William K. Wolfrum

Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek made a giant mistake recently. Instead of going to Iraq and being kidnapped by evil “islamofascists” and garnering world-wide headlines, he went to Africa, where the Western world could just care less.

Salopek was arrested in the Darfur region of Sudan — where more than 200,000 people have been killed and 3 million rendered homeless since 2003 — for “Spying, writing false news and the illegal dissemination of news” among other things.

That a Pulitizer-Prize winning reporter from the Chicago Tribune gets taken in to custody in a foreign country should be huge news, but it really isn’t. Basically, Salopek was taken hostage by the wrong people. Here is what the media is talking about as far as Americans being kidnapped: Jill Carroll (kidnapped in Iraq, released several months ago), and the recently released Fox News workers Olaf Wiig and Steve Centanni.

On Google News:

Stories on Paul Salopek: 582

Stories on Jill Carroll: 1,700

Stories on Olaf Wiig: 3,940

Stories on Steve Centanni: 4,180

And, just for the hell of it:

Stories on John Mark Karr: 21,300

Salopek’s life and freedom are in danger in one of the most dangerous and deadly places in the world. He was there working on an assignment for National Geographic. And now, he sits in jail, mostly ignored as the U.S. government and media work overtime to keep visions of “Islamofascists” dancing in the public’s head.

An editorial run by USAToday and other outlets on the Salopek situation is titled: “U.S. reporter’s arrest shows Sudan has something to hide.”

This couldn’t be further from the truth. They aren’t hiding anything. The Western world just continues to lack any interest in seeing.

-WKW

Terror-stricken Nebraska residents rejoice! The Department of Homeland Security has seen your plight and distributed more that $21 million in Federal funds to help Nebraskans fight the scourge of terrorism.

“In awarding this funding, we’ve remained focused addressing the challenge of integrating communication among our rural, urban and suburban areas,” said Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman. “Without this stream of federal funding that became available following 9/11, these efforts to work toward a statewide communications system would have taken decades, not years, to complete because of the enormous cost.”

Nebraska’s prior communications system involved a complicated scheme of shoulder tapping and hollering. Now, the robust state with a population closing in on 1.8 million can get the sophisticated communications system that it so richly deserves.

Reportedly, experts have noticed an increase in terrorist chatter that continues to not involve Nebraska in any way, shape or form. This is very likely a show of cunning by terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, and that U.S. states like Nebraska and Iowa need extra federal funding to help avoid a certain future attack that will rain a nightmarish hell upon them, says an anonymous expert.

Nebraska, whose five electoral votes went to George W. Bush in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, has long been considered a terrorist target by the group “People Who Take Care of Those that Take Care of Bush” The PWTCTTTCB sites the “Islamofascists blind, seething hatred of corn” as one of a plethora of reasons why terrorists would love nothing better than kill every last Nebraskan.

-WKW

In keeping with their party stance of “Americans, what a bunch of dunderheads,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was the latest to accuse critics of President George W. Bush of being a bunch of confused idiots, who obviously hate America.

From CNN:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday accused critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq and counterterrorism policies of lacking the courage to fight terror.

In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from “moral and intellectual confusion” about what threatens the nation’s security.

Addressing several thousand veterans at the American Legion’s national convention, Rumsfeld recited what he called the lessons of history, including the failed efforts to appease the Adolf Hitler regime in the 1930s.

“I recount this history because once again we face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism” he said.

This comes on the heels of a recent Zogby poll that gave Bush a 34 percent approval rating. Republican insiders say this plays right into their hands in their new platform of “Opinion polls are the work of dirty islamofascists that want to murder your babies.”

-WKW

I hadn’t thought about this for a while but in 2003, on a lark, I entered the Nerve.com “Bad Erotica Contest.” I wrote an entry in about 30 minutes of divinely bad erotic inspiration and sent it in. I didn’t even give it a title or include my name, just the name that came on my e-mail “Bill.”

I forgot about it for a while until I got an e-mail from Nerve telling me I was one of the finalists and to check the Web site to see where I placed. I called my wife over, we checked the site, and lo and behold, I was the winner. I got $500 from it, which took about six months to receive, but they sent it to me. It was a fun experience.

