“It’s sort of inconceivable… right… you could be sitting on your macbook pro… watching the world cup soccer… and writing an essay for one of our favorite publications… in defense of Sarah Palin… right… I mean… you can’t do all those things on a mac… it’s like everything kind of rejects itself…”

- (17th min) contributor on ricochet podcast.

When you have Tucker Carlson, Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Klavan on the same podcast… it’s kinda hard NOT to listen.

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

True.  via Op-Ed Columnist – South Park – NYTimes.com.

The blame-Bush mantra, of course, is an echo of Obama’s own rhetoric. So how do we renew and restore ourselves? Maybe by waiting till 2012 and electing a president who has the capacity to lead rather than pre-emptively make excuses for failure by whining about the “mess” he “inherited.”

Amen brother.  via ‘You’ve Taken the Words Out of My Mouth’.

Finally… a conservative who fights back.

What is so funny about the entire interview is how John Ziegler is trying to prove there was media bias… and all David Shuster could do was cite polls–using a perception he helped create to prove there wasn’t partisanship in the media.

This at best, a classic appeal to popularity, at worst, a lame attempt at ass-covering.

John’s whole documentary is, of course, trying to explain how that perception was created… but Shuster either had no clue what John was trying to say… or didn’t care… which had the rather unintended effect of further re-inforcing John’s credibility.

My answer is always, “Ya, so what’s your point?”  Of COURSE Israel is a stronger Nation… it wouldn’t exist if it didn’t have the power it has.  It’s superiority in the region is the only thing keeping it in the region… the only thing preventing it’s destruction.  In other words, how disproportionate Israel’s power is in comparison to its neighbors really is irrelevant to the discussion… what matters is what is done with the power you have… and whether that power was justifiably or unjustifiably exercised.

But let’s just say that my Palestinian friends are right… we need a greater sense of proportionality in the region.  What should that look like?  Fortunately, Victor Davis Hanson has come up with a few of his own suggestions:

1) Request that 50% of Israel’s air-to-ground missiles be duds to ensure greater proportionality.

2) Allow Hamas another 1,000 free rocket launches to see if they can catch up with the body count.

3) Have Israeli soldiers congregate in border barracks so that Hamas’s random rockets have a better chance of killing military personnel, to ensure it can claim at least a few military targets.

4) Redefine “holocaust” to refer to deaths of terrorists in numbers under 400 to give greater credence to Hamas’s current claims.

5) In the interest of fairness, allow Hamas to establish both the date that war is supposed to begin and the date when it must end.

6) Send Israeli military advisers to Hamas to improve the accuracy of their missiles.

7) Take down the barriers to return to Hamas a fair chance of getting suicide bombers back inside Israel.

Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

For further reading/discussion on this topic, you might also enjoy the discussion board hosted by Ramesh Ponnuru over at The Washington Post.  My favorite quote from the page: “this is just one of the themes that the muslims use when they are getting their butts kicked.”

*update*

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up so nicely:  “In short, we live now in the Age of Post-Journalism. All that was before is now over, as this generation of journalists voluntarily destroyed the hallowed notion of objectivity and they will have no idea quite how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.”

Had any white presidential candidate had a close 20-year association with a white preacher overtly spreading race hatred from the pulpit, that candidate would have been not just universally denounced and deemed unfit for office but written out of polite society entirely…

Obama’s political career was launched with Ayers giving him a fundraiser in his living room. If a Republican candidate had launched his political career at the home of an abortion-clinic bomber — even a repentant one — he would not have been able to run for dogcatcher in Podunk. And Ayers shows no remorse. His only regret is that he “didn’t do enough.”

It would server you well to just simply PONDER what he just said for a moment.  What if a republican launched his campaign in the living-room of an abortion bomber… an un-repentant abortion bomber… what if?  Do you on the left really think you’d just let that slide… and yet you still don’t think the ENTIRE mainstream media ISN’T in the tank for Obama???

This scene is definitely in my top 10 favorite movie scenes of all time (the ‘needle in the hay‘ scene in this same movie also probably makes the cut–as does the ‘green line‘ scene–speaking of which, this might be the most beautiful thing I have heard in a long time). Maybe it’s Gwyneth Paltrow… but whatever it is… The one person we’ve always wanted… is the one person we just can’t have. The more I think about it… the more this movie reminds me of one of Shakespeare’s tragedy’s… it hits me on so many fundamental levels.

Democrat Barack Obama has had about a 3 to 1 advantage over Republican John McCain in Post Page 1 stories since Obama became his party’s presumptive nominee June 4. Obama has generated a lot of news by being the first African American nominee, and he is less well known than McCain — and therefore there’s more to report on. But the disparity is so wide that it doesn’t look good.

This dovetails with Obama’s dominance in photos, which I pointed out two weeks ago. At that time, it was 122 for Obama and 78 for McCain. Two weeks later, it’s 143 to 100, almost the same gap…

In overall political stories from June 4 to Friday, Obama dominated by 142 to 96. Obama has been featured in 35 stories on Page 1; McCain has been featured in 13, with three Page 1 references with photos to stories on inside pages….

Deborah Howell – Obama’s Edge in the Coverage Race – washingtonpost.com.