Yeah. Turned 18 just in time. What an idiot I was: I think my brain was in my (tiny) Birkenstocks.

Jimmy Carter is a waste of the oxygen he breathes.

Goldstein comments:

Carter’s just a fringe element of the Democratic party anyway, and besides—who listens to ex-Presidents? 

And do you honestly believe terrorists don’t have more important things to do than pay attention to the partisan sniping of grandstanding western politicos?  There are nail bombs to make, and buses and subway cars to blow up.

As to whether or not Carter’s comments provide rhetorical cover for the terrorists—of course not!  Carter is simply voicing his dissent, and if a former US president can’t openly criticize his government—publicly, overseas, during wartime, and on the basis of a narrative of events that an investigative panel has already concluded simply does not represent the facts on the ground—well, then the terrorists have already won. After all, aiding the enemy in their propaganda war IS the highest form of patriotism, and nothing says “I love my country” more than “I love my country provided it's run by people like me."

Be sure to read his entire entry. He's got links, too, but I'm too disgusted to follow them right now. Maybe later.

Posted by: Attila at 10:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 222 words, total size 2 kb.

Jeff of Beautiful Atrocities has come up for air. He'd like us to raid our lingerie drawers in defense of the Western World.

I hope those Islamofascists wear size small (not petite) string bikinis in black.

Posted by: Attila at 12:55 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 40 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . has some great footage—and a cool story—over at Trey Jackson's place.

Yes, we treat terrorists who are wounded. That's what we do. I've got to go, though: I'm sending myself to bed without supper because a terrorist had women's panties put on his head once. I'm very upset about the whole thing.

Posted by: Attila at 01:35 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 57 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . sick to death of the term "militant" as a euphemism for "terrorist"?

I was a militant feminist once, but I didn't set off bombs in . . . football stadiums or fundamentalist churches or . . . really, anywhere.

Posted by: Attila at 11:19 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . when I consider the possibility that the West is every bit as decadent as Bin Laden maintains, and that his forces will kill most of us, enslaving the rest and taking most of the world back to the Middle Ages.

And then I think, "not everyone is a lefty moonbat; they're just louder than everyone else."

Posted by: Attila at 12:55 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 67 words, total size 1 kb.

When we get too politically correct, he suggests, we undercut support for the moderate Muslims who must begin to speak up about the evils of jihadism.

You must marginalize the Islamo-fascists. You must shun them.

It is the only way.

Posted by: Attila at 03:38 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
Post contains 46 words, total size 1 kb.

He's just so good; he manages to slap Galloway as if he were a sort of irritating mosquito buzzing through the woods in the summer.

And he explains what is at stake in the War on Terror: everything.

Posted by: Attila at 03:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 40 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . five Scumbags of Interest with respect to the London bombings.

Posted by: Attila at 04:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

They were there, but with all the intelligence gaps we've been looking through a glass darkly. And now (almost), face to face.

Via Goldstein.

Posted by: Attila at 02:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 34 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . the video (at Political Teen) of Christopher Hitchens hitting Ron Reagan, Jr., with a rolled-up newspaper.

It was the finest of guilty pleasures; Hitchens is a lefty I love to love.

Posted by: Attila at 08:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 38 words, total size 1 kb.

Holy shit.

I hope this is just British hysteria, a la all those bogus Jack the Ripper letters in the 19th century. I'm going to assume some joker just sent a prank warning.

But it's very worrisome.

UPDATE: It looks like most of the suspicious packages have been dealt with, and it was just the "centre" of the city that had to be evacuated. So there have been confused tourists heading back to their hotels much too early—not a bad tradeoff for public safety.

I'd still like to hear what happened to that last suspicious item.

Authorities are stressing that this isn't connected with events in London, but I'm not sure they wouldn't say that anyway.

UPDATE: Looks like everyone is safe and sound, but some people did have to sleep outside. That last package was determined to be harmless.

The authorities defend the incident by saying their intelligence was "specific," and "credible."

Posted by: Attila at 05:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 161 words, total size 1 kb.

That's my new idea for supporting Britain. It's shallow, it's fun, and it involves spending money. What could be better?

