Thursday, April 19, 2007

More is Better

Who would have thought Texas would lead the way?

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

All Derb All the Time

What a month of heroism for John Derbyshire. First he outwitted his Iranian captors, then he prevented that massacre at Virginia Tech.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Hide the Mails

The least transparent administration in memory:
The White House is being accused of improperly trying to hide e-mails about government business by using unofficial e-mail accounts.
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Those e-mails were discovered on a Republican National Committee e-mail domain called gwb43.com. That domain is not part of the official White House communication system.
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"They wanted to make sure that no record could ever be found of what they were really up to in the White House," Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told CNN.

Wonkette has posted on this earlier.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Cowardice

Apparently uncertain if people were paying attention to yesterday's demented outburst, Derbyshire is back at it today, calling the British soldiers cowards and calling for them to be punished when and if they're freed:
Once again, it's me and Ralph Peters on the same wavelength, deploring the cowardice of the British sailors and marines kidnapped by Iran. When it happened, I said I hoped the ones who'd shamed their country would be court-martialed on return to Blighty, and given dishonorable discharges after a couple years breaking rocks in the Outer Hebrides (which, believe me—I've been there—have a LOT of rocks). Now, I confess, I wouldn't shed a tear if some worse fate befell them.

The Ralph Peters piece he refers to is in The New York Post. Peters take the same basic view as Derbyshire, but additionally aruges that US and Australian Mariners would never be so weak as the British.
THE greatest shock from the Middle East this year hasn't been terrorist ruthlessness or the latest Iranian tantrum. It's that members of Britain's Royal Marines wimped out in a matter of days and acquiesced in propaganda broadcasts for their captors.

Jingoism aside, I can't imagine any squad of U.S. Marines behaving in such a shabby, cowardly fashion. Our Marines would have fought to begin with. Taken captive by force, they would've resisted collaboration. To the last man and woman.

Derbyshire tries to brush aside criticisms that he doesn't know what they've gone through and are still going through and therefore can't expect them to do what he perhaps could not:
I nurse a quiet hope that if put to the test, I would stand up as well as any Marine. Whether or not I would, however, is irrelevant. Whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to.

Keep nursing that quiet hope, Derbyshire. This is one of the worst examples of armchair war-mongering I've seen. He's got a lot of nerve to support our troops being over over there and yet to call them cowards when they're captured. When's the next episode of Keyboard Kommandos?

Kerry-McCain

Fresh from the Baghdad walkabout fiasco, here's news that McCain approached Kerry about being on the 2004 Democratic ticket. As if Republicans didn't have enough reasons to be suspicious of McCain. His campaign is nearly done, I think, although it might take him a while to realize it.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Crosscut

Cascadia has a new online news magazine. I'll be checking back periodically to see if it's any good. Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster is the major force behind it, and Knute Berger's on board too.

Lament of the Derb

John Derbyshire outdoes himself:
“15 British Agressors [sic] must be EXECUTED.” That was the placard being held up by some beetle-browed Iranian outside the British Embassy in Tehran. Well, I don’t entirely disagree. I certainly think that those British captives who have let themselves be put forward on Iranian TV, that woman wearing a headscarf, and the young man apologizing to the Iranian gangster-rulers, should be court-martialed for dereliction of duty when they get back to Blighty, with shooting definitely an option.

How on earth can Britons behave like that? A previous generation would not have done so.
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What has happened is multiculturalism. The British no longer feel that contempt for other nations that sustained them for so many centuries.

Apparently Derbyshire will be happy if the Iranians just go ahead and execute the hostages, as he thinks those soldiers are spineless and unBritish anyway.

Teaching the Holocaust

Well this sounds ridiculous:
Schools have avoided teaching the Holocaust and the Crusades in history lessons because they are concerned about causing offence to Muslim pupils or challenging "charged" versions of history which children have been taught at home, government research has found.