Brief Notes

Come on, Kevin... tell us how you really feel:

I think I'm going to be sick. In the latest entry in the Bombastic George Bush Mythmaking Contest, Michael Barone compares Bush — seriously! — to Abraham Lincoln. John Kerry is slotted into the McClellan position and the Democratic Party is compared to the 1864 Copperheads who wanted to allow the South to secede and had no beef with slavery.

The increasing probability of a Bush loss in November is apparently driving conservatives toward insanity. Bush is Lincoln. Kerry is a secret appeaser. Changing horses now would be more disastrous than in World War I, World War II, Korea, the Vietnam War, or the Cold War.

And all without even a scintilla of evidence that Kerry would be any less forceful in prosecuting a war against actual terrorists than George Bush — aside, of course, from his inexplicable conduct as a candidate for office in actually criticizing Bush. This, in Barone's view, is apparently what makes him unfit for office.

The stench of desperation is everywhere in this piece. I hope that's good news.

Read the comments - some of the best stuff is in there. (And no, I'm not referring to my comment, I'm referring to this one:

Definitely, whenever I think of Bush, the mind immediately thinks of Lincoln. They have so much in common, after all.
They both came from dirt poor familes and worked their way up from frontier logging to prominent rail lawyer.
They both served successfully several terms in various Congresses.
They both don't drink.
They both write their own speeches and read Shakespeare in their spare time to relax.
They both preemptively invaded distant foreign countries.
But only one of them knows he did more for human rights than any president in history. That would be Bush.

Heh.)

John Ashcroft is probably pissing himself with excitement over this advance:

Weapons that can incapacitate crowds of people by sweeping a lightning-like beam of electricity across them are being readied for sale to military and police forces in the US and Europe.

At present, commercial stun guns target one person at a time, and work only at close quarters. The new breed of non-lethal weapons can be used on many people at once and operate over far greater distances.

Why am I having a bad flashback to an old fifties B-movie with aliens taking over the planet and herding all of mankind before them into pens? Did I really see this movie?