This is better city-making. We’re making a better city.--Larry Newman, the Chamber’s Vice President, Community & Economic Development, on WVIA this past Thursday evening.

The Times Leader decided to publish some more of my nonsense, although, they did edit out some of my more deranged and rather acerbic points. I sincerely do not care about that, but I figure I probably got plenty of people hopping mad by suggesting that the chapter in history devoted to George Bush has yet to be written. If so, I am pleased with myself.

The more left-leaning among us collectively projectile vomit their alfalfa sprouts at the mere mention of a muscular U.S. foreign policy, yet want to intervene in every country when one sandal-clad tribe gets to beheading the other sandal-less tribe. They desperately seek to end the massacres in every far-flung country that decides to throw a massacre, but not in Iraq. Massacres in Iraq are completely acceptable. I guess.

Urban warfare was somehow acceptable in Mogadishu, but not in Baghdad. Well, that is to say, urban warfare was acceptable in Mogadishu until somebody with a U.S. flag patch on his shoulder went and got shot to death. Then the call went out to gather up our expensive ammo and run away as fast as possible. Sound familiar? The Murtha Doctrine, anyone?

Our Army Rangers, Delta Forces and SOAR operatives were expressly denied the armor they had requested by the Clinton Administration before confronting their urban enemies in Somalia, yet the current barely-hinged clarion call is that the Bush administration sent our troops into harm’s way without enough armor. (?) Don’t try to figure out the over-reaching anti-Bush Monday morning pundits, as they rarely make any sense at all.

They constantly harp about our rising deficits, while fondly remembering that Bill Clinton produced budget surpluses. He accomplished as much by halving our military forces as part of his short-sighted “peace dividend” malarkey after the sudden dismembering of the vast Soviet empire. For example, in 1990, our Navy had 600 surface ships under it’s command. When George Bush first took office, it had 301 at it‘s neutered disposal. In 1990, the USS Cole would have been refueled at sea rather than attempt to refuel in a foreign port known to be a terrorist haven. In 2000, that imaginary “peace dividend” directly resulted in the deaths of 17 sailors aboard that ill-fated ship, and unbelievably, Bill Clinton choose not to respond to a wanton act of war directed at a US naval vessel. And yet, we wonder aloud about how and why the terrorist imbeciles became so emboldened.

Now, the same leftists accuse Bush of going to war without enough boots on the ground. (?) Boots that Bill Clinton himself felt we no longer needed. In my opinion, he was and continues to be to strategic forward-thinking what prostitutes are to monogamy.

His administration was the one that stupidly decided we should do without intelligence operatives on the ground in favor of high-tech surveillance technologies. And now, those aforementioned leftists are horrified to learn that our intelligence-gathering is not what it ought be. Look at it this way. You absolutely loved the guy when the stock market was manipulated upwards to the point of absurdity and then crashed and burned, but now you’re paying dearly for his completely inept foreign policies.

What am I thinking? Forget that. Blame Bush.

Oh, and the leftists are frothing at the mouth about how the Bush administration has introduced Nazi-styled tactics (?) for the purposes of eroding our rights, tapping our phone lines and spiriting us away in the middle of the night. Yeah, the Republinazis are supposedly at it again. Funny, the very same lunacy was spewed back when another Republican president made a habit of saying what he thought and acting accordingly:

Sound familiar?

Bill Clinton put his stamp of approval on the government’s monitoring of e-mail, instant messages and some international phone calls, but we’re being told that Bush (just like that evil Ronald Reagan some twenty-five years earlier) is a new-styled fascist working feverishly to enslave the lot of us. If sounding hysterically hysterical, if not downright asinine is so attractive to so many when the political pendulum temporarily swings towards the right, why is it that their attention to minutia becomes so utterly selective when that pendulum swings back the other way? Sounds inherently disingenuous to me, but what do I know? I’m a conservative. I’m a borderline traditionalist. You know…a modern day neo-fascist. Sez you.

It’s a question of honesty. You cannot have a an honest, productive debate of the most critical of issues when one side of the on-going argument is reduced to name-calling and spewing timeworn, utterly useless and completely misleading rhetoric, if not hateful invective by rote.

I say George Bush is exactly what his various and sundry predecessors were: an imperfect president. Sadly, very many of you say he’s a newfangled, out-of-control, neo-Nazi storm trooper bent on ending global warming by unleashing a nuclear winter the world over. Or some such threadbare idiocy. Shame on you for being so easily duped.

As things currently stand, if we took the most vocal of the apoplectic left, stuffed them into a blender and gave the thing a whirl; the end result would be some chunky peanut butter, because the folks in the leftfield bleachers at Politics Stadium are sounding increasingly nuts as time trudges on.

While I cannot even begin to entertain the great preponderance of the ludicrousness you typically bring to the on-going “debate,” you do have my sympathies. You see, needlessly vilifying those that need not be vilified smacks of the very same hateful Nazi-esque tactics you claim to loathe so completely. You have become that which you process to hate the most.

