GOP Vixen

I love Arabs

So I noticed on my blog stats today that someone out of Sacramento, of all places, was searching for the term "bridget johnson hates arabs." Of course, they weren't going to find anything online substantiating that I hate Arabs, because I don't hate Arabs. I like Arabs, as a matter of fact. I love Arab culture, the language, and even teach Arabic to my bird Nahoul. I'm really looking forward to going to Dubai, where I shall pay homage at the world's largest shopping mall.

I don't like al-Qaida, Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Hezbollah, and any other groups who suicide bomb and conduct other such unsavory activities. Is any more clarification than that really needed?

Hugo Chavez's FARC farce

Lights! Camera! Communists! Oliver Stone! Hugo's FARC farce has got it all. I write about it today for Pajamas Media:

"Autocrat, totalitarian, Bolivarian reactionary. Now Hugo Chavez aims to add another descriptor to his storied list of accomplishments:

Hugo Chavez, action hero commando!

(Chuck Norris Unapproved!)

Clad in fatigues and a red beret, Chavez sent two helicopters to Villavicencio, Colombia, to fetch three hostages of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. To make the weekend’s mission truly a leftist epic, Oliver Stone and his cameras went along for the ride. 'There are some good Americans,' Stone told Chavez, purportedly referring to himself. 'That’s why I’m here.'

After all, an action hero has to have a hot director — in addition to Chavez’s notorious supporting cast of Hollywood sheeple from Danny Glover to Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey.

...Chavez hailed his hostage-rescue mission as 'a first step to open a door toward the path for Colombia to have peace soon.' Baloney. It’s actually a first step to reasserting his influence after his grand election failure while simultaneously trying to make U.S. ally and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe look useless. According to Bloomberg, the Chavez government accredited more than 300 reporters beyond those normally in Venezuela for the event. After all, the revolutionary action hero needs Clark Kent to spread the word.

But Chavez’s key ulterior motive likely rests with extending a hand to the leftist guerrillas who could serve his cause for continental domination..."

Read the whole thing!

Aim HIGH on voter turnout!

This from today's stormy election in Kenya:

"Elections chief Samuel Kivuitu, who read the results on live television after other media were expelled from the main vote headquarters Sunday, said (incumbent Mwai) Kibaki beat Odinga by 231,728 votes in the closest race in Kenya's history.

...But even Kivuitu had acknowledged problems with the count, including a constituency where voter turnout added up to 115 percent and another where a candidate ran away with ballot papers."

The GOP's foreign-policy wasteland

At first, I was wary of Mike Huckabee's foreign policy prowess (or lack of it). Now, I just want to cry. First he didn't know what the NIE on Iran's nuclear program was about. Then he thought Pakistan was still under martial law. I mean, turning the assassination of Benazir Bhutto into an illegal-immigration stump was just disastrous:

"'In light of what happened in Pakistan yesterday, it's interesting that there are more Pakistanis who have illegally crossed the border than of any other nationality except for those immediately south of our border,' Huckabee said Friday.

...Huckabee said 660 Pakistanis entered the country illegally last year. When asked by a reporter the source for that statistic, Huckabee appeared unsure, saying, 'Those are numbers that I got today from a briefing, and I believe they are CIA and immigration numbers.' The Huckabee campaign later said the figure came from a March 2006 report by The Denver Post.

But the Border Patrol told CNN on Friday that it apprehended only 'a handful' of illegal immigrants from Pakistan in 2007.

The number of illegal immigrants from Pakistan deported or apprehended is not mentioned in the latest report from the Department of Homeland Security/Office of Immigration Statistics. In 2005, the nation did not make the list of the top 10 sources of illegal immigrants. The previous year, Pakistan was the last country listed, but no specific numbers were given."

And now this:

"On Friday morning, Huckabee listed former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton as someone with whom he either has 'spoken or will continue to speak.'

At a Thursday evening news conference, Huckabee said, 'I've corresponded with John Bolton, who's agreed to work with us on developing foreign policy.'

