Well, that's all the posts I've got time for tonight. If I didn't get to your question, sorry, but there are only so many hours in a day =D

There were less questions than last time, but I thought there were a lot of really intelligent questions.

I look forward to doing this again in 3 or 4 weeks.

See ya on Monday!

Question: "Been trying to learn a bit about communism, and specifically why communism leads to genocide and mass murder. The political/social theory strikes me as very naive, but I really don't see why it should necessarily lead to such atrocities. Can you shed some light on this?" -- Freeven

Answer: Well, just think about the pollyannaish premise behind communism. You have people who are so unschooled in dealing with other human beings that they actually believe that building a society around the philosophy of, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is going to work.

So what happens when human nature asserts itself and the people reject communism, instead making it clear that they prefer a system where each person uses his abilities to benefit himself and his family?

Then the Communist system can only be maintained through state sponsored violence, repression, & terror. And unlike a dictator who, vile and savage though he may be, understands that the system is being of government maintained for their benefit, commies, at least the ones I've communicated with and read, seem to believe that people who oppose their way of thinking do so because they're bad people, maybe even evil. I think that makes enormous body counts & brutality easier for communist elites to accept than they would be otherwise. At least that's my theory...

Question: "Should the US be trading with China?" -- Billary2004

Answer: There are two schools of thought about this.

School of thought #1) Treat China like Cuba. Don't trade with them, deny them funds, try to keep them weak as possible, and hope for their government to be overthrown.

School of thought #2) Trade with China and hope that will help nudge them towards Democracy while our economic ties and military superiority keep any violence from breaking out.

In an ideal world, I'd prefer #1, which is how we deal with Cuba. China is a large, dangerous, communist nation with a growing economy, that is rapidly improving its armed forces, that seems to have no problems with waging wars of conquest, considers our country to be an enemy, & is clearly building up for a war with Taiwan (that may or may not ever come). By trading with China, we're helping them buy the very weapons that they're aiming at us and our Taiwanese allies across the Taiwan Strait.

However, because China has the second largest economy in the world, we almost have to go with option #2. There are tremendous economic benefits to working with China and if we chose not to trade with them, other nations in Europe and Asia would take up most of the slack.

So, option #2 it is. Let's just hope it works out....

Question: "You have a very low opinion of the UN, on the grounds that it's corrupt and overly influenced by morally questionable governments, and have suggested it should be ignored and discredited wherever possible.

How about reforming it instead, or failing that aiming to completely replace it with something that does what the UN is supposed to do?

To put it another way, do you think there's something fundamentally undesirable about international law and international bodies with power over states, or do you merely dislike what currently exists? If you could reshape the UN and the ICJ as you wished, how would you?" -- minamikuni

Answer: First off, let me say that I don't have a problem with cooperating with other nations, abiding by treaties, or in general terms, trying to make the world a better place for everyone.

However, I do have a basic and fundamental problem with international bodies exerting power over the United States. Simply put, Americans and Americans alone should have the right to judge other Americans, decide what our laws are going to be, decide how our military is going to be used, etc, etc.

It doesn't matter what sort of reform or changes are implemented at the UN, that's not going to change.

You see, even if the UN were made up of nothing but "friendly," Democratic nations, they still couldn't be trusted. That's because even nations like Britain, Australia, & Israel don't share all of our values, don't look at the world the same way we do, and have their own interests that don't necessarily coincide with ours. So why in the world should they be making decisions that Americans are currently making for themselves?

In short, the more power that's by our politicians to international bodies, the less freedom US citizens have over our own lives, which is why I believe a weak and ineffective UN is in America's interest.

Question: "How do you choose what stories to blog on and what to leave out, you miss some pretty big important stories and hit on some pretty odd ones. Is it simply personal whim or are you trying to fit a niche that isn't in the blogs you read or what?" -- Christopher_Taylor

Answer: Well, first off, I figure that I'm going to cover just about everything RWN's readers need to be informed about on the political scene in the daily news section. So whether I write about it or not, people are going to have a chance to read about it.

