Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Terrorist “Armies”

Liz Cheney – Retreat Isn’t an Option – washingtonpost.com
No force on Earth — especially not an army of terrorists and insurgents — can defeat our soldiers militarily.

Okay. I know I said I was done with Liz Cheney, but… can anyone out there name the stupidest part of her statement here? Anyone? Show of hands, please.

That’s right. Terrorists don’t form armies. Armies may employ terrorism but terrorists don’t form armies.

TERRORISM IS A TACTIC — NOT A PHILOSOPHY.

One thing that makes terrorism difficult to fight is that it’s not a tactic that can be defeated through conventional warfare.

How is it that I, a simple housewife in Fairfax, Virginia have figured this out — and Liz Cheney, a “former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs” hasn’t?

That just scares the hell out of me.

There Is No “Winning” In Iraq

Liz Cheney – Retreat Isn’t an Option – washingtonpost.com
· We are at war. America faces an existential threat.

Bullshit. “The terrorists” have neither the means nor the united will to threaten the existence of the United States. What Liz Cheney and her ilk keep failing to understand is that terrorism is a tactic — not a philosophy or a nation. Groups employing terrorism have different goals, though most of them agree that they’d like the US to stay out of their regional affairs.

We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere, sometime. We can’t negotiate with them or “solve” their jihad. If we quit in Iraq now, we must get ready for a harder, longer, more deadly struggle later.

Doesn’t Cheney read the news? The violence in Iraq has little to do with “terrorists” and pretty much everything to do with Sunnis and Shiites struggling for control of the region. It’s a civil war. Duh. If Cheney’s so keen on us fighting “these terrorists”, why doesn’t she recommend that we send troops to the places the terrorists actually are? Like Pakistan. (Stay calm, people of Pakistan. I’m not seriously suggesting that the US should invade your country.) Or — forget Pakistan. There are also supposed to be a fair number of terrorists hanging out in parts of Indonesia, aren’t there? Let’s invade Indonesia. They’d be a push-over!

· Quitting helps the terrorists.

Staying helps the terrorists. Pretty much anything we do is going to help the terrorists. News flash, Liz! Those people really really hate us!

Few politicians want to be known as spokesmen for retreat.

This is sadly true. Even when retreat is the smartest thing to do, politicians will let their egos dictate their actions. How many more Iraqi civilians and American soldiers will have to die before the Bush administration finally admits its mistakes and gets us the hell out of Iraq?

Beware the polls. In November the American people expressed serious concerns about Iraq (and about Republican corruption and scandals). They did not say that they want us to lose this war. They did not say that they want us to allow Iraq to become a base for al-Qaeda to conduct global terrorist operations. They did not say that they would rather we fight the terrorists here at home. Until you see a poll that asks those questions, don’t use election results as an excuse to retreat.

There are a lot of things the polls didn’t say. They also didn’t say people want to change to an eight-day week. They didn’t say we want a referendum on whether the moon really is made of cheese. They didn’t say we want to annex Canada. Cheney writes with the built-in presumption that these things the polls didn’t say are actually possible and relevant.

At this point, “winning” the war in Iraq can only mean cleaning up the mess we’ve made of it. I doubt that’s possible for now. Certainly, our leaving wouldn’t decrease the violence by much. Our staying isn’t really helping, though. The only thing that makes any sense at this point is to seek the aid of Iraq’s neighbors. This, of course, is what we should have done to begin with — before we ever invaded.

We are fighting the war on terrorism with allies across the globe, leaders such as Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan.

Ah, yes… Musharraf, that staunch defender of democracy. For those of you who don’t follow this sort of thing, Musharraf is a military dictator — and one heck of a snappy dresser. It’s really interesting how we choose our allies, isn’t it? You’d think, with our deep concern about spreading democracy around the globe, we’d be a little more selective about who we call “friend”. But I digress. Musharraf if probably a fine dictator and I hear he throws a heck of a party.

Brave activists are also standing with us, fighting for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the empowerment of women.

