ConservaPundit

This lie proves Michael Moore a fraud, Left-wing evil

07.31.04 (5:44 am)   [edit]
One thing you can't accuse Lefties of is not working hard-- it's just that they work hard at lying, cheating, stealing, and gaining power at all costs.

Witness Michael Moore, an typical Lefty, whose film is determined to have at least 56 major deceits in it (Dave Kopel's research-- http://www.davekopel.com/Terr...).
He lies in such deviously clever ways, you almost have to admire its genius, much like the way the terrorists planned 9/11. Terrorists exploited America's openness, its trust, its optimism, its good nature, and likewise so is Moore. We simply cannot believe that "men" like this could stoop so low just to lie.

Why can't these folks just argue their position with facts? Maybe it's because the only positions they have are bad ones, the only morals they support are those that get them in power, the only people they care about are themselves.

We can add one more lie to the multitude, and this one is simply amazing.

From Dave Kopel's research--

[i]The [Bloomington, Ill.] Pantagraph newspaper in central Illinois has sent a letter to[Michael] Moore and his production company, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., asking Moore to apologize for using what the newspaper says was a doctored front page in the film, the paper reported Friday. It also is seeking compensatory damages of $1.

[b]A scene early in the movie that shows newspaper headlines related to the legally contested presidential election of 2000 included a shot of The Pantagraph's Dec. 19, 2001, front page, with the prominent headline: "Latest Florida recount shows Gore won election."[/b]

The paper says that headline never appeared on that day. It appeared in a Dec. 5, 2001, edition, but [b]the headline was not used on the front page. Instead, it was found in much smaller type above a letter to the editor, which the paper says reflects "only the opinions of the letter writer."[/i][/b]

So we have Moore passing off the title of an opinion as a news headline. He's trying to pass off something unfactual as fact.

Keep in mind these facts folks: the Democrats cannot let losing go. They hate losing. Every recount of 2000 showed Bush won. Liberal newspapers tried like hell to find a count method that would give the election to Gore, but it didn't happen. BUSH WON 2000, folks, ,get the hell over it.

The Democrats lost it after 2000 and have been living in the intellectual gutter ever since. They are all clowns, they legitimze old-school conspiracists from the Vietnam-era and before, and new ones like Moore. They create legions of dim-witted bloggers like most of the ones on Tblog that can't even stay on message longer than a day because they have to make up more Bush conspiracy theories (like the always amusing Bush is stupid but also an evil genius that fooled everyone twice into going to war).

These folks don't have to care about facts or history. They don't have to care about how things work. They can just promise everything under the sun to the masses and insult our intelligence. And folks will vote for them because of stupid shit like they served in Vietnam or simply because they "look" presidential.

What a horrific joke. God help us all if this party wins the presidency again.

Kerry dissed by Marines at Wendy's-- he can expect a lot of that

07.31.04 (5:28 am)   [edit]
I'm going to post the text of the Washington Post article as it appears at PowerLine, because the Washington Post site has mysteriously removed the article. There's also another article referencing the incident at Wendy's with the Marines in the Boston Herald, which I'll excerpt from.

First, from PowerLine--http://www.powerlineblog.com/...

[b]A few good men[/b]

The New York Post reports that the Kedwards "Believe in America" tour debuted inauspiciously at Wendy's in Scranton yesterday: "Dems' marine misfire." The Post reports:

[i]John Kerry's heavily hyped cross-country bus tour stumbled out of the blocks yesterday, as [b]a group of Marines publicly dissed the Vietnam War hero in the middle of a crowded restaurant.[/b]

Kerry was treating running mate Sen. John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, to a Wendy's lunch in Newburgh, N.Y., for their 27th wedding anniversary — an Edwards family tradition — when the candidate approached four Marines and asked them questions.

[b]The Marines — two in uniform and two off-duty — were polite but curt while chatting with Kerry, answering most of his questions with a "yes, sir" or "no, sir."

But they turned downright nasty after the Massachusetts senator thanked them "for their service" and left.

"He imposed on us and I disagree with him coming over here shaking our hands," one Marine said, adding, "I'm 100 percent against [him]."[/b]

[b] A sergeant with 10 years of service under his belt said, "I speak for all of us. We think that we are doing the right thing in Iraq," before saying he is to be deployed there in a few weeks and is "eager" to go and serve. [/b]

[b][u]Despite the name of the tour, the principal appears to be promoting a bad news depiction of the state of the union:[/b][/u]

In Harrisburg, Kerry noted that there was more bad news coming out of the financial markets yesterday, with oil prices reaching new highs and economic growth limping along at three percent. [/i]

[b]For what it's worth, the average annual economic growth rate under the first three years of the Clinton administration (1993-1995, Q4 to Q4) was 2.88 percent. [/b](See the excellent NRO column by economist J. Edward Carter, "Better than Clinton?")
Posted by The Big Trunk at 02:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

From the Boston Herald-- http://news.bostonherald.com/...

[b]Dem ticket doesn't wow Marines at Wendy's[/b]
Saturday, July 31, 2004

[i]... 12:30 p.m. - Since it's the Edwards' 27th wedding anniversary, the candidates stop for lunch where the couple celebrates each year, at Wendy's. Edwards and Kerry greet a table of Marines, who answered their questions in monosyllables.

Later, the Marines tell reporters they support Bush. ``(Kerry) imposed on us and I disagree with him coming over here shaking our hands,'' one said. [/i]

Democrats: the impostures of pretended patriotism

07.31.04 (5:11 am)   [edit]
[b]The impostures of pretended patriotism[/b]
Mark Alexander
July 30, 2004

It's National Baked Bean Month, and the pretenders were in full regalia in Beantown Monday night as the Demo-lition Party launched its parade of their proudest, most pompous propagandists and praters in front of 4,300 delegates. Full of beans, one and all!

But the infotainment started the eve prior to the DNC's confab, when phony frontrunner John "Fastball" Kerry snuck into town to throw out the first pitch for Sunday's game between the Red Sox and Yankees. Against a backdrop of competing cheers and jeers, Kerry wound up and hurled one into the dirt well in front of his catcher, a 23-year-old Massachusetts native and Afghanistan/Iraq War veteran.

Apparently, Kerry's medal-tossing arm (or were those ribbons he tossed?) isn't what it used to be. Nonetheless, he proved he can still come up short when delivering to America's military personnel.

Earlier, when asked who his favorite Red Sox player was, Kerry responded, "Manny Ortez." The Sox do field Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, but there is no "Manny Ortez" on the roster. (We hasten to add, however, that "Manny Ortez" was closer to the mark than the response Kerry gave the last time he was asked that question: "My favorite Red Sox player of all time is 'The Walking Man,' Eddie Yost." Yost never played for the Red Sox.)

Not to be outdone by her husband's sneak preview, Ms. Teresa (Tuh-RAY-zuh) Heinz (or "Kerry" depending on the audience) was across town telling her home-state (Pennsylvania) delegates that some of the rhetoric coming out of the Democrat Party is "un-Pennsylvanian -- and sometimes un-American." A few minutes later, Colin McNickle, editorial page editor of the conservative-leaning Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, questioned Ms. Heinz about what she meant by "un-American," to which she responded angrily, "I didn't say that. You're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say that."

When pressed by McNickle, whose paper is published near one of the many Heinz-Kerry estates (see http://kerry-04.org/about/hom... ), the opinionated ketchup heiress let loose with, "You said something I didn't say. Now shove it." (Not quite as eloquent as Dick Cheney's recent rejoinder, but close.)

Fortunately for the Demos, the Heinz-Kerry handlers whisked them out of town before they could provide any more embarrassments ahead of Monday's opening ceremonies. But unfortunately for the Demos, they failed to take convention speaker Christie Vilsack, wife of Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, with them. Indeed, Ms. Vilsack provided plenty of amusement Monday morning in a Boston Herald Op-Ed, observing, "I am fascinated by the way some African-Americans speak to each other in an English I struggle to understand." She then added that Southerners seem to have "slurred speech," and "the only way I can speak like residents of Pennsylvania and New Jersey is to let my jaw drop an inch and talk with my mouth in an 'O' like a fish." Thank you, Ms. Vilsack!

Apparently the DNC circulated a memo to all convention speakers that they were not to speak ill of the Bush administration, but everyone else was fair game. Vilsack, for one, is confident that Pennsylvania, New Jersey and black folk everywhere are in the Demo- bag. But, John Edwards notwithstanding, we don't think Kerry should count the Deep South just yet.

There was plenty of entertaining print elsewhere, like this Washington Post front-page headline promoting its special section on the 2004 Democratic National Convention: "ELECTION 2000" -- we kid you not -- in a very LARGE font! But the Post headline was not quite as big as the font on the banner hanging prominently behind the convention speakers' podium under the al-Jazeera Arabic news network's press skybox. That would be the same al-Jazeera network, which regularly broadcasts (read: promotes) the torture and execution of American military and civilian personnel by al-Qa'ida terrorists in Iraq.

