My Son Is a Terrorist!

Well, if he is the Washington State Supreme Court says, "Sucks to be you! You cannot tell anyone."

This is the MOST ridiculous thing I have ever seen and when I found out it didn't come for the ninth district I really became worried. Parents can't monitor kids' phone calls!

Excuse me? Aren't the parents paying for the phone service? As far as I am concerned, if someone uses my phone--unless they ask for privacy--I should be able to hear the whole conversation.

I just want to spit!

X Marks the Spot

Friends--whom I email and IM--really HATE when CHRISTmas comes around because I always type CHRISTmas with CHRIST in all caps.

This is something silly I picked up a while back (High School) when I would see the phrase "X-Mas" everywhere (Kitty has a post on this here). At first I thought it was just an abbreviation, but then I looked at it and asked, "Why would anyone put an X in place of Christ? Why not just use C-Mas?" It is a real attempt to take Christ out of CHRISTmas.

Well, just in time for the CHRISTmas season, the American Communist Liberal Union is on the hunt for the treasure at the end of the Judicial Rainbow. First, we have the Ten Commandments (the world's first CONSTITUTION!, but that's another post) case in front of the Supreme Court (our theocratic dictator favors the Ten Commandments). Next, we have the Pledge of Allegiance in front of the Supreme Court. Then we have the Declaration of Independence BANNED in Cupertino, CA, schools as supplementary materials. And now, in the biggest slap in the face, Target and Macy's are banning CHRISTmas from their stores (while they roll in all the cash).

I ask all my readers to sit back and enjoy CHRISTmas as the celebration of Jesus the Christ's birth (even though we don't know when he was born). If you don't believe that Jesus is/was/will forever be: God and perfect man who bore the burden of sin so that whoever accepts the free gift of salvation by simply believing this will be saved, then fine. But that's what CHRISTmas is about.

If you don't like it, then don't celebrate, but celebrate diversity! Celebrate that people are celebrating something they love and are passionate about; celebrate that people find happiness in things other than materialism (people who want to take Christ out of CHRISTmas but still have X-Mas for all those sales are the true materialists).

This demonstrates what liberals didn't get about "red state" voters. They say we are stupid because we vote against our "economic interests." There are people in this world whose interest are not only about the almighty dollar and what free handout the government can give them. They live their lives devoted to Someone greater than themselves and for one day out of the year, they want to celebrate the Person that gives them their happiness and who saved them.

Labor Day is about how fat-cat, union gangsters saved the "worker" from "oppression" (a holiday for Communists!). Is that day offensive? Not really. So why is CHRISTmas so bad? I think for the same reason the Declaration of Independence sucked for King George and liberated us from the State (aka the British Empire). Christianity liberates people from the bonds of earth, which consequently liberates them from the State.

Since liberals worship the State as God, they are trying to snuff out competition pure and simple.

Deserter

It smelled then when Wassef Ali Hassoun mysteriously disappeared and turned up in Lebanon and now he has been charged with desertion. Michelle Malkin and LGF are all over this.

But he is FINE!

R.I.P. David Brudnoy

Here is one of the 25% of homosexuals, like me, that voted for Bush:

Positively HIV
By David Brudnoy

EDITOR'S NOTE:This article appeared in the April 17, 1995, issue of National Review. David Brudnoy, a longtime contributor and friend of NR died on Thursday night. R.I.P.

The whimsical film critic in me toyed with the idea of calling this piece "Mon Jour chez Oprah,'' in tribute to Eric Rohmer's Ma Nuit chez Maud (1970), but then I decided, a la Richard Nixon, that that would be wrong. What I have to say here is not funny, though my half-year-long ramble through the gruesomeness of AIDS has had its amusing moments. To begin at the end — at least at the end of developments as I write this — I can now say I have spent a day inhabiting the giddy air of the Oprah show, this as a decidedly second banana to Olympic diver Greg Louganis.

As a broadcast and print journalist for the last quarter-century, I am no longer surprised by anything, including the comedy of possessiveness that accompanied the charming Mr. Louganis's appearance on the show. First he was booked, as was I; then ABC's 20/20 convinced Random House, publisher of his new book, that even though that installment of Oprah wouldn't air until three days after 20/20's interview with him, he mustn't appear on Oprah. I was then asked to be Numero Uno on the show, though by the time I flew out to Chicago with my producer, Kevin Myron, the touchy media moguls had relented and allowed Greg to appear. Well, by now you've heard the high points of the sometimes horrifying life — raped at knifepoint, attempted suicide, relentless depression — of the world's greatest diver.

