USA Today exposes more secrets for terrorist benefit

AJ has details.

Lawsuit culture: cops can't chase thieves

Fear of a lawsuit kept these cops from chasing helmetless moped thieves. It happened in the UK, but with our inventive Supreme Court looking to international law for guidance, can we be far behind?

More Presbyterian Insanity

How much more "politically correct" can the church get? Presbyterians have decided that referring to God the way Jesus did is a sin for which they repent:

When referring to the Trinity, most Christians are likely to say "Father, Son and the Holy Spirit."

But leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are suggesting some additional designations: "Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child and Life-giving Womb," or perhaps "Overflowing Font, Living Water, Flowing River."

Then there's "Rock, Cornerstone and Temple" and "Rainbow of Promise, Ark of Salvation and Dove of Peace."

The phrases are among 12 suggested but not mandatory wordings essentially endorsed this month by delegates to the church's policy-making body to describe a "triune God," the Christian doctrine of God in three persons.

The Rev. Mark Brewer, senior pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church, is among those in the 2.3-million-member denomination unhappy with the additions.

"You might as well put in Huey, Dewey and Louie," he said.

Here is the kicker:

Written by a diverse panel of working pastors and theologians, the report noted that the traditional language of the Trinity portrays God as male and implies men are superior to women.

"For this and other distortions of Trinitarian doctrine we repent," the report said.

The left's slander of honorable men

Mike Rosen on the liberals' use of the term "swiftboating".

In defense of Ann Coulter

A great review of Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, by Richard Kirk. I fully agree with his take on her writing style:

What undercuts the liberals' case against Coulter on this score, however, is their own (not always tacit) endorsement of vile epithets that are regularly directed against President Bush and his supporters by the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and a gaggle of celebrity politicos. Coulter employs the same linguistic standard against liberals (with a touch of humor) that they regularly use (with somber faces and dogmatic conviction) when they accuse conservatives of being racist homophobes who gladly send youngsters to war under false pretences to line the pockets of Halliburton executives. Hate-speech of this stripe is old-hat for leftists.

Until Air America, Helen Thomas, and most Democrat constituencies alter their rhetoric, I see no reason for conservatives to denounce Coulter for using, more truthfully, the same harsh language that leftists have employed, with no regard for accuracy, since the time of Lenin.

She's not as nasty as a lot of liberals and she is unqestionably more accurate.

Illiberal liberals

A series of examples from Vermont which are mild compared to what we have seen from liberals around the country over the last decade or so.

Supreme Arrogance leads to stupid decision

Peter Mulhern has a great piece on the bizarre Hamdan decision:

For decades presidents of both parties have failed to take action as the attacks on our way of life have grown ever more outrageous. Presidential passivity makes the perpetrators bolder and more dangerous. It also atrophies our capacity to change course and take effective action.

No, I’m not talking about terrorists this time. I have the federal courts in mind. The Supreme Court issued a decision yesterday in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld which may have finally superceded Roe v. Wade as the most arrogant and unprincipled judicial assertion of power since Hammurabi promulgated his code.

No jurisdiction to rule and no justification for its ruling -- what a pathetic abomination!

Mulhern reminds of Lincoln's decision to ignore the Court when it ruled he could not suspend the writ of habeus corpus and the Court's upholding of FDR's authority during war to place thousands of American citizens in internment camps on the off chance that they might be a problem during war.

I agree with him that Bush should ignore the Court. Just as state authorities should ignore the federal courts when they rule that a state's taxes must by raised and spending mandated for education. When the federal judiciary has clearly gone far beyond its power, the other branches of government must impose discipline.

Ronald Cass describes the contortions of logic in the opinion.

Court of the Absurd

I used to think that the incredible level of absurdity which describes most liberal legal philosophy was best captured by one of their arguments in favor of government-mandated racial preferences. That is, the left-wing nut cases argued that the Constitutional prohibition against government discrimination on the basis of race actually compelled the government to discriminate on the basis of race.

We have a new prize winner in the liberal race to mind-numbing absurdity -- today's Hamdan decision by the US Supremes.

Our "honest, competent" MSM

This post at Power Line just makes you want to puke. Another in the never-ending series of stories put out by the MSM which force you to ask "are they really that stupid or really that corrupt?" only to conclude that it must be both.

Class vs. Crass

Seth Swirsky highlights one of the differences between President Bush and his Democratic opponents. Of course, he could have written a similar article using the president's superior honesty, integrity or intelligence to differentiate them.

Times has history of tipping off terrorists

Michelle Malkin has a new column up which reminds us that the NY Times has a previous history of tipping off terrorists in an effort to frustrate government efforts to stop terrorism.

NY Times -- muslim feelings trump American lives

Dr. Sanity points us to this post by Belmont Club which compares the NY Times' reasons for not publishing cartoons which insult muslims and its reasons for publishing details of one program in our war against terrorists. She summarizes:

Thus we can conclude that--from the perspective of the NY Times editorial staff-- protecting the feelings of Muslims is far more "compelling" than protecting the lives of Americans.

Howard Kurtz just can't help it

Just One Minute does a pretty good job of demolishing the foolishness of Kurtz' comparison of the Plame "leak" and the NY Times' assistance to terrorists.

Even assuming that the administration did "leak" Plames' "covert status" (which likely did not happen), the instances are so incredibly different that Kurtz deserves to be roundly condemned as an idiot.

Not like the others

Which of these is not like the others -- nude dancing, flagburning, student armbands and political speech?

As Michael Barone tells us, it's political speech. It has less protection from the First Amendment than the other three. If you think the founders intended that (or if you think this state of affairs is good for the country), you are insane.

Hewitt guest agrees

Stuart Levey agrees with my assessment of the standard offered by Bill Keller. Levey is the Treasury's Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Hugh has this:

As Mr. Levey pointed out, the standard articulated by Bill Keller in his Sunday defense of Friday's story puts out a standard that will, if unchanged, result in the publication of any secret the Times gets its hands on.

In the same post, he tells us that Levey calls Keller a liar on a key point.

Impeach Bill Clinton -- Again

Vodkapundit's Will Collier has a long excerpt from Louis Freeh's article in the WSJ. Clinton and Berger lied to the American people and refused to confront the fact that Iran had killed our people in the Saudi Arabian terror bombing. Finally, W's dad came forward so the FBI could get the proof. Berger's reaction -- cover-up.

One example of MSM propagandist at work

W. Thomas Smith has a good column about the phone call he got from a veteran journalist with an obvious political ax to grind.

Stop the war that isn't!

Jeff Goldstein makes a great point about some of the left-wing defenders of the NY Times who claim we aren't really at war.

Keller/McManus excuse

The excuses they offer for publication of our national secrets, after one separates all the silliness, boil down to one:

Any secret government program which is conducted by the Bush administration is a potential threat which must be revealed.

That's a real simple calculus. A secret program is being conducted. George Bush is president. Therefore, the public interest (as the MSM sees it) requires publication.

