The Lone Fortress

Cutting the deficit in half

2009-03-25T07:02:00.005-05:00

I thought President Obama said he was cutting the deficit in half. Is he not being honest with us? I guess that's why we're not supposed to trust anyone over 30.

(And that's not even to mention the fact that even the CBO's projections, less charitable than the White House's, are still very opmtimistic themselves.)

Geithner: Bush caused deficits by not spending enough money. Huh?

2009-03-04T13:06:00.002-06:00

Obama admin says deficit due to Bush not spending enough money:

http://www.reuters.com/article/gc04/idUSTRE5225AP20090304

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on
Wednesday blamed soaring budget deficits partly on failure by the former Bush administration to make needed investments in energy security and healthcare.
"We begin our time in office after a long period in which our government was unwilling to make the long-term investments required to meet critical challenges in health care, energy and education," he said in prepared remarks to the Senate Finance Committee.

And if you're willing to "suspend disbelief" and accept these numbers are even remotely accurate, he's not even making sense - he's off by just a few hundred billion. As we all know, Obama just passed a $780 billion dollar stimulus bill. Giethner says $500 billion is Obama's, so somehow $280 billion of this is inherited from Bush, though Obama signed it and it got 3 Republican votes in both houses???

The Obama administration is projecting a deficit of $1.8 trillion, or 12.3 percent of gross domestic product, in fiscal 2009, which ends September 30. Geithner said $1.3 trillion of that total was inherited from the Bush administration.

This must be the same Obama math that says raising the deficit to $2 trillion and then cutting "spending" (by raising $1.0 trillion in new taxes) is "cutting the deficit in half".

"Hope and Change" for inner city school kids?

2009-03-03T07:40:00.005-06:00

The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation's capital. Unlike the Obama girls, they could not afford the school without the $7,500 voucher they receive from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Unfortunately, a spending bill the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill this program -- and with it perhaps the Parker children's hopes for a Sidwell diploma.

Known as the "Durbin language" after the Illinois Democrat who came up with
it last year, the provision mandates that the scholarship program ends after the next school year unless Congress reauthorizes it and the District of Columbia
approves. The beauty of this language is that it allows opponents to kill the
program simply by doing nothing. Just the sort of sneaky maneuver that's so
handy when you don't want inner-city moms and dads to catch on that you are
cutting one of their lifelines.

Deborah Parker says such a move would be devastating for her kids. "I once
took Sarah to Roosevelt High School to see its metal detectors and security
guards," she says. "I wanted to scare her into appreciation for what she has at
Sidwell." It's not just safety, either. According to the latest test scores,
fewer than half of Roosevelt's students are proficient in reading or
math.

That's the reality that the Parkers and 1,700 other low-income students
face if Sen. Durbin and his allies get their way. And it points to perhaps the
most odious of double standards in American life today: the way some of our
loudest champions of public education vote to keep other people's children --
mostly inner-city blacks and Latinos -- trapped in schools where they'd never
let their own kids set foot.

Rumsfeld confirms WMD found

2006-06-23T07:55:00.000-05:00

At Powerline,QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, there has been a lot made on Capitol Hill about these chemical weapons that were found and may be quite old. But do you have a real concern of these weapons from Saddam's past perhaps having an impact on U.S. troops who are on the ground in Iraq right now?
RUMSFELD : Certainly. What has been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it's dangerous to our forces, and it's a concern.

So obviously, to the extent we can locate these and destroy them, it is important that we do so. And they are dangerous. Anyone -- I'm sure General Casey or anyone else in that country would be concerned if they got in the wrong hands.

They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found. And that had not been by Saddam Hussein, as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his weapons . And they are still being found and discovered.
I guess Bush didn't "lie" after all. I expect apologies to be forthcoming.

Interrogations for Terror Plot "going nowhere"

2006-06-19T12:18:00.000-05:00

The Ron Suskind story in Time on a plot to use poison gas in the NYC subways notes that “the interrogations of suspects” with knowledge of the planned terrorists attack “were going nowhere.”

And of course, there was no possibility of increasing the intensity of those interrogations – short of torture to be sure but including sufficient “stress and duress” to achieve results.

No, we’ve ruled that out as unacceptably “degrading.” If that means plots like this one will sometimes be successful and Americans will be slaughtered on the A Train … well, that’s the choice we’ve made, isn’t it?

And of course the New York Times, the U.N., and Amnesty International want to close Gitmo and release any enemy combatants who haven’t committed crimes that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in an American courtroom.

Meanwhile, the thrust of the debate is over whether “first responders” have sufficient resources to clean up the carnage afterwards. How reassuring.
Maybe if we asked the nice terrorists, "pretty please with sugar on top?"

Iraqi's React to Zarqawi's Death

2006-06-09T15:27:00.000-05:00

Most Iraqi's, being human beings, rejoiced at the death of the animal Zarqawi, whose favorite past-time seemed to be slowly sawing off the heads of living people:

"When my young son came and brought me the good news, I did not know what to do out of joy," Eqabbi said of Zarqawi's death. "I took my motorcycle and went to the traffic police sector over here where I work. I was shouting in the street and could see the people in the street with joy on their faces, for each family here has lost someone because of this guy. We thank God for what happened to him."

Back at Madhloom's restaurant, Sawsan Abdul Qadir, a nurse, reflected on losing his own brother in another car bombing. "He was a father of three kids," he said.

When Abdul Qadir heard about Zarqawi's death, he called his brother's wife. "She was so happy, and she told me, 'The Americans got revenge for my husband. I feel just like they brought him back alive for me.' Her oldest son was saying, 'They killed my father's killer.'

"Today, I forget all the sadness of losing my brother."

Still this quote from a Sunni is telling:

"Zarqawi was the one who put a limit to Shiite influence and all the killing of Sunnis," said Saad Saleem, a 32-year-old laborer. "It is a big loss. Who will fight the Americans the way he used to fight them? They were ready to leave the country because of his operations. Now there will be no one like him who will be able to push the Americans to leave Iraq. There will be no one to stop the Iranian Shiites. Al-Qaeda must look for a good replacement for Zarqawi. Otherwise the Sunnis will lose everything in Iraq."

"Ready to leave"? Where would he get that idea? Maybe from America's opposition party and reporting of opinion polls of Americans fatigued by daily media reports of inconsequential (to a strategic victory) violence.

Here is clear evidence, albeit anecdotal, that our media and our anti-war politicians are perpetuating the idea that America is about to withdraw from Iraq, and thereby encouraging the resisntence in Iraq.

And then the same people blame Bush for not having an effective war plan, when, it is my hypothesis, that if the hysterical critics were not actively creating a divided America, we would have succeeded in Iraq long ago.

The Great Haditha Hoax?

2006-06-09T13:56:00.000-05:00

The American Thinker has a piece casting some doubt on the accuracy of the reports of a "massacre" in Haditha, going so far as to call it a hoax. In particular, Clarice Feldman notes many inconsistencies in the stories, and that all of the "reporters" involved have well-documented anti-American sentiment, and that the few military "witnesses" weren't even there and/or had axes to grind.

Now I really don't know how much of this is true and how much of the media reports are true. And neither do you. And neither does Time magazine, Newsweek, Rep. Murtha or the Democratic party.

That's why we usually an investigation before we decide what happened and who is guilty of what.

When will we Support the Troops?

2006-06-06T20:10:00.000-05:00

I'm sure self-righteous, smug Michael Duffy and Time magazine would say they Support the Troops.

Though this doesn't prevent them from declaring them Guilty until proven innocent in their disgusting "expose" on the alleged "massacre" at Haditha: "The Shame of Kilo Company." With a headline like that, I guess we may as well cancel the investigation -- Time magazine has already decide the outcome and is using their sensationalist, Micahel Moore-esque reporting to impugn the valiant effort of all of our brave soldiers, and slander America in the eyes of the world.

Michael Yon responds:In the absence of clear facts, most people know that a rush to judgment serves no one. What word, then, properly characterizes the recent media coverage of Haditha, when analysis stretches beyond shotgun conclusions to actually attributing motive and assigning blame? No rational process supports a statement like: “We don’t know what happened, but we know why it happened and whose fault it is.”

Yon, who has actually observed action on the front lines in Iraq puts this in the proper context: Brave, real-life Americans are dying in order not to put Iraqi civilians in danger. For example, Sgt Ben Morton whose wife Elaina later committed suicide:
On many missions when I tagged along, the commander would say things like, “Be careful about throwing flash-bangs [grenades without fragments] into rooms. Don’t throw them unless you really have to. Practically every Iraqi house has children, and flash-bangs can kill the small kids.”