Secondly, I try to only write about things that pique my interest, that I have a clear opinion about, or when I have something to say everyone else isn't already saying. Also, I prefer to talk about things other people aren't discussing and that I haven't covered in depth (at least whatever aspect of the issue I'm discussing).

So because of that, there are some "hot" stories I don't write about. But, if I don't have anything unique to add, I figure I'm boring people by just saying something my readers can get read on a dozen other blogs and websites.

Question: "If President Bush could answer for the entire government, and you had his complete attention, what 5 questions would you ask? One that I would like to see is “Why do we continue to support the UN?” -- DeeKayT

Answer: I'm going to cheat a little bit and just treat this like it's which 5 questions would I ask W. Here's what came to mind off the top of my head...

-- Are we willing to bomb Iran if that's what it take to stop them from getting nukes?
-- What's the plan for wiping out Hizbollah?
-- Can I read the last few CIA reports you've gotten on Iraq?
-- How far along is the space based weapons program?
-- Do you really think Osama is alive or are we just allowing people to believe he's alive?

Of course, all of this is "secret squirrel" stuff and I'd never be able to tell you what W.'s answers were. But, at least I'd feel better if I heard answers I liked to those seldom asked questions.

Question: "Didn't you used to host another blog? I believe it was called "Brass Knuckles". What ever happened to that?" -- mike_the_engineer

Answer: Yep, I ran Brass Knuckles Webzine for roughly 3 years? It focused on humor, but I also did some interviews, daily links, and special features, some of which are in the archives section of RWN.

However, there was one problem -- the $#$#$% traffic for the page just WOULD NOT GROW. I got it up as high as 3500 daily uniques at one point, but it dropped down to around 2000 daily uniques per day and stayed there. That just drove me up a wall. You have no idea how much it sucks to get some huge, once in a lifetime link, and shoot up to 20k readers in a day, only to slide down to almost exactly the same number of readers you had before within a day or two. But, I'd ask the BKW readers what they thought and it was "great," "fantastic," "love the page like it is, don't change a thing". I loved doing that page, but it was driving me up a wall.

Eventually, I started RWN, ran 'em both for about a year, and then decided to kill BKW because it was too much work to do both pages at the same time, and RWN was growing while BKW wasn't. At the time, BKW had about 2000k sets of eyeballs hitting it per day, M-F, and RWN only had about a 1000. But today, RWN pulls around 6000 readers M-F so I think I made the right call.

Question: "Here in Maryland we just had a raging debate between our Republican Governor and Democratic State Senate on whether or not to allow slots at a select few sites, pretty much all of which were horse-racing sites where betting already takes place legally. Our Governor, elected pretty much because of his stance on this issue (for slots) was defeated by the old Dem horses in the Senate. What are your thoughts on slots? Should they be made legal? And if so, to what capacity? Unlimited? Only in certain spots? I'd be interested to find out your view, as I've found differing views from even the Republicans around me." -- davidslenk

Answer: I understand why some people have a problem with gambling in general and slots in particular. Gambling addictions have destroyed a lot of lives, seedy characters and gambling go together like cheese & crackers, and in effect, gambling becomes a voluntary tax for poor people who don't understand how heavily the odds are stacked against them.

But, in the scope of things, compared to a hundred other issues, I just don't see gambling as all that big of a deal. So, if a convenience store wants to make a few extra bucks by putting in a video poker machine, the state wants to raise revenue by running a lottery, horse racing, or slots, or even if a church wants to fill up the coffers by running bingo, it suits me just fine.

