Saturday, February 25, 2006
VDH on Iraq
VDH has a good recap of where we stand in Iraq. Read the whole thing, but here is the salient point:
The fate of a much wider war hinges on the answers to these questions, since it would be hard to imagine that bin Laden could continue be much of a force with a secure and democratic Iraq, anchoring ongoing liberalization in the Gulf, Lebanon, and Egypt, and threatening by example Iran and Syria. By the same token, it would be hard to see how we could stop jihadism from spreading when an army that is doing everything possible still could not stop Islamic fascism from taking over the ancestral home of the ancient caliphate.That is it. End of story. Period.
If we, the American people, have the heart and the fortitude to see this through the last mile, we will have won, through the blood, sweat and tears of our bravest Americans and their families, a Middle Eastern Democracy that stands and fights with America in our war against Islamic extremism and terrorism, to prevent future 9/11's and worse.
That is why we fight and what our enemies our getting more and more desperate to stop.
And the media, who can't see past their Bush hatred, and the Left, who can't see past their domestic political ambitions, and even some on the Right, who can't see past their personal short-term political issues -- they just don't get it.
Monday, February 20, 2006
More from the Religion of Peace
When does a "protest" become mob violence? The AP doesn't know:
Nigerian Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad attacked Christians and burned churches on Saturday, killing at least 15 people in the deadliest confrontation yet in the whirlwind of Muslim anger over the drawings.
It was the first major protest to erupt over the issue in Africa's most populous nation. An Associated Press reporter saw mobs of Muslim protesters swarm through the city center with machetes, sticks and iron rods. One group threw a tire around a man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze...
Chima Ezeoke, a Christian Maiduguri resident, said protesters attacked and looted shops owned by minority Christians, most of them with origins in the country's south.
"Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters," Ezeoke said. Witnesses said three children and a priest were among those killed.
And the problem is that the West is too intolerant. Right.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Michael Totten is in Iraq
After dinner we watched Southpark on DVD, the episode where Cartman and the rest of the gang end up in Afghanistan and do battle with Osama bin Laden. It was one of those weird Middle East moments. I never thought I would laugh my ass off at Osama bin Laden with a Palestinian friend in Iraq (of all places) behind bomb-blast walls that didn’t seem necessary.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Why am I not surprised?
Popular Mechanics pronounces on the House's Katrina Report:
We've given the report an initial read and found it riddled with poor logic, internal contradictions and exaggerations. . . .
Government work at its finest, I'm sure.
Continued collapse of the mainstream media
I can only hope Americans no longer get their news from these people:
In the absence of any pressing news these days -- other than Iran's nuclear weapons development crisis, the election of Hamas terrorists in Palestine, ongoing worldwide Muslim riots and killing in reaction to a cartoon, Al Gore's near sedition while speaking in Saudi Arabia, the turning over of our East Coast ports to be managed by a United Arab Emirates firm, the criminal leaking of vital NSA secrets to the New York Times, Mexican military incursions across our southern border, the Iraqi crisis, Congress's refusal to deal with the developing financial collapse of Social Security and Medicare, inter alia -- the White House press corp has exploded in righteous fury over the question of the vice president's little shooting party last weekend.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Why We Fight
From a Pentagon briefing in September 05:
I'd like just to briefly characterize the enemy, describe who we're fighting here. This is an enemy, who when they came in, they removed all the imams from the mosques, and they replaced them with Islamic extremist laymen. They removed all the teachers from the schools and replaced them with people who had a fifth-grade education and who preached hatred and intolerance. They murdered people. In each of their cells that they have within the city has a direct action cell of about 100 or so fighters. They have a kidnapping and murder cell; they have a propaganda cell, a mortar cell, a sniper cell -- a very high degree of organization here. And what the enemy did is to keep the population from performing other activities. To keep the population afraid, they kidnapped and murdered large numbers of the people here, and it was across the spectrum. A Sunni Turkmen imam was kidnapped and murdered. A very fine man, a city councilman, Councilman Suliman (sp), was pulled out of his car in front of his children and his wife and gunned down with about 30 gunshot wounds to his head. The enemy conducted indiscriminate mortar attacks against populated areas and wounded scores of children and killed many others. The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents. Beheadings and so forth.
So the enemy's grip over this population to maintain the safe haven was based on fear, coercion, and these sort of heinous acts. And not only were they targeting civilians, brutally murdering them, torturing them, but they were also kidnapping the youth of the city and brainwashing them and trying to turn them into hate-filled murderers.
Friday, February 10, 2006
CNN lies again
CNN headline -- "Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks", obviously referring to the "outing" of Valerie Plame, insinuating that the whole affair is a Bush Administration plot after all.