Sez me.

My published bullspit:

Oh, but wait! According to the hoi polloi, we need to intervene once again, but not in Iraq.

From The Citizens’ Voice:

WILKES-BARRE — Sarah Ancas and fellow Georgetown University students recently lobbied outside Congressman Paul Kanjorski’s office in Washington hoping to raise awareness about genocide in Africa. The 18-year-old Wilkes-Barre resident followed up on that visit Saturday morning by attending the Democratic congressman’s town-hall meeting at Wilkes University’s Henry Student Center. She asked Kanjorski what elected leaders could do to stop genocide in the Sudan. Kanjorski told his young constituent that continued support for the United Nations and an American focus on international economics and elevating the world’s income were some of the ways to combat the problem.

In other words, Paul Kanjorski has no clue as to what to do about anything not owned by the Earth Conservancy.

Hey! What about the genocide going on in Congo?

Drum roll please…stern warnings from the Bushies and some shipments of free flour?

Yeah. That’s what I thought. Nothing.

Interestingly, while Uncle Paul Kanjo was so busy railing against the dreaded Bush administration (boring), he seems to have conveniently sidestepped his long-since pet project that seems to be sinking faster than the ersatz plan to lure Microsoft to Wilkes-Barre by way of a few dormant steam heat pipes.

Rapidly fading congressional dude, what about the ridiculous deflatable dam?

Oh, that’s right! Democrats like to pretend that their obvious failures--their obvious shortcomings--never came about in the first place. Dam? What dam? Um…never mind about all of that. Keep the focus on Bush and say whatever it takes to hoodwink the simpler folk who tend to obsess about their recycling schedules and equally mundane, unimportant things.

Why upset the balance of things by rising above ignorance, mediocrity and the uniformity of less than enlightened thought?

Dam? What dam?

The purpose of holding well-publicized town meetings hosted by the likes of loyal party apparatchiks such as Kanjo is not to inform the public, while they are clamoring for more of what Uncle Paul and his clueless associates have to peddle: accusations.

The dam? Well…um…err…uh…ahem…Bush did it!!!

Or was it Halliburton?

I was going to let this slide, but I decided against it.

“COUGH COUGH MARK!!!!!!?”

To follow that “quote,” go to Wilkes-Barre Politics.

Listen to me tell it.

I’ve been doing this internet thing for a long, long time. And despite being totally up front about who I am and what my intentions were from day one, I’ve endured countless attacks from the folks too completely cowardly to attach their names to their comments.

I’ve never whined about those attacks, nor shied away from them. Rather, I always did a full-frontal assault on those who chose to attempt to sound smart at my expense while steadfastly clinging to their anonymity. I think my favorite internet detractor of all was Ethel. Well, that may or may not be her real name, but I actually enjoyed her acid-dipped, ‘60s version of how things should be all these years later. Maybe she finally overdosed as all good hippies eventually do. I sure hope not. I honestly miss her. Or him. Or it.

I’ve been called every name in the book, and enjoyed every single one of them. If you’ve been following my insane exploits from the very beginning, you know I’ve been called fat, bald, short, lazy, unemployed, bitter and begging for a city job by the anonymous retards. And not a one of those anonymous accusations ever wrung true. I did what I did on the internet because I couldn’t believe what was happening to this place I decided to call my home and never was there any other considerations on my part.

I criticized the elected folk, and I was attacked for doing so. I got involved in my city, and by doing so I happened to rub elbows with some other elected folk. And for that I’ve been criticized, if not told my opinions were irrelevant after having done so. I’ve pretty much heard it all, and it has always left me completely unfazed. Nice try and all.

But…I will not be talked down to by anyone just because they mistakenly think fu>king Blogspot.com has suddenly put them on some sort of equal footing with me. I’ve stood toe-to-toe with many of the people that anonymous bloggers typically get to talking tough about, even though they’d never talk in such a manner if they were to do the toe-to-toe thing themselves. Sure, I talk tough on occasion, but everyone knows where to find me if they have a serious problem with what I have to say. As blogging goes, I‘m about as in-your-face as you can ever expect to find in all of the blogosphere. I seek no rewards, I ask for nothing in return, no key to the city, but I can always respect myself for the way I’ve gone about all of this long before anyone could attach a name to what it is that I do and did long before others summoned up the anonymous “courage” to follow in my footsteps.

Look, going nameless and faceless is one putrid thing. But getting everything ass-backwards and then pretending as if it didn’t happen is a whole other putrid thing. If your part-time advice, insights and prognosticating totally suck, don’t talk to me as if we’ve been sharing the same trenches for years on end.

I’ve been chased after, shouted at and threatened by the best of the worst of ‘em many times over, but don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting that anonymous blogging and publishing in your name are much the same things. Some of us have names. And still others have profiles. You all know my name and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Call me stupid, ugly and ignorant, but I’m all good with what I’ve done.

What say you?

Feeling brave?

That’s what I thought.

Later