Call me dense, but I cannot for the life of me understand what Israel hoped to accomplish by trading five living murderers for the bodies of two murder victims. Defense Minister Ehud Barak Obama non-explains this idiocy, assuring soldiers at the funeral by assuring them that:

If the worst will happen to any of you, Israel will make every possible and legitimate effort to bring them home. And failing that, we’ll make every impossible or illegitimate one to bring you home, too. And if more of you end up getting kidnapped and murdered as a result, oh nevermind, surely that would never happen.

Time for another straw poll. Which is dumber?

1. Endorsing polio because without it, we never would have developed the cure vaccine.
2. Endorsing Barack Saddam Hussein Obama because it took James Earl Ray Carter to get us Ronald Woodrow Wilson Reagan

Make that two more. Which of these is dumberer?

1. Opponents of Barack Hussein Obama harping on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name is Hussein
2. Supporters of Barack Hussein Obama changing their own middle names to Hussein

UPDATE: Commenter Murdoc notes that my first analogy was terribly unfair - to polio.

UPDATE x2: Corrected the analogy to reflect that we only have a vaccine for polio, not a cure. If today’s polls are any indication, we don’t have either a cure or a vaccine for Carter.

The G.O.P. has lost both houses of Congress, and since lost three special elections in what should have been safe Republican seats, and now faces polling numbers indicating that a rabid socialist committed to defeat in the Middle East may, by repeatedly chanting chanting “Hope” and “Change” and smiling nicely, beat out an annoyingly moderate Republican who reads teleprompters poorly and smiles funny. So what do conservative bloggers care about?

The fact that some anti-Semitic nutjob, who for all you or I know doesn’t even support Obama, took advantage of the open forum at my.barackobama.com to post his anti-Semitic drivel, which was promptly scrubbed by the Obama campaign before some of the angry right-wing bloggers could even finish blogging about it. Of course that’s not the only major scoop they got lately. Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin also caught Rachael Ray red-handed … wearing a scarf during a massive heat wave on the East Coast in an ad intended to promote doughnuts not manufactured by Krispy Kreme. And in this case, the dextrosphere got results; at great expense to Non-Krispy Kreme, Non-Krispy ended up pulling that vile and disgusting ad that implied that it’s OK to wear scarves in 100 degree heat to promote doughnuts not made by Krispy Kreme. Or for Rachael Ray to appear in an ad without revealing her entire neck, or more skin in general, or something like that. She certainly wouldn’t look good in a burka, so maybe that’s where they’re going with this. I’m not sure exactly what their objection was, but in any event, hey, it must have been good ‘cuz they got a buzz inside the blogosphere and obtained results outside it. All hail the new media.

On the plus side, some bloggers get it on Obama and the anti-Semitic troll, while others do about … mmmm, donuts.

Happy?

UPDATE: Not to be outdone, Michael Medved lays on the st00pid in criticizing a new monument to gay victims of the Holocaust. For Medved, any attempt to memorialize gay victims at all:

…follows a longstanding, misleading attempt to depict homosexuals as prime targets of Hitler. In fact, even historical material released with the memorial noted only “an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men deported to concentration camps” –and by no means all of them were killed.

Well, in that case, I guess it behooves the people who created the memorial to release historical material with it to make that clear. Oh wait, they did. Never mind. I guess the real objection is not to a lack of perspective, but to the fact that gay victims are being memorialized at all.

While homosexuals surely outnumbered the less-than-one-percent of the German population that was Jewish, Jewish victims of Nazi death camps outnumbered estimated gay victims by more than 500 to 1.

