The Complexion of the Election Changes with One Tape

The transcript of a videotape, reportedly of terrorist dirtbag Osama bin Laden, could have been lifted directly from a Michael Moore movie - or a John Kerry for President television ad, for that matter. The tape, aired by the al Qaeda propaganda organ Al-Jazeera, is probably authentic - meaning that bin Laden has not yet arrived at his reserved spot in Hell, which is of course a pity.

In the 18-minute video, bin Laden lays out the bottom-line for his terrorist organization - that their principal concern is security. Therefore, they will not attack any country that does not attack either them or "Islam", whatever the hell that means. Clearly, bin Laden means to influence the coming Presidential election, though reasonable people can (and probably will) disagree over who the terrorist scum is supporting (and he does have a dog in this fight, I believe).

The fact that the best he can apparently muster 4-days before the election is a videotape (as opposed to a bomb) is something that I take guardedly as a positive sign.

I am not going to attempt to get into the head of this homicidal psycho. I will make no attempt to analyze what this religious fanatic is trying to say. All I'm concerned about right now is the politics of this. To wit ...

There are several reasons why this could reflect negatively on President Bush's re-election chances. First, bin Laden is still alive - that fact alone should be a negative. Second, in the video bin Laden directly challenges the President in language fresh from Farenheit-911, right down to the references to corrupt Arab governments (that pass from father-to-son, you know) and Bush's continuing to read to schoolchildren about "Pet Goats", or some such thing, in Florida on that fateful day in September 2001.

I hope the fat, obnoxious, Champaign-socialist, a-hole who claims to hail from Flint is very proud of himself for providing our sworn enemy his video talking-points. BTW, I hear his mockumentary is selling very well in Iran these days.

That said, there are two reasons why I think the airing of this video the Friday before our national election is a big loss for Kerry:

1) It ensures that terrorism will be the ONLY issue people are thinking about when they walk into the voting booth in 4 days (big plus to Bush as he commands a comfortable double-digit lead in the "who better to handle terrorism" question in every poll - 20-points in today's Battleground poll, for example)

2) There are people in Kerry’s base (the Michael Moore Kool-Aid drinkers and other assorted pinko, pacifist, blame-America-first "anti-war"-types) who will buy bin Laden's nonsense about ‘Don’t attack us and we won’t attack you’

If Kerry, who will eventually have to say something about this, comes out and says that we need to hunt down Osama and kill him, he loses the Michael Moore wing of his coalition. If he says something like “Well, maybe we need to take this seriously” then he loses everyone else.

Still, there are more than a few reasons why this hurts Bush (as outlined above), but does anyone doubt what his response will be? (Osama must die!) The fact that reasonable people can (and should) plausibly think of Kerry even considering the other alternative (the “can’t we all just get along” nonsense) should doom him with enough middle-of-the-roaders to make the election swing back to the President rather substantially.

John Forbes Gets "Al-Qaqaa" on his $600 shoes

The MSM, in their desperate attempts to elect the Junior Senator from the People’s Republic, I mean Commonwealth, of Massachusetts to the Presidency, put out the story this past Monday that the Coalition (read: our troops) failed to secure some 380 tons of high-powered explosives (RDX, PETN) in the Al-Qaqaa munitions dump in Iraq – and that, of course, it was all the fault of George W. Bush. I suppose they think Bush himself should have been guarding the gate and that he fell asleep, or something of that nature.

Let’s ignore for the moment that the Coalition (read: our troops) have found and either have destroyed or presently will destroy some 400,000 tons of ammo, weapons and explosives in the former munitions-dump known as Iraq. The fact is that this stuff (PETN in particular) is nasty stuff. I’ve worked with it and seen it in action. One or two GRAINS of this stuff can launch a 2-kg slug some 20-meters in the air (forgive my slipping into euro-speak with the weights-and-measures, but I am an engineer after all). It is extremely powerful, dangerous stuff that we do not want in the hands of our enemies either in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter.

However, we simply do not yet know all of the facts surrounding the “disappearance” of this material. Frankly, we’re not even sure, as of mid-morning today, how much of this extremely dangerous material may have gone missing.

Then along comes Major Austin Pearson of the U.S. Army Ordinance Corps – late of the 101st Airborne in Iraq. Here, as summarized by Fox News, is what we know about Major Pearson’s side of the story…

A U.S. Army officer came forward Friday and said a team from the 3rd Infantry Division took about 200 tons of explosives from the Al-Qaqaa munitions base soon after Saddam Hussein's regime fell last year.

