Gosh, how long has it been since the Maximum Leader and I have screamed “Bruceeeeeeee!” in the Longwood dining hall?

We had a friend who was easily embarrassed. So, as good friends, we (okay, I might have been the instigator) proceeded to embarrass him whenever possible.

If he entered the dining hall, we’d yell and he would turn bright red.

My favorite was to yell across the campus: “It’s Bruce ‘hung like a mastodon’ (last name withheld).

He once tried to turn the tables. I’m walking across the quad and I hear a booming voice: “Hey, isn’t that Mark (last name withheld), president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance!?”

I didn’t miss a beat: “Yes it is, Bruce ! You missed the meeting last night.”

Never try to outembarass someone who dances like me.

At any rate, through the illustrious Kilgor “the homewrecker” Trout, I bring you two post from a blogger named bruce. No capital letter. Just bruce*.

Falwell’s law school

The Maximum Leader’s fellow travelers

* Some people don’t like to capitalize their names, citing humility. It just seems to be backhandedly pretentious to me.

Besides, to quote the great Al Yankovic, “I’m a million times as humble as thou art!”

Smallholder is the 42,755th most popular word in the English language.

…You set up an optional early morning breakfast to discuss an optional reading, expecting four or five kids and one or two parents to come but you end up with 30 kids and a dozen parents.

Or, on a more bemused note that will appeal to the Maximum Leader, I was going over a quiz today and explaining why some choices were not correct; once “distractor” choice was Immanual Kant. I explained that he was a philosopher, not an explorer, and as we moved on, gave the throw away line, “but some people say he was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.”

Without missing a beat, one of my girls replied “Heidigger, Heidigger was a boozey beggar who could drink you under the table.”

Heh.

The incident related in the Maximum Leader’s post below certainly sounds scary. If he was on 64, which makes sense based on his itinerary, the incident probably happened within view of my farm; if Rick had looked to the left over the downhill side, he might have seen the back of my hill waaaay below. My first reaction (Analphilosopher would condemn this of course) is relief and thankfulness that the humans involved are okay. Rick did the right thing: rather than endanger his family and other human drivers, he risked the bear’s life. And then, like all people of goodwill, became concerned about the bear.

I’m glad animal control was reassuring and said that the bear was likely to survive, but I ave my doubts. The fact that it was able to make it up the hillside is not necessarily an indicator of its long term prospects. Animal control officers know a lot more about this stuff than I do, but I would think that even a minor break or major bruise that resulted in decreased mobility would end up being fatal. Of course, Bears are largely scavengers in heavily populated areas, so he should still be able to outrun trash cans.

I have never seen a bear on or around my property, but the farmer behind me has found the occasional track. Bears harassing my livestock has never been a particular concern. Dogs with irresponsible owners are by far the greater problem.

You might ask why I had lions and tigers in the post title. Last weekend my wife and I took our sweet little daughter to the National Zoo. She really enjoyed seeing the animals. But, when perceived through adult eyes, the National Zoo is rather depressing. The animals are kept in small, non-stimulating pens. Many of the social animals were penned by themselves. The little plaques describing the animals were uninformative. It is a serious tragedy that America’s NATIONAL Zoo is in such a run-down condition. They need new leadership and new funding to turn things around, improve the living conditions of the animals, make visits educational, and to actually conduct real science.

If that can’t be done, it ought to be shut down.

The government could sell the land to private developers and use the sales proceeds to further cut capital gains taxes.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximun Leader was just catching up on some of Rick in Va’s recent posts and read this and this. Like Rick, your Maximum Leader hopes the bear made it. And since this is in the Smallholder’s neck of the wood, your Maximum Leader will ask his Minister of Agriculture if he has ever seen a bear out his way?

