Mark Steyn on Ian Fleming: It's not at all a review of the new Casino Royale movie. Steyn comes to stick up for Fleming as a writer and Bond as a literary character.

Happy Thanksgiving: I'm done for the day and week. Hope everyone has a great holiday. I'm hosting 6 or 7 friends for the feast, so the storm of cooking begins. Cheers!

An Inconvenient Rebuttal: Here's a worthwhile corrective to the ManBearPig's bloviating movie. (Caution, enviros: link may contain actual science!)

In a twofer, via Viking Pundit, here's news of new ways to get at evil fossil fuels.

Ten Worst Automobiles Today: From The Truth About Cars, here are the worst automibiles available for sale in the United States during 2006, as voted on by their readers anyway. My favorite review, of the Subaru B9-Tribeca:

Subaru execs may have been stony-faced when TTAC described the front end of
their new SUV as a “flying vagina," but at least they didn’t turn to stone.
Given the unrelenting hideousness of the Tribeca’s design– from its genital
front end to its fallopian dash to its alien eyes rear end — they should count
themselves lucky. The fact that the B9 is also slow, thirsty and cramped proves
that repulsiveness can be more than skin deep. Why Subaru felt the need to enter
the SUV segment when it offers such a wide range of superb four wheel-drive
sedans and wagons is anybody’s guess. Clearly, they shouldn’t have bothered. -
RF

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Subaru and a Saab are the only non-Big Three models to make the list. So way to go, guys. How about a little help from the Uncle?

It's raining and crappy here:

So I thought I'd ruin every one else's day, too.

Kerry's Line: Nah, I agree with Radley here. I believe that Kerry was trying to zing the president as being dumb with the "stuck in Iraq" line, just like he claims. Even Kerry's not enough of a tin ear to mean what his critics say he meant. Of course it was a painful line, and of course he proved himself the moron with this, but it really does look like just a flubbed joke to me.

And Radley is also right that the GOP trying to make Kerry's stumble carry water for them is plain silly.

Then again, I defended Dick Armey when he said "Barney Fag," so what the hell do I know?

More Kerry: Okay, I'll stop after this, but I just read a little bit of the coverage of this deal for the first time today. First, Jonah Goldberg's post here is just absolutely perfect:

....The guy thinks he can be president and he thinks he's doing what the
"fighting Dem" base wants him to do. The problem is he has basically radiated
himself with the isotope Asinine-90 and the only way the rest of his party can
protect itself from radition poisoning is to sequester the guy in some lime-pit
for 10,000 years until his asininity half-life deterioates to managable levels.

Second, you can read Kerry's statement a few different ways, admittedly. I honestly still believe though, that he was making the statement, speaking to a bunch of students, that if you don't work and study hard you won't have a whole lot of options in life and you'll wind up screwed by The Man and sent to fight a war you don't believe in, like him. I honestly think if he had intended to zing Bush a child could have written a more manageable line than the one he spit out.

And besides, for all the flak Bush takes for his malaprops, if that's what this was by Kerry, he should be roasted for this one like never before. It's the king of flubbed lines, knocking anything Dan Quayle said off the podium.

I didn't want to do this: But I'm going to get all political again, and over one of thedumber issues that could possibly come up. You don't expect serious issues debate at FauxPolitik, do you? So here goes.

John Kerry has the IQ of dog crap. This is not meant as an insult to John Kerry. I would never go personal in a campaign like this, unlike these evil Republican henchmen like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. No, I honestly just worry about the Junior Senator from Massachusetts and his ability to feed and clothe himself without serious injury. Perhaps he should be institutionalized?

Seriously, though, I completely disagree with Radley's take on this, although he does allow that Kerry is a "bumblefuck blowhard" which is an excellent descriptive phrase. He buys Kerry's explanation, though, that it was just a muffed line intended to zing Bush. That just doesn't make sense. The language just doesn't work very well, and such an eloquent speaker as Kerry (well, he does have the President beat in that category, even if it's like playing against the "special" team) would have come up with a better way to deliver the intended line. This was most certainly not off the cuff.

Neither, though, do I think Kerry "hates" the military or veterans, though, and there is a lot of opportunistic and over-heated language from the right to this effect. He doesn't hate them, but I think he honestly doesn't understand them, and to an extent pities them. The Vietnam mentality is impossible for him to shake, that you into the military if you're unlucky and/or poor. Bush was rich and lucky, he wasn't (although I don't recall that he was "born a poor black child," either - Navin R. Johnson he ain't). He doesn't understand that some people actually joined the Army knowing they might have to go fight, and in fact expected to. I know a few who have been to Iraq and they honestly looked at it as , if not exactly a positive experience, at least an opportunity to do what they signed up to do, risks understood just fine, thank you.

The fact is the military population is a fairly good cross section of the country, from a racial, education, economic and geographic perspective (here's one example of this). People join for a lot of reasons, including lack of other apparent options. But by no means does his statement that if you don't study and aren't too bright you'll end up in Iraq hold true in any meaningful sense. But I think he still believes that, as do a lot of people I talk to.

I'm not impressed by the statements of indignation coming from the right (and probably from Democrats as well who don't want to get dragged down by this). I don't think it's something to get all rattled about, because I think the feeling is pretty widespread by those of Kerry's generation. Their entire view of the war and confronting Islamic Terrorism is often clouded by this feeling.