Tsk, Tsk, Titian

The AFP:

India on Tuesday vowed to ban offensive material from the Internet after Facebook, Google and other major firms told the government they were unable to screen content before it was posted.

"My aim is that insulting material never gets uploaded," Sibal told reporters in New Delhi. "We will evolve guidelines and mechanisms to deal with the issue.

"They will have to give us the data, where these images are being uploaded and who is doing it."

Sibal said the government supported free speech and was against censorship but that some material on the Internet was so offensive that no one would find it acceptable.

We go round and round about this stuff all the time.

Let's take that last sentence:

"Sibal said the government supported free speech and was against censorship [nonsense; you want to censor something] but that some material on the Internet [what are the limits of "some" material] was so offensive [eye of the beholder, so forth] that no one would find it acceptable [define "no one." Define "acceptable"]."

Ah, the slippery language of a censor looking for someone to hang.

The goal of censors is always the same. It's not about eliminating the art/photos/text itself, it's about eliminating the person behind it. If you control language, you control thought. The ultimate power trip comes from two little words: Shut Up.

Hence, Sibal's statement: "They will have to give us the data, where these images are being uploaded and who is doing it."

You have to respect Sibal for his honesty. Canada is really no better than India in regards to censorship. Various "human rights" commissions in Canada run roughshod over free speech all the time, and drag all kinds of people into the star chamber for punishment. At least Sibal has the guts to say what he means.

In the meantime, until someone decides that Titian was way out of line and shuts down the Internet, enjoy gazing upon his Venus of Urbino (turn your head if you're offended).

Shopping Cart Fail

I have absolutely no idea what the guys in this clip were trying to accomplish. But I'm sure glad they tried it.

The Anti-Violence Lie

Anti-bully fever is in the air lately.

The Toronto Star has the latest:

Councillor Doug Ford’s office has suggested Toronto schools look into a community service program backed by the violent mixed martial arts league, Ultimate Fighting Championship.

In an email obtained by the Star, Ford’s constituency assistant, Anna Vescio, asked a Toronto District School Board trustee to circulate a brochure touting an initiative called UFC Community Works.

According to the brochure, the program promotes “the development of discipline, respect, teamwork, honesty, time management and physical fitness” through mixed martial arts training and meetings with UFC fighters.

UFC has become notorious for its brutal, bloody, no-holds barred fighting. Mixed martial arts events were banned in Ontario until this year.

The spin later on in the piece is that schools are all about anti-violence, and mixed martial arts is a bad thing for kids to emulate. For Ford's part, he later said that he doesn't want fighting taught in schools. He wants to use the lecture services of the Community Works program to talk to kids.

As the kids might say: "Whatevs."

Ford isn't going to win on this one, now that it's out of the bag. People will see "UFC" written beside "schoolchildren" in the headlines, and that will be the end of the discussion.

I don't enjoy watching UFC fights, but I don't like hypocrisy, either. The most interesting line in the Toronto Star's story is this: "Mixed martial arts events were banned in Ontario until this year."

Yes, they were. And now they're not. Now, the province of Ontario and the city of Toronto can make hay off people beating the living crap out of each other. From licensing requirements, to taxes on overpriced cups of beer, the message from the province is simple: fighting is business, and business is good. To keep the business alive, we need people to smash each other's faces in. How about your children, Mrs. Smith?

It is only logical to conclude - as we do with hockey and football - that mixed martial arts are something that the province's children should admire. The banal sports radio hosts that talk endlessly about concussions in hockey would be the first ones to say that youth hockey is a great idea. Football damages more knees, ribs, and brains every year than mixed martial arts could ever hope to achieve, but we'll throw Johnny on the field the second a coach says, "He's got a nice arm."

The people that earnestly say that we shouldn't lie to children are likely the same people who lie when they teach kids that our society won't condone violence. The kids should think you're nuts. Violence is bad? We just made it legal to step into a ring, kick a man in the head, knock him to the ground, drop a knee into his gut, and then choke him until a) he begs for mercy, or b) the ref stops the choke hold before it kills him.

At Rogers Centre in Toronto on April 30, 2011, a total of 55,724 people paid big money to see just that. It was a record for a UFC event. And we're going to pretend that the province of Ontario has a philosophy of "anti-violence?"

Don't blame the fighter for the bloody mess you find on the floor of the octagon. He gets paid a decent buck to put that blood there, and he's got the province's blessing to do it. It shouldn't surprise you in the least if you find your son - or daughter - in there a few years down the road.