Note that legality is not a consideration. Neither is any requirement of a showing that the secret program has been abused or used improperly in any way. And finally, there is no consideration of whether the program is effective.

Secret program + Bush as president = justification for leak

Vote Dem or die

Power Line passes on a very astute observation from Ace of Spades:

It's blackmail, pure and simple. Either let a Democrat into the White House, or we will continue to sabotage American security and, in effect, kill Americans. We will keep secrets when a Democrat is in office, but not a Republican. So we offer the American people a choice: Let the politicians we favor run the country, or we will help Al Qaeda murder you.

He's absolutely right. As Don Luskin pointed out last week, the Times' justification for publishing the story was not directed at the government, but rather the president. Hugh Hewitt (and a lot of others) has a series of posts on the excuses offered by Keller and McManus.

What it boils down to is real simple -- they know the program was legal and effective. They have no evidence that it was abused in any way. Their justification rests solely on the fact that George Bush is president. In their sick, twisted minds, Bush as president means that any secret program is a potential threat to America. With Bush as president, they believe that there should be no secrets. Because they really, really believe that Congressman Murtha is correct when he says that the US is the biggest threat to world peace.

Lawyers took the diving board

I am a lawyer (but one fortunate enough to make a living doing something else). This is a great example of what's wrong with lawyers.

Heather takes down the Times

Heather Mac Donald is one of the best writers we have. She completely dismantles the Times' justification for its most recent assistance to terrorists. The argument put forth by Bill Keller is so weak that it raises the question -- are they so stupid that they believe it, or so corrupt that they will stand behind it knowing that their story is indefensible?

Clueless TV anchor

CNBC just ran a segment on the issue of whether hedge funds need more regulation. The anchor suggested that the recent news about possible insider trading by a hedge fund highlighted the need for regulation. One guest clearly stopped him cold by disagreeing, explaining that insider trading was illegal under current law no matter who engages in it. We already have all kinds of laws and regulations addressing insider trading violations. These already apply to everyone, including hedge funds. Thus, registration or some other kind of regulation of hedge funds is a completely different, totally unrelated issue from insider trading. They have nothing to do with each other.

The host wasn't able to adjust. All his talking points kept going back to the same question. Finally, he had to end the interview and move on to the next segment. What's a poor journalist to do when all his talking points are rendered irrelevant by the first answer given by one of his guests? We can't very well expect him to say anything interesting without his cheat sheet.

Congress threatens poor, black inner-city kids

The threat to the most at-risk kids in our nation continues as Congress considers cutting them out of the economy by raising the minimum wage.

Government or Administration?

Don Luskin makes an excellent point about Bill Keller's jaw-dropper:

Here's New York Times executive editor Bill Keller's justification for exposing the US Treasury's secret methods for tracking terrorist money-flows, and thereby aiding and abetting terrorists:

"...the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Note that he's talking about "the administration's" access to the data, not government's access. In other words, if any story can colorably create the impression that this administration -- this Republican administration -- is abusing information on citizens, then the "public interest" in the Times making that argument overrides all other considerations of protecting the life and limb of those same citizens.

The NY Times reveals that it sees itself, not as a counterweight to government, but rather as an opponent of this administration.

Not harsh enough

Anyone who thinks my concluding paragraph in the previous post below is a little too harsh needs to read the quotes compiled in this piece. The MSM is one with our enemy. We can't win the war until we destroy the enemy.

MSM -- won Nam for NV, seeks to win Iraq for AQ

Jack Kelly has a must-read at RCP.

The turning point in Vietnam was the Tet Offensive of February, 1968. It was a crushing defeat for the Viet Cong.

"Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise," said North Vietnamese Army Col. Bui Tin in a 1995 interview. "Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out. It took until 1971 to re-establish our presence."

"The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans," said Truong Nhu Tang, minister of justice in the Viet Cong's provisional government, in a 1982 interview. "Our losses were so immense we were unable to replace them with new recruits."

The news media reported this overwhelming American victory as a catastrophic defeat.

...

Shaken by Tet, he planned to seek terms for a conditional surrender, the North Vietnamese commander, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, wrote in his memoirs. But our news media's complete misrepresentation of what had actually happened "convinced him America's resolve was weakening and complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp," Mr. de Borchgrave said.

Anxious to bask once again in the delicious feelings they had after defeating the US in Vietnam, the news media is trying to do the same in Iraq:

Earlier this month, the Army sponsored a conference for retired general officers at Fort Carson, Colorado. They were addressed by recent returnees from Iraq, including Col. H.R. McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

"All returnees agreed we are clearly winning the fight against the insurgents but are losing the public relations battle," said a retired admiral in an email to friends.

A disturbing anecdote from Col. McMaster illustrates why. His 3rd ACR broke the insurgents' hold of the city of Tal Afar last September in an operation which generated these effusive words of praise from the town's mayor:

"To the lion hearts who liberated our city from the grasp of terrorists who were beheading men, women and children in the streets...(you are) not only courageous men and women, but avenging angels sent by The God Himself to fight the evil of terrorism."
Time magazine had a reporter and a photographer embedded with the 3rd ACR. When the battle was over, they filed a lengthy story and nearly 100 photographs.

"When the issue came out, the guts had been edited out of the reporter's story and none of the photographs he submitted were used," said the admiral, quoting Col. McMaster. "When the reporter questioned why his story was eviscerated, his editors...responded that the story and pictures were 'too heroic.'"

MSM editors have a carefully crafted image of the US military as brutal butchers of innocent civilians and torturers of helpless prisoners. After all, our troops mostly come from Red states which voted for the evil Bush and his nasty GOP. These editors aren't about to let a little truth interfere with their propaganda. They've worked too hard.

Prosecute Bill Keller

Who elected Bill Keller to make decisions about national security? Being a journalist does not qualify him for the job. This is absolutely unacceptable. If the Bush administration fails to prosecute him, it will be guilty of a gross dereliction of duty -- a deliberate breach of the president's oath of office. In fact, a refusal to prosecute everyone responsible for these leaks should be considered an impeachable offense.

Update:

I like the captain's description of the NY Times -- "a publication written by traitors for an audience of idiots."

"A dangerous form of vanity"

James Taranto makes a great point about the "blame America first" types and their reaction to the torture and mutilation of our troops:

To most of us, this is a reminder of the depravity of our enemies. But blogress Jeralyn Merritt sees it as a reminder of America's sins:

Violence begets violence. Inhumanity and cruelty bring more of the same. The whole world is watching and we don't have the right to claim the moral high ground so long as those responsible for the abuses at Guantanamo and detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan go unpunished, the policies stand uncorrected and the Pentagon continues to prevent the media from learning the facts first-hand.

The always excitable Andrew Sullivan similarly laments "the cycle of depravity and defeat."

This rhetoric about "cycles" appears to reflect a theory of moral equivalence, but in fact it is something else. After all, if the two sides were morally equivalent, one could apply this reasoning in reverse--excusing, for example, the alleged massacre at Haditha on the ground that it was "provoked" by a bombing that killed a U.S. serviceman--and hey, violence begets violence.

