Picture Perfect - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Picture Perfect
by

SPACE CADET
Re: Shawn Macomber’s Hall of Kerry:

The gallery is, not surprisingly, incomplete. Where’s the picture of Kerry in the space suit crawling out of a tube (and looking, for all the world, like The Human Cannonball, or one of the personified sperm cells from Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex”)?

Why is it that every Democratic convention so closely resembles a Bosch painting come to life? What an amazing collection of political monsters; and what a fate awaits the rest of us if they are victorious.
David Carter

On the subject of Senator Kerry’s war experience I believe H.L Mencken put it best: “The most grasping of all politicians is the war veteran.”

Perhaps someone should make the Honourable Senator from Massachusetts aware.
S. Buyers
Potgietersrus, South Africa

OK, it’s time to pin the tail on the donkey (so to speak), or at least a truly appropriate name on the Candidate.

If it is really true that John Kerry made home movies of Himself reenacting His Heroism while in Vietnam (He served in Vietnam? Who knew!) the only possible name for him is Miles Gloriosus, the stock character from Roman comedy recreated for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”. All the better, this name comes with its own campaign song:

“I, Miles Gloriosus,
I, slaughterer of thousands…”

Didn’t Kerry testify that He had Himself committed War Crimes in Vietnam? Did He reenact those for his own camera?
Jim Stevenson
San Diego, California

MATTERS OF STATE
Re: Jacob Laksin’s Confronting Iran:

Jacob Laksin’s article “Confronting Iran” completely misses the point. Perhaps he should write for the New Yorker or for the Democrats.

He seems surprised when the State Department recommends more diplomacy. Don’t they always? “Engagement” is what diplomats do. Does he remember the Lusitania? Or the invasion of Poland? Vietnam? Lebanon? Tehran? Etc. It takes leadership to go to solve problems, not bureaucrats.

It seems Mr. Laksin thinks the U.S. has unlimited power to go everywhere at once. We neither posses the military or political power to do all we wish.

The point is that President Bush is trying to get the U.N, i.e. the world, to actually do something constructive. Before we can act; he must first demonstrate that the U.N. Security Council is failing in its mission, that there is a threat to the world, and there is no more time to waste. Also, it must be proven that military action is the solution, so the world will support us. Otherwise we will unite the Muslim world against us.

Therefore, before the problem of Iran, North Korea, and China can be solved, Iraq must prevail.

Have a nice day.
James Bercaw

BIPOLAR AMERICA
Re: Wlady Pleszczynski’s Johnny Comes Marching:

If Little John is so concerned about uniting the “two Americas”, maybe he’ll let the Bush tax cuts stand. To repeal for those who have worked hard and climbed the ladder is dividing America, isn’t it?
Glenn Murray

John Edwards may well have saying “hope is on the way” but many in the audience at the Democratic National Convention thought he was saying, “Dope is on the way.” That’s what they’ll need after George W. is re-elected in November.
Gaylon White
Kingsport, Tennessee

“The Carolina Ambulance Wreck,” by the Dixie Styx

Somewhere comin’ round the bend
I hear that siren wailin’
It sounds a mournful day is near,
The end of John’s smooth sailin’.

Fer yew kin be as cool as ice,
Yer smahl (i.e. “smile”) as hot as France,
But yew is headed off the road
When they adds the cost to healthcare, boy,
Of yore chasin’ that ole ambulance.
Gene Wright
Laguna Niguel, California

SPLIT DECISION
Re: Wlady Pleszczynski’s Top Clinton, George Neumayr’s Checked and Unbalanced, and David Weigel’s Great Barack Hope:

Brilliant lines by Wlady: “Clinton doesn’t have to talk about himself to have people eating out of his hands or to project absolute command of whatever devious political scheme he wants to impose on his dull-witted followers…. Once a devil, always a devil, and again dizzied Democrats are in the worst position to see him as he is.” Great !!!

Also loved Neumayr’s description of Gore as a “dangerous fool”
and “Jimmy Carter, ever the old phony, knifing people while grinning.”

But the laudatory article on Obama from the USA Today guy doesn’t belong in the Spectator. The supposed next Senator from Illinois is a pro-abortion leftist-socialist. Who cares if he becomes the only black Senator? It’s just another vote to obstruct progress via filibuster.

How about an article on Denzel Washington’s interview on NBC Dateline, where he took on Meryl Streep and Katie Couric at the same time and stood up for our young people in uniform. Let’s run him against Obama!

