ahh, delusion. It's such a wonderfully common thing today. Where would we be without it? Where would liberalism be without it? One has to wonder, considering:

To the extent that there is such a thing as a "peace movement" in America, its members are a contemptible lot. But why are peaceniks so unworthy?

For one thing, because pacifism is dumb. It is merely the reductio ad absurdum of the trivial truth that war is bad. Philosophers and statesmen have a wide range of opinions as to when going to war is wise, justified or necessary. Only a child or a simpleton thinks the answer is "never." Thus the "peace movement" tends to attract the dull and the immature.

To be sure, under some circumstances it takes courage to stand against one's government. A public pacifist in Nazi Germany, or in Iran or North Korea today, would be an admirable figure notwithstanding the naiveté of his ideology. By contrast, being a pacifist in 21st-century America entails risking exactly nothing.

Well, nothing but the country, that is. Like we said, pity the poor liberals.

After this latest round of lies, and political fiascos, they're never getting this one back.

Ho Lee Shit

"A death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming."

-- Christopher Hitchens, writing on The Adam's Family known as North Korea - I'm telling y'all: that situation ain't as simple as Saddam's - and finding a confrontation with cultism, turning people thin as a piece of Slate.

An End To The Chemical Brothers (Not Techno)

"Iraq yesterday executed by hanging Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein's chief enforcer and supervisor of mass killings, also known as 'Chemical Ali' for using chemical weapons to kill tens of thousands of people.

He was the cruellest and most violent of top Iraqi leaders under Saddam Hussein, his first cousin to whom he was wholly loyal. He had already been sentenced to death four times, most recently earlier this month for the killing by poison gas of 5,000 Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988."

-- Patrick Cockburn, trying his best to cheer me up - and it's working really well - unlike those liberals**, who keep claiming going to Iraq was a "waste", while posing as The Independent.

**Isn't it funny how calling liberals "liberals" really pisses them off?

I Have Seen The Enemy (And It's Us)

"It is easy to mock the thousands of activists, officials and ministers flying to Copenhagen in their jets, driving around in an immense fleet of limousines, and collectively emitting more carbon dioxide than a small African country—all to force the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprints. But it is one thing to accuse them of hypocrisy in not living out their beliefs. Casting doubt on their belief that global warming poses an imminent threat to life on this planet is another.

To question so much scientific expertise and governmental authority seems arrogant or foolhardy—even in the city where Hans Christian Anderson wrote about the little boy who blurted out that the Emperor had no clothes.

Can so many experts be wrong? Well, it is worth remembering that the experts were supposedly united about the apocalyptic dangers of the Y2K millennium bug. Half the world was persuaded to spend an estimated $600 billion to save us from disasters that embarrassingly failed to materialize in the countries and companies that omitted to take any pre-emptive action. Then intelligence agencies around the world were allegedly so convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that we went to war, only to find—zilch. In both cases there was a solid foundation of truth on which enthusiastic professionals and governments constructed an exaggerated scare story that the media lapped up. I was skeptical enough to delve into both those scares and rapidly found the experts were not as unanimous as supposed. But the dissenters were persuaded to keep quiet, bar a handful who were ruthlessly stereotyped as mavericks or worse.

In each case the driving force was 'groupthink.' Irving Janis defined this as 'a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.' The symptoms include:

'Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group; Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as evil, biased, etc.; Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group; Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus; Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.' Campaigners against climate change show remarkably similar symptoms."

-- Peter Lilley, putting the world's delusional political class up against the wall, with no last requests or even the offer of a cigarette, because they're guilty, guilty, guilty of using cultish thinking - in an attempt to snooker us all - including The Wall Street Journal.

Being An Artist Means Bravery - Not Slavery

"When I first saw the Obama Joker poster on my block in April I tried to read the website featured in the upper right-hand corner, but it was too pixilated to decipher. Is anonymity part of the artist's message? Possibly. However, if anonymity is not a part of the message, can you blame the artist for wanting to remain anonymous given the irrational and racially-charged criticism the poster has received?

I find it hard to believe that the Obama Joker creator is the only serious detractor (assuming that it is a critical commentary) within the art community. And I'm sure the incendiary criticism will keep others from creating similar images. But regardless of political affiliation, the art community must embrace all rational dissenters. Art must not exclusively serve the interests of any presidential administration.

It's time for the art community to return to its historical role in political affairs, which means speaking to power, not on behalf of it. Which leads me to the second case where art enters politics on a mass scale. The power of art, in combination with the suppression of free speech or a free press, has been used as a tool by authoritarian governments to control their citizens. From Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, art has been used to deify leaders while preserving the position of the ruling class. Most artists would not want to be referred to as tools of the state, but in the case of Obama's administration, that's exactly what they've been so far. "

-- Patrick Courrielche, speaking to my fellow artists - who have been acting like a bunch of pussies - on what their actual role is, using Reason.

Barack "Hypocrite" Obama*

"Surreal,...the guy who was against the war every step of the way, including the surge, pays tribute to Iraqi independence in the aftermath of Saddam,...fine by me."

-- Allah Pundit, who seems happy - while I can barely keep my food down - listening to all this Hot Air.