But America's critics never make this argument, and its defenders seldom do. That is because it is understood that America knows better. If it is true that U.S. Marines murdered civilians in cold blood at Haditha, the other side's brutality does not excuse it. Only the enemy's evil acts are thought to be explained away by ours.

Implicit in the "cycle" theory, then, is the premise that the enemy is innocent--not in the sense of having done nothing wrong, but in the sense of not knowing any better. The enemy lacks the knowledge of good and evil--or, to put it in theological terms, he is free of original sin.

America ought to hold itself to a high moral standard, of course, but blaming the other side's depraved acts on our own (real and imagined) moral imperfections is a dangerous form of vanity.

The reason it is so easy for them (Merritt, Sullivan et al) to vilify America is because they don't really consider themselves to be part of this country. Of course, Sullivan is British, but my point is that they despise real Americans and it makes them feel morally superior to trash our country, our people, our military and our leaders.

MSM has blood on its hands

And a lot worse. Jim Pinkerton's opinion piece on the study showing that the news media makes terrorism worse is worth reading. I should note that Cori Dauber at ranting profs has regularly pointed out how the media refuses to ackowledge how they are a key player in the terrorists' strategy.

This got me to thinking. We really should point out that the MSM 's decisions about coverage encourages terrorists to kill people. They really do have blood on their hands. The MSM has helped lengthen the war by assisting the terrorists in their most basic strategic goal.

And they know it.

Liberal tactics

I wanted to point this out because it illustrates a common tactic. Robert Pollock of the WSJ discusses his disagreement with The New Republic over a factoid in the global warming debate. Since TNR disagreed with him, they apparently felt compelled to slander him.

Global-warming alarmists take it for granted that they have the "scientific consensus" on their side. The truth is that their views can be as much an article of faith that avoids or elides basic facts.

I was reminded of this recently after suggesting on our weekly television show--"The Journal Editorial Report" on Fox News Channel--that "everyone agrees there has been some warming over the past century, but most of it happened before 1940."

"Not true," declared a subsequent editorial in the New Republic magazine. "The last three decades have seen the sharpest rise." TNR suggested I was what they've dubbed an "Exx-Con"--that is, a conservative whose views on climate change are so unmoored from reality that they can only be explained by a slavish devotion to Exxon and other big oil firms.

Noonan -- Democratic base is nuts

I am so happy that I can again praise Peggy Noonan. I like her and don't like having to disagree with her. It is even more satisfying when she touches on a topic that I had decided last night to write about. I had decided that I wanted to point out that the Democratic leadership has consistently demonstrated that they believe their voters are incredibly stupid. The WMD statements over the last five years are only one example of many. I'll leave it at that for now. Let's look at Peggy's column.

I believe they think their base is mad.
You can see their problem in their inability to get a slogan. Which, believe me, is how they think of it: a slogan. "Together for a Better Future." "A Future With Better Togetherness." Today for a better tomorrow, tomorrow for a better today.

A party has a hard time saying what it stands for only when it doesn't know what it stands for. It has trouble getting a compelling slogan only when it has no idea what compels its base. Or when it fears what compels it.

I got a sense of the distance between Democratic leaders and the base a few years ago when I met up with a Democrat who was weighing a run for the party's 2004 nomination. He hadn't announced but was starting to test the waters, campaigning out of state.

I mentioned to him that the press gives a great deal of attention to the problems of Republican leaders and their putative supporters on the ground in America, but I was interested in the particular problems a D.C. Democrat has with his party's base.

His eyebrows went up in the way people's eyebrows go up when they're interested in what they're about to say. He said--I write from memory; it was not an interview but a conversation--that he was getting an education in that area. He said when he spoke before local Democratic groups they were wildly against the war in Iraq and sometimes booed him when he spoke of it. It left him startled. He had supported the president for serious reasons: He thought Saddam a bad actor who likely had weapons of mass destruction. He wanted to talk about it, but they didn't want to hear him. They were immovable.

But there was something else. He didn't say it, but something in his manner suggested he thought they were . . . just a little crazy.

I thought of him the other day when I saw Howard Dean say something intemperate on TV. I actually can't remember what it was, one intemperate Dean statement blending into another as they do. I was standing near a small screen with recent acquaintances, all of them relatively nonpolitical, and as I watched Mr. Dean speak I blurted, "Why does he say things like that?" A middle-aged woman--intelligent, professional--answered, "Because he thinks they're stupid."

He thinks who's stupid? I asked. The press? "His party," she said. We both laughed because it sounded true.

But today I'm thinking that's not quite it. Howard Dean is actually the most in touch with his base of all D.C. Democrats because he speaks to them the secret language of Madman Boogabooga. Republicans are racist/ignorant/evil. This is actually not ineffective. It's a language that quells the base and would scare the center if they followed it more closely, but they can't because it's not heavily reported because "Dean Says Something Crazy" is no longer news.

But they also think they are stupid. Otherwise, they wouldn't say all the other stuff they do. More later.

Unbalanced Sheet

Jerry Bowyer reminds us that it is pointless (let's just say really, really stupid) to focus on only one side of the balance sheet. The wealth of US households has increased significantly over the last few years. We now have $66 trillion in assets and $13 trillion in liabilities which nets to $53 trillion in net worth. And I think we should mention that this also fails to accurately account for the value of education which is and has been a major investment for many families.

Those who focus only on the liabilities completely miss the boat.

Dems bubble deflating

Pssssssssssssssssssss.

Noel Sheppard has a great piece on the Democrats' deflating bubble. (I have noted that reports of the pending demise of the GOP in November have had a Chicken Little quality.) He compiles a long list of their problems lately and includes a marvelous quote from a GOP leader:

Speaking of incoherent views regarding the war, a few days prior to Murtha making a fool of himself on “Meet the Press,” House majority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) released a statement at his website making fools of the entire Democrat Party:

“After failing to produce a Democrat leadership alternative about how best to combat terrorism in a post-9/11 world, it’s clear that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her Capitol Hill Democrats are divided on their ‘retreat and defeat’ message on the Global War on Terror. Neither House nor Senate Democrats are sure of when they want to retreat or how they want to concede defeat.”

Boehner went on to quote various news agencies depicting Democrats in total disarray concerning this issue. Once again, go figure.

Not sure when to retreat or how to concede defeat. You have to love it. Because the fact is, the only foreign policy strategies that liberals use are retreating and conceding defeat. You can count on them using them. The only tactical question they debate is when.

NY Times -- military has no heroes

The reason the media has not presented any stories of heroism by our troops in the war is that our troops are never heroic. Ranting Profs has the story.

Working to learn the truth

Jack Cashill lays out the first part of the case against the NTSB's conclusions about TWA 800. The problem with the CIA-prepared FBI animation is twofold: 1) the explanation the animation purports to show is aerodynamically impossible -- planes without a nose do not climb thousands of feet into the sky, and 2) the radar reports show that the plane did not climb. Of course, none of the hundreds of eyewitnesses saw the plane climb either.

