I was all set to lend my (considerable) weight to the Thompson campaign, but with Dave Burge entering the race I might have to reconsider. I mean, consider how much cooler the presidential motorcade will be after Dave's modifications.  And I'd bet he wouldn't cruise through Dealy Plaza at any whimpy 15 mph either. No, he'd be screaming through, and I challenge any Lee Harvey's or Grassy Knoll Gunmen to get a clean head shot off at a target moving at 80mph.
    Seriously, after last nights underwhelming Republican debate I am on board with Fred and I'd like to invite my readers (all two of you, thanks for the traffic Mom) to visit I'm with Fred. 
    Hmmm... how's about a Thompson/Burge ticket?
   

  

  Fifty years ago today on May 24, 1957 my uncle Hugh Jackson McLaurin took off from McCord AFB in Washington state for a routine training flight in a F-102a. Just a few minutes into the flight the aircraft began to experience power loss. Ejecting from the aircraft was the obvious option; however, at the time he was over a populated section of the base and couldn't be assured that the plane would not crash into a nearby parade ground occupied by a company of US Army soldiers.  Rather than risk harm to them he stayed with the plane piloting it to an unpopulated area. By the time he "punched out" there was insufficient altitude for his chute to deploy and he was killed. He was 33. 
    Soldiers on the parade ground that day requested that they man the honor guard at his funeral. A few months later he was awarded a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross for his selfless actions that day.
    His fascination with aviation can be traced, according to his brother, to an afternoon in the 1930s. They were working the fields of the family's North Carolina farm when several squadrons of planes from Myrtle Beach AFB flew over while evacuating from the path of a hurricane. After that he knew he wanted to fly and at 19 he joined the Army Air Corps in 1943. He never saw action in WWII but saw plenty in Korea where he was awarded his first DFC for extraordinary skill in bringing home an aircraft significantly disabled in combat. 



     Aviation was his life, and I recently found out that he published several articles on the topic. One, published in the March, 1951 edition of Flying, entitled 13,100 mph -Strait Up described training in a pressure chamber for high altitude flight. 


I never had the pleasure of knowing Uncle Hugh. All this happened three years before my birth, but I was named after him, and this has been a point of pride for me all my life. I'm very proud to be descended from such men, and I can only hope that if faced with a similar decision I'd show as much valor. 










    

    During a visit to a national park back in the late 70s I was once approached by a Hare Krishna.  He greeted my girlfriend and I with an effusive "Hiya Honeymooners! Where 'ya from?"  Knowing him for what he was and being unrepentantly sarcastic  I responded with the first thing that popped into my mind: "Utopia".  A video cam would have come in handy right then because his expression was priceless. He was at once stunned, terrified, and confused. He was only able to stutter "I..I don't believe you!" before literally running away and cluing me into a very effective tool for navigating air ports. 
    I'd inadvertently challenged his narrowly focused indoctrination and his only available response was flight. Comical. 
    Now 30 years have passed and we don't hear so much about cults like the Hare Krishna or the Moonies. Instead todays young, lost, gullible searchers are more likely to find themselves under the sway of Noam Chomski than Sun Myung Moon. Different master, but with the easily duped the more things change...
     I was reflecting on that incident this morning while perusing the news. Adam Housely has been  "on the ground" in Venezuela this week as protests and violence have erupted in response to the closing of dissident media outlets by Hugh Chavez.  And I strongly recommend his blog on that subject found on foxnews.com.
     Adam's able to convey the unrest there in blog form much more informatively than any brief on-air report. And while I reading this I pondered what lefty champions of Chavez like Cindy Sheehan and Harry Belafonte are thinking now that he has abandoned any pretense of being other than a scurvy little dictator. 
     Surely even they now understand the truth that the rest of us have seen from the get go. Do the get it now? Unfortunately I got my answer while reading the comments section of Adam's blog. I give you Alejandro from Mass:
      

Hi Adam, thanks for your live coverage of Venezuela's ongoing protests. A couple of questions: If the people of Venezuela, like many around the globe, see the "hypocrisy and totalitarian nature of Chavez," as you wrote, then why did they re-elect him less six months ago? Also, if polls show that, "80 percent of [Venezuela] watches and supports RCTV," as you wrote, and Chavez went ahead and yanked the situation to great condemnation (including your own), then can we use the same logic to condemn other politicians who pursue policies widely rejected by their countrymen, like the case of the Iraq War in the U.S.? Might that be another instance of "hypocrisy and totalitarian" rule? Thanks in advance for your reply. I look forward to more of your dispatches. — Alejandro (Northampton, MA)

ADAM: Alejandro, You can paint the picture any way you want it. The fact is, I believe in freedom. In the United States, you can speak out against President Bush, Iraq, taxes anything you want. Here, you'll be shot or put in prison ... or gassed like we were.

