Thanks to the overly active imagination of Frank J. at IMAO:

“This is Dan Rather with continuing coverage of Hurricane Jeanne which has surprisingly skipped right over Florida and landed in Minnesota. Yes, I know some ankle-biting pajama wearing fanatics known as ‘bloggers’ are disputing this, some claiming to be from Minnesota and showing pictures that everything is fine, but we still have this evidence.”

Rather held up a photo of hurricane damage with the word “Minnesota” on it.

“See, this photo, sent to us by an anonymous, unimpeachable source, shows hurricane damage and is clearly labeled ‘Minnesota.’ And listen to this expert.”

An expert walked up to Rather. “That is clearly a label.” He then walked away.

“So, you snot-nosed punks, stop doubting me!” Rather then jumped up on his desk. “I am newscaster Rather! Fear my power, or I shall report your obituary!”

This link leads you to an interesting posting regarding the before and after action of CBS in the recent “RatherGate” issue that discusses what constitutes criminal behavior. It’s pretty well laid out. Settle in for a 10 minute concentrated read.

All in all, it’s one thing to mis-report, it’s entirely another to “modify” the truth with conscious effort.

On the ride home the night of 9/20/2004, the local talk fill in host talked about how he was for George Bush, but he didn’t think he was being aggressive enough prosecuting the war in Iraq. Most of his callers agreed.

Here’s the skinny: Step back and look at the proper long term strategy. If President Bush had gone full tilt boogie on the bad guys, it’s still like trying to get rid of the cockroaches in your southeast low country home. You can go after them and beat them back, while you consider your options, or just burn the house down. Option two helps you make it through the day, with only sometimes seeing the bugs at night when you turn on the light. You keep them from overrunning the place, and it’s pretty livable, given other more aggressive options. If you burn the house down, you’ll probably have the cockroaches around, and you’ll get really, really wet when it rains. So here George is, standing at the threshold of getting rid of many of the cockroaches, while his “family” pleads with him to quit gassing the house and spreading chemicals all over, because it hurts the environment. He’s within striking distance, but the gate he must pass through to do more is the one labeled “Re-Election.”

If George leaves office now, we will slip in our resolve, and many of the hard fought gains will be lost. Because the “family” of the American public is teetering on the fence right now, it’s good that he takes a generally moderate, strategic holding battle into the war. It will cost some lives, but here’s the advantage: It will keep the squeamish conservatives on his side that may sway the vote. Since the President has a term limit, once he’s back in, then he can roll up his figurative sleeves, take off his gloves and stand and fight hard for us. It will repel some, yet in the long run, think what four more years of fighting terrorists would do for World peace? If we have come this far since 9/11/2001, and we have had a military that has been transmogrified into a flexible, well trained organization, capable of fighting in asymmetric environments, and conducting joint operations, augmented by OGAs as well as drawing on the significant expertise of the citizen-soldiers of this modern time. In Vietnam, the book On Strategy argued we took a European heavy armor mentality to the triple canopy jungle. The author was right, it didn’t fit the battle field strategically.

Since Vietnam, we have evolved somewhat in our war fighting orientations, but it was still focused on building a better self-contained military. We have been pretty successful at that. What we didn’t seem to learn very well, until we somewhat got it in GWI, is that war is a multi-faceted thing, to include the press, economics, and many other things, and not all of those arenas have people in camouflage in them. We did better this time. Anyhow, back to may main thesis: George Bush needs to grit his teeth until he is re-elected, before he goes to the “and I’m not joking” bare knuckles approach needed to get rid of the terrorists. Once in office for the four more years, then he can get busy prosecuting war as he should, for the betterment of the entire human race. Short of impeachment, and it has been demonstrated how hard that is, he will be able to run it well, provided he has a Republican Congress in his bag of tricks. So, for those who are frustrated with George Bush, help put him back in and see where this goes. Don’t put him in and see what happens in our back yard.

