Redstate

Funny anecdote from the Red Dawn site you referenced:

Five of the 36 parachutists who took part in the invasion scene early in the film were wounded when high winds blew them as far as one mile off target. Parachutist Jim Fisher, wearing a Russian paratrooper uniform, landed in a tree and found himself calling out to local rescuers: "Don't shoot, Don't shoot! I am not a Russian soldier!"

Eerily similar to the heoric behavior of the Flight 93 passengers.  Only in America.

I am embarrassed to admit that I never saw the movie.  I will be going to netflix as soon as this comment posts.

but me and the entire male portion of my HS class were fired up about this movie.

Red Dawn rocked!

Jed Eckert: How did you get shot down, Colonel?

Col. Andy Tanner: It was five to one. I got four.

Col. Andy Tanner: ...The Russians need to take us in one piece, and that's why they're here. That's why they won't use nukes anymore; and we won't either, not on our own soil. The whole damn thing's pretty conventional now. Who knows? Maybe next week will be swords.

Darryl Bates: What started it?

Col. Andy Tanner: I don't know. Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they're gonna fight.

Jed Eckert: That simple, is it?

Col. Andy Tanner: Or maybe somebody just forget what it was like.

Jed Eckert: ...Well, who is on our side?

Col. Andy Tanner: Six hundred million screaming Chinamen.

Darryl Bates: Last I heard, there were a billion screaming Chinamen.

Col. Andy Tanner: There were.

[he throws whiskey on the fire; it ignites violently, suggesting a nuclear explosion]

CNN Re-education Film Narrator: [at what once was the Calumet, Colorado Drive-in Theater] America is a whorehouse... where the revolutionary ideals of your forefathers... are corrupted and sold in alleys by vendors of capitalism...

That WHOLE MOVIE was a funny anecdote!

I saw it twenty-five times, loved it every time, but: it was awful.  Although... I have my own favorite quotes.

(About Europe)

"They decided that twice in one century was enough." (Pause) "Except for the Brits, but they won't last long."*

Moe

*This movie predates the full impact of Maggie Hillary-Will-Be-A-Slave's-Flattery-A-Child's-Imitation Thatcher.

Did it not strike you as odd that the first target of the Commie paratroopers was the local high school?

I watched it for the second time before I left DC for a trip to the Russian Federation my senior year.  It served as an indispensable antidote to the "woe is me, we Americans are so spoiled and terrible" attitude from our Vermont guide.

Happy though I am for Ben, the Washington Post is only re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. But simply adding another Conservative columnist to the opinion pages while keeping their reporting staff a 100% Democrat wouldn't help them.

How come we have former writers for The Nation, The New Republican and other Left-wing outlets working as reporters for the news pages but no one from National Review or Commentary?

It is hysterically funny to hear all the liberals howling at Editor & Publisher about the liberals at the WaPo being "objective," while Domenech is a "partisan." One of them even wanted the Post to hire yet another liberal to 'balance' Domenech.

They just don't understand that what they call "objective" sounds to a majority of Americans like "partisan liberal." Meanwhile, according to the WaPo guy, "the paper is struggling to keep making a profit in the face of declining circulation and growing competition for advertizers [sic]." Maybe one day they'll wake up.

Interesting that the entry that comes up right now is a rebuttal to a psychoanalysis of Conservatives as whiny, disgruntled, hard-to-soothe people.  

Er, I personally don't think so.  My ex-girlfriend, who is a licensed clinical psychologist, is one of the most anxiety-afflicted individuals I've ever known, and she basically drove me crazy because she was impossible to soothe, like a raw nerve.  She's been in therapy for more than ten years and was addicted to Xanax as an undergraduate.  Ditto my former boss, who was a control-freak because she felt that almost everything in the world was rubbing her the wrong way.  

What I've found to be the case more often with Conservatives is that they're very stable people who come from good families and the largest criticism liberals have of them is that they don't sweat the small stuff enough.  They have a tendency to make liberals furious because they don't care very much about their innumerable complaints and foibles.  And being around a committed liberal/leftist for a long enough period of time will make you sick with anxiety, because you'll try to compensate for their fears.  It doesn't work:  tomorrow morning they'll wake up with an entirely different set of gripes.

Anyway, Ben, congratuations on the WaPo stint.    

