Spinnada

Happiness Is A Warm Gun At #DC

2011-11-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

PERFECT! Of course the LSM is ignoring the event! It's too close to home! A moment of silence for a #ODC flea party leftie nutjob that used an illegal gun in D.C., one of the most 'gun controlled' cities in America, to shoot at the Whitehouse. One moment of relief for DC residents in a never ending mindless din of clueless leftie mantra chanting! How appropriate and purposeful! Then the leftie nutjob is caught in Pennsylvania and charged by the FBI with the attempted assasination of the President who was in Kali meeting with the left coast lefties at the time. Priceless! You just can't make this stuff up! RLMAO!

Hey Democrats and RINO's - A 2012 Message

2011-10-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

Obama's Jobs Bill - Porkulus II

2011-10-11T10:59:00.001-07:00

More pork laden spending by the leader in porkbarrel legislation. Read my lips. We don't need no stinkin' jobs bill, Barry.

Obama Doesn't Seem To Care About The Debt.

2011-09-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

This IS The ISSUE!
If a comprehensive plan isn't put in place to reduce the National Debt and stop out of control government spending, America as we know it will become a third world debtor nation. We already owe the Chinese $3TRILLION and Obama wants to borrow even more! Is this President insane??

Obama The Failure

2011-07-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

Barrack Obama is a failure as the President of the United States on so many fronts it's hard to imagine. Obama is the worst President in the 20th and 21st century. Bayy's petulant little tin horn dictator behavior is startling. What is even more startling is the even the Lamestream Dead Media is starting to realize the scope of Obama's failure and ineptitude. Click on the title and you will go to the latest article that itemizes the financial meltdown Obama created with all of the nonworking Stimulus and private industry takeovers. 2012 will be Barrack Hussein Obama's last year as President. Thank the Lord!
2012 - ANYBODY BUT OBAMA!

Osama Bin Dead! Zawahiri is Next!

2011-05-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

Osama Bin Laden has been shot in the face by Navy Seals. 7.62 justice for Mr. Evil!

Zawahiri be afraid! Be Very Afraid! 7.62 justice is on the way. You're Next!

Chevy Volt! Burning Hot Car!

2011-04-15T15:44:00.000-07:00

Great Job, Government Motors!
Excerpt From Article - "I walked outside and looked in the garage door and it was flaming," Dee Connors said. "I grabbed a pocketbook so I'd have a cellphone and a driver's license and a jacket and a pair of slacks. I had no shoes, my feet were freezing."

Within minutes of the 911 call reporting the fire, nearly 50 firefighters from surrounding communities headed to the scene.

The Connors family said that response and the fact there was a firewall built between the home and the garage saved their home.

After the fire was extinguished, the couple invited Eyewitness News into the home to see how effective the firewall was. Even the coats in a closet near the fire were unscathed -- not even blackened by smoke.

Now investigators with the state fire marshal's office and the couple's insurance company are looking into what exactly in the garage sparked the fire.

Officials said they can't rule out that the couple's brand new Chevy Volt hybrid had something to do with the blaze.

Click on the Title link to the entire article and video.

Where's Osama? Don't Ask Obama!

2011-04-15T15:23:00.001-07:00

So Obama, where is Osama? All of those missle strikes in Pakistan and you still haven't found him. Is Osama living with your momma?
Have you checked the Whitehouse visitor's log lately? Maybe Osama came for a visit and you were on vacation. You could have asked him to join your golf tour.

Tea Party Rules, Democrats Are Fools

2011-04-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

Obama Lies, Biden Naps

2011-04-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

Obama's Lies Are So Boring That Joe 6-Pack Falls Asleep

The Real Tea Bagger

2010-01-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

Obermutt's Secret Hobby is tea bagging the little boys from Liberal North Hollywood! The thrill is still running down Obermutt's leg. He is BFF with Scott Ritter, too.

Sarah Tells It Like It Is In the Hannity Interview!

2009-11-19T10:17:00.000-08:00

BAMOPOLY - Obama's Game

2009-10-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

Wanna Play?

Disenchantment with the 'One'

2009-08-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

Barry Soetero Obama is loosing the battle for the public's hearts and minds. People are now seeing the true man and they don't like what they see. Expect more opposition to ObamaCare Porkulus Spending and the grand scheme to control every single American's life, cradle to grave.

Barry the Joker, Media Stroker and Midnight Toker....

Can’t Stand HENRY WAXMAN?

2009-07-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Then, You’ll Want To Put This On Your Event Calendar:
Meet ARI DAVID

8 p.m. Saturday EveningJuly 25th, 2009
Meet & Greet
At the UPSTAIRS PATIO of the Famed Hollywood Watering Hole:
FORMOSA CAFÉ
7156 Santa Monica Boulevard(One block west of La Brea)Next to the former Warner-Hollywood Studio Lot
Ari David plans to seek the GOP nomination for CA-30, to challenge the incumbent Henry Waxman for Congress. If Cap & Trade seems more like slap and tax; if global warming sounds like excuses to raise taxes and raze jobs; if missile defense cuts make you nervous over Israel’s and America’s safety; if you’re just sick-&-tired of the old-&-tired ‘representation’ by Waxman -
No charge to join us, No donation required -
Bring your conservative creative compatriots -
Neo-cons, Paleo-cons, Mod-cons & Classic-cons:
This is a Modern Hollywood Conservative event to meet and greet your fellows on the right - as well as the aspiring candidate planning a ‘statewide campaign to defeat Waxman’ in the most ‘Hollywood’ of all districts.
You are The Ones Ari is waiting for.It’s only 67 weeks left to the election, and time’s a wastin’!
See http://www.aridavidforcongress.com/ - then come The Formosa to meet the first Modern Hollywood Conservative candidate for Congress.

Dimwit Healthcare From Obama and the Dimwits

2009-07-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

See anything WRONG with this picture?

Obama Is NOT a Natual Born U.S. Citizen

2009-07-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

Originally published 6/16/2009
AP- WASHINGTON D.C. - In a move certain to fuel the debate over Obama's qualifications for the presidency, the group Americans for Freedom of Information has Released copies of President Obama's college transcripts from Occidental College.
Released today, the transcript indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, received financial =C 2aid as a foreign student from Indonesia as an undergraduate at the school.
The transcript was released by Occidental College in compliance with a court order in a suit brought by the group in the Superior Court of California.
The transcript shows that Obama (Soetoro) applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship for foreign students from the Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program.
To qualify, for the scholarship, a student must claim foreign citizenship. This document would seem to provide the smoking gun that many of Obama's detractors have been seeking. Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya and there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship, this is looking pretty grim.
The news has created a firestorm at the White House as the release casts increasing doubt about Obama's legitimacy and qualification to serve as president. When reached for comment in London, where he has been in meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Obama smiled but refused comment on the issue. Britain 's Daily Mail has also carried the story in a front-page article titled, Obama Eligibility Questioned leading some to speculate that the story may overshadow economic issues on Obama's first official visit to the U.K.
In a related matter, under growing pressure from several groups, Justice Antonin Scalia announced that the Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear arguments concerning Obamas legal eligibility to serve as President in a case brought by Leo Donofrio of New Jersey. This lawsuit claims Obama's dual citizenship disqualified him from serving as president. Donofrios case is just one of 18 suits brought by citizens demanding proof of Obamas citizenship or qualification to serve as president.
Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation has released the results of their investigation of Obamas campaign spending. This study estimates that Obama has spent upwards of $950,000 in campaign funds in the past year with eleven law firms in 12 states for legal resources to block disclosure of any of his personal records. Mr. Kreep indicated that the investigation is still ongoing but that the final report will be provided to the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder. Mr. Holder has refused to comment on the matter.

LET OTHER FOLKS KNOW THIS NEWS THAT THE MEDIA WON'T EMBRACE!

North Korea's Threat is Unanswered

2009-05-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

Our Madame Secretary of State says North Korea's actions "will have consequences." Yeah, right. The only consequence is words so far and that doesn't impress me or little Kimmy. The Obama administration is going to be the death of America if this crap keeps running. I have zero confidence in the Obama administration's ability to handle our enemies diplomatically and I fear Kimmy isn't bluffing. Will it take another Pearl Harbor to wake Obama up to the threat just like that other Democrat in office when Japan attacked?

Go Ahead, Make My Day

2009-05-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

Well, well ,well.... It seems the tax and spend addicts in Sacramento just got a little intervention from the voters. Now we need to keep up the pressure. Drunken sailors in the CA legislature need to pay more attention and Gov Girlyman needs to remember to live up to campaign promises on stopping the out-of-control deficit spending. Read my lips! No More Taxes or we get out the axes. Chop, chop, chop. Cut down the illegal aliens propping nanny programs now or the voters will start at your knees in the next election. 2010 is just around the corner.....

Joe Biden, The Partisan Jackass

2009-05-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

Joe Biden is quite the remarkable Democrat jackass. He is another one of the Democrats that places his Politics above National Security. In his latest blunder, Biden reveals the location of the secret bunker used after 9/11 to keep the Vice President safe from harm. Is this guy a loony leftie partisan? I think so. Doesn't his blunder violate National Security and isn't that a Federal crime? I think so. Let's prosecute this jackass and get it over with. That is, right AFTER we prosecute the other Democratic partisan jackass, Nancy Pelosi, for her baseless accusation that the CIA was lying to Congress.

The Queen of Lies

2009-05-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

I am ashamed to say that the woman pictured above represents the State of California and was duly elected to serve in the House of Representatives of the United States. Every word that emanates out of her mouth is a lie and the gullible constituents in her district fall for the falsehoods. She epitomizes the crop of liberal agenda driven politicians that represent our State in the Federal Government. All without exception are partisan hacks who care nothing about the people who they purport to represent. We need to remove all of them from office as soon as possible to preserve our rights and to save America from the graft, greed and corruption that they represent. She is truly the Wicked Witch Of The West in the land of OZ our government has become since the election of Obama, the unfit.

Whittle For President

2009-05-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from the Discerning Texan and when I read the blog, I was so impressed with the truth told I felt compelled to post this on Spinnada. Please click on the title to be taken to this fine article and others. I will support Bill Whittle's campaign for any elected office and I urge readers to see the video and understand the depth of this most articulate man. My father's life was also saved by the bombing of Japan on those fateful days. I am here to tell you about it as the result.

When Bill Whittle heard about Jon Stewart calling Harry Truman a "war criminal" for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima (during an argument on waterboarding...), Whittle did his homework and made a video rebuttal that is second to none.This video does to Stewart's lame argument what "Little Boy" did to Hiroshima. Watch the whole thing.It is this kind of video that gets me to daydreaming.....President Whittle? And no, I am not kidding; Whittle would make a tremendously impressive and articulate candidate for our cause.

100 Days - Will The Real Obama Stand Up?

2009-04-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

Jive talkin' is my speciality. I need to look good! Don't think I want y'all to have the freedom to decide anything. You just don't count for nothin'. See this Video and get a good laugh - http://www.pjtv.com/video/ZoNation/Under_My_Bus/1796/

The Comic Book Administration

2009-04-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

Since the current administration has taken office, several comic books have appeared to tout Obama and his wife as “Heroes”. This is fitting as comic books are more fantasy than reality and tell the story as an upbeat fun romp throughout the pages. The real story is drastically different. The comic book mentality pervades this administration’s handling of virtually every issue whether it be financial, foreign or domestic. No basis in reality or precedent is considered, and in fact ignored, in making the amateurish, inept, bumbling decisions put forth. There is also an atmosphere of taking credit for solving issues before they are actually solved and taking undue credit for decisions made by others who did so in spite of the waffling and hedging done by Obama and his players. This is not a game Mr. Obama and you need to realize you are playing with our Country’s future at every turn. So many of your so called ‘decisions’ have verified the perception that you are winging it and don’t really care as long as you ‘look good’ to the press and the Americans that have very little perception based on the reality of your actions. You are a glib speaker who thinks more of himself than the average Americans that you purport to serve. My greatest fear is that you will win out by simply deflecting blame and professing ignorance when the crisis’s facing the U.S. come to a head. I cannot believe how many are duped by your words and choose to ignore your actions. It is incomprehensible to conservatives that you are able to maintain such a high approval rating as you have bumbled virtually every issue and outright put a leftist agenda on those that are being “solved.” I hope that your actions will eventually speak louder than your lies and disinformation to the American public very soon.

The Diplomatic Policy of Apology

2009-04-24T09:53:00.000-07:00

We are not a product to be marketed. We are a country with interests to defend and protect. We should care about world opinion but defuse the misperceptions through education and action, not apologies for policies that have kept us safe and prevented attacks on our soil. To say that America is in the same league as our enemies when it comes to aggressive military actions, torture and willful disregard of human rights is giving aid and comfort to our enemies. This whole philosophy is a fabrication meant to destroy our credibility in the eyes of the Western World by our enemies. I cannot fathom the depth of stupidity and armchair thinking that got us to this point. I believe we are being led by the nose to the slaughterhouse and made to ask for forgiveness for perceptions that are not true along the way.

I also believe that Obama is too young to really remember the mistakes of the past as his excuse is “I wasn’t borne yet” or “I was just a child” or ‘It’s above my pay grade”. Having Biden as VP ( Mr. Misconception and Gaffer) is not helping him either to remember those mistakes that got us into WW1 and WW2.

Then there is Hillary Clinton, a self-serving person that is all mouth and no action exercising “I need to look good” diplomacy. She is very adept at sending the message of weakness to our enemies.

All of the miss-steps in diplomacy in this first 100 days say the current administration is an inept, bumbling collection of idiots when it comes to diplomacy. Unfortunately as we saw with 9/11, the average American will pay the price while the politicians skate with their hubris laden excuse of “We didn’t realize that was going to happen.”

No clear vision of the future adds up to reactive thinking that does nothing to prevent or even consider the unintended consequences of muddled actions meant to only disguise the inability to really perceive the danger. This is the reality of the current administration’s first hundred days of diplomatic miss-steps.

Just remember the mistakes of the current administration will result in more loss of American lives as your sons and daughters and their sons and daughters pay the ultimate price as defenders of the indefensible. This administration’s gaffes and miss-steps in diplomacy are unpardonable and irreversible at that point and it will be too late to change course. If you care about your Country’s future you will vote out the holders of office every time they come up for election starting in 2010 and again in 2012.

Without the leadership in place to really listen, the average American has no voice and is just crying in the wilderness of vapid government. The process is damaged and needs repair badly. All we have left is the power to resist peacefully and vote those who don’t listen out of office. That power was stripped away in the last election by false messages and a false messiah. To restore that power to the voter, it will take a catastrophe of major proportions. I fear one is building right now.

Obama Debt - Tea Party Anyone?

2009-04-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Instapundit. The projected Obama Debt is UNHEALTHY for ALL Americans. Leftie Axelrod has thrown an axle and needs his opinion repaired. This supports the reasoning behind the Tea Parties.

See the whole story at:

http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/76998/

George Orwell Was a Little Late, But Right on!

2009-04-20T13:58:00.000-07:00

This is the confirmation of the Obama Administration watching the folks who attend the Tea Parties. May we come out 10 times stronger on 4th of July. Stand up for your right to be heard!

This is 2009 reality, not George Orwell 1984 fiction.

http://www.americasright.com/2009/04/this-is-2009-not-1984.html

Obama's Hostage Rescue Waffling

2009-04-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

A Navy Rear Admiral's take on Obama's decision making concerning the hostages and pirates

Having spoken to some SEAL pals here in Virginia Beach yesterday and asking why this thing dragged out for 4 days, I got the following:

1. BHO wouldn't authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to the scene for 36 hours going against OSC (on scene commander) recommendation.

2. Once they arrived, BHO imposed restrictions on their ROE that they couldn't do anything unless the hostage's life was in "imminent" danger.

3. The first time the hostage jumped, the SEALS had the raggies all sighted in, but could not fire due to ROE restriction.

4. When the navy RIB came under fire as it approached with supplies, no fire was returned due to ROE restrictions. As the raggies were shooting at the RIB, they were exposed and the SEALS had them all dialed in.

5. BHO specifically denied two rescue plans developed by the Bainbridge CPN and SEAL teams.

6. Bainbridge CPN and SEAL team CDR finally decide they have the OpArea and OSC authority to solely determine risk to hostage. 4 hours later, 3 dead raggies.

7. BHO immediately claims credit for his "daring and decisive" behavior. As usual with him, it's BS.

So per our last email thread, I'm downgrading Oohbaby's performance to D-.
Only reason it's not an F is that the hostage survived.

Read the following accurate account: Philips' first leap into the warm, dark water of the Indian Ocean hadn't worked out as well. With the Bainbridge in range and a rescue by his country's Navy possible, Philips threw himself off of his lifeboat prison, enabling Navy shooters onboard the destroyer a clear shot at his captors - and none was taken.

The guidance from National Command Authority - the president of the United States , Barack Obama - had been clear: a peaceful solution was the only acceptable outcome to this standoff unless the hostage's life was in clear, extreme danger.

The next day, a small Navy boat approaching the floating raft was fired on by the Somali pirates - and again no fire was returned and no pirates killed. This was again due to the cautious stance assumed by Navy personnel thanks to the combination of a lack of clear guidance from Washington and a mandate from the commander in chief's staff not to act until Obama, a man with no background of dealing with such issues and no track record of decisiveness, decided that any outcome other than a "peaceful solution" would be acceptable.

After taking fire from the Somali kidnappers again Saturday night, the on scene commander decided he'd had enough. Keeping his authority to act in the case of a clear and present danger to the hostage's life and having heard nothing from Washington since yet another request to mount a rescue operation had been denied the day before, the Navy officer - unnamed in all media reports to date - decided the AK47 one captor had leveled at Philips' back was a threat to the hostage's life and ordered the NSWC team to take their shots.

Three rounds downrange later, all three brigands became enemy KIA and Philips was safe. There is upside, downside, and spinside to the series of events over the last week that culminated in yesterday's dramatic rescue of an American hostage.

Almost immediately following word of the rescue, the Obama administration and its supporters claimed victory against pirates in the Indian Ocean and [1] declared that the dramatic end to the standoff put paid to questions of the inexperienced president's toughness and decisiveness.Despite the Obama administration's (and its sycophants') attempt to spin yesterday's success as a result of bold, decisive leadership by the inexperienced president, the reality is nothing of the sort. What should have been a standoff lasting only hours - as long as it took the USS Bainbridge and its team of NSWC operators to steam to the location - became an embarrassing four day and counting standoff between a ragtag handful of criminals with rifles and a U.S. Navy warship.

Gun Owners Beware of HR45!

2009-04-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

HR 45 Blair Holt Firearm Licensing & Record of Sales Act of 2009 Please send this to everybody on your list...

Very Important for you to be aware of a new bill HR 45 introduced into the House. This is the Blair Holt Firearm Licensing & Record of Sale Act of 2009. I just learned yesterday about this on the Peter Boyles radio program. Even gun shop owners didn't know about this because it is flying under the radar. To find out about this - go to any government website and type in HR 45 or Google HR 45 Blair Holt Firearm Licensing & Record of Sales Act of 2009. You will get all the information. Basically this would make it illegal to own a firearm - any rifle with a clip or ANY pistol unless:

-It is registered
-You are fingerprinted
-You supply a current Driver's License
-You supply your Social Security #
-You will submit to a physical & mental evaluation at any time of their choosing
-Each update - change or ownership through private or public sale must be reported and costs $25- Failure to do so you automatically lose the right to own a firearm and are subject up to a year in jail.

There is a child provision clause on page 16 section 305 stating a child-access provision. Gun must be locked and inaccessible to any child under 18.

The Government would have the right to come and inspect that you are storing your gun safely away from accessibility to children and fine is punishable for up to 5 yrs. in prison. If you think this is a joke - go one of the following websites and take your pick of many options to read this.

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h45/text

http://www.nraila.org/ - See about half way down the web page on the right.

It is long and lengthy. They hope this bill won't be read by most legislators. Write or email yours and demand they read it. Also express your opposition.
But, more and more people are becoming aware of this. Pass the word along.
FAILURE TO DO SO AT YOUR PERIL!

The RWE Movement

2009-04-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

The current administration, or the Obama Gestapo, labeled all of us as Right Wing Extremists for wanting to preserve our Constitutional rights and disagreeing with the socialist polices they are espousing. I take it as a direct challenge and I am starting a grass roots organization called Right Wing Extremist. I have designed the symbol and printed up t-shirts. If you are interested in joining and want a t-shirt contact me. The RWE Liberty Bell symbol is shown above. Use the following email address: rwe@pipeline.com

Attend The Tax Day Tea Party!

2009-04-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a historical event of untold impact on the Obama administration's ability to defuse our ability to insist on responsible representation. The huge amount of Pork and government handouts enacted by decree cries out for notice. It is not too late to join the taxpayers in their quest to remind our government who the boss really is when it comes to spending our tax dollars.
Click on the link below to visit the offical Tea Party site and then click on your State to find out where the event will be held.

http://taxdayteaparty.com/

Attend if you can! If you can't attend, please watch for future Tea Parties and plan to attend them. This is not affiliated with a political party or special interest group. No formal organization is involved and ordinary citizens who vote are behind the events.
Politicians are welcome to participate but will not be allowed a formal venue to speak. Only nonpoliticians are invited as speakers. Your attendance is very much welcome and truly appreciated by you fellow tax paying Americans.
Don't be intimidated by the Obama administration and the DHS 'Right Wing Extremist' warning propaganda. Rather, see it as a direct illegal challenge to your Constitutional right of free assembly and free speech. I am proud of the label and I will wear my RWE t-shirt with relish at the Tea Party today!

The Pig Likes The Lipstick

2009-03-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

The Porkaholic Demo Derby Congress and the piglet Prez are all very happy with their 8,000 pieces of pork and lipstick can't hide it. The porkers in the Federal pig pen are smiling now.

This truly is the change THEY hoped for.

We Got Your Money, America!

2009-03-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

Click on the following link to see this one! http://www.dailyreckoning.com/we-got-your-money/ Don't miss it! Good for a laugh and some insight into the predicament and financial meltdown to disaster looming.

President Bags Biggest Porker in History of United States!

2009-03-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

Hogzilla Redux. I bet de Prez and his helpers just can't wait to carve it up!

What's Wrong With This Picture

2009-03-04T10:18:00.000-08:00

Well Obama doesn't want to pay attention to the day-to-day swings in the Market, eh? I think I can help him focus on the bigger picture, you know. I also think Obama may be a bigger idiot than I thought if he doesn't start paying attention.
Thanks, E-Trade! I did a little research to find out if the Dow may be a confidence indicator and I think I am spot on. What do you think? Note the huge negative volume trend starting right after the election in 2009.
It spells out to be a BIG no confidence vote from those who invest in America for the Demo Derby and Obama and their idiotic Spendulus public works program pork festival.

U.S.Technology Strikes From Langley VA!

2009-03-04T08:38:00.000-08:00

These terrorist guys are having a very bad day! Turn you speakers on. This is a video from an Apache being directed by a Global Hawk RPV drone over Afghanistan. They made a Taliban puddle!

Pork is Being Shoved Down America's Throat

2009-03-03T14:54:00.000-08:00

I can't think of more stupid thing to do but the Dimwits in Congress and Obama can.....

Is this the change you hoped for?

2009-01-29T14:51:00.000-08:00

Last Picture of the Wife

2009-01-29T14:30:00.000-08:00

The Paperless Society

Like these folks, all of us are looking for some paper to bail us out. Too bad Congress isn't.

Is Everyone Stuck On Stupid Over Illegal Immigration?

2006-05-01T17:17:00.000-07:00

Wow! Even though I believe we need dialog on the people already here, I don't think it should be the primary focus of the issue. We are at war with insane lunatics that will stop at nothing to harm all within the US borders both legal and illegal. This is some seriously deadly game we are playing here. Your whole American or OTA family may die if we don't close the avenues and byways of the Illegal Crossing networks. The major concern and most immediate urgency is to prevent crossings by potential terrorists. If preventing attack means we have to harden our borders then that is top of the list. All illegals in-country that want to stay in-country need to be packing a green card, spend only 9 months out of any calendar year in the U.S. and registered every year with the INS. Sponsorship should be required to complete the picture. Sponsoring companies and contractors who use this type of labor must be compelled to treat these "guestworkers"as regular employees making competitive wage plus the logical benefits needed to be incountry and need social services. All others not registering within the 90 day grace period and not in-country for a minimum of 1 year need to surrender for disposition and be deported. The best interest of the United States citizen is served by dealing with people who have and will cross our borders illegally to do us great harm. The most important issue is lost in a sea of media "immigration reform" PC hyperbole. The new Illegal Crossing sign expresses my opinion on the subject.

The Iraq Democraphobia of the Left

2005-12-22T16:20:00.000-08:00

The al Deans, lefty MSM and the extreme left are again skewered with facts and their own stupidity. VDH doesn't have any mercy and he is taking no prisioners this time. Read on. To see the original article click on the title of this blog.

Why Not Support Democracy?
Our orphan policy in the Middle East.
Victor Davis Hanson
NR Online
Decemer 22, 2005

Why still no big-font, front-page headlines screaming, “Millions Vote in Historic Middle East Election!” or “Democracy Comes At Last To Iraq” or “America’s Push for Iraqi Democracy Working”?

Besides the politics of gloom — Bush at home and America abroad are always wrong — and the weariness with the violence, there has sadly been too small a constituency for trusting that Arabs should run their own affairs through consensual government.

Remember the ingredients of the good old American foreign policy in the Middle East — the one that operated before the bad-new days of neoconservatism?

One, oil thirst increasingly became the overriding consideration, even in areas like Palestine, Lebanon, or Egypt, where there was very little petroleum, but enough instability to affect the larger allegiance of Islamic oil-exporting nations. Earlier rivalry among Western nations had morphed into collective fear of the ever-growing Chinese-energy appetite — always colored by the specter of past oil boycotts, shooting at tankers in the Gulf, and perennial terrorist threats against the oilfields. So if a nation pumped oil, then its government avoided scrutiny.

Two, anti-Communism was another stimulus, specifically the effort to keep the Soviet Union and its satellites from controlling the Persian Gulf, or using their Baathist surrogates to promote petrol-fed anti-Western terrorism. Much of the mess of the Middle East today derives from a Soviet-style, unworkable, amoral state apparatus imposed upon a traditional tribal society at various times in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen — and our own desperation to support any unsavory autocrat who would stop such Communists. So if a strongman fought Communists, he was O.K. with us.

Three, after the Six-Day War of 1967, we alone supported Israel to ensure that it was not surrounded and eliminated by neighboring Arab autocracies — none of whom had ever held a free election. So if a regime tried to destroy Israel…what else would you expect?

