How stupid do you have to be to not see 9/11 as an act of war? Willfully and intentionally stupid. And who in their right mind makes the fate of monsters a high enough priority to make an issue out of it, a crusade?

No compassion for the victims’ families who would only be victimized again by the media circus surrounding any kind of criminal trial and no respect for the rules of war or the integrity of our military to honorably conduct these trials. Personally, I’m relieved we still live in a  country where if a president wants to get re-elected he had better keep Gitmo open and hold tribunals. If it ever goes the other way, we are lost.

Rachel Maddow is not much happier than Michael Moore, but she does at least expose Obama’s cynical politics behind the move.

I’m beginning to think our President likes the damn place.

Either that, or he realizes it’s necessary- especially when a fair portion of the men released end up back at war with us.

And the rest are just fat.

True, these jerks eat well at Gitmo. Along with 21 TV stations and great medical care – they live better than me.

And, right on the water.

My apartment window looks over a fat man urinating.

Almost, the same thing.

Now I used to think Obama saw these suspects as criminals. Which meant they get all the rights that go with it.

But maybe now he sees them as enemy combatants on a strange new battlefield – where the victims can be found in Manhattan, London and Ft. Hood. I dunno.

So with Gitmo open, and our Prez okay with indefinite detention and military tribunals, you’d think someone might say, “I was wrong.”

I can.

I can say that I never expected Obama to refute Erik Holder. I never expected him to reject his dangerously earnest naiveté about the world, or the disapproving opinion regarding America’s role fighting evil.

I never expected them to see it my way.

So I can say, I was wrong.

But now, they should do the same. After all, they trashed so many people for the very policies they practice now. Remember all that crap Bush got by people like Obama?

Someone deserves a hand-written note.

So it would be kinda cool to see someone say, “Hey, they were right. We were wrong. Holder’s a dope. Let’s move on.”

I’d be okay with that.

Also, I’d like some flowers.

And a dune buggy.

Made of chocolate.

And if you disagree with me, you sir are worse than Hitler.

If nothing else, Polanski’s timing couldn’t be better. If you’re a Hollywoodist — even a remorseless child-raping Hollywoodist —  looking for a boost from your fellow Hollywoodists, what better way to hold on to your Frat House bona fides than to direct a film like this? [emphasis mine]:

[A]s a filmmaker, Roman Polanski is back in a big, big way with THE GHOST WRITER. Adapted by Robert Harris (author of the excellent FATHERLAND and ENIGMA) from his own novel, the film is about a mildly successful non-fiction hack (Ewan McGregor) who lands the plum gig of shaping the memoirs of a recently ousted British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) - who bears a none-too-subtle resemblance to Tony Blair. The opportunity is there for the taking because the PM’s former ghost writer washed up dead on a beach somewhere close to Martha’s Vineyard. The only downside to the assignment is the PM’s potentially unlawful participation in secretly shipping British citizens/suspected terrorists off to Guantanamo Bay for the ol’ Jack Bauer treatment.

Here are a couple descriptions of the novel upon which the film is based:

Bookmark Magazine: From there, it quickly gains momentum, merging a shrewd indictment of the war in Iraq with a literate, page-turning thriller. Harris, who was once a friend of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, offers a withering, barely disguised attack on Blair’s policies and his collusion with the United States in the Middle East.

Publishers Weekly: The stakes rise when Lang [the PM] is accused of war crimes for authorizing the abduction of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan, who then ended up in the CIA’s merciless hands.

Sounds as though Ghost Writer is the perfect storm of everything so laughably and maddeningly depraved about the left-wing film industry today. It takes the wrong side in a righteous war — a war we’re presently fighting, by the way — and its creator is a fugitive whose anal rape of a thirteen year-old girl (he drugged) hasn’t dented his celebrity in the least. No shortage of “stars” lining up to work with him!

A new low from those who make the movies? Pish-posh, it’s still morning.

NOTE: This post is in clear violation of the rule that only allows water carrying left-wing film writers to speculate about upcoming films they haven’t seen.

UPDATE: Awesomeness in the comments — “Would you rather be a prisoner in Abu Ghraib, or a young girl in Roman Polanski’s hot tub?”

So what’s the recipe for their self-proclaimed success? Obama’s clumsy and misguided attempt to close Gitmo. According to Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications (nice title), “By prohibiting torture and working to close the prison…we are denying Al-Queda a recruiting tool.”

So lets analysis this theory for a moment. If Gitmo is a great tool for the bad guys to recruit more bad guys, it means the place must be upsetting enough to turn men toward jihad. Translation: the very idea of it ruins their day. Gitmo represents treating terrorists like enemies, using every tool to extract information from them, and using that info to destroy their cause. So it’s not waterboarding that pisses them off, but the fact that we’re trying to beat them.