OK then, how can a "leak" be authorized? A "leak" is by definition an unauthorized transmission of information.
The only evidence offered:
"In a letter to Libby's lawyers, obtained by CNN, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said it is his understanding that Libby testified he was "authorized to disclose information about the National Intelligence Estimate to the press by his superiors."
The NIE? That has absolutely zero to do with the Valerie Plame affair. It's a total non-sequitor.
And this is just flat wrong:
Plame is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to the African nation of Niger to check out an intelligence report that nuclear material was being sold to Iraq.
Actually the CIA sent him, at the request of his wife, to look into reports that Iraq sought to buy yellowcake uranium, which he in fact confirmed.
Hello, CNN? Are you stupid, corrupt, biased, incompetant, or all of the above? No wonder so many Americans believe things that aren't true.
Carter equates MLK with Al-Qaeda
From TCS, on the Corretta Scott King funeral:
Carter, for example, used the opportunity to insinuate that Bush's "domestic spying" was like the spying done by the FBI on Dr. King. Carter commiserated with the King family for having been subjected to such an ordeal at the hands of their government, and, by implication, he also commiserated with those Americans who had been subjected to Bush's domestic surveillance. But does this analogy honor the memory of Dr. King and his movement?
Let's make a simple thought experiment to find out.
Suppose al-Qaeda had decided to air its grievances against the United States by holding a massive peaceful "sit in" at the Twin Towers on 9/11. Suppose Islamic terrorists, instead of blowing up innocent human beings, had vowed only to use civil disobedience. Suppose Osama bin Laden, like Dr. King, had struggled with all his might to keep his organization from turning to bloodshed and violence. Would Bush have felt the need to launch a domestic surveillance program on such a pacifistic movement? Maybe; maybe not. But the fact that al-Qaeda embraces violence and celebrates terrorism -- doesn't this small detail destroy the basis of Carter's analogy? If you can equate bin Laden with Martin Luther King, and al-Qaeda to King's non-violent movement, then, by all means, go ahead and draw the same analogy that Mr. Carter drew about Bush's domestic surveillance program. If, on the other hand, you cannot equate the two, then Carter's analogy becomes at best ridiculous and at worst obscene.
Comparing Media Coverage of the Bush and Clinton economies
Very interesting. Actually I had wanted to do this myself: TCS Daily compares the media coverage of the economic recoveries under Clinton and Bush.
Why do 43% of Americans believe something that isn't true? They still think we're in a recession, despite
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a key measure of economic expansion and contraction, increased by 4.3 percent in the third quarter in spite of the devastating hurricanes. Since the second quarter 2003, GDP has grown over 3 percent each quarter.
The November unemployment rate was 5 percent, where the rate has been hovering since May. (The unemployment rate has since dropped to 4.7% in January).
Continuing the solid monthly trend in 2004, 215,000 jobs were added to the economy in November.
Productivity, an indicator of rising living standards, rose more than expected during the third quarter and increased at its highest rate in two years.
Factory orders and orders for durable goods increased by 2.2 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively, in October.
A survey of America's leading CEOs, the Business Roundtable's CEO Economic Outlook Survey, showed that they expect "broad strength in the economy moving into 2006." The CEO Economic Outlook Index for December 2005 was at 101.4. The index is "centered on 50, which means anything above 50 is expansion and anything below 50 is contraction."
I love this -- comparing Time magazine's coverage:
As an example, Time Magazine published the following articles about economic recovery under President Clinton: "Overturning The Reagan Era," "Picking Up Speed," "Breaking Through," and "Who Needs a Boom?"For the record, I don't think much of this is intentional bias. It's just that when a Democrat is president, Liberal reporters tend to have rosy outlooks on the future, and their reporting reflects that. Counterpoints are merely distractions from the overall message.
At a time when unemployment was at 6.5 percent, and GDP was forecasted to be 3 percent in 1994, Time Magazine wrote, "which would be no boom, but maybe something much better: a pace that could be sustained for a long time, keeping income and employment growing without igniting a new surge in inflation…. The circle (of spending, production and hiring) may not spin fast enough to produce a boom -- but who wants one anyway? Moderate, steady growth is better."
Now compare it to the one Time Magazine article ("How Real is the Squeeze?") written about economic recovery under President Bush. Keep in mind that at the time the article was written GDP grew 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2004 (which was subsequently revised upward to 4.3 percent) and unemployment was at 5.6 percent.
"Jonathan Thornton finally found a job this spring after six months of unemployment. "My wife and I almost parted ways after 13 years because of the financial strain," he says. When he started work in April as a crane operator at a screw manufacturer in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, Thornton treated his wife Rita to a few little luxuries -- a day at the salon, an evening out with the girls. "My outlook has definitely brightened," he says. But Thornton's optimism goes only so far. His paycheck has grown, but the family is still just getting by…. There's supposed to be an economic recovery under way. But the numbers paint a confusing picture."