Note the cute little bait and switch between the relatively small number of German Jews (564,379 per the 1925 census) and the total number of Jews killed by Nazi Germany (roughly six million, or 12 times that amount). Seeing as Hitler didn’t seem all that interested in pursuing homosexuals abroad, the more appropriate comparison would be to compare the number of known German gays who ended up in KL to the number of known German Jews who did. That brings the ratio down to about 56 to 1, if you believe the lower estimate of 10,000, or 38 to 1 if you believe the higher one of 15,000. Even those figures are skewed, for two reasons. First, they assume that 100% of the Jewish population ended up in concentration camps or worse, when in fact, some of them escaped (I’ll leave it to the historians to say if enough did to affect these numbers significantly). Second, and more importantly, the German government had accurate census data to identify all the Jews, while it had none to prove who was gay or who wasn’t. Thus, it should come as little surprise that even if Hitler had targeted Jews and gays equally (and no one seriously contends that he did), gays would have done a much better job of evading detection.

UPDATE: See-Dubya defends the molehill, and I respond. meanwhile, the other side tries equally hard to make Obama’s real mountains into molehills.

Of accolades from Patterico, Powerline, and anyone else who is either committed to victory in Iraq, or at least not so strongly committed to defeat that they’ll sacrifice every other issue under the sun for a promise we can lose the war rather than win. That’s OK, I’m sure that what he loses in support among conservatives, he’ll make up in newfound adulation from Andrew Sullivan types who aren’t conservatives themselves, but love to lecture conservatives on what “real” conservatism supposedly is.

Me, I’m mildly disappointed but not terribly surprised. I gave up on the guy a long time ago.

UPDATE: Beldar has more.

John Hinderacker wants L. Brent Bozell to shut his pie hole from now through November. I’m OK with the idea in principle, but why stop in November?

Uncle observes a tendency of some gun owners to spend more time and effort attacking each other than attacking the real enemy, the Judean People’s Front Brady Center to Prevent Gun Ownership. Usually the fight is between the NRA-ILA and smaller, more ideologically pure organizations like Gun Owners of America. My response has generally been to advocate that those who favor a more ideological NRA should join both organizations, thereby lending support both to those whose views most closely matched theirs and to the group which, like it or not, is far more likely to get anything done.

After reading this idiocy, I’m seriously wondering whether GOA has anything of value to offer at all. John McCain is hardly my first choice as President, but when it comes to guns, he runs circles around anyone who has served in my lifetime, let alone GOA’s. Yet GOA gives him an F-, almost entirely for reasons unrelated to guns. Imagine if this idiocy were applied to real grades. You know, the kind they give you in school. Suppose your son or daughter came home from school one day with a report card that showed an F in biology, which surprised you because you already knew he had gotten the highest score on the final of any student not only in the current class, but if any class that particular teacher had taught. So you ask the teacher what went wrong, and he replies with “Your son/daughter is a real jerk. He/she sucks at everything, the big jerk, and I hate having him my class. And he’s a crappy student overall, um, I mean, in biology, yeah, that.” You respond by pointing out that not only doesn’t your son/daughter suck at biology, but that he/she had gotten the highest score on any of his tests, ever. The teacher grudgingly admits “Yeah, that’s true, but you should have seen the crap he wrote in his English class, and I hear from his history teacher that his essays in that class weren’t too hot, either.” What does any of this have to do with biology, you ask. “Well, it just goes to show he’s a bad student, and really should get an F somewhere, so I’m giving him an F here. And oh, by the way, while his test may have had the highest score of any student I’ve ever had, it wasn’t a perfect score, as he did get one minor detail wrong, and I like to think of myself as a ‘no-compromise’ kind of guy, except for that other nerdy kid I gave an A to for doing slightly worse than your kid in biology, but writing English essays I liked much better. So screw you, your kid’s F stands.”

If that happened, would you allow your kid to remain in that idiot teacher’s class? If not, is there any earthly reason why I should not cancel my GOA membership yesterday?

Richard Viguerie spams:

“I am dismayed that the Fox News Channel apparently plans to bar Ron Paul from its January 6 presidential debate. I have not yet declared my support for any candidate, but I find this action inexcusable.”

Understandable, given that the guy’s a crank, whose supporters have long been doing to online polls what Viguerie himself does to everyone’s inbox. Birds of a feather, I suppose.