There was hot intelligence that some terrorists were in a certain location. I watched part of the mission unfold from the TOC, but had left before Recon platoon hit the house. SGT Ben Morton from Wright, Kansas, who lived just next to me in Mosul, was a fine soldier, a highly respected young man who earned two Bronze Stars with V (for valor) and a purple heart. Ben’s Recon platoon was conducting the hasty raid in Mosul. The intelligence was correct.

Ben was the first up the stairs, and he took four bullets. Only then did his buddies throw flash-bangs and eventually shot down the terrorist who killed Ben. All the Iraqi kids were fine. But Ben Morton died. Soldiers cried that night.
How is that for context, Michael Duffy. Reporting like yours changes the political equations, and gets soldiers like Sgt Morton killed.

But I know, you support the troops. I'm sure you're proud of yourself.

RFK Jr is a Liar

2006-06-05T12:02:00.000-05:00

Rolling Stone published an article by RFK Jr claiming to prove that Bush stole the 2004 Election. At first glance, it seems quite persuasive -- RFK Jr finds hundreds of thousands of Kerry votes that went missing from the final tally.

Sadly for RFK Jr, it's just not true. The "analysis" is a conglomeration of misrepresentations, misquotes, mistakes and opinions of partisan "experts". Farhad Majoo debunks it here.

Granting RFK Jr the benefit of the doubt, we could say he's simply led astray by his own partisan zeal. But Mr. Manjoo's debunking makes it clear that RFK Jr.'s "mistakes" are intentional.
The first salient omission comes in paragraph 5, when Kennedy writes, "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots." To back up that assertion, Kennedy cites "Democracy at Risk," the report the Democrats released last June.

That report does indeed point out that many people -- 26 percent -- who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn't say, though, is that the same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn't find their names listed. The Democrats' report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters were forced to cast a "provisional" ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush voters were made to do the same -- a stat that lowers the heat on Kennedy's claim of "astounding" partisanship.
Such intentional mistakes makes him a liar. A Liar.

If the parties were reversed, particularly when our country is at war, I would find such an argument by a eminent Republican in an international publication disgusting, and I would expect Republican leadership to state clearly that they find no merit in such an argument. (As they clearly denounced Trent Lott's comments at Strom Thurmond's tribute.)

But I won't be holding my breath waiting for such from our Democratic party, that is more interested in falsely undermining our President (and by extension, our country) than in laying out positive reasons why they should be in charge.

The media lied, people died

2006-05-24T12:04:00.000-05:00

First Newsweek reported falsely that Korans had been literally flushed in Guantanamo, sparking riots in Pakistan that left many dead.

Then during Katrina, media incompetence, fear-mongering and Bush-bashing killed Americans:Shame on local officials for fomenting fear and passing along newly minted urban legends, but double shame on the press for recycling this stuff uncritically. Members of the press had access to the Superdome. Why not just run in and look for the bodies? Interview the rape victims? Couldn’t be bothered? The major networks had hundreds of people in New Orleans. Was there not a single intern available to fact-check? The coverage actually cost lives. Helicopters were grounded for 24 hours in response to media reports of sniper attacks. At least two patients died waiting to be evacuated.

Free Tibet! Why not Taiwan?

2006-05-16T21:39:00.000-05:00

whither Taiwan?!

Taiwan also seems to be vanishing a little bit each day. Given all the language that comes out of the Bush Administration about supporting "democracy" over the past few years, it is baffling how China's president Hu Jintao can get state honors from the Bush administration while a few weeks later, Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian's request to stop over in New York or Los Angeles was coldly refused.

Brainwashed?

2006-05-16T14:52:00.000-05:00

Have we been brainwashed?

Think back to September 12, 2001.

Imagine that an omniscient seer had told you then that four-and-a-half years later, the U.K. and Spain would have experienced al Qaeda attacks in their own countries; France's appeasement-oriented government would have been rocked by Islamic riots in Paris and other cities, Denmark would have had its citizens and embassies targeted for Islamic terror attacks on account of political cartoons portraying Muhammed; Russia would have endured a deadly hostage siege by Islamic terrorists at a school full of children; and in all that time, the United States would not have experienced a single additional terror attack on its own soil.

Imagine the seer had told you further that the United States would, in the same period of time, wage and win two wars in the middle east, overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan and midwifing the formation of a parliamentary democracy there, then driving Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and bringing that destitute country to the verge of its first parliamentary government, elected by nation-wide vote and backed by a western-trained police force and a non-Baathist army, while Saddam himself sat in the dock awaiting the verdict of his trial for crimes against humanity. Imagine he had told you that American combat deaths in these two wars over three years time would not have exceeded 5,000.

Imagine that he also told you the American economy would have fully recovered from the 9/11 attack in this timeframe, returning to employment, interest, inflation, and growth rates rivalling if not exceeding those of the Clinton years, despite wartime budget deficits and huge increases in gasoline prices caused by the inevitable uncertainties in the middle east, while the socialist economies of Europe stagnated or shrank.

Then imagine that he told you George W. Bush's approval rating just six months after his reelection would stand at 29 percent.

How could this have happened?Bungles, scandals, corruption, and bad luck? Well, in case anyone has forgotten this elementary fact, every presidential administration has its share of bungles, scandals, corruption, and bad luck. These are the whales, sharks, and other monsters that swim ceaselessly in the political ocean. But the ocean itself -- the medium in which the monsters swim -- is the MSM. In this context, the blogosphere is no more than the foam on the whitecaps stirred up by the vast currents and movements in the ocean below. And while the bloggers were fighting their various and diverse battles in the name of truth, justice, and common sense, the MSM ocean was harnessing its entire immensity on just one story, told an infinite number of times, in every possible inflection, from every direction, and with the deadly persistent accuracy of a dripping tap: George W. Bush is no good.

It doesn't have to be true, it doesn't have to be fair, it doesn't have to be consistent in its terms. All that matters is that it is repeated with uniform constancy: drip, drip, drip. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Change the headlines, seem to change the subject. Abu Ghraib. European disdain. Tom Delay. Katrina. Deficits. Valerie Plame. Gas prices. Karl Rove. Death in Iraq. Angry mothers. NSA wiretaps. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, the lede is always the same. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Forget the good news, bury the accomplishments or ignore them altogether. Drip, drip, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good.

It took the MSM three years to bring George W. Bush's approval ratings down from their post 9/11 high to 52 percent on election day 2004. It's taken them just six months to bring him down another 20 to 25 points. They never forgot their mission. While the princeling bloggers pissed and moaned about Harriet Miers, and immigration, and federal spending, the MSM kept on dripping out its one story, and now they are within reach of their goal -- Democrats restored to the majority in both houses of Congress and the stage set for the vengeful impeachment and dismissal from office of the most courageous president in modern times.

A Tangled Web

2006-05-15T14:17:00.000-05:00

Oops. The NY Times slipped up and finally admitted that Bush's "domestic surveillance" is strictly international.
But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed.
So when the media tells us the truth, it's quite reassuring: The Bush Admininstration engaged in an internal "privacy vs security" debate after 9/11 and made a very sane decision to monitor only international phone calls.

Revisiting our Past

2006-05-09T20:06:00.000-05:00

What if, in 1945, the America government, fully aware of the horrors of Nazi Germany and their slaughter of European Jewry, simply drove Germany back to it's pre-war borders, declared "enough is enough", and decided to leave the Germans to sort out their internal "mess".

Consider this horror:Then her arms were bound behind her back....

By the time filming begins, the condemned woman has been blindfolded with a white bandage. It is stained with blood that trickles from a wound on the left side of her head. She is moaning, although whether from the pain of what has already been done to her or from the fear of what is about to be inflicted is unclear.

A large man dressed in military fatigues, boots and cap approaches from behind and covers her mouth with his left hand. In his right hand, he clutches a large knife with a black handle and an 8in blade. He proceeds to cut her throat from the middle, slicing from side to side....

Her executioner suddenly stands up, his job only half done. A second man in a dark T-shirt and camouflage trousers places his right khaki boot on her abdomen and pushes down hard eight times, forcing a rush of blood from her wounds as she moves her head from right to left.

Only now does the executioner return to finish the task. He hacks off her head and drops it to the ground, then picks it up again and perches it on her bare chest so that it faces the film-maker in a grotesque parody of one of her pieces to camera.
And so Iraq today has horrors and unbound evil of its own. Yet are we to withdraw our troops now and leave Iraq to those described above, so we can get back to our fast-food and reality TV? And Americans who advocate such a plan claim moral authority? I am truly ashamed to be an American today, and I can only express my regret to the Greatest Generation.