For the next four weeks I intend to buy as many British products as possible. Especially Tanqueray Ten gin and Twinings Earl Grey tea. I'll replace my Ketel One vodka with Three Olives, and load up on mustard, chutney, marmalade, and lemon curd.

(For a crime writer, Colman's mustard is a two-fer: Dorothy L. Sayers headed up one of Colman's most successful advertising campaigns before she quit advertising altogether to devote herself to writing mysteries.)

Maybe next winter I'll even buy a bottle of Bushmills, though I tend to prefer Jameson, because it's Irish Irish. (And I don't drink whiskey during the summer, because that's a yucky thing to do: summer calls for gin or vodka drinks. Just like I would never wear high heels with shorts, because that's too slutty even for me.)

Gluttonous lushes of the world, unite and support the British in whatever way you can.

Posted by: Attila at 01:59 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 171 words, total size 2 kb.

will it be confusing to schoolchildren that on 7/4 they are supposed to celebrate our liberation from the wicked English, and on 7/7 they are supposed to feel bad that some people living in England were killed?

"The ones we killed in the 1770s were bad Englishmen. The ones that got killed in 2005 were good Englishmen. The ones that burned the first White House in 1812 were very bad Englishmen indeed. The ones that oppressed the Irish . . . can you guess? I'll bet you know the answer to that one, right?"

I hope my kids grow up fast enough that I can bring some nuance into the discussion. I'm especially looking forward to explaining "blowback" as it relates to international diplomacy. The discussion of the Hitler-Stalin pact will be fun. My daughter will learn to block out the sound of my voice, just as I blocked out my own mother's voice as she discussed mathematical principles.

Posted by: Attila at 01:15 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 165 words, total size 1 kb.

Malkin's tracking the investigation. Naturally, she includes tart observations about dangerous individuals who were allowed to remain in London despite their terrorist ties.

Posted by: Attila at 01:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 29 words, total size 1 kb.

I've heard radically different estimates of how many terrorist plots get foiled every year. It's almost impossible to measure such a thing, and if you did you'd have trouble breaking it down by target country.

Lair has a problem with the "we are all Londoners" meme that so many of us indulged in yesterday (including me). After all, he points out, that means we in the West have to switch nationalities every time there's a successful attack. Sure, it's silly (though I'm sentimental that way).

What we all are, he asserts, is infidels. Correct. And "infidel," by the way, encompasses a lot of Muslims: at least two of the train stations selected were near neighborhoods inhabited predominantly by Muslims.

Measuring how many of these plots are thwarted gets snarled up if you try to figure out which "infidels" they are aimed at. After all, AQ and its allies are perfectly willing to substitute one Western target for another.

The point is, the cells are being rolled up continually, on every continent. California Mafia has an update on the cell in Lodi. It sounds like a joke, until you think of how close Lodi is to Sacramento, and how central it is to the U.S.'s most populated state. Shipping, agriculture, the state government: all were within reach.

Comparing the horror of London yesterday with what these motherfuckers "accomplished" in Madrid leaves one underwhelmed—and almost makes me understand those Brits in the pubs yesterday afternoon, yawning bravely and asking if that was all the terrorists had before ordering another warm beer.

It was a failure. The terrorists brought a knife to a gun fight. We know that their ability to pull these things off depends upon their resources: they will always go for the biggest target, the greatest symbolism, and the highest body count. It was a tiny bloodbath, not even in the same league with 3/11 in Madrid.

Even 9/11 was a failure, measured against its goals: AQ meant to bomb the Capitol building, but failed. Its supposedly brilliant planners hoped that the WTC towers would fall over, and on top of other buildings in the financial district. Most analysts agree that the White House was the initial target of the plane that hit the Pentagon: the hijackers hadn't realized how hard it is to see the White House from the air.

The 9/11 attack was supposed to kill tens or hundreds of thousands, not several thousand. And the U.S. government was supposed to be decapitated, with both the Capitol building and the White House in ruins.

These guys are far from defeated, but they grow weaker every year. It will take many more years, but we are winning.

We are.

Posted by: Attila at 12:50 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 460 words, total size 3 kb.