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader just read over the last posting by the Smallholder. Your Maximum Leader isn’t sure why he might call Bob Dole a fool. He certainly isn’t. He ran his campaign the way he wanted to. Bravo to him. But he certainly doesn’t seem to be dismissing the Swifties. He’s even talked to Kerry about it. A very salient point in this discussion was in fact, brought up by Senator Dole. He said:

He said he was very disappointed, we’d been friends. I said John, we’re still friends, but [the Swiftvets] have First Amendment rights, just as your people have First Amendment rights.

Your Maximum Leader has said before that these organizations, as much as your Maximum Leader dislikes them, have a right to say what they will.

As for dishonesty, what precisely are the Swifties being dishonest about n their ads? They seem to have different opinions about what went on in Vietnam than does John Kerry.

And why should the president ask the Swifties to stop running their ads? Should the president endorse the curtailing of free speech by people with the money and the legal right to speak? As your Maximum Leader mentioned before, free speech doesn’t entitle you to lie. If the Swifties are lying they should be sued. The most recent Swiftie ad that your Maximum Leader saw on a news talk program is condemning Kerry for his anti-war stance after returning from Vietnam. What is dishonest about that? He was very vocally anti-war. Is this proof that you can’t have it both ways? You can’t be an anti-war war hero without pissing off lots of people…

Your Maxmimum Leader doesn’t doubt that Bush (or another close to him) could get the group to pull the ads. But why should he? What is his compelling reason to do so? Your Maximum Leader doesn’t see one. While your Maximum Leader (and the president) both believe that Kerry should be proud of his war service (and your Maximum Leader has called Kerry a war hero many times), it doesn’t mean that those attacking his war record are being dishonest. From what your Maximum Leader has read, some of these men have been saying these things about Kerry for years and years. But are now just getting attention because Kerry has thrown himself into the presidential ring.

And as for Moveon.org… Isn’t comparing Bush and Hitler (like they did in ads earlier this year) a little much? (Full disclosure: Moveon.org, after much public outcry, did remove the ads from their website. But thanks to the wonders of the internet, they are still out there - hence the link.)

527s continue to be a problem for the campaigns. Your Maximum Leader believes more a problem for Bush than for Kerry actually. But these people have a right to say what they will.

Carry on.

From today’s Washington Post:

When Bob Dole Said No
By Noel KochThursday, August 26, 2004; Page A23
“They want me to head Veterans,” Bob Dole said. “They” meant the Bush White House. His tone said there were things he would rather do.
I asked him whether he was going to do it — take on the campaign role of going after the veterans’ vote. “Probably have to,” he said, although he added that he knew the Bush campaign would want him to attack John Kerry, and he didn’t intend to do that. He didn’t have anything against Kerry, he said.
The conversation in my old friend’s Pennsylvania Avenue office took me backdecades. In the 1970 off-year elections, Bob Dole, freshman senator from Kansas, campaigned so aggressively for Republican candidates that he was awarded the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee. It looked like one more giant step forward for the man whose war wound in April 1945 brought him near death on three separate occasions and kept him bedridden for years while other young veterans were starting careers. When he finally learned to walk again, he did it with a vow: “I’m going to get those years back,” he told his brother Kenny.
But the RNC job was a poisoned apple. It came from the White House, and Dole was expected to pay an extravagant price for it. I was, in the way of things, the bill collector. For a brief period, I worked for Charles Colson. Chuck was one day to found an important prison ministry, but before his pilgrimage took him there he styled himself a hatchet man for Richard Nixon.
Colson ran a political operation in the White House, with outreach programs to various constituencies. My “constituency” was Congress, and my job was to get Republican members to laud the president and savage Democrats — particularly House and Senate Democrats. The idea was to keep White House enemies on the defensive. Sometimes it worked. When it didn’t work, it was because the members refused to be mustered into Colson’s attack machine. They valued their independence.
No one valued his independence more than Bob Dole, who had struggled for so long to regain it after years of dependency on others. Colson never understood that; he felt Dole should pay for the chairmanship, and it was assumed I could persuade him to do things he preferred not to do — such as launching gratuitous attacks on his colleagues. “They want me to get out there and accuse Teddy Kennedy of all kinds of stuff,” he would complain. “I’m not going to do that. I have to work with the guy. Besides, I like him.”
Dole was no shrinking violet; he was willing to attack — indeed, his reputation for it shadowed his career for years. But he was not willing to be manipulated. He refused to be used, and Colson swore Dole would pay for his defiance. After the 1972 election Dole was fired as party chairman. His bitterness was palpable: “They invited me up the mountain [Camp David] and threw me off.”
Dole is part of a political generation that took national service for granted. What separated his service from that of so many of his congressional colleagues was that he nearly died and then spent the remainder of a remarkable life overcoming challenges that most people can’t imagine — e.g., simply getting dressed.
No one is better placed than Dole to know how arbitrary are the fortunes of war. It is not surprising to hear John Kerry’s wounds belittled by men who have avoided all risk of being wounded. Someday perhaps we will be able to plumb the neuroses of those who avoided Vietnam and have ever after had difficulty living with the choice. But it is surprising to hear Bob Dole doing it. Kerry not hospitalized for his wounds? Bob Dole was not hospitalized for his first Purple Heart either.
“It was just a scratch,” he later recalled. “I think one of our grenades hit a tree and bounced back.” He received a Bronze Star, but that came much later, and was a bureaucratic exercise having little to do with his service as a platoon leader in the extraordinary 10th Mountain Division on April 14, 1945, the day his war ended, in Italy.
Bob Dole knows as well as any person how capricious is the gleaning of medals. Some men deserve what they don’t get; some get what they don’t deserve. And who should know better than he that it is craven to belittle a man’s service because it didn’t extend over some arbitrary stretch of time?
Bob Dole spent little time in combat. But as a result of the time he did spend, he lay on his back for years, recovering, and helping others to recover.
I spent a year in Vietnam and came home without a scratch. My brother served two tours in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts (and was hospitalized, and does draw disability — weird yarsticks used to measure John Kerry’s alleged shortfall), and yet spent far less time than I did in-country. Indeed, his first “tour” lasted about 15 minutes, ending on the beach near Danang in the midst of the U.S. Marines’ first amphibious assault in Vietnam.
Time in-country, how often a man was wounded, how much blood he shed when he was wounded — it is hurtful that those who served in Vietnam are being split in so vile a fashion, and that the wounds of that war are reopened at the instigation of people who avoided serving at all. It is hurtful that a man of Bob Dole’s stature should lend himself to the effort to dishonor a fellow American veteran in the service of politics at its cheapest.
There was a time when he would have refused. I know. I was there.

I suppose the Maximum Leader will say that Bob Dole is a fool; if he had been willing to condone dishonest attacks in his presidential campagin, perhaps he might have won. That may be so.

But I wish we had leaders who would take the high road in actuality, as opposed to pretending to be on the high road while allowing minions to sling mud and calumny.

Yes, I’m talking about the Swift Boat Veterans. But I’m also talking about the way that Bush supporters made calls to South Carolina voters to whisper that McCain had adopted a “black baby,” perhaps costing McCain that primary and ending his presidential aspirations.

I assume the Maximum Leader will follow his general pattern (correct me if I am wrong, oh partisan one) and say:

1) Bush isn’t running the adds. Private citizens are legally funding them.

2) Well, the Dems and Move On are doing it too!

I’ll concede both points. But respond with this:

Anyone who thinks Bush could not immediately end the adds with a phone call to his backers who are bankrolling the media buys is either willfully deluded, or if they legitimately believe Bush can’t stop the adds, ought to re-evaluate the leadership abilities of their man.

I’m not sure that Move On has been running ads that are parallel in their level of dishonesty. If they are, I’ll condemn it. I guess I’m just not sufficiently partisan. The Minister of Propaganda will be disappointed.