Al-Jazeera's 20-foot-tall, $30,000 banner was quickly replaced with another that promoted "JohnKerry.com." (Our convention moles suggested a "Kerry-04.com" banner, but the DNC declined, citing their extreme aversion to truth-telling.) Convention spokeswoman Peggy Wilhide insisted that al-Jazeera had not been singled out. "Frankly, we're not providing a forum for companies to advertise, we're trying to create the kind of atmosphere we want to best present John Kerry and the Democratic [sic!] party." Of course, the large Leftmedia banners for NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN remained in place.

It should be noted, however, that the Demos made amends with al-Jazeera by allowing Islamist imam Yahya Hendi to give a closing "prayer." Interestingly enough, this is the same Yahya Hendi who was a character witness for Sami al-Arian, the Florida "professor" who was indicted by the Justice Department after 9/11 on 50 counts of terror-related charges. (For more on Kerry's coddling of terrorists, see http://kerry-04.org/terrorism... )

Monday night was a blast from the past, featuring (not coincidentally) a lineup of Southern White House occupants and near-misses including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and, of course, Albert Gore. And it was downhill from there.

Having endured four long nights of hot air, concluding with Kerry's stiff Algorian acceptance speech Thursday evening, we offer the following rogues' gallery of Demo-goguery, the retread politics of division masquerading as messages of unity and optimism.

On division (read: "Demo modus operandi" -- this from the Party whose theme is "Two Americas"):

* "We are constantly told America is deeply divided. [Republicans] need a divided America. But we don't." --Bill Clinton

* "Yet in our own time, there are those who seek to divide us. ... America needs a genuine uniter -- not a divider. We have seen how they rule -- they divide and try to conquer. They know the power of the people is weakened when our house is divided." --Teddy Kennedy

* "Reject Republican efforts to exploit our differences and divide our nation." --Roberta Achtenberg

* "There are choices -- the politics of 'Jim Crow' or of civil rights, the politics of imprisonment or of liberation, the politics of division or of one America." --Marcia Bristo

* "Together we can...transcend our differences and divisions." --Hillary Rodham-Clinton-Rodham

* "Sooner or later, voters in places like that [the South] are going to grow tired of voting on guns, god and gays and start voting on education, health care and jobs. ...We can't be a national party unless we are willing to take our base to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. ...We need to send a progressive message and stop being afraid of going to Utah or Idaho or Alabama or Texas." --Howard Dean (AAARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!)

* "Between now and November -- you can reject the tired, old, hateful, negative politics of the past." --John "Two Americas" Edwards

* "I want to address these next words directly to President George W. Bush: In the weeks ahead, let's be optimists, not just opponents. Let's build unity in the American family, not angry division. This is our time to reject the kind of politics calculated to divide race from race, group from group, region from region. Maybe some just see us divided into red states and blue states, but I see us as one America -- red, white, and blue." --John Kerry (Tell a lie often enough....)

On taxes (read: "class warfare" division):

* "[T]his year, in this election, there is a candidate who understands the middle-class squeeze. Instead of just helping those at the top, I think we ought to give everyone a chance to reach the top." --Dick Gephardt (So, there's a middle class between the "two Americas" after all...)

* "Today, the middle-class squeeze has become a way of life for millions of American families." --Tom Daschle

* "[We're] standing up for middle class and working Americans who got a tax increase, not a tax cut." --Howard Dean

* "We are tired of seeing our hard-earned tax dollars go to haves and have-mores, while the must-haves, could-haves, should-haves, maybes and have-nots have not at all." --Stephanie Tubbs-Jones

* "And why had the powerful been allowed to doggedly cut taxes for the most privileged, knowing there was little left for the most vulnerable." --Rosa de Laura

* "[T]he truth is, we still live in two different Americas. We are going to keep and protect the tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans -- 98%. We're going to roll back...the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. We can build one America where we no longer have two healthcare systems. We shouldn't have two public-school systems in this country: one for the most affluent communities, and one for everybody else.... We shouldn't have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, their kids and grandkids will be just fine, and then one for most Americans who live paycheck to paycheck." --John Edwards

* "I will roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals who make over $200,000 a year, so we can invest in job creation, health care and education. ... [H]ere at home, wages are falling, health care costs are rising, and our great middle class is shrinking. People are working weekends; they're working two jobs, three jobs, and they're still not getting ahead. ... We value an America where the middle class is not being squeezed, but doing better." --John Kerry (The Bush economy is so bad, we're surprised anyone can find just ONE job.)

On race (read: "race-card" division):

* "In all due respect, Mr. President, read my lips: Our vote is not for sale." --Al Sharpton (Wonder how Tawana Brawley is voting...?)

* "In my hometown of Cleveland, the unemployment rate is over 11%. In our black and Hispanic communities, the unemployment rate is higher, entering into the double digits." --Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (And we thought 11% constituted "double digits.")

* "I have heard some discussions and debates about where, and in front of what audiences, we should talk about race, equality, and civil rights. Well, I have an answer to that question. Everywhere. This is not an African-American issue, not a Latino issue, not an Asian-American issue, this is an American issue. It's about who we are, what our values are, what kind of country we want to live in." --John Edwards

On healthcare (read: "Hillary-care" division):

* "We need to rededicate ourselves to the task of providing coverage for the 44 million Americans who are uninsured and the millions of others who face rising costs." --Hillary Rodham-Clinton-Rodham

* "John Kerry won't sit back and watch while premiums rise four times faster than workers' wages." --Tammy Baldwin (Oh, really? Kerry has protected malpractice lawyers like John Edwards for the last three decades, while Edwards and his ilk have padded their pockets with largess paid for by those very premiums!)

* "John believes that we can, and we will, give every family and every child access to affordable health care." --Teresa Heinz

* "You know what's happening. Your premiums, your co-payments, your deductibles have all gone through the roof. ... When I'm President, America will stop being the only advanced nation in the world which fails to understand that health care is not a privilege for the wealthy, the connected, and the elected." --John Kerry (John Edwards knows why premiums are so high, and isn't Kerry a U.S. senator?)

On "partners" (read: "gender neutrality" division):

* "[E]specially my beloved partner in life, Tipper." --Albert Arnold Gore

* "I found a true partner in life...." --Dick Gephardt

* "John Kerry will guarantee the right to family-health benefits to all our families -- including domestic partners." --Tammy Baldwin

* "In addition to being a Senior Vice President of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, I am a lawyer, a mother, and a lesbian. I am proud to be all of those things and one thing more: a Democrat!" --Roberta Achtenberg

On Demo-leadership (read: "Dem and dumber"):

* "To those of you who felt disappointed or angry with the outcome in 2000, I want you to remember all of those feelings. But then I want you to do with them what I have done: Focus them fully and completely on putting John Kerry and John Edwards in the White House." --Albert Gore (And we thought he'd endorsed Howard Dean...)

* "[T]onight, we're all here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic (sic) party." --Howard Dean

* "We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres [Lincoln promised]. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us." --Al Sharpton

* "With John Kerry as president, global climate change and other threats to the health of our planet will begin to be reversed." --Teresa Heinz

* "Our struggle is with the politics of fear and favoritism in our own time, in our own country. Our struggle -- like so many others before -- is with those who put their own narrow interest ahead of the public interest. ... I intend to stay in this job until I get the hang of it." --Teddy Kennedy (Mary Jo Kopechne was not available for comment.)

* "I think I know a great leader when I see one and so does America. [Bill] showed Democrats how to win again. And so will John Kerry." --Hillary Rodham-Clinton-Rodham

* "For four years, we've heard a lot of talk about values. But values spoken without actions taken are just slogans. Values are not just words. And it is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families." --John Kerry

On military service (read: "The JFK legacy project"):

* "If you have any question about what he's made of, you need to spend three minutes with the men who served with him then.... They saw up close what he's made of." --John Edwards (Indeed, see http://kerry-04.org/war/shipm...)

* "Most importantly, they [Vietnam vets] know the real deal, they know the genuine article, they know the truth...." --Carol Moseley-Braun

* "I'd like a commander-in-chief who supports our soldiers and our veterans, instead of cutting their hardship pay when they're abroad, and their health benefits when they get home." --Howard Dean

* "On one occasion [as a kid], I rode my bike into Soviet East Berlin. And when I proudly told my dad, he promptly grounded me." --John Kerry (The Manchurian Candidate?)

* "I ask you to judge me by my record..." (Indeed, to read about Kerry's war record, see http://kerry-04.org/war/)

In summary -- so, what do we take away from all of this Demo-babble? We thought Bill Clinton was good at faking right and running left, but Kerry and company make Clinton's antics look like child's play. George Washington warned that future generations must "Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." Indeed.