So I'm participating as an American Army officer in a Peacekeeper exercise in 1995, essentially where Russian soldiers and American soldiers co-train on peacekeeping stuff.  We're in Manhattan, Kansas, which was reportedly nervous in some circles at the prospect of a hundred or so ACTUAL RUSSIAN soldiers training in their backyard.  (We were actually formally warned that some crackpots might take action.)

Needless to say, we're trying to show these guys a good time after our little deal was over.  We went to a Manhattan KS watering hole (to admire all the Kansas hotties of course).  We're being diplomatic and on our best behavior.  Remember, this is 1995 and we're still trained to shoot T-72s on sight, so we're a little like Kirk in Star Trek IV...aren't these guys the enemy?  Anyway, we walk into the bar and guess what movie is playing behind the bar.

Yup.  Red Dawn.  One can't imagine a worse movie to play (well maybe Rocky IV).

And guess what PART of the movie is playing?  Why, the part where the Russians are executing civilians on the side of the road.  Women and maybe children.

I'm embarrassed at the prospect of being a bad host.  I kinda smile and try to ignore this gruesome scene playing out, and maybe draw their attention away from the movie, while kinda wondering what these Russians think.

One of them replied.  He pointed out that the uniforms of the soldiers in the firing squad were all wrong.

I figured these guys weren't too different from us after all.

One other interesting thing is that the article that Ben cites first is from Toronto.  I can state categorically that if I had to grow up in Canada, I'd be whiny and disgruntled, too.  Eventually the pot soothes them and they get used to having their money taken away from them, though...

I read something by Ben was when he was an intern at NR. If he wasn't an intern, my apologies -- I see that WaPo lists NR contributing editor among his credits.

But this is an amazing thing. When I was Ben's age, the Washington Post was playing the leading role in taking down Richard Nixon. I had it fixed in my mind for decades that the Post, like the New York Times, was not only liberal but anti-Republican.

But since 9/11, I've gained a new respect for the Post's editorial pages. Yes, the paper's still liberal, and a lot of the news reporters, Dana Milbank in particular, have that gorillas-in-the-mist view of conservatives. But the paper's editorials, I think, have been mostly fair to President Bush. They've been factual and reasoned. And more than that, they seem at times to reflect an opinion that America is a great country with a great heart. Which certainly can't be said for the Times.

So congratulations to Ben. And congratulations also to the Washington Post. This is a great day for both William F. Buckley Jr. and for the publishing descendants of Katherine Graham.

Watch your back, Ben. It's a treacherous place for conservatives.

These kids grew up in Berkeley.

Normal, well-adjusted kids would more than likely conform to the expectations of the society they were raised in, which in Berkeley is pretty liberal. The disgruntled ones would be more likely to challenge this view, which would make them conservative.

from Editor and Publisher and you wonder if there's any hope. Doesn't look like there is.  One liberal says that a conservative "slurs Daily Kos".  How is that possible?  It would appear that to the left you're free to say anything you want, as long as it mimics what they say.  Tell me there isn't a totalitarian core at work here.

You want balance? C'mon. The Post already walks that line with skill and a philosophical equilibrium that deserves our praise.

Consider Tuesday's op-ed page. You had Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post columnist, riffing on Harvey Mansfield's recent paeons to the virtues of manliness to mock President Bush's administration.

Mansfield writes that he wants to "convince skeptical readers -- above all, educated women" -- that "irrational manliness deserves to be endorsed by reason." Sorry, professor: You lose. What this country could use is a little less manliness -- and a little more of what you would describe as womanly qualities: restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt.

Then there's E.J. Dionne Jr., bemoaning the retirement of Rep. Boehlert of New York, because Republican liberals are the highest manifestation of enlightened politics, within the GOP, that is.

Paradoxically, because the liberal Republicans didn't pretend to hate government, they were better at fiscal responsibility. They were willing to match their desired spending levels with the taxes to pay for them. It didn't make for exciting, to-the-barricades politics. It merely produced good government.

Now, outside the GOP, we have the highest manifestation of enlightened politics in the op-ed piece by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-MD -- who, I should note, knocked off a liberal Republican, Connie Morella -- warning of the Administration's missteps in Afghanistan.

The passed-over, warmed-over Eugene Robinson declares the Bush Administration, and the Vice President in particular, of living on "The Planet of Unreality." Robinson adds his usual calm, analytical voice:

Here is self-delusion: Dick Cheney went on "Face the Nation" a few hours later and said he disagreed with Allawi -- who, by the way, is a tad closer to the action than the quail-hunting veep. There's no civil war, Cheney insisted. Move along, nothing to see here, pay no attention to those suicide bombings and death-squad murders. As an aside, Cheney insisted that his earlier forays into the Twilight Zone -- U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, the insurgency is in its "last throes" -- were "basically accurate and reflect reality."