And this upsets them, much in the way Leno pisses off Conan, Nicole Ritchie irked Paris Hilton, or the troubling way in which Hulk Hogan undermined the Ultimate Warrior. But even more so, I think.

To me, it’s both naïve and scary that the Administration thinks closing down Gitmo will reduce jihad – as if suddenly terrorists will stop terrorizing once a tool of war is removed. As John Bolton noted, America is, and will always be, the primary recruitment tool for all jihadists – Gitmo or no Gitmo. And if anything, closing Gitmo tells terrorists that their strategy worked – that these murderers can influence our decision-making – which only encourages them to step up their game.

How the Administration can call this Sally Field diplomacy a success is beyond me.

But a lot of things are beyond me. Which is why I own a sponge on a stick.

Tonight: the wonderful Jill Dobson, the delightful Steven Crowder, the insightful Father Jonathan, and the hilarious Jesse Joyce!

These emails have been called “the nail in the coffin” of global warming hysteria.

I wish that were true.

Check out the sites where the Chicken Little`s still thrive. About the hacked emails, The Huffington Post says “this criminal activity has created fodder for right-wing groups to promote their own agenda that global warming is not real.” And, after admitting he was “deeply shaken” by the emails, a Guardian columnist adds that “To bury man-made climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed.”

Really?

For fun: imagine if these leaked emails weren’t about global warming, but Gitmo. Or Dick Cheney. Or Sarah Palin’s private life. How fast would Time, Newsweek, and an intensely sweaty Andrew Sullivan be all over them – calling these emails corruption of the highest order?

But they can’t do this here. Because the lie is the lie that the media believed in. It’s their Watergate – so it’s no wonder there’s no “Woodward and Bernstein” to bring it down.

So, where does this leave Al Gore? He’s got his hands all over this leafy Ponzi scheme, and he stands to make buttloads of money off propagated fear. Something tells me he won’t be discussing these emails in Copenhagen. Because as long as the sky keeps falling, his bank account keeps rising.

Tonight:

Michelle Malkin!

Barret Swatek!

Alex Blagg!

Remi Spencer!

and other stuff!

Note: No Iguana’s were actually shown on camera without their expressed written consent.

So many of us in the business know people who have been overseas to help entertain the troops, and the luckiest among us have actually had the experience ourselves. I’m proud to have moved from Category A to category B this last week, when I was able to spend five days down at Guantanamo Bay.

There’s a lot to talk about. But the thing that struck me hardest was the fact that even though I expected to be blown away by our men and women in uniform, I really had no idea of just how far my high expectations would be exceeded. The competence and discipline I took for granted going in. It was the soldier’s generosity that kept knocking me on my butt.

So here are the remarks I was privileged to have been able to give. I hope that it in some small way captures not just what I feel, but what all we civilians feel, and not just about the men and women stationed at Guantanamo Bay, but rather about every single one of them: past, present and future.

From the “Truth is Stranger Than Fiction” files:

Rock bands including Pearl Jam and REM have joined a coalition of musicians to support the US president’s efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, which also includes former military officers, launched on Tuesday.

Many of the artists who have signed up are angry that their music was used as an interrogation tool in the jail.

But CIA spokesman George Little said music was used only for security, rather than “punitive purposes”.

In a statement, REM said: “We have spent the past 30 years supporting causes related to peace and justice. To now learn that some of our friends’ music may have been used as part of the torture tactics without their consent or knowledge, is horrific. It’s anti-American, period.”

Other artists to sign up to the coalition include Jackson Browne, Steve Earle, Roseanne Cash, Billy Bragg, Bonnie Raitt and Rage Against The Machine.

On behalf of the campaign, the National Security Archive in Washington is filing a Freedom of Information Act request seeking classified records that detail the use of loud music as an interrogation device.

How lacking in self-awareness do you have to be to claim that your music is used as torture? That’s not something most people would call attention to.  

Big Hollywood agrees and calls on the CIA to start using audio tapes of rock stars pontificating on politics as an interrogation tactic. The terrorists would break much faster.

Read the full article here.

Republicans and conservatives are dancing with glee every time a new poll comes out showing Obama’s poll numbers going down faster than a Hilton (Perez or Paris) after a nice dinner and a couple of cocktails. The support for things like Universal Health Care, closing Gitmo, and Cap and Trade are sinking even faster. Yet, that’s not the whole story.  Something else is going on here.  Something that begs the question: Has Liberalism “Jumped the Shark”?

