Monday, January 09, 2006

Shifting Sands - Treason

Sedition's big brother is appearing in the New York Post this morning, wielded by a writer with the background to give weight to the charge. I was reminded in comments recently that I had used the label Copperhead to describe the opposition party over two years ago. I'm quite sure that my initial use of the term predates the exchange cited by a minimum of a year. The opposition party turned to sedition within weeks of the fall of Baghdad, having the foresight to realize that their support of actually protecting the United States (via the AUMF) was going to have the effect of strengthening the President and by extension, his party.

That realization, coupled with an amazing lack of scruples and an invincible ignorance of the existence of principles, has lead the opposition ineluctably to its current place of shame. Watching the remnants of the political power which it had held and wielded for seventy years washing away, coupled with a complete lack of vision regarding what might be done to regain it, raised despair to a level where sedition - and its big brother - seem the only "hope" remaining. What is truly unfortunate about the situation is that the majority within the opposition party do not hold, and in fact, are unalterably opposed to positions taken by its leadership. How many party members would vote 'Yes' for an objective alliance with al-Queada?

Unfortunately, party members have minimal input in the selection of party leadership. Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid do not hold their positions based upon merit or the fact that they share the ideals of the majority of their party but upon a system of advancement based upon seniority coupled with a perceived (and unrealized) ability to raise money. The seams maintaining the illusion of unity within the party have been rent and no amount of mending will rejoin them. Last summer labor clarified its departure - which group will be next?

The collapse of a political party would be a matter of minor historical interest (unless we were speaking of the Rockingham Whigs) except for its inauspicious timing. A collapse coupled with a cynical alignment of party interest and enemies of the United States is another matter. The symbiotic relationship between al-Queada and the opposition party is harmful to the national interest and deadly to our armed forces as well as to the innocents slaughtered by al-Queada in a last effort to effect a change in governance within the only country that has shown a firm determination to accomplish its extermination. Let us hope for an ignominous and speedy end for both parties to this unholy alliance.

48 comments:

Rick Ballard said...

Mark,

Your ability to define useful idiocy is unparalleled. Rather than provide an illustration of single thing that your party might be for you simply fall back on the tired line that is going to reap the party precisely what it deserves come next November.

Name one person damaged by the NSA's action if you wish to remain in the pro al-Queada camp. Come up with a calculus showing damage to anything approaching a civil liberty caused by paying attention to and thwarting terrorist plots.

You and your party don't even have a pair of deuces in your hand and if you had you wouldn't know how to play them. Sedition and treason have never proven to be effective vote getters in the past and there is little reason to believe that they will do so in the future.

Your time might be better spent at lefty sites asking questions as to when current failed leaders might be replaced.

Syl said...

mark

Amanpour works out of London and has contacts all over the middle east. I'd be very surprised if none of those convos were intercepted. In fact, if they weren't, I'd say the NSA wasn't doing its job.

Rick Ballard said...

David,

I completely disagree with that premise. The "mainstream" of the party has been abandoned while party leadership (as personified in the Dean, Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy, Kerry et al) has become totally unmoored from reality. The propaganda organs of the party give space only to the statist/leftist wing and in doing so further diminish any influence that moderates might have upon policy or leadership. A nice, tidy suicide pact that plays out on a daily basis.

The moderates are the ones that are going to be killed in the coming election, the lefty Blue Barons will be the last to fall.

Who besides a dedicated lefty would want to be identified with a party with this type of leadership?

Mark,

What will you say when the NSA (if it actually was within the NSA) traitors are brought before the bar? Will you stand beside those giving aid and comfort to OBL and Zawahiri?

Syl said...

And the Hatch thing wasn't a cellphone (how many repeater towers were there in Afghanistan anyway?) it was a satellite phone.

You can't even get the details right.

Syl said...

syl if you don't think Al Qaeda already knew that

Did you, Mark? Did you KNOW that a call you made on a stolen cellphone could be automatically monitored?

flenser said...

markg8

A dozen or so NSA employees thought this was such an egregious threat to our democracy they came forward to the Times with the information.

How do you know this? It's quite possible that they had some other motivation, is it not? You keep stating your opinions as fact.

If they truly wanted to blow the whistle on what they thought was an illegal operation there were procedures in place for them to do so. Why did they ignore those procedures and go instead to the New York Times?

buddy larsen said...

So, a dozen (likely) Dem partisans in an agency with--what--4000 operatives?--turncoat, and Mark's party, which has been selling out America for a generation, is suddenly without sin?

Eric said...

"A dozen or so NSA employees thought this was such an egregious threat to our democracy they came forward to the Times with the information."