Maybe on his home planet.

Wrap the page up with piece by Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn, on the split nature of the electorate, and that's it.

To summarize:

• Two smug and condemnatory anti-Bush columns by Washington Post columnists.
  
• A WaPo column explicitly prefering liberal Republicans to conservatives.
  
• A column by a Democratic congressman criticizing the Bush Administration's foreign policy.
  
• An analytical column on voting patterns by a Democratic pollster.

That, my friends, is balance.

P.S. To be fair, the Dionne column is mild by his standards, more a salute to Boehlert than a E. "J for Jeremiad" Dionne attack on conservatives. The Van Hollen piece is not overtly partisan either; indeed, its warnings are worthy of consideration.

And, to be even more fair, Marcus and Robinson are always goofs, so Tuesday's column is no departure from the norm.

A. The majority who live east of Dulles doesn't care what the bozos write.

B. Only the moonbats in the White Flag Party think it's true.

C. This is why they are so shocked when they keep losing elections.

4. As such, their delusion is good for the country.

WaPo editorial page is an opinion leader, one of the definers of the MSM. If you see a story on the nightly news, hear the slant of questions at a President's news conference, or even read op-eds at a newspaper in, say, Des Moines, Iowa, the Wash Post and its opinion section played a role in its content and cast.

It is bad for such a dominant force in public opinion to be so slanted, sardonic and stupid, depending on the day and columnist. We face a tougher time defeating the terrorists in Iraq in part because the President's poll numbers are down, in part because the Washington Post plays a role in driving those numbers.

And the Washington Post's opinion section is pretty good, in comparison to some others. At least you get Anne Applebaum, who, while no conservative, understands the nature of evil. And Charles Krauthamer, too.

the knives have already been unsheathed...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/3/23/152531/888

I went and took a look at what the liberal blogs came up with and it would appear that Mr. Domenech appropriated the writings of others, and did so well into his adulthood.

We'll have to let this shake out a bit, of course, but in these days of computers it's pretty easy to do those word searches and connect them to timelines. It looks open-and-shut to me.

This is how Webster's Dictionary defines plagiarism:

transitive senses : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source

intransitive senses : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

So, it theft now a traditional Red State value?

I went and took a look at what the liberal blogs came up with and it would appear that Mr. Domenech appropriated the writings of others, and did so well into his adulthood.

I've seen a movie review and a humor piece from when he was 16/17, and I'll let him answer for those (he will). What else you got, besides that Pointy Stick™?

Poo all over the kitchen sink!

Fortunately, scrubbing is a snap.

Ben

The most important co-stars in the Bond movies are the spy's toys. These films usually have the audience applauding for the stunts and this episode of the superspy saga is no different.

Steve Rhodes

The most important costars in the Bond movies are the spy's toys. These films usually have the audience applauding for the stunts, and this episode of the superspy saga is no different.

Ben

At its best, "The Bachelor" skews the absurdity of any human relationships, even the successful ones. As terrified as Jimmie is of losing his freedom, Anne is equally worried about becoming like her parents, who, it turns out, are an older couple nauseatingly and demonstratively still in love with each other.

Salon

At its best, it skews the absurdity of any human relationships -- even the successful ones. As terrified as Jimmie is of losing his freedom, Anne is equally worried about becoming like her parents -- who, it turns out, are an older couple nauseatingly, demonstratively, still in love with each other.

Sorry I let you back in.

The good news tonight is that Ben/Augustine will be back here at RedState full time any day now, and can get back to ridiculing liberals like Froomkin for writing by cutting and pasting.

I forgot how much I loved mass bannings.

because this is certainly a target rich environment.

And I have an RPC-90.

well, lets ban away but there seems to be some questions that need to be answered.  if those examples of plagiarism are legit then there should be  a fast, good explanation.

Prologue: The Pe-Blam -- A View of the Pile™

Chapter One: View to a Blam

Chapter Two: License to Blam

Chapter Three: Blamming Never Dies

Epilogue: From the Pile™ With Love

He can make a headshot nine times out of ten, so body armor is pointless (as you well know, with body armor, the Golden Gun just nearly kills you).

I prefer to spray bullets across someone's head, or tag them with a moonraker.