Major Austin Pearson appeared at a Pentagon news conference to say it was his mission to go the facility and clear explosives from the base. He said he did not discover that the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported 377 tons of explosives were missing until Tuesday night and he said he promptly contacted military officials.

Major Pearson’s mission, it turns out, was to remove potentially hazardous materials (not just plastic explosives) from Al-Qaqaa and bring them to a rear area (a Logistical Support Area - or LSA - as he continually referred to them) for destruction. One would think that if Major Person, under order to remove hazardous and dangerous materials, had come across hundreds of tons of extremely dangerous PETN or RDX, particularly materials marked with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency, the people who leaked the story in the first place in an obvious attempt to effect the outcome of OUR election) seals, that Major Person and his unit would have removed them and taken them away from destruction. Is that too much of a stretch?

That said, is it therefore too much of a stretch to conclude that either the explosives (which a Pentagon spokesman apprearing with Maj. Pearson said could be more like THREE tons, not the 380 tons reported in Pravda on the Hudson) was gone before our troops ever got there - or that the Coalition (read: our troops) took care of the stuff and therefore it never went "missing"?

Major Pearson admits that he is not an explosives expert, but one has to wonder what basis is left for this story.

This has not stopped John Forbes from hammering away at this issue, though reports are that he’s removed all traces of Al-Qaqaa from his web site and has ordered ads attacking Bush on this point removed from the airwaves (they’re moving on to their old standby, Halliburton - which is also old news recycled for the stretch-run). However, this does reveal a great deal about the type of President Kerry would be.

Kerry has been (at times deservedly) critical of GWB for his seeming willingness to “cherry-pick” intelligence that fits what he wants to believe. But isn’t that exactly what we have here?

Kerry grabs a single New York Times story, one where his own campaign flacks admit that key facts are still unknown, and bases his entire stretch-run on slamming Bush over the allegations contained within. Now it turns out that the story may be made entirely of whole cloth and John Forbes is left with a big, stinking pile of Al-Qaqaa on his shoes. He looks weak, and increasingly desperate to be willing to grab something so flimsy when the states are so high. He flailing in the air, grasping at anything that could sustain him.

I'm left to wonder aloud what his campaign's internal polling is telling them.

One can only hope this episode is enough to convince the mass voting population of two things:
1) that you can no longer trust what you read or see in the MSM, and
2) that John Forbes Kerry cannot be elected President of the United States

I’m having a difficult time saying …

President-elect Kerry.

In fact, it was even difficult for me to type it out; I couldn’t easily make my fingers press the appropriate keys without serious effort.

It sounds even worse when I hear it.

However, the fact of the matter is that I believe I (and the rest of us) had best get used to hearing it.

With one week to go before the first election of my lifetime that really matters, here’s where we stand (poll numbers courtesy of RealClearPolitics):

- George Bush is ahead in national polls by an average of a little over two points
- George Bush is ahead in the electoral vote count 234-228 with enough states “leaning” in his direction (FL, NM and WI) to put him at 276, 6 more than the magic 270 needed to win an electoral-vote majority
- Roughly 95% of George Bush’s base is certain they will vote for him, while only 85% of John Kerry’s base feels the same
- Bush has made strong inroads into the African-American, Jewish and Catholic voting blocks, as well as maintaining his strong support from the demographics that favored him in 2000
- A clear majority, or at minimum a very sizeable plurality, place foreign policy, national security and the war in Iraq as their #1 issue, and (all other things being equal) no Democrat can beat ANY Republican when foreign policy is the top concern of voters on Election Day.

Seems like pretty uniformly good news for our side (the Patriots who want to see George Bush re-elected), right? So why, you may ask, all the gloom-and-doom?

The reason is simple and twofold:
1) The national polls are worthless, and George Bush is not – with one week to go before Election Day – at or above 50% in enough states to command 270 electoral votes (not by a long shot)
2) The national media has only now started to turn out their heavy artillery in their final push to expel GWB from the White House – if you think you’ve seen “media bias” before, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Let’s take the second one first. Anyone who is paying attention now knows that the mainstream media (MSM, for short) were planning an election-eve surprise by dropping about 380-tons of missing Iraqi super-explosives (such as RDX – which Saddam was NOT supposed to have, by the way) right at George Bush’s feet. One problem, apparently the NY Times (Pravda on the Hudson) decided they couldn’t sit on this any longer and decided to scoop (who else?) “60 Minutes”, who was set to air this story the Sunday before the election (hey, the 11th-hour Bush DUI story worked like a charm in 2000, why not go to the well once more?).

