"That means killing the bad guys. Not winning their hearts and minds, placating them or bringing them into the government. Killing them."

This military blog post is well worth reading. It concludes as follows, "Here's one soldier whose morale is not being ground down by the enemy he faces. If it's being eroded, it's by the people who putatively support him."

Schadenfreude at the expense of members of the Democrat party today. First we have former Senator and former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards issuing a lame explanation for an attempt to obtain a Playstation 3 from...Wal-Mart, bane of the left's existence.

Next we have Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi failing in her first effort to place her loyalists in key positions that will be controlled by the Democrat party. "The Democratic caucus voted 149-86 for Hoyer."

Perhaps the other members of her party believed Rep. Pelosi when she promised the "most ethical Congress in history." They knew, apparently better than she, that placing an unindicted co-conspirator from the ABSCAM scandal in the 1980's in the Majority Leader's chair was not consistent with that promise.

The Democrat party wins, and "Voters gain faith in American elections." Nice to see that in print.

The whole notion of attempting to accuse the other (winning) party of nationwide election fraud is ridiculous, and is dangerous to the republic. We still need to find out what ACORN has done, but this election appears to have been generally fair overall.

I hope that any efforts to circumvent the Electoral College have been put aside forever. Otherwise, we would have large groups of disenfranchised states and wholesale opportunities for voter fraud nationwide.

The post-election and Rumsfeld resignation aftershocks continue.

I am more concerned about the impact of Secretary Rumsfeld's departure on force morale and enlistment/reenlistment rates than on the possible political benefits during the just completed election cycle. Still, it appears that his departure was handled so badly that there is a distinct possibility of negative impact on both aspects of the issue.

Ann Althouse has one of the best post-election takes I've read yet.

Read the whole thing. I especially like this part:

"What I'm concerned about is national security and, consequently, the way the election was fought and is being interpreted. I'm upset because I think we have sent a terrible message to our enemies: Just hang on long enough and continue to inflict some damage, and the Americans will lose heart and give up. You barely need anything at all. You might not be able to hijack a plane with a box cutter anymore, but you can take back a country -- a country we conquered with overwhelming military power -- merely by mercilessly and endlessly setting off small bombs in your own town day after day.

How much harder it becomes ever to fight and win a war again. Only pacifists and isolationists should feel good about the way this election was won."

Democrat party takes the Senate, Senator Joe Lieberman welcomed back like the black sheep of the family during the holidays. The far-left nutroots will call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and endless investigations of the Administration. Are they prepared for the consequences of the former? Another episode like the Vietnamese boat people and the killing fields in Cambodia? Time will tell.

There are many postmortems on the election out now, and there will be many more to come. I like the take of the Best of the Web Today so far.

We now return to the era of divided government. An era where there will be much heat, but less light. Perhaps that is best; as Thomas Paine said, "That government is best which governs least." We will certainly see fewer earthshaking changes at the Federal level.

Over the next two years, it will be interesting to watch the 50 states to see which of them produce the best results. Like 50 distinct laboratories, one of them may produce a leader--or may have already done so--who is worthy to lead the nation.

The House has swung to the Democrat party. The Senate is in the balance. There are three Senate races that are too close to call. There will be a recount in the VA race. MO looks like a Democrat pickup. Not enough returns are in as of 11:05 Pacific time to call, although the Democrat challenger is in the lead.

Click here to see the results for the WA races.

My old associate going back to the late 80s (when I was Apple's Networking and Communications Evangelist), Toby Nixon, appears to be going down to defeat in his race to return to the state senate. Toby is a terrific person, with a wonderful family. He is a legendary figure in the evolution of PC communications--he worked at Hayes Communications back when "Hayes modem" was the standard. I believe that he still works at Microsoft, and does important work there. I'm sure that he'll continue in public service in some capacity. He was a very good senator, and his defeat is a loss for the people of the state of Washington.

Eureka! Stem cell breakthrough to aid heart attack victims! Oh, it is based on the original adult stem cell breakthrough, bone marrow injections into the heart.

Nevermind, Michael Fox, nothing to see here...

I'm taking a different approach to "watching" the election results this year--at least at this point. I have two machines up. My laptop running Windows Vista RC2 is streaming Hugh Hewitt's program over on KKOL AM. By the way, Firefox 2 plus the common add-ins runs fine on Vista.

My main machine has Firefox up with 8 tabs. I am in love with Google Reader; I have all of the best bloggers in a category called "opinion" open in a tab that I refresh frequently. I have tabs dedicated to The Truth Laid Bear's wonderful election tracker, Fox News election page, and to CNN's Blog Party--at least for now.

Many pundits predicted a loss of both houses to the Democrat party. A smaller number predicted that the Republicans would retain both houses. I agree with Captain Ed that the Democrat party is likely to take the House--the only question is by how much--but the Republicans are going to hold the Senate--narrowly.

Hugh Hewitt's post reminds me that there is a corollary to the old saw, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". This year, "insults are in the ear of the listener".