   It's a perfect illustration of liberal oblivion. The guy was respectful and not hysterical, and his questions gave the appearance of being well reasoned. But in merely asking them in this context Alejandro revealed his entrenched liberal mindset. Even with the truth of Chavez' corruption in plain view and the Venezuelan people facing  the wholesale theft of their liberty he can only fall back on the default position of all liberal debaters: America is the worlds greatest evil and George Bush is, as Hugo ranted before the UN, the devil. (Sigh...Alejandro, there is no moral equivilance between Chavez and Bush. )  Is there any "evil doer" anywhere in the world today vile enough to shake these guys from their torpor? Or, like my Krisha friend,  will they continue to soldier on in single minded devotion to their deceivers? I hope for their awakening, but I'm not holding my breath.

   

    Woo boy!  An Army of Rosie supporters are circulating a petition to have Elizabeth Hasselbeck fired from The View after she went all "Linda Blair"  on Rosie last week.  Their position is that sweet, demure Rosie was beset by the vicious, spittle spewing Elizabeth while calmly attempting to reason with her.  
   But that's not all! It seems that they feel that The View has become, under the iron hand of Hasselbeck's dominance, an outlet for raw, unchallenged right wing propaganda. Umm...
    Paging Dr Freud.

    Wowzie! Color me surprized!  Who could have ever predicted that granting Hugo Chavez power to rule Venezuela by decree would lead to his abuse of that power by nationalizing key industies and quashing dissenting media outlets.
After all, this is the guy who represented his country with such class during his address to the U.N. last year. And who could doubt the good intentions of someone who's garnered the endorsement of Harry, Cindy, and Jesse? Seriously? Add to that Jimmy Carter's involvement in monitoring elections there and you pretty much have a solid case for a paradise realized in South America.
     So I'm shocked. Shocked and awed by Hugo's behavior. Somebody needs to sit him down and give him a good talkin' too.

  Cue Rosie painting herself as a victim in 5...4...3...2...   

   (And just in case you're still not sure of the character of the Rosie camp there's this.)

    I was just reading about Rosie O'Donnell's latest diatribe on The View, and I feel the need to send out some blog love to Elizabeth Hasselbeck. As The View's "token" conservative Liz must sit opposite America's most notorious, caustically bombastic, left wing ideologue as well as a host of fellow View members and guests with a collective IQ of 30 and EQs even lower while they spew anti-American venom daily.
    Judging from the audience, she has precious few allies there. Meanwhile, Big Ro garners huge reactions with every incoherent riff she spits out - and the more wacky and distant from reality the better. 
    She's been stalked and she was written into an episode of Law and Order as a double rape and murder victim. (I loved the show, but won't watch again). She'sderided on left wing blogs and is constantly treated with condescension by her intellectual inferiors on the show. 
     It can't be easy, but there she is every day. Given, even with all of that it's still a pretty nice gig most of the time, and it's not like she's on patrol in Baghdad, but I certainly don't envy her on this. It's a testament to her character that she hasn't bolted. If fact, now she's going to out last Rosie.
     So, Elizabeth, on behalf of myself and those of a like mind, THANK YOU for fighting the good fight for reason and sanity.

(and for those of you who are on patrol in Baghdad, you're giants among men (and women) in my estimation and I don't have sufficient words for the thanks y'all deserve)

    I've been a bit distracted for the past couple of weeks manning the "FREE PARIS HILTON" hotline, so I've gotten a bit behind in my blogging.  Miss Hilton has indeed gotten herself in a bit of tight out in California. Meanwhile, the other Paris seems to have it's own set of perpetual problems.

    When I first heard that the conservative, reputedly pro-American Sarkozy had been elected over the socialist candidate I was elated.  Even though I take guiltless glee at bashing the French I'd still love to be proven wrong. I mean, there's so much to like and even love about France and French culture. So I'd love nothing more than to find that I was wrong in every regard about their decline. Sarkozy's election seemed a nudge in that direction, and I had a nice "atta boy, France!" blog post outlined in my head. But before I even got it written Sarkozy appeared to pull the old bait and switch when he appointed anti-American Hubert Védrine  as his foreign minister.  OY!  Verdrine is a prominent proponent of the doctrine of containment of creeping Americanism, and the balance of Sarkozy's proposed cabinet selections aren't exactly  designed to inspire joy in the American breast.

