TOBY PETZOLD

Item One: The location from a couple of Saturdays ago when the kid showed up ESPN College Gameday with the rebus-sign saying “CORSO LOVES COCK” was Gainesville —not Jacksonville— Florida. My apologies for not knowing where other states’ colleges are.

Item Two: Hugo Chavez did not, in fact, suggest last month in New York that he was sorry he never got to meet Noam Chomsky before Chomsky’s death. Chavez was actually referring to the late John Kenneth Galbraith. News reports to the contrary effect were based on a mistranslation of his remarks.

I regret the errors.

At this point, I am more interested in voting against Carole Keeton Strayhorn than in voting for Kinky Friedman. I’m so sick of her constant commercials that I just want her to go away.

There’s no consequences to any of this crap, anyway. Nobody really likes Governor Perry, but he’ll win because he’s got money and organization.

Kinky never runs any ads in my market. I wonder why. Is he that broke? Dang!

Mark Steyn unloads on the stupidity of these frivolous times:

Thomas Sowell says the question for this election is not whether you or your candidate is Republican or Democrat but whether you’re “serious” or “frivolous.” A lot of Americans, and not just their sorry excuse for a professional press corps, are in the mood for frivolity. It’s like going to the theater. Do you really want to sit through that searing historical drama from the Royal Shakespeare Company? Or would you rather be at the sex comedy next door?

In the 1990s, Americans opted for the sex comedy — or so they thought. But in reality the searing historical drama carried on; it was always there, way off in the background, behind the yuk-it-up narcissist trouser-dropper staggering around downstage. The mood of the times was to kick the serious stuff down the road so we could get back to President Lounge Act offering to feel our pain. With North Korea, the people delegated to kick the can a few years ahead — Madeleine Albright, Jimmy Carter — are now back, writing self-congratulatory op-eds about their genius and foresight. Not at all. Albright’s much-touted “agreement” was a deal whereby Washington agreed to prop up a flailing basket-case state in order to enable it to buy enough time to become a serious destabilizing threat to its neighbors and beyond. Many of our present woes — not least Iran — derive explicitly from the years when Carter embodied the American “superpower” as a smiling eunuch.

I hope this election will be a rebuke to shitheadedness. Our enemies aren’t going away, you know. Let’s see how the Democrats respond to the threats facing this country for a while. Let’s see how much time they spend on real problems and how much they want to talk about goddamned Mark Foley. 

Who is this color commentator TBS has got calling the Texas-Baylor game?

One of the guy’s “keys to the game” for Texas is getting maximum action from the “Cutest Couple.”

You know: Colt McCoy and Limas Sweed.

Could that be any gayer?

Tom Maguire has directed my attention to this report in the New York Sun about James Baker’s Iraq Study Group:

WASHINGTON — A commission formed to assess the Iraq war and recommend a new course has ruled out the prospect of victory for America, according to draft policy options shared with The New York Sun by commission officials.

Currently, the 10-member commission — headed by a secretary of state for President George H.W. Bush, James Baker — is considering two option papers, “Stability First” and “Redeploy and Contain,” both of which rule out any prospect of making Iraq a stable democracy in the near term.

The news of this report is so bad that it cannot really be spun.

One might say that the War for Iraq has produced some great successes (e.g., the toppling of Saddam Hussein and his government, the exposure of the UN and much of Europe as a lot of criminal degenerates, the extermination of lots of bad people, the courageous promise of three different elections, the projection of American power resulting in the destabilization of oppressive regimes in the region, etc.).

But if this President cannot plausibly talk about his achievements in nation-building in Iraq, then he will not see —in his remaining two years in power— the vindication of his stated goals.

And that is a failure. A near-term failure —for I see this war as both a necessity and the foundation for a better world to come— but a failure all the same.  

Yecchhh.

Anybody care to explain why it’s so damned important that the United States enter into another round of bilateral talks with North Korea?

Is it because that’s what Clinton and Carter did?

Hmm. Well, only a partisan liar or someone completely ignorant of history would suggest that those efforts succeeded.

Bush’s sexpartite strategy is superior for the simple reason that it takes into account the reality of the dynamic in East Asia: North Korea is China’s responsibility. By including the other regional powers, the onus is placed squarely on Beijing to demonstrate their commitment to becoming a partner for peace and commerce in the region.

The idea that the United States is the only obstruction to peace with the North Koreans is just weird. Demanding that we, alone, must negotiate with the Kimchi Pot is to completely ignore the fact that he is Beijing’s proxy in maintaining the tension between our allies and a totalitarian regime where extreme political repression, concentration camps, and famine are the rule.

China just wants to keep deferring the day that the two Koreas are united. They don’t want to see a successful pro-American country sitting so closely to their own. They want to squash that just like they do Taiwan and any other incovenience in their sphere. 

The pendulum of this so-called Foley Scandal appears to have swung as far to the right as it can go. Now, it can only go the other way. From the Washington Post (emphases mine):

Two of the news media’s sources of Mark Foley’s sexually explicit instant messages to former House pages said this week that they came forward to expose the Florida congressman’s actions, not to help the Democrats in the midterm elections.

But there are indications that Democrats spent months circulating five less insidious Foley e-mails to news organizations before they were finally published by ABC News late last month, which prompted the leaking of the more salacious instant messages. Harper’s Magazine said yesterday that it obtained the five e-mails from a Democratic Party operative, albeit in May, long before the election season.

The genesis of the Foley story has become the subject of heated debate, as Republicans try to shift attention away from Foley’s misconduct and the slow reaction of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s office to what they call a political hit just ahead of the midterm elections.

Okay, so that’s the opening three paragraphs of a Washington Post news report about an unconsummated sex scandal —each referencing next month’s elections with all the insistency of a liar protesting his innocence too much. 

Was somebody talking about the elections? I’ll have you know that this scandal is all about the little boys. It’s the children, damn you! Waaahhhhh! Oh! and the predatory pedophiles. We’ve got to protect the children —the little 16 and 17 year-old boys— from the predatory pedophiles!

Miserable turds.

Beating up on Foley is as easy as falling down, of course, but it may also be that getting exposed in a conspiracy of slander and inculpation by association is even easier than that.

The only question now is how will the Big Media collude to squash the inevitable “counter-revelations.” They’ve got to be coming, you know.

Probably before the elections.

If these reports that North Korea has successfully tested a nuclear weapon prove true, there is only one country thats reaction matters.

China is the reason why the Kimchi Pot is even still in power. China abides his nuttiness because it annoys Japan and South Korea and us. If the Chinese cut their comrades off at the knees (viz., in the Security Council tomorrow), then we’ll know their attention’s been gotten. If not, then we’ll know that the Chinese intend to continue using North Korea for their own regional agenda. 

So here comes the real test.