Question: "How do you feel about the fact that Rummy has prohibited photography in Iraqi prisons following the torture scandals? The media may very well be blowing this out of proportion yet this course of action reminds me of the three monkeys and thus 'see no evil'." -- Ryan via email

Answer: Although that story has been widely reported Ryan, I'm not sure it's actually true. All the articles I found relating to this seemed to be based on a quote supposedly given by an anonymous source to a British paper called "The Business". But, after reading an article at The Register, I have come to believe that what "The Business" wrote was based on a piece of satire written in the Daily Farce. I may turn out to be wrong about that, but I haven't been able to find any story about this issue this issue that doesn't trace back to the original story in "The Business".

But, should Rumsfeld ban digital camera phones in Iraqi prisons? ABSOLUTELY. Those pics from Abu Ghraib turned a boring, humdrum, barely mentioned story about a military investigation of prisoner abuse into a screaming, front page story for weeks that hurt the military and gave America bashers, left-wingers, & chronic whingers a full month+ to whine, moan, and complain about Bush, the military, the war, and our country. They are STILL kvetching about it, even now.

And what useful purpose did those pictures serve? The pics didn't kickstart the investigation or changes in Iraq's prisons, that had been in process for months when they came out. Besides, why does a guard at an Iraqi prison need a digital camera phone on the job anyway?

"Prohibit(ing) photography" in Iraqi prisons is just common sense and whether the story that prompted this is true or not, we should be doing it.

I was really happy with the way the first Q&A Friday turned out. There were a lot of good questions, I had time to pump out a lot more material than normal, and everyone seemed to be pleased with how things went.

So today, I'm doing it again. If there's a subject you've been wanting me to tackle or an issue you want to hear my opinion on, just ask your question in the comments section. Your question can be about politics, ideology, history, blogging, RWN, from a liberal, conservative, or libertarian perspective, heck it can even be about movies, music, TV, and film if it's interesting enough and I'll try to root through the questions and answer some of them tonight, starting at 6 PM EST.

My posts will probably be a little shorter than normal and I won't be able to get to every question (so don't even bother asking fluff like "what is your favorite color" or "How often do you clip Patton's nails"), but I'll probably spend a few hours on this tomorrow night although I won't get as many questions answered as last time because I'll also be finishing up a column later tonight as well.

So ask away and let's see how this goes...

Warning Will Robinson, warning!!! What you are about to read is, I repeat, is, a REAL news story, not satire....

"Protesters delivered a message yesterday to the national spelling bee: Enuf is enuf! Members of the American Literacy Society picketed the 77th annual spelling bee, which is sponsored every year by Cincinnati-based Scripps Howard.

Carrying signs reading "I'm thru with through," "Spelling shuud be lojical," and "Spell different difrent," the protesters drew chuckles from bee contestants."

Yes, just when you think protesting can't get any sillier than a bunch of left-wing wackos wearing "No blood for oil shirts" & carrying giant puppet heads, these hosers come along.

Can I make a suggestion here? Why don't these goofs stop wasting their time spell checking and just go buy themselves computers with spell checkers? The rest of America is not going rewrite every book ever made & "unlearn" how to spell just to please a teacher who is too lazy to teach her students English, some guy who never learned how to spell, & an 86 year-old accounting crank. So like it or lump it, you kooks!

Back in August of last year, I put together a list of my favorite columnists. Since it has been a while, I thought now would be a good time to list my current faves again. Of course, you should keep in mind that these sorts of lists change -- sometimes quite a bit -- over time.

35) Heather Mac Donald
34) Michael Barone
33) Burt Prelutsky
32) Byron York
31) Linda Chavez
30) Stephen Hayes
29) Cal Thomas
28) Cathy Seipp
27) Kenneth Timmerman
26) Adam Sparks
25) Hugh Hewitt
24) Neil Boortz
23) Larry Elder
22) Neil Cavuto
21) Armstrong Williams
20) Kathleen Parker
19) John Leo
18) Rich Lowry
17) Jack Kelly
16) Michelle Malkin
15) Mona Charen
14) David Limbaugh
13) David Horowitz
12) Jeff Jacoby
11) Dick Morris
10) Dennis Prager
9) Charles Krauthammer
8) John Podhoretz
7) Thomas Sowell
6) Walter Williams
5) Jonah Goldberg
4) James Lileks
3) Ann Coulter
2) Victor Davis Hanson
1) Mark Steyn

***Update #1***: Shoot, I forgot Brendan Miniter. He deserves to be in there somewhere too...

If you enjoyed this fake campaign ad from Broken Newz, you can see more of their work here.