This may be the first convention that produces a negative bounce for the candidate.

Keep up the good work…
G. Ferguson

MINI ME’S
Re: George Neumayr’s The Boston Me Party:

I totally agree with George Neumayr’s observations on the speakers at the DNC convention. These people are shameless liars and hucksters.

But that said, you have to remember who they are shucking and jiving to; the majority of the American population known as the functional idiot.

For the last 35 years or so the “average” American citizen has been getting dumb, dumber and dumbest. They will believe any lie as long as it’s recited by Dan Rather or it’s in the NY Times. They haven’t got a clue about simple economics and thus buy into any and all class warfare regardless of their own financial situation. They won’t spend one minute doing real thinking about issues of life and death but will practically kill anyone that keeps them from watching the next episode of “Survivor.” …

God help us all.
Greg Barnard
Franklin, Tennessee

How can Liberals devalue the sum of a human life but covet the value of undeveloped individual parts? In such a world, the harvesting of valued parts is no different than the shucking of an oyster to get a pearl. When human beings or anything else only has the value assigned to it by those claiming the power to choose, then we are all only an opinion from oblivion.
Danny L. Newton

KERRY COUNTRY
Re: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Democratic Doubletalk:

Why don’t you extremists just go out and shoot him, like you are so wont to do — since you cannot find anything more dirty on him other than his wife speaks five languages. Your language is deceptive self-righteousness and hate. Clearly, if there is a hell, you’re going, Tyrrell. The Bushes are in flames.
Sincerely,
Ray

I write only to add to Bob Tyrrell’s litany against the UN that both Sudan and Zimbawe currently sit on its Human Right’s Commission, and that the terrorist nation that likely took Saddam’s illegal WMDs and tried to obliterate Amman, Jordan sits on the Security Council. Thank you for a keen eye at the Boston Democrat Circus.
Tim O’Neill
Marco Island, Florida

Since President Bush has urged the EU to welcome Turkey in its ranks without delay, a country with a big and fast growing fundamentalist Muslim population, we know for sure that some powerful Americans are out to actively destabilize Europe. We could have known it from the moment the U.S. joined the only marginally democratic Saudis in their support for the fundamentalist fighters who unleashed a guerrilla war in the formerly peaceful, mixed Christian-Muslim-Atheist Balkan countries, where it was even possible to find a wine cellar in the basement of a Muslim Mosque before the war — but nobody got suspicious because there was little sympathy for a crook like Milosevic either.

Anyway, it is high time for us Europeans to analyze carefully what makes our American friends tick. For one thing, we must digest the fact that many of them are fundamentalists in their own right (45% of all U.S. citizens believe that God created our world in one big splash no longer than 10,000 years ago as described in the Bible, in total ignorance of anything their own great scientists have been digging up — see Gallup). They are only a step away from Muslim radicals with regard to their essential values. At least half the people of the famously modern USA are not Democrats or Republicans, they are hardcore believers above all. They will believe anything as long as it is preached with passion, and act accordingly.

Which is why especially the God- and tradition-loving Republicans shy away from their own party name that contains “res publica”, which means “public affairs” and “state”, which is secular in essence and not clerical. And therefore they abhor the French who have tricked them into a secular Constitution, and they are ashamed of having accepted the Statue of Liberty from them, as they hate the word liberty and being liberal because it sounds French, even though it means freedom too and nothing else. These days, they immensely prefer freedom fries to liberty fries.

I have a gut feeling that many Republicans (and a few Democrats), uncompromising religious warriors, would rather knock some Frenchmen’s and other Europeans’ teeth out than go after militant Muslims. Looking at their choices and preferences, I just can’t imagine what kind of Western values they would want to defend.
Kurt Schori
Biel-Bienne, Switzerland

EUROCENTRICITY
Re: Cailean Iceadadh’s letter (“The Anti-Anti-European”) in Reader Mail’s Conventional Wisdom:

If Europe ever tried to boycott America, that would mean that they would have to get off their butts and work more than 35 hours a week and take a one or two week vacation in the summer like most Americans do, instead of the whole damn summer like French. Go ahead and take your best shot, but it would mean that you would have to WORK!. My regular work week is 60 hours plus. That would kill a European. Europe couldn’t force America to a damn thing! You don’t have the fortitude.
Greg Goff
Casper, Wyoming

Cailean Iceadadh (letters) represents the smug, dumb, arrogant Europe that I (unfortunately) have to live with everyday. You know that Europe — the one that gives billions to Arafat so he can fund the extermination of the Jews. The one that spends virtually nothing on its own defense. The one that taxes people to the hilt. The one that lectures the U.S. about everything yet wouldn’t even stop genocide on its own continent. The one that hasn’t seen a totalitarian regime with whom it couldn’t do business. The one that’s made sure North Korea is becoming fully nuked, and will happily facilitate the same in Iran.