This is maybe somewhat brutal, but then again, maybe not. I think we call the end of the http address the domain, .com, .gov, .net, .us, .biz, edu, .info. I propose a new domain (if that’s the right name for them): .joke. I mean, it would warn people before they went there about the mirth ready to befall them. I we could start with http://www.johnkerry.joke. How does that sound? From there, consider the possibilities. We could have MCM (mainstream comedy media) such as www.billcosby.joke, www.adamsnadler.joke, www.stevemartin.joke, and www.rosannebarr.joke (oops…these are supposed to be funny!). Then again, maybe it’s a bad thing to decide we need more domains. What will come next? Maybe .satire, followed by .news (which may be good, but how will you know if CBS belongs in the .joke or .news domain?). Pretty soon, there might be .bucanneers for the somehow still loyal in Tampa, which would be like .saints for the New Orleans crowd. Anyhow, this is a planted thread, to see where it goes from here. The options are pretty endless, unless we ru n out of English words, at which point, we could do a survey for the next most popular language (Spanish?) and begin lifting those words to populate the net with new domains. The down side is our little heads will explode, trying to keep track of the explosion of addresses we have to keep track of. We’d have to demand wall sized screens, just so we had a hope of scrolling through our lists of favorite addresses. Now, that would drive the display market to feed our need. Oh, but what about if someone opposite your view registers the domain name first> For instance, as a staunch Democrat, you could go to www.johnkerry.com and think he’s some commercially related site, you know, someplace that wants your money! Hey! Wait…that’s it, HE DOES! Not only will he take your donations, he’ll tax you and get what you used to have left over for yourself, and spend it how he sees fit. I digress. But, as a good Democrat, your fingers may slip and you’d end up on www.johnkerry.joke. You may be terribly confused if the jokes there are not household humor of the incredibly wealthy, but those from his opponents. If you went to www.johnkerry.biz, you’d find nothing, as he’s never run a business. At www.johnkerry.mil, there may be a single entry, in large purple heart ribbon color letters that says (no emphasis added): “I SERVED IN VIETNAM!” at www.johnkerry.info, I’m not sure what you’d find, certainly no federal bills bearing his name. How about taking a peek at www.johnkerry.us. Hmmm….just what could be said there? Maybe a list of Heinz plants that have moved out of the country and “outsourced” the work to foreign nationals. So it would carry the connotation of really more like www.johnkerryswifesaysscrewyou.us. That’s our “Momma T!”

“We don’t have an election, we have an auction� Bumper sticker in the parking lot at Borders. You know, they have that right, but I think they haven’t figured out how right they are. I suspect, and it may be wrong for me to assume this, as I have not spoken to the owner of the vehicle, that they think it’s about how the Presidency may be bought by special interests. If they truly believed this in this, then it would seem it would apply to this president, and his predecessor, and the one before them. At what point did they begin being bought, and was it the first dollar we count from, or is there some “threshold”� we should use as a guideline? How far back in our 228 year history does this sham of elections go? Is it limited to one person, one party? Is it universal? If universal, why not some bumper sticker reminiscent of a jeer from the stands at a baseball game: Throw the bums out!�? Ah, ha! You see, the view seems to revolve around a victimized state of mind, a “my vote doesn’t count”� desperation mental frame. Two points are important to discuss here, one directly related, but the important one, with the real insight from the truth behind the bumper sticker will be discussed secondly. Firstly, yes, every vote counts. In fact, it is in getting out and standing in line, suffering thru the “process”� to poke holes in a paper, or to check blocks, or touch a screen, is worth the effort. The Nov, 2000 election is still a matter of heated debate, and it showed how a little over 300 votes in a single state, have caused a lot of dissention. If the special interest groups, with lots of money were truly in control of the election, oops, I meant “auction,”� wouldn’t the margin have been wider? Now, if almost 400 people, with a leaning towards Al Gore had gone to work early, or just got out and voted, would there still be the bumper sticker on that vehicle? Generally, the sentiment on the bumper sticker indicates that the driver didn’t like the outcome of the election, so therefore it was easier to blame it on some grand conspiracy of the moneyed elite. There may be gounds for that influence, but I don’t believe that will be as big an issue while we still refrain from an electronic method of voting. Once we have gone to electronic votes, all bets are off. If you look at how we have progressed from simple viruses on our PCs to very complex ones, and ones that do no more damage, than to get into your machine to gather information and then send it out. Who’s to stop a similar evolution in the electronic voting machines, particularly if they are based on currently well used operating systems, with a widely available list of flaws, and also openly published capabilities and interfaces. Second major point. Yes, we do have an auction. The auction is not who buys the politicians, but which politician buys our votes. We look to our representatives, at all levels, not to operate for the good of the system, but for the good of the entity that they represent, at the expense of the larger, or just simply, the other entities. If these elected officials go off to their appointed positions, and haul back truckloads of cash and benefits for our community, then we are happy to re-elect them, as they proudly trumpet how much they have “done for us,”� and not how they have had to make some hard decisions, which at times resulted in our betterment, but sometimes, took what we perceived as “ours”� and made sure it was used more wisely, and provided us long term benefits, but denied us the pleasure at the moment. There you go, inappropriate analysis from the mere sighting of a bumper sticker on the way got get a cup of coffee.