Four, billions of freely circulating petrodollars created creepy ties between Western defense contractors, universities, lobbyists, and think tanks, and illiberal regimes of the Gulf. For every crass Western merchant who insisted on selling advanced weaponry to Arab dictatorships, there was always a subsidized Middle East scholar who could on spec damn American foreign policy and/or excuse Middle East illiberalism. So if a petrocracy spread some cash, it got a pass from the United States.

Five, popular opinion on the Right was swayed by traditional isolationism — none of those crazy people are worth a single American dollar or life — and Cold War realism: we deal with the awful world as it is and let the gods worry about others’ morality. So if all of ‘em stayed over there, that’s all you need to know.

Six, the Left’s multiculturalism was more cynical. Its chief tenet was that no system could be any worse than the West’s. Thus we had no business in applying our moral “constructs” to judge indigenous cultures by criticizing such things as polygamy, gender apartheid, dictatorship, anti-Semitism, or religious intolerance. Arab intellectuals often praised the American Left, but the latter was every bit as intertwined in the old pathological status quo as the most cynical realist. So who is to say that they are brutalizing their own, when we do the same over here?

Most of the time, the American public was oblivious to all this, as long as there were no gas lines and the annual Middle East harvest of American diplomats and soldiers was kept to a minimum. This complacency ended, however, when the Middle East mess that began in November 1979 with the Iranian storming of the American embassy culminated in the attacks of September 11.

Given the past history and current politics in the region, it is no wonder that near-hysterics accompanied America’s radical alternative post-9/11 strategy of attempting to prompt democratic reform — by force in the case of the worst fascistic states like Afghanistan and Iraq, by isolation and ostracism in the case of Syria and Iran, and through often-embarrassing persuasion in the case of the Gulf states, North Africa, and Egypt.

Oilmen feared their infrastructure would be blown up in war or fall into the hands of Islamists if the sheiks fell.

Lobbyists and businessmen could not see why their short-term profits with autocrats were not merely good for the American economy, but could be made to promote the national interest of the United States as well.

Any Leftists who were not simply against anything that America was for feebly argued that democratic reform could only come from within and should arise within the parameters of socialism rather than crass American-style capitalism.

Worse still, the emphasis on democracy came from George Bush, an anathema to the Democrats who otherwise should have supported the new idealism. Anything that went wrong in Iraq was seen as spurring a spike in the polls for Democratic candidates as we entered our third national election since 9/11.

In perhaps the stupidest move in American political history, the mainstream Democratic party got suckered into buying Howard Dean’s shady investments in American failure — and so turned its back on the Iraqi democratic experiment hours before millions went to the polls in that country’s third and most successful free election.

In short, the promotion of democracy has been an orphan policy, without any parentage of past support or present special interests. It proved to be easily caricatured all at once as naïve by the right and imperialistic on the left. Thus on the war The American Conservative is now almost indistinguishable from the Nation.

Only by understanding this labyrinth of competing interests can we see why the most successful election in Middle East history, birthed by the United States, gained almost no immediate thanks or praise, here or abroad.

Yet think of the dividends that are already accruing from this most hated of policies. Voting, along with constitutional rule, a reformed economy, and American military protection of its infancy, alone are undermining both the appeal of the Islamic fascists and precluding a reactionary counter-response by the usual dictators who promise a restoration of order. If the domino trends in Eastern Europe and Latin America are any indication, Iraqi democracy will prove more destabilizing to theocratic Iran than the latter is to the new Iraq. Indeed, the only alternative choice besides the bad one of taking out the Iranian nuclear complex and the worse one of letting it mature to Armageddon, is hoping that democratic fervor spreads across the border from Iraq.

The sight of purple fingers may eventually silence the Europeans abroad and the Left at home. And constitutional governments — even if they voice anti-Americanism as they do in Turkey, or bother our liberal sensibilities as they do in Afghanistan — will be far less likely to attack each other and draw us back in. More importantly, the consistent support for constitutional government relieves us of much of the constant subterfuge and stealthy machinations of supporting this clique or that dictator. Instead, democracy is a transparent policy that reflects American values.

Truly elected leaders of the Middle East will do more to further the interest and security of the United States, and put an end to the al Qaedists, Assads, and Saddams, than all the Saudi Royals, Mubaraks, and assorted kings, generals, and dictators put together.

We don’t need Peoria or even a struggling Eastern European democracy, just the foundations for something that can allow Muslims to follow the lead of those who participate in government in India, Malaysia, or Turkey and accept the rule of law — and don’t strap on bombs to kill Americans with either government help or hurrahs from a disenfranchised mob. And we see results already right before our eyes. After all, there are really only two countries in the Middle East where thousands fight each day against Islamic terrorists who threaten their newly-won freedom — the legitimate governments in Kabul and Baghdad.

So here we have this most amazing paradox of pushing democracy: a policy that is distrusted by almost every entrenched special interest and at odds with every –ism — and yet one that alone can erode Islamic fascism and make the United States more secure. Odder still, the Democratic party at home is the least enthusiastic about the democratic parties in Iraq.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

Popping the al Dean Zit

2005-12-17T16:41:00.000-08:00

VDH does what he does so well. Skewer the al Dean Democrats on the sword of truth.

December 16, 2005, 7:10 a.m.
Lancing the Boil
Victor Davis Hanson
NR Online

We quietly keep on killing terrorists, promoting elections in Iraq, pressuring Arab autocracies to democratize, and growing the economy.
For some time, a large number of Americans have lived in an alternate universe where everything is supposedly going to hell. If you get up in the morning to read the New York Times or Washington Post, watch John Murtha or Howard Dean on the morning talk shows, listen to National Public Radio at noon, and go to bed reading Newsweek it surely seems that the administration is incommunicado (cf. “the bubble”), the war is lost (“unwinnable”), the Great Depression is back (“jobless recovery”), and America about as popular as Nazi Germany abroad (“alone and isolated”).

But in the real adult world, the economy is red-hot, not mired in joblessness or relegating millions to poverty. Unemployment is low, so are interest rates. Growth is high, as is consumer spending and confidence. Our Katrina was hardly as lethal as the Tsunami or Pakistani earthquake. Thousands of Arabs are not rioting in Dearborn. American elderly don’t roast and die in the thousands in their apartments as was true in France. Nor do American cities, like some in China, lose their entire water supply to a toxic spill. Americans did not just vote to reject their own Constitution as in some European countries.
The military isn’t broken. Unlike after Vietnam when the Russians, Iranians, Cambodians, and Nicaraguans all soon tried to press their luck at our expense, most of our adversaries don’t believe the U.S. military is losing in Iraq, much less that it is wise now to take it on. Instead, the general impression is that our veteran and battle-hardened forces are even more lethal than was true of the 1990s — and engaging successfully in an almost impossible war.
Nor are we creating new hordes of terrorists in Iraq — as if a young male Middle Eastern fundamentalist first hates the United States only on news that it is in Iraq crafting a new Marshall Plan of $87 billion and offering a long-oppressed people democracy after taking out Saddam Hussein. Even al Jazeera cannot turn truth into untruth forever. Instead, the apprentice jihadist is trying to win his certification as master terrorist by trying his luck against the U.S. Marines abroad rather than on another World Trade Center at home — and failing quite unlike September 11.Like it or not, wars are usually won or lost when one side feels its losses are too high to continue. We have suffered terribly in losing 2,100 dead in Iraq; a vastly smaller enemy in contrast may have experienced tens of thousands of terrorists killed, and is finding its safe havens and money drying up. Panic about Iraq abounds in both the American media and the periodic fatwas of Dr. Zawahiri — but not in the U. S. government or armed forces.The world does not hate the United States. Of course, it envies us. Precisely because it is privately impressed by our unparalleled success, it judges America by a utopian measure in which anything less than perfection is written off as failure. We risk everything, our critics abroad almost nothing. So the hope for our failures naturally gives reinforcement to the bleak reality of their inaction. The Europeans expect our protection. The Mexicans risk their lives to get here. Indians and Japanese want closer relations. The old commonwealth appreciates our strength in defense of the West. Even the hostile Iranians, North Koreans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Chinese, and radical Islamists — despite the saber-rattling rhetoric — wonder whether we are naïve and idealistic rather than cruel and calculating. All this we rarely consider when we read of anti-Americanism in our major newspapers or hear another angry (and usually well-off) professor or journalist recite our sins.Al Zarqawi is in a classical paradox: He can’t defeat the American or Iraqi security forces or stop the elections. So he must dream up ever more macabre violence to gain notoriety — from beheading Americans on the television to mass murdering Shiites to blowing up third-party Jordanians. But such lashing out only further weakens his cause and makes the efforts of his enemies on the battlefield easier, as his Sunni base starts to see that this psychopath really can take his supporters all down with him.
The Palestine problem is not even worse off after Iraq. Actually, it is far better with the isolated and disgraced Arafat gone, the fence slowly inching ahead, the worst radical Islamic terrorists on the West Bank in paradise, Israel out of Gaza, and the world gradually accepting its diplomatic presence. The real hopeless mess was 1992-2000 when a well-meaning Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Dennis Ross still deluded themselves that a criminal gang leader like Yasser Arafat was a legitimate head of state or that you could start to end an endless war by giving his thugs thousands of M-16s.
The European way is not the answer, as we see from the farcical negotiations over Iran’s time bomb. Struggling with a small military, unsustainable entitlement promises, little real economic growth, high unemployment, falling birth rates, angry unassimilated minorities, and a suicidal policy of estrangement from its benefactor the United States, Europeans show already an 11th-hour change of heart as we see in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and soon in France. Europe’s policy about Iran’s nuclear program can best be summed up as “Hurry up, sane and Western Israel, and take out this awful thing — so we can damn you Zionist aggressors for doing so in our morning papers.”
The administration did not prove nearly as inept in the Iraqi reconstruction as the rhetoric of its opposition was empty. The government’s chief lapse was not claiming the moral high ground for a necessary war against a fascist mass murderer — an inexplicable silence now largely addressed by George Bush’s new muscular public defense of the war. In contrast, we can sadly recall all the alternative advice of past critics across the spectrum: invade Iraq in 1998, but get out right now; trisect Iraq; attack Syria or Iran; retreat to the Shiite south; put in hundreds of thousands of more troops; or delay the elections.Donald Rumsfeld’s supposed gaffe of evoking “Old Europe” is trumped tenfold and almost daily by slurs that depict Abu Ghraib as worse than Saddam, Guantanamo as the work of Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot, Bush as the world’s greatest terrorist, the effort to democratize Iraq as unwinnable, and American troops terrorizing Iraqi women and children. Most Americans may grumble after reading the latest demonization in the press of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, but they are hardly ready to turn over a complex Middle East to something like a President John Kerry, Vice President Barbara Boxer, Secretary of State Howard Dean, National Security Advisor Nancy Pelosi, and Secretary of Defense John Murtha — with a kitchen cabinet of Jimmy Carter and Sandy Berger.So at year’s end, what then is happening at home and abroad? For the last three years we have seen a carbuncle swell as the old Vietnam War opposition rematerialized, with Michael Moore, the Hollywood elite, and Cindy Sheehan scaring the daylights out of the Democratic establishment that either pandered to or triangulated around their crazy rhetoric. The size of the Islamicist/Baathist insurrection caught the United States for a time off guard, as was true also of the sudden vehement slurs from our erstwhile allies in Europe, Canada, and Asia. Few anticipated that the turmoil in Iraq would force the Syrians out of Lebanon, the Libyans to give up their WMDs, and the Egyptians to hold elections — and that all the killing, acrimony, and furor over these developments would begin to engulf the Middle East and threaten the old order.In the face of that growing ulcer of discontent, we quietly kept on killing terrorists, promoting elections in Iraq, pressuring Arab autocracies to democratize, and growing the economy. All that is finally lancing the boil, here and abroad — and what was in there all along is now slowly oozing out, making the cure seem almost as gross as the malady.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Today Iraqi's Gave The Left Their Purple Finger, Again!

2005-12-15T09:43:00.000-08:00

Voting Extended in Historic Iraq Elections
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Excerpt from FOX News

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Up to 15 million Iraqis — including large numbers of Sunnis, who boycotted the January elections — voted in historic parliamentary elections Thursday to establish a permanent democratic government amid only scattered violence.

I just love the color purple on ones finger and it's effect on the al Dean Democrats and the lefties. Can you say demoralization and defeat?

The Saudis Are NOT Our Friends

2005-12-14T08:04:00.000-08:00

The Saudi Governement behaves as if they are in a War with the U.S. when speaking in front of an Arabic audience. Just check out www.memri.com for the truth. The house of Saud speaks out of two mouths when it comes to Wahhabism and Islamist Terror. The Saudi Royals use the most digusting spin tactics on the West to give what the appeasers want to hear while condemning Israel, the U.S. and it's citizens as Infidels to be killed whenever possible. The Saudi government's tactic is all about spreading lies and Islamist fundamentalist hatred through it's religous schools and organizations worldwide. When is our government going to take a stand against this intolerable behaviour and fundamental hatred of everything Western and Judeo-Christian.
Mr. Woolsey nails it. Read on. Click on the title to see the article on NR Online.

The Elephant in the Middle East Living Room
Watching Wahhabis.

By R. James Woolsey

Early in November, hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee examined hate literature being distributed in American mosques. This material had been translated and published earlier this year by Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom. (I was chairman of Freedom House at the time and wrote the book's foreword.) The hearings examined these Saudi publications in the context of assessing Chairman Arlen Specter's proposed Saudi Arabia Accountability Act. In addition to the material presented at the hearings, the underlying role of Saudi Arabia's state religion, generally referred to in the West as Wahhabism, deserves expanded attention for a variety of reasons.

Recently President Bush addressed a number of the ideological aspects of this long war in which we are now engaged. As he has put it now on two occasions, "Islamofascism" is one plausible characterization of our enemy. Although this is a major step forward beyond designating "terror" as the enemy (we're certainly at war with more than a tactic, albeit a terrible one) there was still a major element missing in his presentation. The elephant in the Middle East living room is Wahhabism. Over the long run, this movement is in many ways the most dangerous of the ideological enemies we face.

Within Sunni Islam, along with several more moderate schools, there are two varieties of theocratic totalitarianism. Both of these are Salafists, believing that only a literal version of the model of rule implemented in the seventh century in Islam has ultimate legitimacy. Both have the objective of rule by a unified mosque and state; for some this theocracy is personified by the caliph. Different individuals in these movements emphasize different aspects, but generally the common objective is to unify first the Arab world under theocratic rule, then the Muslim world, then those regions that were once Muslim (e.g. Spain), then the rest of the world.

Such totalitarian visions seem crazy to most of us; we thus tend to underestimate their potency. Yet the Salafists' theocratic totalitarian dream has some features in common with the secular totalitarian dreams of the twentieth century, e.g., the Nazis' Thousand Year Reich, or the Communists' World Communism. The latter two movements produced tens of millions of deaths in the 20th century in part because, at least in their early stages, they engendered "fire in the minds of men" in Germany, Russia, and China and were able to establish national bases. Salafists had such a national base for the better part of a decade in Afghanistan and have had one controlling the Arabian Peninsula for some eight decades. They haven't attained the Nazis' and Communists' death totals yet, but this is only due to lack of power, not to less murderous or less totalitarian objectives.

Salafists of both jihadist and loyalist stripe, e.g. both al Qaeda and the Wahhabis, share basic views on all points but one. Both exhibit fanatical hatred of Shiite Muslims, Sufi Muslims, Jews, Christians, and democracy, and both brutally suppress women. They differ only on whether it is appropriate to carry out jihadist attacks against any enemy near or far now — i.e. to murder Iraqi Shiite children getting candy, people working in the World Trade Center, etc. — or whether to subordinate such efforts for the time being to the political needs of a particular state, i.e. Saudi Arabia.

The relationship between the Salafist jihadists such as al Qaeda and Salafist loyalists such as the Wahhabis is thus loosely analogous to that between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists of the 1930's. Trotskyites, like al Qaeda, believed it was justified to use violence anywhere while Stalinists, like the Wahhabis, showed primary allegiance to protecting "socialism in one country", i.e. the U.S.S.R. The fact that this difference was only a question of tactics didn't prevent the Trotskyites and Stalinists from being the most bitter of enemies — Trotsky died in 1940 with a Stalinist axe in his skull.

The "IslamoNazi" Threat
Similarly, al Qaeda launches attacks in Saudi Arabia and the Saudis work with us to capture and kill al Qaeda members who threaten them. In this sense both Saudi government officials and probably even Wahhabi clerics are willing to "cooperate with the U.S. on counter-terrorism." But this cooperation does not negate the fact that al Qaeda and the Wahhabis share essentially the same underlying totalitarian theocratic ideology. It is this common Salafist ideology that the Wahhabis have been spreading widely — financed by $3-4 billion/year from the Saudi government and wealthy individuals in the Middle East over the last quarter century — to the madrassas of Pakistan, the textbooks of Turkish children in Germany, and the mosques of Europe and the U.S. Alex Alexiev, senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, testified before Congress on June 26, 2003, that this is approximately three-four times what the Soviets were spending on external propaganda and similar "active measures" at the peak of Moscow's power in the 1970s.

This underlying Salafist ideology being spread by the Wahhabis is fanatical and murderous, indeed explicitly genocidal. (The president's "Islamofascist" term is thus perhaps understated — the Italian fascists were horrible, but not genocidal. "IslamoNazi" would be more accurate.)

For example, the BBC reported on July 18 of this year that a publication given to foreign workers in Saudi Arabia by the Islamic cultural center, which falls under the authority of the ministry of Islamic affairs, advocates the killing of "refusers" (Shia). The imam of Al-Haram in Mecca, (Islam's most holy mosque), Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman al-Sudayyis, was barred from Canada last year after the translation of his sermons calling Jews "the scum of the earth" and "monkeys and pigs" who should be "annihilated." Materials distributed by the Saudi government to the Al-Farouq Masjid mosque in Brooklyn call for the killing of homosexuals and converts from Islam to another religion.

Ideas Have Consequences
The direct consequences of such murderous teachings extend to the war in Iraq. In November of 2004, 26 Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia published a call for jihad against the U.S. in Iraq. Because of the high religious status of the clerics within Saudi Arabia, the exhortation was widely interpreted as a fatwa, a religious ruling. Several Saudi suicide bombers and other terrorists captured in Iraq have indicated that it was this fatwa that had turned them to terrorism. Said one: "I hadn't thought of coming to Iraq, but I had fatwas . . . I read the communiqué of the 26 clerics ... ." During the battle for Fallujah in 2004 Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Abikan said to the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, "What is happening in Falluja is the result of such fatwas ... [The resistance] is bringing about tragedy and destruction for Iraq, Falluja, and their residents." Nasser Sulayman al-Amer, one of the 26 signers of the call for jihad, admitted recently at a press conference in Kuwait that he had met with Iraqis on this matter. On November 13 of this year the Iraqi national-security adviser, Mowaffak Rubaie said: "Most of those who blow themselves up in Iraq are Saudi nationals."

Lost in Translation
Following the controversy over the 26 clerics' edict the Saudi government retracted it, in a sense. But the only two Saudi officials who released the retraction publicly were two Saudi ambassadors, those to the U.S. and the U.K. And the retractions were issued only in English.

Overbalancing such "retractions" of Wahhabi statements is the fact that Saudi education is turning toward, not away from, Wahhabi influence. In February of 2005 a secularist reformer, Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid, headed the Saudi Education Ministry. As he was beginning to respond to internal criticism of curricula that incited hatred of non-Muslims and non-Wahhabi Muslims, he was replaced by Abdullah bin Saleh al-Obaid, a hard-core Wahhabi. Controlling 27 percent of the national budget, al-Obaid will have a substantial effect on the views of the next generation of Saudis. His views are illuminated by aspects of his background. From 1995 to 2002, al-Obaid headed the Muslim World League (MWL). According to the U.S. Treasury the MWL's Peshawar office was led by Wael Jalaidan, "one of the founders of al Qaeda." Moreover, the main arm of the MWL is the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). The Egyptian magazine, Rose al-Youssef, describes the IIRO as "firmly entrenched with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization." In March 2002 the U.S. headquarters representing both organizations was raided and closed by federal authorities. One of the officers of the closed branch in Herndon, Virginia, was al-Obaid. The Wall Street Journal describes him as "an official enmeshed in a terror financing controversy."

Thinly Veiled Totalitarianism
Wahhabi ideology is also totalitarian to a unique degree in its repression of women. In 2002 the world press carried stories of an extreme example: Religious police in Saudi Arabia forced some young girls fleeing a burning school back inside to their deaths because they were not properly veiled. This is a fanaticism that knows no bounds.

Words and beliefs have consequences, and totalitarians are often remarkably clear about what they will do once they have enough power. Many brushed aside Mein Kampf when it was first written but it turned out to be an excellent guide to the Nazis' behavior once they had the power to implement it. We ignore the Wahhabis' teaching of Salafist fanaticism at our peril.

The Struggle for Islam
There are two important points we must understand in dealing with this ideology and its teachings.

First of all, the rest of us — Christians, Jews, other Muslims, followers of other religions, non-believers — are under absolutely no obligation to accept the Wahhabis' and their apologists' claims that they represent "true Islam." This is equivalent to the claims of Torquemada in the 16th century to represent "true Christianity." He tortured and persecuted Jews, Muslims, and dissident Christians, burned many at the stake, and stole their property. We are under no obligation to take Torquemada's word that he represented "true Christianity" and would be under no obligation to take the word of any successor should one arise. By the same token, we are under no obligation to accept the Wahhabis' claim to represent the great and just religion of Islam.

Second, it is difficult for Americans to bring themselves to draw distinctions among those who claim they are following the requirements of their religion — we generally do not want to quarrel with others' religious beliefs even if they seem very strange to us. But we must realize that murderous totalitarianism that claims religious sanction is different. We have defeated four major totalitarian movements in the last six and a half decades: German Nazism, Italian Fascism, Japanese Imperialism, and Soviet Communism. Only Japanese Imperialism had a major religious element. Communism however was secular, so our current generation of leaders has little experience with a totalitarian ideology that seeks to hide behind one of the world's great religions the way Torquemada cloaked his murderousness in claims to represent Christianity. This makes it difficult for most Americans to understand IslamoNazism. We tend to regard each person's religious beliefs as a private matter. But we must learn to make an exception for theocratic totalitarianism masquerading as religion.

During the Cold War we had little difficulty in distinguishing between, say, the Khmer Rouge and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, although both called themselves "Socialists." But it is harder for us to bring ourselves to distinguish between those who follow the Wahhabi party line on the one hand and, on the other, brave and decent individuals such the American Sufi leader Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, who has been warning Americans of the danger of Islamist terror since well before 9/11. We must get over this reluctance to challenge the perpetrators of and apologists for theocratic totalitarianism.

Cold War Lessons
Does taking on Wahhabism and its supporters mean that we must stand opposed to all cooperation with the government of Saudi Arabia, or attempt to change the Saudi regime in short order? No. The needs of statecraft must also be considered. We fought the Communist ideology in different ways from 1917 through the Cold War. But while we were fighting it, for nearly four years during World War II we were close allies of the Soviets, because we needed them with us against Hitler. Over the years we had commercial relations with them (they bought our wheat and Pepsis, we bought their oil) and some of us spent years negotiating arms-control agreements with them, sometimes to positive effect. In short, we worked as the need arose over the years with the Soviet state, but we generally kept up our ideological struggle against Communism, especially after 1947.

We need to keep this history in mind when dealing with the government of Saudi Arabia. The royal family has some reformers in it, including, to a mild degree, King Abdullah, with whom we may make some common cause. We need to work with the Saudi government on reform and, of course, on issues related to oil. But just as we took steps in the 1980s to try to limit Europe's dependence on Soviet natural-gas supplies we would be well advised today to reduce our own oil dependency. And we must never forget the underlying totalitarian ideology of the Saudi state.

How might we undertake to fight this Wahhabi ideology? Again, we should recall some Cold War lessons. By the 1950s, after a congressional attempt to outlaw Communism was struck down by the Supreme Court, and after Joseph McCarthy's attempt to spread guilt by association was defeated, we hit upon several ways to deal with our domestic Communists. We made them register. We infiltrated them with large numbers of FBI agents. We essentially made their lives miserable. It was legal for them and their front groups to exist — indeed they perennially ran Gus Hall for President — and they even recruited some spies for the Soviets. But despite their best efforts they were not a serious force in American life, nor did they succeed in undermining our ability to fight the Cold War. At the same time we made common cause with Democratic socialists around the world, just as we must make common cause today with the hundreds of millions of decent Muslims with whom we have no quarrel.

We should have a frank national discussion about how we may learn from this history and deal with Sunni theocratic totalitarianism — so that we may help it join its secular cousins, Nazism and Communism (and its predecessor totalitarian religious movements such as Torquemada's Inquisition) where they all rightly belong: on the ash-heap of history.

— R. James Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence, is co-chairman of the .

The Finger Purple - The Left's Least Favorite Color.

2005-12-12T14:45:00.000-08:00

Ah Purrrrrrple!
What a glorious color to behold on one's fingertip. I must say that I will be having a particularly good time on the Purple day of freedom. It's already starting. I spotted at least seven photos of Iraqi's with purple fingers since the wounded and military get to vote first. Now we will again see the tide of purple fingers given freely to everyone who doubted and tried to diminish their freedom. The one symbol that even the Left can't ignore. A Most Magnificent Day will dawn Purple for the Iraqi's and the World. The one single day that no amount of moral relavism, cheap sloganeering, wild conjecture, emotional obfuscating, slanted disinformation or even outright lies from the Left will diminish. That's a fact, Jack.

Dean, Kerry & Murtha - Fertilizer Farmers of The DNC

2005-12-09T15:48:00.000-08:00

Do these Democrat air heads ever listen to themselves? I think not! VDH does the subject justice and nails these idiots. With this kind of leadership at the DNC, it's going to be a snap for the Republicans in 2006 and again in 2008. Read on. For the actual article, click on the title.

Democratic Implosion
Victor Davis Hansen
December 09, 2005, 9:08 a.m.
NR Online

Can the party of the people be saved from itself?

The idea that we are going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong.— Howard Dean
And there is no reason… that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the — of — the historical customs, religious customs.— John Kerry
The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home.— John Murtha
Howard Dean, the head of the Democratic party, assures us that we cannot win the struggle for democracy in Iraq. He predicts, as proved true in Vietnam, that the United States will inevitably fail. So it makes better sense to flee now, admit defeat, and thus lessen our inevitable losses.

