Our one is completely broken.

Take the latest John F'ing Kerry story. Kerry is complaining to the FEC that Bush aides are behind the Swift Boat Vet thing. Kerry's campaign wants to create the impression that the Bush/Cheney campaign is behind the whole thing.

"We want people to understand that this is simply an effort by the Bush campaign to get others to do their dirty work for them," senior advisor Tad Devine said in an interview, echoing words Kerry used Thursday. "It's going to be a consistent effort on our part to point out the truth and make sure that the president be held accountable."

Kerry also wanted to have Bush denounce the Swift Boat Vet's Ad

Couple of things there Senator Kerry, if I may.

1) May we check into your connections to Moveon.org?

2) Oh, now you have a problem with the Bush AWOL talk? That's funny, didn't hear you denouncing Michael Moore before, nor denouncing moveon.org before? If I wasn't such a trusting soul, I would swear this is an inside play on your part.

3) You made your Vietnam service an issue. No one else did. You! I could care less about your service in Vietnam.

4) Are you ready for the next salvo?

Senator Kerry, it's time to put up or shut up.

And the only reason he doesn't have to, is because of the pitiful excuse we call the Mainstream media.

Governor McGreevey is a "gay American." His first wife was Canadian. His second is Portugese. And his, umm, is there a word for mistress with gays? - that guy Cipel is Israeli.

Seriously, a whole country full of people of both sexes, and he has to outsource his partners?

Heard on the radio that Kerry was in North Carolina today saying that job losses here were the result of the Bush tax cuts.

Can someone explain to me under any economic ideology, even Marxism, that lower taxes for anyone equals fewer jobs?

In a bloggy way. What a great description of Hardball. Chris Matthews is every bit as poisonous to politics as Carville and Begala (how self-referentially bloggy is that?) I didn't see that segment, but flipping channels last night, I saw part of a segment where Matthews had Thurlow on the phone, and he was badgering him about whether it was okay with him if George Bush - who didn't go to Vietnam - criticized the service of someone who did go to Vietnam.

As if that was what was going on. It was Thurlow (among other Vietnam veterans) criticizing Kerry, not the President. And Thurlow kept making that point. Oddly enough, Matthews never asked whether it was okay with Thurlow - a Vietnam vet - if it was okay for Vietnam vets to lie about their service. Something that there is simply no question about with Kerry. Even if it turns out that not everything the Swift Boat Veterans have alleged is true, even if some guy involved once coached George H.W. Bush for a VP debate in the 80's, the bald-faced truth is that for 30 years Kerry has been making up a story about being in Cambodia on Christmas of 1968. It isn't just a matter of getting grid coordinates on a map a little off, or the date, it is a matter of making up a story that isn't true and imbuing huge political significance to it.

I don't think that even Democrats would argue that if President Bush had done such a thing that it would be a huge, huge story. And yet, for the NYT, the story is not that "Kerry, the Democratic candidate who has pegged his Presidential aspirations on his Vietnam service has been dishonest about aspects of that service," but rather that Republicans are involved with exposing that.

Glenn Reynolds reprints an email which reads in part "my point being that if the public loses faith in our capacity for basic objectivity and fairness, the public will find/create other means of collecting information." Too late, I think.

Found a good BBQ place! Turned up through AOL's Digital Cities, a recommendation for Bullock's Bar B Cue over in Durham. It was a 45 minute drive, but it was good eating. $8.50 for a huge plate of pulled pig, 3 sides, and all the hush puppies and sweet tea you could consume. Not "lite" fare by any stretch.

You might think that since there is absolutely nothing else going on, the media might sieze on a story like a Presidential candidate fabricating part of his military history. And then sending out a fellow senator who also has been caught lying about his service history to call the Vice President a coward.

You might.

I am guessing because it is August, and there is slow news (the big news in the Kobe and Laci cases is that there is no news), that some conservatives are starting to get antsy about W, and they are starting go negative on Iraq. I've noticed it several places, but I was reading NRODT and they had an editorial piece basically saying that the absent the war in Iraq, W would be trouncing Kerry, and so they were kind of, almost, backtracking on the support, though not entirely, like William F. Buckley. And Rich Lowry points out a Republican Congressman backtracking on his support.

I think these people are wrong. Not because everything is peachy keen in Iraq, but because it isn't so that absent Iraq, bush would be sitting pretty in the polls. I don't know that the polls are really all that accurate anymore, but they seem to say on domestic issues, he trails Kerry, and it is only in the war on terror that he has a significant strength. If we hadn't gone into Iraq, I don't think that it is a given that things would be better. It isn't like all the troops would be back in the barracks smoking and joking. They would be somewhere, doing something. And if AQ wasn't busy in Iraq, wouldn't they be focusing their attention here? And if the more things they attempt here, the better chance they have of succeeding. Maybe - maybe - we would not have lost a thousand troops in Iraq. And maybe - maybe - we would have lost thousands more civilians here at home. And certainly Libya would still be rogue, and still working its nuclear program - and buying its stuff from Abdul Q. Khan's atomic blackmarket.