Maybe someday, being "right" will be cool

2006-04-03T21:54:00.000-05:00

Aiding the Enemy

2006-03-30T08:13:00.000-06:00

There are responsible ways to constructively critique the Bush Administration's foreign policy, and then there are irresponsible ways that give aid and comfort to our enemy.

I have long believed that Democratic attacks fall into the latter category and are undermining America's war on Islamic extremism, thereby jeopardizing American lives.

Our enemies agree with me:

In recent visits to several regional capitals, this writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to Rabat. The general assumption is that Mr. Bush's plan to help democratize the heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under pressure from Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism by lifting restrictions against the country's major political parties and allowing their exiled leaders to return. There is every indication that next year's elections will be choreographed to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, arguably the most pro-American leader in the region, is cautiously shaping his post-Bush strategy by courting Tehran and playing the Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.

In Turkey, the "moderate" Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse gear. With the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge of the judiciary and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of the private sector controlled by his party's supporters. There are fears that next year's general election would not take place on a level playing field.

Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed as it has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While Shiite politicians are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy, some Sunni leaders are having second thoughts about their decision to join the democratization process. "What happens after Bush?" demands Salih al-Mutlak, a rising star of Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds have clearly decided to slow down all measures that would bind them closer to the Iraqi state. Again, they claim that they have to "take precautions in case the Americans run away."

There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush's democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabia has put its national dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic rather than political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform machine has been put into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new democratic constitution to set up a constitutional monarchy has subsided. In Jordan the security services are making a spectacular comeback, putting an end to a brief moment of hopes for reform. As for Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to indefinitely postpone local elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired scenario is in trouble. Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by stopping much-advertised reform projects while Islamist radicals are regrouping and testing the waters at all levels.

With the Right to Free Speech comes the responsibility of its reprecussions.
To be clear, I think Democrats believe that a failure of Bush's policies would be beneficial to America (though of course I believe they are sorely mistaken). So I wouldn't call them traitors. But that's a different argument.

The point is, we are seeing the results of these attacks -- the Left is intentionally undermining the foreign policy of the duly elected American President in a time of war. This necessarily creates more American casualties on the battlefield.

So it must be said: Constructive criticism, by it's nature, would be helpful to the "War on Terror". But Democratic attacks on Bush are emperically aiding the enemy. Therefore, it is a fact that these attacks are emperically traitorous.

In an era of terrorism, this puts all of us at risk.

Remember that when you go to vote this year and in 2008.

Why I don't listen to my wife

2006-03-30T07:28:00.000-06:00

Science has finally explained why I can't hear my wife -- I'm disabled! Men have to work harder deciphering what women are saying because they use the auditory part of the brain that processes music, not human voices. Men's brains are not designed to listen to women's voices.
via James Taranto

Can they handle the truth?

2006-03-18T17:59:00.000-06:00

So maybe Saddam had WMD and terrorist plans after all? And why isn't your media telling you about the latest developments? Something tells me if the parties were reversed, e.g. with President Gore leading the fight against Islamic extremist terrorists, the media would be falling all over themselves to present this "startling new evidence" vindicating a Democrat president. But with President Bush, have you even heard of this:

Among the enduring myths of those who oppose the war is that Saddam, though murderous when it came to his own people, had no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist designs outside his own country. Both claims now lie in tatters.

As we've reported several times, a number of former top military officials in Saddam's regime have come forward to admit that, yes, Saddam had WMD, hid them and shipped them out of the country so they couldn't be detected. And he had plans to make more.

Now come more revelations that leave little doubt about Saddam's terrorist intentions. Most intriguing from a document dump Wednesday night is a manual for Saddam's spy service, innocuously listed as CMPC-2003-006430. It makes for interesting reading.

Here, for instance, are the marching orders for Directorate 8, the Mukhabarat's "Technical Affairs" department: "The Eight Directorate is responsible for development of materials needed for covert offensive operations. It contains advanced laboratories for testing and production of weapons, poisons and explosives."

It goes on. Directorate 9, we discover, "is one of the most important directorates in the Mukhabarat. Most of its work is outside Iraq in coordination with other directorates, focusing on operations of sabotage and assassination."

The document also discusses the Mukhabarat's Office 16, set up to train "agents for clandestine operations abroad." The document helpfully adds that "special six-week courses in the use of of terror techniques are provided at a camp in Radwaniyhah."

Got that? Terror techniques.

More Media Lies

2006-03-02T20:23:00.000-06:00

From Captain Ed,

Most news agencies have reported on the AP's tape of a meeting involving President Bush, Michael Brown, and a number of other FEMA officials and local and state politicians during Hurricane Katrina. In the tape, most of the reports claim, Bush specifically heard warnings about levees being breached. However, that's not what the tape shows...

In fact, the record shows that the White House had been fully engaged in the disaster and had repeatedly asked for updates. Brown himself notes (and NBC did report this) that Bush had personally called him twice that day, and it was still only noon. The White House also followed the media reports closely, demanding to know whether the reported breaches had actually occurred. (The fact that the media could not be trusted to get the story straight was later proven when the hysterical reporting about cannibalism, murders, and toxic flood waters all turned out to be false.) What answer did the White House get? The local and state authorities told them that nothing had happened, and that the flooding so far had come from the storm itself and not the lake.

As usual, the news media misreports the Katrina information to sensationalize it, and the skewed story is the one that makes the morning paper. File this one in the same drawer as the mass murders at the Superdome and the Cannibals of St. Bernard Parish, and marvel at the fact that even six months later, the media doesn't take the time to get its fact straight about Katrina.

VDH on Iraq

2006-02-25T09:17:00.000-06:00

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.

More from the Religion of Peace

2006-02-20T07:47:00.000-06:00

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.

Michael Totten is in Iraq

2006-02-18T15:26:00.000-06:00

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.

Why am I not surprised?

2006-02-15T15:10:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-15T08:00:00.000-06:00

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.

Why We Fight

2006-02-14T14:16:00.000-06:00

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.

CNN lies again

2006-02-10T11:09:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-10T09:44:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-10T09:30:00.000-06:00

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?"

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?

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.

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.

So who is dividing America?

2006-02-09T13:27:00.000-06:00

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.

"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.

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?

Preventing 9/11

2006-02-06T17:22:00.000-06:00

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

2006-02-06T07:00:00.000-06:00

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."

Cartoonish Controversy

2006-02-03T13:34:00.000-06:00

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?

2006-02-03T08:21:00.000-06:00

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."

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.

We're winning the "unwinnable"

2006-01-27T15:16:00.000-06:00

From Iraq the Model:

The Anbar tribes’ campaign to rid the province of Zarqawi’s terror organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq is in its 2nd day and so far, 270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested.
[…]
Usama Jad’aan, the leader of Karabila tribes in Qaim told al-Hayat that “the operation will continue to eliminate terror elements according to a quality plan” and added “270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested, in addition to some Iraqis who were providing them shelter”.

Sheikh Jad’aan added “the operation is conducted in coordination between the tribes and the minister of defense Sa’doun al-Dulaimi and since we arrested hundreds of terrorists, I don’t expect the operation to take a lot of time”.

Hide the WMD?

2006-01-26T20:06:00.000-06:00

Another report that Iraq's WMD was moved to Syria:

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.

"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."

Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."

...

Mr. Sada, 65, told the Sun that the pilots of the two airliners that transported the weapons of mass destruction to Syria from Iraq approached him in the middle of 2004, after Saddam was captured by American troops.

"I know them very well. They are very good friends of mine. We trust each other. We are friends as pilots," Mr. Sada said of the two pilots. He declined to disclose their names, saying they are concerned for their safety. But he said they are now employed by other airlines outside Iraq.

The pilots told Mr. Sada that two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, Mr. Sada said. Then Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, he said, including "yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel." The pilots said there was also a ground convoy of trucks.

The flights - 56 in total, Mr. Sada said - attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.

"Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming," Mr. Sada said. "They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians."

Beware the Hudna

2006-01-20T15:12:00.000-06:00

Lest anyone be deceived, Osama's "Truce" = Reload.

Hudna has a distinct meaning to Islamic fundamentalists, well-versed in their history: The prophet Mohammad struck a legendary, ten-year hudna with the Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca in the seventh century. Over the following two years, Mohammad rearmed and took advantage of a minor Quraysh infraction to break the hudna and launch the full conquest of Mecca, the holiest city in Islam.
When Yassir Arafat infamously invoked Mohammad's hudna in 1994 to describe his own Oslo commitments "on the road to Jerusalem," the implication was clear. As Mideast expert Daniel Pipes explained, Arafat was asserting to his Islamic brethren that he will, "when his circumstances change for the better, take advantage of some technicality to tear up existing accords and launch a military assault on Israel." Indeed, this is precisely what occurred in Sept. 2000 when Arafat & Co. launched a terror assault upon Israeli citizens. ...