I would also like to point out the disparity between Bush saying that Kerry should be proud of his war record while allowing (and encouraging by his Machiavellian silence) his supporters to make the harsh claims. Does this sound a wee bit dishonest? I’m sure it doesn’t to the Maximum Leader.

From a pragmatic point of view, Bush’s actions are useful. Kerry is smeared, and Bush isn’t seen by the largely uncritical electorate as being the author of negative adds. Also from a pragmatic viewpoint, Kerry’s response doesn’t say much about his leadership either. As Skippy says, it’s amateur hour over at the DNC.

From the world of Women’s Olympic Soccer:

“I want to say something,” German defender Steffi Jones said after the Americans eliminated them 2-1 in overtime in Monday’s semifinals. “For those players who are ending their soccer careers, we should say thank you.

“Playing against them was awful. Playing with them (in the WUSA) was wonderful. But the whole game of women’s soccer owes them so much. They opened so many doors. I wish that they win the final, and have a nice life afterward.”

Classy sportsmanship. Perhaps this is why I enjoy women’s soccer more than most traditional “American sports.” The players haven’t become egotistical jerks like many of our more high profile athletes.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, who was already feeling a little melancholy today, just did something sure to raise the spirits of any mortal human. He read this post of Skippy’s.

As usual, Skippy is thoughtful, cogent, and objective. (Not to mention a fine writer with a free-flowing style that makes your Maximum Leader jealous. Damn him.)

While it may be overstating it to say that since the dawn of the industrial age the world has depended on the US Dollar for support, it is true that the US economy keeps the rest of the world’s economies going. At what point will the fiscal recklessness that in endemic to our political system cause the complete meltdown of the world economy?

Neither candidate has a plan (or even the thought of having some advisors get together over coffee at the corner Starbucks to make up some platitudes about a plan) to address the real, growing, problem with entitlements in this nation.

And what really can be done? The social programs in question have created dependant classes of people who vote for those giving out the dole. As time goes on it will take a significant number of politicians to go to heroic (and your Maximum Leader is talking Homeric heroic) lengths to save us from the impending crisis. Those hypothetical politicians-cum-statesmen will all lose their careers doing it. Assuming they can pull it off at all.

And that thought, loyal minions, is just enough to put your Maximum Leader over the top today in overwhleming feelings of dread. He will now turn off the internet and drown his apprehensions in superhuman amounts of Scotch wiskey.

Carry on.

Your humble Minister of Agriculture is back online.

After an absence of so long, one would think that I would return with all kinds of fun blogging topics and insightful comments.

Alas, I’ve got neither of those.

So perhaps I will mark my return to Naked Villainy with the tale of a summer visit from an old pal.

Said old pal and I began hanging out in college. We met through the Maximum Leader and another friend, She-who-became-a-monster. I had broken up with a girlfriend who had taken to speaking of marriage. He was carrying on a long-distance relationship with his eventual wife. We played a lot of Diplomacy. We also got thrown out of the college computer lab for playing Mechwarrior too much. Heh.

(Diplomacy if a fun, fun game. We ought to have a Naked Villainy play-by-mail tournament. The anglophiliac Maximum Leader could be England (of course), the pseudo-fascist Foreign Minister could be Germany, the leftist Minister of Propaganda could be Russia, the ever-balkanized-in-his-thinking Minister of Agriculture could be Austria-Hungary. I’m not sure of a good country fit for the Big Hominid or Air Marshal. I’d say France for Kevin based on his love of the language, but that would just be mean. Of course, the rigidly secular Italian state might be a good proxy for the Air Marshal’s skepticism.)

We had some very good times together in that short year of college before he had to leave the ivy-coated nest and fly. I still get the giggles thinking about when we jumped up on the stage during the Rocky Horror Picture show and did the timewarp.