As an Englishman (you know, the one’s you guys rightly dumped in 1776) I’d be happy to dissect some of Cailean’s inane, ignorant and incoherent ramblings.

He’s like all those Democrats who “love” the troops, but hate what they actually do — fight wars. He just “loves” Americans — but hates what they do. Oh, let’s be fair, he seems only to despise Republicans and conservatives. So that’s all right then. I mean, it’s not as if this represents at least half of all Americans.

I know most Americans could care less that particular European (or any) thinks. After all, his little country (Ireland), remained neutral while the UK and the U.S. fought real Nazis. Now it’s sold its soul to a corrupt, socialist, welfare-state addled, anti-democratic enterprise. That would be the quasi-United States of Europe.

As to some of Cailean’s “points,” if that’s not too kind a word. Clearly he doesn’t understand that as individual members of the WTO, European countries cannot impose a “trade embargo” on the U.S. Ireland is not a member of NATO, and no one has asked this little country to supply any troops to die for anybody.

As to his ludicrous diversion into the Crusades, what can one say? It’s clearly escaped his attention that the Crusades were Europe’s last stand against a previous version of Islamo-warmongering. The Mohammedans having reached the gates of Vienna and preparing to subsume all of Europe. Of course, that was at a time when the formerly-Christian Europe had grown weary of that “peaceful” religion and was willing to fight back.

God help us all if Kerry wins — because he and his party are filled with people who think just like Cailean. And contrary to his claims, they really, really do hate the real America and the real Americans who reject their Euro-eccentric view of the world.
David Smith
London, England

Fantastic letter from European Cailean Iceadadh !

It is instructive in that:

• It begins with the reflexive European demand that political speech be restricted,

• Its extraordinary length suggests it could only have been composed by somebody living under a state-mandated regimen of enforced idleness ( filling those interminable hours beyond the 35 one works, unless of course one is among the 10% unemployed and on the dole), and,

• It confesses that despite their desperate cultural snobbery, Euro’s happily buy whatever crap we market to them.

• The most interesting phenomenon reflected in this text, though, is one which I firmly believe is worthy of more study, for it is utterly mysterious. The writer plainly suffers from a delusion that is endemic to Europe. He (she? it? — insert Brussels-mandated PC pronoun here) seems to believe that we Americans are interested in what Europeans think of us.
Paul Kotik
Plantation, Florida

1. I assume from the interesting name that you are from a family that takes its Gaelic pride seriously, and Scottish at that. We have some folks, here who indulge in Celtic names, including myself. I am, however, a mutt. I have a German surname, an English first and middle names, and a forest of Italian surnames in my ancestry. That is what it really is to be an American. The people who settled my area of Virginia called themselves Scots-Irish. An odd and fractious lot, they brought with them the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Randolphs, Masons, and Lees. These men founded a nation that defied the old order. Ordinary men with no family history of privilege or peerage could rise to become just about whatever they wanted to be. Virginia is about to celebrate its 400th anniversary in 2007. That is not old by European standards, but it is very old for us. We are rough, we own weaponry, we do not like being told what to do or how to think. We have faults, and our nation’s founding was tragically flawed with a mark that took 600,000 lives and a Civil War to even begin to correct. But we are good people. We have come to the world’s rescue three times in the 20th century. Our soldiers’ graves occupy your country, France, Germany, Belgium, and countless other places. We came as liberators, and then we left, only staying where we were asked to stay, to lend stability and strength to the defenses of a continent that was battered and paupered by almost 75 years of deadly warfare. We gave immense treasure to help rebuild that continent and those nations. We were the good guys, and we are getting kicked for our efforts.

2. I wish to give you a clue about the United States. Americans ARE their government. In case you haven’t noticed, we have this odd republic, a real one, not a phony Euro thingy… We elect our representatives at the local, state, and federal levels. We elect the President as well. The method is difficult for Euros to understand because it balances the power of the high density generally socialist cities, with the more liberty loving suburbs and countryside. To say that you like Americans but dislike their leadership/government is incongruent.

