Roger may know better than I, but I’ll make a guess regarding the etymology of the term “sitting president”. I suspect (can’t prove) that the term is a result of office being referred to as a “seat” – the person who holds an particular office has long been referred to as “sitting” in that office or “holding the seat”.

As a writer, can you explain the phrase “sitting president” which you and others use? The is only one American President at a time, unlike some other republics, so what does the word “sitting” add to the mix? Certainly, former Presidents are addressed as Mr. President, but they are referred to as former or “ex-” Presidents. (I leave from consideration the odd examples of J.Q. Adams or W.H. Taft, who both held high political office AFTER being president, as there are no similar people alive today.”

And then there’s the poor guy in the interim government who said it disappeared during the looting. Now look, you can almost see how this might have went. Guy gets appointed, just moved into his office, sweeps out the broken glass, trying to figure out how to get a couple of chairs with all four legs, maybe a Mr. Coffee. . .and he’s looking glumly over the eighteen big file cabinets, full of twelve years of water-stained documents left over from his predecessor in the Hussein government, half of which are almost certainly outrageous lies prepared by government flunkies afraid of telling Saddam something he doesn’t want to hear. All delivered this morning by someone from Allawi’s office who says the PM is going to want a complete report on it all before a Cabinet meeting in four days’ time. . .

So then he gets a little phone call from the PM’s office. Hey, Mohammed, how’s it hanging? All moved in? Need anything? Yeah, well, we’ve got to send out for our coffee and half the time it’s cold before it gets back. Anyway, listen, I just got a call from some fussbudget at the IAEA. Says he needs to close the books on some dual-use high explosive they were monitoring out at al-Qaqaa. Sure, I realize we’ve got bigger fish to fry than doing a post-mortem on Saddam’s nuke program. But listen, can you just tell me where the stuff is now? Confirm it’s still out there? Give me the building number, so I can tell them they can come look at it sometime, make sure their precious seals are still on it? No?! Well, damn it, get me a report on this by tomorrow, OK? I’ve got a million things to do, I don’t want to waste time with this.

Poor Mohammed puts down the phone and contemplates the wall of filing cabinets. Big secret nuke-research base. What are the chances the paper trail is neat and complete? Oh boy, forget it. So he gets a jeep, drives out to the place. A God-damned mess, huge place, hundreds of buildings, pits, shacks, some locked, some not. Not clear who he’d have to get permission from to start opening locked doors. Hidey-hole for Saddam’s weird toys for two decades. Where to even begin? No way he can poke through this mess in 24 hours.

But on the way back, lighting strikes. Hah! Everyone knows there was all that chaos and looting in the first week of the war. It was on the TV. Lots of stuff vanished! Guns, ammo, whole fighter jets for God’s sake. Why not some plastique? Who could doubt it? More importantly, who could blame me? Added benefit: I don’t have to throw the blame on the Americans (who hadn’t arrived yet) or the UN (who hadn’t returned). Everybody wins!

So poor Mohammed writes out the memo and sends it on up the line, after which it’s dutifully passed on to the UN chair polishers. Mohammed gets a nice call back from the PM: Good work, Mohammed, glad you were able to nail that down. All serene.

Except, in the middle of the night, Mohammed sits up in a sweat. Wait a minute, HOW much explosive did I say just walked off in the fog of war? Four hundred tons? Fuck! Well, maybe no one will notice. I mean, what sensible person would even give a damn, anyway? This has nothing to do with security in Iraq — plenty of unexploded ordnance for a hundred years of civil war yet, and besides, who’s ever heard of a terrorist having trouble getting ahold of explosives? It’s like some kind of unofficial licensing test, probably, showing you can get the stuff. It’s the least important component of a nuke program, too, and it’s got nothing to do with rebuilding Iraq. Plus it happened a year ago at least and nothing’s happened in all that time.. . .nah, only a complete birdbrain would worry about this. . .

I’m glad you guys found that Fonte article interesting. The article was published back in Dec 2000. Since then, the Culture War has escalated into a full-blown Cold Civil War over what kind of nation America will be going forward. Will American be transformed into European-style Gramscian Marxists like the Democrats want? Or will America transmit our Tocquevillian heritage to our children? Time will tell, but this election may be decisive. God help us if we make the wrong choice.

To all of the MSM junkies out there: tip your head back and open wide for your next dose of special brand NYT-LSD.

Today, we have the Internet and talk radio to counter the media monoliths, but I worry about all those people who just skim a few headlines from a newspaper or semi-watch the news while making dinner.

In the 60s and 70s, Soviet citizens would get the truth by listening to Radio Free Europe or by gleaning the real story from the last few paragraphs of a story in Pravda. . . kind of like the Times today. Dezinformatsia is still being promulgated, only today its biggest disseminator is the MSM.

Wrong.

There are about 25 million people in Iraq and each carried off a handful of the powder in their underwear.

There are two reasons for the administration’s behavior: the first is that Democrats are the sort of disingenuous people who were the president to do such a thing would have an ad on the air in 10 minutes saying “SEE THEY ADMIT THEY’RE WRONG”

The second reason is that, the last time I checked, we were in a war. It is very poor policy for an administration at war to admit to mistakes. Surely even Moonbats are able to see that.

“A tale told by an Idiot, full of sound and Fury, signifying nothing.” That is a perfect description of Democratic blather points. On the surface, delivered forcefully, they look like something, but having no substance to them they fall apart if you look at them very hard.

Here is a Republican Talking point: Why don’t you ask Commodore Kerry about the Vietnam commendation that isn’t on his web site, you know the one don’t you? The one the Vietnamese gave him in 1983: “Hero of Communist Victory”. Surely you know about that one don’t you? It was all over the TV News and in the newspapers back 21 years ago.

See now there is a real talking point: when you first hear it you go “That can’t be true.” but if you look into it you find out it is true.

Is this what you’re looking for?

Link 1

Link 2

Simpler than that is that tactic of throwing out a lame, half-baked charge that is just plausible enough to a third party that it can’t be laughed down and must be rebutted. It takes them 10 seconds to make it and it takes you 10 minutes to rebut using facts and logic. This is a common litigation tactic, for example.