(Photo: Rogers Centre UFC April, 2011. Sportsnet.ca.)

Boozed it. Lost it.

Charlotte Observor: A Hickory man is waiting to hear the list of charges he’ll face after slamming into a DWI mobile comand center Sunday morning.

The incident happened on US 321 at the intersection of 9th street around 2:45am. Law enforcement were conducting a DWI checkpoint when a 1989 red Camaro rammed into the back of the "Booze it and Lose it" mobile unit...Authorities believe Shane had consumed alcohol prior to the crash. Charges are pending in the case."

You must be wasted if you don't see the massive Winnebago camper with the words DWI Checkpoint written on it in letters two feet high.

Side note: I'm not sure if anything says "trash" more than a 1989 Camaro rear ending an RV at 2:45am in North Carolina, but let me know.

Photo: Charlotte Observer.

Tiger - Updated - Video Link Fixed

Tiger Woods won the Chevron World Challenge today, and it was no gimme. Zach Johnson gave Tiger all he could handle, but Tiger birdied the last two holes. When he drained the putt on 18, he fist-pumped furiously as in the old days. It was good to see. Even Zach Johnson's face seemed to say, "Well, I guess it was his moment."

CBS: Woods closed with a 3-under 69, sweeping his arm when the final putt dropped, then slamming down his first in a celebration that was a long time coming. It had been 749 days and 26 official tournaments since he last won on Nov. 15, 2009 at the Australian Masters, back when he looked as though he would rule golf as long as he played.

But he crashed his car into a fire hydrant outside his Florida home on Thanksgiving night, and shocking revelations of extramarital affairs began to emerge, which eventually led to a divorce. Since then, he has changed swing coaches and endured more injuries, missing two majors this summer and missing the cut in another.

Ain't it funny how the time flies? One day you're at the top of your profession, married to a Swedish model, and you have a couple of great kids. Two years later, you're minus the wife and kids - and a whole whack of money - and you're just glad to win one tournament in the past 700 days.

Anti-Tiger talk started out two years ago as a critique of his lifestyle. As he began losing tournaments and getting injured, the talk morphed into a critique of him as a golfer who had lost his stuff. Now that he's tasted glory again, maybe he'll start rolling. Golf will be better for it.

You can catch the video here. Fast forward to :25 to see the moment of truth.

(Photo: Getty Images)

Old Guy

I ran across a blog named Altara. You can find it here.

The guy who runs it describes himself as an "Old Guy. Retired lawyer-businessman. Love living at beach in North Carolina."

He's got some good, short takes on things. Mainly politics. Check it out sometime.

Matt Millen - Expert. Right.

The Onion uses this piece as a send up of Matt Millen, of course, but let's be honest: Matt Millen doesn't have enough football credibility to fill a coffee cup anymore.

The nation's 14 million unemployed persons experienced a combination of rage, disbelief, and near-suicidal depression after seeing former Lions CEO Matt Millen—long regarded as one of the most resoundingly incompetent failures in management history—working as a football analyst on Wednesday's SportsCenter...

"Does ESPN hate football? Do they hate their viewers? Because I know about 40 unemployed guys down at the sports bar who could do that job better than Matt Millen."

It's The Onion, but boy does the story reek of truth.

The Bully Ball Busted

CBS Boston: "Lynch described a phone call she received from the school explaining that the case will be treated like sexual harassment, due to what it considers inappropriate touching.

“‘Your son kicked a little boy in the testicles. We call that sexual harassment,’” Lynch said the school told her.

Only in the bizarro world of our current planet Earth could kicking someone in the balls be called "sexual harassment."

In this case, Ms. Lynch says a boy was choking her 7-year-old son and wanted to steal his gloves. Her son responded exactly as he should have: by squaring the guy. The school reacted to that by saying there would be an investigation for sexual harassment because it involved "inappropriate touching."

Cool. Now I understand: when I inappropriately bumped into that guy on the subway, I wasn't trying to get off the subway, I was committing sexual harassment.

I wonder where we get these educators today? At Penn State, a guy literally can't get arrested for raping kids in the shower. In Boston, a kid's up on a sex rap for defending himself. In Vancouver, people are singing the blues and saying "down with bullies" because yet another poor teen killed themselves after being bullied into depression.