What Westerners need to do is to read Islamic scripture and learn that in Islam there is no concept of permanent submission to any other power than God's. Treaties mean nothing. Beware the hudna.

United We Stand?

2006-01-17T15:17:00.000-06:00

Gateway Pundit has a summary of Clinton/Gore positions on warrantless searches -- they argued for much more expansive powers than even Bush.

...The Clinton administration claims that it can bypass the warrant clause for "national security" purposes. In July 1994 Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the president "has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes." [51] According to Gorelick, the president (or his attorney general) need only satisfy himself that an American is working in conjunction with a foreign power before a search can take place.

But strangely, now that American has voted in a Republican President, Democrats want much more restrictively policies -- in a post-9/11 world! Is this what they meant by United We Stand?

CNN apologizes to Iran

2006-01-17T15:00:00.000-06:00

Seriously. Apparently CNN made a translation error which upset the poor dictators, for which CNN quickly grovelled and fired the person who made the mistake:

In a written statement, CNN said it "apologized on all its platforms which included the translation error, including CNN International, CNN/USA and CNN.com, and also expressed its regrets to the Iranian government and the Iranian ambassador to the U.N."

...

"Obviously, we're taking it very, very seriously. We will never use him again," owner Lesley Howard said, referring to the interpreter.

She said the same interpreter, who like other interpreters is contracted for individual projects, has done good work in the past, including for CNN.

No word yet on when CNN will apologize to the Bush administration, a legitimately elected democratic government, for continuing to refer to what is by definition INTERNATIONAL communications monitoring as "domestic surveillance".

GONZALES: Well, again, as the president indicated, and I'm only talking about what the president described to the American people in his radio address, we're talking about communication where one end of the communication is outside the United States and where we have reason to believe that a party on that communication is a member of al Qaeda or is a member of an affiliate group with al Qaeda.

This ranks up there with the "unilateral" invasion of Iraq by a coalition of 30 countries.

The Ironic Inquisition

2006-01-12T13:29:00.000-06:00

Oh, people of the Left, I hope you are not proud of your Senators, as they conduct an Inquistion into the nature of a college club Alito joined decades ago:

When what should be a simple confirmation process reduces family members to tears, it shows that one party has degenerated into a secular Inquisition. And let me remind you that it was this party that, on more than one occasion, elected a former Klansman to the post of Majority Leader -- a man who as recently as three years ago defended the use of the "n-word".

In fact, most of the Senators from that caucus are responsible for that election of Byrd to his leadership posts.

Wiretaps prevented terrorist attack to "exceed" 9/11

2006-01-12T12:56:00.000-06:00

Thank you to our Italian friends.

Italian authorities recently announced that they had used wiretaps to uncover the conspiracy to conduct a series of major attacks inside the U.S. Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the planned attacks would have targeted stadiums, ships and railway stations, and the terrorists' goal, he said, was to exceed the devastation caused by 9/11.

Have you read about this in your newspaper or seen a reference to this on CNN? I suspect not. This seems like a big story to me, no? I guess news that supports the arguments of our President and therefore the defense of our Country isn't newsworthy.

In this crazy day, "our" media seems to do a better job of supressing news than reporting it. Those who want to be informed citizens must find alternate sources on the internet. If you're not, don't you wonder what else you're missing?

And thank you to our President for continuing to pursue all legal means possible to keep America safe.

Hire that Man!

2006-01-11T18:39:00.000-06:00

On Judge Alito:"I don't think it's appropriate or useful to look to foreign law in interpreting the provisions of our Constitution," Judge Alito said in response to questions from Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, in the third day of the judge's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"I think the Framers would be stunned by the idea that the Bill of Rights is to be interpreted by taking a poll of the countries of the world," Judge Alito said. "The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to give Americans rights that were recognized practically nowhere else in the world at the time. The Framers did not want Americans to have the rights of people in France or the rights of people in Russia or any of the other countries on the continent of Europe at the time; they wanted them to have the rights of Americans."
Imagine that! At least now I can understand why the Left hates him.

On Being Pro-Choice

2006-01-10T07:01:00.000-06:00

John Stossel to address school-choice on Friday in "Stupid in America". Don't miss it!

Documents confirm Saddam trained thousands of Islamic terrorists

2006-01-07T18:43:00.000-06:00

One would think these reports would be big news, yet mysteriously seem absent from the major media:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The Suicide of Western Civilization

2006-01-04T12:19:00.000-06:00

The best thing I've read in a while -- It's long, but worth reading the whole thing. By Steyn, of course.

Barone on Unpatriotic Dissent

2006-01-04T12:03:00.000-06:00

Is Al Qaeda calling you?

2006-01-01T18:03:00.000-06:00

Bush wants to know. So would I.

Update: I should have been more clear: "If Al Qaeda is calling you, Bush wants to know why."

After 9/11, Fighting Terror is Impeachable Offense

2005-12-31T09:52:00.000-06:00

Revelations that Clinton began rendition policy to fight Al Qaeda in 1995. Again, unsurprisingly your trusted big media may have neglected to mention this.

Ahnold strikes back

2005-12-31T09:40:00.000-06:00

Well played.

Value of American Hostages hits new low

2005-12-29T11:47:00.000-06:00

Not so for Germans though. Myopic government policy to blame.

The Point

2005-10-06T12:55:00.000-05:00

Thank God our President gets it. Do you?Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 -- and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.

Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence -- the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers -- and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

On the contrary: They target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence. Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory.

Jimmy Carter causes Terrorism

2005-08-02T16:47:00.000-05:00

Jimmy Carter continues to provide juicy anti-American propaganda to motivate attacks on America and American troops. Al-Jazeera reports:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Saturday blasted the U.S. detention center in Cuba, saying that Guantanamo Bay Naval base was an embarrassment to the United States.

Carter was speaking at the Baptist World Alliance’s centenary conference in Birmingham, central England, where he also criticised the current American President’s decision to invade Iraq, describing the war as “unnecessary and unjust.”

“I think what’s going on in Guantanamo Bay and other places is a disgrace to the USA,” he told a news conference, adding that it was “the cause of terrorism.”

Given that investigations at Guantanamo have almost completely debunked allegations of inhumane treatment, I believe that Jimmy Carter is causing terrorism with his irresponsible rhetoric.

And until fellow Democrats call on him to stop aiding and abetting terorists with his false propaganda, I hold all of them responsible for future terrorism against America and future American troop casualties, since they continue to encourage the enemy to believe (a) their atacks are justifiable and (b) American determination is wavering.

Questions for the reader:

Do you think the War in Iraq cause terrorism?

Do you think abortion causes abortion doctor killings and abortion clinic bombings, or that American policy caused the OK City bombing?

Were your answers different? Why?

Do you need a quick lesson from John Howard?

Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq -- a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations -- when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder."

Lessons from London

2005-07-08T08:24:00.000-05:00

From Belmont Club:The Al Qaeda have characterized the attack on London as 'punishment' for Britain's temerity to resist the inevitability of Islam. It is the kind of punishment these self-ordained masters of the universe are accustomed to meting out against harem women and insolent slaves. A few administered licks, and no doubt the cowardly kuffar will crawl back to his place. The tragedy is that Al Qaeda's perception is perfectly correct when applied to the Left, for whom no position is too supine, no degradation too shameful to endure; but incorrect for the vast majority of humans, in whom the instinct for self-preservation has not yet been extinguished. It will result in history's greatest case of mistaken identity; the mismatch that should never have happened. The enemy is even now dying at our feet, where we should kick him and kick him again.
Which is why me must win the fight against the Islamic crazies in Iraq, and why talk of pulling troops out is pure idiocy, and why America received a temporary reprieve from such insanity when President Bush was re-elected. The hawkish liberal Hitchens quotes Churchill:If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

Gee, You Think?

2005-06-30T14:56:00.000-05:00

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.

Mind-numbingly Obtuse

2005-06-29T21:16:00.000-05:00

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:

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.
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.
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.

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".

Noonan says, Not so Fast!

2005-06-29T07:30:00.000-05:00

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."

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.
Agreed.

Axis of Evil Update

2005-06-15T11:04:00.000-05:00

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.

Let's Be Sensitive!

2005-06-14T09:14:00.000-05:00

Via The Corner

Bush Countries

2005-05-23T15:45:00.000-05:00

What do Arabs think of George W. Bush? Fouad Ajami answers:

To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country. I was to encounter people from practically all Arab lands, to listen in on a great debate about the possibility of freedom and liberty.
I met Lebanese giddy with the Cedar Revolution that liberated their country from the Syrian prison that had seemed an unalterable curse. They were under no illusions about the change that had come their way. They knew that this new history was the gift of an American president who had put the Syrian rulers on notice. The speed with which Syria quit Lebanon was astonishing, a race to the border to forestall an American strike that the regime could not discount.