To Dean, the constitutional evolution in Iraq and the growth of its democratic security forces follow the doomed model of Vietnamization — another sham transition bound to implode.
In this regard, irony is lost on Dean: After terrible sacrifices, mistakes, and government dissimulation, Vietnamization between 1971 and 1975 finally was working. The American military had largely rid the south of the Viet Cong; a peace treaty had established two sovereign nations; and American ground troops were withdrawn.
Yet the war was later lost mostly because a partisan antiwar Senate, emboldened by Watergate and in hatred of a duplicitous Nixon, cut off most material and military aid to the south Vietnamese. That precluded as well American air support to deter an opportunistic conventional invasion from a calculating northern army that had quickly sized up the politics of the U.S. Congress.
Dean seems to evoke Vietnam without any inkling how close the United States was, after a decade of ordeal, to achieving many of the goals originally envisioned — something like a viable South Korean government that, unlike its Communist counterpart, might have a chance to evolve into a truly consensual society. Much less does he cite the millions who perished, were incarcerated, or sent into exile following the establishment of a cruel Stalinist regime, or the effect of that defeat on the security of the U.S. and its allies, as later demonstrated in Cambodia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Central America.
Not long ago, John Kerry was on a Sunday talk show. Without much of a warm-up, he was soon alleging that Americans were terrorizing Iraqis in their homes. Apparently such unproven criticism was meant as a critique of U.S. policy by a former (and future) candidate for president — but it unfortunately came just days before a critical election that may at last smooth the way for democracy in Iraq. One can imagine Sunni rejectionists hoping to derail the elections by proclaiming that even a former American presidential candidate admits that the infidels are “terrorizing our women and children.”
Like Dean, Kerry appears insensitive about the irony: He just lost an election in part because too many Americans recalled his Vietnam-era record of trying to score cheap political points by trashing brave American troops in the field, thanks to his own constant evocation of Vietnam on the campaign trail.
Kerry also called breezily for the resignation of secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the midst of the war. Unfortunately, Kerry’s subsequent exegesis of why the secretary should be sacked only proved why we are lucky to have Rumsfeld and not Kerry or Howard Dean in a position of administrative responsibility.
Despite the stentorian intonation, Kerry’s new suggestions for what to do in Iraq simply outlined what the United States is in fact already doing: training Iraqis, providing protection for the ongoing constitutional process, talking to regional neighbors, trying to get the Europeans involved in the Middle East, and hunting down terrorists on the Afghan borders. Kerry then admitted — though he did not during the election of 2004 when the war polls were more iffy — that he now regrets his vote authorizing the war against Saddam. All that was missing was a George Romney moment in which Kerry might have revealed that he had been brainwashed — and that almost came when he blamed the administration for giving him misleading intelligence briefings.
Sadder still for Kerry, not long after his embarrassing call for Rumsfeld’s resignation, the secretary of Defense offered a review of Iraq and answered questions at a televised news conference at the School for Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins. Where Kerry blamed others for his apparently now-embarrassing vote, Rumsfeld took responsibility for going to war. He pulled no punches in explaining its ongoing difficulty, and answered tough questions by explaining why and how we are winning.
Contrast the Democratic reactions to respective advice offered by Congressman Murtha and Senator Joe Lieberman. The former is a respected but not nationally known Democratic figure; the latter ran for the vice presidency of the United States. The Democrats gushed over Murtha’s bleak Dean-like assessment that the war is essentially lost and that we must leave as soon as possible. But then when a vote was called on the issue, they voted overwhelmingly not to follow the congressman’s prescription.
In contrast, when Lieberman returned from Iraq and gave a cautiously optimistically appraisal that our plan of encouraging elections, training Iraqis, and improving the Iraqi economy is working both inside Iraq and in the wider neighboring region, he was shunned by Democrats — who nevertheless by their inaction essentially agreed with Lieberman and so made no move to demand an immediate withdrawal. How odd to be effusive over the Democrat whose advice you reject while ignoring the spokesman whose advice you actually follow.
Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Congressman Murtha represent the Democratic mainstream. And that’s the problem. None of them can be characterized as embracing the Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan fringe, and none are even prone to the wacky grandstanding of Jimmy Carter or Barbara Boxer.
Yet what we get from the national chairman, the former presidential candidate, and the new popular icon — on the verge of the third and final election in Iraq — is a de facto admission that we are losing and must leave.
In the background, old Vietnam-era themes provide the chorus for the growing antiwar sentiment: apparent disdain for the Iraqis, mirroring the way that liberals pooh-poohed anti-Communist Eastern Europeans, Cubans, and Vietnamese; endemic pessimism that does not match the rapidly evolving events on the ground; and political opportunity that an American embarrassment abroad might reverse a long-term and ongoing unfavorable political realignment at home.
When Saddam was removed in a brilliant three-week campaign, few anticipated that the subsequent effort to craft democracy in his wake would evolve into a conflict for the very heart of the Middle East. Most feared that postbellum Afghanistan would be the harder task — given the wealthier and more secular nature of Iraqi society.
Instead the war, as wars almost always do, has morphed into something quite different than expected — a regional referendum on Lebanon, the future of Syria, reform movements in the Gulf and Egypt, about-faces in Pakistan and Libya, and continued pressure on a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. And despite the heartbreak of 2,100 deaths, we are not just winning in Iraq, but on the verge of something far larger, and more permanent: not a return to the ancient caliphate or another dictatorship, but the real chance for the birth of a new Middle East that takes its place at last among responsible nations.
All that was impossible to envision without the prior American removal of Saddam Hussein — now reduced to a pathetic deposed tyrant, railing against his victims and in his misery calling those “terrorists” who did not give him clean underwear. He plays the role of the dying thug right out the pages of Plutarch; all that is missing are Sulla’s worms.
Dean, Kerry, and Murtha are bright and good men who rightly worry that more Americans will die in a far-off place for a cause that they think is now hopeless. But to follow their apparently popular advice would lead to an abject national disaster as well as calamity for their own party. In short, they have become metaphors of why even Democrats are uneasy about voting for Democrats.
More importantly, the Democrats spent the last quarter century, following Vietnam and Jimmy Carter, trying to reestablish their lost fides on national defense (which were once unquestionable in the age of FDR, Truman, JFK, and senator Henry Jackson). If Joe Lieberman cannot save mainstream Democrats from themselves, perhaps the Iraqis who vote on December 15 can.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

VDH scores and makes some very real assertions -The Moral War

2005-12-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

Victor nails it again. For those of you not familiar with VDH, he is a renowned military historian, Rhodes scholar and military realist who empirically defines his opinions on the current US military and war on terror situations both in Iraq and worldwide. Victor's opinions are based on precedental military fact, keen strategic assessment and his mastery of military history. These qualities are key to VDH's ability to see though political hubris and emotionalism to the actual empirical truths of this war. Some are offended by his pontification style and the left particularly hates him as they have a problem with guys like Victor that burst their hot air balloons with sharply defined rational thoughts rich in military precision and reality. Read on. Click on the Title for the actual article on NR Online.

A Moral War
The moral onus should have always been on the critics of the war.
Victor Davis Hanson
NRO
December 2, 2005

The project in Iraq can succeed, and leave its critics scrambling.
Almost everything that is now written about Iraq rings not quite right: It was a “blunder”; there should have been far more troops there; the country must be trisected; we must abide by a timetable and leave regardless of events on the ground; Iraq will soon devolve into either an Islamic republic or another dictatorship; the U.S. military is enervated and nearly ruined; and so on.
In fact, precisely because we have killed thousands of terrorists, trained an army, and ensured a political process, it is possible to do what was intended from the very beginning: lessen the footprint of American troops in the heart of the ancient caliphate.
Save for a few courageous Democrats, like Senator Joe Lieberman, who look at things empirically rather than ideologically, and some stalwart Republicans, most politicians and public intellectuals have long bailed on the enterprise.
This is now what comprises statesmanship: Some renounce their earlier support for the war. Others, less imaginative, in Clintonian (his and hers) fashion, take credit for backing the miraculous victory of spring 2003, but in hindsight, of course, blame the bloody peace on Bush. Or, better yet, they praise Congressman Murtha to the skies, but under no circumstances go on record urging the military to follow his advice.
How strange that journalists pontificate post facto about all the mistakes that they think have been made, nevertheless conceding that here we are on the verge of a third and final successful election. No mention, of course, is ever made about the current sorry state of journalistic ethics and incompetence (cf. Jayson Blair, Judy Miller, Michael Isikoff, Bob Woodward, Eason Jordan). A group of professionals, after all, who cannot even be professional in their own sphere, surely have no credibility in lecturing the U.S. military about what they think went wrong in Iraq.
Of course, the White House, as is true in all wars, has made mistakes, but only one critical lapse — and it is not the Herculean effort to establish a consensual government at the nexus of the Middle East in less than three years after removing Saddam Hussein. The administration’s lapse, rather, has come in its failure to present the entire war effort in its proper moral context.
We took no oil — the price in fact skyrocketed after we invaded Iraq. We did not do Israel’s bidding; in fact, it left Gaza after we went into Iraq and elections followed on the West Bank. We did not want perpetual hegemony — in fact, we got out of Saudi Arabia, used the minimum amount of troops possible, and will leave Iraq anytime its consensual government so decrees. And we did not expropriate Arab resources, but, in fact, poured billions of dollars into Iraq to jumpstart its new consensual government in the greatest foreign aid infusion of the age.
In short, every day the American people should have been reminded of, and congratulated on, their country’s singular idealism, its tireless effort to reject the cynical realism of the past, and its near lone effort to make terrible sacrifices to offer the dispossessed Shia and Kurds something better than the exploitation and near genocide of the past — and how all that alone will enhance the long-term security of the United States.
That goal was what the U.S. military ended up so brilliantly fighting for — and what the American public rarely heard. The moral onus should have always been on the critics of the war. They should have been forced to explain why it was wrong to remove a fascist mass murderer, why it was wrong to stay rather than letting the country sink into Lebanon-like chaos, and why it was wrong not to abandon brave women, Kurds, and Shia who only wished for the chance of freedom.
Alas, that message we rarely heard until only recently, and the result has energized amoral leftists, who now pose as moralists by either misrepresenting the cause of the war, undermining the effort of soldiers in the field, or patronizing Iraqis as not yet civilized enough for their own consensual government.
We can draw down our troops not because of political pressures but because of events on the ground. First, the Iraqi military is improving — not eroding or deserting. The canard of only “one battle-ready brigade” could just as well apply to any of the Coalition forces. After all, what brigade in the world is the equal of the U.S. military — or could go into the heart of Fallujah house-to-house? The French? The Russians? The Germans? In truth, the Iraqi military is proving good enough to hold ground and soon to take it alongside our own troops.
Despite past calls here to postpone elections, and threats of mass murder there for those who participated in them, they continue on schedule. And the third and last vote is the most important, since it will put a human face on the elected government — and the onus on it to officially sanction U.S. help and monetary aid or refuse it.
Saddam’s trial will remind the world of his butchery. Despite all the ankle-biting by human-rights groups about proper jurisprudence, the Iraqis will try him and convict him much more quickly than the Europeans will do the same to Milosevic (not to mention the other killers still loose like Gen. Mladic and Mr. Karadzic), posing the question: What is the real morality Ã— trying a mass murderer and having him pay for his crimes, or engaging in legal niceties for years while the ghosts of his victims cry for justice?More importantly, we can also calibrate our progress by examining the perceived self-interest of the various players, here and abroad.
The Sunnis — no oil, a minority population, increasing disgust with Zarqawi, a shameful past under Saddam — will participate in the December elections in large numbers. They now have no choice other than either to be perpetual renegades and terrorists inside their own country or to gain world respect by turning to democracy. The election train is leaving in December and this time they won’t be left at the station.
Zarqawi and the radical Islamicists are slowly being squeezed as only a war at their doorstep could accomplish. Critics of Iraq should ask if we were not fighting Zarqawi in Iraq, where exactly would we be fighting Islamic fascists — or would the war against terror be declared over, won, lost, dormant, or ongoing, with the U.S. simply playing defense?
Instead, what Iraq did is ensure that al Qaeda’s Sunni support is being coopted by democracy. Jordan, the terrorists’ old ace in the hole that could always put a cosmetic face on its stealthy support for radicals, has essentially turned on Zarqawi and with him al Qaeda. Syria is under virtual siege and its border sanctuary now a killing zone. Bin Laden can offer very little solace from his cave. And somehow Islamists have alienated the United States, Europe, Russia, China, Australia, Japan, and increasingly Middle East democracies like those in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iraq, and reform movements in Lebanon and Jordan.
Decision day is coming when Zarqawi’s bombers will have to choose either to die, or, like a Nathan Bedford Forrest (“I’m a goin’ home”), quit to join the reform-seeking majority. That progress was accomplished only by the war in Iraq, and without it we would be back to playing a waiting game for another 9/11, while an autocratic Middle East went on quietly helping terrorists without consequences, either afraid of Saddam or secretly enjoying his chauvinist defiance.
Kurds and Shiites support us for obvious reasons — no other government on the planet would risk its sons and daughters to give them the right of one man/one vote. They may talk the necessary talk about infidels, but they know we will leave anytime they so vote. After the December election, expect them — and perhaps the Sunnis as well — quietly to ask us to stay to see things through.
Europe is quiet now. Madrid, London, Paris, and Amsterdam have taught Europeans that it is not George Bush but Islamic fascism that threatens their very existence. Worse still, they rightly fear they have lost the good will of the United States that so generously subsidized their defense — an entitlement perhaps to be sneered at during the post-Cold War “end of history,” but not in a new global war against Islamic terrorists keen to acquire deadly weapons.
Our military realizes that it can trump its brilliant victories in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein by birthing democracy in Iraq — or risk losing that impressive reputation by having a new Lebanon blow up in its face. China, Japan, India, Russia, Korea, Iran, and other key countries are all watching Iraq — ready to calibrate American deterrence by the efficacy of the U.S. military in the Sunni Triangle. Our armed forces have already accomplished what the British and the Soviets could never do in Afghanistan; what the Russians failed to accomplish in Chechnya; and what we came so close to finishing in Vietnam. They won’t falter now when they are so close to winning an almost impossibly difficult war, one that will be recognized by friends and enemies as beyond the capability of any other military in the world.
The Left now risks losing its self-proclaimed moral appeal. It had trashed the efforts in Iraq for months on end, demanded a withdrawal — only recently to learn from polls that an unhappy public may also be unhappy with it for advocating fleeing while American soldiers are in harm’s way. Another successful election, polls showing Iraqis overwhelmingly wishing us to stay on, visits by elected Iraqi officials asking continued help, and a decreasing American footprint will gradually erode the appeal of the antiwar protests — especially as triangulating public intellectuals and pundits begin to quiet down, fathoming that the United States may win after all.
The administration realizes that as long as it stays the course and our military remains confident we can win, we will — despite defections in the Congress, venom in the press, and cyclical lows in the polls. In practical political terms, only the administration, not the Congress or the courts, can choose to cease our efforts in Iraq. Rightly or wrongly, the Bush administration will be judged on Iraq: If we lose, the president will be seen as a tragic LBJ-like figure who squandered his initial grassroots support in a foreign quagmire; if we win, he will be remembered, in spirit, as something akin to a Harry Truman, and, in deed, an FDR who won a critical war against impossible odds, and restored the security of the United States.
George Bush may well go down in history as a less-effective leader than his father or Bill Clinton; but unlike either, he may also have a real chance to be remembered in that select class of rare presidents whom history records as having saved this country at a time of national peril and in the face of unprecedented criticism. BushÃ’s domestic agenda hinges on Iraq: If he withdraws now, his proposals on taxes, social security, deficit reduction, education, and immigration are dead. If he sees the Iraq project through, these now-iffy initiatives will piggyback on the groundswell of popular thanks he will receive for reforming the Middle East.
Strangely, I doubt whether very many would agree with much of anything stated above — at least for now. But if the administration can emphasize the moral nature of this war, and the military can continue its underappreciated, but mostly successful efforts to defeat the enemy and give the Iraqis a few more months of breathing space, who knows what the current opportunists and pessimists will say by summer.Will they say that they in fact were always sorta, kinda, really for removing Saddam and even staying on to see democracy work in Iraq?
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
* * *

The Crying Game

2005-11-26T13:17:00.000-08:00

I just love Victor's keen sense of irony and timing on this subject. As usual, Victor nails it down so tight no lefty Demo dare debate his positions with actual facts. Read on. For the original article in National Review online, click on the title link.

So near in Iraq, so far at home.
Victor Davis Hanson - NROnline.

"The president misled us." "Still no WMDs." "If I had only known then what I do now…"

This is the intellectual level of Democratic wartime criticism about the Bush administration as we near the third Iraqi election — the one that will finally give faces to the first truly elected parliamentary government in the Arab world.

So what is behind this crying game at home — when we are so close to achieving our goals abroad?

Bad polls and far-worse casualties. With over 2,000 American dead in Iraq, the politicians think their own brilliant three-week war was ruined by George Bush’s 32-month failed reconstruction.

But the Democratic establishment’s anger is even more complicated than that since it is not yet quite sure of the mood of the fickle American people.

True, from the very beginning a small group of leftists has done its best to mischaracterize the effort to remove Saddam Hussein as some sort of Halliburton, “no-blood-for oil,” “Bush lied/thousands died,” “neocon” war “for Israel.” But despite the occasional auxiliary efforts of the elite press, until now there were really no takers in the mainstream Democratic party for the vehement antiwar crowd’s slander for at least three reasons.

One was the crazies. By that I mean that the Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Cindy Sheehan factions have a propensity to go lunatic and say or do anything — like shamefully praising the murdering terrorists who blow apart Iraqi women and children and U.S. soldiers as "Minutemen,” or calling the president of the United States “the world’s greatest terrorist.”

A sanctimonious Jimmy Carter may sit next to the buffoonish Michael Moore at the Democratic Convention in VIP seats, but the inclusion of his name with Rep. John Murtha’s is still apparently considered by liberals to be an outright slander. So up until now invoking Bush as a "liar" and our enemies as "heroes" was considered over the top.

Two, the Democratic left wing was wrong on the Cold War and mostly wrong on Gulf War I. With minorities in the Congress, fearful that they might never again be trusted on national security, and cognizant that both Bill Clinton’s campaign against Milosevic and George Bush’s war against the Taliban had been relatively cost-free, they outdid themselves in calling for invasion of Iraq.

Go back and read any of the statements of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or Jay Rockefeller about the dangers of Saddam Hussein and the need to take him out. Only then can you understand why the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly, with a strong Democratic majority, to authorize a war.

So up until now, Democrats had an embarrassing paper trail that in the era of Google searches made it hard to claim that the war was Bush’s alone and not their own. Indeed, as long as casualties were considered "tolerable" and the polls stable, most Democrats continued to talk in accordance with their own past votes and wanted to bask in the success of ending the Hussein nightmare.

Three, most Democrats knew the history of the George McGovern pullout campaign of 1972 that ended in disaster for the party at large. It just isn’t smart to lose American wars by cutting out — unless you have a Watergate for cover. Yet so far not outing a CIA employee who was not a covert agent does not make a scandal.

For all the media pizzazz about the peace candidate Howard Dean, the good Dr. had not a prayer of winning either the nomination or the presidency. Indeed, his tenure as chairman of the Democratic party has been a Republican godsend, since, like McGovern, he has the propensity in a single moment of heartfelt sincerity to scare the hell out of the American people.

Thus the savvy strategy as the casualties grew was to quibble, ankle-bite, and offer empty platitudes like “Get the U.N. back there,” “Get NATO in,” and “Get the Arab League on board,” rather than offering an ad hoc alternative plan of leaving Iraq in the style of Vietnam, Lebanon, or Mogadishu.

Two of those reservations have now vanished, as George Bush’s flight suit; the museum looting; Saddam’s public dental exam; the embalming of the Hussein boys; naked pictures from Abu Ghraib; a supposedly flushed Koran in Guantanamo Bay; rants on the Senate floor; the Scooter Libby indictment; comparisons of the U.S. military to Saddam Hussein; Nazi Germany; Stalin; and Pol Pot; the broadsides of Joe Wilson; Richard Clarke; General Anthony Zinni; Brent Scowcroft; Lawrence Wilkerson, et al.; lies that our soldiers targeted Western journalists; the meae culpae of prominent former war supporters from Francis Fukuyama to George Packer; white phosphorus; leaks about supposed CIA torture prisons abroad — along with mostly silence from the embattled administration and U.S. combat dead exceeding 2,000 — have changed the political calculus.

So Democrats have overcome two caveats. First, they are beginning to sound like Michael Moore while distancing themselves from Michael Moore. Second, they have come up with a clever escape ploy from their own previous rhetoric. Yes, they voted for the war, but the intelligence they had was “not the same” as the president’s. And besides, they were merely senators who fund wars, while George Bush was the commander-in-chief who directs them. “He started it — not us” may be the stuff of errant boys on the playground, but it apparently offers a way out of past embarrassing speeches and votes. Even more clever, they now claim that voting “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq” in October 2002 is not quite the same as actually authorizing a war in March 2003.

Consequently, the Democrats are now inching toward jettisoning their final reservation and embracing the Howard Dean cut-and-run position. Still, shrewd pros like a Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, or Chuck Schumer are not quite there yet for two other understandable worries. The polls say Americans are tired of the war, but not yet ready to quit and give up on all that has been achieved, leaving brave Iraqi reformers to ninth-century beheaders and suicide-murderers.

Second, these more astute Democrats are not sure that the Iraqi gambit might not work, especially with the December election coming up, the public trial of Saddam, the growth of the Iraqi security forces, and the changed attitudes in Europe, Jordan, and Lebanon. Many talk a lot about Vietnam circa 1967 but deep down and in silence most have mixed emotions about Saigon 1975.

For now Democrats stammer, sputter, and go the Bush shoulda / coulda route — not quite ready to take the McGovern sharp turn, forever waiting on polls and events on the ground in Iraq, always unsure whether peace and democracy will come before the 2,500th American fatality.

Yet as they hedge — on television praising Congressmen Murtha who advocates withdrawal, but making sure they vote overwhelmingly on the record to reject his advice — they should consider some critical questions.

First, are the metrics of this war in the terrorists’ or our favor? Are the Iraqi security forces growing or shrinking? Are elections postponed or on schedule? Are Europe, Jordan, Lebanon, and others more or less sympathetic to a war against Islamic terrorism in Iraq? Are bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Zarqawi more or less popular or secure after we removed Saddam? Is al Qaeda in a strengthened or weakened position? Is the Arab world more or less receptive to democracy in the Gulf, Egypt, Lebanon, and the West Bank? And is the United States more or less vulnerable to a terrorist attack as we go into our fifth year since September 11?

I ask those questions in all sincerity since the conventional wisdom — compared to the true wisdom and compassion of those valiantly fighting the terrorists under the most impossible of conditions — is that we are losing in Iraq, our enemies are emboldened, and the Arab world has turned against us. But if we forget the banality of New York Times columnists, the admonitions of NPR experts, and the daily rants of a Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, or Al Gore, more sober and street-smart Democrats are in fact not so sure of these answers.

So these wiser ones wait and hedge their wagers. They give full rein to the usefully idiotic and irresponsible in their midst, but make no move yet to undo what thousands of brave American soldiers have accomplished in Iraq.

What exactly is that? Despite acrimony at home, the politics of two national elections and a third on the horizon, and the slander of war crimes and incompetence, those on the battlefield of Iraq have almost pulled off the unthinkable — the restructuring of the politics of the Middle East in less than three years.

And for now that is still a strong hand to bet against.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

The Lefty MSM Club Gets The Purple Finger.

2005-10-17T17:38:00.000-07:00

AP, Reuters, NYT, CNN, CBS, ABC and all of the other daily leftymoron blogs just got the purple finger, again, for the second time. Iraqis turned out in even greater numbers to vote for freedom and against all of the naysayers, terrorist sympathizers and Islamic terrorists. Al Qaeda might as well al quita or just sulk off and die. The Iraqi people will choose their own destiny, now. But don't think everything is just rosy yet. The Iraqis will need our help to defeat the terrorist insergency. We got a long way to go yet in the War on Islamic Terror. Right up to Bashad's door in Syria is probably not too far away for our Marines. Semper Fi.

Confusion And Dispair In the Leftist Camp - When Good News Strikes

2005-03-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

It seems that the noise factor over the Iraq war from the left has died down a bit. Depression has set in over the realization of being so very wrong on all fronts and not being as smart as the guy they hate the most. The following is a great opinion piece on the whys.
Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.

When Good News Strikes

March 08, 2005, 7:49 a.m.
Rich Lowry - NR Online
Glum liberals’ try coping with a changing world.
If the world that Democrats have been living in lately were made into a reality disaster show, it would be called “When Good News Strikes.”
One of the inconveniences of political debate is that occasionally reality intrudes to invalidate a given position no matter how much its partisans want to believe it. This is what has been happening recently to the argument that the invasion of Iraq produced an irrecoverable mess. Although surely setbacks still await us in Iraq and the Middle East, stunning headlines from the region have left many liberals perversely glum about upbeat news.Schadenfreude has faded into its happiness-hating opposite, gluckschmerz. Liberal journalist Kurt Andersen has written in New York magazine of the guilty “pleasure liberals took in bad news from Iraq, which seemed sure to hurt the administration.” According to Andersen, the successful Iraqi elections changed the mood. For Bush critics, this inspiring event was “unexpectedly unsettling,” since they so “hat[ed] the idea of a victory presided over by the Bush team.”The legendary liberal editor Charlie Peters confessed to his own attack of gluckschmerz: “New York Post columnist John Podhoretz asked liberals: ‘Did you momentarily feel a rush of disappointment [at the news of the Jan. 30 Iraq election] because you knew, you just knew, that this was going to redound to the credit of George W. Bush?’ I plead guilty …” On his show the other night, comedian Jon Stewart — half-jokingly — expressed a feeling of dread at the changes in the Middle East and the credit President Bush will get for them. “Oh my God!” he said. “He’s gonna be a great — pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, ‘Reagan was nothing compared to this guy.’ Like, my kid’s gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.” Stewart is badly in need of the consolation of a yet-to-be-written pop theological tract, “When Good Things Happen to Bad Presidents.”The Democratic foreign-policy expert who was Stewart’s guest that night, Nancy Soderberg, tried to comfort him, pointing out that the budding democratic revolution in the Middle East still might fail: “There’s always hope that this might not work.” There is historical precedent for that, of course. Liberal revolutions failed in Europe in 1848 and Eastern Europe in 1968. What is an entirely new phenomenon is liberals calling such reverses for human freedom — half-jokingly or not — occasions for “hope.”Soderberg added: “There’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s hope.” The way Bogart and Bergman “will always have Paris,” liberals now tell themselves they “will always have Iran and North Korea.” No matter the good news anywhere else, these nuke-hungry rogue states will provide grounds for bad-mouthing Bush foreign policy. But these two intractable problems won’t seriously detract from Bush’s world-changing accomplishment should he succeed in transforming the Middle East.Some liberals are reluctantly giving him his due. The New York Times surveyed the fresh air sweeping the region and concluded, “The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit.” Liberal commentator Daniel Schorr remarked: “During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said that ‘a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region.’ He may have had it right.”Has the administration gotten a few fortunate breaks in the Middle East lately? Well, yes. Asked how he seemed to make so many lucky saves, the great Montreal Canadien goalie Ken Dryden explained that it was his job to be in the right position to get lucky. By toppling Saddam Hussein and insisting on elections in Iraq, while emphasizing the power of freedom, Bush has put the United States in the right position to encourage and take advantage of democratic irruptions in the region.And so we have created the conditions for being pleasantly surprised by the positive drift of events in the Middle East, or unpleasantly surprised — depending on your politics.