Mark Alexander is Executive Editor and Publisher of The Federalist Patriot, a Townhall.com member group.

©2004 The Federalist Patriot

Yes, I gave Michael Moore money

07.31.04 (5:06 am)   [edit]
[b]Yes, I Gave Michael Moore Money[/b]
Charles Mitchell
July 31, 2004

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the fact that I can’t carry a gun now that I live in DC. Unfortunately, I recently found out about another downside to life in the District: I missed out on a free ticket to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. A small independent theater in my college town recently sponsored a “Republicans-only” screening of the film – so people who didn’t want to give Moore a dime could see it on the owner’s dime.

But I missed out. And since I decided lying (i.e. getting a ticket to another movie) in order to expose Michael Moore’s lies was a bit hypocritical – and uninformed criticism, even of steaming piles like Moore’s movies, is lame – I paid a whopping $9.25 to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

Somehow I ended up at a “progressive” theater in DC, one infatuated with independent films I had never heard of and charging ticket prices I wish I’d never heard of. The halls were lined with snooty art rather than cardboard cutouts, and the usual pre-preview advertising was absent.

I actually got a double shot of Michael Moore, as he was in a preview for a movie called The Corporation, which one critic dubbed “the next Bowling for Columbine.” (Some compliment there!) Right after a supposed expert accused corporations of having “no moral conscience,” Moore chimed in, “The problem comes in the profit motivation.” (But Moore’s profits from Fahrenheit – budget $6 million, earnings over $94 million – are apparently not a “problem.”)

The movie itself was nowhere near as fascinating as the setting, nor was it worth $9.25 and a post-midnight cab fare. It’s filled with the usual far-left lies: Bush and the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election, Bush is on vacation all the time, Bush exploited 9/11 for political gain, Bush is under the Saudis’ thumb, Bush was a deserter during Vietnam, Bush lied about Iraq, Bush let Osama get away so he could attack Iraq for oil, the military targets the poor and minorities, etc. But you know what? It was worth every dime to have seen it myself, rather than relying on others’ accounts.

Others have debunked and heckled Fahrenheit far better than I ever could. I won’t bother trying to equal them. But after seeing the movie and feeling rather sick to my stomach, I realized something: conservatives must not make the same mistake Michael Moore does.

Moore’s biggest mistake is that he does with George W. Bush what Jimmy Carter (and most liberals) did with Ronald Reagan: disdain his intelligence, dismiss him as a lightweight, and generally not take him seriously. Moore thinks Bush is stupid (although he does seem to be just smart enough to trick the whole country into going to war, twice) and that his policies are ridiculous - just like Carter thought Reagan was merely a lame-brained actor.

And it’s easy to think of Moore the same way, especially when he says things like, “The terrorist plan wasn’t what [the War on Terror] was all about. [The Bush administration] just wanted us to be fearful enough to get behind what the real plan [invading other countries to further enrich corporate America] was.” We can’t dismiss him like he dismisses Bush though, unless we want the necessary war against the Islamofascists to go the way of Carter’s reelection campaign.

The danger in Fahrenheit 9/11 is not that everyone who sees it will go home believing that the Saudis “own seven percent of America” and control our foreign policy, or that President Bush is a lazy idiot. Anyone who believes this is already beyond help. Rather, what we have to worry about is the uninformed people who will see the movie – or even hear about it from others – and allow such lies and propaganda to dissuade them from supporting the War on Terror that we must win.

I guess I’m particularly sensitive to this as a college student. Michael Moore, clown that he is, has a cult-like following on campuses. People my age who see his garbage, either of their own avail or (sorry to say) in class, happen to be part of the least politically engaged demographic – so they may not have heard the arguments of those who disagree with Moore. We need to address this issue before we write off Moore as simply “preaching to the choir.”

Yes, Michael Moore and his movie have nothing to add to an intelligent discussion of current events. But teaching the politically apathetic – particularly on campus – why that’s the case is definitely worthwhile. The Bucknell Conservatives plan to do our part. What about you?

[i]Charles Mitchell is president of the Bucknell University Conservatives Club, executive editor of its magazine, The Counterweight, and vice chairman of the newly-formed Young Conservatives of Pennsylvania. But most importantly, he is a 2004 summer intern at Townhall.com.[/i]

Dem Zell Miller: Democratic party is one of division, skepticism, and cynicism

07.31.04 (5:01 am)   [edit]
From OpinionJournal.com--

Today, it's the Democratic Party that has mastered the art of division and diversion. To run for president as a Democrat these days you have to go from interest group to interest group, cap in hand, asking for the support of liberal kingmakers. Mr. Kerry is no different. After Hollywood elites profaned the president, he didn't have the courage to put them in their place. Instead, he validated their remarks, claiming that they represent "the heart and soul of America."

[b]See Y'All in New York
Why I skipped the Boston convention.[/b]
BY ZELL MILLER
Saturday, July 31, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Twelve years ago, I delivered one of the keynote addresses on the first night at the Democratic National Convention in New York. It was a stinging rebuke of the administration of George H.W. Bush and a ringing endorsement of Bill Clinton. This summer I'll again be speaking in New York, but it will be to the Republican Convention that renominates George W. Bush.

Many have asked how I could have come so far in just over a decade. Frankly, I don't think I've changed much at all. At 72, I don't feel much need to change my opinions. Instead, the reason I didn't attend the Democratic Convention in Boston is that I barely recognize my party anymore. Most of its leaders--including our nominee, John Kerry--don't hold the same beliefs that have motivated my career in public service.

In 1992, I spoke of the opportunity and hope that allowed me, the son of a single mother growing up in the North Georgia mountains, to become my state's governor. And I attributed much of my success to the great Democratic presidents of years gone by--FDR (a hallowed man in my home), Truman and JFK. The link these men shared was a commitment to helping Americans born into any condition rise to achieve whatever goal they set for themselves.

I spoke of Americans who were "tired of paying more in taxes and getting less in services." I excoriated Republicans who "dealt in cynicism and skepticism." I accused them of mastering "the art of division and diversion." And I praised Bill Clinton as a moderate Democrat "who has the courage to tell some of those liberals who think welfare should continue forever, and some of those conservatives who think there should be no welfare at all, that they're both wrong."

Bill Clinton did deliver on welfare reform, after a lot of prodding from the Republicans who took hold of Congress in 1995. But much of the rest of the promise I saw in his candidacy withered during his two terms in office.

Today, it's the Democratic Party that has mastered the art of division and diversion. To run for president as a Democrat these days you have to go from interest group to interest group, cap in hand, asking for the support of liberal kingmakers. Mr. Kerry is no different. After Hollywood elites profaned the president, he didn't have the courage to put them in their place. Instead, he validated their remarks, claiming that they represent "the heart and soul of America."

No longer the party of hope, today's Democratic Party has become Mr. Kerry's many mansions of cynicism and skepticism. As our economy continues to get better and businesses add jobs, Mr. Kerry's going around America trying to convince people that the roof is about to cave in. He talks about "the misery index" and the Depression. What does he know about either?

And when it comes to taxes and services, you'd be pressed to find anyone more opposed to the interests of middle-class Americans than John Kerry. Except maybe John Edwards. Both voted against tax relief for married couples, tax relief for families with children, and tax relief for small businesses. Now Mr. Kerry wants to raise taxes on hundreds of thousands of small-business owners and millions of individuals. He claims to be for working people, but I don't understand how small businesses can create jobs if they've got to send more money to Washington instead of keeping it to hire workers.

Worst of all, Sens. Kerry and Edwards have not kept faith with the men and women who are fighting the war on terror--most of whom come from small towns and middle-class families all over America. While Mr. Bush has stood by our troops every step of the way, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards voted to send our troops to war and then voted against the money to give them supplies and equipment--not to mention better benefits for their families. And recently Mr. Kerry even said he's proud of that vote. Proud to abandon our troops when they're out in the field? I can hear Harry Truman cussing from his grave.

I still believe in hope and opportunity and, when it comes right down to it, Mr. Bush is the man who represents hope and opportunity. Hope for a safer world. And opportunity for Americans to work hard, keep more of the money they earn, and send their kids to good schools. All the speeches we heard this week weren't able to hide the truth of what today's Democratic Party has become: an enclave of elites paying lip service to middle-class values. Americans looking for a president who understands their struggles and their dreams should tune in next month, when we celebrate the leadership of George W. Bush.

[i]Mr. Miller is a Democratic senator from Georgia.[/i]

John Kerry's Prime-Time Assault on The Truth

07.30.04 (4:54 am)   [edit]
[b]The Biggest Liar of Them All [/b]
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 30, 2004

Now we can understand why Democrats spent the last year attacking the President as someone who lied to take America into an unnecessary war and destroy brave young American lives for his corporate friends in Texas. They did it to disarm and anesthetize us, to deconstruct the very idea of what truth is or what a fact is or what is is -- and prepare us for the most shameless charade in political memory, the phoniest convention for the phoniest party ever to mount an American electoral stage.

