Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials are investigating a Hong Kong press report published earlier this week that said China is set to buy up to 210 French jet fighter-bombers, should the European Union lift its arms embargo.
The Chinese-language Hong Kong Commercial Daily, quoting reliable sources, stated that talks on the sale of Mirage 2000 top-of-the-line fighters has been under way since late 2004, and the deal will include 1,200 Mica missiles. China also wants to buy 20 Atlantic ALF-3 maritime patrol aircraft from France's Dassault Aviation, which also makes the Mirage.
The report said Paris is so confident that the embargo will be lifted that it has scheduled pilot training for 40 Chinese pilots to begin in June. But yesterday, U.S. and EU officials said the embargo on China will not be lifted until Beijing improves its human rights record and eases tensions with Taiwan. Simultaneous with the first aggressive use of these weapons by the Chinese, a major disaster should hit France that results in massive casualties, followed by subsequent disasters for each additional aggressive act.
#1
I think a riot and the burning of the French Embassy in D.C. And L.A. might be in order right now. Maybe the shit heads will wake up.
I doubt Russia would be thrilled by this outcome. Japan would take it as a threat that justifies removing it's self from the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. I would demand we start sinking all ships bound for France and cut off all supplies of Oil to France.
#2
pretty obviously all military and hi-tech exchanges with France neeed to cease.
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/17/2005 23:08 Comments ||
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#3
Kinda interesting... MSM can hire "less than desirous contacts" but our intelligence is forbidden to do so -- based on the whining of this same MSM (liberals and Demos) in the past. Big bad USA can't do that -- but, we of the elite media... we have to let the "public" know what is happening!
In full with no comment interruptions
Boy, this confirmation battle over John Bolton, the president's plain-spoken nominee for U.N. ambassador, is really heating up. Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Party's comely obstructionist, has charged that Bolton needs ''anger management lessons.''
I don't know about you, but nothing makes me want to hurl a chair through the window and punch someone's lights out like being told I need anger management lessons. So I was interested to hear about the kind of violent Boltonian eruptions that had led Boxer to her diagnosis. Well, here it comes. (If you've got young children present, you might want to take them out of the room.) From the shockingly brutal testimony of Thomas Fingar, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Intelligence Research:
Q: Could you characterize your meeting with Bolton? Was he calm?
Fingar: No, he was angry. He was standing up.
Q: Did he raise his voice to you? Did he point his finger in your face?
Fingar: I don't remember if he pointed. John speaks in such a low voice normally. Was it louder than normal? Probably. I wouldn't characterize it as screaming at me or anything like that. It was more, hands on hips, the body language as I recall it, I knew he was mad.
He was ''standing up'' with ''hands on hips''! Who's he think he is -- Carmen Miranda? Fortunately, before Bolton could let rip with a ''pursed lip'' or escalate to the lethal ''tsk-ing'' maneuver, Fingar was able to back cautiously out of the room and call the FBI anger management team, who surrounded the building and told the deranged diplomat to come out slowly with his hands above his hips.
Well, I haven't been so horrified since . . . well, since David Gest split from Liza Minnelli and launched a multimillion dollar suit for damages because she'd beaten him up. As ''The Daily Show's'' Jon Stewart observed, ''There is no conceivable amount of money worth telling the world that you were beaten up by Liza Minnelli.'' Likewise, whatever one's feelings about the U.N. and Kofi Annan and multilateralism, there's nothing that could get most self-respecting men to appear in front of a Senate committee and complain that Bolton put his hands on his hips. At least, Liza allegedly beat David to a pulp. True, she'd recently had two hip replacements, so if she'd slapped her hands on her hips, she'd have fallen to the ground howling in agony, and David could have run for his life. Or, indeed, strolled for his life, given that she was overweight, barely 5 feet tall and a decade his senior. But my point is: Even Gest might have balked at complaining about hands on hips.
Still, in the ever accelerating descent into parody of the Senate confirmation process, nothing is too trivial. By the time Boxer and Co. are through huffing about the need for anger management lessons, Two-Hips Bolton will be able to walk into every saloon in Dodge and the meanest hombres will be diving for cover behind the hoochie-koochie gals' petticoats before his pinky's so much as brushed his waist.
If the Senate poseurs and the media wanted to mount a trenchant critique of Bolton's geopolitical philosophy, that would be reasonable enough. But there's not even a pretense of any of that. Instead, his opponents have seized on one episode -- an intelligence analyst in a critical position with whom Bolton and others were dissatisfied -- and used it to advance the bizarre proposition that every junior official should be beyond reproach, and certainly beyond such aggressive ''body language'' as putting one's hands on hips. Or as Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, complained to the BBC the other night: Bolton was ''disloyal to his subordinates.''
It's been obvious for three years now that the torpid federal bureaucracies -- the agencies that so comprehensively failed America on 9/11 -- are resistant to meaningful reform, but Beinart, in demanding that the executive branch swear fealty to the most incompetent underling, distills the ''reform'' charade to its essence: We'll talk reform, we'll pass reform bills, we'll merge and de-merge and re-merge every so often, we'll change three-letter acronyms (INS) to four-letter acronyms (BCIS) just to show how serious we are, and a year or four down the line we may well get real tough and require five-letter acronyms.
But in the end we believe underperforming bureaucrats in key roles should be allowed to go on underperforming until retirement age. And, if you happen to show you're just the teensy-weensiest bit upset with one of them, we'll blow it up into a month of hearings on TV.
So vast battalions of America's ''public servants'' sit around all day cross-examining each other about some guy's unacceptably aggressive body language. He put his left hand in! His left hip out! In, out, in, out, he shook them all about! It's the hot dance craze we all do at the Sinister Neocon Conspiracy Initiation Ceremony:
''Ev'rybody's doin' a brand new dance now
C'mon, baby, do the loco-Bolton!''
If he doesn't get the nomination, he's got the makings of this summer's novelty hit, Neoconga No. 5:
''A little bit of fingering of my hips
A little bit of sneeriness on my lips
A little bit of rolling of both my eyes
A little bit of petulance in my sighs
A little bit of starting to almost mock
A little 'You so totally do not rock'
A little bit of memo on your desk
A little bit of you makes me Hulk-esque!''
And, if an underperforming bureaucrat winds up getting Atlanta or Dallas nuked, tough. Better that happen than that out-of-control nutcakes rampage around with hands on hips. After all, as National Review's John Derbyshire put it three years ago, deftly summing up the philosophy of this new war: Better dead than rude.
As for the job Bolton's up for, what would make Barbara Boxer and Joe Biden put their hands on hips? Child sex rings run from U.N. peacekeeping operations? Sudan sitting on the Human Rights Commission while it licenses mass murder in Darfur? Kofi Annan's son doing a $30,000-a-year job but somehow having a spare quarter-million dollars to invest in a Swiss soccer club? There are tides in the affairs of men when someone has to put his hands on his hips and toss his curls. And, if the present depraved state of the U.N. isn't one of them, nothing is. Unlike most of the multilateral blatherers, John Bolton is hip to that.
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/17/2005 4:05:25 PM ||
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#1
This is Steyn at his caustic best; but even so, he's being far too kind to the Democrat idiots who gave us last week's farce.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
04/17/2005 17:33 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
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