3. Euros loathe George Bush because he is a real American; sort of rough around the edges, plain spoken, and confident in himself. He also believes passionately in God, his country, and his family. These strong traits are eschewed by aging and weak societies. Appeasement is preferred in Europe — they call it endless diplomacy. I call it bribery, extortion, and blackmail. Bribery for the bad guys, extortion for the poor peasants being taxed into oblivion to support it, and blackmail for friends who are of no threat and have risked life and treasure to defeat your demons. Euros generally prefer weakling nancy boys to lead the US, that way they can abuse it like Baby Huey’s siblings abused him. Boy Bill was loved by Euros because he was as corrupt and cloying as they are. John Kerry is a EuroSocialist (Fascist) just like every other Social Democrat.

I have a university degree in European history. I have noted in my studies, that Europeans have not risen past the serfdom that tied them to their menial lives for thousands of years. They fear what they do not understand, and they do not understand the responsibilities and costs of maintaining liberty. To be sure, many Americans feel as you do we call them Democrats. However, laziness and dependence are not ways to run a society. Europe is dying out. Its birthrate is so low that the population of “native” Europeans is going to disappear in a hundred years or so. Europe will finally be conquered by the Muslims. I wonder what sort of “freedoms” they will bring?

I am sad for Europe. It had the chance to become more than a squabbling group of arrogant ethnic enclaves. It has merely transferred its bent for autocratic rule from unelected Kings and Emperors, to faceless bureaucrats. Its ambition to excel has become a drive to the mediocre. I hope that you change your mind. A strong America is a good thing. Too bad no one listens
to Winston Churchill anymore.
John Schneider
Bristow, Prince William County, Virginia, USA

Mr. Iceadadh: You know you might be right! G.W. Bush just liberated 35 million Muslims. Such a shame, he is a warmonger. But I guess Mr. Clinton must be a warmonger too for preventing the former Yugoslav republics from “cleansing” each other off the map. And Mr. Franklin must be a warmonger for sending 400,000 Americans to their death and freeing half of a continent called Europe.

But you know we Americans can take a hint and we are more than accommodating. I think we will be more than happy to pull out of Frankfurt, pull out of Serbia, and pull out of NATO. And when the Europeans start their petty squabbling as your history is want to do, as the song says — “don’t come a knocking…” as we will be too busy elsewhere. We Americans with the money and resources that are freed up can tackle border security, developing a rationale energy policy towards energy independence, and assure the domestic tranquillity.

One last observation, Mr. Iceadadh, one can be warmonger without a single gun or cannon. Where are the Europeans when it comes to the current situation in the Sudan? Chirac does nothing. The EU is mute. Or how about the Rwanda situation of almost a decade ago? You Europeans sat still until Americans mobilized a token relief force. So Death marches thru that continent like a scythe and the countries who were it’s former masters do little or nothing to relieve the mass murder that is occurring; for the inaction of your continent is as good as holding the gun that is killing innocents. Have you no shame?

I wish you luck and no ill will, but your history bespeaks yet another looming problem of one sort or another, EU or no.
John McGinnis
Arlington, Texas

Regarding the reader mail entitled “Anti-Anti-American,” I find the author suffers from a perplexing affliction shared by many liberals in America: true-leadership phobia. Of course, he (?) is able to cite the usual scapegoat smear that assigns all of the worlds terrorist endeavors against Americans as a mass retaliation to G.W.B.’s policies. What was the source of motivation for terrorist acts prior to September 11, 2001 and G.W.B.’s presidency? That answer is strangely omitted by our Irish “friend.” He questions what has been gained since our offensive was launched against those that are complicit in terrorist activity. The answer is obvious: no further mass murder on our soil, to date. To the author and, unfortunately, quite many Americans, the choice to recognize and directly address those that would cause us harm is too much to stomach. It is far easier to bury our heads in the sand and hope that radical Islam finds a more enticing target. If it was Ireland, I wonder what our “friend’s” opinion would be?
Please withhold my name and source

The writer refers to Bush and Blair “lying…either knowingly or not.” Lying is always intentional, you can’t “unkowingly lie.” You can be misinformed, but that completely lacks the moral complications of “lying.”
Nancy M.

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