You might have noticed it when you first heard of Bush Derangement Syndrome. You might have noticed it when you heard Howard Dean’s scream heard ’round the world. Maybe you read Michelle Malkin’s book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. Maybe you figured it out when you heard lefties calling Cindy Sheehan the “Mother Theresa” of the anti-war movement.

However or whenever it was, most of us have long known that the left has become completely, moonbat crazy.

Unsurprisingly, there is now evidence to confirm just that:

Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans report having excellent mental health, compared to 43% of independents and 38% of Democrats. This relationship between party identification and reports of excellent mental health persists even within categories of income, age, gender, church attendance, and education.

The basic data — based on an aggregated sample of more than 4,000 interviews conducted since 2004 — are straightforward.

Is there anyone shocked by this? I don’t think lefties themselves will even be surprised by this. While we have looked at them this entire time knowing that there is something very, very wrong with the left, and that they need mental help, they tend to blame it on other things. They’ll say it’s all because of the state of the country today, things like CHIMPY McHITLERBURTON!! BLACKWATER!! GLOBAL WARMING!! IRAQ QUAGMIRE QUAGMIRE QUAGMIRE!! ABU GHRAIB!! MILITARY RAPISTS MURDERERS BABY KILLERS!! GUNS BAD!! NO AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE!! YEAAARGGGHHHH!!!!

And these are the people we should put in charge of our country? Yeah, right.

Hat Tip: Liberty Pundit

Last night was the CNN/YouTube debate for the GOP, and unfortunately, I missed it. From everything I’ve read so far, I’m glad I did. It seems like picking out the various crowd plants CNN used would be more fun.

For everyone else who missed it, John Hawkins at Right Wing News compiled a highlights video, so you can watch the best of the debate without suffering through the entire thing.

Enjoy:

It always somewhat apalls me to see some celebrities with children. When you take the most shallow, superficial, unintelligent, egotistical, spoiled, selfish, narcissistic people in the world and make them responsible for children, it never ends well. Why do you think we see so many celebrity offspring with lives ruined by drugs and/or sex? Occasionally, you see a celebrity with their head on straight who can be a good parent, but more often than not, celebrities look at their children as a means for self-fulfillment, a real-life dolly that they can pass off to a nanny whenever they start to get annoying.

What got me onto this tirade? Paris Hilton has decided that she wants to have a baby, so that her baby can play with Nicole Richie’s baby.

It seems Paris has babies on the brain again after hosting a baby shower for Nicole Richie last weekend, according to People:

“Nicole and I have been playing together since we were two years old,” she told PEOPLE at the Nissan Live Sets One Year Anniversary Party. “I was just telling her, ‘I want a baby so that our babies can play together.’”

This is a prime example. You see celebrities adopting kids left and right, getting pregnant after dating someone for a few months… they just decide they want to have kids and so WHAM! They get one. I think it’s very rare for a celebrity to truly understand just how much devotion a child takes, and celebrities are by their very nature selfish, egotistical, and narcissistic.

Take Angelina Jolie. She adopts kids like some women buy shoes. But is she really a good mother? I can’t help but wonder about that, by looking at her jet-setting around the world. She picks up and flies anywhere she feels like at the drop of a hat, and her children seem to have very little stability with her. She keeps saying that after her next movie, she’s going to settle down, but she never actually does. It just makes me wonder if she’s more concerned about being able to do whatever she wants, or what’s best for her children.

And now Paris Hilton is saying she wants to get pregnant just because she feels like it. And you see it all the time — celebrities adopting kids or having babies with someone they barely have a relationship with, and they do it for one reason: their own self-fulfillment, something to fill the void in their lives.

This is why, as far as I’m concerned, some people just shouldn’t breed. It’s sad, because people like these selfish celebrities will never be mature enough to know that they can’t give a child the environment, family, and stable upbringing that a child needs.

At least not prominently. No, it’ll probably run somewhere around page A-16 or so in a little teeny, tiny column, where no one will see it unless they’re really looking for it.

In the QUAGMIRE! that is Iraq according to Dems, deaths have been dropping. Citizens have been returning. Progress is being made, and victory is inevitable, if Democratic leaders will only let us achieve it.

A sign of our coming win in Iraq:

In the Iraq war, November has been one of the more deadly months for U.S. troops. However, this November has been the quietest since the U.S.-led coalition ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003.

With two days of the month remaining, the number of Americans killed this November in defense of Iraq’s new democracy is 34. That’s less than half the U.S. deaths of the previously least violent November.

Here’s the record on post-invasion Novembers:

U.S. deaths in Iraq war:

November 2003: 82.
November 2004: 137.
November 2005: 84.
November 2006: 70.
November 2007: 34.