I met Syrians in the know who admitted that the fear of American power, and the example of American forces flushing Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, now drive Syrian policy.

They hang on George Bush's words in Damascus, I was told: the rulers wondering if Iraq was a crystal ball in which they could glimpse their future.
The Bush Doctrine at work.

Euro-Americans

2005-05-19T08:35:00.000-05:00

Jonah Goldberg writes on the Eurofication of America:Huge chunks of the American population have been body-snatched by zomboid creatures from Canada, or possibly — shudder — Europe. That’s the only conclusion one can draw from the latest monumental study from the Pew Center for the People and the Press....

According to the Pew Center, the less you like to fly the American flag, the more likely it is you are Democrat. The more you think hard work and personal initiative aren’t the ticket to the good life, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. The more you believe the United Nations is a better steward of international relations, while America is a negative actor on the world stage, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. The more you believe that the government is there to help, the more likely it is you are Democrat. The less seriously you take religion, the more likely you are to be a Democrat....

So what does all of this have to do with body-snatching Europhiles? Well, basically, everything. The ideas, assumptions and prejudices held by the statistically typical Democratic voter, according to the Pew study, are quite simply, European. Europeans believe in a strong social welfare state, for rich and poor alike. Europeans are cynical. They look askance — these days — on patriotic sentiment (hence the rush to form a new European nation). The church pews of Europe would make a great hideout for bank robbers since they’re always empty. The United Nations is, in the typical European’s worldview, the last best hope for mankind. From the death penalty to gay marriage, the more similar you are to a typical European in your political and social outlook, the more likely you are to be a Democrat.
I would only add that if you believe the UN is mankind's last best hope, you inhabit a very sad world. Maybe that's why liberals always seem so angry and depressed.

Freedom Spreads

2005-05-17T15:37:00.000-05:00

To the women of Kuwait!

Kuwaiti women hailed as historic a decision to allow them to vote and run for parliament -- a law passed despite fierce resistance by Islamist and conservative MPs.

"Thank God now we've got our rights," university professor Siham Freih said on Tuesday. "Until yesterday Kuwait's image to the world was tarnished because women were taking part in all professional fields but were deprived of the vote."

"Before this I didn't feel like a citizen. They (lawmakers) restored our right that had been robbed from us," said law professor Dr Badria al-Awadi.

Well, who could have predicted this?

Oh yeah. Our President.

The Un-PC

2005-05-05T13:07:00.000-05:00

Another reason to like President Bush:"Como estas, baby!"

Breaking News -- Conservatives: Not an Alien Race, After All

2005-05-04T09:07:00.000-05:00

For all their intelligence, open-mindedness, tolerance and understanding, John Tierney notes that Liberal stereotypes of "blue states" continue:The favorite Democratic explanation is that the red staters are hicks who have been blinded by righteousness, as Thomas Frank argues in "What's the Matter With Kansas?" He laments that middle-class Kansans are so bamboozled by moral issues like abortion and school prayer that they vote for Republicans even though the Republican tax-cutting policies are against their self-interest.

But middle-class Americans don't simply cast ballots for Republicans. They also vote with their feet, which is why blue states and old Democratic cities are losing population to red states and Republican exurbs. People are moving there precisely because of economic reasons - more jobs, affordable houses and the lower taxes offered by Republican politicians.

They're not moving for the churches, and they don't vote for Mr. Bush simply because he reads the Bible every day. One of the main reasons they like him is that he gets bashed so often. When Jon Stewart sneers at him, they empathize because they're used to being sneered at themselves.

They know what their image is in Manhattan and Hollywood, and they know they're not all that different from the Democrats in those places. They, too, watch "Desperate Housewives," and they're not surprised to hear Laura Bush doing Chippendales jokes. They've spent their own dollar bills there. They don't see anything the matter with that - or with themselves.

Operation Iraqi Freedom?

2005-04-27T12:12:00.000-05:00

The Instapundit nails the NY Times for lying about WMD -- the NY Times declares that Bush only "seized upon" Democracy after the claims of WMD proved "fictitious".
The only plausible reason for keeping American troops in Iraq is to protect the democratic transformation that President Bush seized upon as a rationale for the invasion after his claims about weapons of mass destruction turned out to be fictitious. If that transformation is now allowed to run off the rails, the new rationale could prove to be as hollow as the original one.
I'll go farther than the Instapundit -- Actually the NY Times managed to sneak 3 lies into one sentence!

That Bush only "seized" upon Democracy after no WMD were found. Wrong! Refuted by the Instapundit.

Bush intentionally deceived America with the claims of WMD.
"fictitious":
adjective
1. false: not true or genuine, and intended to deceive
Wrong! There is no evidence that Bush was lying, and there is "slam dunk" evidence to the contrary.

With respect to the WMD, we went to war because Iraq had WMD. Wrong again!

The US went to Iraq because Iraq refused to comply with a) the Gulf War I cease-fire, and b) the 16 or 17 UN resolutions, i.e. Saddam did not demonstrate to us that they had no WMD -- in fact he seemed intent on being deceptive.

I suppose the NY Times editors hate Bush too much to see the difference.

More Good News

2005-04-25T08:51:00.000-05:00

Chrenkoff has more Good News from Iraq, including this refutation of the Conventional Wisdom:

Kaban, 31, electrical engineer from Baghdad: "There have been many changes since the fall of Saddam's regime, but the most important change was that we feel free... However, those who say that security was better in the past are completely wrong. It is true we did not have suicide car bombings in Saddam's era, but our homes did not feel safe from the intrusion of Saddam's security men, who came in the middle of the night to kidnap, kill or rape."

NY Times: Eternally Biased

2005-04-21T11:57:00.000-05:00

Jay Nordlinger reports a nice quote from the NY Times:[The President] is lucky it was not the constitution of the English language and the laws of English grammar that he was called upon to support.
But it seems this quote is circa 1860, and the President in question was Abraham Lincoln.

Their arrogance endures.

France supports War!

2005-04-21T11:29:00.000-05:00

It took long enough, but France has finally come around to the idea of pre-emptive war. But it seems they have limits -- you see, they don't support wars to overthrow inhuman murderous tyrant to install a democracy, but they do support a war to overthrow a democracy to install a tyranny:During a state visit to China, French Premier Raffarin threw support behind a law allowing China to attack Taiwan and continued to push for a lift of the EU arms embargo.

At the outset of a three-day visit to China, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he supported Beijing's "anti-secession" law on Taiwan, and vowed to keep pushing for an end to an EU arms embargo that could open the door for Paris to sell weapons to the Asian giant.
Just when I thought I couldn't be more disgusted by the behavior of the French government. Can we finally stop referring to the French as "our allies"? They are not friends to the Free World. I don't think they are necessarily anti-democratic (though we'll see if they attempt to jam the French people with the new EU Consitution without popular ratification). But I do think they can be bought on the cheap, first by Saddam and now by China:Raffarin also signed or finalized major business deals with Beijing valued at around $3.2 billion (2.4 billion euros).
To find the French, follow the money. When you get there, you may even find the Canadians and the UN.

Bergergate Roundup

2005-04-01T11:59:00.000-06:00

Gratefully many bloggers are as outraged as I am: Captain Ed, Instapundit, INDC Journal, Powerline and The Corner. Bloggers unite! We cannot let them get away with this whitewash!

And Balloon Juice takes us back thru the history and reminds us of Bill Clinton's rather weak attempt to downplay the controversy.
Former president Bill Clinton defends his embattled national security advisor as a man who "always got things right," even if his desk was a mess.

"We were all laughing about it," Clinton said about the investigation into Sandy Berger for taking classified terrorism documents from the National Archives. "People who don't know him might find it hard to believe. But ... all of us who've been in his office have always found him buried beneath papers."
Does this implicate Bill in the cover-up? Or did he really, honestly believe pilfering and destroying confidential documents from the National Archives is funny? I hope not, but I wouldn't be suprised if he did.

And a great comment for those who think there is still some chance the destruction of documents wasn't a premeditated cover-up:

"The ambiguity is did he steal the documents in order to cover something up, or did he take them home for legitimate reasons, albeit a criminal action since they were classified, and for whatever reason destroy two and lie about it? The first is pretty damn serious. The second isn't, except for Sandy Berger, although his sentence seems to be pretty light."

Well, duh!! Since he purposfully destroyed 3 'copies' instead of just taking them back....they must have had some comments written on them - otherwise you are asking us to believe that he comitted, what he knew to be a crime as National Security Advisor, a crime for nothing???? Does this even make sense to you?