Ehhhh…

Over the last sixty days or so, we’ve seen some amazing things. We saw a “wise Latina,” a self-described “affirmative action baby” claim that her statements were taken out of context or merely “meant to inspire,” and that race has nothing to do with her job performance. The White House has re-branded the $787 billion “stimulus package” a “stabilization package.” Our Vice-President, devious genius that he is, stated that we need to, “crazy as it sounds,” spend like lunatics to avoid bankruptcy. A gay blogger and gay civil rights champion called a black guy “the worst thing [he] could think of…a faggot.” We saw our government allow Iranian protesters, who peacefully challenged a rigged election, get shot in the street. Concurrently, we demanded that a tin-pot dictator be reinstated after his government got wise to his schemes and legally booted him.

All of these little vignettes, as well as countless others over the last month or two, do not bold well for our little leftist friends. They are examples of liberalism in action, naked and unfiltered. They are the equivalent of an “unforced error” in tennis. There is no opposition baiting these mistakes and revelations. This is in their own voices, not through the analysis of a Rush Limbaugh “teachable moment,” a Glenn Beck meltdown, or Hotair.com “quote of the day.”

It is liberalism unplugged, on display for all to see.

Identity politics, when viewed in its purest form, is racism. Keynesian economics, when distilled to its basic concepts, flies in the face of common sense. Re-branding political policy doesn’t change its ultimate effectiveness. Hypocrites are hypocrites regardless of the causes they support, or claim to champion. The U.S. should not be about “nuance” when it comes to foreign policy. We must always stand on the side of freedom and democracy.

For the first time in a long time even a casual observer can clearly see what modern liberalism is all about.

In an episode of “South Park” the boys encounter the Underwear Gnomes. They are a society of magical little creatures who steal your underwear in the middle of the night. When the boys ask the Gnomes about their motivation, they explain that they are doing it for “profit.” The first step is to steal underpants. The third step is profit. When pressed about the second step there is only silence. The Gnomes don’t know how to transform the stolen underwear into profit, but they continue to steal it anyway. They work tirelessly, stealing underpants in their quest for profit. But without that second step, they will get nothing. Hmmm, what does that sound like? Great goals, but no solid plan of getting there? That’s modern liberalism. It’s an ideology that lacks principles  No step two. To make matters worse, most of the very mechanisms of liberalism (unions, racially segregated interest groups, attacks on capitalism) act counter intuitively to its goals.

I say its “jumped the shark” because, without a strong set of timeless principals to guide it, this political ideology is a fad. It’s had a lot of great, good looking, and popular spokespeople. Last November it had an awesome ad campaign (one so good, Pepsi apparently felt the need to steal it). It’s all style and no substance.  And like the Spice Girls, Beany Babies, Cabbage Patch Kids, and the leisure suit it is destined to fade into obscurity.

Young people, you know those folks who haven’t lived as much as you but know better than you, have always been the bread and butter of hippie liberalism.  But they have a very short attention span, especially the kids today.  During the election, they were all about it.  But now they are really into Adam Lambert and “Twilight”.  Obama and Co. had hoped that the kids would stay in the mix, using the twitter and the Facebook to keep it real and spread their positive message of nationalization of private industry and wealth redistribution.  Sadly, the kids have chucked Obama into the virtual trash bin, right next to the video of the Ally McBeal dancing baby.

Troll traffic on conservative sites is down.  Look at Facebook, MySpace, YouTube etc.  The number of political postings supporting hippie liberalism is almost non-existent. Even more remarkable, the message boards and postings on non-political sites is trending libertarian and conservative when political topics come up.  Perhaps most humorous of all, the State Run Media has failed to make any recent conservative “scandals” or “revelations” stick.  People just don’t care to hear it.  They want results not more talk.  Bush isn’t the president, Sarah Palin resigned, Rush Limbaugh isn’t backing down.  Dare I say that people want to “move on”?

Make no mistake, they aren’t going to evaporate right away.  Even “Happy Days” went on for 100 episodes after the infamous moment (and we got two seasons of “Joanie Loves Chachi”), but the end is nigh.  At some point in the near future (probably in the lead up to the 2010 mid-terms) the pundit class is going to have to ask “can the Democratic Party relate to voters?”  Can the party of Howard Dean, the Daily Kos and Keith Olbermann remain relevant?

With the kids bouncing onto the next big thing, and without any real successes to point to, the hippie liberals are left with their usual crew: trial lawyers, race hustlers, and unions.  There are a few hard-core ideologues out there, but the true, honest liberals who are all about those lofty goals will soon abandon the freak show assembled in Washington.

With hippie liberalism “jumping the shark”, people are going to need a new fad.  It has to be bold, fresh, and at least on paper, original.  A new form of “pop politics” will emerge.  The good news for everyone, is that the Republicans “jumped the shark” at some point in 2005.  We are heading towards a whole new era in American politics.

Hopefully it will be more effective than this whole Pepsi, I mean Obama thing.  I wonder what it may be….