What they witnesses say they saw was a missile hit the plane. What the CIA wanted to "prove" was that no missile was involved. By the way, why was the CIA involved in an aircraft crash investigation anyway?

When all you have is hatred

Dr. Sanity has a great post on the Democrats and their inability to come up with a message that resonates with voters on the big issues. Apparently she agrees with my assessment that all the Dems have to offer is a hatred of Bush (although I think you can broaden that to the GOP in general as the only glue holding the party together since Reagan was elected). She writes:

that is the problem with operating on the basis of opportunism, instead of having any fundamental principles to guide you. As far as I can tell, the only principle guiding these kids is "we hate Bush, so vote for us." The party of nothing, has nothing to offer in these dangerous times--only antiwar platitudes and self-serving behavior.

Once again we see the absolute lack of integrity, honesty, and the unending opportunism of Democrats who are currently more interested in regaining power than they are in protecting and defending the U.S.

And:

This is symptomatic of the PC cancer eating at the soul of the left--and it reveals a fundamental anti-Americanism; so irrational; and so distorted by Bush hatred that it is willing to sacrifice America and all it stands for to the barbarians we are fighting.

NY Times all the news they want you to know

Tom Maguire points out the difference between the Wash Post and NY Times in quoting Republican Roy Blunt on the possibility of an immigration bill being passed. The Post:

Asked whether a deal could be struck with the Senate this fall, in the throes of a difficult reelection season, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) allowed: "I think that's possible. I don't know how likely it is."

The Times cut out the first positive first sentence and only quoted the negative 2d sentence.

The view from Manhattan

One has to wonder who Peggy Noonan knows. She says:

I've never met a career military man who was a conservative on social issues. I think they tend to see questions such as abortion and marriage as essentially uninteresting, private and not subject to the movement of machines. (Connected to this, I suspect Mr. Webb will benefit to some degree by the high number of military retirees in Virginia. They're always assumed to be hawks on Iraq. From personal experience I'd say a high percentage have been dubious about the war, many from the beginning.)

I guess living in Manhattan will do that to you.

If she thinks that career military people don't care about gay marriage, I think she is mistaken. More importantly, a vote to put Democrats in charge of national defense and the Pentagon is not a referendum on the wisdom of fighting in Iraq. It is a choice between two very different views of America and our role in the world. The predominant Democratic vision of America and the role of the American military is attractive to an extremely small percentage of career military people.

Peggy Noonan is a great crafter of words. She wrote great speeches and sometimes writes good columns. Her analysis, however, is often lacking. It seems to suffer from over-exposure to the type of thinking that dominates her neighborhood.

NY Times -- worse than a bad joke

Big Lizards has a great post on the NY Times. Apparently, they hate the president, the military and the US so much that they will publish anyone willing to slander them, even if they have to ignore their own news reporting in the process.

Naifeh dictatorship

Bill Hobbs had a series of posts over the last few weeks on the corruption and illegality that dominated the closing days of the Tennessee legislature.

House speaker, democrat Jimmy Naifeh, didn't have the votes to pass his pet incumbent protection bill. So he simply cast votes for those legislators who weren't in the chamber (some weren't even in Nashville) to come up with enough votes.

Imagine the outcry from the statewide MSM if a Republican had done this.

Newpaper doesn't get it

Bill Hobbs explains how the Tennessean fails to understand how the real world works. In this example, the topic is country music and the Dixie Chicks. The paper editorializes that the radio stations should play music that the audience does not want to hear.

I guess if you have a monopoly and have never had to understand customers or basic economics, you end up putting out the kind of garbage that the Tennessean passes off as a newspaper.

How the war will be won

This milblogger explains. Interesting story about questions from the Iraqi Army grunts and their amazement at the answers.

Teacher certification doesn't help kids learn

Stuart Buck points out the study.

Iraq is not Vietnam

Ho was content to stop in SE Asia. Osama has already come to NY. Greg Richards explains.

Helping the enemy

The enemy has the avowed goal of using the media. On the topic of alleged war crimes, Clarice Feldman does a great job of analyzing the evidence, asking the questions which ought to be asked, and taking the media and Marine brass to task.

There is no excuse for our media playing into the hands of the enemy. There is less than no excuse for military leadership doing the same.

Opening a major can of Whoop-ass

The first commenter on this post got it absolutely right.

Difference b/w Left and Right

David Warren gives some good examples. Noteworthy:

the most obvious contemporary way to distinguish between a "liberal" and a "conservative" is in their views on any passing spectacle of crime and punishment. The "liberal" instinctively identifies with the criminal, the "conservative" instinctively identifies with the victim. The liberal instinctively accuses the conservative of lacking compassion, or of wanting vengeance against the criminal, with whom the liberal has identified. The conservative instinctively remembers that the criminal showed no compassion to the victim with whom he identified.

The reasons for this go deeper than public policy, to the profound narcissism that has taken over the "liberal" mind. I am not suggesting the average liberal is a criminal. He hasn't the guts for that. But in the phantasia of his consciousness he is attracted almost sexually to the idea of "transgression"; to soiling the respectable. This is why, for the Left, "free speech" usually comes down to protecting pornographers; whereas for the Right, it is usually a matter of protecting the right to voice an opinion in good conscience.

MSM presents this guy as a responsible commentator

Protein Wisdom has the following from a Bush critic about Karl Rove:

Karl is a shameless bastard. Small wonder his mother killed herself. Once she discovered what a despicable soul she had spawned she apparently saw no other way out.

And then:

Rove, like Josef Goebbels, has used fear and smear as his primary tools to keep George Bush in power.

Imagine if Linda Tripp or anyone else who had publicly criticized Bill Clinton had penned such language. The MSM would have shouted from the rooftops that such a diatribe proves the critic to be unhinged. Does anyone think that the MSM will similarly expose Larry Johnson?

Dems want enemy to win

Jonah lays out the case against the Democrats. The terrorists want to chase the US out of Iraq. So do the Democrats.

Not only do they want the same result, but they react the same way to the news each day. When Americans suffer a setback, both Dems and Al Quaeda celebrate. When Americans have a good day, both are depressed.

And YES, I am questioning their patriotism. Actually, it is no longer a question. I have concluded that the answer is clear. They are not patriots. Period.

UPDATE:
I want to add this from texasrainmaker:

Isn’t it ironic that good news for America coincides with bad news for Democrats? Isn’t it also ironic that it’s almost impossible to distinguish between Democrats’ and terrorists’ view of who’s winning the war on terror? It’s not a coincidence.

Liars lie again and prove unworthy

Power Line has a takedown of the bald-faced lies advanced by the Democratic leadership in yesterday's debate. As John says:

The Democrats are so patently dishonest every time they talk about foreign affairs that there is simply no way any thinking, informed American could entrust leadership of our country to them.