Andy Warhol was wrong: sometimes you do get more than 15 minutes of fame, even if you're not Greg Louganis. I figure that by now I've had at least 20 minutes of fame, and it continues.

Media outlets across the country have expressed an interest in my story. But when NR's literary editor asked me to write about AIDS, it came as rather an enormous surprise. Not because I'm unfamiliar with this magazine or with the relevant debates. I have been part of the NR family since 1968. And among my nearly ten thousand written and broadcast commentaries, essays, and film, stage, and book reviews, about one hundred have touched on homosexuality and a like number on AIDS, though never until now on my own involvement in either. In NR's issue of July 19, 1974, Ernest van den Haag and I took differing positions on ``gay'' rights, and I find that what I had to say then reflects what I believe now.

The surprise was because this journal has been less than latitudinarian on the subject of those infected with HIV. Most conservatives take a dim view of homosexual activity. But I will not try to justify myself here; arguments about the moral status of practicing homosexuals tend to be as inconclusive as arguments about the nature of God. If you have a decade or so to debate the matter, please do. Unfortunately I don't have enough time left for that.

I was diagnosed with HIV in the spring of 1988. When I recovered from my shock — I had assumed that since I didn't (and don't) do intravenous drugs or anal sex, I could not be infected — I decided to deal with the matter privately. I told my local doctor and a very few friends in Boston, where I live, and elsewhere. My local doctor did blood tests on me twice each month, and we sent the results to a physician in Washington, D.C., who is also the doctor of a couple of other well-known conservative AIDS patients. Two or three times each year I went to Washington and had the expensive tests that relate to AIDS — HIV antigen, HIV antibody, T4 cell count, and the like. In this way, and by getting my drugs pseudonymously and not collecting reimbursement for them from my insurance, I maintained perfect secrecy.

Not because I feel shame. I feel regret and sadness, and you and I know that the overwhelming likelihood is that this will all end very badly indeed. I wanted not to burden my friends and family with the knowledge, and I wanted not to be subjected to the usual media reductionism: ``AIDS-infected talk host David . . .'' and so forth.

Like innumerable others I suffered a few infections in the first six years: a little weight loss, diarrhea, thrush. But then, in Kyoto in November 1993, the side effect of one of my drugs, ddI, appeared: peripheral neuropathy, meaning an increasing pain in my feet, which by ten months later had resulted in near-paralysis. By September of last year I couldn't walk up stairs and the pain was fierce.

At that point, this rationalist realist, this no-nonsense fellow, began a six-week exercise in classical denial. I got what I thought was a bad flu — swollen legs, dizzy spells, falling in the bushes behind the radio station, clutching the walls as I walked through the hallways, fatigue, nausea, high fever. Some flu!

I carried on at my TV, radio, writing, and teaching jobs. Sort of. Several nights I was too ill to work, and on Monday, October 24, my producer yanked me off the air because I was incoherent. But the next day I went to my Boston University class on media criticism and delivered what I tenaciously believed was a brilliant lecture, my students sitting transfixed. Months later I ran into one of those students, who, in response to my question about how he and the others had taken the lecture, told me that they sat transfixed because they had no idea what I was talking about and wondered only if I would live through the day.

I almost did not. That afternoon a friend, Ward Cromer, came by to nurse me with Gatorade, Coke, and cool towels. He insisted on taking me to the doctor the next day and I, too weak to protest, agreed. He then went home to do some work and said that he would be back later in the evening and would sack out on the couch. And then the horror truly began.

I know this not from memory but only from the recitations of others. Evidently after Ward left I wandered out on the street, perhaps was mugged — my watch and wallet never turned up — and then re-entered my building, where I began to collapse. The building superintendent called an ambulance and, unconscious, I was whisked off to Massachusetts General Hospital. Ward returned minutes later, was told what had happened, and called 911 to learn where the ambulance had taken me. Finding that his car, parked in front of my building, had been broken into, he grabbed a cab, rushed to the emergency room, and saved my life by telling the doctors I was HIV-positive, at which point they immediately administered a drug that combats Pneumocystis carinii, the pneumonia that frequently kills AIDS patients. Weeks later the doctors told me they figured that from the time the medics wheeled me in, at most twenty minutes of life remained for me. (Does this begin to sound like a TV Movie of the Week?)