What Will Happen To Hezbollah When Syria Leaves Lebanon?

2005-03-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

The recent world pressure on Syria to exit Lebanon may have unintended consequences. I found a letter on NR Online to Jonah Goldberg from a Lebanese Christian living in Lebanon that is pretty mich right on in my estimation and mostly is a good thing.

MORE HEZBOLLAH [Jonah Goldberg]
I've gotten several emails along these lines:

Dear Jonah,
I read about you asking for an argument as to why Hezbollah would not control Lebanon if Syria withdraws. I am Christian Lebanese and here is my take:
1- Syrian presence is not keeping Hezbollah in check but is giving it a role beyond its natural size.
2- The support of Hizbollah is limited to a part of the Shiite community which has a plurality but is still a minority in Lebanon.
3- Any attempt by Hizbollah to expand beyond Shiite areas will unite all Lebanese against it. Hizballah knows that the West will arm the Christians and Druze against Hezbollah in such an event. Hezbollah will never attempt such a thing.
4- Most Hezbollah supporters are not interested in living under Islamic law but only in the social benefits Hezbollah gives them and which is paid for by Iran. Hezbollah gave up enforcing Islamic law even in areas it controls. It's all about money. If the money flow is turned off, Hezbollah will shrink to a fraction of its size.
5- The Lebanese Parliament has 128 seats divided 64-64 Christian-Muslim. On the muslim half, the Shiites get only 27 seats. This the theoretical ceiling of Shiite power. Today they only have 12 seats.
6- In a free Lebanon, Hezbollah will not have the power to continue its fight against Israel. The Christians will call for peace with Israel. The Druze and Sunnis will say not before peace in Israel-Palestine is achieved. But Christians, Druze, and Sunnis will oppose Hezbollah exposing Lebanon to Israeli retaliation. The net result will be the return to 1949 armistice agreement. It is the Syrian presence that allowed Hezbollah go against the will of the majority. Without Syria, Hezbollah's hands are tied.
Thank You

Merchants of Despair - The New Democrats Under Dean

2005-02-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

Yes. It's Victor again. He is saying what I have been thinking every since the 2000 Presidential Election. It's also why you can't ever have a reasonable debate or discuss other possibilites that are real world with the lefty crowd that seems to dominate the Democrats these days. Dean is determined to turn all of the Democratic party into the types that Victor describes perfectly in this article. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.

Merchants of Despair
Sort of for the war, sort of...
By: Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Much of the recent domestic critique of American efforts in the Middle East has long roots in our own past — and little to do with the historic developments on the ground in Iraq

1. "It's America's fault."Some on the hard left sought to cite our support for Israel or general "American imperialism" in the Middle East as culpable for bin Laden's wrath on September 11. Past American efforts to save Muslims in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan counted for little. Even less thanks were earned by billions of dollars given to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Islamofascist vision of a Dark Age world run by unelected imams — where women were in seclusion, homosexuals were killed, Jews were terrorized, Christians were routed, and freedom was squelched — registered little, even though such visions were by definition at war with all that Western liberalism stands for.
This flawed idea that autocrats supposedly hate democracy more for what it does rather than for what it represents is not new. On the eve of World War II isolationists on the right insisted that America had treated Germany unfairly after World War I and wrongly sided with British imperialism in its efforts to rub in their past defeat. "International Jewry" was blamed for poisoning the good will between the two otherwise friendly countries by demanding punitive measures from a victimized Germany. Likewise, poor Japan was supposedly unfairly cut off from American ore and petroleum, and hemmed in by provocative Anglo Americans.
By the late 1940s things had changed, and now it was the turn of the old Left, which blamed "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of China: We were lectured ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao "really" wanted to cultivate American friendship, but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues — as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more murdered and starved.
Ditto the animosity from dictators like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us instead that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians whose olive branches were crushed by Cold Warriors, and who then — but only then — went on to plan their own gulags in Vietnam and Cuba.
2. "Americans are weak."Before we went into Afghanistan, we were hectored that the country's fierce people, colonial history, rugged terrain, hostile neighbors, foreign religion, and shattered infrastructure made victory unlikely. We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. At that point it resurfaced to assure that Iraq was lost and precipitate withdrawal our only hope, only to grow quiet again after the recent Iraqi election — a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan.
Now a new geopolitical litany has arisen: The reserves are "shattered"; North Korea, Syria, and Iran are untouchable while we are "bogged down" in the Sunni Triangle; a schedule for withdrawal from Iraq needs to be spelled out; there is no real American-trained Iraqi army; the entire Arab world hates us; blah, blah, blah...
In 1917, "a million men over there" was considered preposterous for a Potemkin American Expeditionary Force; by late 1918 it was chasing Germany out of Belgium. Charles Lindbergh returned from an obsequious visitation with Goering to warn us that the Luftwaffe was unstoppable. Four years later it was in shambles as four-engine American bombers reduced the Third Reich to ashes.
Japanese Zeroes, supposed proof of comparative American backwardness in 1941-2, were the easy targets of "Turkey Shoots" by 1944 as American fighters blew them out of the skies. Sputnik "proved" how far we were behind the socialist workhorse in Russia, even as we easily went to the moon first a little over a decade later. The history of the American military and economy in the 20th century is one of being habitually underestimated, even as the United States defeated Prussian imperialism, German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Stalinist Communism.
Nor in our more recent peacetime were we buried by stagflation, Jimmy Carter's "malaise," Japan, Inc., and all the other supposed bogeymen that were prophesized to overwhelm the institutional strength of the American state, its free-enterprise system, and the highly innovative and individualistic nature of the American people.
3. "They are supermen." When suicide murderers dominated the news of the Intifada, followed by the car bombers and beheaders of the Sunni Triangle, many in the West despaired that there was no thwarting such fanatics. Perhaps they simply believed more in their cause than we did in ours. How can you stop someone who kills to die rather than merely dying to kill?
That Ariel Sharon in two years defeated the Intifada by decapitating the Hamas leadership, starting the fence, announcing withdrawal from Gaza, and humiliating Arafat was forgotten. In the same manner few now write or think about how the United States military went into the heart of darkness in Fallujah and simply destroyed or routed the insurgents of that fundamentalist stronghold in less than two weeks, an historic operation that ensured a successful turnout on election day and an eventual takeover by an elected Iraqi government.
So this paradox of exaggerating the strength of our weaker enemies is likewise an American trademark. Spiked-helmeted Prussians were considered vicious pros who would make short work of doughboy hicks who had trained with brooms and sticks. Indeed, the German imperial army of World War I may have been made up of the most formidable foot soldiers of any age. Still, it was destroyed in less than four years by supposedly decadent and corrupt liberal democracies.
The Gestapo was the vanguard of a new Aryan super-race, pitiless and proud in its martial superiority. How could soda-jockeys of the Depression ever fight something like the Waffen SS with poor equipment, little training, and a happy-go-lucky attitude rather than an engrained death wish? Rather easily as it turned out, as the Allies not only defeated Nazism but literally annihilated it in about five years. Kamikazes were also felt to be otherworldly in their eerie death cult — who, after all, in the United States would take off to ram his Corsair or Hellcat into a Japanese ship? No matter — the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army Air Corps were not impressed, and rather quickly destroyed not merely the death pilots but the very culture that launched them.
4. "We are alone."George Bush was said to have alienated the world, as if our friends in Eastern Europe, Britain, Australia, and a billion in India did not matter. Yet the same was said in 1941 when Latin America, Asia, and Africa were in thrall to the Axis. Neutrals like Spain, Argentina, and Turkey wanted little to do with a disarmed United States that had unwisely found itself in a two-front war with the world's most formidable military powers.
By the 1950s we seemed to have defeated Germany and Japan only to have subsequently "lost" China and Eastern Europe once more. Much of Asia and Latin America deified the mass-murdering Stalin and Mao while deriding elected American presidents. The Richard Clarks and Joe Wilsons of that age lectured about a paranoid Eisenhower administration, clumsy CIA work, and the general hopelessness of ever defeating global Communism, whose spores sprouted almost everywhere in the form of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Castroism, and various "national liberationist" movements.
5. Why?Why do Americans do all this to themselves? In part, the nature of an open society is constant self-critique, especially at times of national elections. Our successes at creating an affluent and free citizenry also only raise the bar ever higher as we sense we are closer to heaven on earth — and with a little more perfection could walk more like gods than crawl as mere men.
There are also still others among us who are impatient with the give and take of a consensual society. They harbor a secret admiration for the single-mindedness of the zealot in pursuit of a utopian cause — hence the occasional crazy applause given by some Americans to the beheading "Minutemen" of the Sunni Triangle or the "brave" "combat teams" who killed 3,000 on September 11.
Finally, the intellectual class that we often read and hear from is increasingly divorced from much of what makes America work, especially the sort of folk who join the military. They have little appreciation that the U.S. Marine Corps is far more deadly than Baathist diehards or Taliban remnants — or that a fleet of American bombers with GPS bombs can do more damage in a few seconds than most of the suicide bombers of the Middle East could do in a year.
It is wise to cite and publicize our errors — and there have been many in this war. Humility and circumspection are military assets as well. And we should not deprecate the danger of our enemies, who are cruel and ingenious. Moreover, we should never confuse the sharp dissent of the well-meaning critic with disloyalty to the cause.
But nor should we fall into pessimism, when in less than four years we have destroyed the two worst regimes in the Middle East, scattered al Qaeda, avoided another promised 9/11 at home, and sent shock waves of democracy throughout the Arab world — so far at an aggregate cost of less than what was incurred on the first day of this unprovoked war. Car bombs are bad news, but in the shadows is the real story: The terrorists are losing, and radical reform, the likes of which millions have never seen, is right on the horizon. So this American gloominess is not new. Yet, if the past is any guide, our present lack of optimism in this struggle presages its ultimate success.
A final prediction: By the end of this year, formerly critical liberal pundits, backsliding conservative columnists, once-fiery politicians, Arab "moderates," ex-statesmen and generals emeriti, smug stand-up comedians, recently strident Euros — perhaps even Hillary herself — will quietly come to a consensus that what we are witnessing from Afghanistan and the West Bank to Iraq and beyond, with its growing tremors in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the Gulf, is a moral awakening, a radical break with an ugly past that threatens a corrupt, entrenched, and autocratic elite and is just the sort of thing that they were sort of for, sort of all along — sort of...
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

Diversitoids - Are you one?

2005-02-22T16:25:00.000-08:00

I know all of you just love the term "diversity". But what does it mean to be a Diversitoid? John Derbyshire explains. Warning! Humor and opinion ahead. Not for the faint hearted Diversitoid. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.

Down Among the Diversitoids
February 22, 2005, 2:54 p.m.
John Derbyshire
National Review Online

Derb and the pod people.
I was to be on a panel discussion at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington DC. I mis-remembered the time, though, thinking the event was at 11 A.M., when in fact it was at noon, so I had an hour to kill. Wandering around the conference center idly, looking for something interesting, I came across a meeting hall with an easel outside saying GENDER AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIC SCIENCE. Thinking this might be right up my street, I peered inside. About 30 people were listening to a woman lecturer. The people had their backs to me and were clustered at the far end of the room, facing the speaker. I went in and sat in one of the empty rows at the back.

The woman, whose name I think was Leslie, was 40ish, with very slightly African-American coloring and appearance, and gray hair frizzed out in a large obtuse isosceles triangle like the girl in the Dilbert strip. She was speaking about some court case in Kentucky. A woman college teacher had been denied tenure and sued her employer. Apparently she had lost the case. Leslie was analyzing why. "The biggest difficulty is proving intentional discrimination..." (Especially, I imagine, when it hasn't occurred.) Leslie's entire address was addled with diversity-speak clichés: "respecting differences"..."inclusivity"..."fostering a diverse environment"..."truth to power"...
I lost interest after a minute or so and began to scrutinize the audience. Around half of them were men. These men, who were all white, divided into two subgroups. The larger subgroup consisted of older guys in jackets and ties. The smaller was younger and more obviously campus-resident: beards, ponytails, natural-fiber shirts and sweaters, sneakers or peculiar-shaped shoes, no ties of course. The women were mostly middle-aged or older. Two of them were black — much blacker than Leslie. Several (though neither black woman) had the cropped, truculent look of the modern lesbian. I don't think any of them was wearing makeup.
Leslie finished with her analysis of the court case, which had apparently come up in the context of an audience question. She announced the end of questions and introduced the next speaker.
This was a pleasant-looking fiftyish white woman named JoAnn Moody. Ms. Moody is a big name in the world of diversity, I soon gathered. She has written a book on the subject. This book is highly thought of by diversicrats, to judge from the Amazon reviews.
Ms. Moody was obviously an old hand at the Diversity Seminar game. First she had us all (I had decided to join in here) move the chairs round into a horseshoe arrangement. Then she distributed a printed, single-sheet "scenario" and instructed us to read it.
The "scenario" was a brief, imaginary conversation between three people, all "European-American males," comprising the search committee looking to hire "a director of finance for a large public university in Virginia." The three committee members were a Progressive, a Reactionary, and a neutral Chairman. That was not what Ms. Moody's scenario called them, but that was plainly what was meant to be conveyed by their words. Two candidates for the finance position are discussed. One is Tom, another "European-American male" with a Harvard MBA. The other is Mary, a single black woman with an MBA from "a second-tier school."
Reactionary of course wants to hire the Harvard guy: "He's got to be sound; he's just that type of guy... He reminds me so much of Mervin... Now there was a finance director to hold up as a standard..." Progressive wants to give some special consideration to Mary: "I'd like to make sure that our interview takes at least two hours... It'll take us some time to really feel comfortable with her..." Reactionary disagrees. He thinks all candidates should get precisely equal treatment. "I am gender-blind and color-blind. All I care about is excellence. And we'll know it when we see it..." He then wonders aloud whether Mary, who is single, would be comfortable in the "family-oriented" town.
After we'd all read this little tale — it covered two sides of a standard quarto sheet — Ms. Moody led a discussion. What was going on here? She asked. "Why, it's the Good Ol' Boy network," offered one of the black women, to nods of agreement. "They just want to hire someone like them." Similar comments followed. Ms. Moody played the neutral reflector, skillfully guiding the discussion from one diversi-cliché to the next, occasionally prompting us with the approved word or phrase from the diversi-liturgy. "So," she murmured, after a few exchanges, "we could say that a European-American male from a prestigious school comes with extra points, as it were. Right?" They all nodded. A couple of them jotted down the words in notebooks. Extra points. As it were.
Sitting round in the horseshoe like that, I got a closer look at my fellow participants. The women were, of course, the most enthusiastic. The whole affair, in fact, was running on estrogen. The general atmosphere was that peculiar mix of insistent niceness and angry menace that women are so good at. We are frail, sweet, and sorely oppressed, and you had better be nice to us... OTHERWISE WE WILL SMASH YOU TO PIECES. There was much talk of "sensitivity" and "understanding"; words like "efficiency," "measurement," "standards," came up only as pejoratives. The idea that excellence could be quantified was greeted with unanimous scorn and laughter. A person foolish enough to let slip the word "objectivity" was quickly hooted down by the others. There is no such thing as objectivity! I made a quiet, uncollectable bet with myself that I was the only person in the room with a degree in anything more mathematically rigorous than sociology.
Underneath all the soothing talk about "inclusiveness" and "sensitivity" I began to spot some darker waters flowing. Someone raised Reactionary's comment about being "gender-blind and color-blind." This occasioned a great burst of laughter. "That's what they always say!" "Of course it is!" I am perfectly certain I was the only person in the room thinking the thought: What if it's true? But of course, to these people, it cannot ever be true. As one of the black women said: "Nobody who's lived in the United States can be gender-blind and color-blind." What about me, who has lived only half my life here? Best not ask. One of the fundamental axioms of the diversity ideology is the innate selfishness, cruelty, and dishonesty of white males everywhere. Useless to dispute it. Of course that's what you would say! You're one of them!
The men were more interesting studies than the women. The older guys with jackets and ties looked cowed and didn't say much. The younger ones, the ones with earth shoes and collarless natural-fiber shirts, seemed almost as keen on diversity as the women. What brings a man, particularly a "European-American male," to an affair like this? I wondered. In the case of the older, PC-whipped-looking guys, the answer was probably just the determination to find out where all the "diversity" landmines are planted, so they could make it to retirement and pension in one piece. Good luck to them. But what about these younger ones? They really seemed to believe this stuff. What was driving them? The hope of making some easy pickups from among liberated no-commitment women? I looked round again at the women. No, not that, definitely couldn't be that.
I suppose the most charitable explanation would be misguided patriotism. This is, after all, a diverse nation, and will remain so. Those are facts. We do all have to get along somehow, and it is possible these young male diversicrats believe that by mouthing this vapid cant and submitting to these petty humiliations, they are helping to preserve and improve the nation — a sort of sacrificial masochism. Somehow I couldn't make myself believe this. Masochism, sure, but patriotic? Just looking at those men, it was hard to see any of them flying a Stars and Stripes from his mountain bike. What, then? Just a cynical desire to hold on to a well-paid and undemanding job? No, they didn't seem at all cynical. Very few people are as good at acting as these men would have had to be to be practicing cynicism in that room. They were sincere. They believed the diversity stuff, including all the stuff about how rotten and wicked and malicious they, we, "European-American males," are inside. They really believed it all. They loved Big Sister. I had fallen among pod people.
There was, it seemed to me, something horribly ignoble about these young men. To yield not just meekly but enthusiastically to the stripping away of their privileges, real and imagined; to acquiesce so whole-heartedly in their dispossession, seemed so...unmanly. Not that they looked particularly unmanly in themselves. One of them was large and muscular — though it was the cosmetic muscularity of the gym, not anything intended for actual — ugh! — physical work. (I hasten to add that there were no obvious indications that he might belong to a behavioral minority group.) So why was he jeering along with the others at the mention of "objectivity"? Why did he hoot along with the rest at "gender-blind and color-blind"?
I began to long for Bertrans de Born to ride in on his destrier and cut a swathe through us with his broadsword, howling blood, war, and mayhem. I began to long for anyone or anything, in fact, that might bring with it some spirit, some courage, some damn-your-eyes contrariness, some masculine insolence, some testosterone. All right, we "European-American males" had it all our own way for too long. All right, we beat up on blacks and shut women out of our clubs. It was wrong, wrong. We are guilty, guilty. All right, the world of tomorrow, in fact of today, is a woman's world. All right, all right, all right: but... couldn't we at least go down fighting?
For a wild moment I had the impulse to stand up and say something outrageous in the style of Ali G . "'Scuse me, Missus Muddy. Wot wid all dese colored folk and lezzies yous wantin' to give all da good jobs to, isn't you afraid dat yous white race maybe might die out?" I didn't have the nerve, of course. In any case, I was dressed all wrong: business suit, white shirt (good honest polyester!) and tie.
Besides, part of me had been sucked into the thing. I am more than usually susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome at the best of times. A diversity seminar is the worst kind of place for a person with that weakness. The diversity ideology is, as Peter Wood pointed out in his fine book on the subject (which I reviewed here) "a closed loop of thought and experience. Once one enters this loop and accepts the main propositions of diversity, it is difficult to see out of it."
Diversity is, in short, a cult; and I started to feel that if I hung out in that room much longer, I should be in need of some serious deprogramming. In any case, it was time for my own event. I snuck out quietly, leaving the pod people all ululating in happy unison at someone's mention of Larry Summers.

The Middle East Despots and Their Euro Allies Are Desperate And On The Run.

2005-02-18T12:56:00.000-08:00

Things are changing for the better in the Middle East. The loud and desperate tones the antiAmerican Euros and Middle East Despots use to condemn the US, tells us in retrospect the Democratic heat is on high and they are feeling it big time.
Victor Davis Hanson says this in a more eloquent way than I can and he is spot on in his assessment. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.

Unsung Victories
The effects of American policy throughout the Middle East are gradually being felt.
By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
February 18, 2005

Last week, Mr. Abbas ordered the ruins of Yasir Arafat's Gaza headquarters cleared away. The Israelis had destroyed the building in 2002, and Mr. Arafat had kept the ruins as a kind of memorial. Suddenly, in a day, it was gone." — New York Times, Sunday, February 13, 2005.
In the war against the Islamic fascists and their supporters there have been a number of unheralded victories that have played some role in changing the landscape of the Middle East and eroding the power of the Islamists.

The first bold move was to censure and then ignore Yasser Arafat for his complicity in unleashing suicide bombers, his rampant corruption, and his stifling of Palestinian dissidents. At the time of the change in American policy, other members of the quartet — the Russians, the Europeans, and the U.N. — were aghast. The "moderate" Arab world protested vehemently. Pundits here alleged Texas recklessness and clung to the silly idea of the Arafat/Sharon moral equivalence, as if a freely elected democratic leader, subject to an open press and a free opposition, was the same as a thug who ordered lynchings and jailed or murdered dissidents.
Review press accounts from the summer of 2002: Neither ally nor neutral approved of Bush's act of ostracism and instead warned of disaster. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country then held the EU's rotating presidency, lectured that without dialogue with Arafat "Israel could not stop Palestinian violence through force." A circumspect Colin Powell visited the region often to smooth over hurt feelings and in the process to soften Bush's bold action. Dennis Ross, remember, had met with the American-subsidized Arafat almost 500 times, and it was said that the latter visited the Clinton White House more than any other foreign leader — a fact apparently lost on the Palestinian street, which still spontaneously cheered on news of September 11.
Lost in all the controversy was the simple fact that Arafat had come to power through a rigged vote. He proceeded to corrupt the state, censure the media, and let thugs terrorize Palestinian reformers while he systematically looted public monies. His legacy was a ruined economy, murder, and systematic theft.
All knew this; few would say it publicly; none would do anything about it.
Calumny followed as the Israelis unilaterally went on to start their fence, take out the terrorist elite of Hamas, plan to abandon Gaza, and, pace Mr. Moeller, precisely through force crush the intifada. In those bleak months of suicide murdering, Arafat courted the world's sycophantic press as he railed against Sharon from his pathetic bunker at Ramallah.
Then something unexpected happened. Almost imperceptibly in his last two years, he devolved from a feared dictator to a defrocked terrorist to finally an irrelevant functionary. That metamorphosis proved critical as a prerequisite to his demise, as Arafat slowly lost his four-decade-acquired capital of intimidation — critical for any Middle East autocrat — and with it his grip on the popular imagination of the West Bank. In the Middle East a tyrant can look murderous or even psychopathic, but not impotent — and especially not ridiculous.
Thus when he died, far from being sanctified as a mythical strongman, he was almost immediately forgotten and his legacy is currently undergoing a sort of Trotsky-like erasure. Postmortem stories almost immediately spread about absconded funds, tawdry fights broke out over his estate, and, mirabile dictu, a few signs of freedom emerged on the West Bank as elections mysteriously followed and with them renewed discussions of peace. The American ostracism did not ensure that we would see a settlement, only the chance that we could — and that is some progress in the Middle East.
Later in April 2003, the United States withdrew its troops from Saudi Arabia — most pilots and crews in the desert. The ostensible reason for their original deployment — protection from Saddam Hussein's army in Kuwait and monitoring the no-fly zones — was no longer valid. But many strategists thought Americans were still needed in the kingdom to ensure the free flow of the world's oil supply and perhaps to secure the royal family from the very terrorists that many in the clan had subsidized and abetted. Were we "abandoning" an "old and trusted" ally, or finally coming to our senses that the subsidized protection of a near-criminal state had to cease under the changed conditions of the post-Cold War Middle East?In reality, Americans in uniform were subject to humiliating conditions, such as female military personnel being forced to veil when leaving bases, while helping to ready planes to protect a country where a great many were privately happy that 15 of their jihadists had murdered 3,000 Americans. Our presence among the "holy shrines" only played into bin Laden's hands, as his 1998 fatwa revealed. The Saudi state media often blamed the Americans or the Zionists for most of their own self-inflicted pathologies, hoping that such smears and billions in bribes to terrorists and Wahhabi fanatics might deflect popular outrage onto us.
But by withdrawing, the United States took the first steps in a long overdue disengagement from an autocratic dynasty that will either change under a consensual government into a titular and ceremonial royalty — like the British crown heads — or, as in the case of Iran's shah, be driven out by theocratic fundamentalists. Finally, the United States at last is beginning to cut loose from an octopus whose petroleum tentacles have wrapped deeply around banks, lobbyists, defense contractors, and lawyers in Washington and New York, both Republicans and Democrats, oilmen and multiculturalists alike. It is neither a wise nor a moral thing to have much to do with 7,000 royal cousins who have siphoned $700 billion from their country while unemployment there reaches 40 percent and while women, laborers from the third world, Christians, and assorted others are treated as undesirables.
Now in hindsight, few seem to object to the ostracism of Arafat or estrangement from Saudi Arabia. The moral?
As a rule of thumb in matters of the Middle East, be very skeptical of anything that Europe (fearful of terrorists, eager for profits, tired of Jews, scared of their own growing Islamic minorities) and the Arab League (a synonym for the autocratic rule of Sunni Muslim grandees and secular despots) cook up together. If a EU president, a Saudi royal, and a Middle East specialist in the State Department or a professor in an endowed Middle Eastern Studies chair agree that the United States is "woefully naïve," "unnecessarily provocative" or "acting unilaterally," then assume that we are pretty much on the right side of history and promoting democratic reform. "Sobriety" and "working with Arab moderates" is diplo-speak for supporting or abetting an illiberal hierarchy.
There are other key decisions to be made that will go mostly unnoticed by the world's media. We should decide now to distance ourselves from the Mubarak regime, and to be ready for a dynastic squabble with the passing of the present strongman. We have over the years given $50 billion to that "moderate" dictatorship not to attack Israel — as if it would really start a fifth war it would surely lose. It didn't.
But Egypt did unleash venom against us and become the intellectual nexus of Arab anti-Americanism. In the Arab world, a change in American policies to promote democracy was publicized as "anti-Arab" by state-run media — in almost the identical manner that former support for the corrupt status quo was once condemned as "anti-Arab" by Middle East intellectuals. No matter: Despite the short-term lose-lose proposition, no one ever went wrong in the long-term by standing on the side of freedom.
No longer should we remain in thrall to any Arab government that with its left hand rounds up over-the-top terrorists, while with its right gives others less violent a pass to unleash virulent hatred of America. The Rubicon has been crossed in Iraq, and we can no longer watch Americans die for democracy in the Sunni Triangle while giving billions to a regime that kills off consensual government in Cairo. Diplomats can work out the details without sounding either moralistic or naive, smiling and assuring the Egyptians that our friendship will be only strengthened from a new understanding, as the money dries up and we part without acrimony — even as in desperation Mubarak readjusts to his "helpful" role as a third-party interlocutor in Iraq and Palestine.
The American effort to democratize postwar Afghanistan and Iraq has placed a heavy burden on the United States to develop a coherent and consistent policy of supporting reformers throughout the Middle East. We should continue with demands for elections in a Lebanon free of a tyrannical Syria, elevate dissidents in Iran onto the world stage, pressure for change in the Gulf, and say goodbye to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. If Western elites are really worried about the legitimacy of past elections in Iraq, let them go instead to Lebanon where they can worry first about having any at all, and then later complain about the proper degree of voter participation. The forces of history have been unleashed and we should cease apologizing for the deluge and instead steer the waves in the right direction.
Americans understandably focus on the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet just as important are the unsung successes that received little praise, and then have a weird tendency to drift off into the collective global amnesia as if they arose from natural, not American-induced, reform.— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - May I Say One Word In Admiration - WOW!

