Thank you, Wharf Rat.

I never thought I'd be seeing a silver lining here, but all the crap she put me through in her teenage years have made it possible to cope with her sisters' teenage dramas without panicking. It's like I don't even notice the feeling of impending doom any more.

Well done, daughter!

(And your daddy loves you.)

File under "Sad Ironies"

Blessed Blasted are the peacemakers.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) -- A moderate Muslim cleric who denounced suicide attacks as forbidden by Islam was killed Friday in a suicide attack on his mosque in Lahore, authorities said.

Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi was the first imam in Pakistan to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against suicide attacks in Pakistan.

On Friday, a suicide bomber approached Naeemi as he left the Jamia Naimia Mosque and religious school. The bomber detonated his explosives, killing Naeemi and two others, police said. Another 10 people were wounded in the attack.

A day in the life of an office drudge

These people must have a lot more time on their hands than I do. Can you imagine how long this had to take?



Akubra tip to A Welsh View.

Do NOT underestimate this woman

The Sarahnator's response to Letterman's assholicism:

"The Palins have no intention of providing a ratings boost for David Letterman by appearing on his show," [Palin spokeswoman Meghan]Stapelton said in an email to ABC News. "Plus, it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman."

Misogynists who hate on this lady (and her family) get more back than they bargained for.

the season 'tis, my lovely lambs

What is it about this month that seems to be bringing out the murderous loons? First the Tiller Killer, then the anti-war activist expressing his disapproval of the military, now this piece of work:

WASHINGTON — An elderly man walked into the Holocaust Museum, one of the capital’s most-visited sites, shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday and opened fire with a shoulder weapon or pistol, wounding a security guard before being shot himself, officials said.

The gunman was identified by several news agencies as James W. von Brunn, a man in his late 80s. According to a Web site maintained by Mr. von Brunn, he embraces a far-reaching conspiracy theory involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups. Early reports indicated that he lives in eastern Maryland.

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes before the news media start lumping him in with Christian conservatives. See, we're all on the right, aren't we? Never mind that this lulu liked Christians just about as much as he liked Teh Jooz.

So here's a question: if everybody who spoke against abortion shares the guilt for Tiller's murder, but the recruiter-killer acted in a vacuum, where does Von Brunn fall? Is everybody who waved anti-Zionist signs at these rallies going to be held responsible for this tragedy? I'm betting not.

Where is Todd Palin?

It looks like he owes David Letterman a fist in the mouth.

Riffing on Palin’s trip to New York last weekend, Letterman joked Monday night that during the seventh inning of the Yankees game “her daughter [14-year-old Willow] was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”

Letterman followed up on the line Tuesday night, joking that “the toughest part of her visit was keeping [former New York Gov.] Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.”

Talk about my daughters that way, mister, and see how long you keep your teeth.

No.

Please don't.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The group that tried for years to put slain abortion provider Dr. George Tiller out of business is interested in buying his now-closed clinic in Wichita, its president said.

Operation Rescue president Troy Newman said that his group has discussed the idea of buying the tan, windowless clinic in east Wichita. He made the comment after the Tiller family announced that the clinic would be closed permanently.

"I would love to make an offer on that abortion clinic, and that's some of the discussion that we're having," Newman said in a telephone interview Tuesday from his group's headquarters in Wichita.

If Tiller's abomination had been shut down through honest means, by abolishing the death business legally or (even better) making abortion as unpopular as slave trading, then I'd say it was a great idea. But the man was murdered. We didn't win; he merely lost. I'm pleased that the clinic won't be reopened, but that's purely pragmatic - no more babies will die there. It's nothing to gloat over under the circumstances.

Dancing on Tiller's grave is not only immoral, but it's unbecoming to people who believe in human dignity.

65 years later

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Thanks are far, far short of enough for the men who saved our civilization. But it's all we can give.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Mocking my g-g-g-generation

Warning! Set down your beverage and put something absorbent on your chair before you watch this, especially if you're a Breakfast Clubber like me. Some memories are just best recalled with howls of laughter.


Don't just get the gist and then pause. The end is the best part.

A tip o' the Akubra to Mrs Who.

Brutally honest about a brute

Okay, I'm going to be honest.

I don't feel bad about George Tiller's death.

I've been trying to. As a Christian, I know that I deserve death and eternal damnation as much he does. Only God's grace can save either me or him. I know also that no soul is presumed to be in Hell. There's always the possibility that Tiller repented of his crimes at some point just prior to his shooting. It's my duty to pray so and I've been doing that. Honest. I truly don't wish him to be damned, even if I fear the odds point in that direction.