Nine days of medically induced coma followed. Five dear friends entered into what I suppose we can now call a death watch, observing this barely alive, shrunken thing hovering on the verge, with well over a dozen tubes coming into and going out of me, a huge tube down to my lungs withdrawing gallons (!) of water, and machines massaging my heart, which had swollen to twice its normal size and was barely pumping. The prognosis was grim. I learned much later that on the third day the doctors in the intensive care unit suggested to Ward, who has my power of attorney and the decision power in medical matters, that perhaps they ought just to disconnect me and let me die peacefully. Ward's second life-rescue occurred then as he resisted. Eventually, I began to respond, and on the ninth day the tube was withdrawn from my lungs and I was brought out of the coma, though for days I was confused, unsure of where I was or what was happening to me. My friends guarded my privacy, and the newspapers and TV and radio stations knew only that I was in critical condition from heart and lung disease.

Eventually, after two weeks in intensive care, I was moved into a regular hospital room and began to emerge from my disorientation, though I saw phantom visitors and otherwise was, as they say, not myself. I was still not allowed out of bed, and one night, at 11:15, a man I had never seen before came into my room and announced that he was a neurologist and wanted to test my feet. Twenty-five minutes later, after poking around and finding no response, he stated that he didn't think I would ever walk again. A nice way to go to sleep, alone, wondering just how did Franklin Roosevelt manage it?

Things then began to speed up. A therapist assured me that she had seen many such cases and felt almost certain that I would walk again. She quickly got me up on a walker, then helped me move a few steps with it. As my heart and lungs healed, I began to realize how dependent I had become on others — on, for instance, nurses' aides to bathe me. I had urinary problems and for several days wore a foley bag; I contracted a few bacterial and viral infections, not uncommon in long-term hospitalization, and that curse called shingles, which is the chicken-pox virus, long dormant, emerging again in adulthood.

Shingles may sound ridiculous, but it is among the most painful and unremitting of diseases, and totally resistant to painkillers. The first stages were bearable. Later, when I was moved for two weeks to the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, to continue learning to walk again (I now walk without any aid, though outdoors I use a cane, owing to the wretched sidewalks and streets of Boston), the shingles entered its itch phase, maddening, and then the worst of all: such intense pain that several times a day I lost bowel control. Then, and only then, I wanted to die. The shingles infects me still, in two spots along a nerve that services the buttocks and the genitals. Your imagination can lead you to understand the full misery of this.

In mid November, the inevitable occurred: the rumors that my condition was AIDS surfaced, and the Boston Globe's radio columnist and her counterpart at the Herald called me. I lied, but it was clear the matter would soon be publicized, if only as rumor. Whereupon my friends advised me to call the Globe and strike a deal: they would spike the rumor story and instead assign one of their best writers to interview me the next morning and do a lead story in the November 17 edition. That, and an exclusive radio interview on my own station, followed by the Herald getting the story and "borrowing'' 24 paragraphs from the early Globe edition. I like to say that forests died to provide the newsprint to tell my story.

The deluge was on: every local talk program on radio and one on TV devoted hours to me. Should I have ``come out'' earlier? Did the Globe "out'' me? Would I still be the leading radio talk host in New England if I lived and returned to work?

I watched the election coverage come and go with me in hospital gowns unable to help. I found that my life was now almost completely exposed. Meanwhile, letters and cards poured in, brought to me dutifully each evening by my producer — by now, about twelve thousand, all but about six of them loving and supportive. The hostile letters tended to be scrawled in crayon and one merrily calculated how hot the fires of Hell would be for me.

On December 4, I was released from the hospital and returned home, gradually to recuperate. One month later, on January 5 (coincidentally the beginning of the winter ratings period), I went back on the air, and a few weeks later back to school, and also back to my writing assignments. I now function about 95 per cent as I did before my hospitalization. I have intense shingles pain, pain in my feet, and fatigue, but I've already regained 15 of the 45 pounds that I lost during my illness and hospitalization. I know now that at all my places of work, discussions were begun under the grim assumption that I would either die or never be well enough to work again. It's not nice, I know, to fool Mother Nature, but I have done so — if only for the few years remaining to me.

