Blogoland

Just heard this on the local NPR station. Apparently the NYPD will be getting new, improved bulletproof vests. Yay.

As a side note, the announcer said, the leftover vests will be sent to troops in Haiti and Iraq.

That's right. Only the best, obsolete, second-hand equipment for our fighting men and women!

[original article here, which oddly, does not mention the Haiti-Iraq thing]

Remember how nutso people got with Charlie Rangel insulting Mississippi? Well, we give you Grover Norquist, conservative head of Americans for Tax Reform, appearing on WNYC Radio, discussing whether the residents of the Bay State are actually citizens of the United States: [Audio link. Starts at 20:10]

NORQUIST: I think Romney has done a better job of being good on the Second Amendment, fighting on spending, trying to push reform, while at the same time living in my home state of Massachusetts, where I (sigh) grew up before I immigrated to America.

LEHRER Oooh… Immigrated to America, ouch. We have some people in Massachusetts in our listener audience (laughter)

NORQUIST: I love Massachusetts! My parents live there. I go past Checkpoint Charlie and visit them. (laughter)

Get it? The non-American residents of Massachusetts are Communists! Oh my God, that's hilarious! I'm sure we'll be hearing from the Outrage Commission shortly. Right?

Amidst the deluge of post-election windbaggery, I think this item sort of slipped under the radar. Here's our favorite Rumsfeld fluffer, Victor Davis Hanson:

So we are down to [Rumsfeld's] supposed responsibility for the later effort to stop the 3-year plus insurgency, whose denouement is not yet known. Rumsfeld's supposed error that drew such ire was troop levels, i.e., that he did not wish to repeat a huge presence in the manner of Vietnam, but sought to skip the 1964-1971 era morass, and go directly to the 1972-5 Vietnamization strategy of training troops, providing aid, and using air power.

[...]

For the future, neither precipitous withdrawal nor a big build-up are the right solutions, the former will leave chaos, the latter will only ensure perpetual Iraqi dependency. As it is, there are too many support troops over in Iraq in compounds, who are not out with Iraqis themselves; more troops will only ensure an even bigger footprint and more USA-like enclaves.

Notwithstading this "withdrawl...will leave chaos" boilerplate, isn't what he's saying here is that we need to, well, withdraw troops because there are too damn many of them there already?

This man is divorced from any sort of reality. See, we tried to do that "lighter footprint" thing. And what did it get us? Unbridled chaos in Baghdad. Perhaps Hanson believes that "Operation Forward Together" was a huge success of American-trained Iraqi forces. It, of course, was not. It was U.S. patrols bailing out Iraqis who either could not or would not stop the killing. And Americans have paid with their lives. Even still, there are not enough troops to pacify the capital.

How Hanson can believe that any of this means "success" is beyond delusional. Or par for the course for him.

UPDATE: Even Rich "We are Winning" Lowry realizes that Hanson is out of his mind. Here he ever-so-gently points out that those marvelous Iraqi forces we've trained simply aren't up to the job. Though he doesn't say so, it's clear that he thinks Hanson's prattling on about "light footprints" is a bunch of bunk.

Michael Barone scratches his scalp and tries to explain why exit polling seems to favor Democrats:

Perhaps Republicans are more likely than Democrats to refuse [to answer exit
polls], especially when the interviewer is a young woman whose appearance
signals she is some kind of Bush hater.

"...whose appearance signals she is some kind of Bush hater?" And how would such a creature appear? Crooked nose? Hair of snakes? Horns and hooves?

My theory? Perhaps Republicans are more likely than Democrats to refuse answering exit poll questions because they're afraid they might be discovered as pedophile Nazi cross-dressers.