“Ron Paul is a traditional limited-government conservative in the grand tradition of Robert A. Taft, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.

Yeah, it’s too bad Goldwater’s famously dovish “if we’d just act a little nicer, the communists wouldn’t exist” foreign policy pronouncements cost him the election. On the other hand, President Reagan ushered in a brand new era with his time-honored “I’m not sending my troops anywhere in the world without a war declaration, and then only if it’s written on a John-Birch-Society-approved form” slogan, which left that imperialist Jimmy Carter in the dust. I sure am stoked to see Paul picking up the torch now.

In the latest Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, he is ahead of Fred Thompson in New Hampshire. Yet Fox News is inviting Thompson and barring Ron Paul.

Earth to Viguerie: we’re electing the President of the United States, not the President of New Hampshire. Show me a single scientific national poll in which the fake Republican candidate bests the only real conservative in the race, and then we’ll talk. Until then, keep your pearls of wisdom to yourself, or at least confine them to your own web site and to the mailing lists of those who have actually asked to join it. Just because Congress says you “CAN-SPAM,” doesn’t mean you should.

UPDATE: More on Paul’s brilliant conservatism in the molds of Goldwater and Reagan here and here.

I’m not sure what it is, but something about Larry Craig’s vehement denial just doesn’t ring true.

For eight months leading up to June 11th my family and I had been relentlessly and viciously harassed by the Idaho Statesman. If you saw the article today, you know why. Let me be clear: I am not gay. I never have been gay. Neither have any of the blokes I done in public bathrooms, either, not a one. That pervert cop who busted me, now that’s another story. That guy is definitely gay. I know he’s gay ‘cuz his dick tastes like shit. But none of the other guys I met in bathroom stalls are gay, so why don’t you drop this non-story and leave me and what’s left of my political career… um, I mean, my family, yeah, that’s the ticket … alone? Dammit.

More here, here, here, here, here, here and too many other places to track.

David Weigel of “Reason” continues his magazine’s proud tradition of proving that sarcasm and ignorance don’t mix, snarking at Rudy Guiliani over a YouTube video in which he voices his support for the Second Amendment while acknowledging that no constitutional right is absolute. This point is made doubly ironic by the fact that Guiliani actually overstates the impact of Parker by implying that it generally guarantees a right to carry concealed. In the exchange, a citizen asked Mr. Guiliani the following (the question was cut off at the beginning):

…allow for regional differences. For example, New York City might be an area where you wouldn’t allow the Second Amendment to be enforced. To me that’s like saying someone is half pregnant. You either believe in it or you don’t, and I need to have a clear statement from you with respect to the Second Amendment.

To which Rootin’ Tootin’ Rudy responded:

Sure. The two things are not at all contradictory, in fact the two things are extremely consistent. All you have to do is read the decision of the DC Circuit two months ago, the Parker decision. The Parker decision, written by Judge … uh … Silberman, says the following, it states my view. The Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms It’s a personal right, you have that right, I can’t take it away from you, nobody else could take it away from you. There’d have to be a constitutional amendment to take it away from you, and nobody advocates that. What Judge Silberman says, however, is THAT the Second Amendment, which is equal to, in essence, the First Amendment right of free speech, the Fourth Amendment right to be free of free of unreasonable searches and seizures, is subject to reasonable limitations, just like all the other rights can have reasonable limitations. Some states can do more than others, but no state can take the right away. So a state like New York could want to have more restrictions than a state like New Hampshire. A state like Texas could want to have less. In the case … in that case, the District of Columbia put on too many restrictions, and the restrictions were declared unconstitutional. And, I mean, that’s just a statement of our constitutional law. We have basic rights, the states cannot take those basic rights away from you, but some states can legislate more aggressively than others, and we have the courts to protect us. So, in the case of the District of Columbia, they had virtually eliminated the ability of people to have concealed weapons. Completely. The court says that was unconstitutional. If the District of Columbia wanted to have limitations on concealed weapons, and they .. and they had those limitations involve people who committed crimes, people who were [sic] mental institutions, that would be OK. Some other states may not want to do that. But by going as far a they did, they violated the Second Amendment. And I think that’s the .. whether you have this position or not, that’s what the Constitution says, and I agree with it, and I think that’s the way we should approach it.