The only other problem for Kerry and the MSM is that the story has now blown up in their faces. The explosives were already long-gone (thanks to our months or farting-around at the UN when we should have been rolling tanks into Baghdad) by the time the 101st Airborne could get to them. NBC embedded reports have documented this, complete with video.

Not that any of this is slowing the John Forbes Kerry demagoguery train one bit, mind you. The MSM has served up a juicy morsel for Kerry and he’s taking big bites of it. Kerry’s new attack is that this shows the “gross incompetence” of the administration. Fact just do not matter to him (“Kindly do not attempt to cloud the issue with facts!” George Banks (David Tomlinson) in Mary Poppins), not when there’s an attempt to lie about the (at worst partially) successful Iraq mission to date.

And you don’t think for a minute that the MSM will issue any corrections on their outrageous reporting, do you? Of course not! It is only going to get worse from here (John Forbes himself gave the game away when he stated today that this “affair” was “just the tip of the iceberg” – I expect we’ll see at least 3 additional stories like this over the next 6-days). The MSM’s coverage of the campaign to date is going to turn even those most skeptical about the pervasiveness of media bias into true believers.

The MSM have never before gone so deeply in the tank for one candidate over another and we simply have no way to counter it. The problem for our side is that people will be moved by these stories, no matter how untrue or badly skewed they are. It probably means not less than 3-points for Kerry in the final week of the campaign, virtually guaranteeing that Bush will not achieve the popular-vote majority he desperately desires and so richly deserves.

That brings us to the first point – which is that Bush does not have nearly enough of a lead to counter two virtually certain events:
1) That late-breaking undecided voters will break to the challenger (Kerry) – they always do, and
2) The Democrats have plans in place to commit voter-fraud on a scale never-before seen in any “free” election in history – and there is almost nothing that can be done to stop it.

The first of these points is self-evident. We have to assume that GWB has hit his high-water mark for this election. If he’s at 48% in a state now, that’s probably about as high as he’s going to get. With Nader becoming a non-factor in this race, 48% is simply not going to get it done.

This is especially true when we consider point 2; the systematic exercise of voter-fraud that the Democrats and their leftist allies (MoveOn.org, ACT, etc.) have been planning (and financing) for possibly every day since the Supreme Court ended the madness in Florida in December 2000. In states like Colorado (9 electoral votes), Florida (27), Ohio (20), Wisconsin (10), and at least 3 others, tens-of-thousands of people who are otherwise ineligible to legally vote on November 2nd (illegal aliens, people who cannot verify their address, people who have already voted) will walk into polling places (probably in big cities where vote fraud is a art form) and demand a “Provisional Ballot”. For any of you who don’t know, a “Provisional Ballot” is a vehicle by which any human can walk, crawl or slither into a poling place – without providing any proof that they are registered, or even eligible, to vote – and vote. It is a foregone conclusion that 90% of these votes will go to Kerry, and in states like those listed above, with the narrow margins expected, these “votes” could be enough to swing the election to the communist-sympathizer, traitor and self-described war criminal.

The Democrats have already given away the game here as well – obviously they feel with the MSM providing cover for them that they have no need to hide this outright theft of the election. Tad Devine, a senior advisor to the Kerry campaign, was recently quoted as saying (and I’m paraphrasing only a bit) that “if all the votes are counted, John Kerry will win. Period!” That was not campaign rhetoric. It was a tip-off as to the Democrat strategy for this election – simply put, they are going to litigate the provisional ballots, almost all of which will be fraudulent, until they find some judge and some court somewhere what will force them to be counted as if they were legitimate.

A simple strategy.

Audacious and criminal yes, but also very, very simple.

And do you thing our side will be able to do anything about it? If you think so, consider this: the prevailing belief among a strong majority of voters is that blacks in Florida were disenfranchised on a massive scale during the 2000 election. Where do we get this belief? Why, from the MSM and Democrat press releases, of course. That said, did you know that there has never been a single documented case of a single person (black, brown, yellow, purple or otherwise) who was actually disenfranchised in Florida in the 2000 election? Not a one - zero, zip, zilch, nada. Yet, the belief of widespread disenfranchisement persists to this day.

In 2000, it was confined to one state. Think we'll have any more success beating back the demagogues when it's on a national scale? I didn't think so.