For a while now, I've been meaning to punch something up on some of the people on the right who...well, let me be charitable and say "get on my nerves". Other than one exception, which will be noted, I don't detest these people, but let's just say that I wouldn't put anybody here on my list of preferred dinner guests and the feeling would probably be mutual.

Bill O'Reilly: I'll be the first person to admit that Bill O'Reilly has reason to be more than a little bit cocky. He has had a nice, long, & may I add deserved, run at the top of the cable news network game. That being said, his ego is absolutely planet sized. And I'm not talking Mercury here, I'm talking about Jupiter. I mean if Superman were real and he had just saved the entire planet from destruction, for the 5th time this week, he couldn't justify having an ego as big as O'Reilly's. No one should be that pompous.

Pat Robertson & Jerry Falwell: These guys just slay me because neither of them has any political instincts whatsoever. Yet, it seems that every six months or so, one or the other of them will say something mind blowingly off the wall or offensive that the media will have a field day thrashing conservatives with. Please, do all the rest of us a favor...shhhhhhhh!

John McCain, Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar & The Rest Of The Senate Republicans In Name Only: It's bad enough that wussy quasi-Republicans like Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch, & Arlen Specter vote against the GOP so often. That's an annoyance. But, McCain, Hagel, & Lugar seemingly go out of their way to loudly & publicly disagree with the rest of the party every time some important issue comes up. In fact, if you guessed "McCain, Hagel, or Lugar" whenever you saw a headline like "Senate Republican disagrees with Bush" you'd be right 90% of the time. In return for attacking their own party, these chumps get lauded by the mainstream media. But as Ann Coulter once said, "There is no surer proof of a Republican mediocrity than the media's respect."

Dr. Laura: As a general rule, from what I've heard of her show, Dr. Laura seems to give pretty sound advice. But good grief, is she a shrill devil-harpy or what? I just cannot understand how someone whose entire shtick is being mean to people while giving them good advice can be so successful. Personally, I can't stand to listen to her for more than a 5 minute stretch at a time -- and that's saying something since I usually agree with her.

David Brooks & William Safire: Occasionally, I'll actually link something written by one of the New York Times' two house conservatives. But, are these not exactly the sort of mousey, wishy-washy, type of conservatives the Times would run? I mean, I know the idea of running columns by unapologetic, rock ribbed, conservatives must scare the libs at the Times, but couldn't they find a little stronger right wing medicine than these guys?

Tucker Carlson: The right's less articulate, more moderate, version of Alan Colmes. Enough said.

The Ultimate Warrior: Yes, I'm talking about the guy who used to wrestle Hulk Hogan and I'm absolutely appalled that this guy is getting conservative speaking gigs around the country. I say that, because after following his wrestling career, I long ago came to the conclusion that he's...uh...let's just say "Damaged Goods". Not only did he actually change his name to "The Warrior" back in 1993, but here's a gibbering passage from his website that's pretty typical of the majority of things he has written over the years.

"I am not p/c. What is true never is. The philosophical principles of life I advocate herein my writings will get you through your life on Earth effectively, successfully and happily. What happens from there none of us truly know. Until people can be seen stepping into another plane of existence on The Tonight Show showing us it is truly capable, instead of writing fiction books claiming that it has been done, I’m not going to bet one way or the other nor let my spiritual beliefs pull me around life by the nose. What I am going to do is use the GIFT I AM ENDOWED WITH to deal effectively, successfully and happily with my life on Earth. I do not use the Creation of my life to make excuses, I use it as an empowerment. And when those who are enraptured push on me that there is only a lone way to have a relationship with the Creator yet they, themselves, are not using their own gift of life to fulfill its potential or cannot explain to me what it is they believe because in truth they are only mindless sheep following others, I will unabashedly tell them they are disrespecting any God they believe in by not comprehending and coherently explaining what He is and what He is about. I will also tell them they are spitting in His face by not using the potential of the GIFT ENDOWED. It is that simple for me. Your disrespect, if you are one who is of this kind, is far larger than mine just because I use what I am, and say it like it is."