So yes, everything has a cost - no doubt the fact that we haven't had a clean victory in Iraq that we can point to has had its effect on the President's popularity. But everything has opportunity costs, too. Had we not done Iraq, we would have done something else. Syria? Iran? Saudi Arabia? Something else, for sure. And that would have had its difficulties, too.

So yippie-ki-yay, motherf***er. Cowboy up.

Somewhere along the way I saw someone alluding to the German reaction to President Bush's announcement of troop redeployments being like that of a battered woman - wanting us to leave, and then when we say okay, we'll leave, begging us to stay. I think that gets the relationship backward. The US is the battered woman in the German (and Korean) relationship. They treat us like crap, we love them all the same. And then when we finally say enough is enough, we're moving out, they are all like "don't leave we really love you!"

This is familiar enough - we went through it with the Phillipines and I recall it being that way with Greece.

Then I just read something else that had Kerry complaining about the troop redeployments in front of the VFW, when just a few weeks ago he was saying he would draw down troops in Iraq and pull them out of Germany and Korea. I guess he was for the idea before he was against it. (That one turned out to be Hugh Hewitt. Remember how Stephanopoulos was complaining about Lexis-Nexis - Kerry's guys are going to hate blogs!)

The Mrs. had her procedure, and the exploratory found nothing bad, and she is fine but laid up for a couple of days.

As expected, my customer wasn't ready and I wasted today on site - I wanted to wait until tomorrow to travel because of the surgery. And on my flight today, the pilot forgot to show up - way to go United Express contract carrier Air Wisconsin! Took them almost 2 hours to find a new one.

Oh, and the place where I had the disappointing barbecue experience - the locals say that's the place to go. I may be changing my tune on which Carolina barbecue is the better.

Body of text not as long as sidebar, which is sort of my measure of effectiveness on blogging. Have to work on it some.

Congrats to pittspilot for getting over the hump, and exiting liberal hell!

In that same vein, I just got accepted to a master's program at George Washington University, and look forward to it. Hard to juggle with travel for work, but I'll make it happen. Program in Crisis, Emergency, and Risk Management is right up my alley for background and work.

Mrs. Blaster going in for a little outpatient surgery tomorrow, a little exploratory work. If you are a praying type, add her in your thoughts - God will know who you mean by Mrs. Blaster. He knows everything.

Worst part of that, of course, is that I have to leave tomorrow to travel for work. We were aware of that possibility and have prepared for it and we are blessed with good friends who are helping out watching Junior blaster. But I would still rather be here. But have to keep a roof over our heads, too.

And since I am travelling, looking for more recommendations. Going back to Raleigh, NC, where I had a seriously disappointing barbecue experience. The DC area seems to think Memphis has the monopoly on barbecue - having grown up in South Carolina, I know it ain't true. Though I actually prefer NC barbecue to SC barbecue. And if none of that makes any sense to you, well, I can't help that you are uncultured. So I am in need of recommendations for BBQ in/around Raleigh, NC. The recommendations for Seattle were much appreciated.

Been a long time since we had some WMD news, but the ISG is still on the job. More intelligence that Saddam's WMD went to Syria.

Saddam Hussein periodically removed guards on the Syrian border and replaced them with his own intelligence agents who supervised the movement of banned materials between the two countries, U.S. investigators have discovered.

The recent discovery by the Bush administration's Iraq Survey Group (ISG) is fueling speculation, but is not proof, that the Iraqi dictator moved prohibited weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into Syria before the March 2003 invasion by a U.S.-led coalition.

That would be one heck of an October surprise. My theory on this has been that we are trying to get Syria to do a Libya.

Stories popping up that the US is about to change our troop deployment posture, and that the result is that we will pull back some 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia. This is a manifestly good thing (and to note, I called for it in March of last year). We have been maintaining troops in old Cold War positions, and that war has been over for more than a dozen years. We've got a new one, now. And a soldier acting as a tripwire in South Korea is better employed killing terrorists where they are.

Of course, we've been telegraphing this for a while. And we are finally moving on it. Not everyone is happy with it, but its a good thing nonetheless. There is much talk of our military being stretched too thin. Well, part of that is that a goodly portion of it is still based to protect Germany from the now non-existent Soviet Union. Germany and Korea are static requirements, and conflicts such as the WOT are dynamic requirements. The more we have devoted to static requirements, the less we have for the dynamic.

If Germany can't be bothered to assist us in Iraq, have trouble fielding a brigade for Afghanistan, then their troops are best suited to defending themselves.