Un-Reserved

Out of commo restricted location of past two weeks, now blogging on the road by Palm Treo. Hugh Hewitt asked, on air and in his blog, why the MSM was asking John Kerry the hard questions now and not before the election:

But, given that Russert thought it was important to ask these questions after Kerrry was defeated, why did no one in MSM pose the questions before the election?

Again: Why bother with such questions now if they weren’t worth posing in the summer and the fall? Answer: They might have hurt Kerry then. You can’t wound a dead horse.

Yes, but . . . Kerry is a wounded presidential aspirant, not dead. The MSM Party have consistently acted in support of common interests shared by their coalition partners, the Democrat Party. Before, now, and always, MSM and Democrat parties share a paramount interest in political power — controlling the national agenda. The MSM party is doing the wet work so that their partners can have clean hands and so a clean succession of aspirants: the king is dead, long live the queen.

In his second inaugural address, President Bush called on a generation of young people to put country before self for a time.

I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself - and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.

But it is three years and a season since the “day of fire” and both of his daughters have graduated from college and neither has put on her county’s uniform. Both TR and FDR created an expectation, a family environment, that set their sons on the dangerous path of duty onto which their fathers urged or ordered other men’s sons. All of FDR’s sons served in WW II, one in the Marines, one in the Air Force and two in the Navy. As I have repeatedly noted, thousands of American women are going in harms way each day. Sorry, but following their mother into teaching doesn’t qualify except by a hyperpartisan parsing of the text that would confound the clear call to voluntarily go in harms way in the cause of freedom and long term security.

Scarborough wrote, and the Washington Times published, a piece rejoicing that the Army promises soldiers who are women would be kept out of combat. This is a slap in the face of tens of thousands of American soldiers by a self-styled pro-military writer. The issue is not assignment of women to infantry, armor, or tube artillery units. No legitimate physical objection. The fuss is over women being assigned to support units that routinely colocate with maneuver units. The culture kampf enemies of military women are lost in a bygone era of neat lines on linear battlefields. Today and henceforth our enemies will not so oblige us as to preserve some folks sense of proper social order — manly warrior heroes supported by dutiful women. Women roll out the gates in Iraq every day in small Civil Affairs or large supply convoys. I never worried about gender roles while in fuel convoys over the most dangerous roads in Iraq.

Washington Times reports on Iraqi voter turn out projection.

Not surprising that those who expect to win are motivated and those who reasonable expect to lose are much less motivated.

It is sadly unsurprising that the MSM and establishment Left, elected or annointed, are fellow travelers with those who have turned to bullets rather than ballots. We need to be clear to all parties, including the media party, that tolerating or abetting violence and then claiming the violence as grounds to stop or change unwanted political outcomes is akin to the paricide’s defense “have pity on this poor orphan!”

The wristband is the lapel ribbon of the ’00’s. Lance Armstrong started the trend with the bright yellow “LIVESTRONG” band, raising money and awareness about cancer. The bands, beyond initial fundraising, showed up on Ebay, now a fashion/ social conscience statement. Look for them on celebs. I recently saw an ad for a wristband for exsmokers - encouraging the wearer to stay off the coffin nails. Now embittered Bush and “Jesus land” haters are hawking blue bands [HT - Hugh Hewitt].

But note two things: wrist bands started conservative to neutral while ribbons have shifted from left to right. Wrist bands with the name of a POW/MIA have been worn for at least two decades. The cultural elite came on with the politically neutral Lance Armstrong cancer charity — in contrast to the culture kampf agenda under the red ribbon movement. Ribbons have shifted from left to right on the political spectrum as they exploded in scale and migrated from lapel to bumper, shifting on the color spectrum from red to yellow or red-white-and-blue.