(If only I could timewarp back and remove the girl who went wih us to the show from the otherwise fun memory. Quoth the Maximum Leader: “She’ll cheat on you. She’s cheated on everybody else.” Quoth Smallholder “No she won’t! This relationship is different!” Guess who was right… In fact, Jen could be a whole ‘nother post about how my friends failed to get me to come to my senses about this girl. Of course, we would have to give her a nomme-de-blog first. Any suggestions, lads?)

(Admit it, dear readers, you really missed my off-the-point-asides, didn’t you?)

I also remember all of us getting down at the wattage-in-the-cottage parties. For a really big guy, he was quite a good dancer and attracted a goodly amount of female attention, but never did do much about that attention. The Maximum Leader was there too, but I can’t really say he was dancing with us - it was more of a spastic flailing. But I should talk.

Some of my favorite memories from college are sitting on the porch of The Horseman of Hunger’s house, watching the boys chip golfballs off the hill into downtown Farmville, drinking beer to excess from chilled mugs, arguing politics (particularly the Second Amendment), planning for the future, reading Hunger’s collection of American Heritage (okay - so we were geeks), basking in their jealousy of my girlfriend (before she fulfilled the Maximum Leader’s prophecy).

My bud’s graduation party was also excellent. A late night stroll at the beach with our women, a great volleyball game, and watching my friend’s father get all misty eyed that his boy was all grown up.

I also really enjoy his esoteric knowledge in random fields. I remember his outrage that the rpg shown in an Indiana Jones movie was an anachronism - it wouldn’t be invented until three years after the “Last Crusade.”

He never got me into re-enacting, but I have always enjoyed his stories of life “in the field.”

I don’t get to see him much these days - we live very far apart. But our relationship, even if neither one of us is a particularly good correspondent, is one of those rare childhood friendships that deepens as you get older. As we have become husbands and fathers, I am amazed at how often our ideas and goals are similar. His lovely wife and my dear Sally (both of whom carry the well-earned sobriquet of “long suffering”) have become friends and probably communicate more often then we do.

On his last visit, he came with me to pick up my sweet Bonnie - the Ayrshire heifer that will become our nurse and milk cow. While several of my friends humor me when I go off on farm tangents (and the Maximum Leader is particularly good at humoring me), he is my only friend who actually seems to approach the joy I feel in my heart when working the land.

His response to my re-emergent Christianity has hit the right note. He is perhaps a bit more literal than I, but his Christianity isn’t an in-your-face-everyone-else-is-going-to-hell brand that I find so repulsive in many of my fellow believers. I went through some serious soul-searching at the exact time that the Maximum Leader was rejecting the doctrine of Catholicism. While the Minister of Propaganda seemed personally offended that I was no longer a godless atheist, the subject of this post was a quiet listener.

Well, enough background. My friend’s visit this summer was probably the highlight of my time off. We got to spend some good family time, hung around the farm, played with our girls, shared parenting tips, celebrated our impending familial additions, talked philosophy, and, one night when the girls were asleep, got good and damn drunk with my father-in-law. And nearly burned down my in-laws’ new house at Wintergreen.

But the best part of the whole visit was watching our progeny frolic together. His daughter is a wonderful, precocious, sweet-tempered child. Watching two year olds share conisistently with each other must be the eighth wonder of the world.

Now, my life is pretty darn good. (Is this why I am an uninspired blogger? If only I was more tormented like Skippy and Kilgore…) I have a great family, TWO jobs that I love, and live on my own nine ares of paradise.

But without minimizing all those blessings, life would be even better if we could hang out more often.

Here’s a symbolic beer raised to the Foreign Minister.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader thanks Wizbang for pointing him towards this story. Winnipeg Sun Sports - Back on the beam.

Nothing like having Pam Anderson as a sponsor. There was a day when the Minister of Agriculture would have loved to have Ms. Anderson has his “sponsor.”