Heh, heh… yes, indeed. And many of those brave activists are fighting for those freedoms in the countries of our allies! Saudi Arabia, anyone?

There’s more to Liz Cheney’s editorial. Much, much more. But I grow weary of her disturbingly simplistic “analysis” of the current situation. And this is the sort of person they made a “principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs”? Who knows, with a title like that, maybe all she really did was get coffee for the people who did the real work. Still… the idea of someone so clearly lacking in the ability to think deeply about complex issues is a little scary.

The Next Big Thing From Apple

From the folks at Worth1000.com — click the photo to go directly to the Apple pictures.

Speaking of Apple… I got my MacBook back from the Apple shop yesterday. It needed a new hard drive and a new face plate (the place where you rest your palms when you’re typing… you know.) Happily, it was still under warrantee so it didn’t cost me a thing. Yay! It seems to be working fine now and, hopefully, the hard drive thing was just a one-in-a-million case of bad hardware and not some kind of systemic thing.

Anyway… I particularly like this iFibrillator thing. Thanks to Linn for the link!

No More Mellencamp!

The Songs You Want to Hear – washingtonpost.com
WBIG, known on the air now as Big 100.3, hires a company to conduct these tests twice each year. Another group of about 55 people was coming in the next night, at another hotel, this time in Montgomery County, and the combined results would determine the station’s songlist of a couple of hundred tunes.

And WBIG pretty much sucks. Their “songlist of a couple hundred tunes” is boring, boring, boring. I used to listen to WBIG and I finally reached the point where, if I had to hear that “Jack and Diane” song one more time, I was going to become homocidal.

Then, I discovered WARW at 94.7 FM. Much, much better! If you, like me, prefer classic rock as your driving music — WARW is your station in the greater DC area. Sure, they’ve got the usual goofy contests and such, but at least they’ve got a reasonably good (and expansive) playlist. They play Led Zeppelin, for instance. I don’t think I ever heard Led Zeppelin on WBIG.

Slowly, the enthusiasm leaked out of the focus group. Nobody turns to an oldies station to hear Zeppelin — that harder rock sound would fit in on classic rock stations, such as Washington’s 94.7, the Arrow, but not among the lighter pop fare on WBIG.

Hmpf. Well — I guess if “lighter pop fare” is what you want, then that’s what you’ll get. And that’s why I don’t listen to WBIG anymore. When I discovered 94.7 (WARW), it was such a relief! Finally, some decent music!

It’s a little disturbing to realize there are people out there who actually want to listen to the same old Rod Stewart and John Mellencamp songs over, and over, and over. It’s sort of… Stepford-like, you know?

Snow Day

Snow Arrives in Full Force – washingtonpost.com
The Washington region got its first real taste of winter today thanks to a low pressure system from the Midwest that dumped as much as an inch of snow in the area, causing some traffic snarls and accidents — but leaving others delighted that the season had finally arrived after a long spell of unseasonably warm weather.

Am I the only one who finds it pretty silly to refer to snowfalls of “as much as an inch” with a headline referring to snow arriving “in full force”? One inch is hardly a force. You wouldn’t know it from the way people were driving today. Jesus Christ. 20 miles an hour! On streets that were mostly just wet. What a bunch of morons. I suppose, though, most of the drivers were alarmed by the number of cars they were seeing smashed into one another or off the road in a ditch. Those belong to the other kind of DC-driving-moron. The ones who, as soon as the weather turns at all bad, think that’s the time to drive 80 miles an hour. I guess they figure they need to get home quickly — because it’s snowing.

Truly. People have shit for brains.

You Put The Lime In The Coconut, You Drink ‘Em Both Up

Eugene Robinson – A Reality-Based State of the Union – washingtonpost.com
In other news, fellow citizens, scientists reported that 2006 was the warmest year on record for the United States. The first half of January 2007 was so balmy in the Northeast that crocuses bloomed. Only recently has the president begun to pay grudging lip service to global warming, while firmly resisting measures — such as capping carbon emissions — that might actually mitigate the pressure humans are putting on the climate system. I’ve begun to wonder how a row of palm trees would look in my back yard.