So where's the comment that "moderate, steady growth is better," particularly when the GDP growth and unemployment rate were better in 2004 than in 1993?
But when a Republican is President, well things just can't be getting along ok, so there just has to be a negative view that should be reported.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
So who is dividing America?
After Bush is attacked at Coretta Scott King's funeral, Hillary Clinton says she believes Bush is deliberately targeting impoverished blacks:
Senator Clinton told a largely friendly audience here Saturday night that the slow pace of government-sponsored reconstruction following Hurricane Katrina was the result of a deliberate decision by the Bush administration and may have been motivated by a desire to discourage Democratic voters from returning to the devastated region.Disgusting. Anyway, how does a person simultaneously be a Bible-thumping born-again member of the Christian Right to someone who deliberately targets the poor?
"I think that basically we are now watching a deliberate policy of neglect take root," Mrs. Clinton said during an appearance at a fund-raiser for legal services charities.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Preventing 9/11
I think the question isn't "Why is Bush surveiling terrorists". Rather, why wasn't Clinton?
A 2004 NBC report graphically illustrated what not having this program cost us 4 1/2 years ago. In 1999, the NSA began monitoring a known al Qaeda "switchboard" in Yemen that relayed calls from Osama bin Laden to operatives all over world. The surveillance picked up the phone number of a "Khalid" in the United States--but the NSA didn't intercept those calls, fearing it would be accused of "domestic spying."
After 9/11, investigators learned that "Khalid" was Khalid al-Mihdhar, then living in San Diego under his own name--one of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. He made more than a dozen calls to the Yemen house, where his brother-in-law lived.
NBC news called this "one of the missed clues that could have saved 3,000 lives."
Cartoons Fake but Accurate
via Gateway Pundit:
Meanwhile, the Danish tabloid Extra Bladet got hold of a 43-page report that Danish Muslim leaders and imams, on a tour of the Islamic world are handing out to their contacts to “explain” how offensive the cartoons are. The report contains 15 pictures instead of 12. The first of the three additional pictures, which are of dismal quality, shows Muhammad as a pedophile demon [see it here], the second shows the prophet with a pigsnout [here] and the third depicts a praying Muslim being raped by a dog [here]. Apparently, the 12 original pictures were not deemed bad enough to convince other Muslims that Muslims in Denmark are the victims of a campaign of religious hatred.
Akhmad Akkari, spokesman of the 21 Danish Muslim organizations which organized the tour, explained that the three drawings had been added to "give an insight in how hateful the atmosphere in Denmark is towards Muslims."
Friday, February 03, 2006
Cartoonish Controversy
So Muslims want an apology from the West for our religious intolerance? Well, I guess that's understandable. Putting it succinctly,
I think the Danish ambassador should issue an apology. In the largest Christian church in Saudi Arabia.Something tells me that the word "hypocrite" doesn't translate into Arabic.
Got Religion?
Michelle Malkin notes that the media has a new found respect for religion:
"CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam."More from MRC:
Where was that deference when Ted Turner was calling Catholics "Jesus Freaks?"
Where was the sensitivity about offensive religious imagery when Jeanne Moos was mocking images of Jesus Christ or Jonathan Mann was reporting on the Virgin Mary covered in dung?
Why is it that American media, including CNN, have absolutely no qualms about splashing Kanye West-as-Christ all over the airwaves and Internet...
[NBC] showed no respect for Christians when it forged ahead with the religion-mocking show, "The Book of Daniel."
This from the network that plans to feature Britney Spears as the host of a fictional cooking segment called "Cruci-fixin's" in an upcoming "Will & Grace" epsiode.
Meanwhile, no one seems to care that I'm offended by this movie.
It was a surprise to NBC in 1992 when "Saturday Night Live" aired pop star Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II and crying "Fight the real enemy!" But now NBC has aired a planned, scripted episode of a sitcom that attacks not the Pope, but Jesus Christ Himself.
The February 22 episode of the painfully unfunny new sitcom "Committed" made a mockery out of the sacrament of the Eucharist. As William Donohue of the Catholic League explained about the show: "By far the most offensive scene occurs when [male characters] Nate and Bowie accidentally flush what they think is the Host down the toilet...To say that Catholics are angry about this show would be an understatement — the outrage is visceral and intense."
NBC has encouraged the producers of "Committed" to "push the limits of comedy," and the producers just pushed comedy off a cliff. Not just Catholics, not just Christians, but anyone who reveres God should be outraged.