Denial ain't a river

Dr. Sanity responds to another issue raised by Barone -- "It is hard in retrospect to understand why the left put so much psychic energy into the notion that Mr. Rove would be indicted."

She provides the answer. Remember:

It is worth recalling that during Vietnam, the media; academics, intellectuals, many public figures, entertainers, and the antiwar protesters of the time consistently and stubbornly refused to see Communism for what it really was. They steadfastly ignored the millions of deaths in the Soviet Union and elsewhere and instead focused their attention on the United States as the center of all evil in the world.

Today we have the very same people and their intellectual descendents consistently and adamantly refusing to acknowledge Islam and the Jihadis for what they are. Again, this group are extremely adept at ignoring a barbaric ideology that promotes enslavement and death; while actively undermining the premier international symbol of freedom and the sanctity of an individual's life.

With tedious and infinitely repetitive talking points, they again subscribe to the comforting notion that the US is the cause of the mayhem and butchery and ignore the real butchers.

Why? -- DENIAL.

In other words, the MSM's Vietnam "template" is actually nothing more than that primitive and immature psychological defense mechanism known as DENIAL.

In two major wars, the Left has consistently perceived America as the threat to the world, and ignored to the point of complete hysterical blindness the real oppressors of human freedom and dignity. During Vietnam they deluded themselves into thinking that Communism was benign (some even believed it to be superior to a free society) as long as you didn't provoke it.

And now they prefer the same delusion about Iraq and the homicide bombers of the religion of peace.

They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

And the clincher:

Many in this country would prefer to pretend that 9/11 didn't really happen. Or to pretend that the U.S. caused the attacks; or that if Bush hadn't been the President, the attacks would never have happened. All these fantasies have one thing in common. They deny the reality for the purpose of maintaining a sense of control over events whose implications are horrendous.

For some, it is so much better to believe in the fantasy of control because then the solution would be simple: get rid of Bush and it will all go away--just like a bad dream!

Criminalizing Political Differences

Michael Barone's column in Opinion Journal deserves the attention it is getting today. At the end, he asks when the left will stop trying to criminalize political differences.

Answer -- when the members of the left stop believing, as an article of religious faith and their reason for being Democrats, that Republicans are evil.

Dems will lose

I agree with this.

A little different take

I think the Anchoress is great. I love her stuff. I have a little different take on Ann Coulter, however.

She says that Ann's cheap shots may be the type that liberals get away with all the time, but we should never engage them. She writes:

She’s doing here precisely she herself says the left does, and no, it’s not clever, it’s not funny. It’s not better because it comes from the right. It’s not “justified” because “they started it.”

It’s weak. It’s lame. It’s spiteful and immature. It is what the left does with impunity, but that doesn’t make it right. And once again it undercuts and discredits the very sound and excellent points Coulter makes at the end of her piece, where she puts out very “uncivil” quotes made by members of the MSM who are now castigating her for incivility.

I don’t know…maybe I really am all wrong, but to me the way to battle incivility is not to embrace it to yourself and then crow about how you are doing so. You’ve got something critical to say, then say it and hell yes a little snark is a good thing…but snark demands a bit of wit.

Some times you have to hold a mirror up to them. Yes, it would be a bad thing if all conservatives did it. But having a few on the right give the left a dose of their own medicine can be useful.

In hockey, basketball and baseball, it helps to have an enforcer on your side to keep the other side honest. The idea -- we don't cheap shot folks. But we also want you to realize that we will respond when your behavior is out of bounds. Keeps the game cleaner.

Pot calling the milk bottle black

Barone points out something about RFK, Jr.'s embarassing tissue of lies which I had not considered -- his dad was the campaign manager for the 1960 election of his uncle. A lot of people have good reason to believe that the 1960 election was stolen.

Barone doesn't put as much credence in the evidence of fraud in Texas as I do, but his point is still solid. When your dad was likely involved in vote fraud in an effort to steal a presidential election, you probably shouldn't be making up lies about others trying to do the same.

Barone on another example of MSM bias

Barone:

How the Democrats can win

The Washington Post Outlook section last Sunday had a feature on "How the Democrats Can Win." It included recommendations from various Democratic strategists and thinkers, and from some Republicans and others as well. Nothing wrong with it at all. But here's my question: Do you remember whether the Post or another MainStreamMedia organ has ever run a piece on "How the Republicans Can Win"? I certainly don't remember any from the 1994 cycle, when such an article would have turned out to be particularly apt. I have vague recollections of sets of articles—How Democrats Can Win; How Republicans Can Win. But does anyone remember a piece focusing on Republicans alone, as the Post here focused on Democrats alone?

My memory may just be faulty, and perhaps readers can come up with examples that I have forgotten or never saw. But absent that, I think what we're seeing is this: MainStreamMedia personnel want the Democrats to win, and so naturally go and commission pieces on how they can do so. But they don't want Republicans to win, so naturally they never think of commissioning such pieces. A (rather benign) example of MSM bias

Sucking up for cash

I just ran across this column by Lileks on the Hate-America-first speeches by Clinton, Gore and Carter. Bottom line --

It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that they're just fond of the 40 pieces of silver they get for showing up.

They're probably paid in euros.

Support the Camp Pendleton 8

This is upsetting. I'm not happy with the weenies in command who have been scared by the vicious coverage of the MSM.

Future problems for Liberals

Just One Minute has more info on Liberals and their low numbers of children (perhaps the reason they voted down the library prop in CA). He quotes from a USA Today story:

In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs. ... It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children.

It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future — one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families.

Musil notes:

The news is even worse for Mr. Dionne and his pro-library funding sympathies because some studies have found that the children of liberals read less than children of conservatives, with the liberal children playing more computer games and watching more television than their conservative counterparts. Worse, some studies also suggest that children who play computer games to excess are more disposed to violence than their parents - with the effect on the children apparently detectable in their brains.

In Seattle -- 45% more dogs than kids. Hmmmmmm.

I don't think I want these people making decisions which affect MY kids and their future.

Let's farm Darryl Hannah's front yard!

I love this suggestion. As for the celebrity protester -- I'm inclined to say that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, but that implies that she has one.

EnviroTruth

Big Lizards on Globaloney. Interesting testimony:

paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"

Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

Contrast truth on our troops to media version

Tom Bevan has a must read. I was especially glad to read of the op-ed by the admiral overseeing Gitmo. Bevan writes:

Navy Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr., the man who directly oversees operations at Guantanamo Bay, recently responded to critics with an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune detailing the quality of treatment received by detainees. According to Admiral Harris that treatment includes: 12 hours of recreation and exercise per day, three meals a day that meet cultural (halal) dietary requirements and that cost three times as much as the food served to our troops, korans, prayer beads, rugs, five prayer sessions a day, a library stocked with 2,000 titles in Arabic, and medical care including dental work, eye exams, vaccinations, and screenings for colon cancer.