      What's the deal? Is this some cleaver ploy on Sarkozy's part? Or is he getting in touch with his true inner frog? Game or more of the same? Pro- American or non?  Well, I'm just a guy in his pajamas , and I don't come within 5000 kilometers of possessing a sophisticated understanding (or even rudimentary understanding, for that matter) of the political realities he faces. But the mere fact that the French electorate handed him a tidy margin is encouraging.  

    Could it be that rationality thrives behind the convoluted facade presented to the world? Does there exist the vital will to live in the collective French psyche?  Well, the jury's still out on that one.  After all, France does have a history of finding it's nerve only when it's too late.  I pray that's not the case today. Like it or not, they're family, and we'd be horribly affect by their demise. 

    So, come on France!  Reach deep and shake off that fuzzy headedness. It's not too late!  And meanwhile I'll be giving the Sarkman a cautious nod for now (which I'm sure is a load off his mind, eh?). We'll know in a couple of years if there's any cause for hope.

Update: The Verdrine Thing Falls Through

    Not only but Sarkozy has appointed a pro-American, pro-Iraq war guy. See the details here. An emotional roller coaster!

 Liberal Dictionary

Pronunciation: 'chI(-&)ld
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural chil·dren /'chil-dr&n, -d&rn/
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English cild; akin to Gothic kilthei womb, and perhaps to Sanskrit jathara belly
1 a : A person over the age of 18 who has volunteered for military service in order to defend his or her country    and who is now in service in Iraq.

       Yep, how many times have we heard liberals refer to the men and women of our armed forces as children. As in "those children are being sacrificed for the sake of Haliburton profits".  This is as demeaning as it is inaccurate. To hear this language you'd think we were rounding up kids from orphanages to send over as cannon fodder. 

      For examples of actual children in combat on must look to the likes of Al-Qaeda. There was a recent report of parents of a mentally retarded 13yr old who sold him to Al-Qaeda in order that he carry out a suicide bombing and, therefore, be of some service to Allah. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it?
   
     Meanwhile, according to the libs,  what rational people understand to be a child in it's mother's womb is to them merely an inanimate glob of protoplasm. And not until this glob makes it's way out of the birth canal and takes a breath does it gain status as a human child. At that point, presumably, liberals would forcefully defend this child from being sent into combat. However, prior to that a lib would have no problem with this glob having it's brains vacuumed out in order not to inconvenience the mother. Go figure.

              

    British researchers have data that suggests that marijuana use can trigger temporay psychotic episodes in certain individuals.  Well now. That explains my first marriage. Now, if you'll excuse me I'll be getting back to my doritos and Blue Oyster Cult.

Chip's Faves

Favorite Example of Animal Rights Lunacy : Just when I think PETA can't get any nuttier...

   ...they do something like this and totally restore my faith! I'm guessing that PETA members imagine life as a Disney movie complete with utterly virtuous, talking pandas and spoonfuls of sugar .  This time they're bemoaning the common sense practice of referring to animals as "it".  Really, I kid you not - go check it out.
       I certainly don't want anyone to abuse their pets, but these guys are just a couple of years away from calling for them to be given the right to vote.
       A couple of years ago the PETA folks ruffled a few feathers (pun intended) among my fishing brethren when they published this educational comic book warning the kiddies of Daddy's cruelty towards the fishies.  I understand they were handing these out to children at public gatherings. Good thing they didn't hand one to my daughter with me around.


Fact de France of the Week



    Turns out there's a country that holds France in lower esteem than the US. Who'd a thunk it? Actually, this kind of restores some of my faith in French judgment.

(hat tip to hot air)


(Least) Favorite Insane Democratic Misadventure -  Now they've done it!



    I can't muster too much sarcasm on this one given the gravity of the situation. Still, finding material for this category is just too easy. Last week the United States Senate followed the House in opting  for surrender by passing the soon to be vetoed  Iraq Supplemental Spending Bill. The topic has been blogged to death by far brighter minds than mine, but I'll post the depressing stats anyway:

House-  Yea 218
                Nay 208
Senate   Yea  51
                Nay  46

You can join the White Feather Postcard Campaign to let our Congressional losers know how you feel.


