Monday, August 27, 2007

Vietnam Water On The Brain

When President Bush cited the Vietnam War as justifcation for staying the course and winning in Iraq, Democrats loudly and disingenuously objected. Of course ignorance of the Vietnam War remains frightening among liberal circles with a particularly insulting deceit offered that we were somehow responsible for the Cambodia holocaust because of our supposed escalation of the war to Cambodia.

The facts don't bear this out. North Vietnam had garrisoned some 300,000 soldiers in Cambodia with their VC surrogates, attacking South Vietnam and at the same time building up the Khmer Rouge. The US began bombing these bases in 1969, with no objection from then-Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk, because of his tacit collaboration with Hanoi, was overthrown by General Lon Nol, who then ordered the Communist Vietnamese out of his country. The North Vietnamese Army promptly attacked Cambodia; only then, in late April 1970, did the US strike into Cambodia to clean out enemy bases. The attack destroyed these bases but Congressional outrage bullied the US into pulling back before finishing the mission.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it. Bush actually leads, and Democrats howl in protest while trying to bully us into abandoning victory. It's why the Democrats are becoming less credible and relevent to anything.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Inconvenient Truths About Hansen And Hillary

Two of liberalisms modern gods, Hillary Milhous Clinton and NASA gloabl-warming scaremonger James Hansen, have the intellectual sincerity and reliability of Michael Vick guarding a dog kennel. Hillary Milhous Clinton gets an interesting comparison while James Hansen gets skewered for his inaccurate data and then goes verbally postal about it.

What we have here is the discharge of more hot air than mankind could conceive over millenia.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Where Are The Lead Changes?

Jeff Owens looks back at Watkins Glen and believes NASCAR's increase in race winner points has intensified the excitement of the chase to the Chase. He cites the fact that several drivers overdrove their cars and spun out while in the general area of the leader and that Jeff Gordon spun out while leading with two to go; he also notes how Carl Edwards almost crashed on the final lap trying to catch Tony Stewart, and he cites some driver quotes to the effect that they were trying hard to win the race.

Owens notes how skepticism of this minor increase in race winner points - which is aimed at seeding of Chase contestants when the top twelve in points are reracked for the season's final ten races - began as soon as the change was announced and persisted as the season ran through one uncompetitive race after another. Owens' argument, however, begins falling apart when he calls the Watkins Glen GP "the most furious competition we have seen all season." Obviously Owens ignores the incredible war for the win in the Firecracker 400 at Daytona, a finish infinately more ferocious than anything that happened at Watkins Glen.

The points weren't particularly on the line, since the spread among the top twelve is for the most part too much of a chasm to matter. It is hard, however, to equate the varied spinouts of this Watkins Glen race with particularly great racing. If anything, they showed how useless road courses are to racing, since whenever someone drove hard they spun out.

But the key problem is really pretty simple - if they were really trying that hard, where were the lead changes?

By now of course it is undeniable that Winston Cup has been in a competitive funk for many years now, and Watkins Glen was just another Dead Lane Era race. The Jeff Owens article, though, comes amid recent weeks of rather public defensiveness by NASCAR about the quality of its competitive product, a defensiveness justified with continued slumps in ratings and attendence at Winston Cup races.

The increase in race winner points really affects nothing because all it does is seed the reracking of points for the playoffs and adds nothing to the actual point award for drivers; it does not make winning races relevent to the championship. And for all the rhetoric about wanting to win at Watkins Glen, all season long this minor increase in points hasn't done anything as far as the intensity of racing.

To live up to its billing, this points change would need to see racing like in the Firecracker 400 finish every week - the drivers would have to be fighting for the lead every race, lead change records would have to be threatened or broken, something that bhas not happened to any relevent degree since Bristol reached 41 lead changes in 1991. Ken Squier noted decades ago, "Lead changes tell the story of why this kind of racing provides the ultimate in competition." This remains as true today as back then, because lead changes are the only credible gauge of a race's competitiveness. And this increase in race winner points falls short yet again.

Talladega has regularly exceeded 40 lead changes every race in this decade; there is no reason why every other track can't do the same.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Blockhead Barack, or Idiot Obama

Barack Obama is a total idiot. He proudly proclaims how he was supposedly right in opposing the Iraq War - even as it continues to progress in our favor - and now says he'd invade Pakistan if they don't get serious about finishing off Al Qaida cadres holed up in the mountains.

One has to wonder why he opposed the Iraq War when he's so macho for invading Pakistan, since the Iraq War involved destroying a terror-sanctioning regime rearming for more direct aggression and now entails protecting a nascent democracy from overthrow by Iran/Syria-backed guerrillas. But the more one wonders, the more one realizes this is in keeping with what passes for foreign policy priorities with the Democrats - ignore America's enemies and instead punish our allies.

It shows in the "15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers were Saudi" retort common to Bush-haters denying Iraq's alliance with Al Qaida; it is an implicit demand that we leave Iraq and instead invade Saudi Arabia. (The Bush-haters, BTW, never mention the ethnicity of the other four hijackers, who were from Baluchistan, a region controlled by Iran where Iraq recruited quite a few terrorists) This is the mind of someone not serious about who America's actual enemies are; scream about Saudi Arabia (cerrtainly groups in that nation do fund terrorism) but stop pretending that it is more dangerous than Saddamite Iraq.

It also shows in the history of Democratic presidencies. Though John Kennedy understood the reality of Soviet-backed aggression against South Vietnam he nonetheless allowed the overthrow of the Diem regime, which crippled Saigon's government at the worst possible time of that conflict. Jimmy Carter a quarter-century later did even worse, quietly sanctioning the undermining of the Shah in Iran and the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, both of which were promptly replaced by regimes sanctioning international aggression. Bill Clinton may not have been to that level of incompetence but he hardly comes out a winner in his less-than-sincere efforts against Islamo-Arab imperialism amid half a dozen major attacks and the open flaunting of sanctions by Iraq toward rearmament and sanctioning of terrorism (you do rememnder the Iraq Liberation Act of the 1990s, don't you?). And of course we had the grotesque specter of Nancy Pelosi going to Syria and prostituting herself to that regime, wearing the oppressive headwear that Islamo-Arab imperial societies practically staple to women to keep them in strict line.

Blockhead Barack is merely continuing a Democratic Party tradition of being total idiots about international security, a fit of idiocy involving dancing around reality.