Right-Wing & Right Minded

W2
Watching some news show, on Fox News I think, and the host referred to Bush's second term as W2. I like it. I think I'll start using it from now on.

CONDIW has appointed National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to take over Colin Powell's position as Secretary of State during W2. As we all know, I was hoping for fellow Okie Tommy Franks, but we can't always get what we want.

GREAT READ
The Bush hating paper, The New York Observer, has an article called Five Reality Checks For Democrats. Enjoy.

"Reality check No. 1: Bush is not an idiot - and even if he were, saying so, over and over again, would not be a strategy. It would be an insult to the 59 million Americans who voted for him; a gift to anyone and everyone who wants to paint the Democratic Party as a coven of elitists, and a slap in our own face. For a group of people who pride ourselves on intellectual superiority, we seem remarkably capable of ignoring the most basic questions. Here is one: If Bush is an idiot and he has beaten us twice, what does that make us? Reality check number No. 2: Kofi Annan is not an oracle. Whenever an incumbent has a mess on his hands, it is natural for the challenger to reach for the easiest possible alternative. In the case of Mr. Bush and Iraq, the alternative put forth by Mr. Kerry was the specter of some wider, broader, happier international coalition which would allegedly make a great deal of difference on the ground. Reality check No. 3: Michael Moore is a filmmaker of talent and a self-marketer of genius. He should never have been appointed Democratic ambassador to the working man. I bring up Mr. Moore not because I think that he played some role in Mr. Bush's re-election, or that he doesn't have his base-stirring uses. It's because he so strikes me as the personification of the Democratic Party, in that he so robustly refuses to hear or see so many of the people he purports to champion. What is missing from his films is precisely what is missing from the Democratic approach to the electorate: the quality of searching. Never, in the course of viewing a Moore film, does one get the feeling that he is putting his own world view through the paces, finding out something that he didn't already know. Like the Democrats, he also seems to have missed American political life since 1980. He doesn't seem to entertain the possibility that an honest-to-God, respectable, working-class American might also be a true-blue conservative, and even have reasons for being such - not reasons that a liberal has to embrace, but reasons that a non-losing liberal would have to take seriously in some way. Just so, the Democrats are on God knows what cycle of fighting a class war that is of no interest to the class on whose behalf it is supposedly being fought. The tax cut benefits the rich, so we are going to spend yet another election blasting the tax cut for benefiting the rich, never to delve into the issue of why so many non-rich Americans so manifestly could care less. Reality check No. 4: American women come in all shapes and colors. Three of those colors are conservative, very conservative and extremely conservative. Thus, it is time to shed the notion that politicians who are 100 percent for abortion rights are good for women, regardless of what else they favor. Long treated as the price of admission to viability as a big-time Democrat, this is, in fact, the flip side of the right-wing fanaticism which says that any politician who is against all forms of abortion is morally superior, regardless of what other positions he holds. Democrats would argue that Republicans are bad for women on a host of non-ovarian quality-of-life issues, too - but they sure don't spend much time spelling that out in a way that could appeal to a woman who does not necessarily view Roe v. Wade as a gift from God. And finally, reality check No. 5: Democrats cannot lay claim to leading a country when so many of them speak so frequently about leaving the country. The United States just had a hugely contentious, hyper-democratic election in which many people voted, nobody got killed, and the day happened to be carried by the other side. And what is the chic line for Democrats to take as a result? 'I'm moving to France.'"

Check 1 and 3 are my absolute favorite. There's a lot more to the piece. Click the link to read the whole thing.
Credit: New York Observer
The Only Thing Necessary For Evil To Triumph
Is For Good Men To Do Nothing