Month: August 2005

Most everyone in the MSM assumes that Hillary Clinton will be running for president in 2008. Even most bloggers I read believe she’ll make a run for the White House. This speculation (some would say “sure bet”) has prompted many to float the names of potential challengers to Hillary. Not surprisingly, another woman, current secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has been mentioned, and is regularly polled on her prospects. Other women, like Kay Bailey Hutchison have been suggested as replacements for George W. Bush.

Just tune into any of the Sunday TV talker shows and you’ll sense a sort of inevitability to Hillary’s candidacy, which leads into the mentioning of all the other individuals and their potential to win. Clearly, it’s a hot subject that quickly turns into a debate about whether you like one over another.

But I wonder why I don’t hear this question asked or discussed.

Is America ready to elect a woman President of the United States?

Not ready to think about electing a woman president. Not ready to consider the idea of electing a woman president.

I’m talking about the last question that runs through a voters mind the second before they “pull the lever”. In 2008, will a majority of Americans vote a woman into the oval office?

Forget about chances, and the spin, conventional wisdom and specially worded polls (which release nearly every day). None of these can effectively predict what happens on that Tuesday in November.

The last time Americans considered this issue the country only dipped their toe in the water with Geraldine Ferraro as the Democratic Veep nominee in 1984. And, before you go any further…I’m not suggesting that Ms. Ferraro’s failed campaign was an indictment on placing a woman in the highest office in the land. That was a completely different time. But even then, there were many who believed that the act of electing a woman president was long overdue, given that many other western nations had already been served by female heads of state. Since the ‘84 election, the subject of electing a woman president hasn’t gotten a lot of significant air time, until now.

And the noise is everywhere. With the help of Friends of Hillary, (indirect, under the radar) help from the DNC, FOB’s and complicit members of the media, you’d think that America has made up its mind about a woman president, so much so that office pool funds are accumulating, awaiting the winner who successfully picks the designer of the dress the new “Madam” president will wear at her inauguration.

But, I’m just not sure that the all important majority are ready. It seems that in most all decisions, Americans play a “what if?” game. I believe they would play a similar game in this case, and I’m wondering how it would come out.

Maybe we need to take time now, before the hype of the primaries, to ask this question, to talk about it and help people think through it? Whether you’re for Hillary or Condi or Kay Bailey, or a future unknown, the success of their run for high office will be affected by the same single question.

Are we ready?

I wonder.

Two blog posts within the same month…does this mean that Allah is back?

What do you bet that guilt that got to him?

A Christian preacher in the Bahamas is recanting a news release he issued claiming his miracle water had brought a dead man back to life.

A Christian preacher in the Bahamas is recanting a news release he issued claiming his miracle water had brought a dead man back to life.

Bishop Lawrence Rolle of the International Deliverance Praying Ministry told the Nassau Guardian the announcement was inaccurate, and admitted neither he nor the author of the release had witnessed the healing.

The release, issued last week, spoke of a man who had been attacked with a machete and rushed to a hospital. It said after being anointed, the man came out of the emergency room fast.

Rolle acknowledged he wasn’t sure if the man had ever been declared dead, that the information he received on the incident was secondhand as he was not at the hospital where the anointing took place.

However, he told the newspaper other accounts of healing in the news release were true.

They included a man cured of deafness, a woman whose armpit cancers disappeared and another man whose egg-sized brain tumor went away.

What about the (illgotten) offering he took in that night?

You’re looking at it. This is it. No more Cindy Sheehan here. I’ve had it.

And I’ll leave you with this.

This is how Paul Schroeder, father of fallen Marine Lance Cpl. Edward Schroeder, described Cindy Sheehan. Schroeder made the comment today while appearing before the media to urge President Bush to either put more troops into Iraq to end the war quickly or withdraw from the mission completely. The Ohio couple have long opposed the war and tried to dissuade their son from joining the Marines.

I’m just wondering – if you are against the war, and I mean radically against it, do you see Cindy Sheehan as the “new Rosa Parks”?

Are the two even in the same league?

While American struggle to learn to live with the effects of September 11th, the blame game continues.

Still smarting from Waco, Clinton era Pentagon lawyers blocked the sharing of military intelligence outing the September 11th Terrorists to avoid backlash.

Pentagon lawyers, fearing a public-relations “blow back,” blocked a military intelligence unit from sharing information with the FBI that four suspected al Qaeda terrorists were in the country prior to the September 11 attacks, after determining they were here legally, a former Defense Department intelligence official says.

