Welcome Back Roundup
I expect a lot of people will be surfing the blogs looking to figure out what they missed over the long weekend. Here's a roundup of some good stuff:
> Thanks so much to Dale of Okie on the Lam for helping out and guest posting here through a difficult time for me! He did some great work, and I hope you'll keep checking in with him for some more. For an example, which he cross-posted on this site, but why not go over to his and read about the most brilliant mainstream media gambit since British conservative Bruce Johnson called for giving nuclear weapons to the Iranian mullahs: The LA Times' Jonathan Chait wants to put Saddam Hussein back in power.
There's just not much to say to something like that.
> Do check out my little Christmas song about the exploding Palestinian Granny. Also my summary of a great catch of a pattern of deceptive Iraq reporting by Flopping Aces is worth your time.
> A moderate Muslim condemns terrorism and is expelled by his mosque. Happens every day, you say? Yeah, but in Tulsa?
>Lileks on vacuous relativism in children's movies:
If the current filmmakers had made “Ol’ Yeller,” the dog would have been allowed to stay rabid and chew all the locals. Why, bitin’s what a dog does! And I wouldn’t say he was mad. Why, sometimes I think the crazy ones are the only sane folk around! And who are we to say what’s sane and insane, really, in a world where – AAHHH! JESUS CHRIST! HE BIT ME! GOD, GET HIM OFF!
>Finally, a comment even better than this pointed one from Garfield Ridge on Baker and the "ascendancy" of "realism" showed up in the Weekly Standard:
So let's add up the "realist" proposals: We must retreat from Iraq, and thus abandon all those Iraqis--Shiite, Sunni, Kurd, and others--who have depended on the United States for safety and the promise of a better future. We must abandon our allies in Lebanon and the very idea of an independent Lebanon in order to win Syria's support for our retreat from Iraq. We must abandon our opposition to Iran's nuclear program in order to convince Iran to help us abandon Iraq. And we must pressure our ally, Israel, to accommodate a violent Hamas in order to gain radical Arab support for our retreat from Iraq.When you play poker under realist rules, it costs extra to fold. In fact, probably about as much as it does to stay in and turn another card.
Imagine how much it would cost us for the privilege of restoring Saddam Hussein to power?
ALSO: Huzzah! Russian FSB officers kill a top Al Qaeda poobah in Dagestan, opting to use exotic new "gun" technology instead of the commonplace "polonium-laced sushi" method. Wow, who do you root against in a fight like that? Al Qaeda, sure, I know.