Month: July 2004

Newsweek reports that the Department of Homeland Security is looking into ways to postpone the November Presidential election in the case of an Al Qaeda attack.

But the success of March’s Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections—as well as intercepted “chatter” among Qaeda operatives—has led analysts to conclude “they want to interfere with the elections,” says one official.

Forcing a delay in elections is every bit as much interference, if not more so, as an attack which causes people to change their vote. This is so obvious that I have trouble believing that it’s escaped the Bush administration.

Soaries, a Bush appointee who two years ago was an unsuccessful GOP candidate for Congress, wants Ridge to seek emergency legislation from Congress empowering his agency to make such a call. Homeland officials say that as drastic as such proposals sound, they are taking them seriously—along with other possible contingency plans in the event of an election-eve or Election Day attack.

Contingency plans are good. Legislation that could delay the election is bad. Sure, if something happens to LA the day of the election, it would be good to hold the results until the voters of Los Angeles can vote — but it does not make sense to keep the entire country from voting in a situation where they could reasonably get to the polls.

Gosh, that’s unfortunate. Some of Bush’s service records were destroyed in 1996 and 1997. By accident.

This should be easy enough to resolve; since Bush wasn’t the only guy whose records were lost, one assumes that there’d be an official record of the accident. Perhaps even a postmortem. Memos. That sort of thing.

Except that I can’t help noticing that Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett said, in February of this year, that members of George Bush’s staff purged the National Guard files in 1997. Damned confluence of dates. Now, the records that Burkett says were destroyed were not the records that the Defense Department just admitted to destroying accidentally, so this is not exactly a smoking gun. I think the time period is still suggestive, however. If you believe Burkett, it’s not a stretch to suspect that the Texas Air National Guard was not the only organization willing to clean up Bush’s records.

Anyhow, the next step is getting a look at the memos from 1997 which discuss the accident.

Then, in Rwanda. Now, in Sudan. This is pretty much for me so that I don’t forget to read these regularly.

On a semi-detached, attempting dispassionate note, the Rwanda blog is a new twist on the Pepys and Sei Shonagon blogs: historical events retold in the blog — dare I say it? — medium. I think it works.

On the Fourth of July, I choose to commemorate the holiday with the words of one of the very first Harvard intellectual leftists, a moonbat and a traitor if there ever was one; a man whose reputation among the ruling classes was far worse than any Moore or Chomsky. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you one of the most important men of the American Revolution, the loud-mouthed angry revolutionary, Samuel Adams.

“In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.”

Thank you, and enjoy the fireworks.