Note to schools: your anti-bully campaigns won't do nearly as much good as a lesson from the 7-year-old who aimed for the goal posts with his groin punt. Don't punish him. Let him teach the anti-bullying class.

Who would you trust these days: 7-year-olds who follow their instincts of self preservation, or school administrations that can't protect kids and in fact give the kid hell for protecting himself?

Arab Spring to Simmering Summer

Not great:

Judges overseeing the vote count in Egypt's parliamentary elections say Islamist parties have won a majority of the contested seats in the first round. The judges spoke on condition of anonymity because official results are expected to be released later Thursday.

Less than good:

Continued success by Islamists will allow them to give Cairo's government and constitution a decidedly Islamist character. It could also lead Cairo to shift away from the West towards the Iranian axis.

Bad:

“When I asked Shams el-Din, the Brotherhood neurologist, whether he believed that homosexuals should be stoned, he said, “Yes.” “We think that the laws should conform with what has been put forward by the revelation, using parliamentary means.”'

I was talking to an Egyptian, who said that the Muslim Brotherhood will never have control of Egypt, because the military won't give them the run of the country. I said, "What if the military simply becomes the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood? The MB gives them popular support in exchange for the military being a bodyguard. 'Keep your guns, just kick the asses of people we tell you to.'"

My friend blinked and said, "Don't even think that."

My friend didn't say it couldn't happen.

Photo: CNN

Fall Hard, Fall Fast

In hindsight, they should have just given him a gold watch.

From the Probably Not What They Had In Mind file:

ABC News: Patrick Sullivan was such a popular sheriff that Arapahoe County renamed the jail after him when he retired. Sullivan, arrested on drug charges this week, is now an inmate in the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility.

Apparently, he was an upright guy and everybody liked him. According to ABC, he served as sheriff for close to twenty years, was named national deputy of the year in 2001, retired, had a jail named after him, and became director of safety and security for a school board. Then he allegedly tried to swap meth with a man in exchange for sex.

And that's that.

Cutting the Christmas List Down to Size

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid."

Or rather, you would, if it weren't for the European credit crisis, high US unemployment and other assorted economic heebie jeebies. Fact is, you can't have everything, including that air rifle.

The Daily Mail:

The largest Santa school in the U.S. has been advising its students on how to lower children's expectations in the economic downturn. When confronted with a huge list of 'I wants', Santas are being told to tell them that they can't have everything. They should also take a look at the children's parents and 'size them up' before promising them something that their mother and father can't afford.

My knee jerk reaction is to say that Santa Claus shouldn't be a killjoy. But then, I have a feeling if I was down on my luck and my kid was wearing crummy old shoes, I'd appreciate if Santa Claus took this in and downplayed the latest iPod, too.

By the way: they have Santa schools? Since when?

The Bus Arrives: Bruce Boudreau

Black Monday was pretty dark for a couple of NHL coaches. Bruce Boudreau got tossed under the bus in Washington DC, and Paul Maurice got his pink slip from the Carolina Hurricanes.

The Boudreau dismissal is getting more press, and the talking heads are saying things like, "Ovechkin had his best season under Boudreau, but..."

The Washington GM said, “[Boudreau] pushed every button he could push. … You make the change and hope that a new voice and a new way of doing things and a new focus gets the best out of these players.”

That's a laugher. Just a couple of years ago, Ovechkin inked a 13-year, $124 million contract extension. His teammates Semin and Backstrom currently make $6.7 million/year each, and Mike Green pulls in $5.25 million. If that kind of money doesn't get the best out of somebody, nothing should. General Managers must want to send desks through windows when they discover that a player isn't "motivated" by Fort Knox.

Best for the Capitals means the Stanley Cup. The Capitals have won their division for the past four years, but always got booted out of the playoffs early. Nothing short of a Cup will be enough for the management and fans.

It's axiomatic that if you own an expensive player, then they own you. You aren't going to fire somebody worth $5 million to send a message to the team, and everybody knows it. And so: bus meets coach.

Learn a Trade

The road to salvation?

Here is a decent piece from the Wall Street Journal, which talks about how many blue collar job there are out there, and how few people there are to fill them.

It dovetails nicely with a piece I saw in the New York Times a while back, about law schools that keep pumping out more and more lawyers every year, without a thought to quality or job availabilty. And why shouldn't they? As the piece shows, running a law school means big bucks.