Of course, all you’ll hear in the media and from the cut and run, cowardly, traitorous defeatocrats Democrats is how we “can’t afford to stay in Iraq anymore”, how the country is tired of war, how Iraqis don’t want us there, blah blah blah blah blah.

Good news in Iraq = bad.
Bad news in Iraq = good.

For the Dems and the mainstream media, it’s defeat at any cost. But no matter how hard they try to make us lose, we’re still winning. The numbers don’t lie.

Hat tip: Ace

I wonder what he’ll write about Chappaquiddick.

Yes, folks, Teddy himself has sold the rights to his “memoirs” for a whopping $8 million.

The memoirs of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the youngest and last surviving brother of the America’s most famous political siblings and for decades an eminent liberal statesman and legislator, have been acquired by an imprint of the Hachette Book Group USA.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but a publishing official with knowledge of the negotiations said the agreement was comparable to the $8 million Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton received for “Living History” and the $9 million former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will reportedly get for his planned memoir.

The New York Times reported that Kennedy received an advance of more than $8 million.

“I’ve been fortunate in my life to grow up in an extraordinary family and to have a front row seat at many key events in our nation’s history,” Kennedy, 75, said in a statement. “I hope my reflections can contribute to a deeper understanding of many events in the history of this great country and to a more in-depth picture of an American family.”

Yes, this will be fascinating. He can explain all about Mary Jo Kopechne and the “accident” at Chappaquiddick. He can tell us all about how he was expelled for cheating at Harvard. He can list his favorite liquors, so that we all can be a drunken buffoon like him.

Jeez, I can’t wait. Sounds like a real page-turner, huh? This could be Teddy’s version of OJ Simpson’s “If I Did It”, right?

Right?

Hat Tip: Liberty Pundit

Hats off to this lady. I’m competitive, almost to a fault, but I don’t think I could do what Claire Markwardt did.

ESPN High School has her story. Claire is a long-distance runner, and her high school cross country team was competing at the state finals. In the video, you’ll see her fall — this is where her left tibia broke. She gets up, and tries to continue running, causing her fibula to snap. Instead of giving up, however, she crawled to the finish line, determined to finish the race.

What Markwardt saw in the video might not be visible to the rest of us. She saw a teenage girl who, a year earlier, watched the state meet from the stands and made a personal commitment to run in that race in her senior year. She saw a girl who fulfilled that commitment, and then, with a badly broken leg 45 feet from the finish line, had a choice: Finish, or don’t finish.

To her, it was a no-brainer.

At the 1- and 2-mile markers, Markwardt was on a personal-best pace. Then, as she entered the stadium at Columbus’ Scioto Downs, with about 400 meters to go, she heard her left leg crack.

The leg had been sore on and off for the previous two weeks, prompting Berkshire coach Julie Cole to limit Markwardt in practice. When she heard the crack, Markwardt thought it was a muscle pull or tear. She thought she could gut it out to the finish line.

“There was a runner from one of our rival schools right in front of me,” she said. “I kept staring at the back of her jersey and pushing myself to catch her.”

But some 200 meters later, Markwardt heard the leg crack again. And again. Then there was a louder crack, and her entire leg gave out. She fell to the ground as onlookers winced at the sound and the sight of what happened.

One of Markwardt’s teammates, unaware of what had happened, encouraged her to get up. She tried, using her right leg. But as soon as she shifted weight to the left, the loudest crack yet came. And her leg gave out again.

“At that point, I knew what had happened. I knew my leg was broken pretty badly. And I knew I couldn’t get up again. So I started crawling,” she said.

She said she thought not of her coach, nor her parents, nor anyone else who had encouraged her to never give up, to see things to the finish. Instead, she thought of the countless stories she had heard about runners who collapsed before a race’s end and somehow found the courage to cross that last line. Even if her leg had given out at the 400-meter mark, she said, it wouldn’t have mattered. She was going to finish.

“They may not have let me, and it might not have been pretty, but I would have tried,” she said. “I had come so far. Our team had come so far. All season, we had been working for state, and now we were there. I was almost done, and there was no way I was going to let the team down.”

She finished the race with a time of 20:24.07, only :18 slower than her personal best. She finished in 67th place, helping to put her school in a fourth-place finish in the Ohio High School Athletic Association Division III championship.

“When I saw her crawling, I wanted to cry,” said Richard Markwardt, Claire’s father. “I was just so incredibly proud — as proud as any father could be.”

She apparently didn’t cry at all after the race, even as doctors fastened her leg into a splint. Her tibia was broken in multiple places, her fibula in one, and she was going to need surgery. But she’s been able to hold it together.