In Boston the Democrats -- the party of Al Sharpton, Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy and Michael Moore -- presented themselves as the party of patriotism and military glory and American military strength, and John Kerry as a man whose life has been one long preparation to be commander-in-chief. "I am John Kerry," he saluted his audience to begin his convention speech, "reporting for duty." Pardon me while I hurl. This is a man who came back from Vietnam to stab not only his country but his comrades-in-arms in the back. This is a man who to this very day has an honored place in the Communist enemy's "War Crimes Museum" -- that's American war crimes. This is a party and a wannabe commander in chief that has clamored and voted to oppose America's wars in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and in Iraq. This is a party and a commander in chief that lent comfort and aid to Communist dictators in Central America during the last years of the Cold War and nearly brought the Reagan presidency down for attempting to oppose the Communist tide.

This is a man and a party that voted to cut America's military and its intelligence services year after year, a man and a party who refused to institute the security measures that would have prevented 9/11. And this is a man and a party that has sabotaged the war on terror since the day Baghdad was liberated, that has embraced the reprehensible traitor Michael Moore, and the antiwar left of the Dean campaign, that has spread monstrous lies about its commander in chief and and in doing so undermined the nation's credibility and defenses. If another terrorist state were to become a threatening nuclear force (Iran comes immediately to mind) what American president can now face that enemy down with a credible military threat?

This is a party that from the beginning to the end of its convention pretended to be what it is not. And that is because it fears that American people already know what it is.

[i]David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as “the first great autobiography of his generation,” and which chronicles his odyssey from radical activism to the current positions he holds. Among his other books are The Politics of Bad Faith and The Art of Political War. The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as “the perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield.” Horowitz’s latest book, Uncivil Wars, was published in January this year, and chronicles his crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism on college campuses last spring.[/i]

Major Al Qaeda suspect caught ILLEGALLY into Texas, heading to NY

07.29.04 (5:50 am)   [edit]
....at least we caught this one, I guess. But neither Bush or Kerry have supported actually clamping down on illegal immigration.

Perhaps she was heading to the Republican National Convention?

[b]Al-Qaida Suspect Arrested in Texas[/b]
Updated: Wednesday, Jul. 28, 2004 - 6:50 PM
By J.J. Green
FederalNewsRadio.com

A South African woman picked up in Texas almost 10 days ago may turn out to be a key, high-level al-Qaida operative.

Her name is Farida Goolam Mohamed Ahmed. She was stopped at McAllen Miller International Airport on July 19. She was headed to New York.

Eddie Flores of the U.S. Border Patrol office in McAllen, Texas, tells FederalNewsRadio.com that a review of her papers raised some concerns.

"In looking at her documents, they did not find any entry documents in her passport where she was legally admitted into the United States," says Flores.

Ahmed produced a South African passport to the agents with four pages torn out, and with no U.S. entry stamps. Ahmed reportedly later confessed to investigators that she entered the country illegally by crossing the Rio Grande River. Ahmed was carrying travel itineraries showing a July 8 flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, to London. Six days later, Ahmed traveled from London to Mexico City before attempting to travel from McAllen to New York.

Government sources tell FederalNewsRadio.com that capturing this woman could be comparable to the arrest of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. It was revealed in court Tuesday that she was on a watch list and had entered the U.S. possibly as many as 250 times.

Tuesday, the South African government issued a warning that al-Qaida militants and other terrorists traveling through Europe had obtained South African passports, and authorities believe they got them from crime syndicates operating inside the government agency that issues the documents.

(Copyright 2004 FederalNewsRadio.com. All rights reserved.)

The Patriot Act has is constitutional, and it has saved lives. Period.

07.29.04 (5:35 am)   [edit]
[b]The Patriot Act Has Saved Lives[/b]
By Paul Rosenzweig
New York Newsday | July 29, 2004

Falsehood, according to Mark Twain's famous dictum, gets halfway around the world before the truth even gets its shoes on. Time and again, outlandish stories seem to grow legs and find wide distribution before the truth can catch up.

A good example is the USA Patriot Act. It's so broadly demonized now you'd never know it passed with overwhelming support in the days immediately after Sept. 11, 2001.

Critics paint the Patriot Act as a cauldron of abuse and a threat to civil liberties. Advocacy groups run ads depicting anonymous hands tearing up the Constitution and a tearful old man fearful to enter a bookstore. Prominent politicians who voted for the act call for a complete overhaul, if not outright repeal.

But the truth is catching up. And the first truth is that the Patriot Act was absolutely vital to protect America's security.

Before 9/11, our law enforcement and intelligence agencies were limited by law in what information they could share with each other. The Patriot Act tore down that wall - and officials have praised the act's value.

As former Attorney General Janet Reno told the 9/11 Commission, "Generally, everything that's been done in the Patriot Act has been helpful, I think, while at the same time maintaining the balance with respect to civil liberties." And as Attorney General John Ashcroft's recent report to Congress makes clear, this change in the law has real, practical consequences.

Information-sharing facilitated by the Patriot Act, for example, was critical to the successful dismantling of terror cells in Lackawanna, New York; Portland, Oregon; and northern Virginia. Likewise, the information-sharing provisions contained in the act assisted the prosecution in San Diego of those involved with an al-Qaeda drugs-for-weapons plot involving "Stinger" anti-aircraft missiles.

It also aided in the prosecution of Enaam Arnaout, who had a relationship with Osama bin Laden and used his charity organization to obtain funds illicitly from unsuspecting Americans for terrorist groups.

These are not trivial successes. On the contrary, they're part of an enormous, ongoing effort to protect America from further terrorist attacks.

We cannot, of course, say that the Patriot Act alone can stop terrorism. But every time we successfully use the new tools to thwart a terrorist organization, that's a victory.

Yet, remarkably, some of these vital provisions will expire at the end of next year. So here's a second truth: If Congress does nothing, then parts of the law will return to where they were on the day before 9/11 - to a time when our government couldn't, by law, connect all the dots. Nobody wants a return to those days, but that is where we are headed if Congress does not set aside its partisan debates.

But what of the abuses, you ask? Time for a third truth: There is no abuse of the Patriot Act. None. The Justice Department's inspector general (who is required by the Patriot Act to examine the use of the act and report any abuse twice a year) has reported that there have been no instances in which the Patriot Act has been invoked to infringe on civil rights or civil liberties.

Others agree. For example, at a Judiciary Committee hearing on the Patriot Act, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said: "I have never had a single abuse of the Patriot Act reported to me. My staff...asked [the ACLU] for instances of actual abuses. They...said they had none." So the fiction of abuse can be laid to rest. The government is not, to take but one popular myth, invading libraries and scouring your book records. It's a convenient fiction that calls to mind (as Joseph Bottum, a contributor to The Weekly Standard, has written) the appealing image of "white-haired...[librarians] resisting as best they can the terrible forces of McCarthyism, evangelical Christian book-burning, middle-class hypocrisy, and Big Brother government." But no matter how appealing the image, it has no more reality than any good Hollywood movie.

Government's obligation is a dual one: to provide security against violence and to preserve civil liberty. This is not a zero-sum game.

We can achieve both goals if we empower government to do sensible things while exercising oversight to prevent any real abuses of authority. The Patriot Act, with its reasonable extension of authority to allow the government to act effectively with appropriate oversight rules, meets this goal.

And the truth eventually catches up to the fiction.

Dem's new slogan: No Teacher Left Behind

07.29.04 (5:29 am)   [edit]
[b]Dems' New Slogan: No Teacher Left Behind[/b]
Ann Coulter
July 29, 2004

The traditional greeting at the Democratic National Convention is, "Where do you teach?" On rare occasions, the greeting is modified to, "Where does your husband teach?" or "Where does your gay lover teach?" (Democrats could save a lot of money by holding the Democratic National Convention and the National Education Association Convention at the same time.)

The Democrats keep loudly proclaiming that Republicans represent only extremely white rich people, while the Democrats represent all Americans. (Bar bet: Among the four major candidates for president and vice president this year, who has the smallest net worth? Answer: George Bush.)

If the Democrats are a fair cross-section of America, then I guess we can stop worrying about class size. As a friend of mine points out, if the Democratic delegates represent America, then the teacher-student ratio in this country is, at worst, one teacher for every three students. And since the teachers unions don't include private or parochial school teachers, we're looking at a teacher-student ratio of about one teacher for every one student.

Democrats are representative of the nation only if the nation we're talking about is Brazil. For Democrats, there is only the maid and millionaires. There are no Americans in the middle. To the extent Democrats are forced to recognize working-class white men, they call them "fascists."