2005-02-11T14:26:00.000-08:00

Get ready for the Shock and Awe Condi is leaving in the wake of her visits abroad. Rich Lowry says it far better than I can. Read on. To see the original article click on the title of this post.

Rice on Tour
“Look, this is America!”
By: Rich Lowry
National Review Online
February 11, 2005

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's just-concluded trip to Europe signals that the United States is back in the diplomacy business in earnest again. Part of the reason is that after four years of Colin Powell, the United States now has a secretary of State in full.

A contradiction President Bush's critics have never confronted is that they spent the past four years lamenting the Bush administration's poor diplomacy at the same time they celebrated its top diplomat. They only turned on Powell when he took the administration's case against Saddam Hussein to the world with his February 2003 speech to the United Nations — never mind this is the sort of thing written in a secretary of State's job description (it wasn't Powell's fault that the prewar intelligence was so grievously flawed).
Rice was helped in Europe by having a wind at her back from Bush's reelection and the Jan. 30 vote in Iraq, and there will surely be difficult days ahead for her (can you say Pyongyang?). But her tenure, following directly on the heel's Powell's, will probably offer a tale of two secretaries of State.
Rice gets things Powell never did. For instance, that leaking to Bob Woodward and other Washington Post reporters is not the secretary of State's chief responsibility. Powell was so obviously the primary source for so many journalistic accounts of intra-administration fights that he often deserved a co-byline. Or that being known as a dissenter from administration policy only undermines your standing and your credibility as a spokesman for the United States.
Powell was the least-traveled secretary of State in 30 years, for a couple of reasons. One was that he wanted to stay home to be better able to engage in the vicious intramural fighting necessary to undermine the president's policy. The other was that he considered travel an inconvenience. That is understandable, even if Powell didn't have to deal, like the rest of us, with security lines and metal-detector wandings. But shouldn't it have been a sign he was better suited to be secretary of the interior?
Rice, in contrast, supports the president's policy and is loyal to him, so she has no need to hang around in Washington to indulge in bureaucratic backstabbing. She is also young and vigorous, a workout obsessive who could beat most other foreign ministers in the world in a 5k race and is up to the rigors of foreign travel.
This is a good thing, because Rice's trip proved the Woody Allen truism that 80 percent of life is showing up. If you are willing to stand before a potentially hostile foreign audience (in Paris, of all places!) and explain U.S. policy, or stand next to a foreign counterpart and take skeptical questions from reporters, your very act of being there shows a level of attention and caring that wins points. And when you are as winsome as Condi Rice, you might actually move some people. Has Gerhard Schroeder yet fully recovered from his Rice-induced swoon?
Indeed, it would take a heart of stone and an utter disregard for symbolism not to be a little moved at the images of Rice shaking hands with foreign dignitaries. Those pictures fairly yelled — "Look, this is America!" The message of her ascension to the top echelon of the U.S. government couldn't have come at a better time. When Bush is trying to reform a part of the world that has the lowest possible regard for women, Rice implicitly says women are as capable as men. When Bush wants Middle Eastern governments to respect pluralism and people of all faith and ethnicities, Rice implicitly says race and creed needn't matter. When Bush is extolling the power of freedom and American ideals, Rice implicitly says liberty and respect for human dignity can triumph over injustice, as they did in her 1950s-era Birmingham, Ala.
She, in other words, is a secretary of State to make us proud. Her trip therefore coupled national pride with diplomatic niceties. What a combination.

The Democrat Minority Leaders Are Preventing Social Security Reform Bipartisanship.

2005-02-10T13:38:00.000-08:00

I believe that we have the actual answer as to why Democrats aren't crossing the aisle to support Social Security Reform. Read on. Click on the title of the post to see the original article.
Congressman: Democrat Leadership Threatening 'Retribution' for Dems Who Cooperate with White House
by Allan H. Ryskind
Posted Feb 10, 2005
Human Events Online

Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) was asked at a CATO conference in Washington yesterday whether he had persuaded any Democrats to back his plan to rescue Social Security from its financial troubles. Under his legislation (HR 4851), no new taxes would be needed to pay for "transition costs," participation in the new system would be voluntary and individuals would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll tax into a mutual fund.A questioner from the audience, stressing his own Democratic credentials, said he believed Ryan's plan should attract members of his own party and wondered whether the Wisconsin lawmaker had secured any Democratic sponsors. Ryan said he had been working with friends on the "other side of the aisle" who were favorable toward his solution, but he faced an enormous problem: intense pressure on his colleagues from the minority leadership."We were in planning stages [with friendly Democrats]," said Ryan. But each essentially told him: "I like what you're doing. I like this bill. I think it's the right way to go. But my party leadership will break my back. The retribution that they are promising us is as great as I have ever seen. We can't do it."Ryan said he believed the only thing that can assure passage is an outpouring from America's grassroots.

AARP Is Obsfucating Social Security Reform

2005-02-10T10:30:00.000-08:00

Even though in a few years, I could be considered a member of the AARP, I am not joining ever! This organization is not helping Retired Americans achieve their dream by blocking reform of the system. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.

AARP’s Agenda
February 10, 2005
AARP distorts the public-opinion data on Social Security.
By Peter Ferrara - National Review Online
AARP released a poll last month purportedly showing that the public agrees with it on a personal-account option for Social Security — opposing the idea by 48 percent to 43 percent. That poll seemed odd, since it was way out of line with polls going back over ten years now consistently showing large majorities supporting personal accounts.

So USA Next, the rapidly growing organization for future-looking, 21st-century seniors, asked nationally renowned pollster John McLaughlin to look into the AARP poll. What he found might remind you a little of what bloggers found when they looked into the supposed documents behind Dan Rather's phony CBS story about President Bush's National Guard service.
First, the survey excluded everyone under age 30. To AARP, they don't exist, even though they made up 17 percent of voters in the last election.Those over 60 constituted 34 percent of the survey sample, even though they represented 24 percent of voters in the last election. Thirty-three percent of the survey's respondents reported that they regularly receive Social Security benefits, yet only 20.7 percent of all adults do.The AARP survey also included 37 percent Democrats and 31 percent Republicans. But that is hopelessly outdated, as voters in the last election were identified as 37 percent Republican and 37 percent Democrat.Another example: AARP asked respondents in the survey whether they agree with the statement, "Social Security should be protected as a guaranteed benefit, and should not be privatized." But Social Security benefits are not guaranteed under current law. Moreover, personal-account reforms would not downgrade the status of Social Security benefits, as the question implies.
USA Next then engaged McLaughlin to do a real survey on personal accounts. McLaughlin found that 55 percent of voters would support allowing workers a free choice to shift some of their payroll taxes into their own personal-savings and investment accounts, with only 27 percent opposed.
McLaughlin also asked voters what they would think if the personal accounts were backed up by a federal guarantee ensuring that workers would all receive at least as much as promised by Social Security under current law. Such a guarantee is included in the bill introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Sen. John Sununu (R., N.H.). In this case, support for the idea soars to 64 percent.
By contrast, voters overwhelmingly oppose by 71 percent to 17 percent eliminating the long-term Social Security deficits by reducing future promised benefits by 30 percent. This is what shifting the basic Social Security benefit formula from wage indexing to price indexing would do. Many think-tank warriors have strongly indicated their great willingness to sacrifice the political prospects of elected Republicans by having them add such price indexing to a personal-account-reform package.
These survey results show the importance of crafting personal-account reforms carefully. When personal accounts are done right, they are overwhelmingly popular. If Democrats fight without reason against such reform, Republicans are only going to gain politically in base Democrat constituency groups such as African Americans, Hispanics, and low- and moderate-income workers.
But adding overwhelmingly unpopular ideas like price indexing to the reform is only going to undermine the popularity of personal accounts, give the Democrats a real basis of opposition, and probably kill the whole reform effort. Those who support price indexing simply don't understand the personal accounts.
If the accounts are large enough, as in the Ryan-Sununu plan, then the accounts will eventually eliminate the long-term deficits of Social Security without any benefit cuts like price indexing to the old Social Security structure. That is because so much of the Social Security benefit obligations are shifted to the accounts that the old program is left in permanent surplus. This has been established by the official scores of various reform plans by the chief actuary of Social Security. It can be accomplished as well by phasing in the large accounts more slowly, though that would delay the achievement of permanent solvency.
Finally, the public should recognize from the analysis of these polls that AARP is a liberal lobbying group, not an honest representative of seniors. Most important, USA Next now offers members all the benefits that AARP does. So unless you support high taxes and big government, as AARP does on every issue, there is no longer reason to belong to AARP.
— Peter Ferrara is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation and director of the Social Security Project for the Free Enterprise Fund.
* * *

How Wrong Can You Be And Still Think You're Right?

2005-02-04T15:00:00.000-08:00

Victor David Hanson gets it right again. The Liberal Elites are so wrong about everything in Iraq yet they still deny the proof and claim to be right??!! Read on. To see the original article click on the title of the post. Warning - Opinion and humor ahead!

The Global Throng
Why the world’s elites gnash their teeth.
Victor David Hanson - National Review Online

Do we even remember "all that" now? The lunacy that appeared after 9/11 that asked us to look for the "root causes" to explain why America may have "provoked" spoiled mama's boys like bin Laden and Mohammed Atta to murder Americans at work? Do we recall the successive litany of "you cannot win in Afghanistan/you cannot reconstruct such a mess/you cannot jumpstart democracy there"? And do we have memory still of "Sharon the war criminal," and "the apartheid wall," and, of course, "Jeningrad," the supposed Israeli-engineered Stalingrad — or was it really Leningrad? Or try to remember Arafat in his Ramallah bunker talking to international groupies who flew in to hear the old killer's jumbled mishmash about George Bush, the meanie who had ostracized him.

Then we were told that if we dared invade the ancient caliphate, Saddam would kill thousands and exile millions more. And when he was captured in a cesspool, the invective continued during the hard reconstruction that oil, Halliburton, the Jews, the neocons, Richard Perle, and other likely suspects had suckered us into a "quagmire" or was it now "Vietnam redux"? And recall that in response we were supposed to flee, or was it to trisect Iraq? The elections, remember, would not work — or were held too soon or too late. And give the old minotaur Senator Kennedy his due, as he lumbered out on the eve of the Iraqi voting to hector about its failure and call for withdrawal — one last hurrah that might yet rescue the cherished myth that the United States had created another Vietnam and needed his sort of deliverance.
And then there was the parade of heroes who were media upstarts of the hour — the brilliant Hans Blixes, Joe Wilsons, Anonymouses, and Richard Clarkes — who came, wrote their books, did their fawning interviews on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and Larry King, and then faded to become footnotes to our collective pessimism.
Do not dare forget our Hollywood elite. At some point since 9/11, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Whoopi Goldberg, and a host of others have lectured the world that their America is either misled, stupid, evil, or insane, bereft of the wisdom of Hollywood's legions of college drop-outs, recovering bad boys, and self-praised autodidacts.
Remember the twisted logic of the global throng as well: Anyone who quit the CIA was a genius in his renegade prognostication; anyone who stayed was a toady who botched the war. Three- and four-star generals who went on television or ran for office were principled dissidents who "told the truth"; officers in the field who kept quiet and saved Afghanistan and Iraq were "muzzled" careerists. Families of the 9/11 victims who publicly trashed George Bush offered the nation "grassroots" cries of the heart; the far greater number who supported the war on terror were perhaps "warped" by their grief.
There were always the untold "minor" embarrassments that we were to ignore as the slight slips of the "good" people — small details like the multibillion-dollar Oil-for-Food scandal that came to light due to the reporting of a single brave maverick, Claudia Rosett, or Rathergate, disclosed by "pajama"-clad bloggers without journalism degrees from Columbia, sojourns at the Kennedy School, or internships with the Washington Post. To put it into Animal Farm speak: elite New York Times, CBS News, and PBS good; populist bloggers, talk-radio, and cable news bad.
In place of Harry Truman and JFK we got John Kerry calling the once-maimed Prime Minister Allawi a "puppet," Senator Murray praising bin Laden's social-welfare work, Senator Boxer calling Secretary of State Rice a veritable liar for agreeing with the various casus belli that Boxer's own Senate colleagues had themselves passed in October 2002. And for emotional and financial support, the Democratic insiders turned to George Soros and Michael Moore, who assured them that their president was either Hitlerian, a dunce, or a deserter.
Then there was our media's hysteria: Donald Rumsfeld should be sacked in the midst of war; Abu Ghraib was the moral equivalent of everything from Saddam's gulag to the Holocaust; the U.S. military purportedly tried to kill reporters; and always the unwillingness or inability to condemn the beheaders, fascists, and suicide murderers, who sought to destroy any shred of liberalism. Meanwhile, the isolation of a corrupt Arafat, the withdrawal of 10,000 Americans from a Wahhabi theocracy, the transformation of the world's far-right monstrosities into reformed democracies, and the pull-back of some troops from Germany and the DMZ went unnoticed.
What explains this automatic censure of the United States, Israel, and to a lesser extent the Anglo-democracies of the United Kingdom and Australia? Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.
Thus we now expect that the New York Times, Harper's, Le Monde, U.N. functionaries who call us "stingy," French diplomats, American writers and actors will all (1) live a pretty privileged life; (2) in recompense "feel" pretty worried and guilty about it; (3) somehow connect their unease over their comfort with a pathology of the world's hyperpower, the United States; and (4) thus be willing to risk their elite status, power, or wealth by very brave acts such as writing anguished essays, giving pained interviews, issuing apologetic communiqués, braving the rails to Davos, and barking off-the-cuff furious remarks about their angst over themes (1) through (3) above. What a sad contrast they make with far better Iraqis dancing in the street to celebrate their voting.
There is something else to this shrillness of the global throng besides the obvious fact of hypocrisy — that very few of the world's Westernized cynical echelon ever move to the ghetto to tutor those they champion in the abstract, reside in central Africa to feed the poor, give up tenure to ensure employment for the exploited lecturer, or pass on the Washington or New York A-list party to eat in the lunch hall with the unwashed. Davos after all, is not quite central Bolivia or the Sudan.
First, there is a tremendous sense of impotence. Somehow sharp looks alone, clever repartee, long lists of books read and articles cited, or global travel do not automatically result in commensurate power. So what exactly is wrong with these stupid people of Nebraska who would elect a dense, Christian-like George Bush when a Gore Vidal, George Soros, Ben Affleck, Bruce Springsteen, or Ted Kennedy warned them not to?
If the American Left is furious over the loss of most of the nation's governorships and legislatures, the U.S. House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, the Europeans themselves are furious over America's power — as if Red America is to Blue America as America is to Europe itself. Thus how can a mongrel culture of Taco Bell, Bud Light, and Desperate Housewives project such military and political influence abroad when the soft, subtle triangulation of far more cultured diplomats and sophisticated intellectuals from France, Germany, and Scandinavia is ignored by thugs from Iran, North Korea, and most of the Middle East?
Why would the world listen to a stumbling George Bush when it could be mesmerized by a poet, biographer, aristocrat, and metrosexual of the caliber of a Monsieur Dominique de Villepin? Why praise brave Iraqis lining up to vote, while at the same hour the defeated John Kerry somberly intones on Tim Russert's show that he really did go into Cambodia to supply arms to the mass-murdering Khmer Rouge — a statement that either cannot be true or is almost an admission of being a party to crimes against humanity if it is.
Second, political powerlessness follows from ideological exhaustion. Communism and Marxism are dead. Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs. Castro and North Korea are not classless utopias but thugocracies run by megalomaniac dictators who the world prays will die any minute. The global Left knows that the Cold War is over and was lost by the Left, and that Eastern Europeans and Central Americans probably cherish the memory of a Ronald Reagan far more than that of a Francois Mitterrand or Willy Brandt.
But it is still more disheartening than that. In the 1960s and 1970s we were told that free-market America was becoming an anachronism. Remember Japan, Inc., whose amalgam of "Asian Values" and Western capitalism presaged the decline of the United States? Europeanists still assured us that a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave entitlement, and secularism were to be the only workable Western paradigms — before high unemployment, low growth, stagnant worker productivity, unassimilated minorities, declining birthrates, and disarmament suggested that just maybe something is going very wrong in a continent that is not so eager for either God or children.
Perhaps the result of this frustration is that European intellectuals damn the United States for action in Iraq, but lament that they could do nothing in the Balkans. Democrats at home talk of the need for idealism abroad, but fear the dirty road of war that sometimes is part of that bargain — thus the retreat into "democracy is good, BUT..." So here we have the global throng that focuses on one purported American crime to the next, as it simmers in the luxury of its privilege, education, and sophistication — and exhibits little power, new ideas, intellectual seriousness, or relevance.
In this context, the Iraqi elections were surely poorly attended, or illegitimate, or ruined by violence, or irrelevant, or staged by America — or almost anything other than a result of a brave, very risky, and costly effort by the United States military to destroy a fascist regime and offer something better in its place.
Yet as Yeehah! Howard Dean takes over the Democratic party, as Kojo Annan's dad limps to the end of his tenure, and as a Saddam-trading Jacques Chirac talks grandly of global airfare taxes to help the poor, they should all ask themselves whether a weary public is listening any longer to the hyped and canned stories of their own courage and brilliance.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

Medication Versus Recreation With Drugs

2005-02-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

The following article details the two legal recreational drugs and their effect on our society. It also can be used to show how ridiculous the DEA's position is on the Drug Inquisition. Notice that I don't call it the "War On Drugs" because it isn't. It is a War on American Citizens by the U.S. Government because they recreate with their drug of choice which doesn't happen to be one of the Government sanctioned recreational drugs, Alcohol or Nicotine. The DEA would have you believe the bald faced lie that illegal Drugs are the more dangerous. This flys in the face of the staggering statistics that show Nicotine and Alcohol are ten to 100 times more lethal per year by just calculating the deaths attributed to their consumption. All illegal drugs combined are responsible for approximately 4,000 to 10,000 deaths per year while perscription drugs, alcohol and nicotine are responsible for over 400,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Which would you consider more dangerous? Illegal drugs are not all bad as well. As example, Marijuana is very useful for the treatment of many medical conditions encountered by Chemotherapy patients and others with terminal illnesses and is responsible for NO deaths on record yet the DEA labels this beneficial natural occurring substance the "most dangerous illegal drug". There are also approximately 20,000,000 adults in this country recreating with this drug without permanent ill effects. Organizations like the DP Alliance, NORML and Change In Direction combat this illogical thinking and have had some recent sucesses in stopping the DEA from purveying this false and misleading propaganda. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.

Alcohol abuse kills as many people around the world as tobacco and high blood pressure, a new study shows.
And researchers charge that popular alcohol control measures, such as school-based abstinence programs, have proven to be ineffective.
“These programs may reduce drinking in the short-term, but within two or three years they have no discernible effect,” study researcher Robin Room, PhD, tells WebMD. “This has been shown in study after study.”
Getting Drunk Not Heart Healthy
The news about alcohol and health has been largely favorable in recent years, with an increasing number of studies touting the health benefits of light to moderate alcohol consumption. But the new research sheds light on the downside of drinking.
Room and colleagues report that alcohol is responsible for 4 percent of worldwide disease, contributing to more than 60 different medical conditions. Tobacco is responsible for 4.1 percent and high blood pressure, 4.4 percent.
Moderate drinking, up to two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women, is now widely believed to help protect against heart disease. But binge drinking has the opposite effect.
“If you get drunk on the weekends you are not helping your heart,” Room says.
Room added that most people probably drink more than they need to reap alcohol’s health benefits.
“One of the special things about alcohol is that you can be both benefiting from it and harmed by it, or harming others, at the same time,” he says. “The same drink can have both effects.”
75,000 Deaths in U.S.
CDC alcohol researcher Robert Brewer, MD, says binge drinking was responsible for more than half of the 75,000 deaths due to excessive drinking in the United States in 2001.
Binge drinking is commonly defined as five or more drinks at one sitting for a man and four for a woman.
In a study published last September, Brewer and CDC colleagues reported that three-quarters of those who died from alcohol abuse were male and 6% were under the age of 21.
Figures from the World Health Organization suggest that alcohol abuse is responsible for roughly 1.8 million deaths annually worldwide.
Brewer tells WebMD that binge drinking is on the rise in the United States, increasing by almost 30 percent since the early 1990s.
“(The CDC) is not in the business of telling people that it is wrong to drink,” he says. “Our focus is on excessive drinking, and our study affirmed that excessive drinking is a very serious public health problem.”
Getting Drunk Cheaper Than Movie
In the Lancet review, Room and colleagues outlined several measures that do seem to help curb alcohol abuse, including strengthening drunken driving laws and increasing taxes on alcohol. Room researches the public health impact of substance abuse at Sweden’s Stockholm University.
The problem of excessive drinking is of particular concern on college campuses. Henry Wechsler, PhD, conducts studies at the Harvard School of Public Health about drinking among college students.
Wechsler blames the alcohol industry for targeting young drinkers and fighting legislation that could help reduce alcohol abuse. He says ease of availability and price are major factors in the culture of college drinking.
“It is cheaper to get drunk on the weekend than to go to a movie,” he says. “And around college campuses most bars and liquor stores have price-based specials.”
The promotions have gone beyond the traditional two-for-one drinks and "happy hour." Wechsler says they may now involve supersizing alcoholic beverages and single price "all-you-can-drink" specials.By Salynn Boyles, reviewed by Michael W. Smith, MD

I Found An Unbiased Assessment Of The Social Security Reform Plan

2005-02-04T10:26:00.000-08:00

The clip that follows is an excerpt of some of the great levelheaded assessment done by CATO. To visit the CATO Social Security Reform site click on the title of this post.

Crisis for the “There Is No Crisis” Crowd
The anti-reform coalition has made a mantra out of the phrase “there is no crisis” when it comes to Social Security. They have even constructed a blog dedicated exclusively to convincing the world there is no Social Security crisis called “There Is No Crisis.”
But it appears the anti-ownership crowd has miscalculated in making this their principal talking point. According to a Cato Institute survey conducted by Zogby International, only 6.7% of all Americans agree with this sentiment. Meanwhile, a majority of Americans (52.2%) believe Social Security “is facing serious problems" and requires "major changes." Moreover, a plurality of older Americans (37.8%) feel Social Security is facing serious problems and requires major changes. You can read the entire poll by clicking here.
In addition to being untrue, the “there is no crisis” argument against Social Security choice is simply -- literally -- unbelievable.
Cato/Zogby Poll: Majority Backs Individual Accounts for Social Security
A majority of Americans agree that younger workers should be allowed to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in individual accounts, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby International for the Cato Institute. [Read More]

Tough Guys Don't Mince Words When It Comes To Destroying Terrorists.

2005-02-04T09:31:00.000-08:00

I know many out there are going to be shocked by this Marine's comments. Remember that this guy is a war hardened soldier that is tougher than nails and talks that way. I for one think his comment is great because it is the absolute truth for him and his troops. I really don't care if it 'offends' those who don't have the guts to put themselves at risk in front of an enemy that uses any dirty tactic they can to kill innocents and coalition soldiers. It's about time those scum learned just how tough American soldiers can be in the face of terrorism and the oppression of women and innocent. Also the Marines are truly 'Devil Dogs' when it comes to finding, killing and capturing Terrorists. They have a burning yearning to avenge all coalition soldiers, free Afghan and Iraq government officials as well as innocent civilians that have been the victims of this scourge. This is an excerpt of the original article. Read on. If you want to see the original article click on the title of this post. Also the article is a little misleading as the General never refers to law abiding Afghans as he is talking about the Taliban, Iraq Dead Enders and al Qaeda terrorists. The writer spins the General's words to infer that meaning. Another example of Media Spin! Even though the article is from Fox News it was written by an AP reporter that is famous for slanting news toward the negative to please the liberal and leftist Democrat class.

Marine General's Comments Stir Outrage
Friday, February 04, 2005

WASHINGTON — A decorated Marine Corps general said, "It's fun to shoot some people" and poked fun at the manhood of Afghans as he described the wars U.S. troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His boss, the commandant of the Marine Corps (search), said Thursday that the comments reflected "the unfortunate and harsh realities of war" but that the general has been asked to watch his words in public.
Lt. Gen. James Mattis (search), a career infantry officer who is now in charge of developing better ways to train and equip Marines, made the comments Tuesday while speaking to a forum in San Diego.
According to an audio recording, he said, "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling."
He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

The Purple Finger Salute To Iraqi Freedom

2005-02-03T16:02:00.000-08:00

If someone disses the Iraq election, remind them that millions of Iraqi's are giving that attitude the purple finger salute. I am dyeing my right index finger purple to the first knuckle in solidarity with the free Iraqi's that gave terrorism and the Islamofascists the purple finger salute on Januay 30th. How about you?

Social Security Reform And Private Accounts - An Informed Opinion

2005-02-03T14:35:00.000-08:00

Although I remain skeptical, I am listening intently to all sides and I will not decide anything on this topic until I see all of the information in an unbiased fashion. This is an interesting take on the proposed private accounts that is part of President Bush's Social Security Reform Plan. Read on. If you would like to see the original article, click on the title.