Stand Up Guy of the Week - Joe Liebermann




      It's obvious that Joe is a man of true integrity. Rather than pander to the demands of the fringe left he's stood his ground on the war and paid a heavy price. We can all be thankful that he didn't give up after the primary and leave us with the likes of Ned Lamont. If the bulk of Dems were like him they might not have lost me and many, many others.
       Well, there were few bright spots during the Spending Bill debate, but Joe's speech defending sanity and denouncing the bill  was one of them. Here's a taste:

     "Do my friends really believe that this is the way to convince Iraqis, and the world, of the goodness of America and Americans? Does anyone in this chamber really believe that, by announcing a date certain for withdrawal, we will empower Iraqi moderates, or enable Iraq’s reconstruction, or open more schools for their children, or more hospitals for their families, or freedom for everyone?"

   *** Stand Up Guy Runner Up - Jon Voight  ***

        Yes, I know he carries the taint of having had Hanoi Jane in his lap once, but  he's a stand up guy nevertheless. With Hollywood being the hopeless lefty cesspool that it is, it's all the more shocking when a voice of reason is heard above the din. So I was pleasantly surprised by Jon Voight's appearance on O'Reilly last week. He's not saying anything we don't know already, but simply  hearing a movie star speaking truth to idocy is enough to give one pause. Hot Air has a link to the video.

 Favorite Quote of the Week

      " I operate under the theory that when my political opponets are committing suicide there's no reason to murder them" 

      
        John Boehner on the Michael Medved Show discussing whether he would consider any effort to censure Nancy Pelosi for her Syrian escapade.


Favorite Instance of Fire Melting Steel  (which, of course, is impossible)

     I'll defer to my fellow townhall blogger Hopefully Onesimus who made this interesting point . Check out his post from this morning.

    I used to get steamed when  Hannity and Colmes, O'Reilly, et. al. would have Sharpton and his ilk on their shows. "Why are they giving these creeps national exposure?" Then I realized that everytime a Sharpton, Jackson,  O'Donnell,  Frankin, or Sheehan opens his or her mouth near a microphone hundreds of conservatives are created.
    
   Well, about an hour ago I saw an item at Hot Air that prompted me to head strait over the NRA web site and join up. Assuming it's not a parody (which is entirely possible),  this op-ed piece by Dan Simpson at toledoblade.com is an incredibly sobering hint of the totalinarian impulse that, in my opinion, springs naturally from the liberal mind. Go read it, but be prepared for hypertension.

    Like the Sharptons, Jacksons, O'Donnells, Frankins, and Sheehans we need more Dan Simpsons out there sharing their vision of an America more Orwellian than Jeffersonian to bring clarity to the muddy waters of right/left discourse. He made a beliver out of me. Next stop: Gun Shop. 

Correction: I had erroneously called this guy "Dan Gibson" ...it's Simpson.

Update! Dan Simpson parodied by the mighty Iowahawk! Funny, funny stuff.
   

   

  Reade Seligmann's alma mater, the Delbarton School, has awarded him a medal for demonstrating "courage, nobility, integrity, and charity"
   Imagine that. Reade managed to weather 13 months in the crosshairs of America' s liberal elites and race baiters without once seeking absolution from Sharpton.

   The Student Senate of the University of Rhode Island voted last night to reverse their previous revocation of the URI College Republicans status as an office campus organization, wrapping up what was for them a very valuable lesson in constitutional law within a public university system.
   Last November the College Republicans ran ads for a satirical White Heterosexual Male Scholarship (of $100) in the school's paper to shed light on the inequities of race based scholarships and admission policies. They faced derecognition by the Student Senate as an official campus organization if they refused to pubicly apologize for the stunt.
   The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education quickly became involved pointing out to administrators and the senate the unconstitutionality of the move. Facing pressure from F.I.R.E., public outrage, and at odds with the university administration the senate finally fully realized their position and voted to drop the matter. 
    Such abuses are S.R.O. for college administrators nationwide, but this case was unique in that it was another student organization threatening to illegally deny students of their rights while the URI President came down on the side of the constitution and directed the senate to relent. 
    Congratulations to the College Republicans for fighting the good fight. And thanks to F.I.R.E. for their relentless efforts on behalf of student rights.

    I caught pieces of Bill Moyer's Journal last night. I say pieces 'cause I frankly can't watch too much of this tripe without developing an arrythmia. It was basically the old "Bush Lie/People Died" bit. But the really hallucinatory bit was near the end featuring Moyer's and Dan Rather earnestly discussing "our craft".  (Presumably that craft is journalism, but it's really anybody's guess, eh?) Nauseating, and I refuse to even provide a link.