To thunderous applause here in the American Taliban, billionaire Teresa Heinz Kerry said she looks forward to a day when "women who have earned the right to be opinionated will be called smart and informed -- just as men are." It's no wonder Democrats weren't interested in liberating Afghanistan and Iraq from woman-hating Islamicist fanatics: They think real oppression of women consists of people calling Teresa "opinionated" right here in the USA.

How did Teresa "earn" the right to be opinionated again? By marrying inherited wealth? She also boasted that the Heinz family charity, John Kerry, "earned his medals the old-fashioned way." A couple of sponges on another man's wealth might want to steer clear of using the word "earn" so much. Democrats don't believe in capitalism and don't worry about taxes on earned income because they can't imagine there is any way to "earn" money other than the Teresa Heinz-John Kerry way.

Despite colossal efforts by the Democrats to fake out Americans and pretend the Democrats are normal Americans who love their country, every once in a while they make a mistake and give us a "tell." The Democrats have carefully studied Americans, observed their habits and expressions, so you would think for five days the Democrats could pull off a passable impression.

Special-effects artists are working overtime. Gore was prohibited from screeching about Republicans being Nazis, and Clinton was told not to show up in a toga. Democrats unable to conceal their America-hating pacifism were relieved of their anti-war signs and escorted to the free-speech veal pens a few blocks from the convention center.

Convention organizers even forced the delegates to choke their way through the Pledge of Allegiance -- something the teachers' students are not allowed to say. The delegates play along, pretending they know the words and making the occasional random reference to "God," trying not to sound ironic.

But, inevitably, they stumble, dogs start growling, and you realize these people are androids.

In a prepared speech carefully reviewed by the Democrats' Americanization team, Jimmy Carter said: "After 9/11, America stood proud." Proud? I believe "proud" was the last emotion most Americans were feeling after 9/11, coming in considerably behind, for example, "fighting mad," "incensed," "enraged," "humiliated" and "vengeful." It didn't occur to any of the Democrats vetting Carter's speech to cut that line? "What's the matter, Prince? Why are you growling? That's just a moderate Democrat."

Even as Democrats ape Republicans -- producing a platform that lyingly claims Democrats support war with Iraq, the Patriot Act and the defense of America -- the fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats can't help slipping out: Democrats are not angry about 9/11. Sad, maybe -- sad that it didn't happen on Clinton's watch so his legacy would be more than a semen stain. But they're not angry.

Indeed, the belle of the ball at the convention is noted patriot Michael Moore, who apparently thinks Americans who voted for George Bush deserved to be killed on 9/11. The day of the attack, Moore wrote this on his Web page: "Many families have been devastated tonight. This is just not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C. and the planes' destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!" Perhaps Moore could provide the terrorists with a map of the red states before the next attack.

This week, Moore was boasting about how well-received he was by the Democrats in Boston -- evidenced by his yukking it up in a sky box with former president Jimmy Carter. He has been hugged by DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe and praised by impeached former president Bill Clinton.

Moore's only concession to the Democrats' role-playing is to deny that he is a Democrat, hoping enough Americans were taught by public school teachers that no one will know how to look up Moore's voter registration card. ("Democrat.")

Moore says Bush must be defeated because Bush lied about the war in Iraq. Ninety-three percent of the delegates agree with him, saying they oppose the war in Iraq, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

But the Democrats' candidates for president and vice president both voted for war with Iraq. Their party platform supports the war with Iraq. (Let's just hope wherever the delegates teach, they're not teaching logic.)

The only "issues" Democrats dare discuss publicly are the things everyone can agree on: They are for "jobs," a good economy and the middle class. None of their blather ever touches on any issue on which Democrats and Republicans could possibly disagree.

The issues on which the parties differ are: pre-emptive attacks on terror-producing nations, gay marriage, gun control, partial-birth abortion, taxes, letting non-citizens and felons vote. But the Democrats won't talk about those issues. This is the Democrats' week to make-believe they are Republicans for the folks watching at home on TV. In the lingo of the delegates, this is "story time."

Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org, a Townhall.com member group.

©2004 Universal Press Syndicate

The 9/11 report says government needs to imagine the unimagineable. Huh.

07.29.04 (5:22 am)   [edit]
The 9/11 report says that the US government's lack of imagination, for decades, allowed 19 Muslim terrorists to stage 9/11. Therefore, one of their recommendations is that we have to think "outside the box," so to speak. The Bush administration has dared to think outside the box already, and has been bashed for it.

Or have you forgotten the terror futures "market" that was a Bush proposal in 2002? Basically, intelligence types in the anti-terror fight would bet on the likelihood of a type of terror attack at a certain place. The idea behind it is that since the markets are often a better predictor economically than relying on conventional methods, a terror market might save lives . It was definitely a daring idea.

But it was also controversial. Leaving behind the left-wing nutjob accusations that this proves the callousness and detachment of the Bush administration (and of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Admiral Poindexter), there was real concern that, just like the stock market, a terror market could be manipulated and abused by terrorists themselves or perhaps independently wealthy folks who hate the US (hey, George Soros is one of those). It was probably a good idea, then, to not go forward with the project.

The Bush administration, however, has demonstrated that it does think outside the box and is fighting the right kind of war on terror. After all, John Kerry's only disagreement with the war on terror is that Bush somehow couldn't get France and Germany on board (as if he could-- they were in deep financially with Hussein) with Iraq, and that we don't have enough troops (is he proposing a draft? How would Kerry change that?). We've heard nothing-- and won't hear tonight-- anything from Kerry that thinks outside the box, that imagines the unimagineable. Instead, all we'll hear about are these mythical "values" that Kerry has over Bush (which means endorsing abortion?) and how he served in VIETNAM! (forgetting how his service, in light of his anti-military record means nothings, and also forgetting that he himself declard in 1992 that a man's service during the war didn't matter).

I think most sane folk know that they'd rather have Bush's leadership protecting us than John Kerry's. Bush has dared to think outside the box (Patriot Act, terror futures, its legal classifications of what a terrorist is and what rights they do/do not have), while Kerry has offered us nothing.

Fetal stem research: don't do it for the Gipper

07.29.04 (5:03 am)   [edit]
[i] Stem cells have other sources besides artificially-created fetuses. For instance, they can be harvested from umbilical cord blood without taking innocent life. Those who push for stem cells which involve the taking of innocent human life do so not because of some sort of medical necessity, but because there is gold in them thar hills to be had from the creation of an immense, wealth-generating industry dedicated to the manufacture and destruction of innocent human life for profit. [/i]

From Catholic Exchange--

[b]Fetal Stem Cell Research: Don't Do It for the Gipper[/b]
by Mark Shea
07/28/04

A few years ago, in Washington state, some particularly tone-deaf conservatives thought it would be a great idea to use the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday to stage a demonstration at the state capitol on behalf of the right to keep and bear arms.

The poor dears, full of enthusiasm for the Constitution and the work Dr. King had done to see that all Americans benefited from its protection, just did not seem to get it when most of Seattle (and in particular, Seattle's African-American community) failed to warm to the idea of rallying for the glory of gun ownership on the day set apart by our country to remember a great man who was murdered by a sniper. It was, shall we say, infelicitous.

[u]Misusing Reagan's Name[/u]

Now, we are living in the moment of the death of another great American: Ronald Reagan. Reagan is rightly honored for many great achievements, including his major role in the consignment of European communism to the ash heap of history, his renewal of American confidence after the "malaise" of the '70s, and his clear-thinking and clear-speaking approach to issues of human freedom and, in particular, the value of each individual human life. More than any other president, Reagan articulated a conviction in the "unalienable personhood of every American, from the moment of conception until natural death" and vowed "that I will take care that the Constitution and laws of the United States are faithfully executed for the protection of America's unborn children." Reagan, the author of Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, was profoundly committed to the sanctity of human life.

And yet, before Reagan's body was in the grave, powerful forces were capitalizing upon his death from Alzheimer's Disease to urge that we use stem cells — derived from fetuses grown specifically for the purpose of killing and harvesting their tissues — in the hope that some cure for this and other debilitating illnesses may be found. We are, in effect, being asked to endorse the killing and cannibalization of the unborn "for Reagan's sake." It is as tone-deaf a plea as the cry for gun rights at a Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial service.

[u]People Before Profits[/u]

And it is not medically necessary. Stem cells have other sources besides artificially-created fetuses. For instance, they can be harvested from umbilical cord blood without taking innocent life. Those who push for stem cells which involve the taking of innocent human life do so not because of some sort of medical necessity, but because there is gold in them thar hills to be had from the creation of an immense, wealth-generating industry dedicated to the manufacture and destruction of innocent human life for profit. It is ironic that those most critical of Reagan and his "Decade of Greed" are those most staunchly in favor of the creation of a system that is entirely (and needlessly) about the exploitation of innocent human life for the sake of Mammon.