Nixon didn't erase those 8 minutes off of the tape because they weren't important and Berger didn't shred these documents because they were just copies....to belive [sic] that is just ridiculous!

Intimidation in Kalamazoo

2005-04-01T08:54:00.000-06:00

Free speech for me, but not for thee.

The Democrats' Watergate

2005-04-01T07:50:00.000-06:00

It's not the crime, it's the cover-up, right? Well in this case, we may never know what the crime was, because it seems the cover-up was largely successful.

Sandy Berger, National Security Advisor under Bill Clinton, has admitted to illegally removing classified documents relevant to the 9/11 attacks and shredding them by hand, and to making false statements to cover himself.

The Washington Post reports this morning,
Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, a former White House national security adviser, plans to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, and will acknowledge intentionally removing and destroying copies of a classified document about the Clinton administration's record on terrorism....

The deal's terms make clear that Berger spoke falsely last summer in public claims that in 2003 he twice inadvertently walked off with copies of a classified document during visits to the National Archives, then later lost them....

The terms of Berger's agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international consulting business.

The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an "after-action review" prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration's actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration's awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil.
I am very interested to hear how this offensive obstruction of justice (with respect to the Congressional investigation) will be reported to America by our media. If Condaleeza Rice or Paul Wolfowitz were caught red-handed shredding National Security documents relating to the 9/11 attacks, we would probably already be hearing talk of impeachment of the President, Watergate style.

So let's take review first reports this morning:

CBS and CNN report only the AP version, which actually forgets to mention the hands-on shredding and implies that there is still some doubt about his guilt and the whole situation is the Republicans' fault anyway:[Berger] called the episode "an honest mistake," and denied criminal wrongdoing....

Many Democrats, including former President Clinton, suggested politics were behind disclosure of the probe only days before the release of the Sept. 11 commission report, which Republicans feared would be a blow to President Bush's re-election campaign.

ABC News has a different AP story which also forgets to mention the shredding, but does note that a "sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration's handling of al-Qaida terror threats" is still missing.

NBC at MSNBC news has no reference, and apparently doesn't consider destroying classified government documents from the National Archives concerning 9/11 to be a "top story".

The NY Times does mention the shredding, but only to put the Berger spin on it with no counterpoints:On Sept. 2, 2003, in a daylong review of documents, Mr. Berger took a copy of a lengthy White House "after-action" report that he had commissioned to assess the government's performance in responding to the so-called millennium terrorist threat before New Year's 2000, and he placed the document in his pocket, the associate said. A month later, in another Archives session, he removed four copies of other versions of the report, the associate said.

Mr. Berger's intent, the associate said, was to compare the different versions of the 2000 report side by side and trace changes.

"He was just too tired and wasn't able to focus enough, and he felt like he needed to look at the documents in his home or his office to line them up," the associate said. "He now admits that was a real mistake."

Mr. Berger admits to compounding the mistake after removing the second set of documents on Oct. 2, 2003, the associate said. In comparing the versions at his office later that day, he realized that several were essentially the same, and he cut three copies into small pieces, the associate said. He also admitted to improperly removing handwritten notes he had taken at the Archives, the associate said.

Two days later, staff members at the Archives confronted Mr. Berger, and he now admits to misleading the Archives about what had happened. He indicated that the removal was inadvertent, and though he returned the two remaining copies of the report, he said nothing about the three he had destroyed, the associate said.
Yes, he inadvertenly removed the documents in order to review them at home. And then shredded them because they were all the same. Now I get it.

An "embarassing" "mistake"? Actually a treacherous crime.

Update
Not suprisingly, the Instapundit has more, including a link to Jim Geraghty:

[T]here were some facts out there that were so damning, Sandy Berger was willing to break the law to make sure the public never saw them.

The UN's Ken Lay

2005-03-30T15:33:00.000-06:00

From the WSJ:

Following yesterday's publication of Paul Volcker's second interim report on the U.N.'s Oil for Food program, Kofi Annan issued a statement saying "the inquiry has cleared me of any wrongdoing." Later, asked if had any plans to resign, he answered, "Hell no!" Question for the Secretary General: How do you define "wrongdoing"?

In the narrowest sense, Mr. Volcker's Committee found "no evidence" that the Secretary General influenced the U.N.'s 1998 selection of Swiss inspections company Cotecna for an Oil for Food contract. It also found that "the evidence is not reasonably sufficient to show that the Secretary-General knew that Cotecna had submitted a bid on the humanitarian inspection contract in 1998."

In a broader sense, however, what Mr. Volcker's report reveals is an "adverse finding" against the Secretary General: That is, patterns of willful neglect, conflict of interest and incompetence that would have any business CEO out on his ear.

Governing the Internet

2005-03-30T06:53:00.000-06:00

Captain Ed relates that now the UN wants to take control of the internet, because as we all know, the internet has been an utter failure up to now. As Houlin Zhao, representing that perennial defender of free speech, China, says "the whole world is looking for a better solution to internet governance".

Captain Ed:

All one needs to do is to look around the General Assembly to understand which government rules will get "more respected". The UN mostly consists of dictatorships and autocracies, which have little use for the free speech and open information that the Internet provides people all over the world. A free Internet threatens their power and their oppressive regimes. Nothing would please them more than to get their hands on the engines of the Internet in order to suppress the information that would inspire their subjects to throw off their shackles and claim freedom for themselves.

Let me put it to all in this light. Will we trust the same organization that put Libya and Cuba in charge of human rights and Syria in charge of counterterrorism to manage the Internet and safeguard free speech?

Albania gets it

2005-03-27T11:23:00.000-06:00

Some thoughts for old Europe, from the Albania ambassador to America. Btw, Albania is a majority Muslim country.

Upon committing Albania to the Coalition of the Willing, Prime Minister Nano urged his fellow European leaders to visit Normandy "to see for themselves what the United States has been willing to undertake in the name of freedom. We should all visit Normandy. We should pay homage to those brave Americans who stormed ashore at Omaha Beach and gave their lives for the freedom of others. The wonder of it is that the Americans are willing to do it again," Mr. Nano said.

And of course, it was the U.S.-led effort of NATO to rein in Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo that proved to the world that, in the name of freedom, the United States was willing to fight for the freedom of the oppressed, regardless of religious belief.

So it is with Iraq. The importance of the American-led effort to liberate Iraq and establish a democratic government for the first time in this country's history cannot be underestimated. It is not the first time the United States has faced suicide bombers trapped in a cult of death. The Japanese kamikazes sought to do to the Americans toward the end of World War II what the terrorists are attempting in Iraq today. The kamikazes failed then, the terrorists will fail now. Japan became a democracy and so will Iraq.

The difference between the United States and the Islamic terrorists is this: The terrorists export death. The Americans export freedom.

The surprise is not in Albania's decision to send more troops to fight for freedom in Iraq. The surprise would have been if Albania did not.

Why?

If you believe in freedom, you believe in fighting for it. If you believe in fighting for freedom, you believe in America.

Quagmire Alert

2005-03-26T09:54:00.000-06:00

Glenn Reynolds notes a report that Iraqi insurgents are seeking an "exit strategy". Heh.

Life is Good

2005-03-25T12:19:00.000-06:00

Blogging wirelessly by the pool on the new laptop. Does it get any better?

Strange bedfellows

2005-03-25T12:07:00.000-06:00

The Corner notes that Ralph Nader has joined in Terri Shiavo's defense, with a good point, if true: That not only has the court ordered her medical treatment terminated, but it has forbidden her only family from providing her with water, e.g. in a syringe or a spoon. Think about that. I have to agree with Ralph on this one -- I think this crosses the line into a court-ordered killing.
The courts not only are refusing her tube feeding, but have ordered that no attempts be made to provide her water or food by mouth. Terri swallows her own saliva. Spoon feeding is not medical treatment. "This outrageous order proves that the courts are not merely permitting medical treatment to be withheld, it has ordered her to be made dead," Nader and Smith assert.
As for the rest of the Left, I cannot understand why it is enthusiastic about having a disabled woman killed seemingly based solely on the testimony of her husband, who by the way already has a fiancee lined up. Is this modern feminism?

The Afghani Rosa Parks

2005-03-20T21:46:00.000-06:00

Kudos to Newsweek for the suggestion. I wonder when Western feminists will begin to actually care about women in the Islamic world.

Terri Schiavo

2005-03-20T21:32:00.000-06:00

I haven't paid too much attention to this sad story, though I've found these interesting. Myths and Hypocrisy. I think Jonah is exactly right on this point:

I would respect the Democrats more if they had the courage to argue that Terri should die. That is their position.