For all she’s gone through and all that lies ahead, Markwardt said she has broken down only twice: once on the hospital phone call to her sister, and once when she told coach Cole that she will miss the spring track season.

This Wednesday, when doctors asked her to rate her pre-surgery anxiety before the second procedure on her leg, she said, “Two.”

All this time later, after the surgeries and the recovery she has looming before her, she still says she wouldn’t have changed anything if she knew what the outcome would have been.

Runner or not, I don’t know anyone who couldn’t be inspired by Claire’s story. She has a level of determination and resolve that many adults are lacking, let alone teenagers. As far as I’m concerned, this is much more than just a story about running or sports, but a story of inspiration, hope, and what a person can achieve if they put their mind to it. (Besides, the world does not revolve around politics!)

Claire, I wish you the best of luck for a speedy recovery, and I hope you’re able to keep running in college. You’ve got the heart to make it far in whatever you choose, and we’re all pulling for you.

Hat Tip: Second Wind

Yesterday, Bill Clinton spoke in Iowa about how he was against the war in Iraq from the beginning:

We need to “go back to fiscal responsibility and reclaim our economic sovereignty. That’ll require people like me, who got five tax cuts that I should not have gotten, in my income group, when we had soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers.”

Apparently, we should be asking for Bill Clinton’s OK on everything before we proceed. He’ll resent us otherwise, and then whatever will we do?

Unfortunately for Slick Willie, people pay attention when he talks. And he can’t have press records locked up indefinitely in the Clinton Library. And Allah at Hot Air has been doing some digging.

First, some notable quotables from 2003:

May 19, 2003- (Associated Press): “Former President Bill Clinton accused President Bush of spending more time fighting the war on terrorism than on domestic issues during a commencement speech at Tougaloo College. ‘I supported the president when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but we can’t be forever strong abroad if we don’t keep getting better at home,” Clinton said Sunday to a crowd of about 8,000. […] The Bush administration, Clinton said, ‘is still focused on defeating terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and that’s good, but not good enough. The power of our example is just as important as our military might.’”

April 14, 2003 (Minneapolis Star Tribune): “In his first speech in Minnesota since leaving office, former President Bill Clinton on Sunday praised President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq. But he criticized Bush’s domestic priorities and urged the administration to offer North Korea aid and a pledge of nonaggression in exchange for an end to that country’s missile and nuclear weapons programs.” [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 4/14/03]

So… I guess he means we should go to war with Iraq, but just not make it our number one priority?

Allah then points us to this:

In the crucial weekend before to the final breakdown of diplomacy in March, Mr Clinton was a guest of Mr Blair’s at Chequers where the pair discussed the crisis…
Three days after his Chequers meeting, Mr Clinton made a rare public appeal to his successor, George Bush, to give the UN weapons inspectors more time.

That story was posted April 25, 2003. This brings us to Slick Willie being for the war on April 19th, against it April 25th, and come May, for it again.

I think my head’s starting to hurt. But fasten your seatbelts, folks, because we’re just getting started.

In March of 2003, he wrote a piece for The Guardian telling us to trust Tony Blair:

Last October, when I spoke at the Labour conference in Blackpool, I supported the efforts of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to renew efforts to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and to try to accomplish this through the UN.
In November, the UN security council adopted unanimously resolution 1441, giving Saddam a “final opportunity” to disarm, after 12 years of defying UN resolutions requiring him to do so. The resolution made it clear that continued sanctions were not sufficient and that continued defiance would lead to serious consequences.

…

In the post-cold war world, America and Britain have been in tough positions before: in 1998, when others wanted to lift sanctions on Iraq and we said no; in 1999 when we went into Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing. In each case, there were voices of dissent. But the British-American partnership and the progress of the world were preserved. Now in another difficult spot, Prime Minister Blair will have to do what he believes to be right. I trust him to do that and hope that Labor MPs and the British people will too.

So in March, he had no opinion except to trust Tony Blair’s decision (no mention of trusting President Bush, of course). Then, he was for the war, then against it, and then for it again.

Finally, Hot Air readers give us the results, from June of 2004:

Former President Clinton has revealed that he continues to support President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq but chastised the administration over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

“I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over,” Clinton said in a Time magazine interview that will hit newsstands Monday, a day before the publication of his book “My Life.”…
Pressed on whether the Iraq war was worth the cost to the United States, Clinton said he would not have undertaken the war until after U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix “finished his job.”…

“I want it to have been worth it, even though I didn’t agree with the timing of the attack,” Clinton said.

So, come 2004, he was for the war, but against the timing.