Bolton, however, has a different view. 'I’d be happy to speak with Huckabee, but I haven’t spoken with him yet,' said Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

...Huckabee said he had also spoken with former State Department official Richard Haass (now president of the Council on Foreign Relations); military analyst Ken Allard; former national security adviser Richard Allen; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank; and a 'number of military personnel.'

Reached via e-mail, Allen said an intermediary asked him to speak with Huckabee, but he hadn't yet agreed. 'I'm gradually getting older, but am fully capable of recalling with whom I have spoken,' said the former Nixon and Reagan foreign policy campaign adviser."

I cannot support a candidate who's so out to lunch on foreign policy. And that's a beef I have with Mitt Romney as well, who delivered a similarly lame response to the Bhutto assassination:

"'If the answer for leading the country is someone that has a lot of foreign policy experience, we can just go down to the State Department and pick up any one of the tens of thousands of people who spent all their life in foreign policy,' he said Thursday in New Hampshire.

Instead, Mr. Romney said, what is needed is a chief executive with leadership and the ability to assemble 'a great team of people to be able to guide and direct them to understand what decision has to be made.'"

Who really wants a president who's leaning on a stable of "yes"-men, who needs aides whispering in his ear every time he meets with a foreign delegation? A leader knows the issues and knows how to make decisions, not someone who brushes off the importance of foreign policy expertise.

Campaign fatigue, cranky autocrats to reign in 2008

So what's gonna happen in 2008? I make some semi-brilliant predictions in my Los Angeles Daily News/New York Times News Service column today:

Ayman al-Zawahri ended 2007 by saying he's open to questions from reporters, but only through Jan. 16 - which is, incidentally, the day that the U.N. Security Council froze the assets of Osama bin Laden and Co. in 2002. After whetting the media's appetite with this tease, al-Zawahri will make the talk-show circuit, starting with "The View" and moving into a rousing YouTube debate with a melting snowman.

The media will finally stop referring to al-Zawahri as al-Qaida's No. 2. Let's be serious: Robert Wagner has overtaken Dr. Evil.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf will continue to run the show. Note that I didn't say he'd necessarily get re-elected.

Fidel Castro's myriad TV appearances reading a newspaper in his jogging suit will be found to be a re-enactment of "Weekend at Bernie's."

Someone will whisper to Hugo Chavez that "absolute power corrupts absolutely," and he will snarfle a big belly laugh before enacting by force all of the constitutional "reforms" that failed with voters in 2007. His loyal subjects - aka Evo Morales and Daniel Ortega - will press similar neo-Marxist endeavors in their own countries.

Speaking of BFFs, cooperation will grow at an alarming rate between Venezuela, Russia and Iran. Even as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's secret stash of Cher and Erasure CDs is discovered, he'll keep hanging all the gays.

Read the whole thing!

John McCain and the GOP: A match made in heaven?

I'm so grateful to have been able to write a political column that disses the lame eHarmony commercials at the same time -- as I did last week for Pajamas Media. Read on:

"...A man and a woman are lackadaisically standing in front of a camera, arms around each other like limp noodles. The guy proclaims that, with eHarmony’s '29 dimensions of compatibility' matching system, he found a woman who has everything he was looking for: 'Pretty … a great smile…,' he trails off as the bouncy music tries to convince us that they’re desperately in love as they dance like fumbling eighth-graders.

It’s like the courtship of low expectations that’s become a hallmark of Campaign 2008.

What’s missing is the passion, the oomph, the can’t-live-without-you factor. The poll swings have shown that each romance with a fresh new face fizzles quickly at best, and can spell a fiery death for the GOP at worst. Candidates try to convince us they’re a perfect fit on their eHarmony-esqe dimensions of conservative street cred, true compatibility that apparently can best be determined by checking off boxes..."

And that, I theorize, brings us back to the tried-and-true when deciding who gets our electoral affection. Read the whole thing!

Senator Fro-back?

Hint: It's from TMZ's totally entertaining photo gallery of the presidential candidates then and now...

Ron Paul supporters have multiple personalities!

Bloggers, check your IP addresses: You may find that commenters leaving pro-Paul posts under different names or handles are in fact the same person. Like "Smear" and "Call to Arms" here, for just one example...