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that Rachel is going to check out the other recording of Tristan und Isolde. She’s a sucker for Deitrich, your Maximum Leader for Kirsten. Ah the joys of loving classical music…

Does anyone out there (excepting Rachel) even know the Liebestod from Tristan? The “Love-Death” as it were? It is a great peice of music. For those of you who are visually stimulated, yet do not care to watch the whole opera to get to the Liebestod, rent the film Aria and watch the Liebestod segment. You’ll get the jist of the piece.

Speaking of Aria. Your Maximum Leader didn’t care for it too much the first time he saw it. But a second viewing improved the effect for him. (Except in that one segment with all of the bodybuilders.) He figured that people who might not like opera could be moved to learn more about the operas from which the various segments were taken. And that isn’t all that bad.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader reads that the President has asked that the Swift Boat Vets stop running their ads. But he also added that other 527’s should stop their ads too.

Well Mr. President, your Maximum Leader hates to tell you this, but none of it will stop. It will not stop because it is legal and effective.

Your Maximum Leader got a real chuckle out of John Edwards’ demand that the President “take responsibility and demand that the ad come off the air.” That is a laugh. Responsibility for what exactly? Is the president responsible for the ad? No. Do people responsible for the ad have connections to Bush people? Well yes. Your Maximum Leader would be shocked if they didn’t. It is the duty of politicians to find people who will give them money with which they run their campaigns. And those people can also give money to other groups (and frequently do).

Your Maximum Leader believes this is a type of political speech. You find out who agrees with your positions on various issues, and then support them by volunteering or buying their publications, or making donations to them. Why should people stop giving money to legal organizations with which they agree?

They shouldn’t.

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t believe it is the duty of the President Bush to tell the people he knows affiliated with the Swift Boat Vets group to stop their ads. Nor does your Maximum Leader believe that Senator Kerry should tell the people he knows affiliated with Moveon.org that they should stop their ad campaigns.

Some people say that the difference between Moveon and Swift Boat Vets is that the Vets are lying. Great! Senator Kerry should sue them. Lying is not protected speech. No court in the land would allow outright lies to be publically disseminated. Unless of course the lies aren’t outright lies but differences of opinions based on sometimes obscure facts.

As your Maximum Leader has written before, John Kerry is a certified war hero in his book. He served with distinction while in Vietnam. Your Maximum Leader hasn’t cared for much of what John Kerry has done publically in the years since his return from Vietnam. That doesn’t diminish his war service, but it also doesn’t give him a free pass to be president.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was reviewing his site server statistics and seeing what had happened to his dearly beloved blog in the weeks of limited posting. He discovered that while his traffic has fallen off since the high point in June we still get between 65 and 120 unique visits a day. Not too bad really.

Also, while checking the referral log, you Maximum Leader discovered that 10 unique visits to Nakedvillainy.com came from Neil Barker’s Seoul. Neil has sent traffic here, has wisely chosen to blogroll this site and writes some good stuff. Thus he has been added to the Legion of Villainy.

In reviewing search terms that brought people to this site, your Maximum Leader has learned that he is still the number two match for the name “Summer Saunders” on Google. It is all because of this post. The joys of misspelling a name will be revisited upon you for ages. But hey, it is worth about 25 hits a month…

Ah, Summer… She would probably still make the list of the most desireable women in the universe ever. What is she up to know your Maximum Leader muses? A quick search of her name (spelled correctly) shows that she is still the co-host of NBA Inside Stuff. That bit of knowledge is almost enough to get your Maximum Leader to watch, although he hates the NBA and basketball in general. Here is a chat transcript with Summer from the WNBA site. Interesting, she’d want Ashley Judd or Diane Lane to portray her in a movie. Grrr baby… Summer also still hosts “Figure it Out” on Nick. Your Maximum Leader should get the Villainettes to watch it one day…

One last housekeeping matter. Some lucky soul found Nakedvillainy by searching for the following words: “wanted ayrshire heifer in washington state.” Humm… On Google that puts us on the second page of matches, and Yahoo also puts us on the second page of matches. Well Mr. “Looking for an ayrshire heifer in Washington state,” if you are still visiting shoot an e-mail to the Minister of Agrigculture (link on left) and he will extoll the virtues of ayrshires to you. And perhaps encourage you to join his ayrshire breed fan club…

Enough of this…

Some of you minions may be wondering when your Maximum Leader is going to get to the “Exit Stratergery” part of the post. Well here it is.