So, the bottom line is that unless George Bush is ahead by not less than 5-6 points in national polls, and at or above 50% in the states where he needs to be in order to get to the magic 270, I’m afraid that we are looking at the prospect that in January we will be witnessing the inauguration of John Forbes Kerry, a certified traitor to his country, and a man so ludicrously disqualified for the Presidency that the very prospect of this scenario should give you goose bumps (I have them as I type).

That being the case, I suppose I should jot down a few thoughts about what I think 4-years of John Forbes Kerry as President would be like. Granted, I only get through the first year, but I think you'll get the point.

For starters, I expect that the GOP will retain a narrow majority in the House of Representatives (Thank God!) but probably lose the Senate through the judicious use of the very same voter fraud outlined above (you don’t believe the Democrats are only interested in stealing the White House, do you?). As such, you can expect the already weak-kneed GOP Senate delegation to lose whatever backbone they may have had previously and basically bend-over for any nominee (Judicial or Administrative) that Kerry sends to them. Kerry’s judicial nominees will make Clinton’s look like Clarence Thomas by comparison.

The GOP faithful will (rightfully) be disgusted with the performance of their senators and we could very well end up with a full-blown revolt on our hands unless someone steps up to take the lead (and Bill Frist sure ain’t the dude). Look for someone like Rick Santorum (PA), Jeff Sessions (AL) or John Kyl (AZ) to come-up big here.

Once the American MSM and world-wide orgasm of Kerry’s victory (or, more appropriately, Bush’s defeat) subsides into afterglow, the realities of the world will set in. Having defeated Bush without even having had to blow-up anything, we can expect that al Qaeda will only become more emboldened and that Iraq will quickly degenerate into more of a mess. Our few remaining allies (who didn’t take very kindly to Candidate Kerry referring to them as the “Coalition of the Bribed and the Bought”) will quickly bail out on Iraq, leaving our overextended and overworked soldiers, marines and airmen at the mercy of a rejuvenated terrorist movement. All of this will be reported in the MSM as being “stunning and dramatic progress” – toward what, they will never specify.

Terrorism will grow dramatically worse as President Kerry makes good on his promise to allow the enemies of the United States (such as the U.N.) veto power over the exercise of our foreign policy (the so-called “Global Test” – with a certified America-hater in Kofi Annan serving as the Head Proctor of the exam). The leftist fringe, to whom Kerry will owe his election, will demand that we be “honest brokers” in the Middle East – which will only happen if Kerry sells-out Israel. Israel in turn, feeling that her very existence is now in very real danger, will (not entirely unjustifiably) lash out at some of her more aggressive neighbors (Syria and Iran), and the entire region will be aflame in war probably by Labor Day 2005. We will likely see another major attack on our soil by then, which President Kerry and the MSM will dutifully lie at the feet of now ex-President George W. Bush.

Kerry, for whom hindsight passed for wisdom during the campaign and who's "plans" in the end really do amount to little more than a cotillion of complaints and loosely connected policy ideas, when faced with the challenge of having to actually do something for the first time in his 20-year political career, reverts to his senatorial instincts and dithers. The problems with terrorism only get worse from there.

Domestically, we can expect that Kerry will get his tax increases, which will predictably plunge the already fragile economy into recession, resulting in lay-offs, unemployment approaching 7% within a year, and federal deficits in the range of $700 billion – all of which will be once again blamed on George Bush.

The rest of Kerry’s agenda will likely be held up (thankfully) as long as the GOP holds the House, but some of the more obnoxious elements (the Medicaid expansion, the “re-importation” of prescription drugs from Canada, the “full funding” of the No-Child(and Teacher’s-Wallet, apparently)-Left-Behind-Act – all of which will be unmitigated disasters played-up as “stunning successes” in the MSM) will likely make it through a narrowly divided (222-213, I predict) House.

The military, falling well short of their recruiting and retention goals – to say nothing of Kerry’s “vision” of expanding the services by 2-Divisions (40,000 men) – will be the subject of endless deliberation in the Administration and Congress, until the Kerry-Edwards Administration proposes the very thing that they demagogued more than any thing else in the run-up to the 2004 election – a draft.

It is at this point that 2005-2006 in America starts to look like a reply of 1968-1969, and frankly I’d rather not think too much about that.

Note that it gives me no joy to put this to electronic paper – but I believe it is my mission in life to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.

You read it here first.

Heaven help us all.

The Biggest Choke in the History of Professional Sports

If you have a pulse, you know by now (or will soon) that the Boston Red Sox have managed to do something that no other team in the history of professional baseball (and, to my knowledge, only two other teams in the history of ALL professional sports) have managed to do – which is come back from a 0-3 deficit to win a best-of-seven series – this series being the ALCS, meaning that the Sox get a chance to defeat either the Houston Astros or the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series.