Bhutto: Already a political football

Tragedy in Pakistan today as, sadly, the inevitable happened: Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by a cowardly little extremist who then blew himself up. Already, Ron Paul is on Fox, whining that this means we should keep our noses out of Pakistan as well as every other country -- that nuclear arsenal that could fall into the hands of Islamists, Ron, would definitely not stop at Pakistan's borders, nor does the tug-of-war between moderates and extremists. And on the campaign trail, comments generally looked like a competitive joust of who knew Bhutto best, who knew her longer (Clinton said she did), yadda yadda. The AP story on candidates' reactions is a bit gentler than the TV coverage, but still the campaigns are spinning the assassination into an opportunity to state that they're the best at foreign policy, dealing with the Islamic threat, and just best to be president in general:

"At a high school in Lawton, Iowa, on Thursday, Clinton said she had come to know Bhutto during the former prime minister's years in office and her time in exile and was "profoundly saddened and outraged" by the assassination.

In a world of such violence and threats, Clinton said, 'it certainly raises the stakes high for what we expect from our next president. I know from a lifetime of working to make change.'

Giuliani said the assassination underscored a need for the U.S. to increase its efforts to combat terrorism.

'Her murderers must be brought to justice, and Pakistan must continue the path back to democracy and the rule of law,' Giuliani said in a statement. 'Her death is a reminder that terrorism anywhere — whether in New York, London, Tel-Aviv or Rawalpindi — is an enemy of freedom. We must redouble our efforts to win the terrorists' war on us.'"

Can't, for the moment, anyone just express their sympathies and leave the footballing for another day? I guess this is what Bhutto gets for dying so close to the Iowa caucuses.

Victims may have taunted Tatiana the tiger

From the San Francisco Chronicle comes this on the zoo tiger attack:

"San Francisco police are investigating the possibility that one of the victims in the fatal tiger mauling on Christmas Day climbed over a waist-high fence and then dangled a leg or other body part over the edge of a moat that kept the big cat away from the public, sources close to the investigation said Wednesday.

The minimal evidence found at the scene included a shoe and blood in an area between the gate and the edge of the 25- to 30-foot-wide moat, raising questions about what role, if any, the victims might have had in accidentally helping the animal escape.

The three victims, all young men from San Jose, were visiting the zoo together. They were all present just outside the tiger's grotto when the tiger escaped, killed 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr. with a savage slash to the throat, and injured the other two. The names of the survivors, who are brothers ages 19 and 23, have not been released.

The injured victims fled, leaving a trail of blood, which police believe the tiger followed for 300 yards up a zoo pathway. As the tiger cornered and attacked one of the brothers, four police officers arrived, distracted the animal and shot it dead.

...Police sources said a footprint had been found on a metal fence, suggesting that someone had climbed the fence to get closer to the big cats. Authorities were looking into whether the tiger escaped by latching on to a leg or body part.

Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo said it was also likely that the animal was provoked.

'Somebody created a situation that really agitated her and gave her some sort of a method to break out,' Mollinedo said. 'There is no possible way the cat could have made it out of there in a single leap. I would surmise that there was help.

'A couple of feet dangling over the edge could possibly have done it.'

Sources said pinecones and sticks that were found in the moat might have been thrown at the animal. Those items could not have landed in the grotto naturally, they said.

However, police Sgt. Neville Gittens maintained that there was no reason to think that the victims were taunting the tiger."

Oh please. There seems to be plenty of reasons to believe the tiger was taunted. The police are being way too PC. On his MySpace page, Sousa last logged in on Christmas, and listed his mood as "high." It remains to be seen if the guy whose goal was to "partyharder than a rock star" was being literal -- San Fran authorities are conducting an autopsy, as well as a necropsy on Tatiana.

If this is a case of the tiger being taunted, and of a guy climbing over into the enclosure, I hope the city of San Fran does not settle and fights any family lawsuit in court. If the tiger was taunted and lured out of the cage, I would say that the guys would be responsible for this beautiful, endangered cat.