Winning the unwinnable

2005-03-20T21:25:00.000-06:00

Is America winning the war in Iraq? Recent signs seem to point that way.
The top Marine officer in Iraq said Friday that the number of attacks against American troops in Sunni-dominated western Iraq and death tolls had dropped sharply over the last four months, a development that he called evidence that the insurgency was weakening in one of the most violent areas of the country.

The officer, Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, head of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, said that insurgents were averaging about 10 attacks a day, and that fewer than two of those attacks killed or wounded American forces or damaged equipment. That compared with 25 attacks a day, five of them with casualties or damage, in the weeks leading up to the pivotal battle of Falluja in November, he said...
This is rather unexpected, because I'm pretty sure that our own media and our ever-patriotic Democratic party has been telling us for two years that this war is unwinnable. (And at the same time encouraging the inhuman resistance in Iraq to keep fighting and killing our soldiers. But I know, they "Support the Troops!")

Reliving the Election -- in Pictures

2005-03-19T10:45:00.000-06:00

Comparing the candidates with a photo-blog from the election, via Tim Blair.

Just a sample:

and

Don't miss the rest!

End the Occupation!

2005-03-14T13:10:00.000-06:00

Publius Pundit has the latest on the counter protest to Assad's staged protests last week. Estimates near 1,000,000 people protesting Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Amazing!

Bloggers Beware

2005-03-04T11:19:00.000-06:00

Is this America or Iran? Free Speech or not?
Bradley Smith, one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission (FEC), reports that his outfit is set to crack down on internet speech about political candidates and elections. It will do so by treating at least some of our political utterances as in-kind campaign contributions, especially when we back them up by linking to a candidate's website. This move is the outgrowth of the restrictions that the McCain-Feingold places on political speech, and a decision by a district court judge in Washington D.C. (Clinton appointee Colleen Kollar-Kotelly) that the internet, unlike the MSM, is not exempt from these restrictions. Smith and the two other Republican commission members wanted to appeal the decision, but the three Democratic members demurred.

As George Will and others have noted, the limits on speech imposed in the name of campaign finance reform operate to enhance the MSM's monopoly position when it comes to presenting information and opinion about politics. In the past, the threat to that monopoly position came from candidates, their well-to-do supporters, and other wealthy issue-oriented individuals. Now a new set of usurpers has emerged. They are called bloggers, but they are mostly just citizens with access to a computer who think they have something to say. Bloggers, for example, played a major role in the extraordinary defeat of Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle. Daschle had relied on the leading state newspaper not to report facts showing the extent to which he had become a liberal "creature" of Washington. But bloggers were able to present this information to voters to Daschle's great detriment.

The political establishment and its speech police is not amused. They have not defeated "big money" only to have their designs ruined by a bunch of pajama-clad upstarts.
Register with your credentials with The Government now, for the privilege to criticize it. Please sir, may I have another?

And who do we have to thank for all of this? McCain, the leading Republican candidate for President, and George W Bush, who signed this disgusting unconstitutional restriction on free speech into law, and our venerable Supreme Court which cannot countenance restrictions on the most vulger pornography, but has no trouble finding real honest-to-goodness political speech illegal.

Why do I feel the urge to puke?

Update
An excerpt from Captain Ed's letter to his Senator:

The effect of this would have been to force me to shut down my blog, or convert it to something else. In fact, it would have caused me less legal heartache to convert my site to a porn blog and do nothing but post hard-core pictures all day long. In the twisted environment of the McCain-Feingold Act, that kind of website would enjoy greater First Amendment protection than my political speech, a result for which every single Senator should feel shame and outrage.

Each of you should read the Constitution you swore to uphold and defend, and reflect on the unequivocal language of our forefathers:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Shame? What is that? For our leaders in Washington, I provide a definition, in case they've forgotten:

shame: a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness, or disgrace

Yes, a disgrace. That sounds right.

Dear sirs, when you're done wiping your ass with my Constitution, please let me know.

Where Freedom meets Liberty

2005-03-03T07:03:00.000-06:00

More on Lebanon from Publius and the Washington Post:
The 8 million Iraqis who turned out to vote, the Palestinians who have overwhelmingly supported the cease-fire with Israel, and the tens of thousands of Lebanese who have been marching and camping in the center of Beirut have all proved more potent than assassinations and suicide bombs. If Mr. Assad will not yield to the new political realities they are creating, he will place his own regime at risk.
More dominos? Egypt? Syria itself?

Seems almost like Freedom is on the march.

Another Domino to Fall?

2005-02-28T12:09:00.000-06:00

I'm always skeptical about the disconnect between words and actions in the Middle East, but reports say that the pro-Syrian government in Lebanon has "resigned". Publius has the best round-up.

It looks like Freedom is on the March. Hmmm, where have I heard that before?

Too little, too late

2005-02-27T16:59:00.000-06:00

As far as I'm concerned, America has been at war with Syria for about 2 years now, due to their not-so-secret support of the Iraqi insurgents. But Captain Ed finds that Syria may be getting the message:

Iraqi officials said Sunday that Syrian authorities had captured Saddam Hussein's half-brother and 29 other officials of the deposed dictator's Baath Party in Syria and handed them over to Iraq in an apparent goodwill gesture....

Somehow I doubt that Syria just now stumbled across these 30 Saddamites. So why now? Maybe they've decided America isn't as "overextended" as they once thought, and they're looking for a way out.

End the Occupation

2005-02-15T08:36:00.000-06:00

Syrian forces should withdraw from the quagmire of Lebanon. Only then will Beirut know the peace of the "safest city in Iraq", Fallujah.

Why do they hate us?

2005-02-14T12:16:00.000-06:00

Maybe because some of them actually believe the lies debunked here.

Down Syndrome Bomber

2005-02-11T17:33:00.000-06:00

Chrenkoff links to an article concerning the Down Syndrome child used as a ~~suicide~~ homicide bomber by the ~~insurgents~~ terrorists in Iraq:Accustomed to living on charity, [the Zubaidis] were not surprised when, 10 days before the election, two men arrived saying they were from the local Sunni mosque and wanted to help Amar. Ms Zubaidi was overjoyed.

'They said they would organise a sickness pension from the new government, that they were arranging with the Red Crescent for a block of land on which we might build a house, and they gave me $300 for stock for the shop.

'They said that they would take Amar to a special school, and each day they collected him and drove away. They gave him sweets and clothes and cigarettes - he loved them. Sunnis had helped us before, so I didn't think it strange'.
Comments from his family:The election was meant to be so exciting. But we've had to give Amar as a present for the new Iraq and we just hope that it will get better as a victory for Amar and all the people.
My question is, what is happening to these sub-human terrorist animals as they are caught by the Iraqi authorities? When do we get to read about the horrible punishments they receive?

Breaking Rumor

2005-02-11T10:49:00.000-06:00

Market rumor is that there was a coup in North Korea. Stand by for updates....

Update
Rats! Seeing as how there have been no follow-up news reports, I'm afraid this rumor probably wasn't factually based.

Elections sweep Middle East!

2005-02-10T15:38:00.000-06:00

Via Little Green Footballs, the BBC reports on elections. In Saudi Arabia!

Voters have gone to the polls in Saudi Arabia's first nationwide municipal election, as the kingdom's government aims to bring in elements of democracy.

The first phase was held in and around the capital, Riyadh, with later rounds to be staged elsewhere over two months....

Voting was initially slow but the numbers arriving at polling stations in Riyadh and its suburbs increased as the day went on.

"This was a wonderful moment," Badr al-Faqih, a 54-year-old geography professor, told AP after casting the first ballot at one polling station. "This is a first step towards more elections."

"This is patriotic participation," he said. "I want this campaign to succeed...."

A US state department spokesman said the polls were "a sign that Saudi Arabia is not immune to the reforms sweeping the region."

Granted this is a small step, but in the past 6 months we've seen elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia. I think this is largely due to President George Bush's influence, and his refusal to drop the topic of Democracy. Does anyone think this would have happened if Gore had defeated Bush in 2000?

More Tipping?

2005-02-10T15:34:00.000-06:00

Earlier I said I thought the Iraq election would be a tipping point towards stability in Iraq. Tim Blair links to a Washington Post report with some evidence to support that.

In the week since national elections, police officers and Iraqi National Guardsmen said they have received more tips from the public, resulting in more arrests and greater effectiveness in their efforts to weaken the violent insurgency rocking the country.

Rather Biased?