I’ve been avidly reading blogs for about 5 months now and decided today was the day to join the fray. I happily join the other pajamamujahadien in the cyber world.

As a way of introducing the reading I have been doing, which from which you can conclude my leanings to some degree, here are some of the many that I make a special effort to read daily, if not more depending on how fast the news is breaking. I will shamelessly promote the blogs with my thoughts on them as well:

Little Green Footballs
I was reading this well before RatherGate. Charles was the one who overlayed a MS Word document on the Texas ANG memos and got the entire ball rolling on the forgery issue. Even before that, his blog has a lot of links to news that is published overseas, or downplayed stateside. Great discussions from many thinking readers makes it even better thatn the basic posts alone!

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller
Misha has a lot of insightful commentary, with “edgy” adjectives. Again, as with LGF, the discussions are lively and well populated.

Black Five
Matt is ex-military, with many connections to the real men, women and family members doing the hard work for the sake of freedom. His perspective is well founded when he adds to the material he links. Great place to find great reading and links to the real warriors, so you can see it through their eyes, not the filtering of the MSM.

International Monkey Assasination Organization
Frank isn’t really an assassin, but he doesn’t like monkeys. The man has a view of life of his very own and manages stick figure cartoons to get his point across. It’s a hoot!

That’s a few to start with. Surf on over and spend a few minutes reading.

This post is will be “the one that started it” for me. I’ve been reading blogs for about 6 months now and have decided to join the ranks of the pajamahadeen. More on the logic behind that to come with time, but it has at it’s core the desire to let the main stream media (herinafter referered to as “MSM”) and their blind supporters know there are plenty of thinking, knowledgeable people out here, who did not choose to wear a press pass for their chosen career. Not all of these people had to go through a higher education institution to get their smarts, either.

“They” employ “experts” all the time, and, while I’m thinking of it, they actually pay them for their commentary. Look at all the talking heads they had who used to wear a uniform for the Gulf War and the War on Terror? In the land of the cyber-expert, it seems plenty of people did some tremendously detailed research. all free of charge for the MSM, and their idea of “thanks” was to tell the world that people who sit at home and type in their pajamas can’t be taken seriously.

If I had the free money, I’d sure pay plenty for some not-photshopped pictures of the major luminaries of the press corps typing at home on their laptops…in their PJs!

Comments?

I feel like I’m running out the back of a Super Casa at 15,000 ft. I’m now falling into the cyber-atmosphere, but I packed a ‘chute, it will be OK….