I've been trying hard to avoid politics lately--it's gotten so bitter and silly that it's much more fun to simply go on a cruise or two and watch some college basketball.

But, in the interim, a couple of things have happened.

First, Iraq elected a parliament. Now, we don't know who won yet, but the fact remains that for the first time in history, an Arab nation has elected a fully representative government.

Of course, to the extent that this remarkable achievement has been reported in Old Media, it's been spun largely as "what will go wrong now and how it will hurt Bush."

Riiiiiiiggghhhtttt.

Next, we have the New York Times story on government monitoring of communications between terror suspects in foreign countries and those in the U.S. It is an open question as to what the story really is. Is it "domestic spying" as the Old Media is largely spinning it, or is it the illegal leaking of intelligence information as the Administration asserts?

Or maybe a bit of both?

Certainly we need to be concerned whenever the government monitors U.S. citizens' communications. But should we also be concerned that an intelligence operation, maybe an ongoing one, was (by admission of the New York Times) illegally leaked to them?

Old Media keeps trying to re-live their successes with the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.

But have they, in their zeal to "get" a sitting Administration, gone too far?

We are in the curious position, it seems, of allowing (unelected and therefore fundamentally undemocratic) major media outlets to decide whether national security will be harmed by revealing secret information.

Despite the libertarian/anarchical notion that "information should be free," I'd suggest that this is, generally, not a good idea.

Hopefully a court will decide who, if anyone, should go to prison for a long, long, long, long time in this affair.

Glitter's Rock & Roll Part II is an arena/stadium staple:

da-dum da-dum da-dum da
DAAAA-DUM!
HEY!!!!

da-dum da-dum, da
DAAAA-DUM!
HEY!!!

da-dum da dum

Note to aging rock stars: don't get accused of molesting twelve-year-olds in Vietnam. Your holiday may be extended by, oh, four months or so by the friendly Vietnamese government.

I think the CIA should be abolished.

If you look at the CIA's astonishingly bad intelligence to the President and the U.S. government on the Iraq matter, throw in the whole Valerie Plame thing which looks more and more like a CIA operation against the duly elected President of the U.S., and lay on top of that story after story of general CIA incompetence and you realize that Jack Ryan is very, very much a fictional character.

Shut the CIA down, and round up all of those former "Able Danger" military intelligence types and tell them that it's their show now.

Michael Barone agrees with me.

Via Instapundit.

Snookums and I are back from a Mediterranean cruise, where I had time to sit back and think about lots of things, including where this blog has been and where it should be going.

More:
Travel photos, basketball commentary, lifestyle-type stories.

Less:
Us vs. Them commentary (unless the Them are the barbarian Islamic extremists).

With the apparent passage of the Iraqi constitution, the quagmire in which anti-liberty forces such as Teddy Kennedy, George Soros, and Cindy Sheehan find themselves grows deeper. They have no exit strategy for their myopic and cynical opposition towards the ultimate WMD (weapon of mass democracy): individual freedom and liberty.

We can only continue to call on Kennedy, Soros, Move-On, the New York Times, the Democratic Party, and all other No-Blood-For-Freedom forces to pull out of their doomed foray into politics and to bring the rent-a-mobs home.

First, Oklahoma.

Then, Georgia Tech.

Now, UCLA.

Isolated incidents, or a new terror strategy of targeting institutions of higher education?

Seems that long-time political blogger Bill Hobbes is tiring of the all-politics-all-the-time world:

The biggest change: I'm going to suspend writing about politics for awhile. After four years of writing about Tennessee state government and the state budget - more, actually, if you count the more than a year that I wrote about that topic for the City Paper and, before that, for about a year for the now-defunct weekly In Review - I need a break from it.

I'll be publishing non-political essays here from time to time - because I'm a writer not just by trade and training but by nature. I might also do some more photo-blogging. And, occasionally, if I have some new insight into this fast-evolving new world of citizen journalism that hasn't already been noted by Jeff Jarvis or J.D. Lasica or Jay Rosen I might peck out an essay on that.

But what you won't see me doing is day-to-day coverage of and commentary on what's in the news that day in state or national politics and government. Instead, I'll post, without commentary, links to articles and blog posts that I've read and think you might like or benefit from reading too.

It didn't take me near as long as him to burn out on the daily grind. But I'm enjoying life more now by not thinking I have to post ten different things every day, I know that.

Let me get this straight: the complaints against the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court consist of:

1) She's not a judge (i.e. "doesn't have the background.") Or, variously, she's not a "constitutional scholar" like those Justices who have given us such learned decisions as Kelo v. New London.