[u]I Know What It's Like[/u]

It will doubtless be replied that those who do not rush to affirm this grotesque exploitation of President Reagan's death in wholesale betrayal of a truth he held dear are "heartless" and that if we only knew what he and his family had endured for the past ten years we would not be so critical. As a matter of fact, I do know what the Reagans have endured. I do not speak as somebody disengaged from the tragedy of Alzheimer's Disease. My mother-in-law is in the final stages of Alzheimer's. We also have had to watch her go far away to a place where we can no longer reach her. We've also had to struggle with the terrible suffering Dad has endured in the struggle to care for "Mamma Bear." We're acutely aware of what a hardship it is for both victim and family alike. But, as Reagan taught us, when the voice of Moloch whispers "Sacrifice your children and for you it will be well" then that voice must be resisted. And nobody would say that more vigorously than my lioness of a mother-in-law — were she still able to speak. Except, of course, Ronald Reagan.

[i]Mark Shea is Senior Content Editor for Catholic Exchange. You may visit his website at www.mark-shea.com check out his blog, Catholic and Enjoying It!, or purchase his books and tapes here. [/i]

Democrats in denial: they believe every thing wrong in the world is Bush's fault

07.28.04 (6:41 am)   [edit]
From NRO--

July 28, 2004, 12:08 a.m.
[b]Fleeting Nonsense
Election? What election?[/b]
by Jonah Goldberg

Boston, Mass — When Homer Simpson ran for the office of sanitation commissioner, he offered this stirring call to arms: "Animals are crapping in our houses and we're picking it up. Did we lose a war? That's not America!" The crowd went wild and Homer won the race.

After the first night of speeches here at the Democratic Convention, it's pretty clear the Democrats are borrowing from Homer's playbook. Here's the drill: State the obvious as if it is insightful. Then twist it to make it sound like the Republicans are fools or ogres for not seeing the wisdom in what you're saying.

"The Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the right people — their people," Bill Clinton declared to thunderous applause here Monday night.

What in the world is he talking about? This is an election, right? The Republicans think Republicans should run things. Democrats think Democrats should. Is there something I'm missing? Are Republicans somehow "cheating" because their campaign platform suggests that their own party is the right one to run America?

This was one of the many ironies, alas, lost on the Democrats.

So, too, was the rather rum spectacle of Jimmy Carter lecturing about the need to "restore the greatness of America" and gird American strength around the globe. Then again, maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps on the morning of September 11, 2001, millions cried in anguish, "If only Jimmy Carter were president!"

Aside from his shockingly gratuitous and unpresidential cheap shots about Bush's military service — wasn't it Carter who pardoned all those honest-to-God draft dodgers? — what stood out in Carter's oration was his tendency to attribute so many of the world's longest-running and most intractable problems to George W. Bush. "Violence has gripped the Holy Land," Carter intoned. Talk about walking into the movie half way through. Violence has gripped the Holy land for a very, very long time. In fact, bears have been using the woods as a bathroom since George Bush has been president, too. That's not exactly George W. Bush's fault. (Indeed, the worst flare-up of violence occurred after Bill Clinton failed to seal a peace deal in 2000 between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak.)

This is just a small sample of the convention's rhetorical drift so far. The Democrats have decided George Bush is guilty of every charge imaginable until proven innocent, and they are not interested in considering any evidence to the contrary. Admittedly, that's the nature of conventions, which are essentially giant choirs hungry to be preached to. Nevertheless, what varies from convention to convention and party to party is the credibility of those assumptions, and here the Democrats come up wanting.

The Boston Democrats take it as a fact that George W. Bush deliberately divides people, and for bad reasons. Time and again, Clinton insisted that Republicans "need a divided America." Jimmy Carter accused Bush of lying, or of "manipulating the truth" about the war in order to "generate public panic." The analysis behind such convictions goes something like this: George W. Bush enjoyed an astronomically high approval rating after 9/11 and the war with Afghanistan. But for political motives no one can explain, he chose "to divide" Americans and risk that popularity by "lying" about a war we didn't need to fight.

None of this is supposed to make sense on a rational level. These are expressions of faith. And for the Democratic Party, a Republican is by definition "divisive" whenever he does things Democrats don't like. It's similar to the way Democrats bang their high chairs about "wedge issues" — which is to say, issues that work better for Republicans than Democrats.

Speaker after speaker insisted that President Bush was a dangerous unilateralist who broke the common bonds of the international community. Among the evidence cited by Bill Clinton was George Bush's refusal to participate in the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto treaty. Never mind that Clinton took pretty much the same position when he was president. Bush is a dangerous maverick! Similarly, speaker after speaker took John Kerry's word for it that he has the sort of charm necessary to persuade the "international community" to share the burden in Iraq and Afghanistan it now refuses.

In other words, as with Homer Simpson, the Democrats are in denial. Homer thinks that someone else needs to clean up the messes in our homes, that somehow it's unfair that we should do our own dirty work. The Democrats have convinced themselves that George Bush unfairly — "divisively" — interrupted the holiday from history that was the 1990s. This is all nonsense, of course. But that's beside the point.

Copyright (c) 2004 Tribune Media Services

Clinton rewrites the economic history of the 1990s

07.28.04 (6:28 am)   [edit]
[b]That '90s Show
A return to Clintonism wouldn't be a return to peace and prosperity. [/b]

Wednesday, July 28, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Ah, the glorious, roaring 1990s. Bill Clinton got elected, raised taxes on the rich so that the budget deficit and interest rates fell, and thus kicked off one of the great booms in economic history. Then Al Gore lost the 2000 election--sorry, had it stolen--President Bush cut taxes, and the economy more or less immediately went to hell.

In case you've missed the speeches, this is one of the major story lines emerging from this week's Democratic conclave in Boston. As Mr. Clinton boasted in his Monday stemwinder, he left America in 2001 with "peace and prosperity." So elect John Kerry, we are told, and he'll take us back to the Clinton policies, starting once again with a tax increase that will reduce the deficit and return us to the happy days before Osama bin Laden, Enron, and the "middle-class squeeze."

This all sounds so good that even we'd like to believe it. There's just the small matter that it isn't even close to being the real economic history of the 1990s. Allow us to recall a few of the missing details amid this nostalgia trip, starting with the fact that the Clinton years began by inheriting a recovery that was finally gathering steam. The economy grew by more than 4% in 1992, including 4.5% in the fourth quarter, too late to re-elect George H.W. Bush but enough to give the Clinton era a running start.

Mr. Clinton did pass a tax increase in the summer of 1993, but only after Senate Democrats stripped out his new BTU tax and Senate Republicans killed his spending "stimulus." The expansion stumbled in early 1993, no doubt partly on tax-hike uncertainty, then revived late in the year. In 1994 stock markets were flat but interest rates actually rose throughout the year, peaking on the very day in 1994 that Republicans took Congress. That turned out to be the real start of the 1990s boom.

In economic policy, the rest of the decade was a stalemate between Mr. Clinton and the GOP majority on Capitol Hill. The Republicans prevailed on a capital-gains tax cut and the balanced budget, which Mr. Clinton first resisted and then embraced in part to block (successfully) GOP entitlement reforms. Congress actually cut discretionary federal spending in 1995, for the first time since 1981, and defense spending continued to fall.

A kind of virtuous Beltway gridlock took hold, with Washington doing little to get in the way of the private-sector's natural animal spirits. As the telecom and tech bubbles expanded, taxes from rising capital gains and stock-option payouts boosted federal revenues to a post-World War II high as a share of GDP (20.9%). And with budget surpluses rolling in, both parties began to spend like liberals once again after 1998.

Then the bubble burst--not in 2001, but starting in 2000. The tech-heavy Nasdaq peaked in March of Bill Clinton's final year in office. The National Bureau of Economic Research now says the economy shrank by 0.5% in the third quarter of 2000--albeit too late for voters to feel it that November. After a fourth quarter blip in growth, the economy slipped into recession by the formal definition (at least two consecutive quarters of declining GDP) in the first half of 2001.

In other words, the "Bush recession" began for all practical purposes on Mr. Clinton's watch. The spectacular popping of the dot-com bubble also meant that at least some of the wealth created in the late 1990s had been an illusion. While productivity gains and much of the growth were real, the over-investment in telecom and other areas was so great that it has taken years to recover.

As we later learned, the corporate scandals that burst into public view in late 2001 also began in the 1990s. Set aside who and what caused them, this timing meant that the Bush Administration had to clean up after the scandals, and the regulatory costs associated with that cleanup (Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.) caused a further delay in the recovery of business confidence and spending.

With all of this, as well as the aftermath of 9/11 and the war on terror, the amazing thing is that the recession was so short and mild by historical standards. The economy has now been expanding since late-2001, moving to more rapid growth in mid-2003 after the Bush marginal rate tax cuts were accelerated. There have been mistakes (too much non-defense spending) and budget deficits have returned, but the U.S. has led the rest of the world out of the doldrums. Despite the current political fighting over jobs, today's national jobless rate of 5.6% is about where it was (5.4%) when Mr. Clinton took credit for prosperity while campaigning for re-election in 1996.

