More Porkbusters courtesy of the Mercury News (hat tip: Instapundit)…

“I am shocked that the Republican staff of a Republican-led committee in a Republican-majority Congress would do opposition research on a fellow Republican,” first-term Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia wrote in a letter to fellow GOP lawmakers. “I do not see any other purpose behind the preparation of this report other than for it to be leaked to the press.”

You’re goddamned right, that’s what the purpose is… because, like it or not, your voters and taxpayers are going to hold your feet to the fire, and if you balk, your base is going to stay home.

From “Matty Groves”

“I can’t get up, I won’t get up, I won’t get up for me life,
For ye have a bitter sword, and I’ve but me pocket-knife.”

“It’s true I have two bitter swords, in shape just like the first,
You shall have the better of them, and I shall have the worst.
And do you strike the very first blow, and strike it like a man,
I shall strike the very next blow, and kill you if I can.”

So Matty struck the very first blow, and hurt Lord Donald sore,
Then Donald struck the very next blow, and Matty struck no more…
—-

So, the Islamists and Al-Quaeda supporters pulled a psy-op, and got everybody in a tizzy over freedom of expression, and whether we invite our worldly doom by daring to make a hypersensitive Islamist feel offended.

The results: well, besides the High Priest Vulture Elite blathering over whether the EU needs to worry about its freedom-of-speech laws (they have freedom of speech in the EU? Since when?), what has the result of all this sturm-und-drang been?

Well, it’s been a lot like an intellectual version of Fallujah. The great victorious rage resulted in the entire civilised world’s Scorn-o-Meter being pegged at 11 (one wonders what, in fact, Salafists actually know how to do, besides sodomize goats and kill people), while those who actually engage in journalism, rather than parrotting the HPVE, dug up the facts of the case and realized that the whole thing was, in fact, carefully manufactured.

Meaning that the true believers have done nothing but show their true colors, and for most of them, their faces, in front of western cameras, while the western world gets another round of inoculation from the insane Wahhabi/Salafist broth of darkness.

Eurocratic tranzi-weenies aside (and we have always had their ilk about, under various guises), this is part of our general pattern: we give the bad guys as much leverage as they could possibly want, and see what they do with it. Then, once they’ve taken a swing, we kick their teeth in.

The Taliban’s fucked: they can’t even manage small-unit assaults. Saddam, for all his bluster, was pulled out of a “spider hole” looking like a truck-stop reject. Ghaddafi got smart and quit while he was ahead. Now it’s Iran’s turn… soon, the Mullahcracy will have a nuke…

who thinks Ah-Matty-nejad is capable of learning from history?

Yeah, right.

Sorry, I’ve seen too many folks who have turned their backs on Russia, permanently, at the insistence of their own parents. But in a way, Putin’s idea isn’t all that ridiculous. One, those folks are out there b/c they were told or lured to go in order to Russify their neighbors — a fact, combined with Soviet law, that has done nothing to ingratiate those folks to their neighbors.

And Russia is indeed demographically imploding. But that’s mostly because conditions at home are so intolerable. I tend to agree with Andy Blair that Russia right now is closest to a Lakedaimonian Oligarchy. If Putin wants to succeed, he’s going to have to start using Russian oil and natural gas wealth to improve the lives of its NeoHelots… because otherwise, given a choice between being roundly scorned and resented, but paid regularly, where they live now, and uprooting themselves to face all the horrors that make up domestic life in Russia right now… not a chance.

Much of this depends squarely on Putin. Russia can survive, and be a powerful player in the following century, if he opens up and reverses some of his oligarchic trends. Even some of the minorities that are also going extinct, such as the Mari, would likely be overall regime-supporters were that to happen.

But if he fails to do so, no amount of energy revenue will save Russia from becoming a colder version of Libya — well-funded (for those who matter), inhospitable to the average political subject, and too underpopulated to have any meaningful effect upon its neighbors.

Hrm… I didn’t read the original in french, but according to this analysis, Chirac’s latest nuke bluster was aimed as much at the US as at Iran… and perhaps more so.

Not that there’s any danger that the French are going to support war, let alone nukewar, with the US… the article is careful to point out just how relentlessly discredited Chirac is at home. But in terms of understanding the various complex triangulations around Iran, this makes the Bush administration’s reticence all the more understandable.

(Now, I personally think that Ahmadinejad is trying to sucker us into attacking, at which point it will be proven that there was nothing but civilian nukepower apparatus — this would do us more foreign-policy damage than anything else he could possibly do, and it would all be self-inflicted. So as I read the game, Chirac’s batting for geopolitical stability here doesn’t bother me in the least.)