And this directly from the op-ed:

many detainees persist in mixing a blood-urine-feces-semen cocktail and throwing this deadly concoction into the faces of the American men and women who guard them, feed them and care for them. Most of the time after such an assault, our guards decline the opportunity to take a day off. After a quick medical checkup and a shower, they prefer to put on a clean uniform and return to duty. And the only retribution they exact on the detainees is to simply continue to serve with pride, dignity and humanity. [snip]
The young Americans serving here in Guantanamo are upholding the highest ideals of honor and duty in a remote location, face to face with some of the most dangerous men on the planet. Your readers should be proud of them. I am proud to be their commander.

Advice to conservatives

Betsy points to the Captain's advice to weary conservatives. I think this fails to appreciate the real need. Here is what I wrote as a comment to her post:

You won't get more conservative governance out of the GOP in DC until you neutralize the MSM. We bloggers don't seem to realize that the MSM's reduced influence is still absolutely massive. No politician with ambition (is there any other kind?) is going to be willing to stand up to the onslaught of vicious press as long as the MSM is the only real game in town.

Trying to elect a different politician only results in electing a democrat.

Bottom line -- you want conservative action in DC? Reduce the influence of the MSM on voters. It's the only way (as long as the MSM serves as a liberal propaganda tool). That leaves two options: force the MSM to be balanced and fair OR diminish their influence by finding other ways to get the message out.

The answer -- 527s, ad buys, e-mail campaigns, video ads on the net, web sites, organized blogging, etc. In essence, constant campaign mode. If you aren't willing to give your party politicians that kind of support to counteract the MSM, don't be surprised at the results.

I really don't understand why this isn't blatantly obvious to everyone.

Dumbest and Dumbester

Read this.

Even Dumb and Dumber are too smart for this.

Facts or Policy

I've said before that political arguments today are less about policy than about simple facts. As John Leo and now Lori Byrd have written, the whole idea of what is a fact seems to be controversial.

I want to point out that this is not a recent development. Iraq, the economy and Katrina are excellent examples of recent stories that have had the "facts" distorted beyond recognition. However, virtually every major argument that liberals have made in the last quarter century has been based on fuzzy or misleading facts -- the number of homeless and the cause of their homelessness; the "pristineness" of the wilderness hellhole in Alaska that has been proposed for drilling; global warming, spotted owls, and other environmental myths; Super Bowl violence, underpaid women, and little girls ignored by teachers; intimidation of black voters, pay discrimination, the list goes on and on and on ....

UND pres. exposes NCAA idiocy run amok

Read this letter. I almost wish they'd sue, but who has any confidence in the courts? They're liable to do something even worse than the NCAA.

Your unbiased MSM at work

Drudge points out this photo.

TN legislators -- ignorant, proud and going for the green

Bill Hobbs has a great story:

The Monday Knoxville News Sentinel has a very revealing headline: Many legislators unaware pensions rose by $13,600. The subhead: "But most not critical of benefits that increase the longer they serve."

So there you have it. They vote on stuff that they don't understand, and aren't embarrassed about it.

And:

The legislature basically voted to give bigger pensions to legislators who serve longer, with the maximum being reached at 34 years of service in the legislature, after which point a retired legislator would receive $31,100 annually until death for doing nothing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, per capita income in Tennessee last year was $31,107 - and most Tennesseans work hard to earn it at full-time jobs.

Legislators, on the other hand, will make that much for retiring from a part-time job.

Since Jimmy Naifeh runs the legislature (at least the House) as a dictatorship, I'm not surprised that legislators claim not to know what they voted on. They know their votes don't make much difference.

Dem Pollster -- Targeting Wal-Mart is a political loser

Econopundit posted on this at RCP. Gotta love this from a Democratic pollster:

The temptation to "stand up to Wal-Mart" as a campaign ploy reflects the sometimes cocooning and self-deceptive nature of Democratic Party activists. Indeed, in RT Strategies polls we consistently find that the most vociferously anti- Wal-Mart groups are Northeast and West Coast liberals who themselves rarely or never shop at Wal-Mart, shunning the retailer as not worthy of their patronage. They cannot understand how others fail to reach the same conclusion. At the extreme, such a person as a Democratic candidate for office might even want to suggest a few new laws or regulatory interpretations to help those who cannot help but dally in the devil's workshop.

By staying out of the stores themselves, anti- Wal-Mart Democrats might have missed the fact that:

· 84% of Americans shopped at Wal-Mart in the past year, probably because 81% say it is a good place to shop, according to a December 2005 Pew Research Center poll;
· It is not uncommon for thousands to apply when a few hundred new jobs open up at a Wal-Mart, provoking comparisons that Wal-Mart's hiring team can be more selective than Harvard undergraduate admissions or the high-IQ organization MENSA in choosing which candidates to hire.
· For the average family of a Wal-Mart employee, the company represents opportunity: The vast majority of Wal-Mart store managers rose to that post from hourly jobs on the floor.
· For the average family of shoppers, the savings at Wal-Mart are over $2,000 per year.

Unlike the most vociferous of Wal-Mart's opponents, most Americans do shop at Wal-Mart, and most Americans understand the benefits of Wal-Mart--and do not understand the priorities of those who want to make Wal-Mart the issue.

Steve notes in his post that the $2000 saved at Wal-Mart compares to the total of $13,000 paid by the average family in local, state, and federal taxes. Being a Democratic activist means loving the taxman and hating the money-saver. Sounds like a big winner!

More on lack of liberal theory

I noticed this post at No Left Turns by Joseph Knippenberg today and found it interesting in light of my e-mail to Bevan referenced in the previous post. Reading it this morning prompted me to write the post about that e-mail without waiting to see if I got a reply. Knippenberg is well worth a read. I find his quotation of a left-wing academic about the weakness of Peter Beinart's theorizing especially good:

Here’s an author who clearly is insufficiently informed about the classic critiques of political liberalism put forth by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss, and Kojève. My progressive postie friends would cringe at his clunky attempts at defining a national purpose by demonizing and scapegoating an Other. Beinart desperately takes a crowbar to the work of political theorists Michael Walzer and Hannah Arendt in an attempt to dignify his case that the war on terror ought to be seen as continuous with earlier wars against communism and fascism. But my undergraduates, drawing more thoughtfully on Arendt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Foucault, would have an easy time dismantling his adamant but woefully antiquated notion of totalitarianism. Such a book will not engage or inspire my undergraduates, because--should I say it baldly? --it is theoretically impoverished, something of an embarrassment to read. It is not worthy of their intellectual efforts. Is this the best we can do?

This brings to mind the old lawyer's advice to a young litigator -- when you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have the facts, argue the facts. When you have neither, pound the table and raise your voice.

What we are seeing from Democrats over the last few years is a lot of table-pounding and raised voices. They can't figure out what they stand for except that they just know that the GOP is evil. To keep the faithful faithful, they have to yell louder and louder.

Dems escalate slander -- is it inevitable?

