Music of the Day: Quad Venti, Colors

Yesterday was semi-momentous; MLB and I drove off the mountain to see a high-powered pulmonary specialist, who gave us good, but weird, news. Let’s just say that the truly dreadful possibilities associated with her recent respiratory problems have more or less been assuaged. Time now will make the difference in her full recovery.

So, we stopped at a restaurant we like to visit when we hit The Big City and we indulged in a good meal and a good margarita each. I knew before I ordered that the green chile enchilada was not a good idea, but I thought, “what the hell, let’s celebrate.” Oh yes, it was tasty and good and oh-so-filling and when we got back up the hill to the ranch, I celebrated our good news with a beer before turning in. All was well with the world; MLB was going to get better, with time and patience and love and care.

At 2:15am I thought it best to get out of bed, on the assumption that puking on the clean sheets would likely get me banished to sleeping in the garage again, so up I got, and then I spent the next 90 minutes wandering around various parts of the house, taking slow, deep breaths to quell the nausea. I sat in the library for a while, read a few pieces from my new issue of Commentary, and then when the alarm bells had stopped going off in my nether regions, I stumbled back into the bedroom, and went back to sleep.

But, my sleep was fitful and I think I dreamed writing up a piece for the blog that went something like this: Senator McCain’s foreign policy speech I alluded to in my previous posting here was on my mind and so was Mr. Rush Limbaugh’s fevered denunciation of the substance of the speech. Now I have to admit that I have not read the transcript of Senator McCain’s speech, but I did see the taped replay of it on C-SPAN and while some parts of it were a little off-putting, and other parts of it were fluffy, Mr. Limbaugh’s reaction was so nearly delirious that I had to laugh. He was concerned, in particular, with Senator McCain’s suggestion that we forge better relations with other democratic nations in the world, perhaps even establishing something like a “league of democracies,” I guess on the old model of the League of Nations (and implicitly rejecting the United Nations as a non-functioning and non-functional international organization). Senator McCain also said we ought to listen more to our European friends and that we should more carefully consider their points of view as we think about and discuss our own policy decisions.

This had Mr. Limbaugh all exercised, and while I didn’t hear his entire argument, I think I know how it goes—McCain isn’t a conservative, he’ll sell America down the river in order to appear less like a “cowboy” than the current president, he’s in the thrall of the national, and international, news media, and that American sovereignty is in jeopardy with Mr. McCain at the national helm. Perhaps. On the other hand, it seems more likely to me that Mr. McCain was saying, at this point in the run-up to the national election, what needs to be said to both preempt potential Democratic criticisms of his proposed policies and to, more importantly, establish that he’ll be willing to listen and talk with friends around the globe. I do not think for a minute that this means that Mr. McCain would take advice that jeopardized American security or interests, but apparently Mr. Limbaugh believes that.

Of course it’s easy for Mr. Limbaugh to criticize Mr. McCain’s statements because Mr. Limbaugh isn’t trolling for votes and Mr. McCain is; and Mr. Limbaugh doesn’t have to give a damn if our allies take us seriously or not, but Mr. McCain does. As noted above, the speech wasn’t great, some of its ideas were a bit mushy, but in the main I thought Senator McCain said what needed to be said.

So much for my 2:15am reverie. No more green chile enchiladas for me for a while.

AJ.

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Fourplay, Chant

On March 5 of this year, in this fine space, I wrote a short piece called "H. Chavez, Venezuela, and Colombia." I said things were getting interesting south of the border; things just got a little more interesting. The Colombian military just confiscated 66 pounds of URANIUM from a FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) stronghold; remember that FARC is an organization that favors kidnapping and drug sales as its two major "funding sources," and that it has been in the business of thuggery for nearly one hundred years. Now it appears that FARC, supported rhetorically and materially, by Mr. H. Chavez, the petty tyrant in Venezuela, meant to use the URANIUM as a sales item in the world of terrorists eager to get their hands on nukes.

Yesterday, Senator McCain gave a foreign policy speech in Los Angeles and in it he mentioned that we must be better neighbors with the countries south of the border; this is true, and as I noted in the March 5 piece, Colombia is a good neighbor to the United States. Venezuela is not a good neighbor, neither to the United States nor to any of its Latin American neighbor-states. While Iran and North Korea continue to attract most of the attention in the nuke-acquisition business, and the nuke-distribution business (particularly the North Koreans) keeping a watchful eye on both FARC and Mr. Chavez seems like a really good idea. If the thugs in FARC can get their hands on URANIUM, there's no telling what the Venezuelan government has gotten its hands on and might be willing to pass along to its titular allies in the terrorist world, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

And with that happy thought, have a pleasant day.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Spyrogyra, You Can Count On Me

Mrs. Clinton claims as her excuse for the recent Bosnia-flap that she utters "millions of words a day," which sounds like a lot and now makes me have more sympathy for Mr. Clinton than ever before. No wonder he fooled around. . . .

Her recollection of landing under "sniper fire" in Bosnia was, she says, a mistake and shows how "human" she is; had a similar explanation been offered, say, by President George W. Bush for a similar mistake, the howling, led probably by Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, would have been immediate and scathing. Bush would have, again, been called a moron for making such a mistake, for being "human." But, again, as always, the Mrs. gets a pass on being called an idiot or a moron because she's the Mrs.

