This is a very big world...

And I've been to lots of places, but look how many more places I have left to go! (I've visited the countries in red.)



create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Dean Goes Nuts

Everyone's been posting these, but this is a collection of remixes of Dean's red-faced exhortation of the troops in Iowa.

Lileks on the life of a lawyer...

James Lileks notes the life of his wife, a lawyer:

She’s been doing contract work for a firm, and they got hit with a document dump – so she’s off to another town for three days of peering over blurry photocopies in a windowless room. Such is the life of a lawyer. I wonder what people who watched “The Practice” or other such shows in high school will think a few years hence when they find themselves admitted to the bar – hey, where’s the smoldering hunky lawyers, the brilliant glib lawyers with a passionate sense of justice, the slinky stick-thin lawyers who sleep with every partner AND client AND the opposing counsel? What is this? And how come nothing has that dim, sultry, flattering light all the TV law offices have? And why am I at my desk at 10 PM singing a lullaby over to the phone to my child while eating microwaved Chinese? How did this happen?

That's true...

Al Gore

One can't help feeling sorry for Al Gore. The poor guy simply cannot catch a break.
He is scheduled to give a speech today in New York, on............ global warming!!
As my wife, Susan, observed this morning, Al Gore is the kind of guy who puts his finger up to test the wind... and then pisses into it!

Duuh. I'm a dumb Republican.

You may have already heard about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer column by Neal Starkman in which he explains, basically, that the reason Bush is popular is because people are stupid.

I don't have the time or the patience to really respond to this, so I refer you to The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler's typically low-key fisking of the column.

A pair from Lileks

I'm just feeling bloggerific today.

James Lileks has two great newspaper columns that I'd like to call your attention to:

The first, written on Dec. 22, notes inter alia (bringin' the Latin, are you impressed?) the following truths:

Saddam Hussein had a pistol when he was captured, but he didn't use it. He just surrendered without a shot. And people wonder whether he was still getting advice from the French.

. . . .

What bold new thinking would President [John] Edwards bring to this multidimensional world? A new U.N. Security Council resolution opposing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Splendid idea. Just don't enforce it! Make it something nice and stern, with words like "strongly pledge" and "emphatically reject." Then take a vote and have a nice long lunch; New York is full of great restaurants. It's fun being a U.N. diplomat! And while you're up, make a resolution against killer asteroids and musicals based on Boy George, OK? Thanks; kisses.

Howard Dean graciously praised the capture [of Saddam], but you could hear the big BUT flexing in the wings. Sure enough: "The capture of Saddam has not made America safer," Dean said in his big foreign-policy speech. "I have never found the evidence convincing that Iraq was ever a significant threat to the United States." Drawing on his own network of Iraqi informants and private spy satellites, Dean also remarked that Saddam's capture "could have taken place six months ago."

Remind us again why we're getting foreign-policy advice from a former governor of a tiny state most famous for tree sap and ice cream?

And this one, from December 31, in which he elucidates his resolutions for both Bush haters and lovers:

For the haters:

I resolve, as a purely abstract philosophical matter, to consider the possibility that France may not have America's best interests as the guiding principle of its foreign policy.

. . . .

I resolve to ask myself whether my attachment to French approval is uncomfortably analogous to a high school chess geek mooning after the lovely but haughty cheerleader who regards everyone with bemused contempt. She winked once. That was weeks ago. Was it all a tease?

And for the lovers:

Whenever I believe that the president always and only acts from high-minded principle, I resolve to say the words "steel tariffs" and "campaign finance reform bill" in a soft, regretful voice. I resolve to recall the new prescription drug benefit, which sounds nice now but is an entitlement that will grow until it mandates government-funded Pepto-Bismol on tap in every house. And I really, truly resolve not to wish the whole "nukyular" pronunciation thing didn't dismay me at the molekyular level.

A day without Lileks is a day without, well... pretty much just without Lileks, but I really prefer days where I get to read his stuff.

Why an International Tribunal is a lousy idea...