The other day I sent an e-mail to Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics asking him for his opinion on several questions. My query was prompted by the incredibly dishonest piece put out by RFK, Jr. claiming that the 2004 election was stolen in Ohio. I was curious if he thought that the piece was vetted by members of the Democratic leadership establishment. After all, we can be fairly certain that he didn't write it himself. And as a Kennedy, we would imagine that he and his writers would have bounced it off the family's political advisors at the least.

I then asked Bevan if he thought this paper by RFK, Jr. represented a significant escalation of the slander that serves as the principal political tactic of the Democratic Party. It is one thing for party leaders to say all manner of nasty, vicious slanders while speaking at a rally, but quite another to do so in a carefully crafted, edited paper replete with extensive footnotes. Off the cuff remarks can be more easily written off as the product of the heat of the moment. Not so, a paper such as this.

Finally, I asked if he agreed with me that such escalation was inevitable. Starting with Krauthammer's axiom that Democrats think that the GOP is evil (not just wrong), I would go even further and say that the belief in the evil nature of Republicans is the essential glue which holds the Democratic Party together. They are made up of such disparate groups with such different agendas that all they share is a hatred of Republicans and a common belief in the slanderous accusations they make against the GOP (racist, sexist, homophobic, mean-spirited, hate-filled, etc.).

As their minority status continues, the lack of any unifying ideology leaves them with no other strategy than to increasingly ratchet up the nasty slanders until they get the voters' attention. Without a strategy, all that is left is tactics. And slander is first page of their play book. Although the slanders generally hurt them at the ballot box more than help, they do serve to motivate the activists and aid fund-raising. It seems inevitable to me that they will choose to continue to double down on their bets and follow the same course until they are left in a shambles.

Herbert -- walking definition of "mindless"

RCP has a takedown of Bob Herbert. He swallowed the RFK, Jr. propaganda piece, lies and all, despite the fact that the blatant falsehoods therein had been exposed by numerous commentators including liberals. Normally, this kind of idiocy would reduce the credibility of a newspaper, but Herbert writes for the NY Times.

Who to believe?

Lying, murderous terrorists or groups who have bent over backwards to be fair and honest? Big Lizards shows that the MSM will always take the word of the lying terrorists.

With friends like this ...

Megan McArdle points out that pro-choice papers have a knack for profiling abortion supporters whose stories don't do much to help the cause. I attribute that to the fact that journalists at such papers have consistently demonstrated a remarkable level of incompetence. Read the post.

Do Americans "earn" their incomes?

Steve Antler highlights the divide between liberals and conservatives on economic policy with a simple question:

First is the issue of everyday life's basic "fairness." Ask the question: under normal/average circumstances do people generally "get" what they work for or deserve? If you say "no" you're a Democrat. And if you're brave enough to say "yes" you're either a traditional economist or a conservative Republican.

In concentrated form this issue separates opponents and proponents of the inheritance tax. Bequests are the accumulated net sum of a lifetime's work. Do these sums represent legitimate private property or something akin to -- well, theft?

One of the nasty faces of the Democrats

I would suppose that most readers here also read Power Line. Just in case you haven't, I want to highlight this post, "Who is Keith Ellison? (6)". A leader of a known communist front organization, a black muslim activist, and a supporter of an avowed-terrorist who tried to murder policemen with pipe bombs, Ellison is apparently proud to hate America at every turn.

Minnesota Democrats have endorsed him and he is the favorite to win election to Congress to represent the Minneapolis area. Just a regular kind of Minnesota Democrat?

Barone says it all

Michael Barone, once a Democratic campaign consultant, explains how American voters find the lefties' rooting for American defeat so repulsive.

Chaitred = stupidity

I've always thought Chait was working with less than a full deck. This , however, is almost childishly stupid.

"We don't need no stinkin' facts"

Dr. Sanity has a post which develops off a great column today by John Leo. Liberals rely less and less on facts every day. We've just about reached the point where facts have become completely irrelevant to them.

Time's Hidatha story unravels some more

A J Strata has more details of problems with this story. Rueters is looking pretty suspect.

Dr. Sanity points to Sweetness & Light's takedown of the journalistic malfeasance of Time.

Standing Up for Ann Coulter

Dafydd at Big Lizards has a post which ought to be read by conservatives who are too quick to react to Ann Coulter. The evidence supporting her summary of the Jersey women who have used grief as a political weapon is overwhelming.

But is this really a psych job?

I agree that, if we have leaked genuine intel, this is deplorable. But what if we didn't get inside info? What if we got the info from someone not part of the inner group? Wouldn't this be a great way to have the survivors tear their group apart as they view each other with suspicion? Oops, link here.

The need for rationality

Real Clear Politics has this column about the relentless rush to condemn the US military and Bush. I want to focus on one point made at the end, "surely there is also an obligation ... to grant members of the American military the same presumption of innocence afforded petty thieves".

Compare the attitudes of the Free Mumia! types. The US military is always presumed guilty. Those for whom the evidence is beyond dispute that they are cold-blooded murderers, however, deserve every possible presumption of innocence.

The strange "through the looking glass" world of the liberal gets increasingly "curiouser and curiouser" no matter how often one thinks that it couldn't get any more bizarre and twisted than it already is.

Another Mary Mapes?

Clarice Feldman lays out how weak the "massacre" allegations are on Haditha and wonders if the Time reporter involved is trying to pull a Mary Mapes.

Truth revealed thru humor

Democrats to fight on.

Who bought all those albums?

Is marketing themselves as lefties victimized by the Right working for the Dixie Chicks in their effort to revive their careers? Hmmmm. The numbers are interesting.

Reality shreds another liberal's credibility

Bill Hobbs explains how the huge tax revenue surplus in Tennessee proves that the state income tax advocates were wrong (again).

Another reason to hate the death tax

From Steve Antler.

Julie Ponzi sees political hay to harvest.

For the Children

Robert Musil has lots of good post up over the last week or so. This one made me laugh while making a very good point. Why would Californians approve a propositiion to be taxed for mental health care, but not one for preschool? Perhaps because Democrats are more likely to be unhappy (even depressed) and less likely to have kids. Read the whole thing.

Algore's previous stupid crusade

I'm glad to see that Robert Musil is posting on his blog again. He has this:

When pondering Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" it is perhaps worth remembering that this is not the first time the former vice president has waged a campaign to impose gigantic costs in the service of correcting a problem of dubious reality (that in fact turned out not to exist nearly to the extent he insisted) and was not substantially ameliorated by anything he proposed.

The reader will recall that Mr. Gore headed the Clinton administration's campaign against the "Y2K Bug," sometimes known as the "millennium bug." There are striking parallels between Mr. Gore's two crusades. As with potential major human-caused global warming, the larger number of Y2K Bug "experts" were predicting that the bug was a huge problem that would have cataclysmic consequences if not aggressively and expensively corrected.

