Totalitarism 101.

The Belmont Club, possessing some of the best historical-political analysis to be found on the Web, provides an excellent discussion on how the totalitarian mind views human beings as mere columns of a ledger.

Let us keep in mind -

"Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them" - George Orwell

Zimbabwe's Nightmare.

The Post reports on the "Madness of President Robert":

By Craig TimbergWashington Post Foreign ServiceSaturday,
February 12, 2005

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 11 -- The Zimbabwean
government, backing off forecasts of a bumper harvest, announced Friday that 1.5 million people were in immediate need of food aid, especially in the country's drought-stricken southern provinces.

The state-controlled Herald newspaper in Harare, the capital, reported that the government planned to spend about $8
million to buy and distribute more than 15,000 tons of corn meal, the staple food in southern Africa, in the weeks leading up to nationwide parliamentary elections March 31.

The announcement drew immediate criticism from opposition
leaders, human rights activists and other government critics who warned that in the previous two national elections -- in 2000 and 2002 -- President Robert Mugabe's ruling party used food handouts to garner votes. Mugabe has been in power since 1980.

...

"They want to control the food and politicize it," said
Pius Ncube, the Catholic archbishop of Zimbabwe's second-largest city and one of Mugabe's most vocal critics. "They'd rather kill people for the sake of power." Ncube said the announcement was part of a strategy that began last May, when Mugabe called on international food donors to leave Zimbabwe. "We are not hungry . . . Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked. We have enough," Mugabe told Britain's Sky News...

...

The government also has limited the purchase and transport of corn meal by individuals. Roadblocks have been set up on main roads, and Zimbabweans caught carrying more than two or three of the bags can face fines or imprisonment...

[Zimbabwen] agricultural output has plummeted since 2000, when Mugabe sanctioned violent seizures of white-owned commercial farms. Many once-productive fields have turned brown and are overgrown with weeds. As recently as 2002, the World Food Program fed more than half the population.

...

In Rhodesia man exploited man; in Zimbabwe it's the other way around...

Exit Jordan.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reports on the resignation of CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan, and makes a very interesting observation:

"...Even as he [Jordan] said he had misspoken at an international
conference in suggesting that coalition troops had "targeted" a dozen journalists and insisted he never believed that, Jordan was being pounded hourly by bloggers, liberals as well as conservatives, who provided the rocket fuel for a story that otherwise might have fizzled..."

A remarkable admission that the MSM's investigative journalism ceases at a brother's frontdoor.

Re: The Nutty Professor

There isn't much more I can add to the Churchill fiasco not stated earlier and more eloquently by David Horowitz or Mark Goldblatt...other than to remind us that we protect the freedom of a third-rate intellect to make an ass of himself in order to guarantee the right for first-rate intellects to speak freely.

Oh, the Savings we will Save!

W has released his budget. OK... I'm thinking of freshly run-over kittens in order to restrain laughter while I read: there is going to be a big fight over cutting about twenty some-odd billion in domestic spending (flax subsidies, paving West Virginia once again, a compilation of the oral history of mimes in America, etc) out of a budget of 2.7 Teradollars.....Bwahaahaahaaahaaa! Sorry, I wasn't strong enough. Ahem....we are in deep, deep kimchee if we can't cut more than 1% of the budget and not have to commit political suicide.


Everybody's want, er need, is vital. Sir, please lead on real cuts, and we might just follow.