Law school has an image that high school grads and their mothers dig. Plumbing apprenticeships do not. Hence, a lot of lawyers and not so many plumbers. This is why I have a bone to pick with the headline editor of the WSJ piece. The headline says Help Wanted: In Unexpected Twist, Some Skilled Jobs Go Begging.

An unexpected twist? Since when? Society's been telling kids for decades that the only way to get ahead in life is to graduate from university. The university grads - unemployed or otherwise - shouldn't be surprised now that their toilet's stuck and their call goes straight to voicemail.

"Learn a trade." It was advice I heard a lot when I was younger. If things didn't work out, "Learn a trade." As it happens, I didn't go to school for a trade, but it was good advice back then, and it still is now.

As a note to the kids who have been watching too much TV, a tradesperson is still cool at parties. A carpenter and a surgeon deserve equal respect in my books, and as far as I can tell, they both get that respect. If it'll make you feel better, just say you're a "contractor." The doctors and lawyers immediately nod and say, "Wow, a contractor," and start thinking about renovations.

Grey Cup, Grey Hair, Black Eyes

Two CFL players finally did something worth watching.

Unfortunately, they're both over 70 years old.

Yahoo! Sports: The action starts almost immediately when Mosca and Kapp are both invited up on stage. Kapp holds a flower out towards Mosca, Mosca responds "Stick it up your a##," to cheers, Kapp then does stick the flower right into Mosca's face (as claimed in Mosca's version of events), then Mosca hits him with a handheld mike. Mosca then delivers the titular cane to the face a couple of times, and hard, while Kapp returns fire with a bull rush and a couple of punches and knocks Mosca through the curtain.

Talk about bearing a grudge. Apparently they've hated each other since a Grey Cup in 1963.

Unfortunately, the Yahoo! guy decides to get sappy: Someone could have been badly hurt here, and given these guys' ages, the danger of serious injury is even higher. It's also not the best advertisement for the CFL to have two of its legendary alumni engage in an all-out brawl like this.

Please. Like the CFL is going to get any better publicity than two old dudes throwing a fight made for YouTube.

Black Friday

Economics professors that ignore economic truths crack me up. Actually, they usually crack me no matter what their take on the economy, if only because they turn out to be dead wrong so often. Whenever the economy takes a powder, there's lots of economics guys telling us how to fix the problem. Nobody ever seems to ask, "Hey, genius, why didn't you see this coming in the first place?"

Anyway, take Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell. He wrote a piece in the New York Times that is full of all kinds of baloney (he also wrote a book that has the words "Common Good" in the title, so obviously he knows how to live your life better than you do; which is to say, he's full of it).

These people have apparently not read Robert Frank.

His latest piece is about Black Friday, the day when Americans race out to buy discount goods and sometimes beat each other up or pepper spray each other over $2 waffle irons. Frank doesn't like this. He thinks it's bad. He thinks you should be in bed at a reasonable time on Thanksgiving Eve, and that you shouldn't be out shopping too early in the morning. Frank, like many of his Ivy League ilk, thinks you need some guidance in the game of life. In this case, his way to get you out of the stores and back with your mother-in-law is to...tax Black Friday.

Let's just tiptoe through the tulips of Robert Frank's nonsense. It is an essay that reeks of arrogance:

In recent years, large retail chains have been competing to be the first to open their doors on Black Friday. The race is driven by the theory that stores with the earliest start time capture the most buyers and make the most sales. [It takes a univeristy professor to figure this out?] For many years, stores opened at a reasonable hour [which hour is reasonable?]. Then, some started opening at 5 a.m. [Oops. I guess 5 a.m. is unreasonable], prompting complaints from employees [name three of them] about having to go to sleep early on Thanksgiving and miss out on time with their families.

He has to be kidding. I find it hard to believe that Robert Frank stays up at night worrying about people that have to work the night shift. Besides, if it's a case of missing out on time with families, why doesn't Frank worry about gas station attendants, steel workers, cops, nurses, firefighters, late night bartenders, and 7-11 clerks? My guess is because those jobs don't have an anniversary date in the headlines, and they don't have the icky "consumerism" vibe that guys like Frank dislike so much.

Though I smell a rat when it comes to Frank's family-bleeding-heart-syndrome nonsense, I'll give him another crack at it:

Last year Toys “R” Us opened at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving. This year, Wal-Mart will do the same. The costs to store owners and their employees and families are enormous: millions must now spend time away from home on the one occasion that all Americans, regardless of religion or cultural background, share as a family holiday.

