It’s a slow weekend, so I’ll post another picture from my sojourn last year. This time, the scene is a casual Friday evening, on the back porch of our tent. I’m on the left, my friend Todd, a corporal, is on my left, and Joel, a gunnery sergeant, is on the right. (I’d use their last names but I don’t have their permission. They probably wouldn’t care, but still.)
Author: Eric Johnson
A dire public health warning
During the war, I smoked the occasional cigarette. They were all around, they’re a pleasant diversion, and when you don’t shower for 37 days straight you don’t worry too much about the smell it leaves behind on your clothing. But then a warning on a carton of British cigarettes told me I should mend my ways…
…and I never smoked again.
Well, except for cigars. They don’t count.
Pregnant minors, lies, and Hodean
I haven’t seen too much about Hodean’s abortion views. I assumed he was as pro-abortion as the rest of the Democrat candidates — which is to say, he is in favor of any abortion at any time for any pregnant female, no matter how young or vulnerable she is. That assumption was correct.
Now it turns out that he is a liar about abortion, too. In a speech, he claimed he saw a 12-year-old female patient who was pregnant with her own father’s child. He left out the part that someone else was convicted for getting her pregnant. The invaluable Tim Russert confronted Hodean about leaving out that inconvenient fact. (By the way, conservatives should thank God that someone as intellectually honest as Russert is NBC’s main political analyst. He’s a liberal Democrat, but he asks tough questions of everyone he interviews.)
Not that anyone should be surprised by this revelation — after all, if you believe in unrestricted abortion on demand, you have to believe in all kinds of untruths: that the state has no business intervening to protect a helpless child, that an 8-month-old fetus doesn’t experience pain and isn’t really alive, that most abortions are performed by the free choice of the mother and not out of male coersion or sheer terror…et cetera, et cetera.
I have a lot of empathy for a scared girl who is pregnant long before she can handle it. I have not even the feeblest amount of compassion for politicians who think it’s all right to get rid of her child and call it a good social policy.
All the Web is a stage
Open Source Shakespeare, my master’s thesis project, now has all of Shakespeare’s plays in it. Check all of them out here.
The next stage will be to make the search tools better, as well as indexing the complete works word-by-word, instead of line-by-line. However, it should be useful right now as it is. Enjoy!
Dot-com Dean
Looks like Hodean is going to have a rocky road on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination, if indeed he makes it at all. His third-place showing in Iowa will be hard to recover from, especially since he’d been camped out there for two years and was the odds-on favorite as recently as three weeks ago.
Senator Kerry is a better candidate for the general election, but his nomination will doom the Democrats anyway. Why? Because Hodean’s supporters aren’t going to campaign for a regular, boring, “establishment” guy. They wanted moxie, spunk, fire — all of the things that Kerry does not have. The Deanie babies will be disillusioned with the election, and possibly with politics in general. That’s fine by me — I hope they’re so mentally scarred by the experience that they never vote again. If they do vote, they’ll probably latch onto whomever the Green Party nominates this year, which is the next-best thing.
Let me be the first one to tag Hodean as “Dot-com Dean.” His candidacy has had the feel of a dot-com company circa 1997. Hodean attracted a ton of venture capital in the form of Internet donations, and his “user base” of college students and graying hippies were excited about the novelty. Yet when it came time to deliver the product, it didn’t quite live up to the hype — the rollout was fraught with gaffes, and the target market didn’t embrace it wholeheartedly. The established “brick and mortar” candidates learned from his mistakes and swept him from the field.
Howard Dean: the Pets.com of Election 2004.