(The beginning of three days of bad memories. As well as Paul Revere's Ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord, of course.)

I went to see The Ladykillers which is total fluff and a lot of fun. The Coens being the Coens, it's quirky. I liked it.

Rich finally got around to getting us a motel for next weekend. With the volleyball championships which I didn't even know Sacramento had, moving up to Reno this year, motel rooms are hard to come by, so it has free local calls but may not have any way to hook my 'puter up. We will see.

One thing I never understand is why calling President Bush a Texas cowboy is supposed to be a compelling argument AGAINST him. You hear this all the time...from the anti-Bush crowd here in Hollywood. But while I’ve never met a cowboy I didn’t like, I can’t say the same about Hollywood types--
- Columnist Catherine Seipp in National Review Online

Kerry, UN "peacekeepers", and Kosovo

Victor Davis Hansen, Our Present Chaos:

Is there any general explanation for all these contradictions? I think very little other than the general lesson that we can draw about a rather humane, affluent, and leisured society after September 11 finding itself confused and in a baffling war against medieval enemies it thought were not supposed to be around in the 21st century.
....
Apparently, even after 9/11, we trust that we really are so strong and so competent that our military can provide us with the (false) assurance that American soldiers alone -- without our own engagement, consistency, or sacrifice -- can stop such savages from once more crossing the Rhine and Danube to mass murder us. So here at home in Rome, in our world of utopian perfection and material surfeit, we fiddle in hearing rooms and in focus groups while our enemies burn; on the assumption that there is no room for human error, that hindsight is always perfect, that the messy choices of the present are never between bad and worse, and that humans are always expected to be godlike rather than fallible.
...
let us feel terrible about not preempting the genocide in Rwanda; let us hate ourselves for belatedly preempting in vain to save a quarter-million Bosnians and Kosovars in the Balkans; and then let us be ashamed even more that we finally really were preempting to take out a mass-murderer in Iraq -- and let us scream and slur about all this all at once!
...
If that was not enough, a U.S. senator, with a reprehensible record of personal excess and abject immorality, now in his dotage damns the war in Iraq on moral grounds -- even as young Marines seek to protect a nascent and tottering consensual government from thugs and killers. An ex-president who calibrated his campaign for a Nobel Prize by criticizing his successor in a time of war to the applause of foreign powers now steps forward to call for a more principled nation. Such are the moralists of our age.

Are we crazy? I think in fact we almost are. But the tragedy is that if we are paradoxical, self-incriminatory, and at each other's throats, our enemies most surely are not. They know precisely what they want from us -- an Islamic world of the 8th century, parasitic on the resources and technology of the 21st, by which all the better to destroy a supposedly soft and bickering West. And if the present chaos here at home continues, they are apparently on the right track.

Alternate history (Gregg Easterbrook)

Miniter on multinationalism.

One cheer for Kerry, James Taranto:

We'll increase it to two cheers if Kerry criticizes by name the domestic extremists who are trying to divide America, sap American resolve and force the premature withdrawal of U.S. troops--most notably Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd.

Taranto again:

It's hard to believe, but Democrats used to talk like this, back when it was the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, rather than of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis and JFK's dissolute youngest brother.

And one more time (guess who caught up today!)

More and more it seems to me Mr. Bush is not only Bill Clinton's successor but his exact opposite: Mr. Clinton perfectly poised and hollow inside, a man whose lack of compass left him unable to lead within the Oval Office but who gave a compelling public presentation of the presidency, and Mr. Bush a strong president with an obvious soul, decisive at the desk, but with no dazzling edifice. It's actually amazing that two such different men came so close together. Lucky for us, considering the history, that Mr. Bush was the one who came now.