*And don't leave out the Democratic Party, the French (I could tell you stories) and anyone else who was against seeing this moment become real. I knew that "war is sacrifice" going in, but this one - surely - took it's toll, on the battlefield and personally, so I get no pleasure sharing this victory with anyone but George W. Bush, the now-free Iraqi people, and my fellow veterans and patriots. The rest of you pussy crybabies can go suck an egg, because that's all you've been these last eight years: One giant rotten fucking egg.

In case you haven't noticed, I've lost all respect for your kind. You faggots have been the worst American farts in history, for sure, and for shame. We didn't lose the war, as you always said, but you definitely lost me - and I'm never coming back.

Democrats: They Can't Win Even After Winning

"Let's face it, this is shaping up as George W. Bush's best month in years. The last time the 43rd president enjoyed this kind of vindication was when a bedraggled Saddam Hussein was pulled from a hole in the ground by American soldiers in 2003. All of Barack Obama's efforts to cast the Bush administration as an immoral stain on American history have not merely collapsed, but collapsed on the heads of Bush's most public and vocal critics."

-- Abe Greenwald, showing that time - and integrity - can do wonders for a person's image, also in Commentary.

The Truth Is Bush Set Him Free (To Attack Bush)

"I know that if Saddam Hussein had been there the man wouldn't have been released, and he probably would've been executed."

-- Laura Bush, on the shoe-throwing incident in Iraq - and what it's true meaning was - on FOX News.

They Don't Call It "Spin" For Nothing

"As the world knows now,  a particularly juvenile Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at George Bush in Baghdad Sunday. Bush characteristically made light of the situation. If there’s one thing many can agree on about the president, it’s that he doesn’t take insults too personally, at least in public. Good thing too, considering all the abuse that has been heaped on him in recent years. I can’t imagine I would have behaved the same way. With my temper, I would probably have picked up the shoe and gone after the dopey journo myself.

Well, maybe I wouldn’t have. The clod probably did Bush a favor, making the president look good. And Bush could use it, because I can’t think of a public figure in my lifetime who has been so reviled except Nixon.  And Bush never did anything provably wrong. He didn’t cover up an illegal break-in, try to sell a Senate seat or even have oral sex with an intern in the White House (and then claim it wasn’t sex). He just did his job to the best of his ability.

Oh, yes, I forgot, the WMDs. “Bush lied and people died.” Or did he? If he did, then so did those many dozens of Congress people and foreign leaders working off the same information - not to mention that no one has ever proven those WMDs weren‘t there.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as the famous “argument from ignorance” goes.

But more importantly and more apposite to today’s event was that other, oft forgotten, reason Bush went to war in Iraq - that the only way to bring true peace to the Middle East would be through democracy. He wanted to spread the democratic system preemptively.  A lot of people have sneered at that idea lately, but while they were sneering Iraq has inched forward toward a democracy.  It’s even turning into a (somewhat) decent place to live. That buffoon-like shoe chucker - his name is Muntazer al-Zaidi from Al-Baghdadia channel which broadcasts from Cairo - proved it. No matter what happens to al-Zaidi now (and it won’t be much if anything), it will be nothing like what would have happened to him if he had hurled a shoe at the president during the previous Iraqi administration of Saddam Hussein. As we all know, in that case, he would either have had his tongue and scrotum cut out or both, if he would have survived at all.

And that’s the point - something good has happened.  Something very good."

-- Roger L. Simon, cutting through the over-whelming (and over-whelmingly stupid) liberal lying, for Pajamas Media.

The Clean-Up Woman

"We inherited a law enforcement mentality where you punished the crime after it happened, instead of trying to prevent the crime...

...We inherited,...the failed Camp David Accords, and as a result the Second Intifada. Yasser Arafat was in power, stealing people blind and working with terrorists,...

We inherited a Lebanon with Syrian forces there for 30 years. Now, Syrian forces are out. There is a democratic government in power -- yes, being challenged by Hezbollah -- but the prime minister has survived and they've elected a president. The Lebanese army is out in the country for the first time. And they are friendly to the United States.

...Saddam Hussein dragged the region into a war and lost over a million lives. It dragged the U.S. into war. He murdered his own people, terrorized his neighbors and sought weapons of mass destruction. Today? You have a multiethnic, multiconfessional democracy that isn't threatening its neighbors.

So, I just don't understand this argument that it is so much worse. I always say, 'as opposed to what?' Syrian forces in Lebanon and no democracy. Saddam Hussein in power, threatening his neighbors and us. The Taliban in Afghanistan. The Palestinians and Israelis in an open intifada. That was the better Middle East? And it wasn't as if politics wasn't going on -- it was just going on in radical mosques and the madrassas, whereas now it is going on in the open. And yes, once in a while the Hamases of the world will win, but frankly I'd rather have them out in electoral politics trying to explain how they will fix the sewer system than running the streets with their faces covered, being the glorious resistance.

Is it done? No. But we'd have never gotten on this different path without Iraq."

-- Condoleezza Rice, untying the rhetorical knots on real politiks that Democrats have used to bind American foreign policy - before she hands the mop and broom off to them, of course - in The Wall Street Journal.