Take the Krugman 6.5% Challenge
It’s dirty work (not really), but someone has to do it.
Paul Krugman and Dean Baker have a challenge for those of us who advocate Social Security reform with personal accounts.
Krugman, of course, is America’s most dangerous liberal pundit — but maybe you’ve never heard of Baker. He’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a leftist think-tank funded by George Soros. Krugman and Baker were recently cited as “excellent sources” on Social Security reform by the Communist Party USA.
Here’s the challenge, from Krugman’s New York Times column Tuesday:
Mr. Baker has devised a test he calls “no economist left behind”: he challenges economists to make a projection of economic growth, dividends and capital gains that will yield a 6.5 percent rate of return over 75 years. Not one economist who supports privatization has been willing to take the test.
But the offer still stands. Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to explain your position?
Krugman is using Baker’s test to try to suggest that stocks can’t possibly have the kind of returns in the future that they’ve had in the past — so Social Security reform with personal accounts that could invest in stocks is bound to fail. And he’s suggesting that Baker’s brilliance has stunned the opponents of reform into silence. Hardly — it’s just that none of us would have bothered to pay attention to someone like Baker if Krugman hadn’t elevated him to the pages of America’s so-called “newspaper of record.”
It’s dirty work, but someone has to do it.
Actually, it isn’t especially difficult. But to make the exercise interesting, I’ll limit myself to data Krugman himself offers in his very same Times column. Stand back, everybody — here goes.
Krugman states that the return on stocks from dividends and share repurchases is 3 percent. He states that “profits grow at the same rate as the economy,” and notes that “economic growth ... averaged 3.4 percent per year over the last 75 years.” It’s simple arithmetic that if dividends grow at the rate of earnings growth, and earnings grow at the rate of GDP growth, and if the dividend and repurchase yield stays at 3 percent, then stock prices must rise each year by 3.4 percent.
That’s 3 percent per year in yield plus 3.4 percent in capital gains. Sounds like a 6.4 percent return, to me. Just a hair shy of the 6.5 percent Krugman and Baker asked for, but I am still going to declare victory.
Even without the arithmetic, there’s nothing so unusual about thinking that stocks could return something like 6.5 percent, after inflation, over the next 75 years. After all, they’ve returned exactly that over the last 75 years, according to Ibbotson Associates. Stocks are somewhat more highly valued today than they have been on average in the past, but that may well be nothing more sinister than a reflection of the risk-reduction opportunities in today’s globalized economy. Besides, today’s valuations are fully reflected in the 3 percent dividend and repurchase yield that Krugman himself posited.
What does the guru of long-term stock investing — celebrated Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel — have to say about it? According to a Krugman column two weeks ago, “even Jeremy Siegel, whose ‘Stocks for the Long Run’ is often cited by those who favor stocks over bonds, has conceded that ‘returns on stocks over bonds won’t be as large as in the past.’” The point being that Americans would be better off leaving their Social Security taxes invested in the bonds held by the system’s trust funds, rather than investing in stocks through personal accounts.
But Krugman Truth Squad member Jim Glass, on the Scrivener.net blog, caught Krugman “Dowdifying” that quotation. What Siegel really said, after the sentence Krugman deceptively selected was, “I see a 5%-to-6% return on stocks, adjusted for inflation. I’m pessimistic about real bond returns.”
Okay, 5 to 6 percent isn’t quite 6.5 percent. But it’s close. And it’s a heck of a lot better than the rates of return offered by today’s Social Security system. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security offers very poor returns for the median quintile of household earners — the present value of their payroll taxes is greater than the present value of their future benefits.
But Krugman does make one good point in Tuesday’s column. He states that stock returns in the neighborhood of 6.5 percent will not be possible over the coming 75 years if economic growth is as low as the 1.9 percent rate used by the actuaries of the Social Security Administration in their solvency estimates. He says that for that to occur, “you have to believe that half a century from now, the average stock will be priced like technology stocks at the height of the Internet bubble — and that stock prices will nonetheless keep on rising.”
How did Krugman figure that out? The Princeton economics professor — who some people think could someday win the Nobel Prize — had to ask Dean Baker to “help me out with that calculation (there are some technical details I won’t get into).” Indeed, Krugman probably needed the help — he never has had a very firm grasp of stock market valuation. During that “height of the Internet bubble,” Krugman wrote in his Times column that “I'm not sure that the current value of the Nasdaq is justified, but I’m not sure that it isn’t.”
Hmmm. That wasn’t exactly the unambiguous call to sell techstocks that Jeremy Siegel issued at the height of the bubble, when he wrote a piece titled “Big-Cap Tech Stocks Are a Sucker Bet.” No, as new ex officio Krugman Truth Squad member James Neel put it in an e-mail, “Krugman was for the bubble valuation of Nasdaq before he was against it.”
Today, once again, Krugman wants it both ways. He’s sure that stocks will perform poorly in the future, but he says, “if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.” But that’s simply not true.
Kent Smetters, the Wharton professor who has pioneered the analysis of Social Security’s solvency beyond the deceptively arbitrary 75-year timeframe most often cited, told me that faster economic growth amounts to “very little over the long term.” Krugman’s analysis — which focuses on the higher taxes collected in the near term — ignores the reality that correspondingly “higher benefits come outside the 75-year window.” So you collect more now, but you just pay it out later. That’s largely because a 1977 law, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, indexed Social Security benefits to economy-wide wage growth.
I’d conclude by turning Krugman’s challenge back on him: “Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to explain your position?” But I can’t — I’ve been writing the Krugman Truth Squad column long enough to know that he’s no gentleman.
— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your visit to his blog and your comments at don@trendmacro.com.

Let's Define Media Spin For Those Who Are Confused

2005-02-03T11:44:00.000-08:00

I have recieved several comments lately accusing me of spin. Obviously, the commenters don't understand what media spin is when reading an article or news report or, for that matter, political blogs. Media Spin is the distortion of recent events in the guise of an objective news report. Analysis of the news is OPINION not media spin. Just because an opinion appears in an Op Ed piece doesn't mean that it is spin. To be media spin, some distortion of commonly known facts about a current event has to take place in an Op Ed piece or news report or blog. I can have an opinion and state facts about an event without resorting to media spin tactics. I check my sources very carefully and I only comment on what I can prove independently from a wide variety of sources. If this constitutes spin in some people's minds, it is their failure to grasp the difference that is the problem. So it goes.

Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, A True American Hero And Medal OF Honor Recipient For His Selfless Service in Iraq

2005-02-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

I have posted this article in it's entirety so you would not miss anything. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title.

Iraq hero joins hallowed group
President Bush will present America's top award for bravery to the family of the sergeant who died defending his soldiers.
By ALEX LEARY, Times Staff Writer
Published February 2, 2005

THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION
For a multimedia report on the story of Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, published as a special section in the Times last year, click here.

Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, who spent his boyhood in Tampa, became a man in the Army and died outside Baghdad defending his outnumbered soldiers from an Iraqi attack, will receive America's highest award for bravery.
President Bush will present the Medal of Honor to Smith's wife, Birgit, and their children Jessica, 18, and David, 10, at a ceremony at the White House, possibly in March.
The official announcement will come soon, but the Pentagon called Mrs. Smith with the news Tuesday afternoon.
"We had faith he was going to get it," Mrs. Smith said from her home in Holiday, "but the phone call was shocking. It was overwhelming. My heart was racing, and I got sweaty hands. I yelled, "Oh, yes!' ... I'm still all shaky.
"People know what's he's done ... people know that to get a Medal of Honor you have to be a special person or do something really great."
What Paul Smith did on April 4, 2003, was climb aboard an armored vehicle and, manning a heavy machine gun, take it upon himself to cover the withdrawal of his men from a suddenly vulnerable position. Smith was fatally wounded by Iraqi fire, the only American to die in the engagement.
"I'm in bittersweet tears," said Smith's mother, Janice Pvirre. "The medal isn't going to bring him back. ... It makes me sad that all these other soldiers have died. They are all heroes."
With the medal, Smith joins a most hallowed society.
Since the Civil War, just 3,439 men (and one woman) have received the Medal of Honor. It recognizes only the most extreme examples of bravery - those "above and beyond the call of duty."
That oft-heard phrase has a specific meaning: The medal cannot be given to those who act under orders, no matter how heroic their actions. Indeed, according to Library of Congress defense expert David F. Burrelli, it must be "the type of deed which, if he had not done it, would not subject him to any justified criticism."
From World War II on, most of the men who received the medal died in the action that led to their nomination. There are but 129 living recipients.
Smith is the first soldier from the Iraq war to receive the medal, which had not previously been awarded since 1993. In that year, two Army Special Services sergeants were killed in Somalia in an action described in the bestselling book Black Hawk Down.
The officer who called Birgit Smith on Tuesday nominated her husband for the medal.
Lt. Col. Thomas Smith (no relation) sent in his recommendation in May 2003, beginning a process that involved reviews at 12 levels of the military chain of command before reaching the White House. On Tuesday, Lt. Col. Smith expressed satisfaction that the wait was over, and great admiration for his former subordinate.
In the Army, he said, you hear about men who won the Medal of Honor. "You think they are myths when you read about them. It's almost movielike. You just don't think you'd ever meet someone like that."
Paul Smith, he said, was not a "soft soldier" who suddenly got tough under fire. "This was a guy whose whole life experience seemed building toward putting him in the position where he could do something like this. He was demanding on his soldiers all the time and was a stickler for all the things we try to enforce. It's just an amazing story."
Lt. Col. Smith commanded the 11th Engineer Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, during the American attack on Iraq, which began March 20, 2003. On the morning of April 4, the engineers found themselves manning a roadblock not far from Baghdad International Airport.
A call went out for a place to put some Iraqi prisoners.
Sgt. Smith volunteered to create a holding pen inside a walled courtyard. Soon, Iraqi soldiers, numbering perhaps 100, opened fire on Smith's position. Smith was accompanied by 16 men.
Smith called for a Bradley, a tank-like vehicle with a rapid fire cannon. It arrived and opened up on the Iraqis. The enemy could not advance so long as the Bradley was in position. But then, in a move that baffled and angered Smith's men, the Bradley left.
Smith's men, some of whom were wounded, were suddenly vulnerable.
Smith could have justifiably ordered his men to withdraw. Lt. Col. Smith believes Sgt. Smith rejected that option, thinking that abandoning the courtyard would jeopardize about 100 GIs outside - including medics at an aid station.
Sgt. Smith manned a 50-caliber machine gun atop an abandoned armored personnel carrier and fought off the Iraqis, going through several boxes of ammunition fed to him by 21-year-old Pvt. Michael Seaman. As the battle wound down, Smith was hit in the head. He died before he could be evacuated from the scene. He was 33.
The Times published a lengthy account of the battle, and Smith's life in January 2004. It can be seen at www.sptimes.com/paulsmith
Sgt. Matthew Keller was one of the men who fought with Smith in the courtyard. "He put himself in front of his soldiers that day and we survived because of his actions," Keller said Tuesday from Fort Stewart in Georgia. "He was thinking my men are in trouble and I'm going to do what is necessary to help them. He didn't care about his own safety."
Some of the men who fought alongside Smith were sent back to Iraq last month. Keller, 26, is scheduled to return Feb. 15, but was scrambling Tuesday to delay his deployment to attend the medal ceremony in Washington.
"I want to be there to support the family and show thanks for what Sgt. Smith did," Keller said.
Mrs. Smith moved to Holiday after her husband's death, to be near his parents. Her daughter, Jessica, recently moved out on her own and is thinking about going to college. Son David is a fifth-grader at Sunray Elementary School in Holiday.
"From the beginning (David) didn't show much feelings, keeping to himself," Mrs. Smith said. "He thinks if he brings it up it will make me sad. He's trying to be the strong one. The day Paul left for Iraq he told David, "You're the man in the house now.'
"Paul is not forgotten," she said. "He's part of history now. It makes me feel proud, so honored that I was allowed to be part of Paul's life. Even today he's probably laughing at all of us, saying "You're making way too big a deal out of me.'
"He did what he had to do to protect his men, not to get a medal."THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION
For a multimedia report on the story of Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, published as a special section in the Times last year, go to www.sptimes com/paulsmith.

A New Vietnam For The Left? - Warning Humor And Opinion Ahead.

2005-02-02T11:04:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a humorous, considered opinion is a worthwhile read. Especially if it is based on current events. Humor goes a long way as well to tell the story and illustrate the point. Some will view this as 'spin". I don't as it is advertised as "Opinion" not "news". Read on. If you want to see the entire article, click on the title.

The Quagmire on Slothnor
The Left and Vietnam.
Jonah Goldberg - NRO Online
February 2, 2005

The year is 2456. The human colonies on Mars have been invaded by giant, laser-visioned tree sloths bent on crushing humanity and forcing the survivors to work as slaves in the massive dung mines of the planet Slothnor. In a last-ditch effort to save our species from extinction, the brave humans launch a counterattack on the Sloths' home world. Le New York Times (headquartered in Paris since 2018) blares in a bold holo-headline "Disturbing Echoes of Vietnam Conjured by Earth Aggression."

O.K., I'm kidding. It would probably take a few weeks before the Times actually invoked Vietnam. Perhaps they'd wait until we got bogged down in the actual marshes of Slothnor to start bleating about "quagmire." Who knows?

All I can say for certain is that I am no longer capable of being shocked by the Left's and the mainstream media's capacity to shove pegs of any shape into the round hole of Vietnam. A recent New York Times headline blared, "Flashback to the '60s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam." A cursory search of the Nexis-Lexis database shows that the words Iraq and Vietnam have appeared together nearly 800 articles in the last year and that's just in the New York Times. The Washington Post: 764. The LA Times: 683. The Chicago Tribune: 526. Time magazine, a weekly publication, ran more articles mentioning Vietnam and Iraq (70) than it put out issues in the last year, and that doesn't even include letters to the editor.

Now, granted, some even many of those articles didn't rehearse the media's usual mode of Vietnam fixation. Some were merely about the campaign of John Kerry, who boasted incessantly that his service in Vietnam made him more qualified to be commander in chief.

Even so, Kerry's Vietnam fixation shares this in common with the media's Vietnam obsession: They have more to do with liberal baby-boomer myopia than with a war that ended 30 years ago (and that bears almost no resemblance to the conflict in Iraq).

Indeed, you can tell this fixation has little to do with Iraq because the war in Afghanistan prompted hundreds of comparisons to Vietnam as well. Between October 1, 2001, and October 1, 2002, the Times ran nearly 300 articles with the words Vietnam and Afghanistan in them. On day 24 of the Afghan campaign, Times's muckety-muck R. W. Apple revived the Q-word which to liberals can only mean Vietnam in a thumb-sucker titled "A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam."

Arianna Is A Partisan Airhead.

2005-02-02T10:26:00.000-08:00

Arianna is definitely out to lunch on this issue. She conviently ignores the worldwide astonishment of the naysayers and the Hate America crowd. Nothing they predicted would happen during the Iraq voting actually occurred. But little miss stupid toes can't deal with that. She would rather whine about the inconsequential and minimize the most significant political event of the 21st century because of partisan obstinance. Read on. To see the entire article click on the title.

Post-Election Buzzkill: Why Iraq Is Still A Debacle
February 02, 2005
Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi elections were not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention.The media have made it sound like last Sunday was a combination of 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Filipino "People Power," Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday, all rolled into one.

But it was all of that and more. Notice how the terrorist would disagree with you, idiot. And you're in denial over it. So do us all a big favor and just shut the hell up and swallow it. I suggest therapy. Maybe Dean's therapist might help.

The War On Drugs Is A Greater Threat To Your Rights Than The Patriot Act

2005-02-02T08:58:00.000-08:00

The loss of rights to the average American is far greater when the War on Drugs is involved. This is by far a more serious problem than anyone can imagine. It pervades all of our lives in insidious ways and cost the taxpayers Billions of dollars to enforce, prosecute and incarcerate Drug offenders using the current Federal and State laws. Now the Feds want to circumvent your 4th Amendment rights as well. Read on. To see the entire article, Click on the title.

Drug War Shrinking Bill of Rights
Thursday, January 27, 2005
By Radley Balko
Fox News
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that if you're pulled over by the police for speeding or, say, not wearing your seatbelt, they may bring out drug-sniffing dogs to investigate your car without violating the Fourth Amendment.
On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Orin Kerr observes that Justice John Paul Stevens (search), writing for the majority, indicated that the Fourth Amendment protects not against violations of privacy or invasiveness, but against violation of property rights. Since one can't have property rights for illicit drugs, a search can't violate the Fourth Amendment.
It's a troubling precedent. It's hard to see how any police search would violate any rights under Justice Stevens' ruling, so long as the search turned up something illegal. That sort of undermines what the Fourth Amendment (search) is all about.
That case is just the latest in a number of court rulings and pieces of legislation that have been chipping away at the criminal justice rights of substance-abuse suspects. Ours is quickly becoming a two-tiered criminal justice system, one in which there are one set of criminal protections for drug and alcohol defendants, and a broader set of protections for everyone else.
Last month in Virginia, pain physician Dr. William Hurwitz (search) was convicted on dozens of counts of drug distribution. Prosecutors and the foreman of the jury that convicted him conceded that Hurwitz didn't knowingly participate in a drug trade, but because the pain medication he prescribed made it to the black market, he was nevertheless found guilty. He faces life in prison. Proving intent — as is required to secure a conviction in nearly every other crime — apparently wasn't necessary.

Oh NO! Bush May Have Been Right! - Liberals Are Soul Searching Over The Iraq Election

2005-02-01T13:24:00.000-08:00

Could the Iraq Election be the turning point for some Liberals in their constant bashing of President Bush over the Iraq conflict? Read on. To see the entire article, click on the title.

What if Bush has been right about Iraq all along?
February 1, 2005
BY MARK BROWN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Maybe you're like me and have opposed the Iraq war since before the shooting started -- not to the point of joining any peace protests, but at least letting people know where you stood.
You didn't change your mind when our troops swept quickly into Baghdad or when you saw the rabble that celebrated the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue, figuring that little had been accomplished and that the tough job still lay ahead.
Despite your misgivings, you didn't demand the troops be brought home immediately afterward, believing the United States must at least try to finish what it started to avoid even greater bloodshed. And while you cheered Saddam's capture, you couldn't help but thinking I-told-you-so in the months that followed as the violence continued to spread and the death toll mounted.
By now, you might have even voted against George Bush -- a second time -- to register your disapproval.
But after watching Sunday's election in Iraq and seeing the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people, you have to be asking yourself: What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?
It's hard to swallow, isn't it?
Americans cross own barrier
If you fit the previously stated profile, I know you're fighting the idea, because I am, too. And if you were with the president from the start, I've already got your blood boiling.
For those who've been in the same boat with me, we don't need to concede the point just yet. There's a long way to go. But I think we have to face the possibility.
I won't say that it had never occurred to me previously, but it's never gone through my mind as strongly as when I watched the television coverage from Iraq that showed long lines of people risking their lives by turning out to vote, honest looks of joy on so many of their faces.
Some CNN guest expert was opining Monday that the Iraqi people crossed a psychological barrier by voting and getting a taste of free choice (setting aside the argument that they only did so under orders from their religious leaders).
I think it's possible that some of the American people will have crossed a psychological barrier as well.

Mickey Mouse Moore, The Fraud From Flint.

2005-01-31T13:23:00.000-08:00

The following article exposes Moore for who he really is not what he says he is. Click on the title to see the entire article.

The Fraud "From Flint"
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 31, 2005

PONTEFICATIONS
MICHAEL MOORE AND HIS AGITPROP FILM FAHRENHEIT 9/11 were nowhere to be found on the lists of Academy Awards nominees released last week. And despite his commercial success, the Writers Guild omitted Moore from consideration for its first list of documentary writing award nominees. The only award Moore received was from a gun rights group highlighting his hypocrisy after a bodyguard for this maker of the 2003 Academy Award-winning anti-gun Bowling for Columbine got arrested in New York City for carrying a handgun not licensed there.
Hypocrisy is nothing new for Michael Moore, nor the Hollywood Left. But Hollywood makes its money by anticipating which way the winds are blowing. By distancing itself from this self-aggrandizing egomaniac, Tinsel Town may be signaling that America’s cultural winds are shifting away from the Loony Left.

So who is Michael Moore, this multi-millionaire filmmaker and author of several books, who has been called “the Left’s only well-known shock jock,” compared by Christopher Hitchens to socialist Adolf Hitler’s film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl?

Michael Moore is his own fictional character, a self-written being who soon will require another rewrite if his lucrative fantasy career is to survive.

Moore’s production company, aptly named, is Dog Eat Dog Films. His agent Ariel “Ari” Emanuel is brother of Congressman Rahm Emanuel, D-IL, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a former White House operative for President Bill Clinton.

Michael Moore never was a “working class boy from Flint, Michigan,” as he pretends. He was born on April 23, 1954, in Davison, Michigan, a lily-white upper-middle class suburb 10 miles east of Flint, where his father Frank assembled AC spark plugs, and his mother was a clerk-secretary for General Motors (GM).

For a few decades following World War II, America’s global power (relative to war-shattered Europe and Japan) and the benefits provided to employees by GM and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union made life pleasant.

Moore’s parents enjoyed ample income, free medical and dental care, four weeks of paid vacation each year, and had two cars in their well-to-do Davison home. Moore’s Irish-American father had spent workday afternoons playing golf. After he retired at age 53 with a full pension, he enjoyed a life of ease, golf and volunteer work at the local Roman Catholic church.

Who Really Won the Iraq Election?

2005-01-31T11:45:00.000-08:00

Dateline Iraq -
Sunday, January 30th, 2005

Iraq - 10,000,000
Terrorists - 37

Who do you think won the election?

More Kennequidick Bluba Ba

2005-01-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

Kennedy is the biggest Lefty Blowhard of them all. Notice how he is disjointed and spurious on this issue. He has no workable plan, he just wants to pull on the heartstrings of America and dig the President at the same time. This guy is a lefty partisan buffoon and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Talk simmers in Congress of plans for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq
By Liz Sidoti, Associated Press Writer
January 27, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Talk of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq is simmering on Capitol Hill.
Its mostly from Democrats -- Edward Kennedy on Thursday became the first senator to say "we must begin" withdrawal -- but Republicans, too, expect the discussion to increase as an Iraqi government takes shape and Congress considers more billions of dollars for the war.

President Bush wont set a timetable and Iraqs interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, says its too soon to talk about American forces leaving.

Can the Idiot Left Biased Media Get More Stupid?

2005-01-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

Can the media be any more stupid about this? Critizing the choice of clothing of our Vice President when attending a ceremony in a blizzard and miss the importance of his attendance? Can you get more lame? Read on.

Cheney's green parka and boots stand out
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, center, is flanked by his wife Lynne, rigth, and Israel's President Moshe Katsav, left, when leaders from 30 countries gather to remember the victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops in Oswiecim, southern Poland on Thursday, Jan. 27, 2005. (AP Photo/Herbert Knosowski)
OSWIECIM, Poland -- Vice President Dick Cheney's utilitarian hooded parka and boots stood out amid the solemn formality of a ceremony commemorating the liberation of Nazi death camps, raising eyebrows among the fashion-conscious.
Cheney replaced the zipped-to-the-neck green parka he sported in Thursday's blowing snow and freezing wind with a more traditional black coat - red tie and gray scarf showing underneath - for his tour of Auschwitz on Friday.
Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan described Cheney's look at the deeply moving 60th anniversary service as "the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower."
"Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood," Givhan wrote in Friday's Post, also mocking Cheney's knit ski cap embroidered with the words "Staff 2001" and his brown, lace-up hiking boots. "The vice president looked like an awkward child amid the well-dressed adults," she said.
'

I think these self important clowns are about as relevant as tits on a boar hog when it comes to the Vice President's choice of clothing. I wonder what they wear to work on a day that it is snowing so hard you can't see 3 feet. I'll bet they wear a similar outfit. If they don't then they are truly idiots.

What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror.

2005-01-27T15:38:00.000-08:00

Wow! If this is true, it is certainly scary and compelling proof that things were set in motion long before 9/11 to destroy America and it's people by the Islamofascists. A excerpt of the interview follows. Click on the title to read the entire interview.

FP: Mr. Lance, welcome to Frontpage InterviewLance: Great to be talking with you.FP: What motivated you to write this book?

Lance: Cover Up began as an effort to answer the two big unanswered questions left after I had finished 1000 Years of Revenge. To get an overview of my findings in that book, your readers can sample the 32 page illustrated Timeline from 1000 YEARS at my website under “Terrorism.”
Like the book, the Timeline goes back 12 years to 1989 and traces al Qaeda's treacherous development of the 9/11 plot, focusing primarily on the how the New York office of the FBI (NYO) the Osama bin Laden "office of origin," failed repeatedly to interdict the plot.The two big questions, which I sought to answer at the end of that book were:1) Why did the U.S. Justice Department ignore probative evidence from the Philippines National Police (PNP) in 1995 that Ramzi Yousef, the original World Trade Center bomber, had conspired with his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) as early as 1994 to set in motion the plot that culminated on 9/11? In the spring of 1995, Col. Rodolfo B. Mendoza, a leading PNP investigator who had interrogated Yousef's lifelong friend and co-conspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad, gave the U.S. Embassy in Manila evidence that Yousef and KSM already had chosen had six targets: the WTC, The Pentagon, CIA HQ at Langley, VA, The Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco and an unnamed nuclear facility. Col. Mendoza also had evidence that up to 10 Islamic radicals were then training in U.S. flight schools. This was 1995.I found FBI NO/FORN memos from that year proving that the Bureau had this intelligence, but they dropped the ball. I wanted to find out why. It should be noted that the detailed intelligence from Col. Mendoza was for a plot involving the hijacking of airliners that was completely distinct from the Bojinka plot in which Yousef, KSM, Murad and a 4th conspirator, Wali Kahn Amin Shah, planned to plant Casio watch powered-nitroglycerine bomb triggers aboard up to a dozens U.S. jumbo jets exiting Asia with U.S. tourists.That plot went way beyond the initial plane to hijack a small plane and fly it, laden with explosives, into CIA Headquarters, an early scenario which Murad had discussed with Col. Mendoza in the early days of his 67 day interrogation. Yousef had even undertaken a "west test" bombing of a Casio Nitro device which he planted under a seat in the 26th row of Philippine Airlines Flight #434 on the morning of December 11, 1994.Planted on the first leg of a two-leg flights, Yousef got on board, pieced together the apparently innocuous components of the bomb and exited the flight after hiding it in the life jacket pouch below seat 26K. He mistakenly believed that the center wing fuel tank of the 747-100 began at the 26th row.In fact that tank runs below the 17th to 25th rows. So Yousef was a few feet two short.Nonetheless, after he exiting, while PAL #434 was heading toward Japan, his device exploded with such force that it blew a hole in the passenger floor and killed Haruki Ikegami, a 24 year old Japanese national in seat 26 K.The heroic pilot was able to get the plane on the ground. But now Yousef knew that if he and his cohorts merely moved the devices FORWARD a few rows, the downward blast would ignite the fuel tanks, turning the jumbo jets into flying bombs. They intended to do this on up to 12 flights when they had a fire in their Manila bomb factory on the night of January 6th, 1995 and the Bojinka plot was foiled.However, at the same time that they plotted Bojinka (and a third plot to kill the Pope who was to arrive in Manila in early January 1995) Yousef and KSM had well in motion the hijack-airliners-fly-them-into-buildings scenario that culminated on 9/11.Col. Mendoza, who was the Richard Clarke of The Philippines, when it came to his knowledge of Islamic radicalism, was very clear with the U.S. government and warned our officials in in the spring of 1995 of that PRECISE plot which unfolded six years later.The Justice Department seemingly failed to pursued this extraordinary warning and I wanted to know why.2) The second question left unanswered, when I had finished my first book, was why did the FBI and Justice Dept. treat the hunt for KSM so differently than the public hunt for his nephew -- which had successfully brought Yousef to ground? Yousef was arrested in early February, 1995 in a bin Laden controlled guesthouse in Islamabad, Pakistan after a tip to the U.S. State Department from an informant that Yousef had recruited. This young South African (Istaique Parker) wanted the $2 million reward being offered under a program called Rewards for Justice that was the brainchild of the late Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) agent Bradley Smith.During the two years since Yousef had fled New York on the night of the first WTC attack (February 26th, 1993) he had been the object of a worldwide public manhunt. Newsweek ran stories with banner headlines like The World’s Most Wanted and the State Dept. even printed posters touting the $2 million reward on matchbook covers that they circulated by the thousands through the middle east.Parker finally gave up Yousef, but the day he was arrested by DSS and DEA agents on February 7, 1995, I recounted in my first book, how an FBI agent got to the 20 room guesthouse late and blew a chance to grab Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was staying in a ground floor room. In fact, KSM was so audacious that he gave an interview to Time magazine on the Yousef takedown using his own name "Khalid Shaikh." But by the time FBI agent Brad Garrett got there KSM was gone.This didn't stop Garrett from participating in a 60 Minutes II story in the fall of 2001 in which he took false credit for the Yousef takedown.Meanwhile, back in 1995, rather than doing a Wild West style worldwide search using the same rewards posters that had brought Yousef down, the Justice Dept. changed tack. For unknown reasons they indicted KSM along with Yousef in 1996 but kept the indictment sealed and his name from the press.