Via Goldstein, the Stratfor brief everyone's talking about. This details a rumor within the intelligence community to the effect that Blair's government knew in advance about the subway bombings. This is being spun furiously by moonbats and Buchananites alike.

The problem? There are two versions of this rumor: in the first, UK authorities told the Israelis about the terrorist attacks minutes before they actually occurred, and in the second version, the Israelis tipped the British off a few days earlier.

Obviously, it's unlikely that both are true, and extraordinarily unlikely that UK security knew anything actionable before this happened. (Sure there might have been one of those memos like the one Condi Rice got grilled about by the 9/11 Commission, which essentially said, "Bin Ladin would like to strike here in the States somewhere, sometime. You betcha.")

This sounds a lot like a combo plate: a little bit of "Blair knew!" with some "the Jooos did it!" on the side.

We're missing the Masons and the Trilateral Commission, but they'll pop up sooner or later.

Posted by: Attila at 09:55 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 195 words, total size 1 kb.

Political Teen has the video of his statement. He's clearly fighting to control his emotions; you can tell by the cadence of his speech. Other than that, he keeps the stiff upper lip.

Sully is so shaken up that he hasn't posted about gay marriage all day. Go to his site, though: there's wonderful stuff on the British reaction, and that strange stoicism that put a lot of Britons into pubs today, assiduously following sports. The sportscasters didn't mention the bombing, and the games weren't called off: it's just the quiet British way of telling the terrorists to get fucked.

Posted by: Attila at 09:16 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 104 words, total size 1 kb.

From a Protein Wisdom commenter comes this map of the explosion sites.

Posted by: Attila at 03:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 16 words, total size 1 kb.

If, as one must suspect, these bombs are only the first, then Britain will start to undergo the same tensions—between a retreat to insularity and clannishness of the sort recently seen in France and Holland, and the self-segregation of the Muslim minority in both those countries—that will start to infect other European countries as well. It is ludicrous to try and reduce this to Iraq. Europe is steadily becoming a part of the civil war that is roiling the Islamic world, and it will require all our cultural ingenuity to ensure that the criminals who shattered London's peace at rush hour this morning are not the ones who dictate the pace and rhythm of events from now on.

Always nice to hear from one of the few remaining intellectually honest leftists in the world.

After the Rodney King verdict there were riots in Los Angeles. My boyfriend—now my husband—called me and told me to stay put that night. I did, and I watched television all evening to stay on top of what was going on. (That was before the internet was widely available, at least in its present form.)

The next day I figured out how to take the freeway around the center of the city. I swung by work to collect my papers and headed to Glendale, where Attila the fiance lived. It wasn't clear how long the riots were going to last, so I went to Vons that afternoon to stock up on food. Although Glendale wasn't too close to the center of the city, we were going to stay inside until we saw actual law and order in L.A.

It was a scary time: a few homeowners in the Bohemian part of Venice had resisted the cultural pressure to not own guns. A few of these people took up posts on their roofs to keep the mostly black hoodlums from invading their homes.

In Koreatown, closer to the center of events, grocery store owner used bags of rice as sandbags to create perimeters around their businesses. These people had military-issue rifles, and each store had at least two men guarding it.

At Vons I got enough staples to last a few days. The line was very long; I could tell it would take around 45 minutes to get out of there. (And I'm an American: five minutes is a long time to wait for the checker in the grocery store.) In the meantime I talked to a black woman about what a terrible situation we were in. No one mentioned race, because it was understood then that the problem was hoodlums versus civilized people.

And so it is with muslims: the vast majority are decent, but those who are must be willing to condemn those who want to bring Western Civilization down.

There is no room for waffling, here. AQ wants to take us back to the 12th century.

And I'm not going.

You might want to take this moment to choose sides.

Posted by: Attila at 02:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 498 words, total size 3 kb.

I hope I'm being clear.

Posted by: Attila at 01:30 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 13 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Quite eloquent.

Posted by: jody at July 07, 2005 08:14 PM (uWBw8)

2 Perfectly clear:-)

Posted by: Heather at July 07, 2005 08:18 PM (nafy6)

3 100% true. fuck them all the cunts

Posted by: MARVEL at July 21, 2005 08:43 AM (qeRgj)

Hide Comments | Add Comment