What are their names? I don't see any names. Who are these people? Until I see names and so forth, I have to assume that it wasn't 'whistle blowing' and was just another attempt at embarrassing the Administration.

But its all much simpler than that. Its Risen's book, and the splash that this story made to aid its sales.

buddy larsen said...

Well, hell, hot-lips, quit reading here!

buddy larsen said...

"I can't," says Mark, "..big money involved--over the years, I've made dozens of dollars taking these troll assignments!"

buddy larsen said...

"...I'm neither a terrorist or a cellphone thief...."

(translation)

"I'm a terrorist and a cell-phone thief!"

Unknown said...

I think Karl Rove pays mark.

God knows he is not helping his cause.

The point is the dozen or so "patriots" that slithered out from under that rock broke the law.

Unknown said...

BTW mark, on December 21st Jane Harman {D} who has a great deal more experience in this field than you do, said that the release of this information damaged our intelligence gathering capabilities...she also said the program was essential.

It seems not all Democrats are on the same side as the NYT.

buddy larsen said...

Aw, shucks, I must've missed a mark 'special'--comment removed. All my needling for naught.

buddy larsen said...

Jane Harmon drives me nutz most of the time, but there is something about her that's likeable. I think it must be her sincerity (rare on that side of the aisle).

buddy larsen said...

Hey mark, let's trade, arlen for jane.

buddy larsen said...

Well, I'm unemployed, so that should've been a relatively easy maneuver.

Anonymous said...

Ms Terrye,
I will thank you to leave my creature Markg8 alone,he is worth thousands of votes for the Republican party.
Best Karl

buddy larsen said...

Aw, blogger messed up my snappy comeback--I had a good about tarzan rescuing jane from the witch doctor, but I couldn't get it to post. Timing is everything.

buddy larsen said...

I like the 'Esquire' part, but i'm just another 50 yrs of hard-scrabble blue collar, like you, Mark, and dumb-lucky enough to've only recently caught a crazy upswing in the local real estate mkt, and thereby buying myself a little time to write comments to you. So, your turn, how do YOU manage to write comments all day long? Win a few personal-injury lawsuits or somethin'?

buddy larsen said...

Righto, Duke Peter! Bloody East-Ender Marxists can't even learn the nomenclature.

buddy larsen said...

If it's brain damage, somewhere there's a busted respondent.

buddy larsen said...

Ha--seriously, I'll betcha ten...uh, ha'crowns (?) that if USA had the "English Rule", mini-marx wouldn't have time for his hobby.

buddy larsen said...

It ain't that all democrats are con-artists, it's that all con-artists are democrats. Except maybe that damned meme-destroying Abramoff.

buddy larsen said...

Actually, I meant the "Loser Pays" rule in civil suits. Make a case on somebody and lose, you pay the falsely-accused's defense costs.

Extremely sound law, and the only reason we don't have it here is that Congress set an early precedent, to allow lawyers to run for office (sorry julian, vnjagvet, others--I don't mean to say the profession is bad--just the ethics-lite tort bar).

buddy larsen said...

Which is of course, for some odd reason, overwhelmingly Democrat.

buddy larsen said...

Geez, I missed all that--and there i was wearing a horse race. I knew Mark would call me a horse racist sooner or later--it's the Burden of the Southerner. I keep a skinny old mule to help me pull stumps outta the dry crik, and Tony Soprano calls me a Cavalier.

Unknown said...

Well actually mark I keep hearing Democrats say that one of the reasons we need to dump the Republicans is that the Europeans and the Brits like Galloway don't like him. And sucking up to the European socialists is so important to them.

I too am a working stiff. I have one of those jobs with odd hours. But I am not nor will I ever be rich.

buddy larsen said...

Terrye, if not for one good exit-decision, i'd've been milking goats and making cheese until i fell over dead, probably in the dung-pile.

I was lucky enough to've so offended the local regulators--who were SO swelled-up under Clinton--that they hounded me outta business (on 'reporting' technicalities, I never failed a single hygeine inspection or test).

I just wasn't big enough--what with kids in college--to hire a dedicated FDA liason, and was so close to Austin HQ that health-inspectors could take a full day 'in the field' to make a two hour round-trip to my place [keeping the staff so busy on mickeymouse that we could barely operate], and then slide on into a 6 hour lunch to finish the workday.

So I finally quit, & put dairy proceeds into the stocks of the companies I knew from my pre-farmer career in the oilpatch.

These of course are the stocks that took off on long dub & trip runs that ain't over yet, making me a real-live Haliburton war-profiteer.

And now, everyday, I say a little thank-you to Bill Clinton for ruining my little micro agri-business, while hating him for sucking me into distortions where I make a buck off the nation's bad luck with energy reserves.

