John Cole is not amused by Michelle Malkin’s thinly-veiled glee over Cindy Sheehan’s failing marriage. John writes:

Who f-ing cares? Sheehan’s marriage is irrelevant- married, single, gay, straight, she is still Casey’s mother, and no amount of discussions regarding what her husband believes, or why she is divorced, or any other personal details change that. Stick to her statements about the war, stick to her actions, and stick to the groups promoting her. But stay the hell out of her marriage, or her failing marriage. Or get a job with the National Enquirer.

Me, I don’t know. I’m all for quaint concepts like privacy and all that fun stuff, but then again, divorces are public records, Sheehan has made herself into a public figure, and news is news, particular when it goes to a person’s credibility. When I first heard of Cindy Sheehan, I was wowed by her superior intellect. No, really, that woman is amazing. Who else can derive the gift of happiness, of being together from a meeting with a person who is completely totally disconnected from humanity and reality? Then I learned that she knew more about Iraq than all of her grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins put together, and was more impressed still. I thought, my God, that Sheehan chick is just the bomb. From that point on, I was just dying to hear her take on every issue under the sun, from income tax liability to the role of the Joos in U.S. foreign policy [UPDATE: or maybe not? FURTHER UPDATE: Yup, she said it all right - then lied to cover it up.], who attacked us on September 11, 2001, the legitimacy of last fall’s election, quote-unquote, and last but not least, whether it is or isn’t approproate to brand someone as unpatriotic just because she thinks her country isn’t worth dying for. And hey, when you think about the murderous liar she’s up against, can you really blame her if she hates him just a wee bit more than she loves her son or even her surviving children? It’s all in a day’s work for the next Rosa Parks, whom even the original Rosa Parks’s arch-enemy David DuKKKe has found something nice to say about.

Then, without warning, my bubble was burst. Now that I hear she’s getting a divorce, however, suddenly ol’ Rosa Parks II’s ideas don’t seem so profound anymore. But that’s just me.

CourtTV contributor Rikki Klieman has been filling in for Bill Handel for KFI lately. This morning, while discussing the Cindy Sheehan affair with Michelle Malkin, Klieman said Sheehan could be “the next Rosa Parks.” O-kay. Between Nancy “Win Ugly” and Catherine “Whutz a Bill of Attayndur?” Crier, Klieman’s silliness brings to three the number of CourtTV talking heads who have me convinced that the network has no quality control whatsoever.

UPDATE: Then again, maybe Klieman knows what to look for in the next Rosa Parks. She is, after all, married to the next Bernard Parks.

Much has been made lately of a recent admission by Tariq Aziz that the U.S. never gave the “green light” to Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990. It is hoped by some that Aziz’s admission that the story is bunk will put an end to one more “conspiracy” theory.

Me, I’m not holding my breath. Moonbat theories die hard, and the mere fact that an ex-official of a now-defunct regime tells a story the victors want to hear carries little weight. Of course Aziz says that now, he’s trying to cut a deal! What the ‘bats will have a harder time explaining – or perhaps, an easier time ignoring – is that Aziz said the same thing in a November, 1992 interview with U.S.A. Today, in which he stated that then Ambassador April Glaspie, far from giving Iraq the go-ahead to take any action in Kuwait, “just listened and made general comments” about Iraq’s gripes with Kuwait, and that the Iraqi government “knew the United States would have a strong reaction” to the invasion of Kuwait. Aziz is reported to have said essnetially the same thing in 1996 and 2000 interviews with PBS, again, at times when Aziz had no incentive to lie in the Bush Administration’s favor. If Aziz’s 1992, 1996 and 2000 admissions weren’t enough to set the record straight in the eyes of the moonbats who still blame the first Bush Administration for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, I don’t that anything ever will be.

According to the latest “study” by Iraq Body Count, 75,000 of the 100,000 Iraqi civilianss we killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom have come back to life.

Molly Ivins has admitted (h/t: Michelle Malkin) that her claim we have killed more Iraqis than Saddam was way off base. No, seriously, she did, and without the usual neoclintonian caveats or they-a culpas one might normally expect under circumstances like this. She did explain how she arrived at that conclusion, but made no excuses for it. For someone like Ivins to apologize so thoroughly is beyond the usual “man bites dog” story; it’s more like “man gets down on all fours, humps a dog’s leg and sniff’s another dog’s butt.” You just don’t see this stuff every day (I hope). Molly ends her column thusly:

There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong.

I was certainly under no illusions regarding Saddam Hussein, whom I have opposed through human rights work for decades. My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry.

Apology accepted. Now, if you could just add a word or two about that time travel thing…

Hugo Schwyzer, a pacifist (?) liberal who opposed the war in Iraq, now suggests that the war may have been worth it because José Maria Aznar’s support of the war against Iraq (which, we all know, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda) motivated al-Qaeda (which, we all know, had nothing to do with Iraq) to murder hundreds of Spaniards just in time to swing the election in favor of the new government, which opposes terror in all of its forms (except, of course, any forms having anything to do with Iraq), and which has since gone on to enact gay marriage.

