Children should find other reasons to count to fifteen

Rick Warren on the road to Damascus

Christopher Hitchens introduces us to the other side of the Rev. Rick Warren, the one that posed for pictures in Damascus:

Whatever time Warren managed to get with the dear bristled leader was not wasted—you should check out the hilarious parody of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that accidentally results from the official photograph—and whatever hospitality he received from the Syrian authorities did not go unreturned. "Syria," he told his viewers back home by video, is "a moderate country, and the official government rule and position is to not allow extremism of any kind." This is a highly original way to describe a regime that is joined at the hip with the Iranian theocracy, that is the patron of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that is the official and unabashed host of the fugitive Hamas leadership whose military wing directs massacre operations from Damascus itself. (One might also add that the Syrian Baath Party's veteran defense minister,* Mustafa Tlas, published a book under his own name that accused Jews of using the blood of non-Jewish children for the making of those ever-menacing Passover matzos. I suppose it depends how you define extremism.)

Warren also told his hosts that 80% of America opposed the administration's policy in Iraq. It's as if Peter Arnett had a religious calling.

Our good pastor also found the time to tell his captive audience—if I may use such an unoriginal phrase in a literal way—that 80 percent of his countrymen opposed the administration's policy in Iraq. Assume yourself, dear reader, to be one of that possible 80 percent. Did you ever ask to be spoken for by Warren, who was a guest of a regime that sponsors al-Qaida infiltrators in Iraq, or to see him denounce the administration in front of an audience of Syrians that had no choice but to listen to whatever it was told? For shame.

Hey, idiots. The first rule of comedy is that cancer isn't funny.

Time for this week's Idiot Politician of the Week. Yep, we're moving it to Friday to give them a chance to repent over the weekend.

We have a few nominees this week that could win the prize almost any other week if we're weren't talking about politicians.

We start this week with international affairs, specifically former President Jimmy Carter's love affair with radical Palestinian terrorist groups. Carter is about to go on a trip to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to talk with the leaders of Hamas. Just a warning to Jimmy. These Muslim fundamentalist extremists tend to take a rather dim view of homosexuality, so don't go laying a Carter-Loves-Brezhnev on them or they might just stone you. Since we doubt you're going to avoid asking them to stop firing rockets at Israel, could you at least ask them to stop killing Palestinians that disagree with them?

Closer to home some idiocy is even criminal. Kenosha County Executive and former Sheriff Allan Kehl has chosen option "B" for living off the taxpayers for awhile - as an inmate at a federal prison near you. As former State Senator Cathy Stepp put it, "I mean really, accepting money in a bag in someone's garage?! Even drug dealers are more sophisticated than that today."

This is your brain. This is your brains on drugs. This your brain if you're a politician accepting bags of cash in your garage.

Sometimes I feel like I'm writing less of a blog than I am a sort-of political Darwin Awards segment. This week's winner comes from the "I could have been a contender until I started poking fun at cancer" category. State Representative Sheldon Wasserman must've fallen off his bicycle one too many times without a helmet to not try to stop his fellow liberals from scoring the biggest "own goal" of the November election cycle so far. Democrats are putting around the story that State Senator Alberta Darling is too ill from surviving breast cancer to mount an effective re-election campaign this year. Of course, it's not true. It's also a pretty low and slimy political stunt. I don't think Democrats would have been too happy about if the situation was reversed and it was Republicans spreading the story about Attorney General Lautenschlager two years ago.

Think about how twisted this double-standard is.
Lautenschlager (D): brave, courageous.
Darling (R) : Too ill to serve.

Wait until the women in the senate district find out that Wasserman's political allies were trying to use breast cancer as an issue in the campaign. Wait until they hear Doctor Wasserman's allies were using someone's health as an issue in the campaign.

The moment Wasserman saw the mention of Darling's health in Milwaukee Magazine he should've told his side to cool it. He claims he didn't know.

Well Sheldon, you're the Idiot Politician of the Week. If you don't know what's in the press about your own campaign, if you don't know what your own side is doing, then you're the idiot. And if you did know, then you're a slimy idiot at that.

(Send your nomination for the "Idiot Politician of the Week" to Jamesmdw@yahoo.com. The idiots will be identified every Friday.)

Dershowitz at Brandeis

I just watched on C-Span Alan Dershowitz's response to former President Carter at Brandeis University. It will be on again Sunday, January 28 at 9:45 am EST and Monday, January 29 at 12:15 am EST. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in what's happening in Israel.

Here's an excerpt:


By the way, Dershowitz repeats his offer of $15,000 to anyone who can find a prominent Jewish leader that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Update! Yid with Lid has Dershowitz's own reaction to the speeches at Brandeis.


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