Members of an intelligence unit known as Able Danger were shut out of the September 11 commission investigation and final report, the official said, despite briefing commission staff members on two occasions about the Mohamed Atta-led terrorist cell and telling them of a lockdown of information between the Defense Department and the FBI.

The intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Pentagon lawyers “were afraid of a blow back” — similar to the public’s response to the FBI-led assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which left more than 70 people dead — and decided to withhold the information from the FBI.

The official said the decision was made at the Army’s Special Operations Command (SoCom) headquarters in Tampa, Fla.,which concluded that Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 hijackers, and the others were in the country legally and thus had the same legal protections as U.S. citizens.

“If something went wrong, SoCom felt it could get blamed,” the official said.

A can of worms containing incompetence seasoned with political correctness. All the while, finger pointers are everywhere.

Some claim a cover-up is in the works. Others blame conservatives for misrepresenting the players involved. Then there are those who claim it was our flawed immigration system that allowed Arab terrorists who trained at camps in Afghanistan to freely travel within the U.S.

I’ve got nothing against learning from our mistakes, and clearly these investigations are aimed at accomplishing this, but do we gain anything by attempting to point blame at an individual, or a department, or a president’s administration for the tragedy of September 11? None of it will bring the dead back to life. Aren’t there less destructive ways of accomplishing closure?

Right now, when it is most important for the United States to protect itself from terrorist attack, why should we be distracted by infighting? Aren’t we more vulnerable when we take our eye off the ball? Isn’t that what the terrorists want? Could they be laughing at the US as we bicker incessantly at one another? 

I’m partisan on a lot of issues, but I refuse to blame Americans for 9/11.

Two individuals who were seen by F-16 fighter jet pilots were ID’d as crew members of the doomed flight.

A trained pilot standing in as cabin crew and his air hostess girlfriend appear to have been the two people seen by Greek air force pilots trying to save a Cypriot jet before it plunged into a hillside outside Athens, reports said on Tuesday.

Andreas Prodromou and his girlfriend Haris Charalambous have been provisionally identified as the pair from video footage shot from the two F-16s scrambled after communications with the airliner were lost on Sunday, the privately owned Antenna television reported.

While it doesn’t clear up the mystery that still surrounds the tragedy of the Cypriot jet crash, at least the terrorism rumor can be put to rest. 

Priorities.

Cindy Sheehan is distracted. She’s been on the cover of weekly magazines. She’s been interviewed all over cable news outlets. She’s made a TV commercial. Like E.F. Hutton, she has thousands of ‘supporters’ who await with bated breath her every utterance. In a variety of ways, you could say she’s winning. Day by day the pulpit from which she speaks grows higher and larger. Hour by hour she gains more notoriety.

Fame is fleeting.

As she continues her protest spectacle outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, Cindy Sheehan is losing. In fact, she’s playing a game she can’t win. In a little while, ‘All Cindy All The Time’ will be over. She’ll have to leave Crawford and go back to her life.

What kind of life is it?

She’s lost her son Casey. While most mothers would want to honor the life of a son who served his country, Cindy Sheehan has politicized his death. And where is Casey now? Just yesterday, during one of her (what seems like hourly) press statements, she called for the withdrawal of Israel from Palestine and vowed not to pay her taxes. What’s next, a rally for the Spotted Owl?

She’s lost a lot more. Cindy lost the support of her family. They think she’s gone over the edge.

And now she’s lost her husband, whose divorce petition cites “irreconcilable differences” for the demise of the couple’s 28-year marriage (the Sheehans have been separated since June 1). Irreconcilable indeed.

Is Cindy’s protest still just about her son? No, it’s not. She’s being blinded by the lights of celebrity and being led by a group of radical leftist. Oh, she’ll lose them too, just as soon as the TV lights go off.

Cindy Sheehan is no winner, she’s a three time loser. While she could not prevent the loss of her son, she could have prevented the loss of her family and marriage. She chose not to. The memory of Casey Sheehan has been fouled by the actions of a mother caught between real life and a short-term celebrity fantasy world.

Tragedy breeds tragedy.

Newsweek doesn’t have a history of being good to George Bush. In fact, one of their key employees, Jonathan Alter, regularly goes after the president and his administration.

So then, what do we make of this? See anything strange? Anything out of the ordinary? Read the article.

Has something changed at Newsweek? Given their record on Bush, how did a piece like this pass editorial? What’s their motive? Are they trying to win an audience back?

UPDATE: Newsweeklies struggle for the first half of the year.