Here’s a question for my liberal friends in the U.S.: assume for argumewnt’s sake that gay marriage is so wonderful that it’ worth an otherwise unnecessary war and the murder of 200+ innocent Spaniards, most of whom didn’t even support that war in the first place. Assuming that, does gay marriage even count if it’s enacted by an elected legislative body rather than a court?

Molly Ivins has been widely and deservedly condemned around the blogosphere for a particular line in a recent column that claims that the US has killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein did. That might be the most offensive part of Ivins’s column – and don’t you dare question her patriotism over it! – but it’s probably not the stupidest. After all, countries at war with each other usually kill more of their enemies’ citizens than they do of their own. It pretty much goes without saying that in the same war, Saddam Hussein killed more Americans than George Bush did, or that Hitler killed more Americans in World War II than FDR did. The only time one party kills more of its own citizens than the enemy does is when that party is one of worst of the worst, e.g., Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot or, um, Dick Durbin Saddam Hussein. So while Ivins’s claim may be stupid, baseless and unpatriotic, it at least describes some events that could have happened, or which Ivins may have honestly believed did.

That’s more than I can say for Ivins’s historical revisionism over H.J. Res. 114, the October 11, 2002 vote by both houses of congress to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Rather than concede that the 77-23 split in the Senate and the 296-133 split in the House may indicate that Karl Rove was on to something, Ivins rationalized the “no” votes thusly:

The vote on invading Iraq was 77-23 in the Senate and 296-133 in the House. By that time, some liberals did question the wisdom of invasion because: A) Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11 and B) it looked increasingly unlikely that Iraq actually had great stores of weapons of mass destruction because the United Nations inspectors, who were on the ground, couldn’t find any sign of them – even though Donald Rumsfeld said we knew exactly where they were.

Item (A) is, of course, common, run-of-the-mill moonbattery. Voting against the war on Iraq because Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 makes no more sense than voting against the war in Afghanistan because Afghanistan had nothing to do with the invasion of Kuwait of, for that matter, turning Dennis “Please call me BTK” Rader loose because he had nothing to do with the murder of Sharon Tate. It would be one thing if the Bush Administration had ever alleged such a link, but of course it hasn’t. It would be another if Ivins at least believed in good faith, albeit mistakenly, that the Bush Administration had ever made such a claim, but her March 11, 2003 column makes it clear even that is not the case. In that article titled “Bring Back Poppy,” which ran a mere eight days before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, Ivins wrote:

According to a poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS, 42 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein of Iraq was personally responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center, something that has never even been claimed by the Bush administration.

Is Ivins honestly going to argue that the Bush Administration reversed gears sometime between March 11, 2003 and March 19, 2003 and started claiming Saddam Hussein of Iraq was personally responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center? Or does she merely assume that enough time has passed since March 11, 2003 that her readers are now ready to believe a revisionist lie about the Administration’s pre-2003 rhetoric which they never would have believed had she told the same lie in 2003? Or was she just trying to make a funny by writing a column with the theme “we are all individuals who think for ourselves,” only to herself repeat a lie that she herself did not believe, but which all those other liberal non-individuals had been chanting since singer/geopolitical analyst Barbra Streisand sent her infamous September 25, 2002 fax urging Dick “Gebhardt” to vote against H.J. Res. 114 because “Sadam” Hussein had not bombed the twin towers and had nothing to do with al “Queda” (Spanish for “stay,” which presumably is what she wanted our troops to do)?

Dishonest though it is, Ivins’s newfound revisionism about (A) is not the loonies part of her column. Like her allegation that George Bush killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein did, it is dishonest and wrong, but at least could have happened. Part (B) of the argument, however, could not have, unless Ivins believes up to 156 Congressmen are capable of time travel. That argument is, once again, that:

The vote on invading Iraq was 77-23 in the Senate and 296-133 in the House. By that time, some liberals did question the wisdom of invasion because: … it looked increasingly unlikely that Iraq actually had great stores of weapons of mass destruction because the United Nations inspectors, who were on the ground, couldn’t find any sign of them.

Oh really? Hans Blix’s team may well have been “on the ground” somewhere in the world on October 11, 2002 – most of us are, after all – but whoever’s ground they might have been on, it sure as hell wasn’t in Iraq’s. There were no UN inspectors in Iraq until November 18, 2002, which was more than a month after H.J. Res. 114 had been voted on, and which probably would have never happened if not those 156 allegedly prescient Congressmen had gotten their way and defeated H.J. Res. 114. So to credit them for acting in advance on some future findings by a group of inspectors they effectively voted against allowing into the country at all is a whopper, indeed.

Perhaps this was an honest mistake by an idiot savant who just happened to remember the precise number of Representatives and Senators voted for vs. against H.J. Res. 114, but could not remember when that vote took place and saw no reason to bother looking it up. Or, perhaps, it was a bald-faced lie by a hack columnist who figures she can write anything she wants because most of her readers are like idiot savants themselves, only without the “savant” part. I report, you decide.

Clinton W. Taylor catches George Galloway in a lie.

Q: What’s worse than a “news” organization that insists on calling Iraqi terrorists “insurgents?”

A: A “news” organization that takes issue with Iraqi non-terrorists calling such terrorists terrorists.

Xrlq Goldstein offers an annotated version of Chris Rock’s recent attempts at political commentary.