Dick Morris: I'll be first to tell you that Morris is a political genius even if he does tend to be a bit overdependent on polls. Heck, I even think so highly of Morris' political acumen that I put together a page full of his quotes. But, Morris is an amoral political animal. By that, I mean that I get the impression he'd suggest George Bush secretly push Laura in front of a bus if it would give W. a 5 point sympathy bounce with women next November. Politics is important, but you can't make life and death decisions that may have ramifications for decades based on whether or not it'll move you up or down in the polls a few points. Judging from his columns, Morris doesn't see it that way...

Pat Buchanan: Even though the "king of all Paleocons" isn't even a Republican anymore, he has a TV gig where he's supposed to represent the opinion of conservatives. But, Pat is a Reform Party member who's an isolationist, anti-free trade, and he sounds like Michael Moore or Robert Scheer when he talks about the war in Iraq. Buchanan makes my skin crawl...

We can't well judge where we stand on victory in Iraq - and how much more needs to be done - without stepping back and reviewing what our objectives there were in the first place. I'm not looking so much to answer all these questions in this one entry as to frame the issues:

1. Removing the Regime: As I've explained repeatedly before (see here, for example) and will no doubt return to again soon, the first and primary reason for the Iraq war was the nature of the regime itself - implacably hostile to the United States, planted at the center of the region that has been the epicenter for terrorism against the United States and its allies, immune to outside persuasion or pressure, safe from any internal revolt, and unpredictable in its actions. The regime's record on numerous issues supported the conclusion that it could neither be changed nor safely ignored. Recall just one example, one of the most critical facts about Saddam Hussein's regime: after September 11, when nearly all of the world's worst dictators - Castro, Khaddafi, even Arafat - were lining up to give lip service to denouncing the attacks, Saddam's state-run media was trumpeting t hem with front-page celebrations. The Ba'athist regime put up murals cheering the attacks. All of which underlined why the United States Congress had passed, and President Clinton signed into law, legislation making "regime change" in Iraq the formal policy of the United States. Removing the regime would also take care of its appalling human rights record.

The objective of removing the regime was, of course, accomplished by mid-April 2003, which is what anyone who was paying attention understood to be the "Mission Accomplished" announced by President Bush a few weeks later. The final nails in the coffin were the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein and the December 2003 capture of Saddam himself. While it's true that some ex-Ba'athists are starting to resurface in the new Iraq, notably in the Fallujah Brigade tasked with pacifying Fallujah (and now the head of the new provisional government), that's as unremarkable as the presence of ex-Communists (like Yeltsin and Putin) in post-Soviet Russia, given the lack of alternatives to being in the Ba'ath party while Saddam ruled the country. There's nothing to fear in terms of the regime rising again in anything resembling its prior form, especially given how much of that form was dictated by the personality of Saddam Hussein himself.

2. Removal of the WMD Threat: While the human element was Iraq's chief threat, the regime's persistent pursuit of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological, nuclear - was, famously, the subject of international debate for years before the war dating back to Israel's bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. On the issue of WMD programs, we can feel pretty good about what we've accomplished - we know that the regime was continuing to, at a minimum, 'keep its powder dry' in terms of maintaining the know-how and capability to ramp up production of chemical and biological weapons, which are cheaper, quicker and easier to produce and transport than nuclear weapons; that that capability was concealed from weapons inspectors; and that that capability is now dissipated.