The 'No Government Spin' Legislation Idea is looking pretty good at this point.

2005-01-27T14:54:00.000-08:00

The more I think about this legislation the more I like the idea. It would counter the government's spin factory no matter who was in power. I believe the current administration did make a mistake in hiring pundits to promote thier cause at my expense. I don't like state sponsored bias. If we get a decent law out of the idea it would be a definite good thing for the American people. Read on.

Sens. to Introduce 'Stop Government Propaganda Act'
credit: Aya Kawano
By Brian Orloff Published: January 27, 2005 12:10 PM ET
NEW YORK In response to continued revelations of government-funded "journalism" -- ranging from the purported video news releases put out by the drug czar's office and the Department of Health and Human Services to the recently uncovered payments to columnists Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher,who flacked administration programs -- Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) will introduce a bill, The Stop Government Propaganda Act, in the Senate next week."It's just not enough to say, 'Please don't do it anymore,'" Alex Formuzis, Lautenberg's spokesman, told E&P. "Legislation sometimes is required and we believe it is in this case."The Stop Government Propaganda Act states, "Funds appropriated to an Executive branch agency may not be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States unless authorized by law.""It's time for Congress to shut down the Administration's propaganda mill," Lautenberg said in a statement. "It has no place in the United States Government." The bill is co-sponsored by Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.). Formuzis told E&P that while the bill is being introduced by Democrats, its message and intent is something endorsed by Republicans and Democrats alike."We only have a few senators on the bill so far, but we hope and expect that we'll get a number of others to sign on to the legislation once we introduce it," he said. "This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. This is an issue about an independent press, and I think that's something that will cross party lines."The act would allow citizens to bring qui tam lawsuits on behalf of the United States government when the Department of Justice does not respond. If the matter is taken to court, the bill proposes that the senior official responsible would be fined three times the amount of the "misspent taxpayer funds" plus an additional fine ranging from $5,000 to $10,000. And if a citizen's qui tam suit is accepted, the bill proposes that the plaintiff receives between 25 and 30% of the proceeds of the fine."The President said that his cabinet agencies made a mistake when they paid commentators to promote his agenda," Kennedy said in a statement. "It's more than just a mistake, it's an abuse of taxpayer funds and an abuse of the First Amendment and freedom of the press. ... If the President is serious about stopping these abuses, he will support this legislation."According to a release, publicity or propaganda is defined in the bill as: news releases or publications that do not clearly identify the government agency responsible for the content; audio/visual or Internet presentations that do not identify the responsible government agency; any attempt to manipulate journalists or news organizations; messages created to aid a political party or candidate; messages with a "self-aggrandizing" purpose or "puffery of the Administration, agency, executive branch programs or policies or pending legislation"; and, finally, messages that are "so misleading or inaccurate that they constitute propaganda."

Roger, I could not have said it better.

2005-01-26T14:40:00.000-08:00

Roger Olsen has a very good point here and he says it in a way that puts things into perspective. Please read on.

Bush aversion
Isn't it interesting that liberals thought ending subjugation of women worldwide was a worthwhile goal, until Bush made it happen in Afghanistan and Iraq? That black, Latin and other minority voices in high government and judicial offices was a noble endeavor, until Bush made it the norm? That Social Security was in crisis, until Bush stepped on that "third rail" and attempted to provide actual long-term benefits?
That "God" and "worldwide liberty" were just fine in the inaugural addresses of FDR, Truman and JFK, but Bush's mention deserves scrutiny and doubt. And that Bush's ambitious fulfillment of campaign promises is denigrated as hubris. Any wonder the liberal left has moved the Democrats out of favor, out of touch and out of office?
Roger Olsen
Burbank

The Usual Lefty Suspects Are incredibly Stupid

2005-01-26T10:46:00.000-08:00

More Lefty entertainment. Don't they realize how stupid they appear when stooping to such low partisan attacks over nothing and lying all the way? I really hope they never get it as it could mean the end of their tenure. Getting them voted out of office is getting easier and easier. Read on.

Democrats Slam Rice, But Senate Approval Assured
Jan 25, 8:14 PM (ET)

By Vicki Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of Senate Democrats opposing the nomination of Condoleezza Rice as U.S. secretary of state on Tuesday accused her of deceiving Congress and called her an architect of blunders in the Iraq war.
But Republicans, jumping to Rice's defense, said Democrats were grandstanding since Rice was certain to be confirmed in the post by a full Senate vote on Wednesday.
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy called Rice "a key member of the national security team that developed and justified the rationale for war, and it's been a catastrophic failure, a continuing quagmire."
Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota said Rice "misled the people of Minnesota and Americans everywhere about the situation in Iraq, before and after that war began." He added: "I really don't like being lied to repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally."
Republicans rose to defend Rice, who for four years has been Bush's national security adviser and appears set to become the first black woman to head U.S. foreign policy.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas accused Democrats of "inappropriate partisan attacks against a nominee who deserves our respect," and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska proclaimed it "a nomination all of America can be proud of."
While most lawmakers who opposed Rice were long-standing critics of the war, Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh, who backed the invasion, also said he would vote against her.

Read the entire article here:
http://reuters.myway.com/article/20050126/2005-01-26T011422Z_01_N25379705_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-CONGRESS-RICE-DC.html

Wear Protective Clothing! Liberals Do Spew.

2005-01-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

This really puts into perspective the problem I have with Regressives and wacko Lefties. Joan nails 'em right between their running drivel.

Cows Moo, Liberals Spew
Joan Swirsky
Friday, Jan. 21, 2005
NewsMax
How astonished would you be if you turned on your household faucet and champagne – or, for that matter, Pepto Bismol – flowed out? Or if you went to a farm and a cow came forth with an oink? Pretty dumbfounded, I think.That’s because all over the world, water faucets bring forth water and cows moo – just as maple trees produce maple syrup, religious leaders preach their faith, and pianists play, well, the piano.
Story Continues Below
Invariably and predictably, mechanisms like faucets and species like plants or animals (including humans) are what they are and do what they do. Technology may change from day to day, but Mother Nature never lies. All one has to do is observe the behavior of a particular species to know what it’s all about.
The Political Species
For instance, conservatives are interested in preserving time-tested traditions as well as gathering the kind of hard data that leads to a balance of funds and resources between social programs and maintaining our country’s safety and security. So their behavior – what they say and do – is to campaign and vote for these principals. That is why liberals often think of them as “mean.”
In contrast, liberals seem exclusively interested in those they consider the victims of society and in convincing the masses that, in fact, all of them are victims! This includes, among others, people unhappy with their medical care, those who choose to have eight or nine kids without marriage or a job, and those who cross our borders illegally. So their behavior is to campaign and speak their socialist cant on behalf of these “injured parties.”
Their strategy is to appeal to every aggrieved person in America, promise them the world and – if history is any measure – deliver them nothing! This is why conservatives often think of them as “clueless.” And why Winston Churchill said, "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
Liberals think they are much smarter than ordinary people and therefore should control every aspect of their lives, especially their money and, by association, their own money! It’s worth mentioning that the very members of the party fighting Social Security reform fail to tell their constituents that they, as legislators, would lose the privilege of NOT paying into Social Security and still garnering a generous stipend from the government for the rest of their lives – even if they’ve served only one term!
All you need to know about what is so misguided, ignorant and even treasonous about liberals can be found in observing their behavior. Simply, watch them spew! One hundred percent of the time, their repertoire is limited to venom toward anyone who disagrees with them and toward their own country!
They can’t help it. Their worldview is based on pure narcissism – the notion that they are so intellectually superior and morally evolved that anyone who strays from their worldview is more than worthy of their bile. This is the definition of narcissism – a serious mental malady, by the way – that is characterized by obsession with the all-important self, an allergic intolerance to and irrational lashing-out at any dissent, an exaggerated sense of self-importance (coupled, interestingly, with frequent thoughts of suicide) and an insatiable need to be accepted and admired for who they are, as opposed, significantly, to what they stand for.
When people disagree with them – as they did in the past two presidential and congressional elections – they become consumed with rage. And like angry volcanoes, they spew hot lava.
Let’s take a few recent events.
The Spewer-in-Chief
Like other people around the globe, President Bush learned of the devastating tsunami in Asia from the “experts,” who initially said the death toll was 5,000. Being a thoughtful and prudent man who demands empirical evidence before acting, the president immediately allocated a generous $15 million for relief. This while France and other “philanthropic” countries were helping the victims with mere thousands!
But as the days passed and the death and devastation toll grew, the president more than doubled U.S. aid to $35 million, and, as more data flowed in, he announced that our government would contribute a whopping $350 million – with more to come, he said, possibly up to a billion dollars or higher.
And how did the still-depressed and enraged liberal Democrats respond? By spewing their typically bogus and always-negative “talking points” about the president’s "late" response, about the comparative cost of his inauguration (which is paid for by private donations) and about the need for more body armor for our troops (which they know is a matter of production efficiency – or, in this case, inefficiency).
A majority of the American public knows all this, which is why they gave President Bush a decisive victory over his famously waffling opponent, John Kerry – who no doubt agrees with his fellow leftists that Bush himself caused the tsunami!
Proving that he is still America’s Spewer-in-Chief, Kerry, on a recent trip to Baghdad, could not resist the opportunity to demoralize our troops – a tactic he perfected when he slandered his fellow veterans after the Vietnam War. He told the men and women who are fighting – and dying – for our country that their efforts were a result of a president who made "horrendous judgments" and "unbelievable blunders."
Then he visited President Bashir Assad of Syria, the dictator who protects terrorists and has done nothing to stop them from crossing into Iraq to kill American soldiers. Regarding this butcher’s regime, Kerry proclaimed that the U.S. and Syria have “areas of mutual interest.” Really?
Kerry also traveled to Ramallah, evoking his pet fantasy that the spectacularly ineffectual “international community” would help make peace with Israel. That means France and the rest of the European Union that has, historically, vilified Israel while glorifying the architect of Middle Eastern terrorism, Yasser Arafat.
Then onto infamously anti-American Cairo, where Kerry once again bad-mouthed American foreign policy before visiting France to meet with his ideological soul mate, President Jacques Chirac, chief obstructionist to America’s fight against terror.
Like the seemingly elegant vessel that contains not spring water but sludge, Kerry reinforces the point that what comes out of a species is what’s inside that species. Like other liberals – who minimize good things to the size of a pea and elevate bad things to the size of a mountain – he simply can’t help himself. All that is within him – and his like-minded species – is sludge, often mixed with contaminants, toxins, pollutants, venom and raw verbal sewage.
More SPEW (Sorry Politicos Emitting Waste)
Take the president’s announcement that Condoleezza Rice was his choice for secretary of state. Predictably, liberals could not summon up one positive thing to say about this amazingly accomplished woman but instead resorted to rank racism and insults. And now, during Dr. Rice’s confirmation hearings, they have once again – led by a bitter, camera-hogging and sludge-oozing Sen. Barbara Boxer – resorted to name-calling and false accusations.
Again, they couldn’t help themselves. Vessels (as they are) may be fluted or engraved, ancient or modern, pretty or ugly – but if they contain sludge, sludge is what comes out!
Just as it has relentlessly leached out during the confirmation hearings of Judge Alberto Gonzales, the president’s choice for attorney general. Here, most if not all liberal senators (and their echo chamber in the media and the ACLU) have trumped up charges that Gonzales “supported” the torture of prisoners (“enemy” combatants) because he refused to extend the Geneva Conventions to captured terrorists.
Liberals, in other words, would like to make treaties or “negotiate” with al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in spite of the fact that they fill none of the criteria of the Geneva Conventions, i.e., having a commander responsible for subordinates, wearing formal and recognizable military insignia, carrying weapons openly, and adhering to the time-worn laws and customs of warfare.
Forget about their utter lack of identifiable leaders; their hiding and storing weapons in hospitals and mosques; their civilian clothes and facemasks; their sneak attacks, car bombs and improvised weapons; their savage beheadings and torture – and their wanton murder of Americans. Let’s talk to them, liberals insist! Let’s afford them the benefits of the Geneva Conventions!
Which only proves that the liberals’ objections to Gonzales lie more with their own obstructionist agenda and perverse vision of the real world we live in than in choosing the best man for the job.
More SPEW (Sorry Pundits Emitting Waste)
The far-left spewers among us include splenetic – and, if ratings are any measure, largely discredited – TV pundits like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, any number of CNN’s “journalists,” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, inveterate Clinton lackey George Stephanopoulos of ABC, CBS’s King of Spew, Dan Rather, and of course the New York Times. Those worshippers of treasonous anti-Americans like Susan Sontag (whose recently published obit was the definition of hagiography) who still think that we’re in a campaign season and that the “dumb” Republicans can be out-talked and outwitted by the sheer brilliance of their socialist insights.
And they still can’t figure out why their collective and formidable efforts to defeat the president ended in a decisive Electoral College victory for him, as well as the largest popular vote in American history.
Clearly, it’s because Americans recognized those Emperors with No Clothes and their pretense of being cloaked in journalistic integrity when, in fact, they have none. While most people in our modern age have learned how to recognize “spin,” it must be a stunning shock to today’s dying mainstream media that in the past election, our citizens also recognized – and roundly repudiated – their spew!
Of course, the left’s spewers – being the species they are – are unlikely to change. Indeed, far-left liberals like Senators Hillary Clinton, John Corzine, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer and Robert (Ku Klux Klan) Byrd (among many others) apparently never heard the expression “Get over it!”
They can’t. Lacking utterly in original, forward-looking ideas and with nothing more to offer than criticism wrapped in bile-soaked half-truths or downright lies, all their talk of “coming together” and “doing what’s right for the country” rings hollow, even pathetic.
They are simply too full of sludge and narcissism to think of themselves second and their country first.
Joan Swirsky is a New-York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com.

Iraqi's Deserve the Same Civil Rights That Americans Take For Granted

2005-01-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

The Left and NGO's constantly blast the U.S. over Civil Rights, yet say nothing about the current Klu Klux Klan like atmosphere most decent Iraqi's must face in Iraq on a daily basis. It's not even on their radar. Read on.

The Civil Rights of Iraqis
It’s a struggle we’ve been through.
By Steven Vincent
NRO - 1-24-2005

Three individuals — two foreigners, accompanied by a local guide — venture into a hotbed of insurgency in a dangerous mission to spread democracy to an oppressed people. They are waylaid on a lonely road by police sympathetic to the insurgents, and then murdered. Their deaths are intended as a warning to others who might seek to challenge the killers' reactionary ideology of tribal supremacy and religious hatred.

This, in brief, is what happened in Iraq last March to American activists Fern Holland and Robert Zangas, along with their translator Salwa Ali. Angered by the Western feminism the three were teaching to Iraqi women, paramilitary gunmen disguised as policeman stopped their vehicle at a fake checkpoint south of Baghdad and riddled it with bullets. Holland and Zangas were the first American civilians working with the CPA to die in Iraq.
Forty years before these deaths, three other civil-rights workers met similar fates in Mississippi — as the January 6 arrest of a 79-year-old preacher, Edgar Ray Killen, reminds us. Two of the victims, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were whites from "foreign" New York; the third, James Chaney, was a black man from Meridian, Miss. On June 21, 1964, a policeman stopped the three for "speeding," holding them in custody long enough for Killen to organize two carloads of Klan members. The gunmen waited for the release of the civil-right workers, then, after a car chase, eventually caught and executed them, burying their bodies under a levy. Seven men were convicted for the murders. Killen escaped judgment when a jury deadlocked eleven to one on his conviction. (The killings formed the basis for the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.)
I mention these two incidents in order to highlight what too many people excuse or even champion: the nature of the so-called Iraqi "insurgents." To many people in the West — especially the Michael Moore crowd — the Sunni Triangle gunmen are "guerrillas" engaged in a legitimate "resistance" against a neo-colonialist occupation. This might be true if Iraq were a mid-20th-century-style struggle for national liberation, à la Vietnam or Algeria. But it is not: The war in Iraq is more akin to the struggle for civil rights played out in America in the generations after the Civil War. And in this struggle, the insurgents play the identical role as the racists, bigots, and white supremacists who resorted to violence and murder rather than see their fellow Americans achieve equality.
When the paramilitary death squads ("insurgents" is too clean a word) kidnap and behead Iraqis who work for the reconstruction of their nation — is that not similar to an old-fashioned lynching? The message in both the south and the Sunni Triangle is certainly the same: If you challenge our power, this will be your fate. When gunmen stalk the Iraqi countryside, murdering civilians in the name of "defending their homeland," can we not see a modern-day Ku Klux Klan? They, too, were masked; they, too, mounted an "insurgency"; they, too, sought to reinstate a reactionary regime based on ethnic and religious supremacy. When a car bomb explodes, killing innocent Iraqis — do the victims not join hands across the years with the four teenage girls killed in the Birmingham church bombings? When Iraqi terrorists gun down election workers in the streets of Baghdad, can we not see, reprised before our eyes, the assassinations of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, in addition to Medgar Evers and others who gave their lives in the name of democracy?
There is hardly an American today who would not shout in loud protest if such racist abominations once again took place in our country. And yet, many of us watch in silence as the exact same atrocities occur in Iraq. Especially perplexing is the silence of the Left — the people who, a generation ago, stood on the forefront of the civil-rights movement. How can they tarnish their proud legacy of fighting for democracy and equality by refusing to take sides in the same struggle 10,000 miles away? Why do they persist in claiming the fight against reactionary extremists is "unjust" and "immoral?" None of these people would for a moment praise the Ku Klux Klan — why do they legitimize the so-called "insurgents"?
Over 40 years ago, men organized by the Christian preacher Edgar Ray Killen tracked down and murdered men whose sole crime was to attempt to expand voting rights throughout the south. Two decades later, similar killers, perhaps organized by a Muslim cleric, assassinated two Americans and one Iraqi in a similar fashion. Different times, different conflicts, but the principles for which these people died — democracy, equality, and freedom — remain the same. In the 1960s, the deaths of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney created an uproar that helped unite the country and assisted the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How many more innocents must Islamofascists kill in Iraq before that same outrage, that same commitment to the spread of freedom, becomes manifest? What will it take for the people of the world, particularly on the American left, to understand that this war is not about oil, U.S. imperialism, or corporate greed — but the very bedrock of democracy, civil rights?

Sometimes You Just Need To Shut Your Pie Hole, Babs.

2005-01-24T09:56:00.000-08:00

Boxer isn't happy until the WHOLE world knows what a whining, lying, simpering Lefty she is. Read on.

Sen. Barbara Boxer says she is the real victim of last week's confirmation hearing for Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice, yet continued yesterday to question the national security adviser's honesty. "She turned and attacked me," the California Democrat told CNN's "Late Edition" in describing the confrontation during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. "I gave Dr. Rice many opportunities to address specific issues. Instead, she said I was impugning her integrity," Mrs. Boxer said.

Oh, pooooor baby. This broad is out of her skull if she thinks that Condi is just going to sit there and let butthead Barbara or any Democrat insult her integrity without calling them on the issue.
So, butthead Barbara has yet again proven to be another nut job lefty whining when called on maligning a conservatives integrity over innuendo, and outright fabrication of 'facts'. I pity her constituents.

Yesterday President Bush Made America's Enemies Very Nervous

2005-01-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

The part of the world that comprises America's enemies are not sitting comfortably right now. I rather like that. They need to be very afraid and consider what their future will be shortly if things don't change in their little area of our planet. This holds true with America's enemies that live in the U.S. and Canada as well. The message is clear and to the point. Tyranny and terrorism will not be tolerated by the current administration. Freedom is winning the day over both and we are embarking on a journey to insure that it happens sooner rather than later. I believe that this Inaugural Day will mark a turning point for enemies of America. A tsunami of democratic freedom is headed their way. Condi Rice is riding the crest of that wave and is a world class surfer who will not relent until victory is at hand.
What a refreshing change over the previous 'Bubba and the Dummies' administration.

I May Never Stop Laughing!

2005-01-20T16:26:00.000-08:00

Ah! The absolutely delicious fun of it! I was literally rolling on the floor with a pain in my side I laughed so hard. Boxer and Kerry on the same ticket and looking incredibly stupid for all of the world to see. It's like a dream come true. Condi kicked both of their Donkey behinds without even breathing hard. The funniest thing to come to mind was my take on Boxer's hair dud. It looked as if she just pulled her head out of her azz, but then decided to put it back in to check her position. And Kerry's comment about how the Arabs wanted to "help". Oh, it was so precious. What a dummy. He thinks these Arab guys tell him the truth??!! You know, the more I listen to these idiots the more I realize that the Demo’s are really the party of the Jackazz. Their political party symbol says it all! Can you say HeeHaw??
I can't wait for more on CSPAN!

Boxer Slams Rice Over Nothing As Usual

2005-01-18T15:11:00.000-08:00

Boxer needs to learn to tell the difference between the truth and real facts supporting the truth from innuendo and personal feelings. This partisan hack is a shill for the lies and obsfucation of the truth that the left is so famous for.

Boxer Punches at Rice in Confirmation Hearing

Tuesday, January 18, 2005
WASHINGTON One of Condoleezza Rice's toughest critics, California Sen. Barbara Boxer (search), drilled the secretary of state nominee on Tuesday, saying Rice's loyalty to President Bush on Iraq overwhelmed her respect for the truth.
"I personally believe that your loyalty to the mission you were given to sell this policy overwhelmed your respect for the truth," Boxer told the nominee during Rice's confirmation hearing.
Boxer, who two weeks ago held up congressional certification of Bush's election win after objecting to the Electoral College votes from Ohio, said Rice had directly contradicted herself in trying to sell the war to the American people by changing the story on whether Saddam Hussein (search) had nuclear weapons. Boxer also referred to the visual image and lasting impression Rice left when she warned that the smoking gun in Iraq shouldn't be a mushroom cloud.

Oh, how unfactual, sophoromoric, emotional, trite and stupid. Boxer must think the people who voted for her are idiots that will believe anything just because it came from butthead Barbara's pie hole.
Read the entire article. Click on the link below.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,144771,00.html

If It Bleeds, It Leads, but only if it is American Blood

2005-01-18T13:23:00.000-08:00

The media spin on Iraq is a gross distortion of the facts. If America wins, suddenly it isn't news anymore. LTC Tim Ryan puts it into perspective for the reader. Read on.

