peter's hip pocket

I Wish She Was Still On Vacation

From Common Sense and Wonder

From Maureen Dowd's column today:

Can you believe President Bush is still pushing the cockamamie claim that we went to war in Iraq with a real coalition rather than a gaggle of poodles and lackeys?

The UK, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Norway, Denmark, poodles and lackeys? They sound more like a significant portion of the European continent. According to her logic, any country that was part of our coalition is automatically a poodle and a lackey. So how do you change the coalition to include non-poodles and lackeys when any country that joins our coalition automatically becomes a poodle or a lackey? It seems like a very Kafkaesque situation. Let me put it another way in case it is confusing. The only way to have a broad coalition, by her definition, is to get countries that don't support us to join it, but if they don't support us, why would they join it? What this all boils down to is that I don't think the coalition would ever be broad enough to satisfy the likes of Maureen Dowd.

The folks at Common Sense and Wonder continue to be among my favorite daily reads.

Max Jacobs on Bush's space vision

Via Common Sense & Wonder

There is always a reason why not to explore, not to be bold. I'm sure there were people telling the various European exploreres (sic) not to sail across the Atlantic, but thank God they did. Imagine if the discovery of America was delayed a couple of hundred years? The world would be so completely different and I think also would be much worse off. After all there was a very good reason why so many people across the world have risked everything to come here. Just because we don't really see the immediate benefits of exploration doesn't mean that they won't be massive over time.

Yes, I would rather private industry do all this since they would probably be able to do these things more efficiently. But barring a Bill Gates turning his sights away from Malaria and onto space, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything other than Hilton building a hotel in space. At this point, I will take any sort of research in space I can get. If it has to come from NASA, so be it.

Friedman: "It's No Vietnam"

Tom Friedman had an interesting piece in the NYTimes last week.

There is this notion being peddled by Europeans, the Arab press and the antiwar left that "Iraq" is just Arabic for Vietnam, and we should expect these kinds of attacks from Iraqis wanting to "liberate" their country from "U.S. occupation." These attackers are the Iraqi Vietcong.

Hogwash. The people who mounted the attacks on the Red Cross are not the Iraqi Vietcong. They are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge -- a murderous band of Saddam loyalists and Al Qaeda nihilists, who are not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves. They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis.

[via Commonsense & Wonder]

Yet Another Sobering List

Post-war deaths in Iraq.