Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats:

Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia — and I wasn't a target.

I'd ask what I've been doing wrong with my life that I missed out on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama's fuckwit brigade. But alas, I know full well wherein I failed. This is what I get for going on hiatus for months to finish my book and put multiple spokes in the wheels of SCO. I didn't maintain the momentum I had in 2002/early-2003, and fell off the moonbats' radar.

To all of you who were targeted -- Internet Hagannah, InstaPundit, Steve denBeste, Charles Johnson, and others: you have my respect and my thanks for what you do every day. The war against terror is a war of ideas as well as bullets. You do great service by unflinchingly exposing the lies of the terror network and its apologistsin the West. The Malaysian Moonbats, in recognizing this, have paid you greater tribute than I can.

Hmmm. Maybe I ought to update the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto. Think that'd piss 'em off enough that they's try to DDOS me?

Why Howard Dean Won't Get My Vote:

After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to walk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving independents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean — who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA.

OK, I like the fact that Dean is pro-gun. In this, and in other ways, he's sane on subjects where Democrats are generally insane. But it is almost certain I will not vote for him. Because the next President of the U.S. must have a strategic vision for fighting the threat of Islamist terror and WMDs, and Dean has no such vision.

Note that I am not saying the next president must have George Bush's strategic vision — and don't bother with the Bush-is-an-idiot, it's-all his-handlers routine; Bush has routinely outsmarted people who underestimated him and as long as they delude themselves that he's a moron, it will be easier for him to continue doing so. But there must be some strategic vision, some sense of realpolitik. Dean ain't got it.

In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls appears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities, with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman. And supposing there were, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it through the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election.

And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by interest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously.

I'm not actually talking about the inmates of the asylum that is today's loony left: the retread Marxists, the po-mo academics, the anti-globalization crowd — what conservatives call with some justification the Blame-America-First brigades. Expecting anything but toxic babble from these people was always doomed. No, the trouble is that the Democratic interest groups that aren't outright insane have no way to fit an anti-terror strategy into their model of how to do politics.

How can feminists, gays, or the various skin-color cliques in the racial-problem industry cope? For these groups, politics is all about identity and grievance and maybe who gets the biggest slice in the next round of redistributing the domestic wealth — they've actually lost the very *concept* of the 'national interest', and are no more capable of grappling with the implications of 9/11 than they would be of speaking Sumerian.

Or the people who are *really* calling the shots in the Democratic Party — trial lawyers and the public-employee unions. (Forget labor in general. The Democrats stopped listening to the AFL-CIO about a nanosecond after it became clear that the private-sector unions could no longer keep most of their people from voting Republican.) Again, nothing about their relationship to the political game gives them anywhere to stand in foreign policy.

The Republicans don't have this problem. All of their major factions have commitments that don't stop at the water's edge. The so-called "national-greatness conservatives", the ideological free-traders, small business, big business, the Christian Right, even the Buchananite isolationalists — they may disagree violently on what the national interest is, but at least there is a place in their normal discourse about politics where they know that concept fits.

Not so most of the the Democrat pressure groups — which means that the terms of internal Democratic debate about foreign policy are being set by the loony left, because the people some of my warblogger colleagues call "barking idiotarian moonbats" are the only ones in the Democratic Party who actually care! They're the only Democrats with a world-view that involves thinking about the rest of the world as anything other than a passive backdrop for domestic politics.

(I'm actually convinced that the reason most Democratic politicians suck up to the U.N. and the French so assiduously is that following "international opinion" relieves them of the intolerable burden of having to think about foreign policy.)

Thus, Dean. Mostly a mainstream Democrat in that what he really wants to do is ignore foreign-policy issues — but the only way he's found to mobilize the angry-Left cadres who matter so much in the primaries is to bark like a moonbat.

That won't get my vote.

Hey, DLC, Rethinking Is Not Enough:

The Democratic Party is getting hip to the fact that advocating gun bans loses them elections. Way to go, Dems! For a crowd widely touted in the media as the best and brightest, it has taken you far too long to wake up.

But there is still a weird feeling of unreality about the exercise. It seems to be mostly about spin rather than substance, mostly about making people believe that Democrats have reformed on this issue without actual reform.

Various bloggers have waxed acidulous about this, but nobody has stepped up and said, explicitly, what the Democrats' problem is and how to fix it. So. DLC honchos, you talk about being reality therapy for the rest of the party. Here is reality.

I am one of the independent, swing voters that could have won you the 2000 election. I do not consider myself a conservative, nor do I vote the Republican ticket.

I believe that the Founding Fathers of the United States bequeathed to me as a member of the unincorporated militia (that is, all citizens capable of bearing arms) the responsibility to remain armed and vigilent against both foreign enemies of my nation and domestic tyrants.

I am one of the people who will almost never vote for a Democrat, because I believe the Democratic Party wants to trash the Second Amendment, confiscate my guns, and destroy the balance of power between citizens and government that was intended by the framers of the Constitution.

I do not really trust either major political party on this issue, but whereas Republicans have less than sterling credibility, Democrats have negative credibility. That is, experience strongly suggests that when Democrats are quiet about firearms policy, they are concealing an anti-gun rather than a pro-gun agenda. Their silence is a lie.

Democratic pollster Mark Penn says "The formula for Democrats is to say that they support the Second Amendment, but that they want tough laws that close loopholes". Be aware that I will interpret any Democrat talking about "tough laws that close loopholes" as an anti-gun agenda being pursued by stealth and deception.

If the Democrats want my vote, it is not sufficient for the Democratic merely to refrain from pushing more firearms restrictions. The Democratic leadership must explicitly recognize the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual right, explicitly repudiate the gun-grabbers in their ranks, and make the abolition of firearms restrictions part of their formal agenda.

Negative credibility means you have a ways to go before you can even get to zero. Want my vote, and that of millions of independent gun owners like me? Start earning it with pro-gun action, not just talk...because if you don't, those millions of independents will have no realistic option but the Republicans, and the already serious decline of the national Democratic party may well become terminal.