This is a small thing, almost an insignificant thing, but it is an indicator of the tilt of the playing field in the mainstream media.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Gerald Albright, Georgia On My Mind

In the last week I’ve been across the country twice by airplane, as you already know if you regularly read this screed. And I’ve done some driving in that time, too—and the interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that I haven’t noticed any of the following interesting things:

No bumper stickers that say, “Death to Osama.”
No billboards reading, “Kill Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, and Saudis.”
No signs anywhere calling for, “Blood for Oil!”
No advertisements in newspapers that said, “Bomb Iran Into the Stone Age.”
None of those things saying, “We Hate All Arabs and Islamists.”
No obvious cases of the dreaded, “Islamophobia.”

I did see two “Obama” bumper stickers and one “Hillary” bumper sticker, on separate vehicles. Those Dems are mobilized! On the down side, I didn’t see a single “McCain” bumper sticker—the man must have no money.

The other thing I saw a lot of was ordinary folks, going about their business, taking their kids to and from school, driving on freeways to their jobs, heading off to church on Easter Sunday, people enjoying a meal out with friends and family on Friday evening, guys with beer guts mowing their lawns, dufus-looking kids riding skateboards in the street, and people clustered around a big screen TeeVee watching college basketball.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM’S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Chris Botti, Tell Me So

Being on the road without MLB is not a whole lot of fun.

Five hours in an airplane is a long time for someone who is having back spasms.

Usually I freeze half to death on an airplane; this time I worked up a sweat without doing anything other than reading or listening to music.

Airplane manufacturers keep making seats too small to accommodate the girth of way too many typical passengers.

I thought I saw a co-worker from the 1970’s on the airplane; because she was an unpleasant person I didn’t particularly like then, I didn’t speak to her to renew the acquaintance. Her hair was dark, but the roots were grey.

Getting from one end of the country to the other in half a day is pretty damned amazing, even if the plane was too warm and overpopulated with hefty passengers.

I’ll probably jinx myself for life by reporting this, but only once have my bags been misplaced by an airline—they were delivered a few hours later, safe and sound—and that was on a trip to Atlanta about twenty years ago.

The worst part of the trip to Mom’s neck of the woods was standing in line at the car rental office; I had a dozen people in front of me, with another two dozen behind me, and there were only three harried clerks processing all the paperwork. It took a while, but they were efficient and polite. All the customers seemed to be polite, too.

The bed in Mom’s guest room is, for me, profoundly uncomfortable; I will sleep on the floor to try to get some relief from the pain in my lower back.

Mom believes that American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are routinely committing war crimes (specifically by killing “30,000 innocent civilians”) in Iraq because that’s what she has heard on television/network news.

Mom hates Bill O’Reilly. I don’t think Bill O’Reilly would hate my Mom.

Sleeping on the floor sounded like a good idea; practically speaking, however, there was no real “sleeping” that got done, just a few hours of lying around on the floor.

Having two margaritas in the middle of the day is good medicine for a bad back.

I’m not sure if hearing the news is a good thing or a bad thing.

I thought I had found the only Starbucks’ on the planet that doesn’t have wireless capability, just three miles from Mom’s house—so much for blogging away from home. But, as it turns out, I forgot to change the wireless setting on the laptop. Ooops.

Mom is watching something called “The View” on television; this program features four women all talking simultaneously—I believe that in some previous iteration this program may have featured the boorish Rosie O’Donnell, who may have left the program because she was more outrageously boorish than the other women. Because I have read everything I brought with me, my Policy Review, my Claremont Review of Books, and because I don’t have access to the internet here, I must entertain myself in a more meaningful way than watching “The View”—so I am pulling my fingernails and toenails out with a pair of vice grips. I will also insert an ice pick into my sinus cavities. And if this program lasts much longer I will set fire to my face with a propane torch. . . .

The Dems are still talking about an “exit strategy” from Iraq, but of course they are not talking about the most significant, and best, form of “exit strategy,” which is victory. Instead, their fine-sounding term is just another way of saying what the knights in Monty Python’s movie The Holy Grail said when they encountered the attack rabbit, to wit: “Run away! Run away!” But, you must admit, the phrase “exit strategy” sounds impressive, thoughtful even, and perhaps, because of that word “strategy,” it is vaguely military-sounding. And “exit” sounds pretty good, too—you know, that’s what you do when the movie is over, you just go ahead and exit, no muss, no fuss, you don’t even have to clean up after yourself, you just leave the empty popcorn and Milk Duds boxes on the floor and . . .you. . .exit. Someone else will come along to clean up the mess. Same concept in war, I guess—you just leave when it gets untidy or lasts too long or you encounter some setbacks or failures, or in the present case in Iraq, even when you encounter some success. And now I’m thinking of an old stage direction that seems appropriate—Exit, Stage Left. Yeah. . . .

It’s nice to visit Dear Old Mom and all the wonderful people who are such supportive, loving, giving, positive influences in her life—but it’s better to be home.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.