…that the Democrats won’t have a nationally televised convention this year. If they did, this is what the public would see (and here’s the whole thing for non-subscribers):

…in bigger-than-life projection was an extended trailer for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which played to a nearly instantaneous standing ovation. In addition, the conference screened other documentaries, some innocuous (The Motherhood Manifesto, featuring Rosie the Riveter balancing a baby on her bicep) and others not (Iraq for Sale, whose name is self-explanatory).

Down below, on the concourse level, signs flanking entrances into the Hilton’s 45,000-square-foot exhibition hall and its vendor booths read, “We know what to do: Impeach him.” On top of NOW, NARAL, ACORN, and the ACLU (which still contends it is nonpartisan), there was the Backbone Campaign, which sold miniature spines to discourage purchasers from engaging in yes-man, convictionless support of their politicians.

Attendees cautious of “establishment politicians” also seemed to be looking for signs of spinelessness at 8:15 a.m. Tuesday in the Hilton’s International Ballroom, a classy combination of contemporary architecture bathed in florid adornments. That’s when Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. John Kerry, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi were to begin their back-to-back-to-back speechmaking.

Before the main event, two graying, hippie-looking men in the third row hoisted a handmade banner that read, in all caps, “IMPEACH BUSH.” (This was becoming the unofficial theme of the week.) Wild applause erupted, and several people nearby, energized by their proximity to this agitation, felt compelled to stand in solidarity and raise peace signs. This horrified the conference leaders, who discouraged such displays and constantly reminded attendees, whom they treated like mischievous children, to “be respectful.”

Not a pretty picture. That’s why I suspect that the Donkeys are going to be disappointed again this fall.

David Bernstein discusses:

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve had several correspondences along these lines, none challenging the points I raised (though not necessarily assenting, either), but simply arguing that any such points are completely irrelevant, because all that matters is whether or not Israel violated international law.

It has struck me that debating such people is just as frustrating and unproductive as arguing with a religious believer about some matter within the scope of his religious belief–just substitute “God says so” for “international law says so.”

…the compassionate left.

Kos:

“It was a time that was very stifling for liberal voices in the American landscape,” he remembers. “No one could criticize the president because it was considered treasonous to criticize the president in time of war.” But as an Army veteran who served in artillery logistics in the first gulf war, he felt he could question the rush to combat with impunity. “I vowed my life for the right to criticize our leaders. Nobody was going to tell me I could or could not criticize anybody.”

Yes, I recall well the night all the dissenters were rounded up and sent to the work camps, with just the scraps of clothes on their backs–the wails of anguish, the cries for missing loved ones. Just a few brave souls, veterans like Markos Zuniga, were willing to stand up to the man, and speak truth to power, in defiance of the storm troopers.

—

It’s funny, he probably said this with a straight face, and the Newsweek reporter sees no need to align it with reality. Other than Ann Coulter, I recall very few people being accused of “treason” for “criticizing the president” (and even in her case, I think that the charge was a little more involved than that). Hell, I criticized the president–I still do. What he means is that he (and many others) weren’t allowed to spout inanities and insanities issued from the depths of their dementia and Bush derangement without being criticized for it.

Sorry, Kos, but the rest of us have free speech rights, too.

Well, actually, the Age of Varuna. The hits just keep coming.

How long is Kos going to drag this anchor? I mean, it’s not like he doesn’t have enough problems of his own…

It’s all about the money. And, errr…the astrology.

And this is one of the guys who’s going to lead the delusional Donkeys to the political promised land?

[Saturday morning, back in Florida, update]

But wait! There’s more:

Astrologer Jerome Armstrong notes that Ixion and Quaoar are following close in Pluto’s wake in early Sagittarius, and connects the rise of the political version of religious fundamentalism with the astronomical exploration of the Kuiper Belt in 1992. He cites incidences as disparate as the rise of Osama bin Laden onto the world stage and the Republican Revolution of 1994, fueled by Christian fundamentalist voters and culminating now with all three branches of government in Republican control. In addition, he cites the ascendance of political Hinduism in India in 1996 with the election of the BJP. One might add to this list the emergence of Conservative majorities in Israel and the UK.