Sunday, January 8, the New York Times carried a story, opening another deluge of attention in the media: CBS's Evening News; People magazine; bits on ABC's Day One, NBC's Today, and NBC's Evening News. Fox is nibbling, as are several publishers who want me to do the book version of all this.

I can now claim the dubious distinction of being the most famous AIDS person in New England; as a lady friend put it, the Magic Johnson who can't jump. The story isn't a bad one, of course, but it is really a one-line tale: Conservative media figure is gay and has AIDS. Certainly some of the reaction of some conservatives, not on my show but on others, has been dismay that the Brudnoy they thought was on their side must be a fraud because homosexuals can't be conservative. I have had many a grim laugh hearing that sort of nonsense but, let us be frank, many conservative journals (not, in recent years, this one) have perpetuated that idea.

Obviously I would trade away every second of media attention if in return I could be rid of AIDS. In lighter moments I've borrowed Woody Allen's classic line: I don't fear death — I just don't want to be there when it happens. I'm stronger by the day, given a 100 per cent clean bill of health for my heart and lungs. I'm injecting myself thrice weekly with a drug to help combat anemia, and my doctors watch me carefully. I'm busy, enthusiastic, never despondent or depressed, and determined to make each day count, since I'll probably have fewer days of health — and for that matter of life — than would ordinarily be the case.

So we come again to Oprah Winfrey's show and to the last minutes there at her studio before returning to Boston. Greg Louganis and I, who had never before met and had spent all of ten minutes in each other's company that day, realized that the end for the two of us will be grimly similar. Greg reached out and embraced me before we left, acknowledging our shared condition. We are a fast-growing fraternity, worldwide, we with HIV, and in America AIDS has become the leading cause of death among people ages 25 to 44, heterosexual and homosexual alike. What horrors await Africa one can only speculate, but there, and in Asia and Latin America and Europe and Russia, the word is out: HIV is reaching more and more people.

One of the TV commentaries in November featured my old TV sparring partner and dear friend Mike Barnicle, who on the Boston ABC affiliate talked of the many people who don't think that they know anyone with AIDS, and of how easy it has been for many people to speak disparagingly of those who have it. Mike said that everybody watching that station, where we had worked together for two years, knows somebody with AIDS: "David Brudnoy has AIDS."

As Expected

I heard Ann Coulter take on Pat Halpin go toe-to-toe on the subway this morning and nearly fell out laughing (yes, everyone was looking at me). She, as usual, forced Halpin to reveal the fact that he is a racist!

As I predicted from that exchange, she would pen a piece in defense of Clarence Thomas like she did of Dr. Condelezza Rice. She shows how liberals are practicing a New and Improved Racism and are reminding us who the original racists are:

Most recently – at least as we go to press – last Sunday Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, had this to say about Justice Clarence Thomas: "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written." You'd think Thomas' opinions were written in ebonics.

In the same interview, Reid called Justice Antonin Scalia "one smart guy." He said that although he disagreed with Scalia, his reasoning is "very hard to dispute." Scalia is "one smart guy"; Thomas is the janitor. If Democrats are all going to read from the same talking points, they might want to get someone other than David Duke to write them.

On the Sean Hannity radio show, Democratic pundit Pat Halpin defended Sen. Reid's laughable attack on Thomas by citing Bob Woodward's book "The Brethren," which – according to Halpin – vividly portrays Thomas as a nincompoop.

I return to my standing point that liberals don't read. Harry Reid clearly hasn't read any of the decisions Justice Thomas has written, and Pat Halpin clearly hasn't read "The Brethren."

"The Brethren" came out a decade before Thomas was even nominated to the Supreme Court. The only black Supreme Court justice discussed in "The Brethren" is Thurgood Marshall. That's one we haven't heard in a while: I just can't tell you guys apart.

How many black justices have there been on the Supreme Court again? Oh yes: two. It's one thing to confuse Potter Stewart with Lewis Powell. After all, there have been a lot of white guys on the court. But there have been only two black justices – and Democrats can't keep them straight. Two! That's like getting your mother and father confused. I can name every black guy on a current National Hockey League roster: Is it asking Democrats too much to remember the names of the only two black Supreme Court justices?

Even an op-ed in the NY Daily News recognizes the racism in the democratic party's loathing of Clarence Thomas and supports my assertion that while mormons are socially conservative, they are still racists.

