This point in history is too crucial to be left to appeasers & apologists for the terrorists. You anti-warriors, mainly on the left, have let your fecklessness toward the enemy & eagerness to get Bush lose all of us some hard earned ground, especially on domestic programs. That’s just more reason to be annoyed about the stance of the left on the war.

On the “implication”: The CNN story was all implication, from headline to text & nothing else. I can do little about CNN(except watch Fox) but E’s posts are quite a different matter.

As for the “gotcha jokes,” E writes a lot about & evidently cares a lot about “class,” “taste” & likes to titillate about sexual affairs. He must at least be concerned about these issues — or else why write about them? It’s his pathology, not mine — I merely observe & attempt to diagnose. None of it has any bearing on the issue of the war but if he’s going to toss non sequitur into the mix we have a perfect right to respond.

As for the rest of your admonishment, is it really “cranky” to respond to E’s posts with spirit & passion? I marshal & present my opposition as best as I can & will continue to do so.

Wish you had a sense of humor. You treat a few cracks about Bush Sr. and the “implications” of a journalists’s revelation with dead earnestness. And then you put them together for an imagined “gotcha.”Jokes about old WASPy “class” are just Tom Wolfe-like “social notes,” surface observatins that, put together with many others, give you some understanding of where these people came from and what forces (family, wealth, schools, connections) shaped them. There’s no “anxiety” attached to these little notes.
But I’m wasting words and time here. I was also being tongue-in-cheek about a “conspiracy” between W and Osama. I leave that sort of fantasy to right-wing and left-wing blogs.
You’re bored. I’m sorry about that. Read a book.
And if you want something serious to think about, consider the elimination of the Supplemental Food Program (USDA) in Bush’s proposed 2007 budget. $107.2 million for “balanced food boxes” for 525,000 mostly elderly citizens, cut. See how it effects some of them, people like James Barone, 70, who is left with $90 to live on monthly after paying for rent and medicine.
Read the story, “Food Bank challenges program cut” in the Reno Gazette Journal, publ. on Feb 21.
Serious food for thought.
Well, I leave you to your warrior dreams and hope you get over your crankiness.

Naw, the Bush Sr. “relationship” with a State Dept. woman is known in DC. He did it smoothly, not in the Clinton lack of class manner.

Eleutherius loves to gossip about affairs & yet we are put on notice from the beginning of Eleutherius’s anxiety over issues of “taste” & “class.” I guess it doesn’t occur to Eleutherius that engaging in the one could signal a lack of the other.

Haven’t you seen the story on CNN: “Bush: Bin Laden helped me, book says?”
“I thought it (the Bin Laden tape just before 2004 election) was going to help,” Bush is quoted. If I were conspiracy-minded, why…

IF? Hmmm … Hey, I know! Why doesn’t Eleutherius pretend he is conspiratorial, just for the fun of it & flesh out the implication for the readers. I’m guessing that Eleutherius is all implication & no real theory on this one but one can always hope.

On the CNN story, here’s my favorite quote. Apparently the bin Laden tape was a subject of concern among some Bush campaigners, who thought it might work against Bush. When recalling the discussion back then, Bush related to the interviewer that he had argued the opposite:

I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.

Exactly. It couldn’t be said any better.

Releasing a tape just before the election that attempted to influence the election was a mistake & calls into question OBL’s utter lack of judgement concerning the reaction by Americans to certain stimuli.

Me battling in the Middle East? No, those much better than I are doing that quite well. And I’m trying to save the teeth I have left, so opening C rations with them is out of the question. My dentist would be really annoyed if he found out.

The fact is I’m just not needed over there, where our soldiers are doing a great job. I think me & others who think as I do are needed more in the battle over here, where the anti-warriors give talking points to bin Laden in their desperate & vain attempts to get Bush. I wouldn’t be surprised if bin Laden came out for impeachment a la Richard Dreyfuss the next time he feeds al Jazeera some video; he’s certainly been quick to pick up on other anti-warrior talking points. In one of his missives he even recommended a book written by a leading anti-warrior. The up to then obscure book went to number 12 on Amazon’s top sellers.

The article you linked was junk. Strauss was a scholar who was interested in close and disciplined readings of the great classics of philosophy; Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and so on. His disciples, who could fit in the back room of the elks club without crowding the place, are teachers who carry on his work of teaching and scholarship.

They are neither interested in contemporary politics nor foreign policy.

When I was an undergraduate, I took courses from real died-in-the-wool Straussians. It was the late 1960s, an even more politicized age than this one. Contemporary politics never made it into their classrooms.

There may have been one real Straussian at the Pentagon a couple of years ago, but he was a third or fourth tier guy. He is gone now. The idea that the liberal ivy league snobs who run the CIA harbor Straussians in their midsts is risible.

Myself, I almost donated to the Clinton fund, but I started seeing reports of the money he was getting from Hollywood fundraisers & decided my small contribution wouldn’t make any real difference. I liked ol’ Bill a lot. I voted for him twice & was unhappy to have the Executive branch hampered by the Monicagate farce. That was pre-9/11, of course.

I guess the Demos think its pay back time. Problem is, all their shenanigans to get the administration could hinder the WOT. Well, it already has, hasn’t it? We don’t have to worry too much anymore about listening to terrorists, now that the terrorist know all about the NSA program. Too bad, that could prove fatal to a bunch of Americans one of these days but we’ll never really know, will we? Harm can be done with impunity if the culprit is reckless & clever. Us Neocons have to do our best to see that the anti-warriors don’t succeed in their dangerous mischief or we’ll never forgive ourselves.

Oh, & I sure didn’t know about the Bush senior affair — teehee, snicker, snicker. Do you & your buddies get all giggly talking about Presidential extramarital affairs or is it more of a somber conversation with vigorous nods of approval & grunts of agreement at favorite gossip-points?