TOBY PETZOLD

I’m not offended by Larry Craig because of his homosexuality, but because he is a hypocrite who once had the power to actively deny gays their full civil rights. And, if I recall correctly, he used it.

Craig’s little misdemeanor is actually unrelated to his now-recognized homosexuality. People of all orientations enjoy the thrill of illicit sexual behavior. But the recklessness appalls and the absurdity of such closetedness is apparent.

I would ask my friends in the Republican Party —who love their country enough to know that its foreign policy must never again be lost to the degenerates in the other party— to carefully consider the value of its own anti-gay positions. Is it the Holy Bible that gives you the authority to ignore the science of sexuality? Homosexuality is as old as the species. God said, “Let there be light —and it was fabulous.” You know that. Gender preferences are innate. Is there really any question? Moral conservatism consists of a hell of a lot more than denouncing and demeaning homosexuals; it should, instead, extol and practice the virtues of commitment and honest sexual being.

Take it from an involuntarily celibate old man: human beings should have a right to be what they are as sexual creatures, but they owe it to others to have complete dignity about it and to take absolute responsibility. We are only separate from the animals by our human being —the eternal mind of the species, thinking itself into existence.

Lying to the world about what you are as a man for the sake of political ambition? I reject that as wrong and still unnecessary.

Ten years ago tonight, I was walking out my front door on my way to work a midnight shift when one of my relatives —decidedly not on his way to work— pops out of his side of the duplex we were living in and asked me if I’d heard that Princess Diana was dead.

“No,” I grumbled, half-awake. “I wonder what she’ll wear to the funeral.”

My point is not that I didn’t cry some —and I did, later on, being a lifelong Anglophile— but that Diana Spencer was and is an annoyance to me. She isn’t tragic or heroic or anything else to me but overrated. Her global celebrity was entirely a function of the media age into which she emerged. Maybe she ushered it in, like some sort of sick aftershock of the British Pop Invasion from the mid-1960s. But I dislike all of these recollections in the media because they are frivilous emotionalism.

Admit it: “Candle in the Wind” didn’t always suck and make your stomach curdle.

Glenn Reynolds links to this excellent post by Beldar, the semi-anonymous Texas lawyer and sometime blogger:

When I first brought it to his attention in September 2005, I reminded Sen. John F. Kerry that — based on the publication date on or about August 25, 2004, of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry by John E. O’Neill and Jerome R. Corsi — Sen. Kerry had already allowed the one-year statutes of limitations for defamation to expire in Texas (where Mr. O’Neill resides), New Jersey (where Dr. Corsi resides), and the District of Columbia (where their publisher Regnery Publishing, Inc. has its principal place of business and Sen. Kerry has his own regular place of business).

But as I noted then, Sen. Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts has a very unusual, extremely generous and pro-plaintiff three-year limitations period for defamation claims. Massachusetts’ three-year statute of limitations for defamation claims made it the very last feasible venue in which Sen. Kerry conceivably could file suit and gain his public vindication, if the SwiftVets’ allegations about him were false. Those claims were certainly, indeed deliberately, injurious to his reputation; his damages arguably include the loss of the 2004 presidential election, however that might be valued in dollars and cents; and if John Kerry could hope to find a home-town advantage anywhere, surely it would be there. But now he’s let the incredibly generous Massachusetts statute of limitations run out, too.

Read it all and remember: John Kerry didn’t “ignore” the Swiftboat Veterans’ attacks on him.

He was simply unable to respond without proving his opponents right.

Why has NBC put Keith Olbermann on the main network tonight before Sunday Night Football? I guess it’s some sort of experiment to see how much anti-American bullshit Middle America can take in one sitting. Guess they’re doing some prep work for the DNC demo projects this coming election year.

One way to cut the crank for the non-cultists would be to soften it up with a Bob Saget-level blooper segment. Nice choice. Then segue into the usual viciousness and ignorance.

They’ll have a laugh and then learn about the President’s secret plan to suspend the 2008 Elections. And then maybe something about Britney Spears.

You know: whatever is chickenshit.

The anti-American hippie Left is fond of euphemizing, as evidenced by this casual characterization by the New York Observer’s Steve Kornacki in his piece on Michael Dukakis, master political strategist (emphasis mine):

Since his fall collapse was made official on Nov. 8, 1988—an eight-point, 426-to-112 electoral-vote loss to George H.W. Bush—Democrats have held up Mr. Dukakis’ general election campaign as a case study in the perils of not hitting back. In 1992, Bill Clinton, with his rapid response team and pitch-perfect shaming of Mr. Bush in their first debate, showed he’d learned the lesson; in 2004, John Kerry showed that he’d forgotten it.

But while Mr. Dukakis readily indicts himself for fatally ignoring the 1988 version of Swift-Boating—the G.O.P.’s success with Willie Horton, he said, “was my own damn fault; no one else’s”—he worries that his party has oversimplified the lesson of his defeat, and of Mr. Kerry’s and Al Gore’s, too. And if Democrats don’t learn the right lesson soon, he fears they’ll be locked out of the White House for a third straight time in 2008—no matter how rosy the electoral math now looks.

“Swiftboating” is apparently now a euphemism for a Democrat being exposed by his own past. It is a verb for a Republican telling the truth and a Democrat not liking it.

One might think that it is an unfair attack —one to which those making it have no right— but that is total crap. Yeah, I remember Dukakis acting like he was better than fighting Bush the Elder. He was a smarmy, college-boy liberal. But if he “ignored” Bush on Horton, it was only because he had no defense for his furlough policies. None. Horton exposed Dukakis for just the kind of guy who would tell Bernie Shaw that he wouldn’t support the execution of the murderer and rapist of his own wife. 

Similarly, Kerry had no response to the accusations and recollections of his fellow Swiftboaters because they were right. Kerry got busted with his own words and deeds. Period. Only an asshole who doesn’t understand how American politics works would presume to call the Horton ad or the Swiftboat Veterans’ anti-Kerryism as anything but hanging a dumb bastard with the rope he gave them.

The Devil was beating his wife today while I was at work. That’s always a very strange —and somehow counterintuitive— sight to behold.

“The summer of aught-seven was the damnedest one I ever saw,” they’ll say.

“I reckon so,” I’ll say.

(Last night was a farmer’s moon, my marmoset.)

Will the repair last? I doubt it completely.

Still no comment functionality —and the old comments themselves may now be gone, as I very much regret, especially in the case of the thoughtful few (e.g., Rider, Arkady, Sluggo, et al).

Been extremely busy lately with a great overtime opportunity, so it is a great relief to come home and vegetate and not get wrapped up in the follies of men, anyway. There’s no question that the ignorant cocksuckery of the anti-American liberal Left runs unabated, but my perspective on that is safely superfluous.

Enjoy the day.