Few people realize how the big guy colors the attitudes of the regulatory agencies--which operate on their own, under a thing called Administrative Law--where if you dispute the agency, your hearing is AT THE AGENCY.

Of course, if you have the $, you can seek 'legislative relief'. By the time Bush came in and the regulators had to put their codpieces back in the drawer, I was--thanks Bill--already arranging my exit.

But, my point is always the same, the people whose meal-ticket is self-appointed control of everyone else's business, have to be kept out of power--or we're Franced.

Unknown said...

Buddy:

Ahh yes, the inspectors. nasty little power hungry paper pushers.

I can remember milking when it was so cold the cows' tits were frost bit.

Now that takes courage.

And mark, what the hell are you talking about? I have worked all my life and I can honestly say that whether or not I made money had more to do with choices I made and did not make than it did with the man in the Oval Office.

I remember going into Home Health Care after I left the farm. Clinton was president and he cut medicare visits in home health care. Only a few weeks for each patient. The company almost went out of business and a lot of smaller ones did.

A lot of old folks lost their help too. So it seems mark that Democrats can cut social programs too.

I can also remember my taxes going up at the time too, even as my pay check was getting smaller.

thanks Bill.

Peter, you sure do seem to rub mark the wrong way. He is probably French.

buddy larsen said...

The business I shucked, I'd put fifteen years of 365-days/yr, 18 hrs/day effort into--and i'm not exxagerating. It gutted me, from a young strong confident guy to a divorced two-pack-a-day knees-gone slobbola.

The plan was to build a regional brand, and leave it to the kids, starting a thing that would employ people in this rural area where housewifes can't find work and the land won't support but a cow/20 acres (but far more goats), and giving my family a center so they wouldn't scatter to the winds like my sibs and I did.

And I did it, I built a local brand with 100% market-clearing (no mean trick w/ perishables), and a very loyal following.

It would've worked as planned had I not burned out, from the consequences of having insulted--and refusing to bootlick--one certain mid-manager down at the agency. One dickhead who delights in amping up his job-evaluations with tiny scalps from microbusinesses that lack the power to fight him.

So, Mark, I ain't 'The Man', I'm a shrimp under the gov't bootheel--just like you.

Difference is, I'm not welded to the Democratic party, and am thus able to think for myself about what the nation needs at this time, in a leader.

Rick Ballard said...

Buddy,

Extrapolate the behavior of the health comissars accross the vast spread of the federal bureaucracy and toss in thousands of meritless patronage promotions over eight years and it still does not cover one tenth of the damage done by Wild Bill and Comrade Hillary. While they were (and are) total failures at party politics they were masters at filling slots with sycophants.

On the optimistic side, Bush is the first Republican president who appears to understand the bureaucratic game AND has the talent pool to draw from in order to effect bureaucratic change. The number of fingernails being left in door jambs is another reason for the Dem hysteria. Barring the promotion of a junior level bureaucrat at the GS-13 level appears meaningless - until you repeat the process 10,000 times.

buddy larsen said...

The crucial thing (sorry, i have to fin the story) was that, my first dozen years, i was under "Milk & Dairy Dep't".

I had no idea that technically i should've been under "Manufactured Foods Dep't".

Tho the 12 yrs of wrong regime was not my doing (I had been 'assigned' to it), the new regime came in like bulls, trying to find fault with the 12 yrs of smooth, professional dealings I'd had with M&D.

Yes, I was involuntarily in the middle of THEIR much larger turf war.

The first thing the new guy did was charge me plus interest and penalty for the 12 years of licenses from HIS dept (tho I'd been paying the other dep't for a similar operating license, for dairies).

I refused to pay the 'interst and penalty'--until I had to, to stop his recalling my product from grocery shelves.

And THAT is what put me into the crosshairs.

All the damage to me and my fine little growing business--employing ladies who had no job before or since--was done in those last three years under the new department.

A bureaucratic assassination, is what it was. I did 15 yrs hard labor on a false charge, basically, in effect, is how it ended up.

If i hadn't caught a drift of luck on real-estate and stocks, you'd have seen me on TV, "Local Farmer Arrested Driving BullDozer Into Health Dep't Building".

buddy larsen said...

I averaged about 30/mo sales (my price was 'producer', one step under 'wholesale, as the reefer needs and thin geo-mkt precluded my own distribution) at full creamery cap over the last 10 yrs.

I took home the leftovers after costs--about 5k/mo, the other 25k/mo going into the local 'depressed' cash economy, to feed stores and my chesse-processing ladies.