As one commenter notes, this is the gift that just keeps giving. Obviously, Rove must be behind this. All part of the Republican war on science.

And yes, this does bring a whole new meaning to the term “moonbat.”

It’s all about the money. And, errr…the astrology.

And this is one of the guys who’s going to lead the delusional Donkeys to the political promised land?

[Saturday morning, back in Florida, update]

But wait! There’s more:

Astrologer Jerome Armstrong notes that Ixion and Quaoar are following close in Pluto’s wake in early Sagittarius, and connects the rise of the political version of religious fundamentalism with the astronomical exploration of the Kuiper Belt in 1992. He cites incidences as disparate as the rise of Osama bin Laden onto the world stage and the Republican Revolution of 1994, fueled by Christian fundamentalist voters and culminating now with all three branches of government in Republican control. In addition, he cites the ascendance of political Hinduism in India in 1996 with the election of the BJP. One might add to this list the emergence of Conservative majorities in Israel and the UK.

As one commenter notes, this is the gift that just keeps giving. Obviously, Rove must be behind this. All part of the Republican war on science.

And yes, this does bring a whole new meaning to the term “moonbat.”

It’s all about the money. And, errr…the astrology.

And this is one of the guys who’s going to lead the delusional Donkeys to the political promised land?

[Saturday morning, back in Florida, update]

But wait! There’s more:

Astrologer Jerome Armstrong notes that Ixion and Quaoar are following close in Pluto’s wake in early Sagittarius, and connects the rise of the political version of religious fundamentalism with the astronomical exploration of the Kuiper Belt in 1992. He cites incidences as disparate as the rise of Osama bin Laden onto the world stage and the Republican Revolution of 1994, fueled by Christian fundamentalist voters and culminating now with all three branches of government in Republican control. In addition, he cites the ascendance of political Hinduism in India in 1996 with the election of the BJP. One might add to this list the emergence of Conservative majorities in Israel and the UK.

As one commenter notes, this is the gift that just keeps giving. Obviously, Rove must be behind this. All part of the Republican war on science.

And yes, this does bring a whole new meaning to the term “moonbat.”

It’s been half a century, and many good people died or were imprisoned in the attempt to liberate themselves from one of the great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. But they won, eventually, no thanks to the US State Department. Or perhaps even the CIA, which seems in many ways to be our greatest enemy these days.

By Mark Steyn:

…it wasn’t until Ann Coulter pointed it out that you realize how heavily the Democratic party is invested in irreproachable biography. For example, John Kerry’s pretzel-twist of a war straddle in the 2004 campaign relied mainly on former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from a Vietnam grenade accident whom the campaign dispatched to stake out Bush’s Crawford ranch that summer. Maybe he’s still down there. It’s gotten kinda crowded on the perimeter since then, what with Cindy Sheehan et al. But the idea is that you can’t attack what Max Cleland says about war because, after all, you’ve got most of your arms and legs and he hasn’t. This would normally be regarded as the unworthy tactic of snake-oil-peddling shyster evangelists and, indeed, the Dems eventually scored their perfect Elmer Gantry moment. In 2004, in the gym of Newton High School in Iowa, Senator John Edwards skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. “We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.” Mr. Reeve had died the previous weekend, but he wouldn’t have had Kerry and Edwards been in the White House. Read his lips: no new crutches. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry’s speeches ever do for the able-bodied. As the author remarks, “If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards.”

“What crackpot argument can’t be immunized by the Left’s invocation of infallibility based on personal experience?” wonders Miss Coulter of Cleland, Sheehan, the Jersey Girls and Co. “If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we’re allowed to respond to?”

Why not, indeed?

I will note that I haven’t read Coulter’s book, and don’t intend to. It’s sad that she couldn’t make her many legitimate points about the secular religion of the left without dragging science and Darwin into it. Unfortunately, though, it’s the inevitable pushback from evangelizing against God by the likes of Dawkins and Dennett.