What is it about university professors that make them think they know how to run a store better than a store manager, or work the night shift better than a working father of three? And why does Frank feel that he knows how you should spend your Thanksgiving? Want to collect some overtime? Want to surf Facebook? Want to do handstands on the corner of 5th and Main? Want to play handball with a piece of cement? As long as you're not breaking the law or writing crappy stuff for the New York Times, I don't care, and neither should Frank.

"The cost to store owners and the employees and families are enormous." Frank seems to forget that nobody is dragging these people into the store and forcing them to work under the whip. What these people are doing is called working. They have what is called a job. It gives them this thing called money, which they can use to put food on the tables of the families that Robert Frank is so worried about.

Note to the arrogant writer: these people aren't working at Wal-Mart and Target because they want to give you something to write about. They work there to make a living. If it wasn't worth it, they wouldn't do it, and neither would the stores. This is called "economics," Mr. Economics Professor.

As every mature adult realizes [take that, you damn immature conservatives!], we have to tax something, and the revenue from my 6-6-6 plan [his plan - besides having a horrible number for the marketing people to deal with - is to tax everything sold on Thanksgiving Thurs/Fri between 6pm and 6am at 6%] would make it possible to reduce taxes on other activities that are actually useful [name just three activities you would reduce taxes on, Bobby; I beg you]. Best of all, it would encourage Americans to spend Thanksgiving night where they really want to — in bed.


The arrogance is astounding. "Other activities that are actually useful...Encourage Americans to spend Thanksgiving where they really want to..." How does this guy know what people want? Robert Frank, just because you don't think cheap t-shirts and discount toys for the kids aren't useful, doesn't mean the single mom working on minimum wage won't appreciate the sales.

I'm getting tired of the people that are so worried about the poor that they decide to hammer the poor for being poor. Who does the man think is shopping at Wal-Mart and Target at 5am? Rockefeller? Black Friday is a time of year that a hurting family can grab some stuff on the cheap, while the employees can pick up some extra hours and overtime (and there's my arrogance; does it have to be poor people shopping at 5am? No. It could be anybody. And it's their business, not mine - pun intended).

If it's the odd Black Friday violence you're worried about, sure, the odd idiot might throw a punch here and there. That's life in large crowds. It draws headlines and makes people like Frank wet their pants, but it's few and far between. It's hardly a good enough reason to hose the guy who's looking for a cheap leaf blower.

When Robert Frank sits down at his computer on Sunday to tell people yet again how to live their own lives, I hope there's thousands of football fans saying what a great deal they got on their 50-inch TV. It should at least please Frank that they're spending time at home.

Update:

From CNN: Preliminary reports for Black Friday indicate that retailers may have seen their strongest sales ever during the all-important kick-off to the holiday shopping season.

Retail sales on Black Friday climbed 6.6% this year to an estimated $11.4 billion.

I don't know how this squares with Frank's funny theory that everyone in the country wants to stay home on Thanksgiving, but maybe he'll explain at a later date.
Photo: Michael Nagle/Getty Images

Short Cuts

Some more reviews of movies I was either too busy or too lazy to review before. Enjoy.

G.I. Joe: Not your daddy's G.I. Joe movie. America is mentioned in passing once or twice, but this revamp of the Joe team is headed by...NATO. Giggle at will. A lot of effects, not much acting, but a few skin tight suits to keep the boys happy. Since all of the West's real enemies gave up at the end of the Cold War, Hollywood has had to invent bad guys and heroes or just steal them from fifty-year-old comic books. Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? North Korea? International terror? Come on, you can't make a movie about those boring subjects. We need something ripped from the headlines. Hence, this movie.

The Taking of Pelham 123: Highly enjoyable thriller with John Travolta and Denzel Washington. Does the original Pelham (starring Walter Matthau) justice. Travolta and some henchmen hijack a subway car and hold the people inside hostage. Mayhem ensues. Travolta is great. Washington is quite good, too, but Travolta has the better part. Always more fun to play the bad guy.

Crank 2: Completely implausible and totally over-the-top. Also fun as hell. Check your incredulity at the door and just enjoy. Jason Statham plays a guy who has an artificial heart which needs to be shocked every few minutes or he'll die. As if that's not enough, he has to find the guys who have his real heart while dodging cars and bullets along the way.

