Llamabutchers has an hysterical quote.

More and more people (including our own Foreign Minister) seem to be subscribing to a new doctrine: Presidential Infalibility.

David Ignatius takes on this doctrine in today’s Washington Post. The Maximum Leader will certainly like the Winston Churchill reference:

The British historian Christopher Andrew has argued that one of the
decisive strengths of Winston Churchill, generally reckoned the greatest modern
war leader, was that he learned from his mistakes. He bungled badly during World
War I, championing the disastrous assault on Gallipoli in 1915 that was made
with too few troops and too little strategic planning. He made other errors in
his early career, from economic policy to diplomacy, but he learned from them
and became a better leader. He never stopped growing.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, just this once, wishes he watched Crossfire with some regularity. That said, he only wishes that because of the recent kerfuffle caused by an appearance by Jon Stewart. The Minister of Agriculture mentioned this yesterday. And your Maximum Leader brings it up again because he finds it ironic (or to paraphrase the president, ironical) that a fake news show is AP news wire news.

Carry on.

Primarily, I haven’t been posting lately because I’ve been so busy with work (sure, I enjoy my unemployment benefits as much as the next lazy liberal, but it’s not enough to pay all my bills). I have, however, been following the blog posts semi-regularly, and I’ve appreciated the occasional shout-out in my direction (how nice to be lost but not forgotten).

Sadly (for me anyway), the pre-election debate at this site must continue on without my input. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be doing full-time advance work for John Kerry’s national campaign. I don’t know exactly where I’ll be or the state of my internet access, but I suspect these opportunities will keep me busy right up until the election.

For the record, however, I’ve long maintained that John Kerry could beat George Bush. Nothing in the last month has changed my opinion of the state of the race. As it stands now, while the polls may be ambiguous, I believe Kerry is on track to snatch victory away from the Republicans (even Virginia is polling within the margin of error, Mr. Smallholder). A major event, of course, will be a challenge to both campaigns and would mean that all bets are off. But whatever your position on the issues, Republicans who think Bush has the election locked up are in for a rude awakening this November.

Good night, good debating and God bless (I’m just kidding about the ‘God bless’, although even us liberal atheists respect your right to worship as you choose).

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has decided to do a little link dumping. Please forgive him as he is phoning this one in.

He was reading over the Cranky Neocon’s website and noticed this post: Revenge Of The Stupid Lyrics V. Your Maximum Leader wonders how he could have missed volumes I-IV! Must agree, carrots in cake is an abomination against all humanity. Must disagree on Carmen - horny soliders are important lession for kids to learn.

Kilgore gives us warnings on how to name the new Washington baseball franchise. our Maximum Leader thinks the name should be Senators or Grays. But the name will likely be something stupid and silly, like the Foggy Bottom Boys.

The Big Ho… Next Exorcist. One day, one day soon, the power of Christ will compell him to prance naked through the halls of his school. Naked. Save for an ill-fitting lab coat.

Annika gone? Bad. Sad. Makes your Maximum Leader wonder…

Like a New Jersey deubtante with an “undiscovered gift” from the Mexican gardner who does her neighbour’s lawn, is Anna attempting to smother her baby blog again? Anna… Your Maximum Leader needs a fix. You are worse than crack woman! Start pushing again!

While talking about his favourite bad habits of the blogosphere… Sexy Sadie Mirth needs a man. Or two men. Or a man and a woman. For some reason, your Maximum Leader isn’t sure that two men and a woman would be enough.

The Acidman… Dancing… Heh. He still is better than your Maximum Leader.

Villainy indeed! BRD and Dr. Rusty teaming up? Yet another insidious plot by the good Doktor to get more site traffic. Here is a tip from your Maximum Leader to Rusty. Want more traffic. Post photos of Mrs. Shakelford’s fine can.

Aircraft cheesecake photos by JohnL. Beauty, eh?

Ally… You had me at High Calibre. Then your Maximum Leader read your post and lamented that you weren’t talking about guns… That is okay however. Your Maximum Leader hopes we all continue to deserve your readership.

Alas… This post isn’t helping keep anyone reading. It is definately not Scottish… Blame it on baseball…

Carry on.

Jon Stewart schools Tuckler Carlson:

Smackdown

I wish I had seen this episode.

The Big Hominid has a link to the video here for those of you with fast connections.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is tired, very tired. (More on that later perhaps.) But he did see this: Scholars Grapple With Godzilla Legacy on the newswire and felt he had to comment.

There is a huge legacy to grapple with when discussing Godzilla… How many times did he sack Tokyo? More times than the US Army Air Force by your Maximum Leader’s reckoning. And it was amazing how quickly they would rebuild that city… And your Maximum Leader knows that the Japanese have thought of their nation as the “land of the Gods.” Well, it also seems to be home to fire-breathing lizards, giant moths, and massive mechanical dinosaurs bent on destruction. One wonders how Japan’s economic development was hampered by all those monster attacks. Perhaps the reason that the Japanese economy has been on the ropes the past few years is because monster attacks have been on the decline.

At any rate, you can tell there is a lot to talk about in Lawrence, Kansas over the 3 days of the conference. Let’s hope the outcome of their grappling is a comprehensive anti-monster plan for the US and the world. Because frankly, if one of those monsters decided to align themselves with Al-Quaida… Well, it is best not to imagine it…

Carry on.

I have two links to one of the Maximum Leader’s favorite conservative pundits.

The first is for the Foreign Minister - A consumer dissatisfication rant on par with Greg’s Popeyes diatribe.

And a discussion of why a conservative will vote against Bush. Read the comments thread - there is a good deal of reasoned, civil, give-and-take exchange going on. I wish all political discussion could be as noble.