2) She's a long-time advisor to Bush (i.e. a "crony.")

3) She's someone who didn't show up in the crystal balls of our esteemed pundits and experts. They've been shown up by Bush and are embarrassed and angry about that.

4) Harry Reid likes her, therefore she must be a stealth liberal moonbat.

5) She's an evangelical Christian, therefore she's a not-so-stealth right wing wacko.

6) She's not stunningly physically attractive. This one puzzles even me. I mean, Ruth Bader Ginsberg somehow got on the Court, didn't she?

Did I miss anything?

During my little sabbatical from posting, I've had some time to think about a few things. I've stepped away from the news, played a bit of Civilization III, watched/recorded some MST3K, took in some football.

I've come to some conclusions:

1) The major news media is irredeemably corrupt, biased, and actively working to undermine the soul of our country, the United States of America. Emphasis on the word "irredeemably."

I do not believe that the news media in its current form can rise above its baser instincts as shown by Shepard Smith and the pack of baying hounds who transformed the Hurricane Katrina response into the Bataan Death March without a shred of substantial evidence.

2) The implicit deification of the person in the office of President of the United States is repugnant. I am referring to the deification of Bush not by his supporters, but by his opponents: supporters of Islamic terrorism (aka anti-war activists) and the news media (aka the Baying Hound Pack and their followers).

Case in point: the Iraq War. The President can't declare war. Congress has that power. Congress exercised that power (absent only the word "war") when the House and the Senate passed the Iraq War Resolution. Bush, the Congress, and the rest of the world had the same facts in front of them. It was Congress' job to weigh the facts in evidence and either declare war or not.

They declared war.

So, if there is blame, it is laid primarily at the feet of every Representative and Senator who voted for the resolution. They had the final say, and they spoke. That is, if they were wrong in their fundamental decision. I continue to believe that it was in fact the right decision at the right time.

Even absent the WMD mantra, there were good and sufficent reasons to take down Saddam's regime. There was in fact evidence for WMD's found in Iraq. There wasn't much, and it was nowhere near the threat it seemed before the war, but it was there. Did you know that? Of course you didn't. Those small but inconvenient finds did not support the news media Hate-W meme, so they simply buried on page A-27, and would never have been noticed at all if not for the Internet and conservative talk radio. (See point #1).

3) Some of the same people are saying "if only I knew now what I knew then, I'd have voted the other way." Yeah, hindsight's a B-itch, isn't it? But let's speculate for a minute on where we would be if the war resolution had been defeated.

Saddam Hussein would still be in power, murdering and terrorizing his citizens. His sons would still be picking girls off the street, raping them then tossing them away like bagels from a street vendor.

With the loss of Afganistan as an operational base, al Qaida would move elsewhere. Their plain intent is to create a radical Islamic Caliphate whose heartland would be Iraq. It is possible, even likely, that AQ would have settled in Iraq, not to blow up car bombs, but to plan the next, bigger attack on the U.S.

So that's what the news media is working towards (along with the pro-terrorism demonstrators and their tragically deluded puppet figurehead Cindy Sheehan): the Islamic Caliphate, continued terror and misery for the Iraqis, and the ultimate world domination of radical Islam. Yeah, I know that any sentence that contains the words "world domination" sounds seriously wacked out. But that's where we are.

4) Katrina would still have hit New Orleans. The corrupt and incompetent Louisiana and New Orleans governments would still have badly fumbled the response, then passed the blame to FEMA. And Shepard Smith would still have made a spectacle of himself on the highway overpass.

I conclude with great regret that the news media is an unregulated center of power in our society. Like all such centers, as Lord Acton noted, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The news media is dangerously close to absolute power, and is deeply, irredeemably corrupt, at a time when I believe our national survival is (or soon will be) threatened by a radical and violent religion.

We are coming close to having to make a horrible choice: Limiting First Amendment freedom of the press, or national survival. The thought chills me to the bone.

The New York Times fires 500 people:

The cutbacks will include about 250 positions at The New York Times Media Group, including the 45 newsroom jobs at the Times newspaper. Other properties in that group include the International Herald Tribune and NYTimes.com. Specific reductions for those properties were not revealed.

At the New England Media Group, some 160 positions, including those at the Globe, will be lost. Other outlets within that division are the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Boston.com. Another 80 job cuts will be spread across the company's regional newspapers, broadcast outlets, and corporate staff, Mathis said, but did not offer specifics.

Any chance that the remaining reporters won't be stuck on stupid? Then again, this is the New York Times we're talking about . . .