Antichrist: Great, great movie, but not for everybody. If you hated anything by Bergman, then you'll hate this flick. A man and a woman (they remain nameless throughout) lose their child in an accident. The man takes the woman to the woods to help her recover. He's a therapist. She's a decidedly uncooperative patient. There's blood and violence, but the horror is mostly of the psychological kind. This movie pulls no punches. Beware.

Two Fists, One Heart: Paint-by-numbers Australian flick about a boxer and his desire to please his father. And his girlfriend. And himself. This has Redemption Theme written all over it. You've seen it all before, but it's an okay movie.

Surrender

Whoa.

This is a huge shift in foreign policy:

AP: President Barack Obama is prepared to accept some Taliban involvement in Afghanistan's political future and appears inclined to send only as many more U.S. troops as needed to keep al-Qaida at bay, a senior administration official said Thursday.

The sharpened focus by Obama's team on fighting al-Qaida above all other goals, while downgrading the emphasis on the Taliban, comes in the midst of an intensely debated administration review of the increasingly unpopular eight-year-old war.

McChrystal wants troops. The President doesn't want to send them. Solution? Don't declare the war's over - declare an enemy isn't an enemy.

As for the "increasingly unpopular war" stuff, it doesn't always mean what the media wants it to mean. If they mean "increasingly unpopular and pull out now," they're wrong. If they mean "increasingly unpopular with the way it's being fought," then they're on the money.

Eight years ago, the Taliban provided a haven for fanatical religious thugs to get boned up on how to shoot guns and knock down buildings. Eight years later, the US is prepared have them involved in Afghanistan's political future. Spin it any way you want, but this action only has one label: surrender.

Time: Last month, Taliban fighters in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, hijacked two NATO fuel tankers. The robbery escalated into an international incident because NATO aircraft, following a German request, bombed the two stranded tankers while civilians were siphoning free fuel. The death toll — more than 125 Afghans perished, nearly half of them civilians — overshadowed the gruesome fact that the Taliban had beheaded one of the tanker drivers. Beheadings and killings of NATO supply drivers are a common occurrence, according to several private security contractors.

Wonderful ally, that Taliban. Man, the outlook for the political future in Afghanistan looks pretty good, huh?

The Most Trusted Name in News

Via Hot Air.

The guys at CNN are unbelievable.

Here's Wolf Blitzer (the man who went -$4600 on Celebrity Jeopardy) and crew fact checking an SNL skit about Obama. Talk about sticking up for your guy. Fact checking a negative comedy skit about a politician? CNN's more transparent than a window.

At the end of the clip, they find time to pull out SNL's take on Sarah Palin, which they call..."dead on."

My favorite CNN/YouTube clip is underneath this one.



Fast forward to 1:23 to see your Fact Checker in all his glory:

The Bus Idles - McChrystal

From the Telegraph:

According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.

The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago's unsuccessful Olympic bid...

Word is the president is furious over McChrystal's speech. A taste:

[McChrystal] told the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that the formula, which is favoured by Vice-President Joe Biden, would lead to "Chaos-istan".

When asked whether he would support it, he said: "The short answer is: No."

He went on to say: "Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support."

That may be, General, but it isn't your problem. Your problem is to follow orders from your civilian commanders. Public support and long term strategy are concerns of the president. Your job is to carry out orders until you retire or get canned.

I may agree with McChrystal's assessment, but you can't have a military commander mouthing off in another country about how much smarter he is than the president. It smacks of insubordination and brings up memories of MacArthur vs. Truman. Didn't end so well for MacArthur.

One more speech like this and expect the bus to arrive for McChrystal.

The Hyperbole Bus

It looks like Obama isn't alone in jumping aboard the Hyperbole Bus today.

Here's Peggy Noonan, with more of her insipid flowery prose:

Who are The Elders? They set the standards. They hand down the lore. They're the oldest and wisest. By proceeding through the world each day with dignity and humanity, they show the young what it is that should be emulated. They're the tribal chieftains. This role has probably existed since caveman days, because people need guidance and encouragement, they need to be heartened by examples of endurance. They need to be inspired.

Who are these Elders-with-a-capital-E of which she speaks?

Newspaper reporters and TV anchormen.

She begins the piece with this:

When William Safire died the other day, we lost one of the Elders of journalism and the argumentative arts. We've been losing a lot of them lately: Walter Cronkite, Bob Novak, Don Hewitt, Irving Kristol. "The stars seem to be going out one by one," said Howard Stringer at Cronkite's memorial.

No, the piece isn't satirical. Yes, Pegs really believes this stuff.