Diversity!

Harry Reid: Racist

Look, it shouldn't shock most that a mormon dislikes a black man. I've met some wonderful mormons, but they believe that black skin is the mark of Cain and it wasn't until the 1970s that blacks were allowed to join the mormon church.

But his statements on Meet the Press were over the top and simply added more evidence that liberals hate conservative minorities--and their complaint is always that they are NOT QUALIFIED (i.e. STUPID).

First read Ann Coulter's, It's Dr. Rice, Not Dr. Dre.

Then read this piece by a liberal that is beginning to see the pattern here.

Inside Job

The fact that Armstrong Williams reveals that Mfume got the boot from the NAACP from by Julian Bond only makes me like Mfume more. Here's a little of Armstrong's account:

Don’t believe the well scripted press conference where former President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Kweisi Mfume, announced his resignation.

Mfume did not resign from the nation’s oldest and most prestigious civil rights organization. He was kicked out, following a long simmering feuded with NAACP Chairman Julian Bond. The two began feuding after Mfume nominated National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice for his 2003 NAACP Image Award.

Furious that Mfume was reaching out to the Bush administration, Bond responded by nominating “Boondocks" cartoonist Aaron McGruder for his Image Award.

MacGruder had ridiculed Rice in his comic strip and later caller her “murderer” for her role in the war in Iraq.

The rift grew as Mfume continued to reach out to the Republican Party. Mfume realized that by reflexively voting Democrat in every election, the black voting populace has given away most of their political bartering power.

Here's a Traitor

Everyone blasted Ann Coulter for writing a book on treason but never calling anyone a traitor. As a lawyer, she knew that if she did so, she would be sued for libel. But I am free to call anyone I want a traitor because I do not have the means to disrupt someone's livelihood that can be quantified in a dollar value.

Tom Hayden is a traitor. And a great article in today's Front Page Magazine illustrates this perfectly:

Today's anti-war movement models itself on the Vietnam protesters, and the movement's leaders include familiar faces. Tom Hayden has written an article, "How to End the War in Iraq," that outlines how to organize an effort to ensure that the United States is defeated in Iraq. The opening sentence: "The anti-war movement can force the Bush administration to leave Iraq by denying it the funding, troops, and alliances necessary to its strategy for dominance." Hayden next lauds the success of the anti-war movement within the Democratic Party and gives proof of its effectiveness. "The pressure of anti-war voices and the Kerry campaign led Bush to delay the request for a supplemental $75 billion appropriation, the assault on Falluja, and the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi elections until after Nov. 2." In other words, giving the enemy breathing room to regroup, delaying democracy for the Iraqi people, and denying our troops the funding they need are all triumphs for the protesters. But it's not enough. More must be done to make sure that American forces are defeated and forced to withdraw. Why? Because, "Once the election was over, the Bush administration turned Fallujah into a slaughterhouse." Here is enemy propaganda, pure and simple, breathtaking in its utter disregard for the truth about the gangsters who controlled Falluja and videotaped the beheadings of innocent people.

Hayden details his plan for Vietnam-like withdrawal from Iraq. "The first step is to build pressure at congressional district levels to oppose any further funding or additional troops for war. If members of Congress balk at cutting off all assistance and want to propose 'conditions' for further aid, it is a small step toward threatening funding. If only 75 members of Congress go on record against any further funding, that's a step in the right direction towards the exit." To accomplish this, the Democratic Party must be pushed into becoming the anti-war party. "The progressive activists of the party should refuse to contribute any more resources, volunteers, money, etc. to candidates or incumbents who act as collaborators." Note the use of the word "collaborators" -- meaning, of course, those who collaborate with the duly elected government of the United States.

Steroids Redux

One way to tell that the media is liberal and/or that McCain is running for president in 2008 is the following: Steroids in MLB.

The media is awash with stories now about how our nation's children, teens and college students are being inundated with steroid pushers now that McGuire, Bonds and Giambia have admitted to using steroids (or HGH).

But where was the media when Bush mentioned this in his State of the Union in 2004? Almost a year ago, Bush said:

To help children make right choices, they need good examples. Athletics play such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some in professional sports are not setting much of an example. The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football, and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message -- that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now. (Applause.)

I remember Nancy Pelosi saying that Bush was crazy for bringing up a subject that was not even a real problem...hmmm, so now that McCain says it--that's news?