Mark Steyn, as usual, writes a pithy column about why an International Tribunal is a really bad place to try Saddam Hussein.

A very good point, sort of thrown in, however, is this:

Up to the moment Saddam popped out of the spider-hole, the international jet set's line was that deplorable as Saddam's rule might be -- gassing Kurds, feeding folks feet-first into industrial shredders, etc. -- it was strictly an internal matter for the Iraqi people. The minute the old boy was in U.S. custody, the international jet set's revised position was that gassing Kurds, feeding folks into industrial shredders and so forth were crimes against the whole world and certainly not a matter for the Iraqi people. Instead, we need a (drumroll, please) United Nations-mandated international tribunal.

Self-hating Westerners...

I've been blog-free for a bit; but I thought I'd point out an interesting column by Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online from December 30.

He notes that for some reason, many in the West are particularly self-loathing; why else would they spend so much time agonizing over Bush's liberation of Iraq and so little time mourning his victims?

Some choice quotes:

In liberating 50 million people from both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein it has lost so far less than 500 soldiers -- some of whom were killed precisely because they waged a war that sought to minimalize not just civilian casualties but even the killing of their enemies. Contrary to the invective of Western intellectuals, the American military’s sins until recently have been of omission -- preferring not to shoot looters or hunt down and kill insurgents -- rather than brutal commission. While the United States has conducted these successive wars some 7,000 miles beyond its borders, it also avoided another terrorist attack of the scale of September 11 -- and all the while crafting a policy of containment of North Korea and soon-to-be nuclear Iran.

Thus by any comparative standard of military history, the last two difficult years, despite setbacks and disappointments, represent a remarkable military achievement .Yet no one would ever gather even the slightest acknowledgment of such success from our Democratic grandees. Al Gore dubbed the Iraqi liberation a quagmire and, absurdly, the worst mistake in the history of American foreign policy. Howard Dean, more absurdly, suggested that the president of the United States might have had foreknowledge of September 11. Most Americans now shudder at the thought that the former might have been president in this time of crisis -- and that the latter still could be.

. . . .

[On television, another] worried-looking European analyst was raising the specter of a potential oppressed prisoner suffering at "Guantanamo" -- in voicing concern for the rights of Saddam Hussein! French trading with a mass murderer, profiting from selling him arms to butcher his own people is one thing; worrying that the same monster fully understands the nuances of Western jurisprudence while in the docket is quite another. Of course, our European humanist never noted that his own country’s pusillanimity over the last decade was responsible for abetting Saddam’s reign of terror even as someone else’s audacity was for ending it.

I could go on, but you get the picture of this current madness. There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia, most prominently in academia, the media, and politics. We don’t need Osama bin Laden's preschool jabbering about "the weak horse" to be worried about the causes of this Western disease: thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world -- the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest.

. . . .

Hatred of Israel is the most striking symptom of the Western disease. On the face of it the dilemma there is a no-brainer for any classic liberal: A consensual government is besieged by fanatical suicide killers who are subsidized and cheered on by many dictators in the Arab world. The bombers share the same barbaric methods as Chechens, the 9/11 murderers, al Qaedists in Turkey, and what we now see in Iraq.

Indeed, the liberal Europeans should love Israel, whose social and cultural institutions -- universities, the fine arts, concern for the "other" -- so reflect its own. Gays are in the Israeli military, whose soldiers rarely salute, but usually address each other by their first names and accept a gender equity that any feminist would love. And while Arabs once may have been exterminated by Syrians, gassed in Yemen by Egypt, ethnically cleansed in Kuwait, lynched without trial in Palestine, burned alive in Saudi Arabia, inside Israel proper they vote and enjoy human rights not found elsewhere in the Arab Middle East.

When Europe frets over the "Right of Return" do they mean the over half-million Jews who were sent running for their lives from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq? Or do they ever ask why a million Arabs live freely in Israel and another 100,000 illegally have entered the "Zionist entity"? Does a European ever ask what would happen should thousands of Jews demand "A Right of Return" to Cairo?