Taken at face value, this statement means that erstwhile gun control champion Rudolph Guiliani has completely reversed gears, and now believes that the Second Amendment requires either Vermont-style carry or shall issue in every state. Nobody tell Mr. Guiliani this, but Parker doesn’t actually endorse that view, and in fact contradicts it:

That is not to suggest that the government is absolutely barred from regulating the use and ownership of pistols. The protections of the Second Amendment are subject to the same sort of reasonable restrictions that have been recognized as limiting, for instance, the First Amendment. See Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781, 791 (1989) (”[G]overnment may impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place, or manner of protected speech . . . .”). Indeed, the right to keep and bear arms - which we have explained pre-existed, and therefore was preserved by, the Second Amendment - was subject to restrictions at common law. We take these to be the sort of reasonable regulations contemplated by the drafters of the Second Amendment. For instance, it is presumably reasonable “to prohibit the carrying of weapons when under the influence of intoxicating drink, or to a church, polling place, or public assembly, or in a manner calculated to inspire terror . . . .” State v. Kerner, 107 S.E. 222, 225 (N.C. 1921). And as we have noted, the United States Supreme Court has observed that prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons does not offend the Second Amendment. Robertson, 165 U.S. at 281-82. Similarly, the Court also appears to have held that convicted felons may be deprived of their right to keep and bear arms. See Lewis v. United States, 445 U.S. 55, 65 n.8 (1980) (citing Miller, 307 U.S. at 178). These regulations promote the government’s interest in public safety consistent with our common law tradition. Just as importantly, however, they do not impair the core conduct upon which the right was premised.
[Emphasis added.]

So Guiliani over-interprets Parker, but no matter. What matters in his case is not so much what Parker actually says, as what Guiliani believes it says, and with which he “agrees.” This is the right-wing equivalent of the gun-grabber who “agrees” with the U.S. Supreme Court supposed ruling in Miller that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean anything; it tells you nothing about the actual case, but everything about the candidate. Coming from a federal candidate (and setting aside Guiliani’s own record, in the face of which this statement appears to fly), this statement is about as pro-Second Amendment as it gets.

So leave it to “Reason” to miss the issue entirely, as is its wont, fixating instead on the fact that Guiliani also acknowledges have leeway to allow more gun rights than the Second Amendment requires, should they choose to do so. From this we get the point-missing snarkline:

If Mr. Weigel’s Reason-able point is that the Second Amendment or any other should be construed absolutely, that’s his position and he’s entitled to it, though query why he’s picking on Guiliani specifically for taking a position shared by all serious Presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle (not to mention all nine Supreme Court Justices). If that’s not his point, then what exactly is his objection to the fact that some states regulate guns to the full extent allowable by the Second Amendment, while others choose not to? It almost sounds as though Mr. Weigel is reading the Second Amendment the way BAMN and the ACLU read the Fourteenth, acting as though it requires what it barely permits.

Meanwhile, Bryan Preston make hay of the fact that a guy named Al Gore once chided a guy named President Bush for understating, rather than overstating, the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the outside world. This from the same guy who later criticized another guy, also called President Bush, for overstating in 10 years later! Hypocrite! Never mind that Saddam Hussein really did possess the vast quantities of WMD in 1992 that he really did not possess in 2002. Never mind that our intel really was wrong both times, first in underestimating his stockpile when he really had it, and later by erroneously “finding” it when he didn’t. No matter. All that matters is we have a video of the same guy criticizing two different people (albeit with similar-sounding names) for two different things at two different times. Neener.

Her usual critics are alarmed, but my defense of Ann Coulter’s recent comparison of gays to John Edwards is below the fold.
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