Actual weapons - including the large stockpiles previously identified by the UN (and cited by President Bush) but not accounted for - are another matter. If we ever get comfortable that there really were no such stockpiles by the time of the war, of course, that would be good news; a propaganda victory for war opponents, but good news nonetheless. On the other hand, if there's one thing that's made me genuinely nervous about the aftermath of the war (or perhaps the interminable 14-month "rush to war"), it's the possibility that WMD materiel made its way to Syria or into the hands of rogue individuals or groups, including Al Qaeda or other international terror groups. Thus, it remains premature to declare victory on this front, and we may never really get to the bottom of the question.

3. Eliminate Iraq as a Terrorist Safe Haven: Regardless of the continuing debate over the extent of Saddam's active operational and financial assistance to various terror groups, the incontestible fact remains that Iraq before March 2003 was (as Iran and Syria remain) a black hole on the map into which terrorists of all kinds - Zarqawi, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, Ansar Al-Islam, possibly some of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers - could disappear or encamp without fear of being apprehended or reliably traced. For the moment, that aspect has been greatly diminished - it's true that we haven't found Zarqawi, but then fugitives in the US have been known to evade capture for years as well, and there have been many, many foreign terrorists captured or killed by US forces there. There's at least been very significant progress in reducing the freedom of terrorists to move into Iraq as a safe haven. And, of course, Saddam is no longer pumping cash into the suicide-bombing oper ations in Israel, which is good.

4. Prevent the Re-Emergence of a Hostile Regime: Obviously, this is the big-ticket endgame right now, and one that might ultimately require us to play power politics, since neither the Shiites, the Sunnis nor the Kurds can create a dangerous rogue regime in Iraq if the other two groups retain some base of power. The major danger would be an Islamist theocracy controlled by Iran under someone like al-Sadr (who's pretty well discredited and weakened at the moment, although the careers of the likes of Khomeini and Saddam suggest that a guy like this is a continuing danger to bounce back until he's actually dead or in permanent US custody).

5. Prevent the Descent of Iraq into a Failed State: The opposite pole, and the first of the objectives that represents an objective of the reconstruction rather than the war (although Christopher Hitchens, among others, has argued that Iraq was headed this way anyway) is preventing anarchy - if Iraq winds up looking like Somalia, it will resume its status as a place for transnational terror groups to congregate. Again, the jury's still out, but the growth of local institutions in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south hopefully could create a fallback position where if post-occupation Iraq started to crumble, there would be hope of salvaging parts of the country from anarchy.

6. Building a Role Model: Most of the objectives of the Iraq war were negative - get Saddam out of power, stop the spread of weapons and terror groups, etc. The positive goal - building democracy in Iraq - has attracted mountains of scorn, but when you consider that we had little choice but to try to rebuild the place anyway once we'd removed the existing regime, why wouldn't we want to use all the persuasive powers at our command to try to provide a positive example to the rest of the region? Needless to say, this aspect of President Bush's "forward strategy of freedom" has a ways to go, although there's no reason to suspect that there won't be elections by January - the more troubling question is what comes after that. My own bottom line: regardless of the shape it takes, if the resulting institutions provide accountable government that the Iraqi people are happy with, that alone will put pressure on the neighbors to shape up. Considering the number of form er tyrannies around the world that have transitioned to functioning or semi-functioning democracies in the last 20 years without any U.S. troops at all, and sometimes in the face of bitter-end internal resistance, faltering economies, and/or inhospitable cultural traditions, I hardly consider this an unrealistic endeavor.

7. Humanitarian Reconstruction: Rebuilding roads, schools, hospitals, etc. Keeping the lights on. By all accounts, this is going well. In fact, we made significant progress just by putting and end to the failed sanctions regime, which gave the "containment" policy a brutal cost in human life.

