Thursday, June 30, 2005
Gee, You Think?
The London Times:
In person Mr Bush is so far removed from the caricature of the dim, war-mongering Texas cowboy of global popular repute that it shakes one’s faith in the reliability of the modern media.What shocks me is that there are apparently people out there who still have faith in the modern media.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Mind-numbingly Obtuse
Democrats and the media clearly believe there is absolutely "no connection" between 9/11 and the ongoing war in Iraq.
PowerLine explains why they're wrong:
Pelosi's claim that there is "no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq" is mind-numbingly obtuse. Let's itemize just the huge, obvious connections:Democrats just don't get it. Please, let's not entrust them with the Presidency until Islamic extemism is a completely defeated ideology on the "dust-bin of history".
1) The people we are fighting in Iraq are Islamist terrorists, many of them associated with al Qaeda, the same organization that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
2) The principal purpose of the Iraq war is to promote the spread of freedom and democracy throughout the Arab world, which remains the only long-term cure for the problem of Islamist terrorism that anyone has proposed. (If the Democrats have an alternative, they're keeping it a secret.)
3) After Sept. 11, knowing what terrorists could achieve with (relatively) conventional weapons, it was no longer acceptable to risk leaving in power a tyrant like Saddam, who a) had a decades-long fascination with weapons of mass destruction; b) had used weapons of mass destruction on many occasions; c) was a long-time supporter of terrorist groups; and d) had long been viewed as such a threat to America and its allies that since 1998, regime change in Iraq had been the official policy of the United States government, based on an act of Congress.
4) Let's follow up on 3 c). One of the Democrats' most ridiculous mantras is that there was no connection between Saddam's Iraq and international terrorism. This claim is demonstrably false, but as usual, the Democrats are playing to the least well-informed Americans. Let's just itemize a few of Iraq's most notorious pre-war connections to 9/11 style terrorism:a) Ansar al Islam, an al Qaeda branch, manufactured ricin for use in attacks on Europe.These are just some of the many connections between Saddam's regime and international terrorism that we happen to know about. Others are known, and no doubt still more remain unknown.
b) Saddam hosted al Qaeda's number two leader, Zawahiri, in the 1990s.
c) Saddam harbored, and put on a government pension, one of the few perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing who escaped apprehension.
d) Saddam harbored Abu Nidal, once the world's most famous terrorist, until, for reasons that remain mysterious, Saddam apparently had him murdered shortly before the war began.
e) Saddam harbored Abu Abbas, organizer of the Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking in 1984; Abbas was captured in Iraq during the first days of the war.
e) Zarqawi, the world's most deadly terrorist, fled Afghanistan when the Taliban fell at the end of 2001 and went to Iraq. Why? Because he knew that terrorists were welcome under Saddam.
f) From Iraq, Zarqawi organized the murder of American diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan.
g) From Iraq, Zarqawi organized and financed a chemical weapons attack on Jordan that could have killed tens of thousands. The perpetrators of that scheme are now on trial in Jordan.
h) Saddam paid the families of suicide bombers to encourage terrorist attacks against Israel.
Noonan says, Not so Fast!
I happen to like Senator Barack Obama -- he doesn't seem so full of the hatred and anti-conservative bigotry that permeates the Democratic party leadership. However, I agree with Peggy Noonan that it takes some chutzpah to compare oneself to Abraham Lincoln:
This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he's a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better. "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat--in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles."Agreed.
Oh. So that's what Lincoln's for. Actually Lincoln's life is a lot like Mr. Obama's. Lincoln came from a lean-to in the backwoods. His mother died when he was 9. The Lincolns had no money, no standing. Lincoln educated himself, reading law on his own, working as a field hand, a store clerk and a raft hand on the Mississippi. He also split some rails. He entered politics, knew more defeat than victory, and went on to lead the nation through its greatest trauma, the Civil War, and past its greatest sin, slavery.
Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family. He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton's first campaign for the presidency.
You see the similarities.
There is nothing wrong with Barack Obama's résumé, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it also is a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Axis of Evil Update
Granted I know President Bush is a moron, despite receiving virtually the same grades at Yale as the esteemed intellectual, John Kerry, but maybe he was right about this axis-of-evil thingy:
Iran is secretly negotiating with North Korea to build a network of underground bunkers to conceal its clandestine nuclear weapons project.
A team of construction experts has arrived in Teheran to conduct a survey of Iranian requirements. It included a senior North Korean specialist in underground construction who helped to design the bunkers that contain Pyongyang’s illegal weapons programme.
Current talks centre on whether the North Koreans will undertake the work for the Iranians, or act as advisers to Iranian construction companies.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