And:

The Y2K Bug was not a "scam" - and the possibility of serious adverse consequences of global warming is not a "scam." There were some glitches: A few satellites went out, Al Gore had problems on his campaign web site computer because it wasn't DeBugged properly, that kind of thing. But the world of economic decisions does not consist of binary decisions between "scams" and the need to spend trillions of dollars! Was it worth spending a Trillion Dollars to ward off the Y2K Bug - even though countries that did not make systematic efforts suffered few consequences, and no serious consequences at all? I very much doubt it. It is not hard to think of very good uses of One Trillion Dollars, far better uses than remorsely chasing a software bug that did little damage even where nothing was done to fix it. Of course, a Trillion Dollars would be a small down payment (peanuts, really) in comparision with the costs that An Inconvenient Truth implicitly or explicitily demands be born by the world's economy ... much of it by the world's poorest people.

Duke story just gets more bizarre

Betsy points out the latest info on this abominable prosecution. Outrageous is too kind a description.

Takedown of Al Gore

Amen to this column via Real Clear Politics. Everyone ought to read it.

Sowell on "Facts"

Thomas Sowell reviews a book which explains how so many "facts" are actually liberal myths. Yesterday, I was at a book store and looked through a book much like this one by John Stossel which was less about politics and more about myths promoted by the media. Obviously, there is still quite a bit of overlap.

"Saddam no worse than Bush"

More thoughtful analysis from the Left reproduced by Mary Katharine Ham at Hugh Hewitt:

I'm not saying Saddam Hussein's a good man, but he's no worse than George Bush. Under Saddam Hussein, no al-Qaeda in Iraq; under George Bush, al-Qaeda. Under Saddam Hussein, relative stability; under George Bush, instability. Under Saddam Hussein, 30,000 deaths a year; under George Bush, about 50,000 deaths. I don't understand. Why is this better to have George Bush be the King of Iraq rather than Saddam Hussein?"

The Bush Lied Lie

Jack Cashill wrote this piece back in October, but it should be reviewed now and then to remind us of just how vicious the lies from the Left are. A couple of notes:

in the year 2000, before September 11 would color all retrospection and well before the publishing world insisted on slander to feed the voracious anger of America's left, Butler wrote a book called The Greatest Threat. I then asked the caller if he knew what the "greatest threat" was. He did not choose to answer. The subtitle of Butler's book answers for him, Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Growing Crisis of Global Security.

As I explained to the caller, the Australian arms-control expert Butler knew more about Saddam's WMD program than any outsider and that as a leftist and as an internationalist he had little reason to stack the deck in Bush's favor.

After being booted from Iraq in late 1998, Butler considered Iraq's ongoing plea of innocence "the blackest lie." He does not mince words. "It would be foolish in the extreme," he writes of Saddam, "not to assume that he is developing long-range missile capabilities, at work again on building nuclear weapons, and adding to the chemical and biological warfare weapons he concealed during the UNSCOM inspection period."

And:

In that same innocent year of 2000, Hamza wrote a book called Saddam's Bombmaker. When first published, it was subtitled The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda.
....
For more than twenty years, the MIT-educated Hamza worked on Saddam's program to build a nuclear bomb, eventually heading up that effort. If Butler had the keenest perspective of any outsider, Hamza had the keenest of any insider. The story they tell is the same.

Lying CNBC hypes Dem chances

CNBC financial anchor just reported that the GOP "barely" held on to a House seat in an "overwhelmingly" Republican district and states that this could be a harbinger of good things for Dems in the fall election.

Rality -- this district went only 55% for Bush in 2004. But telling the truth would hurt the propaganda value of Democratic talking points. So CNBC won't tell the truth.

Righty law prof vs. Lefty

This transcript from the Hugh Hewitt Show is priceless. Hugh just slices and dices Paul Campos. Even by the end, Campos doesn't seem to understand how thoroughly he has embarrassed himself. It ought to be read simply to get a flavor for how much hatred of the military and the USA is part of the thinking of a typical liberal today.

Time's "balance

CNBC just had on 2 people to comment on the Cal 50 Congressional results. One was an avowed conservative talk show host. To provide balance, the liberal position was argued by a Time magazine reporter. The Time "reporter" couldn't have been more partisan in repeating Democratic Party talking points if he had been on the Dems' payroll. Of course, since he is on Time's payroll, one could conclude that he IS paid by Democratic party activists.

Revision -- looking at my TV, now I'm not sure whether the discussion was on CNBC or Fox. The point about Time, however, remains the same.

Why the Times no longer qualifies as a real newspaper

The RCP blog has this on a graduation address from publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. They are right, the worst part is not the silliness of the politics, but the childishness the speech reveals. If there are any real journalists left at the Times, imagine how bad they must feel to have to work as a child's play thing.

See any moral difference?

Dr. Sanity:

Here's a fundamental difference between the left and the right position on the war on terror:

The left thinks it is unseemly that the right is "whooping it up" because a group of terrorists is caught in Canada before they could act on their terror plans. Meanwhile, the right kind of thinks it is unseemly that the left is overjoyed because Marines might have killed innocent civilians in Iraq.

I'll leave it for you to decide which of these positions is morally repulsive.

John Kerry -- liar and deluded fraud

There is much to chew on about John Kerry and the renewal of his quest. One small detail that I had not heard before which I found very interesting is in this post at Just One Minute. Tom points out:

the news that we were violating the Cambodian border made headlines when it broke in 1973. So why was Kerry so shy in his 1971 Senate appearance? If he had been to Camodia, why not break that news to the Senate, along with the Ghengis Khan allegations and what-not? What, was he afraid it might turn them against the war?

In John Kerry's testimony in 1971, he throws out every attack on the government and the military he can dream up. If he really had a personal experience in the war that demonstrated illegal conduct of the war, he would have highlighted it and made it the centerpiece of his testimony. It would have made his appearance an even bigger bombshell. Yet he never mentioned Cambodia.

Because he didn't really go there.


(And of course, he didn't really listen to Nixon claim we weren't there at Christmas in 1968, because Nixon wasn't president then and no one asked anyone about Cambodia until 1973.)

Liberal means never having to use one's brain

This piece by Peter Bienart has been laughed at by others in the blogosphere (e.g. Power Line gently pokes fun), but I want to point out how pitiful it is as an example of rational argument.

That liberals are weak on fighting terrorists is supposed to be W's fault!

The UN, IMF, World Bank and NATO were the vehicles that defeated Soviet communism!


What a strange, barren, bizarre place the liberal mind must be in 2006. Perhaps the courageous explorers of the next generation will be those who boldly venture forth against all odds to learn what goes on in there. I'm not sure even Stephen Hawking could make any sense of it, however.

UPDATE:

I guess I could just do a constant blog under this title. In catching up on my reading, I just found this. Exit polls are foolproof! Dennis Kucinich is unbiased and non-partisan! The moon is made of green cheese. Whatever.

Home from the beach

Just got home from a great vacation with the family. We really enjoyed Wild Dunes on Isle of Palms outside of Charleston, SC.