Some selected excerpts for you non-clicking-throughasaurouses:

If the Senator from Massachusetts thinks that improved style, greater diplomatic
efforts, concerted multilateral coordination, and even copious amounts of
American aid can get India and Pakistan to sign on to the Non-Proliferation
Treaty or create a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace, then, well, he’s drunk
too much of the multilateral Kool-Aid. Bill Clinton — who epitomizes the kind
of diplomatic style Kerry could only hope to achieve — invested a fair amount
of diplomatic capital on both of these flash points, during a time when
America’s global prestige was greater than today — and in the end achieved very
little of consequence. There are international problems where the conflict of
interests are so sharp and the stakes are so high for the affected parties that
all the outside diplomacy in the world won’t achieve anything. And I can’t help
but wonder if Kerry believes he can somehow talk radical Islamists into
submission.
So I’m troubled by this — but at this point I’m more troubled
by the Bush administration. Robert A.
George has a New Republic column that encapsulates a lot of my difficulties
voting for the GOP ticket this year. Here’s the part that hit home for me:
President Bush has failed to live up to the second key tenet of conservative
government: accountability.
Take, for example, the Pentagon’s disastrous
planning for postwar Iraq. The lack of troops for the post-invasion period
enabled the insurgency to bloom and put American soldiers at risk. Worse, while
memos from Ashcroft’s Justice Department seemingly provided legal cover for the
abuse at Abu Ghraib, the material causes could be found, again, in the
underdeployment of troops: “What went wrong at Abu Ghraib prison?” asked The New
York Post’s Ralph Peters, one of the more earnest supporters of invading Iraq.
Pointing to the two independent reports examining the scandal, he concludes:
“Woefully deficient planning for post-war Iraq, too few troops and inadequate
leadership at the top.” Peters is among the conservatives who believe the Abu
Ghraib fiasco should have been the final straw for Rumsfeld.
But it didn’t
happen. And it won’t happen, because accountability is a foreign word in this
administration. To demonstrate how little he has learned, Rumsfeld observed,
“Does [the abuse] rank up there with chopping off someone’s head on television?
It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Was it done as a matter of policy? No.” Forget that the
abuse was far more pervasive than just the handful of servicemen that first
popped up in photographs; when the secretary of defense basically says, “Hey,
what the terrorists do is much worse,” the moral foundation upon which America
stands begins to crumble. The president’s stated goal was to try to bring
democracy to the Middle East–not to allow us to become tainted by the barbarism
so prevalent in the region we are attempting to liberate. So Rumsfeld stays
on–even as the situation rapidly deteriorates.
Then again, this shouldn’t
come as a surprise: George Tenet remained in his position following the worst
intelligence failure in U.S. history, enabling him to tell the president later
that evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” The
first failure helped lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans; the second
failure led us into a conflict from which there exists no clear exit strategy
and that has rendered the word of the United States suspect. Yet Tenet stayed
on, too.
And no wonder. As Bob Woodward writes in Plan of Attack, “[S]everal
things were clear from the president’s demeanor, his style and all that [Colin]
Powell had learned about Bush. The president was not going to toss anyone over
the side…. The president also made it clear that no one was to jump ship….
They were a team. The larger message was clear: Circle the wagons.” The larger
message is that loyalty is prized above all, regardless of the results and
regardless of the effect on U.S. standing in the world….
No, a Kerry
administration would not be any conservative’s ideal. But, on limited
government, a Democratic president would, arguably, force a Republican Congress
to act like a Republican Congress. The last such combination produced some form
of fiscal sanity. And, when it comes to accountabilit, one could hardly do
worse. Of course, a conservative can still cast a libertarian vote on principle.
At crucial points before and after the Iraq war, Bush’s middle managers have
failed him, and the “brand” called America has suffered in the world market. In
any other corporate structure plagued by this level of incompetence, the CEO
would have a choice: Fire his middle managers or be held personally accountable
by his shareholders. Because of his own misguided sense of “loyalty,” Bush won’t
dismiss anyone. That leaves the country’s shareholders little choice.

Given the foreign policy stakes in this election, I prefer a leader who has a good decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I don’t like, over a leader who has a bad decision-making process, even if his foreign policy instincts are skewed in a direction I do like.

Annika has been MIA for a while now. I was hoping the blank home page was some kind of tech problem that would be repaired shortly. Alas, the lovely Annika has not returned to us.

Its that Endorsement time again!

I guess they are allowed one day to be unbiased! One day when all that time spent in Journalism class learning about reporting the news and not making it can go right out the window.

back to the trenches….

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader loves to cook. He loves the preparation of food. He loves eating food. He loves just about everything about food. (And he watches the Food Network with his kids a lot too.)

Indeed, today he is cooking a Venison Ragu. What is a Ragu you say? Well, until the word “ragu” was hijacked by that worthless sauce product, a “ragu” was a type of thick stew made by italian peasants. Your Maximum Leader took a large chunk of venison offer to him as tribute from the good Minister of Agriculture out of the freezer and decided that it was going to become ragu.

Your Maximum Leader has cooked a venison ragu for the Smallholder and his family before. And he has used a number of other game meats to make ragus in the past. Upon further recollection, your Maximum Leader has made ragus containing: venison, beef, pork, veal, caribou, elk, buffalo, and wild boar. That, my minions, is a damned versitile recipe.

Why is your Maximum Leader writing about food today? Well, he found a post from the ever thoughtful and always interesting Bill Keezer. After reading this peice your Maximum Leader thought that Bill was just spot on. Buffets are ugly. (And they bring out the worst angels of our dietary nature.) And presentation counts! Your Maximum Leader has thought before that one of the reasons he so enjoys Japanese food (served at a high class place - like Masaharu Morimoto’s restaurant) is the extreme care and thought put into presentation.

Carry on.