Which reminds me of what I’ve been telling Mark. We have to move to northern Minnesota because soon it will be the only place where you can still grow coconuts!

Heh, heh….heh…h…..hm. Yeah, not really all that funny.

Regardless, the always-wonderful Eugene Robinson makes some really good (and really depressing) points in this Washington Post editorial. Read it.

Nuts To That

I got an exceptional deal on nuts yesterday at the Safeway store. Two pound bags of mixed nuts (like those in this photo I took) for $2.99 and large brazil nuts (my favorites!) for $1 per pound. I bought four 1-pound bags of the brazil nuts and two 2-pound bags of the mixed nuts. Mmm.

I presume the nuts are left over from Christmas time. Hey, no problem. I can keep them in the fridge or freezer until I need to use them. It got me thinking, though, about why there should be so many unsold nuts left over that they were selling them so cheap. (Safeway, after all, isn’t known around here for really swell prices.) I have to assume it’s because people just aren’t buying nuts like they used to. And, because I tend to think the worst of the general public, I’m supposing it’s because cracking nuts is too much work for lots of people. Hey, fine. Their loss is my gain.

Still, it does seem to be a general trend that people don’t want to make their own food anymore. Most of the grocery stores around here are really going for the whole “prepared meal” thing where all a person has to do is take the food home and eat it (maybe nuke it first.) I know most of the people who buy that sort of thing claim they just don’t have the time to cook but cooking, like pretty much anything else, is something you need to make time for.

I think it’s really a mistake for people to not cook most (or all) of their own food. When you cook your food, you get a better tasting meal that’s exactly what you want it to be. You get fresh ingredients without preservatives or high fructose corn syrup. And, best of all, you get TIME to just slow down and relax. Yes, cooking IS relaxing! And, if you cook for other people, it’s a really nice nurturing kind of thing. Listen to me because I’ve been waaaaay ahead of the curve on lots of things that are food and eating-related. This “prepared meal” business is a mistake. Avoid that stuff. Find fresh fruits and vegetables (and nuts!) and take the time to cook your own food. Even if you don’t care all that much about the nutrition side of it, do it because it’s good for your mental and emotional health.

Tonight’s meal: roasted potatoes and brussels sprouts, barbecued “riblets” (a fake-meat product that, yes, you buy in the frozen foods section), and — for dessert — apple crisp, made from scratch with hand-peeled apples and hand-cracked nuts. Yum!

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Update: This apple crisp is really good. The recipe, which I found on allrecipes.com, is made with just nutmeg instead of cinnamon. I used brazil nuts instead of the walnuts in the recipe and they’ve added an interesting (and delicious) sort of “smokey” taste to the whole thing.

New House Tour

For those of you who are interested in such things, I finally got around to making a new photo slide show of the interior of my house. Click on the picture above to view it.

Honestly, it’s more than just showing off. I’m actually really interested in seeing how other people live and I assume there are a fair number of other people out there who also enjoy that sort of things. So… here ‘ya go!

Visit to Annapolis

When my sister and brother-in-law were visiting last month we took a little day trip to Annapolis. This won’t interest most of you, but — yes! — there are pictures. Just click on the photo of the sailboat to see them!

Webb to Rebut Bush

Ooooo! This ought to be entertaining!

Webb to Give Democrats’ Response to State of the Union – washingtonpost.com
Virginia Sen. James Webb (D), a former Marine elected in November after vehemently opposing the Iraq war, will give the Democratic response to President Bush’s State of the Union speech next week, party leaders announced today.

For those of you not up on these things, Webb is the new senator from Virginia. (He beat George “Macaca” Allen.) Shortly after taking office, Webb was criticized for not playing nice with President Bush when the latter asked him how his son (a military man serving in Iraq) was doing. Webb told him, “That’s between me and my boy.”