Sweeter still for Sox fans – they did it against their arch-enemy, the dreaded Evil Empire, the New York Yankees.

And because sports (like politics) is a zero-sum game, that means that the 2004 Yankees will bear the rather dubious distinction of being the first team in major league baseball history to blow a 3-0 lead in a best-of seven, erasing their 101-win regular season and American League East crown.

In the end, Game 7 was not even close. In fact, it was all-but over after the first inning.

Banned to the basement to “watch” the game on computer (the Mrs. controls the TV in the evening for all but special occasions), I could see after the 1st that this game was going to be over early. The Sox were staked to a 2-0 lead by virtue of a David Ortiz home run (why did the Yankees even bother pitching to this guy after Game 4???) and the “modern day Murderer’s Row” of Jeter, A-Rod and Sheffield went 3-up/3-down in the bottom of the first (a fly-out, a ground-out, and a strikeout – the losers’ trifecta).

Even from the vantage point of relying on ESPN’s running box score to monitor the games’ progress, it was clear that the Yankees were going to end up mailing this one in. A second inning grand-slam by Johnny Damon (he who looks like an extra from “Castaway” and had been about 1-for-150 in the ALCS to this point), on the first pitch offered by 2004 all-star Javier Vasquez (who was brought in because of the seeming ineffectiveness of Yankee starter Kevin Brown – he of punching-a-wall-and-breaking-his-non-pitching-hand-as-his-team-enters-the-stretch-run fame), sealed the deal. I stopped paying attention with 1-out in the top of the second inning. Apparently, I didn’t miss much.

So, why was this “The Greatest Choke” and not “The Greatest Comeback”? Well, let me first say that I mean to take nothing away from what the Red Sox accomplished, which is historic and unprecedented. I also mean to take nothing away from some of the truly heroic performances in this series, particularly that of Curt Schilling – who’s strong 7-innings with a blood-soaked stocking (literally a “Red Sock”) in Game 6 was more than anything else responsible for sweeping the Sox into legend.

All that said the bottom line is that the Yankees had two opportunities to close the deal in the ALCS and blew both of them in pathetic fashion. They were 3-outs away from sweeping the series and the former “Doctor Doom” (Mariano Rivera) blew the save. When given another opportunity in Game 5 to close out the Sox, Tom (“Flash”) Gordon – staked to a 2-run lead – couldn’t get a single out in the eighth inning AND gave up a home run to David Ortiz to lead off the inning (why again did they bother pitching to this guy???), leaving Rivera in the hopeless situation of a 4-3 lead, first-and-third, NO OUTS in the bottom of the eighth. Rivera was unable to keep the runner on third from scoring, and the Sox won both games in extra innings (12 and 14, respectively).

THAT’S why it’s the biggest choke in the history of professional sports. That and the fact that the highest paid offense in baseball history managed a pathetic 13-run output over 4-games, after scoring 19-runs in Game 3, alone.

In case anyone is wondering, being so close to Boston and all, my point of view is this: I LOVE baseball – but am not a fan of any team in particular. That said I sort-of like the Yankees, but I really do NOT like the Red Sox. Believe me, I want to like them – they are after all my adopted home-town team – but I cannot bring myself to. Perhaps it’s that I was brought up by a father who is a hard-wired Yankee fan from his youth – but I doubt it.

No. The fact is that this particular batch of Red Sox (with only Schilling as an exception, in my book) is a wholly unlikable bunch of people. Frankly, they look like a collection of felons, hobos, and crack addicts who don’t even know how to wear their uniforms properly (what is that crap on Manny Ramirez’ helmet, anyway?). Oh well, maybe now that they are going to the World Series, the Red Sox can afford to pay Johnny Damon enough to get a shave and a haircut. Only time will tell.

Part of this is also the average Red Sox fan. The preponderance of “YANKEES SUCK” bumper stickers (hey, if they can put it on their cars, I can put it in my blog), and assorted similar slogans (often involving Jeter, A-Rod and former-Yankee/current-Astro Roger Clemens) really bothers me. I think it shows a level of inferiority complex and other mental illnesses that I’m neither prepared nor equipped to deal with on a daily basis. They too are a very unlikable bunch – but now they have their big win. Let’s see what they do with it. The fact that when I look to the north I see that Boston is not aflame is something that I take as a hopeful sign.

Back to politics tomorrow – when I spell out why I dread the thought of John Forbes Kerry pulling off a similar comeback.