All of this is relevant today because the Kerry Democrats want Americans to remember the 1990s as a Periclean-Clinton Age, while blaming the Bush Administration for the costs of cleaning up after the bubble and fighting the war on terror. If only we'll return to the Clinton mix of tax hikes to finance more spending on health care and education, they now say, the boom will return. As you can see, that wasn't--and wouldn't be--the half of it.

I had an abortion!!!

07.28.04 (6:18 am)   [edit]
[b]I had an abortion![/b]
Mike S. Adams
July 27, 2004

Yesterday, a columnist for Human Events (unfortunately, it was not Ann Coulter) sent a link advertising the latest t-shirt for Planned Parenthood. The text of the brief advertisement follows:

“They have finally arrived! Planned Parenthood is proud to offer yet another t-shirt in our new social fashion line: "I Had an Abortion" fitted T-shirts are now available. These soft and comfortable fitted tees assert a powerful message in support of women's rights. Order yours for $15 each.”

The columnist who sent me that link also asked “what do you think about Planned Parenthood selling t-shirts that celebrate abortion?” Well, here’s what I think:

I think that the notion that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” was never really the position of Al Gore, the Democrats, or Planned Parenthood.

I think that John Kerry is more honest than Al Gore. He admits that life begins at conception but still thinks that abortion should be legal. I think that John Kerry is a real humanitarian.

I think that America has been involved in an unjust war on the unborn for over thirty years.

I think that liberals are right when they say that a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats those who cannot fend for themselves.

I think that I am lucky to have parents who are pro-life.

I think that many people who are “pro choice” are glad that they were born before 1973. Otherwise, they might not be able to make choices.

I think about the night that my wife spent six hours with a woman who was having her second miscarriage. While the young woman was passing the fetus and writhing in pain, she was thinking about the two abortions she had previously. She was also thinking that she would never be able to have a child now that she wanted one. She may have been thinking about how she had been misled by Planned Parenthood and the Women’s Resource Center.

I think about feminists on my campus who violate the civil liberties of groups who wish to provide comfort for those women who need love and support, not condemnation. I think that they need someone who will share the Truth with them after their lives have been destroyed by the lies of Planned Parenthood.

I think about campus feminists who pass out condoms and put Planned Parenthood advertisements in every woman’s bathroom stall on campus.

I think about my failed efforts to get campus feminists to debate the abortion issue on our campus. I think about a North Carolina chapter of Planned Parenthood that declined a campus debate on abortion saying, “It is our policy not to debate the abortion issue.”

I think about the early feminists, the true feminists, like Susan B. Anthony, who were steadfastly opposed to abortion.

I think about all of the abortion clinics in minority communities. I think that the next Martin Luther King was probably aborted years ago.

I think that Margaret Sanger would have been proud to see the genocide against African Americans that has been launched in the name of “choice.” I think that she would be proud to see that this genocide is sponsored, celebrated, and embraced by the Democratic Party.

I think that those in Congress who voted against the ban on partial birth abortion should wear t-shirts saying “I have the blood of innocent children on my hands.”

I think that Jesus Christ loved us before we were born. I also think that He was single for all of his 33 years.

I think about Clinton’s former Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, when she said that pro lifers “need to get over this love affair with the fetus.” I think that Planned Parenthood has a “love affair with abortion.”

I think about Planned Parenthood telling teenagers that having an abortion is just like picking a scab. I think about someone wearing a t-shirt that says “I just picked a scab” in order to convey a “powerful message in support of women's rights.”

I think about American churches paying for the abortions of church employees.

I think that Psalm 139 speaks with finality on the issue of abortion.

I think that abortion is the most important issue in the coming election. I think that is true every election year. In fact, I think that abortion is the most important moral issue of our time.

When I hear college professors comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, I think about Hitler’s assertion that “the demand that defective people be kept from propagating equally defective offspring” represents “the most humane act of mankind.”

When I visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, I think about abortion.

I think that we are blessed to have George W. Bush as our president.

I think that by the time you read this article, our nation will see its 45,000,000th abortion since Roe v. Wade.

I think that pro-life groups should make their own t-shirts saying “your mother didn’t.”

NOW you know what I think.

Mike Adams can be reached at adams_mike@hotmail.com. Signed copies of his
first book are available at http://www.DrAdams.org and at the Salt Shaker Christian book store in Wilmington, NC.

©2004 Mike S. Adams

The convention cover-up

07.28.04 (6:14 am)   [edit]
[b]The convention cover-up[/b]
Cal Thomas
July 27, 2004

Boston - The Democratic National Convention, designed for television with so many flat-screen TVs in use that it looks like Circuit City on steroids, is trying to steal Ronald Reagan's optimism. Behind the party's smiling masks, though, is the traditional Democratic cynicism that says people can't do much for themselves without the help of government.

The "no Bush bashing" and the ban on talk about "gay marriage" messages went out early and are being (almost) enforced. There are references to President Bush's "dishonesty" and laments about the federal deficit, which never seemed to bother big-spending Democrats when they controlled the checkbook.

But these are not your "San Francisco Democrats" now served up for the TV audience from this East Coast liberal city. These are family-values/pro-militar y/responsible taxing-and-spending Democrats who exist only in the minds of consultants, pollsters and others for whom true convictions are to be hidden until the day after the election.

Former President Bill Clinton, who wowed the delegates and caused most of the big media to swoon, was at his best (worst?) as he spun his new rich-guy image and non-military service.

Clinton wants to sell the idea that draft dodging and enlisting are morally equivalent. No journalist dared to mention that Clinton could have voluntarily given his tax cut to the federal government, or that John Kerry could have taken advantage of a Massachusetts law that permits residents to pay at their old, higher rate. This is typical of those who think the Bush tax cuts are unfair. They want the political point, but they still keep the money.

Speaker after speaker criticized the war with Iraq, or the way it has been fought, but Clinton and Kerry have repeatedly pointed to what they believed to be Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and said that he must be removed from power.

Republicans will have no problem recalling such Clinton masterpieces as: "One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." (Feb. 4, 1998). He also said: "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." (Feb. 17, 1998)

Clinton's national security adviser Sandy Berger said: "(Saddam) will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 10 times since 1983." (Feb. 18, 1998).

Let's not forget Kerry. On Oct. 9, 2002, he said: "I will be voting to give the president of the United States the authority to use force - if necessary - to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." On Jan. 23, 2003, he said: "Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. . . . He presents a particularly grievous threat. . . . The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real."

In addition to the occasional financial contribution, the media are making in-kind contributions to the Democrats by refusing to recall some of these statements and allowing speakers - from the platform to their high-priced interview booths above the gigantic TV studio, uh, convention hall - to recite the party line. They are in too many cases cheerleading for the party they love to love. ABC's Peter Jennings labeled Sen. Hillary Clinton a "rock star," which, to the aging anchors hungering for one more rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine," is a good thing.

Many of the broadcast and cable TV networks are treating Teresa Heinz Kerry's remarks to a reporter to "shove it," after he questioned her about statements from Republicans she considers "un-American," as candid or courageous. They are not calling her a liar for denying what a videotape shows she said. Heinz Kerry is rapidly becoming the Martha Mitchell of her party, emulating the loudmouthed and out-of-control wife of the late Nixon attorney general John Mitchell.

The Democrats want this to be a positive convention and for the most part it is. But last week, many of these same Democrats who are all about optimism and positive feelings were calling President Bush a liar. And their surrogates, from Michael Moore to Whoopi Goldberg to Linda Ronstadt, will continue their name-calling until Election Day.

This convention is a masquerade ball. Look for Republicans to announce it's midnight and to unmask the cover-up.

©2004 Tribune Media Services

Five reasons to fear the Democratic party

07.28.04 (6:05 am)   [edit]
Five reasons to fear the Democratic party
Michelle Malkin
July 28, 2004

The theme of the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night is "A Stronger More Secure America," which will be capped off by a rousing speech from a renowned law-and-order Democrat: Al Sharpton. No joke.

Here are five other reasons to be afraid, very afraid, of putting a Democratic administration in charge of guarding America's gates.

1. Ted Kennedy. The senior bloviator from Massachusetts has worked relentlessly since the Sept. 11 attacks to cripple homeland defense. For
once, Teresa Heinz-Kerry speaks for me: "Ted Kennedy I don't trust."

Last January, he secretly attempted to remove funding for the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) -- a Justice Department program that helped nab at least 330 known foreign criminals, 15
illegal-alien felons and three known terrorists who attempted to enter the country. Last month, he introduced legislation that would gut the PATRIOT Act and radically restructure the immigration court system to protect and strengthen illegal aliens' rights.