8. Prevent Iraqi-on-Iraqi Violence: At the end of the day, this is Iraq's problem, not ours, although we obviously need to keep violence from overwhelming the other mission objectives. The US media has tended to elevated this to Job One in Iraq, thus missing the entire point of the exercise.

(I'm ignoring "prevent violence against US troops," since that's not so much an end goal as something we're trying to do while working towards our goals; in military terms, force protection is an ongoing priority but not a mission objective - if every other job on the list was done, we could keep the troops safe just by bringing them home. The importance and difficulty of protecting our forces has, of course, been a critical concern through all of this.).

9. "Flypaper": The notion that our troops would serve as "flypaper" - attracting jihadist fanatics to Iraq to kill them rather than have to hunt them down elsewhere - always struck me more as a sliver lining to the cloud of the insurgency rather than a positive goal. It's not that we actually want people attacking our soldiers. But if they are going to pour into Iraq, killing a lot of them is a laudable goal that will advance our ultimate war aims, and the casualty figures from the front suggest that we are indeed doing this at a fairly high volume.

10. Get the Wells Pumping: Nobody seriously argued that oil should have been a valid reason for war - we could have increased Iraq's production by lifting UN sanctions - but given oil's importance to the Iraqi, world and US economies, getting the wells pumping at full tilt was obviously an important thing to do. From what I've read, that's going fine, although it may be some time before Iraq can really tap into its full potential as an oil producer.

11. Reorganize US Base Structure: Basing US troops in Saudi Arabia, of course, was not only expensive and inefficient (like the Germans, the Saudis could be picky about where they would let us go), but also an irritant cited by bin Laden as a grounds for jihad. We seem to be headed towards the first leg of this objective, getting our bases out of Saudi Arabia, and for now we have temporary bases in Iraq from which to stage more operations against the likes of Syria and Iran. But it's an open question whether the new Iraqi government will agree to long-term basing rights.

I've probably forgotten something, and I'm also leaving off some of the more intangible objectives, like demonstrating US resolve, sending a message to other dictators, improving the future credibility of UN resolutions, repaying the Kurds and Shiites for abandoning them in the past, etc. I'm also ignoring the end of the oil-for-food boondoggle, since that wasn't and couldn't have been fully appreciated as a war aim before the war.

If you enjoyed this column by Dan McLaughlin, you can read more of his work at The Baseball Crank.

So while I'm vacationing this week-end, I decide to take in a movie. Unfortunately for me, I chose to go see "Shrek 2," a festering, execrable, dung heap of a children's movie that will undoubtedly turn every child who watches into a perverted cross between Marv Albert and Michael Jackson. Some of you probably think I'm exaggerating, but it's almost impossible to convey to you how warped you'd have to be create a monstrosity like this and market it to children.

The two main "protagonists" of the film are big, green, orcs, hobgoblins, trolls, something, I'm not sure what they were supposed to be, they never said. But, they run around assaulting humans, farting, and insulting Eddie Murphy's character, their friend, who is a donkey who apparently mated with a dragon. Of course, it gets worse later in the movie when we find out a woman and frog are married. Welcome to the "Shrek 2" freaky free-for-all mating zone!

If only that were it, this simply would be a bad movie -- another Leonardo Dicaprio's "The Beach" or even "Gigli". But, the kid's pervert-o-mind-a-rama doesn't stop there. We get the female troll's father trying to have her husband murdered, Pinocchio wearing women's underwear, the lead hobgoblin and his friends stealing things from a faerie godmother like common criminals, and a gingerbread man having his arms ripped off and drowning to death while everyone else has a lovely party. It was like some sort of demented wonderland dreamed up by a crack addict who just watched the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

So, let me cut to the chase -- thumbs down -- so far down that my thumb is now right now in China and there is a Chinese woman there, looking at my thumb, and asking herself how a thumb could have gone so far down that it made it to the other side of the world. But, that's how bad, how twisted, how perfectly French this despicable movie was.

PS: I'm just kidding, thumbs up except for the Pinocchio wearing women's underwear thing. Who wants to see that in a children's movie?