Here's an excerpt that includes Hugh's response to Jonathan Chait of the LA Times:
"Everybody in professional politics, conservative or liberal," Chait wrote, understands that Kerry was trying to make a joke about Bush. And yet the GOP has succeeded in convincing the country that he was denigrating American soldiers." Which means that those who disagree with Chait must be stupid or lying. That group includes a vast number of men and women in the military, as has been pointed out repeatedly across the web. MSMers like Chait refuse to acknowledge their opinions and judgments. They don't want those opinions and judgments to be counted, just like the military's votes in Florida in 2000.

So do I, young war heroes, so do I.













H/T: Michelle Malkin.

James Q. Wilson pens a must-read indictment of "The Press at War". It is well worth your time to read, especially less than 48 hours prior to the closing of the polls in America.

Hang him high.

Austin Bay applies a coup de grace to John Kerry's pathetic and revolting vitriol and non-apology apologies.

H/T: Instapundit.

John Kerry, no one is laughing at your joke, no matter how many times your water-carriers try to explain it or edit it after the fact. This father's tale is worth your time to read.


Sadly, I expect to see stories about issues with military voting. I didn't have to wait long.

The Democrat party--they support the troops, you know. That is, until it comes time for those who preserve and defend the Constitution are about to take the opportunity to exercise their rights under it.

According to Wikipedia, schadenfreude is a German word meaning "pleasure taken from someone else's misfortune." Once the editors at the New York Times and their Democrat allies let this soak in--and after Rush and company trumpet it throughout the new media tomorrow--the schadenfreude is all going to be on the other foot.

Essentially, the New York Times story validates the pre-war worries about WMD. The Times and IAEA attempt to blame the Bush Administration for somehow leaking the information to help Iran.

As though A. Q. Khan, North Korea and China hadn't already gotten there first.

Here's Captain Ed with an especially large helping.

Update: Jim Geraghty's take is even better.

Christopher Hitchens latest, "The indecent haste to exit Iraq," is another sterling defense of our mission in Iraq.

Excerpt:

"But the many disappointments and crimes and blunders (the saddest of which is the utter failure to influence Iran, and the corresponding advantage taken by Tehran-backed militias) do not relieve us of a responsibility that is either insufficiently stressed or else passed over entirely: What is to become, in the event of a withdrawal, of the many Arab and Kurdish Iraqis who do want to live in a secular and democratic and federal country? We have acquired this responsibility not since 2003, or in the sideshow debate over prewar propaganda, but over decades of intervention in Iraq's affairs, starting with the 1968 Baathist coup endorsed by the CIA, stretching through Jimmy Carter's unforgivable permission for Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, continuing through the decades of genocide in Kurdistan and the uneasy compromise that ended the Kuwait war, and extending through 12 years of sanctions and half-measures, including the "no-fly" zones and the Iraq Liberation Act, which passed the Senate without a dissenting vote. It is not a responsibility from which we can walk away when, or if, it seems to suit us."

The anti-war left that glories in what they call America's defeat in Vietnam ignores the consequences of our withdrawal of US troops and of support for anti-Communist governments in the region--the Vietnamese boat people, the Cambodian killing fields, to name two. I don't want our nation to go through years of guilt and self-doubt over a mission and a people that believed in America, only to see both abandoned to a terrible fate. This expansionist enemy wants to force America back as it expands, just as the Communists did. We cannot fail to show resolve now in a self deceiving hope to return to the "What me worry? 1990s.

Omar Fadhil (AKA Iraq the Model) has written a plea to America to remain by the side of Iraq; it's a far better case than I can make.

Isn’t it now undeniable that US Soldiers in the field
1) read and watch and listen to the media, and
2) are affected/have opinions about it, and
3) their morale is affected by what the media distributes?

Contact Music quotes from an interview in Vanity Fair: (Sumner)Redstone concluded that his decision to axe (Tom) Cruise "sent a message to the rest of the world that the time of the big star getting all this money is over. And it is! I would like to think that what I did, or what we did, has had a salutary effect on the rest of the industry."

Hmmm. It would appear that moonbats everywhere are beginning to see that words and actions have consequences...

Captain Ed nails the Kerry flap.

Excerpt:

"I'm still pretty torn on this controversy. Had Kerry simply come out yesterday and said, Whoops, my bad -- I left out a couple of key words from the punchline and left the wrong impression -- my apologies!, I think the entire story would have died immediately. However, in his typically tone-deaf manner, he decided to brand the entire incident a Republican smear, despite the fact that he had been quoted accurately.

Now he's left with the argument that he misquoted himself while trying to show off his supposed intellectual superiority over George Bush, and that it's all Bush's fault despite being Kerry's intellectual inferior. Really, no one could have scripted a more hilarious scenario, and the longer Kerry continues this line of defense/offense, the more ridiculous a figure he becomes. It demonstrates clearly that the 'I was for the $87 billion before I was against it' gaffe was no fluke."

That's it in a nutshell: John Kerry misquotes himself and manages to make himself look even more ridiculous than ever.

Update: Drudge points out that the troops understand what Kerry meant.