While vacationing, Villainette #1 (the Princess) made a little friend. Your Maximum Leader and the little friend’s parents engaged in a little chit-chat of our own while watching over our progeny. Little friend’s father (LFF) noticed your Maximum Leader was reading the most recent issue of National Review. He then started to ask some political questions of your Maximum Leader. Who gladly opined in the areas in which LFF was interested. Then LFF asked your Maximum Leader if Bush was wrong to go into Iraq without a clear exit strategy. Your Maximum Leader said no, it is almost impossible to plan a clear exit strategy when you have no idea how the war will turn out. Your Maximum Leader then asked LFF if having an exit strategery (so to speak) is a critical component of supporting going to war in the first place. LFF said yes it was. Your Maximum Leader then asked LFF when did President Clinton unveil his exit strategy for Bosnia? Or Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon for Vietnam? Or Presidents Truman and Eisenhower for Korea? Or FDR for WW2?

None of them really did was the point.

Exit strategies are tricky things. If you make them up ahead of time they must be flexible enough to adapt to a changing situation on the ground. Your Maximum Leader seriously doubted that Truman or Eisenhower thought that fifty years after the truce was signed in Korea that US troops would still be on the peninsula. It is hard to imagine FDR telling Churchill that he would be happy to send US troops to Europe “… But only if we have a sort of plan for bringing the boys home quickly after victory is won. The American people will not stand for a long-term occupation.”

So the question before us is what about Iraq now? Did the current administration have a plan for getting us out of Iraq once we got in? Your Maximum Leader believes the consensus opinion would be that they had some loose ideas about what would go on, but not a really firm plan. Administration officials said that ou troops would be in Iraq for a few years. That seems like a reasonable assessment. Our actions are being determined, in part, to the very fluid situation in which our troops and their officers find themselves.

Our goal should continue to be propping up the Interim Government and doing all in our power to stabilize the country and turn over full authority to a new Iraqi government. One that is democratically determined and popularly supported. Of course, your Maximum Leader’s preference is that the government be a regular “western-style” democracy. (With certain basic freedoms, rule of law, and toleration.) But that might be something of a stretch.

Our goal, in a roundabout way, brings us to the problems in Najaf. It seems as though the forces of the interim government are going to storm the Ali Mosque. This is, in your Maximum Leader’s opinion a generally good thing. The Interim Government needs to surpress insurrections. If that means storming a mosque that has been made into a makeshift fortress… So be it. The militants inside were given fair warning to put down their arms. They were offered amnesty. Now the Interim government must show it has some balls.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is tanned, rested, and returned from his fun beach vacation with the family. Perhaps another post follows on that topic later…

Well, your Maximum Leader sees that his suggestion for an Olympic Truce was met with the outcome of least effort, few posts. Que sera sera.

Well, your Maximum Leader admits that he will not likely be able to catch up on all the reading he missed from a full seven days away from anything resembling an internet connection, or a peronal computer for that matter. So with that in mind, how about a little link dumping to let some of your Maximum Leader’s favourite bloggers know that he does care about them.

Above all, allow your Maximum Leader to send belated first blogoversary wishes to the first (excluding the various ministers posting here) blogger to be ennobled with the sacred title of “Loyal Minion” — Kilgore Trout. Your Maximum Leader cannot heap enough praise on good Kilgore. There are few blogs your Maximum Leader checks multiple times a day. Kilgore’s in one of them. (Of course, Kilgore rarely posts more than one nugget of joy a day - which is probably related to the fact that he is a distance runner and can only summon up one nugget of joy a day; so perhaps your Maximum Leader is overanxious in seeking Kilgore updates.)