But on a secular level, frankly, I think he really did have this coming. Let's not pussyfoot here: the man made a huge amount of money slaughtering defenseless babies. These were not early-term fetuses (feti?), nor "clumps of cells," as abortionists often say to gloss over the question of whether or not a fetus is human. These were late-term, viable babies. Fully or near-fully formed children. Some of them, by Tiller's own admission, were due to be born the next day.These were human infants, beyond any room for argument, whose parents had decided for one reason or another they wanted them dead. Not adopted. Dead. And George Tiller was more than happy to make that a reality. For a handsome fee, of course.

Nor was this an easy, painless death such as the most despicable criminal gets. These babies were torn to pieces with no anesthetic and vacuumed out bit by grisly, pathetic bit.

Tiller bragged that he had killed more than 60,000 babies in this way. Why should we mourn the loss of a man who treated human life that cavalierly?

In fact, Tiller died in much the same way as his victims: at the hands of a stranger, in a place where he should have been safe. His death was followed by tribute upon tribute and candlelight vigils outside his abattoir. Yet not one candle was lit there for any of the nameless, forgotten infants he snuffed out with no remorse whatsoever. If anyone had been so brazen as to light one, they'd probably have been arrested for arson.

His defenders point to the fact that his actions were permitted under current law. So was the Holocaust. But who defends Eichmann because he was within the law?

I've never mentioned it before, but I had a friend who was convinced to have a late-term abortion at Tiller's "clinic," about twenty years ago. A doctor told her the baby growing inside her wouldn't live very long, and her husband didn't want the work of raising a "defective" child, so they flew to Wichita and had it killed. Not "it," him. She had already named him, and for as long as I knew her after, she wore a bracelet with his name on it, carrying the grief of a child she never got to hold or see. But Tiller didn't lose any sleep over it. He pocketed the money and went on to the next one. It turned out later that the doctor's diagnosis could well have been wrong and my friend's baby might have been perfectly healthy. But we'll never know.

At that, my friend was one of the lucky ones. Stories abound of women whose abortions were handled haphazardly at Tiller's hands. Some of them died. We may never know how many, because abortion clinics operate above the laws on record-keeping and reporting. The only botched abortion is one where the patient dies before the check clears.

George Tiller was a stain on the human race. I wish it weren't so, but he was. There is no personal virtue he could have possessed that I can imagine mitigating his sheer loathesomeness. God loved him. I wish I could, but I just can't. (I hope God will correct that defect in me one day.) I also, as I said, hope that he repented. I wish he had been granted more time, in the hope that he might eventually have turned from his grisly ways.

Mind you, I'm not gloating at his death. I know I'll be accused of that. I also know I should see him as the child of God he was. But all I can see is a monster.

God also loved the children that Tiller tortured and killed. Do any of the people eulogizing him today have hearts soft enough to spare a thought for them?

I didn't think so.

A martyr for Moloch

George Tiller was aborted this morning.

Some stupid son-of-a-bitch shot him while he was sitting in church. In church!

Now, I don't especially mourn Tiller. I know, a better Christian than I am would, but I think he deserved exactly as much legal protection as his victims. Make of that what you will.

But the fact is, he did enjoy greater legal protection, and it plays right into the hands of the pro-aborts who paint all pro-lifers as frothing lunatics. Heck, Homeland Security already declared us domestic terrorists. Never mind that actual pro-life violence is far, far rarer than the violence perpetrated against us. The perception still stands.

And now they have an excuse to come after us. Shut down our March for Life. Prohibit the crisis pregnancy centers. Force every health care provider in the country to take Tiller's place.

No, if he was going to die, it should have been by God's hand, not ours. There was a good chance of his going to jail, which would have served to save many more babies than killing him did.

Murder was his stock in trade; it shouldn't have been allowed to make a martyr of him. This idiot has put all our necks on the block.

Nice going, jackass.

(Thinking about it, I wonder if this was a set-up by a pro-abort? I rather fear it wasn't, though. We have enough homegrown Oswald wannabes that we don't need an agent provocateur.

You want ID?

Here's my [fornicating] ID, [oedipally-inclined person]!

Akubra tip to Wicked Thoughts.

Memorial Day Weekend

The ribs are on the grill, most of the family is here, and I have the weekend off. I posted this two Memorial Days ago, but things haven't changed. I don't think I could say it any better today..
-------------
See that earnest-looking kid on the right? Calvin Samuel Martin III, his name was. You wouldn't know it to look at him, but he was a first-class smart-ass, with an easy charm that made people like him as soon as they met him. That was my dad, in his high-school yearbook, before he went to war.

Unfortunately, I don't know a whole lot about his experiences in the war, because he never talked about it afterward. And I mean never. Even in the 80s, when it became stylish to dredge up buried memories of Vietnam, he had nothing more to say than just that he was proud that he'd gone.

