Please bear with me, TCm readers, as I’m still trying to get my blogging sealegs under me again. I have been treading water of late, for obvious reasons, and am now trying to settle back into a steady state in my life.
For myself, I will return to work tomorrow, a step back towards stability. I anticipate a post about my father soon, probably over the weekend.
In the meantime, I’ve added a few new blogs to the blogroll. Please give them a gander.
Okay, now the Kerry camp is just pathetic.
Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign slammed Vice President Dick Cheney, a heart patient, over reports he had a flu shot, despite a shortage of the vaccine.
The campaign complained that Treasury Secretary John Snow and Senate Majority leader Bill Frist also had jabs, despite Bush’s advice that the young and healthy did not need to get an injection.
“Once again, the Bush administration proves that it is the ‘do as we say, not as we do’ White House,” the campaign said in a statement issued in Pittsburgh where Kerry was campaigning.
“The very week that (health) secretary (Tommy) Thompson is telling Americans to keep calm, Dick Cheney, John Snow and Bill Frist are getting flu shots.”
“It is unfortunate that the Bush administration failed to do the work necessary to ensure that all Americans, including those most at risk, had been able to get shots as well.”
Cheney would fit into the government’s definition of those most vulnerable to a looming influenza epidemic as he has a long history of heart disease.
John Kerry may become our president. It would be a travesty if it comes to fruition, as it would be the based on the sleaziest campaign I can remember, a campaign of lies, innuendo and defeatism, seemingly sanctioned and propped up by the mainstream media. Now, are they actually trying to garner political gain from a flu vaccination administered to a 63-year-old key government official with a history of heart ailments? I repeat, pathetic.
Those pesky Taliban types, driven from their brutal reign, are now at odds with each other over their inability to hamper the recent Afghan elections.
Fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has had a serious falling-out with some of his lieutenants, who blame him for the rebels’ failure to launch a major assault during landmark Afghan presidential elections, the US military said today.
The October 9 poll was largely peaceful, and US military spokesman Major Scott Nelson claimed that intelligence reports from Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan showed this had demoralised the Taliban militia.
“There’s been serious disagreements between Mullah Omar and some of his lower commanders on the strategy for the follow-up after the election,” Major Nelson said. “There’s a lot of frustration with his lack of effectiveness in disrupting the election.”
Omar, whose hardline Islamic regime harboured Osama bin Laden, has been at large since US-led forces ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001. The rebels have repeatedly mounted attacks in the past year on government and coalition targets.
Major Nelson said he still saw “indications the man (Omar) is involved in planning Taliban operations” in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, but conceded the military didn’t know in which of the two countries the one-eyed rebel leader was hiding.
The US military, which has 18,000 forces hunting al-Qaeda and Taliban holdouts in Afghanistan, has hailed the election as a body blow to the rebels because their threats to sabotage it failed to come true.
An estimated 8 million Afghans turned out to vote, and US-backed interim leader Hamid Karzai appears set to become the country’s first directly elected leader after a quarter-century of conflict.
This is the effect of the continuing and relatively unsung pressure that has been placed on the bad guys in Afghanistan. The Taliban militia is essentially castrated, hoping for terrorism while unable to take the field in any significant manner for fear of being shredded. They cannot even pretend to keep up a sustained guerilla campaign, as the Afghan national army continues to train and grow.
It must suck for Omar to be stuck on the mountainous sidelines, watching the freedom he despises beginning to take root. Afghanistan, and indeed the whole world, will be better off with death of the last Taliban scum.