2005-02-08T11:08:00.000-06:00

Paul Mirengoff applies standard courtroom practices to determine if CBS News was politically biased in RatherGate:THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW PANEL which investigated CBS News's faked memos found no basis to accuse Dan Rather or Mary Mapes of political bias in connection with their roles in the offending 60 Minutes story about President Bush's National Guard service. In its report the Panel characterized the very question of whether a political agenda could play a role as "subjective" and "difficult." And panelist Louis Boccardi later explained that "bias is a hard thing to prove."

Yet questions about motivation lie at the heart of many garden-variety legal disputes, most notably cases involving issues of unlawful discrimination under various civil rights statutes. Recognizing that very few employment decision-makers will admit to bias, the Supreme Court quickly developed a construct for inferring the existence of bias through "indirect" evidence. Proving bias thus became no more difficult than proving other allegations of fact, a state of affairs consistent with Chief Justice Rehnquist's comment that the state of one's mind is just as much a factual issue as the state of one's digestion.
Verdict: Guilty as charged!

Talking Down the Economy

2005-02-05T17:27:00.000-06:00

President George Bush's economic plan has brought America through one of history's worst economic bubbles, such that unemployment now stands at 5.2% (far lower than it was when Clinton was reelected due to his "miracle economy") and more than 2.2 million jobs were created last year.

So let's read how CNN is still reporting this amazing recovery:

Jobs still can't get in gear

The job market started the new year in much the same way as it finished out the old -- posting disappointing job growth.

The Labor Department reported Friday that U.S. payrolls grew by 146,000 jobs in January, up from a revised 133,000 in December. But that was below the 200,000 new jobs economists were looking for, on average, according to a survey by Briefing.com.

January marked the seventh time in the last eight reports that economists had overestimated the number of jobs the economy created.

The unemployment rate fell to 5.2 percent from 5.4 in December, but that came mostly from a drop in the size of the labor force, not due to strong employment gains. Economists were looking for an unchanged reading.

"Some of the signals pointing to job market improvement simply did not bear fruit this month," said Robert Brusca of FAO-Economics, who had forecast a gain of 225,000 jobs. "The report makes the economy look even less like it is building a head of steam."
Their own chart belies their spin:

Those numbers look very solid to me. Somebody needs to inform CNN that the election is already over.

Corruption at UN Documented

2005-02-03T15:33:00.000-06:00

I'd like to say this is shocking, but it isn't.
A senior U.N. official solicited and received allocations of oil from Iraq for a trading company while directing the U.N. oil-for-food program, a key investigative report said on Thursday.

The official, Benon Sevan, engaged in conduct that was "ethically improper and seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations," said the report by Paul Volcker, the former U.S. Federal Reserve (news - web sites) chairman. Volcker was appointed by the United Nations to lead a probe of the now-defunct $67 billion program....

"Mr. Sevan repeatedly solicited allocations of oil under program [sic]. Iraqi officials provided such allocations for the purpose of obtaining Mr. Sevan's support on several issues" such as funds for repairing Iraq's crumbling oil facilities, said the report....

But since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, documents have emerged that show Saddam Hussein skimming funds from the program, selling oil illegally outside the program, often with the knowledge of big powers on the Security Council, and bribing a variety of officials around the world.

Volcker also said that U.N. officials ignored procurement procedures and safeguards from the very start of the program.

Investigators found "convincing and uncontested evidence" that the selection process was tainted by irregularities for each of the first three contractors selected -- the French bank Banque Nationale de Paris, the Dutch firm Saybolt Eastern Hemisphere BV and the British Lloyd's Register Inspection Ltd, the report said.

Why John Kerry Lost

2005-02-03T08:58:00.000-06:00

In my opinion, the Democratic Party leadership (but not all Democrats) has one goal for the Iraq War: That it be remembered as a failure, as the Vietnam War is usually remembered.

Then the Presidency of George Bush, whom they despise, will be remembered as a disaster, and the Democrats will be regarded as the sages who warned America of the impending debacle, thus restoring their prestige and winning future votes as the only party with enough wisdom and foresight to be trusted with the power of the Presidency.

What's more, the left-wing of America has dug themselves such a big hole with their overbearing and unconstructive criticisms, that if Iraq turns out to be a success, they will look completely ridiculous. So Democrats find themselves in an uncomfortable position -- every piece of good news out of Iraq is cause for alarm and consternation.

Today's WSJ editorial captures a succint example:

On Sunday, some eight million Iraqi citizens risked their lives to participate in parliamentary elections--as vivid and moving a demonstration of democratic ideals in action as we've seen in our lifetimes. Whereupon Senate Democrats Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry took to the airwaves to explain that it was no big deal and that it was time to start casting about for an "exit strategy."

Mr. Kerry: "No one in the United States should try to overhype this election.... It's hard to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can't and doesn't vote."

Mr. Kennedy: "While the elections are a step forward, they are not a cure for the growing violence and resentment of the perception of American occupation. . . . The best way to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that we have no long-term designs on their country is for the Administration to withdraw some troops now . . ."

Minority Leader Reid: "We need an exit strategy so that we know what victory is and how we can get there. . . . Iraq is clearly important, but there are so many bigger threats to our national security . . ."

So what is the Democratic Party's message on this inspiring exercise in Iraqi self-determination? First, that the election's legitimacy is questionable. Second, that its effects will be minor. Third, that America's presence in Iraq is doing more harm than good by generating terrorism and anti-Americanism where none previously existed. Fourth, that the U.S. has better things to do. Fifth, that American sacrifices in Iraq are best redeemed not by victory, but by the earliest feasible departure.

To be blunt, the Democratic Party as a whole has no interest in the Iraq War succeeding. They need failure. They want failure. (Failure meaning simply bringing the troops home before success is assured.)

In November 2004, enough Americans intuitively understood this that they did not hand over the reins to John Kerry who, at least subconciously, was looking for defeat in Iraq. And so George Bush defeated John Kerry in a relative land-slide.

The Most Trusted Name in News

2005-02-02T08:13:00.000-06:00

After admitting that CNN knowingly and intentionally covered up the crimes of Saddam Hussein (in my opinion, as great a media scandal as Dan Rather's debacle), the head of CNN allegedly claimed publicly at Davos that US soldiers were intentionally targeting members of the media in Iraq.

Shameless and disgusting. Fair and Balanced he is not.

A Job Well Done

2005-01-31T13:02:00.000-06:00

Is the Iraqi Vote a "tipping point"? I think so -- one of many to come.

Via BlackFive, from an Air-Force photographer in Sadr City:For the next five hours the Colonel toured many neighborhoods and polling areas throughout Sadr City. And Sadr City was an unbelievable site. Hundreds of people lined the streets and congregated outdoors. Children, teenage boys, and men played dozens of soccer games in the grass between the streets. Children swarmed me and the other troops chanting "Good, Good Mistah (the nickname they call us)! Good, Good Mistah!" Men and Women held their blue fingers high with pride and thankfulness so that I could get pictures of them. One man came up to my camera, held his blue finger up and shouted, “Bush Good! Bush Good!" They played music and danced. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Soldiers with me smiled and shook their heads in disbelief telling me that this was the same street they'd traveled down 8 months ago when they had their bloodiest and costliest battle. It was the route you could not go down for many months without being ambushed with RPGs and towing back at least one tank or Bradley. These soldiers leave in a couple of weeks and I think the best thing they could have experienced-proof: their job well done.

Iraq Vote Slideshow

2005-01-30T14:35:00.000-06:00

From the NY Times:

A woman held up her ID card and wept with joy after casting her vote in Najaf.

A Great Victory for Freedom

2005-01-30T10:01:00.000-06:00

Defying those who say democracy has no appeal to Mid-East Muslims, and defying threats of extreme violence, millions of Iraqis streamed to the polls to vote.

Via Fox News:

Truly a great day for all who love Freedom.

Soda Bloatware

2005-01-28T07:45:00.000-06:00

Lileks: "What the hell?"

Civil Rights for all Iraqis

2005-01-27T13:51:00.000-06:00

As Iraqi elections near, The Lead and Gold blog compares the Shia struggle against their Sunni oppressors to the American civil rights era, highlighting a few heroes who died here in America in support of freedom for all Americans.

Is that comparison merited? Consider this report from an Iraqi blogger:

I had an interesting conversation with a middle-aged taxi driver who used to live in Fallujah and is now at relatives in Amiriya, Baghdad. After asking me which tribe I belong to (thus assessing my sectarian background) he started hurling abuses at the Shia, calling them Persians, Majoos (fire worshippers), rabid dogs and a handful of other descriptions that I can't mention here....

He said that resistance was the only commonsense solution. First driving out the Americans, then fighting the Shia back into submission (as in 1991).

I haven't heard of that kind of hate and bigotry since.... well the 60's. And yet it seems the same people who supported minority civil rights in America seem to be hoping that the Iraqi elections will fail?