Not that he had much choice. It was 1966, and he had just flunked out of UW, and the government offered him a full scholarship to the University of Pleiku, without a lot of room to decline. This was before Kent State, before Jane Fonda straddled an enemy gun like she was posing for a girlie magazine, before it became really fashionable to cry "peace, peace" where there was no peace. My mom says that he had some misgivings about the war itself. But it didn't matter; he went.

I don't know anything about what-all happened there, either, except little snippets. My mom says he got to be pretty friendly with the Montagnards, and got his heart broken by what happened to them. (I had to look them up; I'd never heard of them.) He ran supply convoys, "delivering socks," as he told his younger brother later. I don't think he ever shot anybody, but he certainly got shot at enough.

Whatever he saw over there, it damaged him pretty badly. He came back with a self-destructive streak that he watered liberally with ethanol. My mom says that he was like a completely different person. I wouldn't know; I was born on the army base just as he was getting out.

The problems he came back with exacted a price on both him and his family, and he eventually left. I spent a lot of my childhood without him, except as an occasional visitor. I started getting close to him again when I was in my teens, but by then it was kind of awkward. I didn't know it when I was little, but the war had taken my daddy away.

When I was 26, it took him away for good. Now, my dad wasn't what you would call an abstemious man. He drank like a fish, he chain-smoked for twenty years (then just up and quit), he ate anything he wanted, and he was entirely too fond of the fairer sex. (And I do mean "entirely"; if I didn't know he'd had a vasectomy I'd be on the lookout for people who looked a lot like me.) But just as he had settled into a career he loved (working in the Orient designing mass transit systems), and a marriage that looked like it was going to last, he started having some health problems. He came back to the States for some tests, and three months later he was dead of a brain tumor.

For all his vices, the one really virtuous thing he had done in his life had exposed him to Agent Orange. My dad died from the war, just as surely as if he had been shot by a sniper.

Even with him gone, the war still casts a shadow. He was cremated, and buried in his home town of Goldendale. He has two headstones: one in the veterans' section, and another in a family plot. The family couldn't agree on whether to be proud or ashamed that he'd gone to war.

Well, I paid as much of a price as any of them, and I'm proud. Proud as hell. Yes, I know it's fashionable to regard Vietnam as a huge blunder forty years later. Yes, I know the aging hippies are getting their kicks pretending that Iraq is Vietnam and their sign-waving actually matters a rat's ass. I know these things. But I also know what happened to the Montagnards after we left, and I know that the army today is all that stands between us and this. And I know what my dad would say about the people who insist the only way to "support the troops" is to cut them off at the knees.

I loved my dad. I miss him. He only lived to see one grandchild, but I think he'd have made a helluva grandpa. And on Memorial Day, I think I'll crack a beer, barbecue some dead cow, and be grateful to him and every other fresh-faced kid who stopped a bullet or breathed poison so I could do it.

Thanks, Dad.

See what happens when you question The One™?

Notre Dame isn't a Christian university anymore. It's now dedicated to the worship of the real messiah. Thus saith Barack.

And old gleeps like this who insist on having gods before Obama are just begging to be hauled away in chains.

IOU

Happy Mother's Day to my own mom and to the woman I'm proud to have for the mother of my children. (And to Wharf Rat, who's having her first one as an actual mother.) I love you all!

Just because

Because I'm a defiant Jesus Freak, and because it's Friday, and because, as much as we bellyache about persecution, us American Christians have nothing on the Poles.

I saw Steve Taylor do this song in concert back in 1985, just a couple of years after the events he's referring to. The lyrics are here. There's not a single banal line, not a wasted syllable. The man was a frimpin' lyrical genius.

You don't have to be a Christian believer to find yourself waving a fist in the air along with the Polish Catholics.



(I seem to remember that Brian posted these lyrics at one point, but I don't have the post handy to link to and I'm too lazy to search it out.)

Go granny go!

Maggie is an ancestress again! Wahoo!

Vengeance is mine...

... sayeth the guy whose dinner hour has been repeatedly interrupted by phone solicitors. (Language alert!)

Snatch the pebble from my hand...

The last couple of days my young co-worker Kaci and I have been taking turns training each other in the esoterica of our respective jobs. She kept looking perplexed when I made mention of things like grasshoppers and pebbles, and it dawned on me this morning that she's actually never heard of Kwai Chang Caine. A whole generation of boys grew up kicking each other and whacking each other with sticks because we all wanted to be Caine, and now he's relegated to history.(Do they even show reruns anymore? I'd love to find them and relive my boyhood.)

I don't know when this intro ceased to be universally familiar, but now she'll see what I was talking about.

A song to lie dreaming by

Not everybody will get this, but I don't care.


Akubra tip to Mark Shea.