Just as Kilgore’s sexual frustrations amuse us, so too do the sexual frustrations of our Poet Laureate. Your Maximum Leader says morals be DAMNED! Fuck Miss SNU. Do it! Dooooooo it! Risk your lab-coat wearing job! Just do her! “Cutler” her even.

(NB: “To Cutler” a verb created by your Maximum Leader and the Smallholder while on their roadtrip. Its etymology comes from Jessica Cutler who revealed that men like her for her ass. Her half-Korean ass that is. Humm… The Poet Laureate is half-Korean… Jessica Cutler is half-Korean… If they got together and made babies - which by the way is unlikely if the Poet Laureate were to cutler Jessica Cutler - they would still be half-Korean wouldn’t they?)

Up next, Dr. Rusty Shackleford is always out there keeping an eye on what is important out there. And as a reward, he has more traffic than Noam Chomsky. Huzzah! As an added reward, Rusty will not be dragged out and shot for idiocy when the MWO comes. The same cannot be said for Noam.

Since Anna hasn’t posted in almost as long as your Maximum Leader one can only assume that the Botox went horribly wrong.

Your Maximum Leader thought of Annika while on vacation. Not like that! Get your minds out of the gutter. (But Annika can bring out the best in men that is for sure.) Knowing how Annika enjoys flying and planes caused your Maximum Leader to think of her when he took the Villainettes to Kill Devil Hills and paid a little homage to the brothers Wright.

BRD is now on vacation, but his short missive on toilets amused your Maximum Leader. Which reminds your Maximum Leader, didn’t the Poet Laureate have a run-in with Japanese toilets? He must have posted about it, but your Maximum Leader lacks the will to find the post(s) in question.

Your Maximum Leader also missed reading Bill’s blog while he was gone. Bill wrote a remarkably thoughtful comment on the recent post of the AirMarshal concerning the young girl and communion. While your Maximum Leader will not go into much comment on this matter here, he is torn between understanding the church’s position (at least its theological foundations) and the knowledge that the church has made exceptions frm time to time for good reasons. It seems to him as though this wouldn’t be a bad time for an exception.

What can one say about Skippy? Well… Your Maximum Leader, like Skippy, finds Michele Malkin hot. (But never has a happy ending watching her on TV. And your Maximum Leader watched her on Hardball last week too. She got her delicious ass handed to her by Matthews. But, in all honesty, Matthews was being a domineering bastard who wouldn’t let her talk.) And just to note one more thing, your Maximum Leader believes that the more physically attractive a woman is, the less likely she is to be good in bed. Just like Skippy says.

Your Maximum Leader always likes Rachel’s blog. This must be, in part, because she loves classical music. But really Rachel? You’d prefer the Overture from Tristan und Isolde rather than the Liebestodt? Perhaps you should give a listen and reconsider. (And try this recording instead. Your Maximum Leader is a sucker for Kirsten Flagstad.) Your Maximum Leader also thanks Rachel for the link to Communists for Kerry. Your Maximum Leader thought he would originally do his blog along a communist theme, but sadly discovered that it was already done, and done better than he would likely be able to pull off.

Speaking of the Commissar, he also directs us to Communists for Kerry.

In closing let your Maximum Leader give a shout out to his Dear Buddhist Minion Andi… Your Maximum Leader says get the fitted tee and the thong.

Please…

Then send photos. Your Maximum Leader will then decide if you are a bad Buddhist or a naughty Buddhist. Such determinations are only possible with photographic evidence. (And if in these hypothetical photos you are clutching a sword while wearing the fitted tee and the thong your Maximum Leader would be unable to control himself and would likely have a hormonal overload… Frankly just the thought in his mind of a sword-wielding, tee-topped, thong-clad Buddhist chicka is causing him to go a little cross-eyed.)

With that last comment, your Maximum Leader (necessarily) declares this post closed.

Carry on.