Once the State got thru with me, that 25k/mo was "zero", as it had been 15 yrs before.

Rick, wrt to Bush & the administrative-law sector, you're right, he's putting in real people and dumping the trash--and the trash lobby is utterly FURIOUS.

buddy larsen said...

Well, Peter, thanks, at least i'd have the one sale--but the transatlantic postage would probably eat up the profit.
\;-D

buddy larsen said...

Not if he could distract the clerk, and slip one under his shirt.

buddy larsen said...

Sorry about the rant--just trying to let Mark know that in my case--others may speak for themselves--his Konservative Kartoon Show is all baloney.

buddy larsen said...

damn, that IS a good read. Short and right up the funnel. Comments are excellent, too.

buddy larsen said...

well, peter, I'm not bitter for myself, just others, young folks, trying to start-up a biz under the agency monarchy.

As i said, i kinda like being a worthless retired old fool. besides, I'm gonna run down a franchise on this--and it never would've interested me had i not gotten depressed and let myself turn into a lump of smoking lard. The timing is right--parts are starting to fall off the forward edge of boomers--an avalanch of demand is coming.

Besides (scroll down), some folks have REAL problems: "The Sacramento Bee reports on an appearance by actor Sean Penn at a rally for hate harpy Cindy Sheehan: "Penn said Bush and the war in Iraq have made it hard for him to give up his addiction to cigarettes. 'It makes it very difficult to quit smoking under this administration,' he said."

buddy larsen said...

Except Bush won't let him quit smoking, and YOU won't let me.

Anonymous said...

Rick,
I try and be optimistic most of the time but it's hard to see a way for the Democrat party to rescue itself, surely
it is spiraling down a one-way trip to rest alongside the Know-Nothing party... maybe the current military situations
in Iraq and Afghanistan will yield an Eisenhower-type figure to do for the left as Ike did for the republicans in the fifties?

Rick Ballard said...

Charles Henry,

The Republicans should have gone out of business in '32. The total ineptitude of the fat cats then in control of the party is very comparable to the intellectual bankruptcy exhibited by the left (and controlling) wing of the Democratic Party today.

It took about forty years for the Rebublicans to begin to develop a coherent strategy to regain effective political control. It also took forty years for the Yellow Dog base of the Dems to begin to die off in sufficient numbers to make a shift in control possible. It may take forty years for the lefties who (along with their agitprop allies in the ever dwindling MSM) are currently running the party into the ground to die off to the extent that the party can rebuild internally.

I tend to believe that a new centrist/progressive party will arise prior to that time. Not for another ten years, perhaps, but not much later than that either. There are a number of contributors here who are uneasy enough with certain Republican policies to slide easily into a new centrist/progressive party - if it demonstrated a firm foreign policy.

buddy larsen said...

You're right, Rick--the libertarians just don't quite fit the bill for this emerging conservative bloc. I think the new party will be federalist with a vision of a smaller but stronger central government. A stripped down hot-rod, rather than this Dr. Seuss-looking thing we're driving around nowadays.

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Rick,

In any war, there's always going to be opposition. On any policy whatsoever, there's always going to be dissent. Traditionally, there has always been a party which was isolationist and anti-war. In the early part of the Twentieth Century, it was the Democrats. Then the Republicans took the mantle, and now the Dems have it again. The isolationist party is almost always the one out of power. I don't really expect the Dems to go completely down the tubes, but it will take a long time before they start to become realistic about their plight. Many of them are still convinced that they didn't really lose the last two elections. Many of them live in an echo chamber like Boulder or the Bay Area where no one dare decry their moonbat policies, so it seems as thought there is no oppposition, and they cannot imagine that there is any need for a change. Eventually, they will realize it and they will change. It will be a matter of 40 years perhaps. In that timeframe, I expect another terrorist attack of major proportions, a war with Iraq, and a war with China.

buddy larsen said...

MHA, i think you meant "Iran"?

Anonymous said...

Do you not think, though, that after the buyer's remorse for Perot in the 90s, it would be more difficult for a third party to emerge and be seen as a viable option?
I keep thinking it would be too hard a sell to convince people to leave the major parties for
something so new, when there's so much at stake.

buddy larsen said...

I agree--the 'two' is really not a random number, it is the design of the system, whereby splinters are forced to create workable compromises inside a party, before presenting a platform to the election. Third parties just destroy the balance of the system and open it to demagoguery, log-rolling, featherbedding, and all that other courthouse-gang tomfoolery.

What we're talking about is the absorption of a broken party shell into a new meaning.

Having said all that, I loved Ralph Nader's candidacy, but hated Perots. Ha--pretty inconsistant, huh?

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Buddy, Doh!