The opening line seemed to really capture everyone’s imagination:

“She woke with the taste of his turgid penis on her lips …”

Some sites that mentioned it:

Cruel.com

Swoon

Boing Boing

Suburban Blight

i-Boy.com

And some others. I even just noticed that writer Steve Almond, one of the judges, gave a reading of it, along with the other winners. Trippy.

“That was so fun (to judge the contest). It was terrible, but so good. Good terrible. “I awoke with the taste of his turgid penis still in my mouth.” So bad it’s brilliant.” — Steve Almond

I don’t know where to find the whole story, except at Nerve.com, but you need a subscription. Trust me, it was truly hideous. But, you know, I meant it to be that way.

I just wanted to come clean, as it were.

Edit: Check that, I just found the whole story, saved by one of Gene Merrill’s “Constant State of Flux” friends, Adam. You can find it here, if you can stomach these sort of things.

-WKW

Remember the infamous Iraqi Minister of Information, who would defiantly state that Saddam’s army was overwhelming and destroying U.S. forces by the droves, even as you could plainly see U.S. soldiers handing out candy to kids behind him?

Well, he’s reemerged as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

From CNN:

“In Iraq, we’ll never be in civil war,” al-Maliki told CNN’s “Late Edition” on Sunday.

Despite Health Ministry figures that put the number of Iraqi civilians killed in July at about 3,400 — more than double the 1,600 killed in January — the prime minister said violence was decreasing in his country.

Al-Maliki did not dispute figures published in “The Economist” magazine that put unemployment at as high as 40 percent, with double-digit inflation and as much as 20 percent of the population in poverty.

“But this is a new Iraq, and inherited from the previous regime who left unemployment and destruction,” said al-Maliki, who won power in December’s elections.

Asked when coalition troops might leave, the Iraqi leader was equivocal.

“It could be a year or less, or a few months,” he said. “This has to do with the — with our success of the democratic — or the political process in Iraq, and to have the security agencies to protect this process.”

-WKW

From a studious reader and commentator of Glenn Greenwald’s blog, some words our 16th President really did write:

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,-’I see no probability of the British invading us’; but he will say to you, ‘Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.’”

and,

“The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.”

Abraham Lincoln,
in a letter to William Herndon, in regard to the Mexican-American War
February 15, 1848.

-WKW

While it’s one thing for a disgruntled Wal-Mart employee to furiously type in ludicrous statesments under a psyeudonym like “SuperAmerican1971,” it’s another when politicians, or wanna-be politicians let the verbal madness fly.

What the politicians are saying

“If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin … Whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong.”

- Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla. and Fla. electorate, 2000

_________

“I’m responsible for the federal government,”

- President George W. Bush

_________

“This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is.

- Sen. George Allen, R-Va and besmircher of his father’s name.

_________

“You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed, and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

- Mayor Ray Nagin, D-New Orleans
_________

“I know from experience that blacks are not the greatest swimmers, or may not even know how to swim.”

- Tramm Hudson, Republican candidate for the Fla. House seat to be left by Harris.

And finally …

“Nothing!”

- President George W. Bush, in answer to the question “What did Iraq have to do with 9/11?”

-WKW

It seems that authoritarian side of the Republican party is trying to slowly soften up the nation to the concept that the U.S. Constitution is, in fact, a pain in the ass that, like the Bible, can and should be cherry-picked as needed.

There’s this recent brilliance by Clifford May heads the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based organization that can war-monger with the best of them.

“You do have to do certain things, I think, in order to win the war,” May said. “Our Constitution and the rights we have, those are not a suicide pact.”

Now, enter the fray comes Abraham Lincoln, as if he wasn’t busy enough being dead for 140 years.

In Pennsylvania recently, Dana Irey, the Republican candidate running against incumbent Democratic Rep. John Murtha - a vocal critic of the Iraq war — came up with this gem at a rally:

Our 16th President (Lincoln), and I quote: ‘Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.’

Of course, Lincoln never said that.

According to FactCheck.org, the “quote,” and I quote, came from “conservative author J. Michael Waller,” who admitted that the words were his, not Lincoln, and in the spirit of “never take any blame,” blamed the misunderstanding on copy editors at Insight magazine, where it was published in an article he penned.

So, should the idea of using invented quotes by Abraham Lincoln be the GOP’s plan, here are a few other things Lincoln never said, that now can be used by them, due to the fact that they were written, and Lincoln’s name is near them.