So, let’s recap. In March of 2003, he offered no opinion except “trust Tony Blair.” In April 2003, he was for the war, and then against the war. Come May of 2003, he was for the war again. Then, in June of 2004, he was for the war, but just didn’t like the timing. Now, in November of 2007, he’s been against the war from the very beginning. Whew!

Surprisingly, the DU is calling BS on his new line, which means that us conservatives are thinking the same way as the far-left loonies at the Democratic Underground.

You’re not so slick, Willie. Not this time.

Hat Tip: AllahPundit at Hot Air

So far, we’ve got Oprah backing Obama, and now Babs Streisand is stepping forward to offer her support to Shrillary.

Apparently, Shrillary can bring “historic change!”, “respect in the global community!”, “a strong economy!”, and “universal healthcare!” to the United States.

Yawn.

Perez Hilton has the press release. Read and enjoy, especially when Babs feels the need to drone on and on towards the end about her many accomplishments. You know, judging from this press release, Babs may have accomplished more in her lifetime than Shrillary has — maybe she could run!

Today I endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. Below is the announcement the Clinton campaign released to the media with my endorsement statement.

Barbra Streisand Endorses Hillary Clinton

Legendary filmmaker, artist, and Democratic activist, Barbra Streisand, today endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. Streisand cited Clinton’s ability to bring about change and the historic nature of her campaign as reasons why she is supporting Hillary’s candidacy.

“Madame President of the United States…it’s an extraordinary thought. We truly are in a momentous time, where a woman’s potential has no limitations,” said Streisand. “Hillary Clinton has already proven to a generation of women that there are no limits for success. She is driven by her passion for public service and her belief in the enormous potential of our country. Smart, capable and strong in her convictions, Hillary has transcended the dictates of what is thought to be possible for our time.

“Hillary is a powerful voice for change as we find our country at an important crossroads. Under her leadership, our country will regain its respect within the global community. She will prioritize issues of global climate change, universal healthcare and rebuilding a strong economy. After 8 long years, the public will once again have faith in their government.

“Another former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote, ‘In government, in business, and in the professions there may be a day when women will be looked upon as persons. We are, however, far from that day as yet.’ More than 50 years later ‘that day’ is now upon us… and Hillary Clinton is ready to shatter through that glass ceiling for all women.”

Streisand has been working on behalf of Democratic candidates for over forty years, performing at fundraisers and participating in campaign events. In addition, the Streisand Foundation has raised millions for causes including the environment, women’s equality as well as human and civil rights and liberties.

“I’m honored to have Barbra’s support,” said Clinton. “Barbra has used her immense talent to be an advocate for truth, justice, and fairness and I deeply appreciate her confidence in my candidacy as we work together to change the direction of our nation.”

Barbra Streisand is a singer, theatre and film actress, composer, film producer and director. She has won Oscars for Best Actress and Best Original Song as well as multiple Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards, and Golden Globe Awards. She is considered one of the most commercially and critically successful female entertainers in modern history.”

You know, someone might want to check that Eleanor Roosevelt quote though.

Conservatives rejoice.

Michelle Malkin has updates.

A disturbing story today, from Powerline:

Fort Huachuca, the nation’s largest intelligence-training center, changed security measures in May after being warned that Islamist terrorists, with the aid of Mexican drug cartels, were planning an attack on the facility.

Fort officials changed security measures after sources warned that possibly 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists were to be smuggled into the U.S. through underground tunnels with high-powered weapons to attack the Arizona Army base, according to multiple confidential law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Times.

According to the FBI advisory, each Middle Easterner paid Mexican drug lords $20,000 “or the equivalent in weapons” for the cartel’s assistance in smuggling them and their weapons through tunnels along the border into the U.S. The weapons would be sent through tunnels that supposedly ended in Arizona and New Mexico, but the Islamist terrorists would be smuggled through Laredo, Texas, and reclaim the weapons later.

A number of the Afghans and Iraqis are already in a safe house in Texas, the FBI advisory said.

Can we close them now? This is just an example of what anyone with half a brain has been worried about. This is what can happen if we have a border with more holes in it than Swiss cheese. See, us conservatives are not just bigots and xenophobes. We actually like our country and want immigrants to come (provided they follow our laws). We do not want Al Qaeda to be able to pay off Mexican drug cartels and smuggle themselves in without a problem.

See, liberals? It’s not just an immigration issue (although it is a factor). This is also a let’s make it as tough as possible for Al Qaeda to enter the United States and wreak havoc and terror issue. So let’s just stop all this politicizing B.S. over closing the border now and just do it, simply because it’s the right thing to do — it’s what needs to be done.

However, I won’t hold my breath.