Media's coverage has distorted world's view of Iraqi reality
By LTC Tim Ryan
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COMTuesday, January 18, 2005
Editors' Note: LTC Tim Ryan is Commander, Task Force 2-12 Cavalry, First Cavalry Division in Iraq. He led troops into battle in Fallujah late last year and is now involved in security operations for the upcoming elections. He wrote the following during "down time" after the Fallujah operation. His views are his own.
All right, I've had enough. I am tired of reading distorted and grossly exaggerated stories from major news organizations about the "failures" in the war in Iraq. "The most trusted name in news" and a long list of others continue to misrepresent the scale of events in Iraq. Print and video journalists are covering only a fraction of the events in Iraq and, more often than not, the events they cover are only negative.
The inaccurate picture they paint has distorted the world view of the daily realities in Iraq. The result is a further erosion of international support for the United States' efforts there, and a strengthening of the insurgents' resolve and recruiting efforts while weakening our own. Through their incomplete, uninformed and unbalanced reporting, many members of the media covering the war in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy.
The fact is the Coalition is making steady progress in Iraq, but not without ups and downs. So why is it that no matter what events unfold, good or bad, the media highlights mostly the negative aspects of the event? The journalistic adage, "If it bleeds, it leads," still applies in Iraq, but why only when it's American blood?
As a recent example, the operation in Fallujah delivered an absolutely devastating blow to the insurgency. Though much smaller in scope, clearing Fallujah of insurgents arguably could equate to the Allies' breakout from the hedgerows in France during World War II. In both cases, our troops overcame a well-prepared and solidly entrenched enemy and began what could be the latter's last stand. In Fallujah, the enemy death toll has exceeded 1,500 and still is climbing. Put one in the win column for the good guys, right? Wrong. As soon as there was nothing negative to report about Fallujah, the media shifted its focus to other parts of the country.
More recently, a major news agency's website lead read: "Suicide Bomber Kills Six in Baghdad" and "Seven Marines Die in Iraq Clashes." True, yes. Comprehensive, no. Did the author of this article bother to mention that Coalition troops killed 50 or so terrorists while incurring those seven losses? Of course not. Nor was there any mention about the substantial progress these offensive operations continue to achieve in defeating the insurgents. Unfortunately, this sort of incomplete reporting has become the norm for the media, whose poor job of presenting a complete picture of what is going on in Iraq borders on being criminal.
Much of the problem is about perspective, putting things in scale and balance. What if domestic news outlets continually fed American readers headlines like: "Bloody Week on U.S. Highways: Some 700 Killed," or "More Than 900 Americans Die Weekly from Obesity-Related Diseases"? Both of these headlines might be true statistically, but do they really represent accurate pictures of the situations? What if you combined all of the negatives to be found in the state of Texas and used them as an indicator of the quality of life for all Texans? Imagine the headlines: "Anti-law Enforcement Elements Spread Robbery, Rape and Murder through Texas Cities." For all intents and purposes, this statement is true for any day of any year in any state. True — yes, accurate — yes, but in context with the greater good taking place — no! After a year or two of headlines like these, more than a few folks back in Texas and the rest of the U.S. probably would be ready to jump off of a building and end it all. So, imagine being an American in Iraq right now.
From where I sit in Iraq, things are not all bad right now. In fact, they are going quite well. We are not under attack by the enemy; on the contrary, we are taking the fight to him daily and have him on the ropes. In the distance, I can hear the repeated impacts of heavy artillery and five-hundred-pound bombs hitting their targets. The occasional tank main gun report and the staccato rhythm of a Marine Corps LAV or Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle's 25-millimeter cannon provide the bass line for a symphony of destruction. As elements from all four services complete the absolute annihilation of the insurgent forces remaining in Fallujah, the area around the former insurgent stronghold is more peaceful than it has been for more than a year.
The number of attacks in the greater Al Anbar Province is down by at least 70-80 percent from late October — before Operation Al Fajar began. The enemy in this area is completely defeated, but not completely gone. Final eradication of the pockets of insurgents will take some time, as it always does, but the fact remains that the central geographic stronghold of the insurgents is now under friendly control. That sounds a lot like success to me. Given all of this, why don't the papers lead with "Coalition Crushes Remaining Pockets of Insurgents" or "Enemy Forces Resort to Suicide Bombings of Civilians"? This would paint a far more accurate picture of the enemy's predicament over here. Instead, headlines focus almost exclusively on our hardships.
What about the media's portrayal of the enemy? Why do these ruthless murderers, kidnappers and thieves get a pass when it comes to their actions? What did the the media show or tell us about Margaret Hassoon, the director of C.A.R.E. in Iraq and an Iraqi citizen, who was kidnapped, brutally tortured and left disemboweled on a street in Fallujah? Did anyone in the press show these images over and over to emphasize the moral failings of the enemy as they did with the soldiers at Abu Ghuraib? Did anyone show the world how this enemy had huge stockpiles of weapons in schools and mosques, or how he used these protected places as sanctuaries for planning and fighting in Fallujah and the rest of Iraq? Are people of the world getting the complete story? The answer again is no! What the world got instead were repeated images of a battle-weary Marine who made a quick decision to use lethal force and who immediately was tried in the world press. Was this one act really illustrative of the overall action in Fallujah? No, but the Marine video clip was shown an average of four times each hour on just about every major TV news channel for a week. This is how the world views our efforts over here and stories like this without a counter continually serve as propaganda victories for the enemy. Al Jazeera isn't showing the film of the CARE worker, but is showing the clip of the Marine. Earlier this year, the Iraqi government banned Al Jazeera from the country for its inaccurate reporting. Wonder where they get their information now? Well, if you go to the Internet, you'll find a web link from the Al Jazeera home page to CNN's home page. Very interesting.
The operation in Fallujah is only one of the recent examples of incomplete coverage of the events in Iraq. The battle in Najaf last August provides another. Television and newspapers spilled a continuous stream of images and stories about the destruction done to the sacred city, and of all the human suffering allegedly brought about by the hands of the big, bad Americans. These stories and the lack of anything to counter them gave more fuel to the fire of anti-Americanism that burns in this part of the world. Those on the outside saw the Coalition portrayed as invaders or oppressors, killing hapless Iraqis who, one was given to believe, simply were trying to defend their homes and their Muslim way of life.
Reality couldn't have been farther from the truth. What noticeably was missing were accounts of the atrocities committed by the Mehdi Militia — Muqtada Al Sadr's band of henchmen. While the media was busy bashing the Coalition, Muqtada's boys were kidnapping policemen, city council members and anyone else accused of supporting the Coalition or the new government, trying them in a kangaroo court based on Islamic Shari'a law, then brutally torturing and executing them for their "crimes." What the media didn't show or write about were the two hundred-plus headless bodies found in the main mosque there, or the body that was put into a bread oven and baked. Nor did they show the world the hundreds of thousands of mortar, artillery and small arms rounds found within the "sacred" walls of the mosque. Also missing from the coverage was the huge cache of weapons found in Muqtada's "political" headquarters nearby. No, none of this made it to the screen or to print. All anyone showed were the few chipped tiles on the dome of the mosque and discussion centered on how we, the Coalition, had somehow done wrong. Score another one for the enemy's propaganda machine.
Now, compare the Najaf example to the coverage and debate ad nauseam of the Abu Ghuraib Prison affair. There certainly is no justification for what a dozen or so soldiers did there, but unbalanced reporting led the world to believe that the actions of the dozen were representative of the entire military. This has had an incredibly negative effect on Middle Easterners' already sagging opinion of the U.S. and its military. Did anyone show the world images of the 200 who were beheaded and mutilated in Muqtada's Shari'a Law court, or spend the next six months talking about how horrible all of that was? No, of course not. Most people don't know that these atrocities even happened. It's little wonder that many people here want us out and would vote someone like Muqtada Al Sadr into office given the chance — they never see the whole truth. Strange, when the enemy is the instigator the media does not flash images across the screens of televisions in the Middle East as they did with Abu Ghuraib. Is it because the beheaded bodies might offend someone? If so, then why do we continue see photos of the naked human pyramid over and over?
So, why doesn't the military get more involved in showing the media the other side of the story? The answer is they do. Although some outfits are better than others, the Army and other military organizations today understand the importance of getting out the story — the whole story — and trains leaders to talk to the press. There is a saying about media and the military that goes: "The only way the media is going to tell a good story is if you give them one to tell." This doesn't always work as planned. Recently, when a Coalition spokesman tried to let TV networks in on opening moves in the Fallujah operation, they misconstrued the events for something they were not and then blamed the military for their gullibility. CNN recently aired a "special report" in which the cable network accused the military of lying to it and others about the beginning of the Fallujah operation. The incident referred to took place in October when a Marine public affairs officer called media representatives and told them that an operation was about to begin. Reporters rushed to the outskirts of Fallujah to see what they assumed was going to be the beginning of the main attack on the city. As it turned out, what they saw were tactical "feints" designed to confuse the enemy about the timing of the main attack, then planned to take place weeks later.
Once the network realized that major combat operations wouldn't start for several more weeks, CNN alleged that the Marines had used them as a tool for their deception operation. Now, they say they want answers from the military and the administration on the matter. The reality appears to be that in their zeal to scoop their competition, CNN and others took the information they were given and turned it into what they wanted it to be. Did the military lie to the media: no. It is specifically against regulations to provide misinformation to the press. However, did the military planners anticipate that reporters would take the ball and run with it, adding to the overall deception plan? Possibly. Is that unprecedented or illegal? Of course not.
CNN and others say they were duped by the military in this and other cases. Yet, they never seem to be upset by the undeniable fact that the enemy manipulates them with a cunning that is almost worthy of envy. You can bet that terrorist leader Abu Musab Al Zarqawi has his own version of a public affairs officer and it is evident that he uses him to great effect. Each time Zarqawi's group executes a terrorist act such as a beheading or a car bomb, they have a prepared statement ready to post on their website and feed to the press. Over-eager reporters take the bait, hook, line and sinker, and report it just as they got it.
Did it ever occur to the media that this type of notoriety is just what the terrorists want and need? Every headline they grab is a victory for them. Those who have read the ancient Chinese military theorist and army general Sun Tzu will recall the philosophy of "Kill one, scare ten thousand" as the basic theory behind the strategy of terrorism. Through fear, the terrorist can then manipulate the behavior of the masses. The media allows the terrorist to use relatively small but spectacular events that directly affect very few, and spread them around the world to scare millions. What about the thousands of things that go right every day and are never reported? Complete a multi-million-dollar sewer project and no one wants to cover it, but let one car bomb go off and it makes headlines. With each headline, the enemy scores another point and the good-guys lose one. This method of scoring slowly is eroding domestic and international support while fueling the enemy's cause.
I believe one of the reasons for this shallow and subjective reporting is that many reporters never actually cover the events they report on. This is a point of growing concern within the Coalition. It appears many members of the media are hesitant to venture beyond the relative safety of the so-called "International Zone" in downtown Baghdad, or similar "safe havens" in other large cities. Because terrorists and other thugs wisely target western media members and others for kidnappings or attacks, the westerners stay close to their quarters. This has the effect of holding the media captive in cities and keeps them away from the broader truth that lies outside their view. With the press thus cornered, the terrorists easily feed their unwitting captives a thin gruel of anarchy, one spoonful each day. A car bomb at the entry point to the International Zone one day, a few mortars the next, maybe a kidnapping or two thrown in. All delivered to the doorsteps of those who will gladly accept it without having to leave their hotel rooms — how convenient.
The scene is repeated all too often: an attack takes place in Baghdad and the morning sounds are punctuated by a large explosion and a rising cloud of smoke. Sirens wail in the distance and photographers dash to the scene a few miles away. Within the hour, stern-faced reporters confidently stare into the camera while standing on the balcony of their tenth-floor Baghdad hotel room, their back to the city and a distant smoke plume rising behind them. More mayhem in Gotham City they intone, and just in time for the morning news. There is a transparent reason why the majority of car bombings and other major events take place before noon Baghdad-time; any later and the event would miss the start of the morning news cycle on the U.S. east coast. These terrorists aren't stupid; they know just what to do to scare the masses and when to do it. An important key to their plan is manipulation of the news media. But, at least the reporters in Iraq are gathering information and filing their stories, regardless of whether or the stories are in perspective. Much worse are the "talking heads" who sit in studios or offices back home and pontificate about how badly things are going when they never have been to Iraq and only occasionally leave Manhattan.

Read the entire article. Click on the link below:
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/breaking2453389.0680555557.html

The ACLU Would Hate This Success Story.

2005-01-18T11:11:00.000-08:00

The ACLU hates the Boy Scouts and is trying to ban the organization from all Federal and State sponsorship. This flies in the face of the enormous good done by the BSA for over 100 years in preparing America's young boys to be honest citizens that have ethics and a moral code. Somehow, to the ACLU, being a secular homosexual is more important than being an ethical and moral Boy Scout. If you espouse heterosexually, the ACLU condemns you because you aren't sensitive to homosexuals and invite them to be leaders of young boys in the Boy Scouts. The ACLU would prefer moral decay of our boys and girls to ethics and honor. This to me is a very good example of the Left's pretzel logic. Despite the opinions of the ACLU, there are some very good and caring folks out there that know the ethical and moral values that Scouting brings to a young boy's life. Read on.

Pair sees foster son soar as an Eagle
By Dennis McCarthy
"What really matters is they wanted me when no one else did." -- Jonathan Compton He was 6 weeks old, a preemie weighing all of 4 pounds, the first time Rita and Bob Prectl held the foster-care baby named Jonathan Compton in their arms and hugged him 18 years ago.
Today the kid's more than 6 feet tall and built like a linebacker -- but still not too big for the Prectls proud foster parents to hold and hug.
Along with two other Scouts from Venture Crew 415 in the Balboa Oaks district, the baby no one had wanted 18 years ago stood with his proud foster parents Sunday on the stage in the auditorium at St. John Baptist de la Salle Church in Granada Hills to receive his Eagle Scout badge of honor.
Then he turned and pinned a special Eagle Scout pin on his parents standing behind him -- giving them a hug for providing him the best home and upbringing any child could ever have had.
"I could see they were proud of me, but I was more proud of them," Jonathan said. "They raised me. They're my parents, and I love them."
It's rare that a foster child stays in one home his whole life, but Jonathan did, said Nancy Sandler, a social worker supervisor with the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services, who attended the Eagle Scout ceremony Sunday.
"When Jonathan was 10 he went to court and told the judge that if it meant leaving the Prectls, he didn't want to be adopted, so he stayed. They're a very special, amazing couple."
Yes, they are. I wrote a column in April about Rita, deciding to retire after 36 years of opening her home to more than 75 foster children. She laughed and said she was the only woman at her 50th high school reunion who had to hire a baby-sitter to get out of the house.
At 72, she thought it was time to let some younger women step in to be a temporary mom to children without a home. But she had one favor to ask.
Jonathan, the baby who stayed, was turning 18 in June and needed a little help with his Eagle Scout project. He had been a Scout since the second grade and was graduating from Kennedy High, heading for Pierce College in the fall in hope of becoming a landscape architect someday.

Read the entire article. Click on the link below:
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~21377~2658725,00.html

The Memory Of MLK Is Again Exploited By Jesse Jackson

2005-01-17T08:50:00.000-08:00

I bet Dr. King is looking down from heaven upon Jesse Jackson with scorn and disappointment. This latest exploitation is another reminder: Read on.

Jackson says war, poverty sap King legacy
By HARRY R. WEBER, Associated Press WriterSunday, January 16th, 2005 06:34 PM (PST)

Related Information
The life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
JONESBORO, Ga. (AP) - War, poverty, violence and social injustice are dampening Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy as the nation prepares to celebrate the slain civil rights leader's birthday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told a church gathering Sunday.
In a passionate speech at Dixon Grove Baptist Church in Jonesboro, south of King's native Atlanta, Jackson assailed the war in Iraq and insisted the gap between rich and poor in America is widening despite King's message of peace and equality.
"It's easy to admire Dr. King," Jackson told the 650 people at the church. "It's a challenge to follow him."
Jackson, who was standing beneath the motel balcony where King was fatally shot in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, suggested a good birthday present to King would be for Americans to strive more for financial and social equality.
"You can be out of slavery and out of segregation and have the right to vote and starve to death without access to capital and industry," Jackson said.

Yes, Jesse it IS a challenge to follow in Dr. King's footsteps. You above all should know that all too well. Is is YOU and other so called divisive "Black Leaders" playing the "We Are Still Oppressed" race card that dampen Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy as the nation prepares to celebrate the slain civil rights leader's birthday. Remember that (Rev.) Jesse Jackson is the guy who jumped up and ran to the balcony where Dr. King lay dying and smeared Dr. King's blood on himself for a photo op. This individual lives off of the exploitation of Dr. King's memory and the bones of his own followers. When will we all see ourselves as merely Americans instead of some color of American? When will we honor and practice the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King without colorization?
You can read the entire article by clicking on the link below:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/24hour/front/story/2022705p-10054389c.html

Is Abu Mazen Arafat's Ghost?

2005-01-14T16:29:00.000-08:00

UH.... I think Arafat's evil spirit has found a body to inhabit to continue his lies and dirty tricks.
An excerpt from an article today that seems to confirm my suspicions. Read on.
Israel Closes Gaza Strip Crossings After Terror Attack
By Julie StahlCNSNews.com
Jerusalem Bureau Chief
January 14, 2005
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Israel sealed off all crossings from Israel to Palestinian areas of the Gaza Strip on Friday following a bombing and shooting attack at the Karni crossing overnight that left six Israelis dead and five more wounded. The attack was the latest and worst in a series of assaults in the Gaza Strip since Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was elected to lead the PA on Sunday on a platform that called for an end to violence by Palestinian groups. Hamas and the Al-Aksa Martyrs' Brigades -- part of Abbas' own Fatah faction -- claimed joint responsibility for the attack in a statement, saying it was "a continuation of resistance" that further proved "the enemy will leave the Gaza Strip under fire from the strikes of the Palestinian resistance."

Want to read the entire article? Click on the link below:
http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=\ForeignBureaus\archive\200501\FOR20050114b.html

And Another Thing About Regressives

2005-01-14T13:40:00.000-08:00

I was just ruminating through the latest updated blogs and I came across an example of why the "progressive" label doesn't make sense. The blog titled Hollywood Progressive Institute is a perfect example of why I believe they need to change the title to the "Hollywood Regressive Institute." I also noticed that you cannot comment on the blogs or email anyone unless you're a member of the group. Did they get this tactic from the NY Times? I guess the Hollywood Regressives are too emotionally fragile from the 2000 and now the 2004 Presidential Elections to engage in any meaningful dialog with others who might not ascribe to their views. Poor regressive babies!

The Left Desperately Wants Insecurity Instead Of Social Security

2005-01-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

Another excerpt taken from a great article from NRO's Financial Contributing Editor, Donald Luskin. Read on.

The Innumeracy of It All! - Behold the mathematical exaggerations of the Left on Social Security.

In the debate over Social Security reform, the dollar figures involved can be dauntingly large and dizzyingly complex. That opens up a lot of opportunity for demagogic mischief, and the leftist opponents of reform are taking full advantage.

In fact, there seems to be no end to the Left's demagogic innumeracy on Social Security. In an op-ed in the New York Times last week, Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore, wrote that the administrative costs of keeping track of these private accounts, according to President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, will be 10 to 30 times the cost of administering the current system. But the President's Commission's report said that the administrative costs would be about the same as those of the current system: three-tenths of 1 percent per year. That's 30 basis points, not 30 times.
Why the Times would hold out a professor of psychology as an expert on such matters is a mystery. And so far the Times has not run a correction ("public editor" Dan Okrent accused me of being "infantile" when I asked for one). Of course, the Left has already repeated the Times's uncorrected statement. Three days later it appeared almost word for word (to put it delicately) in a Molly Ivins syndicated column. No correction there, either.
Ivins is on a roll. In another column this week, she wrote that "The Social Security trustees, paid to be professional gloom-mongers on this subject, say [the system is] good until 2042 ... not before Social Security goes broke, but before Social Security has to dip into its trust fund." Dead wrong. What the trustees really say is that Social Security will start dipping into its trust fund in 2018. The year 2042 is when they say the trust fund will be entirely and utterly exhausted after 24 years of dipping. Correction? Surely you jest.

Want to read the entire article? Click on this link:
http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_luskin/luskin200501141230.asp

It's the definitive answer to the regressive thought pattern on Social Securty and President Bush's reform intentions.

NRO's Victor David Hanson Gets It Big Time.

2005-01-14T13:09:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt of Victor David Hanson's remarkable "Triangulating the War - Yesterday's genius, today's fool, tomorrow's what?" article appearing today in NRO Online:

Reading the pages of foreign-policy journals, between the long tracts on Bush's "failures" and neoconservative "arrogance," one encounters mostly predictions of defeat and calls for phased withdrawal always with resounding criticism of the American "botched" occupation.

Platitudes follow: "We can't just leave now," followed by no real advice on how a fascist society can be jumpstarted into a modern liberal republic. After all, there is no government handbook entitled, "Operation 1A: How to remove a Middle East fascist regime in three weeks, reconstruct the countryside, and hold the first elections in the nation's history all within two years." Almost all who supported the war now are bailing on the pretext that their version of the reconstruction was not followed: While a three-week war was their idea, a 20-month messy reconstruction was surely someone else's. Yesterday genius is today's fool and who knows next month if the elections work? Witness Afghanistan where all those who recently said the victory was "lost" to warlords are now suddenly quiet.

Mr. Hanson's article is spot on. He reviews the situation and the mentality that got us into this fix. He also makes the reader aware of the disturbing lack of honor and truthfulness among the many foreign and domestic critics of the American led War On Terrorists in Iraq.

Want to see the entire article? Click on this link: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200501140730.asp

It's definitely a no spin, informative read.

Which is it? Progressive or Regressive?

2005-01-14T10:24:00.000-08:00

I am having a little trouble with the latest lefty Liberal label that these guys have invented for themselves. Progressives. I don't think that label is correct at this juncture. I believe the label of Regressives applies and is a clear indication of their direction politically. They are regressing to the Political Hippy era of the 1960's and that is just fine with me as it will alienate all those who have truly Moved On. So now that's my label for all those lefties that are stuck in the timewarp of 60's mentality. Of course, realizing the left's zeal to misinform the public, maybe it DOES fit as Regressives are always the exact opposite of who they claim to be at any given opportunity.

"Support Our Troops" What's That Mean?

2005-01-13T15:54:00.000-08:00

Do you own a Support Our Troops car bumper magnet? Is it on your car where everyone can see it? Or did you go Pollo and decide not to display the magnet?
If you didn't go Pollo and it is on your car then.............
What does it mean to you? Why did you put it on your car in the first place? Do you really SUPPORT our troops as advertised? Do you contribute to the USO? Do you contribute to Project Uplink? Do you send in your old cell phones to be recycled into funds that buy care packages for our troops overseas? Do you write letters of support and gratitude to our troops? Do you read the stories about our troops heroic actions and tell your friends about them? Just what do you do to really SUPPORT our troops?
Oh, and if your bumper magnet says Bring Our Troops Home then........
You don't really SUPPORT our troops you just want to tell them what to do as any Liberal would. They're big boys and girls now and I trust they will know when it is time to go home.

Clint to Moore "If you ever show up at my door with a camera - I'll kill you"

2005-01-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

I guess Clint doesn't like Lefty spin either. An excerpt from an article on the net:

Clint Eastwood squinted like Dirty Harry Tuesday night as he took aim at Michael Moore.
"Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression," Eastwood told the star-dotted crowd attending the National Board of Review awards dinner at Tavern on the Green, where Eastwood picked up a Special Filmmaking Achievement prize for "Million Dollar Baby."
Then, the Republican-leaning actor/director advised the lefty filmmaker: "But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I'll kill you."
The audience erupted in laughter, and Eastwood grinned dangerously.
"I mean it," he added, provoking more guffaws.
Sitting well out of range at a table in back, Moore - who received a special "Freedom of Expression" award for his anti-Bush polemic "Fahrenheit 9/11" - chuckled.

Laugh on fatboy. Do you feel lucky punk? Please go ahead and make my day.
Want to read the whole article? Click on this: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/270757p-231851c.html

Saddam Must Have Been A Great Guy

2005-01-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

This leadin quote to a MyWay story on the net is very humorous and telling concerning the Abu Ghraib trials and the political dog and pony show they represent. Read on.

"I couldn't believe in the beginning that this could happen, but I wished I could kill myself because no one was there to stop it," Hussein Mutar, who was sent to Abu Ghraib accused of car theft, said in videotaped testimony.
"They were torturing us as though it was theater for them," he said, as the prosecution wound up its case against Graner on assault, dereliction of duty and other charges that could bring him up to 17 1/2 years in prison.
An obviously ill-at ease Mutar added: "I was extremely emotional because (even) Saddam didn't do this to us."

Ah.... So you're saying that because Saddam merely tormented, physically brutalized, maimed, killed tens of thousands of political prisoners and their whole families, and placed those who disagreed into plastic shredders, he was a great guy because he didn't force you to masturbate?????

Can you say idiotically revisionist? Give me a break! A common criminal (by his own admission) is given this kind of credibility? Of course this is fodder for a whole segment of the world that equates the minor harassment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib by U.S. Reservists with "torture". I think the left needs to experience real torture at the hands of the Islamofascists to tell the difference. I am sure there are Al Qaeda Terrorists and Saddam regime holdouts that are eager to teach them the difference without appointment.

Paltry Is As Paltry Does

2005-01-12T10:51:00.000-08:00

Do you ever yearn for more of the story? I find myself wanting more than the "news lite" presented by most media organizations. I become highly suspicious of those who don't report on the whole story objectively. I have a very low opinion of media types that call themselves journalists and yet claim they were mislead by their staff or producers or directors or whatever when caught reporting a bogus story. Especially when the person has a huge number of years of experience at practicing their craft. The internet is a marvelous tool for getting at the truth if you know how to use the medium. It is my speciality as I have over 14 years of skills associated with doing just that. I hope through this blog to bring out the truth for all to see and discuss. A closed mind is a terrible waste of gray matter.

Not A Happy Camper

2005-01-11T11:28:00.000-08:00

Rather biased Danno is not the happy go lucky fellow he once was. Getting caught by lowly bloggers in an obviously liberal biased attempt to defraud the public is not exactly a TV News journalist's finest hour. Now that the fab four have left the building, Danno is out on a limb with the saw on the wrong side. Can you say Jason Blair, Danno? Don't worry, be happy, Danno. I am sure there is a job waiting for you at the NY Times. At the Gray Lady, truth, justice and credibility come second to supporting Liberal causes and harming Conservatives. You'll fit in nicely.
So it goes.

The Irony and The Ecstasy

2005-01-10T13:35:00.000-08:00

The Abu Ghraib trials are under way. No, not the Saddam ones. The U.S. Military ones. Ah, the irony! One of the most brutally vicious killers of his own people gets less press on the horrible crimes he committed against his people at Abu Ghraib (like putting them feet first into a plastic shredder) than the U.S. military prision guards that made cheerleader style pyramids of Iraqi insurgent prisioners and forced them to wear panties on their heads. Of course the "crimes" committed by the U.S. Prision Guards at Abu Ghraib are more talked about in the Liberal Media than anything concerning Iraqi terrorism and Saddam's crimes against humanity. But the firing of the 4 CBS losers today is an estatic event in my mind and I hope it gets the proper half life to live on for weeks in the media. Rather is AWOL today from his CBS anchor job. This is also cause for a good laugh as ol' Danno is on his way out. I predict Danno will retire later this year from all CBS programming. Ain't life wonderful sometimes?

I Say Hitem' Where It Hurts Most.

2005-01-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

If you have ever watched professional boxing even for just an instant, you will not fail to notice that a good boxer always works on his opponent's weakest areas. Well, it's time to employ that strategy in fighting terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. I rather like the idea of hit squads that would be missioned to take out the terrorist leadership anywhere they are found to be hiding. Even if it means taking them out in France, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon or Iran. The only good Islamofascist terrorist is a really publicly DEAD Islamofascist terrorist.
The U.S. Military command is now seriously considering this ploy and I say hurry the F### Up! Time is awasting and there are good people dying at the hands of this scourge. By the way, most honest Iraqis including the interim government are supporting this tactic. Loyal Iraqi Peshmurga and Shia fighters would be trained and missioned for this purpose within Iraq and the U.S. Special Forces would handle operations out of country. I know the weak kneed Liberals will have a hissy fit, but really who cares? We have a country and way of life to defend and we must battle dark forces that do not honor anything except the death in the most horrible way possible of all who would disagree, Iraqi, American or anyone else that supports a free, democratic Iraq.
Let's cut the head off of the snake of terrorism in Iraq so that the body will wither and die.