There’s a category I have for quoting in full, something that someone else wrote. It’s called “Word!” Never more appropriate than today:

Mr. Obama,

Given the uproar about the simple question asked you by Joe the plumber, and the persecution that has been heaped on him because he dared to question you, I find myself motivated to say a few things to you myself. While Joe aspires to start a business someday, I already have started not one, but 4 businesses. But first, let me introduce myself. You can call me “Cory the well driller”. I am a 54 year old high school graduate. I didn’t go to college like you, I was too ready to go “conquer the world” when I finished high school. 25 years ago at age 29, I started my own water well drilling business at a time when the economy here in East Texas was in a tailspin from the crash of the early 80’s oil boom. I didn’t get any help from the government, nor did I look for any. I borrowed what I could from my sister, my uncle, and even the pawn shop and managed to scrape together a homemade drill rig and a few tools to do my first job. My businesses did not start not a result of privilege. It is the result of my personal drive, personal ambition, self discipline, self reliance, and a determination to treat my customers fairly. From the very start my business provided one other (than myself) East Texan a full time job. I couldn’t afford a backhoe the first few years (something every well drilling business had), so I and my helper had to dig the mud pits that are necessary for each and every job with hand shovels. I had to use my 10 year old, 1/2 ton pickup truck for my water tank truck (normally a job for at least a 2 ton truck).
Continue reading →

…is very eloquently smashed by this article. h/t to Instapundit.

P.J. O’Rourke tours the Big Stick, and thinks about the presidential race. Money grafs:

Some say John McCain’s character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do–voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer’s or a half gallon of Dewar’s. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There’s Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there’s the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?”

(snip)

A strange flight it is–from the hard and fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters–who, put together, don’t have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on the Big Stick–presume to run for president of the United States. They’re not just running against the hero John McCain, they’re running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.

Via.

From a discussion over at Samizdata, jumping on Drudge for revealing that Prince Harry was in Afganistan.

Wait, let me get this straight. Here in the US we criticize the POTUS for serving in the National Guard as a fighter pilot during Vietnam and not shipping his daughters off to Iraq, but in England we criticize the royals for sending a Prince to serve in Afghanistan???

OK, anti-war-loonies, make up your dammed minds!!!!

I really don’t think they should have pulled him out. Instead, they should have made damn sure everyone around him was a volunteer (of which there’d be no shortage) and then gone to town on the jihadis when they made their inevitible attacks.

Couldn’t have been said better about a nicer candidate:

Hillarymandias

I met a pollster from an antique land,
Who said–“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand, one in Texas…., one near Canton,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose brow, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The electorate that mocked them, and the press that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Hillarymandias,
Look on my resume and campaign fundraising, ye fellow Democrats, and despair!
Nothing else remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. Heh.

Via.

Seen in the comments on Howard Taylor’s Schlock Mercenary blog:

What this country needs is a 6% unemployment rate. With rates in the low fours, the otherwise unemployables get hired and inflict themselves on the rest of society.

I consider that a backwards endorsement of my contention that we’re getting the bureaucracy we pay for; e.g. city employees are underpaid. What with the sex offenders and other criminals turning up, I’m a little unhappy over what we’re hiring these days. In related news, the audit of city employee bonus pay has been published. Don’t hold your breath looking for political bombshells or embarrassing revelations in there. Annise Parker knows how to play ball.

Via Instapundit:

REAL SIMPLE: George Jonas explains what ought to be obvious:

I’ve stumbled upon the secret of the countries Israel has never bombed or invaded. Different as they may be from one another, they have one thing in common. These countries have never bombed or invaded Israel…No matter how much you detest Israelites in particular, or Jews in general, as long as you can content yourself with calling on God’s wrath to rain down on the Jewish State, and refrain from reinforcing your prayer by supplying missiles to Hezbollah, you can exercise your religious freedom of loathing with no other consequence than perhaps being loathed in return.

It’s so simple. Hell, we haven’t been able to play that nice during any of the last six decades (counting from the current one). But Israel’s record is perfect.