After I'd already arrived at the beach last Friday, I received the following email from RWN reader, Jeremy J. Luzier. Here's what Jeremy had to say...

"Dear Mr. Hawkins,

Sincerely
Jeremy J. Luzier
Sic Semper Tyrannis"

Because I wasn't all that familiar with the Constitution Party's agenda or Mr.Peroutka, I took a few minutes to peruse the page and get a basic feel for what they believe in. I think this sums it up pretty well...

"The Constitution Party is the only party which is completely pro-life, anti-homosexual rights, pro-American sovereignty, anti-globalist, anti-free trade, anti-deindustrialization, anti-unchecked immigration, pro-second amendment, and against the constantly increasing expansion of unlawful police laws, in favor of a strong national defense and opposed to unconstitutional interventionism."

Other than the "anti-free trade" & "anti-homosexual rights" part of the platform (If we're talking about being against gay marriage, I'm with you, otherwise, probably not), I agree with the basic principles that the party seems to stand on.

That being said, let me apologize in advance because I'm about infuriate all the people who are serious about third parties.

Third parties, the Constitution Party included, are a waste of time. That goes for the Libertarian Party, Green Party, Reform Party, etc, etc, etc.

People who take these Parties seriously are like Sisyphus, forever pushing a rock up a hill, when they're destined never to reach the top. Heck, in some ways, the people who vote for third parties are worse than Sisyphus, because their efforts aren't merely futile, they're working against their own best interests.

Just look at the Greens in 2000. They voted for Ralph Nader instead of Al Gore, a man who's such a left-wing, environmental whacko that he once wrote, "We now know (the internal combustion engine's) impact on the global environment is posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront."

But no, he wasn't pure enough for rabid kooks in the Green Party, so Ralph Nader drained off enough support from Gore to put George W. Bush in the White House.

Of course, it's hard for me to feel any sympathy for the Dems since I believe the Reform Party probably cost the GOP the White House in 1992 (although that can be debated) and the Libertarians are forever siphoning off votes from us. It's also worth noting that I've heard more than a few left-wingers publicly yearning for Roy Moore to run on the Constitution Party's ticket just so he could funnel votes away from W. Just imagine that: Roy Moore helping to put John Kerry in the White House.

It would be tempting to call that an anomaly, but in reality, it's just par for the course. The Constitution Party & the Libertarian Party might as well be funded by Ted Kennedy, MoveOn, and George Soros, because those are the people whose agendas they unwillingly serve. And although they're on the opposite side of the aisle, I should give a big, sloppy, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy hug to Ralph Nader and company too because they might as well be funded by the Bush campaign since that's who primarily benefits from his candidacy.

That's not to say that people in these third parties I've mentioned are bad people or are even wrong (scratch that, the Greens are wrong -- about almost everything), it's just that what they're doing is totally unproductive. If they really want to make a difference, they should either join a major party and try to change it from within or they should spend their time battling in the arena of ideas to prove the merit of their ideas. That's productive, that has a point. But this whole "Hooray, we managed to cost the guy who we agreed with the most the election" mentality in counterproductive and I hate to see people who might be able to make a real impact in the GOP or Democratic party instead of wasting their time campaigning for candidates who can never win.

***Update #1***: Wow, somehow or another I missed the anti-free trade portion of their platform when I read this originally. I'm rabidly pro-free trade, so that wouldn't apply to me. Therefore, I corrected I added that in the original post.

Also, while I'm also not in favor of deindustrialization, I'm also not in favor of the government bending over backwards to stop it.

One of the things many bloggers have long believed is that weblogs are able to influence public opinion, despite not receiving massive amounts of traffic, because large numbers of influential people read blogs. In other words, blogger influence comes mostly from "the who", not the "how many". So, in order to test that hypothesis, I decided to poll more than a 100 prominent conservatives to see if they read blogs. Here are the results...(Cont)