This isn't the real Mexico.

Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

If you're not too busy celebrating the victory of the Mexican army over the worthless frogs or working your way towards the worm at the bottle of a bottle of mescal, I'd point you towards the following diversions--

* Today is also anniversary of the sole lethal attack by the Japanese during WW II on American civilians on the mainland of the United States. It happened right here in Oregon.

* Swinebread, my kids spent Saturday watching Iron Man and partaking in Dim Sum and Free Comic Book Day. Once in a while my kids will tell me how cool I am. It's really not me. I just have cool friends like Swinebread.

* I caught Gordon Smith's new tv ad this weekend and it really gave me a chuckle. Smith doesn't have a challenger to his seat until after our primary on the 20th. Rather than wait to see which of the two democrats will be running against him he instead ran an ad attacking them both. This doesn't exactly exude quiet confidence on his part. Good.

* I'm going to pick-up Mario Kart Wii next weekend. Now if I can just figure a way to keep the missus away from it and the television. I can't afford to replace another flat screen.

* I continue to be scared by the growth of ocean dead zones. Besides the other side effects of global warming this is one that hits home for me directly. We going camping and crabbing off the coast every summer and the areas where coastal sea life can survive are shrinking at an alarming rate.

My dear penguins, we stand upon a great threshold! It's alright to be scared; most of you won't be coming back.

It's difficult to come up with a word that succinctly describes this silly bit of wingnut dead-ender logic. The one word that comes immediately to mind is "inane." I'm sure you could come up with a better descriptor.

To try and wrap your brain about where he's coming from you really should read the Boston Globe piece he links that he's so unsuccessfully trying to riff on. He's basically taken the original opinion piece by Joan Vennochi and inserted Harry Truman's name wherever George Bush appeared in the original. Hey, nobody ever accused conservatives of originality.

This ongoing pattern of attempting to conflate the war in Iraq with WW 2 has quickly moved from cute but wrong-headed to downright sad. It's one thing to formulate an analogy only to have it collapse under the weight of it's own internal logic. It's quite another thing entirely to stick with that analogy after said collapse.

It should be more than obvious to anyone with even a smathering of understanding of world history that the current conflict against fundamentalist extremists is nowhere near the scale, nor poses nowhere near the threat, as the conflict against global tyranny that was the Second World War. Our enemy has no standing army. No navy. No air force. All they have is anger and intent. Hardly much of a threat to the world's last superpower, particularly if it remains vigilant and aware.

But what really elevates such screeds to the realm of pathetic is invariably the author won't be typing out their global call to arms from a tent in Baghdad or an aircraft carrier off the Gulf, but from the safety of a keyboard a half a world away. In the case of the above article the author, DJ Drummond, is a grad student. He is not fighting in this war.

I'm sure Drummond would have some excuse or another as to why he's not in uniform patrolling the streets of Baghdad but the long and the short of it is that, whatever his excuse, his argument in support of the war comes across thusly:

We are fighting WW III in Iraq. Our enemies threaten our lives, our faith, our very way of life. But don't ask me to fight because I have better things to do like finish college.