Other things Lincoln didn’t say

“If your laws don’t allow torture, ship a potential enemy of the state somewhere that does.”

“Only by taking a big crap on the Constitution will we be able to live as free Americans.”

-WKW

I decided I needed a recurring blog post, so this seemed like a good idea. It’s a look at what average Americans are saying over at some good, old-fashioned conservative sites.

Today’s sample group: TownHall.com

The Column: Will the West defend itself?

In this column, Walter Williams decries Americans being too weak-willed to go as far as they need to destroy their enemies:

Think about it. Currently, the U.S. has an arsenal of 18 Ohio class submarines. Just one submarine is loaded with 24 Trident nuclear missiles. Each Trident missile has eight nuclear warheads capable of being independently targeted. That means the U.S. alone has the capacity to wipe out Iran, Syria or any other state that supports terrorist groups or engages in terrorism — without risking the life of a single soldier.

Terrorist supporters know we have this capacity, but because of worldwide public opinion, which often appears to be on their side, coupled with our weak will, we’ll never use it. Today’s Americans are vastly different from those of my generation who fought the life-and-death struggle of World War II. Any attempt to annihilate our Middle East enemies would create all sorts of handwringing about the innocent lives lost, so-called collateral damage.

Americans respond

And here are some of the comments to that article:

“We have to seriously consider our pre-emptive options. To do so we have to get the hand-wringers to shut the f**k up.”

_______________________________________

“I thought I outlined reasons for eliminating whole bunch of them. Maybe the sarcasm didn’t work. If all the people who find comfort in the koran were gone the greater world world would miss nothing of value…nothing … Whithout the islamos we could return to an open society which is out birthright.”

_______________________________________

“Abraham Lincoln knew how to win a war. He didn’t give a rats behind what anyone said, all he knew is that he needed to win. During the Civil War, Lincoln siezed control of several newspapers, suspended hbeas corpus, issued arrest warrants for Supreme Court Justices that disagreed with him, even exiled a United States Senator.

It is WAY past high time for some of our media outlets to be shut down. We can start with the hanging of “Pinch” Sulzberger and Bill Keller for High Treason by publishing classified information on the front page of the New York Times.”

_______________________________________

“The enemy is in sight. It doesn’t even attempt to hide. Kill or be killed. These people wish to rule over us. Our forefathers refused to be ruled a king from a distance and fought for a republic instead. I refuse to be ruled by a Caliphate, Imam, or some other self proclaimed Islamic cleric. Get this fight started. Before you know it we’ll be staring at a nuclear Iran AND North Korea. Then what? Nuclear deterrance doesn’t work if the enemy knows you won’t actually use the nuclear weapons. Lets create a surprise of our own. The rest of the world will whine and cry in public while they give a big sigh of relief in private.”

_______________________________________

“get rid of the seditionists, the subversives and the hate-America Americans. We have to go into war totally. War is life or death, it is to eradicate the enemy, not to make friends with him. It does not matter what the frogs think. We go to total war, level the countryside devoid of housing, shoot ununiformed ‘insurgents’ on the spot, destroy all cover from which they could return fire and occupy the oil fields. Hey! China! You want some oil? Here, we can turn the spigot as easy as the Iranians. And, how about fifty dollars a barrel? You think they won’t approve of our ‘War on Terrorism’ at $50 a barrel???”

And finally …

“You people disgust me.”

-WKW

So is it wrong of me to wish Jill Carroll be kidnapped again, and only released if she promises never to write again? Because, it just feels like the Christian Science Monitor is holding us all hostage with her captivating tale of sitting on a floor wearing a hijab.

It’s wrong, isn’t it? I’m pretty much damned, anyway, I suppose. How about if ol’ “Ink Eyes” comes back and takes her PC or typewriter hostage?

It had to be harrowing, and all. But I really think it’s the type of situation best resolved with silent prayer and deep, inner reflection, as opposed to baring her adjective-laden soul upon the world.

I sobbed the whole day. Quietly, so they wouldn’t hear me. I was so tired, so worn out. I’d been fooling myself, thinking some days were happy. It had been three months and I was drifting further and further away from my family, from my life. Enough was enough. “Let me out!” I screamed to myself. “Let me out!”

In other news, 20 Iraqis on a pilgramage were killed after gunmen opened fire on them. Reportedly, CSN officials blame the deaths on “lack of belief in Jesus.”

-WKW