He opposes allowing the nation's 600,000 local and state law enforcement officers to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. And, in proposing that the federal government maintain a new national registry
of law-abiding gun purchasers, [b]he has exploited the War on Terrorism to advance his anti-Second Amendment agenda.[/b]

If the Sept. 11 attacks were a "failure of imagination" as the 9/11 commission concluded, protecting America requires that we imagine this bone-chilling scenario and do all we can to prevent another disaster: Ted
Kennedy, attorney general of the United States.

2. The American Civil Liberties Union. The organization maintains dangerously absolutist positions against the use of torture to gather intelligence from al Qaeda terrorists, against the designation of enemy
combatants apprehended on either foreign or American soil, and against common-sense profiling in wartime. The ACLU joined Sen. Kennedy in opposing the carefully targeted NSEERS program. It sued to stop enactment of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which tightened employment requirements for airport screeners. And under the guise of protecting
civil rights, the ACLU supported the infamous wall of separation that handicapped communications between U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies fighting terrorism.

[b]In the nearly three years since the mass murder of 3,000 innocent people on American soil by fanatical Muslim terrorists, there is not a single law or policy that the ACLU has supported that would help prevent a
bloody repeat of Sept. 11.[/b]

3. The Professional Grievance-Mongers. From the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the collective response of the Diversity Is Our Strength
crowd to the War on Terror has been to cry, "Racist!" The ethnic shakedown artists who have sued over every slight and hyped every faked claim of a hate crime are America-bashing enablers of the worst sort -- and they
are the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

4. The Open Borders Lobby. Longtime readers know of my dissatisfaction with the Bush administration's unwillingness to get serious control of our immigration chaos. But if you are unhappy with the lack of progress
on securing our land, air and sea ports of entry, it will only get worse under Kerry-Edwards. Groups such as the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the National Council of La Raza, and the Ford Foundation
have protested enforcement, detention, deportation, employer sanctions, and secure identification measures every step of the way. It is from these ranks that a Democratic administration will draw upon to staff the
Justice Department, Department of Transportation and Department of Homeland Security. Scary.

5. First Responder Fetishists. In her convention remarks on Monday night, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton said the first homeland security priority in response to the 9/11 report was the "need to fully equip and
train . . . our first responders in the event of a terrorist attack." Eager to suck up to men and women in uniform, John Kerry has proposed adding 100,000 first responders to the ranks of firefighters and emergency
medical personnel nationwide. As I have said before, there is no question that our brave firefighters, cops and emergency personnel need increased training and support -- but dialing 911 is not the solution to
stopping another 9/11.

And neither is voting the party of the Chicken Little Clean-Up Crew into office.

Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at
michellemalkin.com

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Same old Carter at DNC, but he leaves one question unanswered

07.27.04 (8:30 am)   [edit]
July 27, 2004, 2:00 a.m.
[b]No Good
Same old Carter.[/b]
By Steven F. Hayward

Ever since the infamous "Killer Rabbit" attack of 1979 I've had trouble disassociating Jimmy Carter from Monty Python ("That rabbit is dynamite!"), and yet another flashback occurred during the Bill Clinton-narrated film about Carter preceding Carter's speech. Clinton's encomium — "No one has done more than Jimmy Carter, no one has done more than Rosalyn Carter, for the cause of peace" — brought to mind Eric Idle's send-up of the typical locution of the Academy Awards, in which Idle introduced an Oscar winner with the spot-on neologism: "A man who has only done more than not anyone."

Or maybe he's becoming a P. G. Wodehouse character. His line that "our leaders cannot lead if they mislead" recalls Wodehouse's comical fascist, Sir Roderick Spode, who stupefied his storm troopers with Carteresque lines such as, "Nothing stands between ourselves and victory — except defeat!"

But when Carter wasn't being unintentionally self-satirical, he was being his old squalid self. Never mentioning Bush by name but making obvious inferences is vintage Carter. Recall how he would call attention to Chappaquiddick in 1980 by saying "I never panicked in a crisis." His low point in last night's speech was accusing "the current administration" of fostering "public panic." Carter no doubt prefers Americans to approach terrorism with malaise instead. He began his speech recalling his 1976 theme of giving us "a government as good as the people," forgetting that one reason the people decisively rejected him four years later was because he had come around to saying the people were no good. (In fact, Carter used many of the same stiff and awkward looking hand gestures of his famous "malaise" speech.)

And should Carter ever use the word "screeching," especially in connection with an oxymoron like "Middle East peace process"? ("The current administration," Carter said, has brought the Middle East peace process "to a screeching halt.") The old Carter chutzpah was on full display as well, with his precious comment that "the current administration" has let the North Korean nuclear crisis fester. This is the man who aggravated the crisis in the first place, and came back from Pyongyang to tell Americans that Kim Il Sung, the last of the Stalin-era thanatocrats, was the North Korean equivalent of George Washington or Patrick Henry.

But the performance Carter most resembled was not a literary creation of Monty Python or Wodehouse, but his own in the debate with Ronald Reagan in 1980. At least twice in his speech last night Carter used the word "disturbing," as well as the word "extreme," to describe the Bush administration. In his 1980 debate with Reagan, Carter called Reagan's views "disturbing" six times, and "extreme" or "out of the mainstream" several times. One of Carter's own aides remarked that throughout the debate, "Jimmy looked like he was about to slug him."

Reagan famously flicked Carter off his sleeve with his retort, "There you go again." With that one line, Reagan deflated Carter's relentless attacks on his supposed extremism, reminded voters about Carter's essential unpleasantness, and made obvious who was the "disturbed" person on stage. But last night's speech did leave out one important detail from his debate with Reagan. Carter left unanswered the question on everybody's mind: What does Amy think about the war on terrorism?

— Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Real Jimmy Carter: How America's Worst Ex-President Undermines Democracy, Coddles Dictators, and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry.

RFK, Jr. calls Bush a "fascist", makes up the word's definition

07.27.04 (8:27 am)   [edit]
On a side note, I am astounded that the party that claims to be about giving everyone a "voice" coerces people into voting for them and tries to force Ralph Nader out of exercizing his right to run for president.

Hypocrisy marches on.

From NRO--

July 27, 2004, 10:21 a.m.

[b]RFK Jr. Uses the F-Word[/b]
The Kennedy heir tells a left-wing audience that Bush has brought fascism to America.

Boston, Mass — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the late senator and nephew of the late president, told an audience in Cambridge, Mass. Monday that President Bush has brought fascism to America.

Kennedy appeared at a forum, "Books, Politics, and the Culture War," sponsored by the Harvard Book Store and the Progressive Book Club. A longtime environmentalist, he delivered an extended criticism of the Bush administration's environmental policies before alleging that the president has, in effect, created a fascist system of government in America.

"I was taught that Communism leads to dictatorship and that capitalism leads to democracy," Kennedy told the audience at the First Parish Church. "Well, it's not that simple." Free-market capitalism, Kennedy explained, does in fact lead to democracy, but "corporate, crony capitalism," which Kennedy said is practiced by the Bush administration, "is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria."

"You have to understand the difference between free-market capitalism...and the kind of corporate crony capitalism where you have large corporations running our government," Kennedy said. "There's a name for that, and the name is fascism."

The overwhelmingly left-leaning crowd, many of whom had come to Boston for the Democratic National Convention, began to cheer loudly. Kennedy finished his point by citing the American Heritage Dictionary, which he said "defines 'fascism' as the control of government by large corporations with right-wing ideology, driven by bellicose nationalism." That, Kennedy said, is the situation America is in today under the Bush administration. The crowd broke into even louder cheers — the most enthusiastic of the event.

Monday was not the first time that Kennedy has suggested the Bush administration has fascist tendencies. Last December, in an interview with the left-wing website Buzzflash, Kennedy said, "A farmer sent me a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary's definition of fascism the other day, and the definition is roughly that the control of government by large corporations with right-wing ideologies, driven by bellicose nationalism. That has a familiar ring these days."

For the record, the American Heritage Dictionary, as available on the web, includes the phrase "belligerent nationalism" but does not include references to corporations or "right-wing ideology."

At the First Parish Church, Kennedy's fellow panelists were novelist Toni Morrison, Clinton loyalist Sidney Blumenthal, and anti-Bush radio host Al Franken. The discussion was moderated by Joe Conason. Although the session was advertised as an examination of the role of books in politics, much of the time was devoted to denunciations of the Bush administration, coupled with admonitions for the audience to vote for John Kerry this November.

For example, during the question-and-answer part of the program, a woman rose to say that she had been very involved in the presidential campaign of Dennis Kucinich. She was now trying to decide whether to vote for Kerry, she said, but "Since I got here [Boston], I feel worse and worse about making that choice." She was particularly unhappy with Kerry's position on the war in Iraq.

"What am I going to do?" the woman asked.

"You're going to vote for Kerry," Franken told her.

"You should make the correct choice, and it's a very simple and easy one," added Conason.

9/11 Commission does it right by referring to terrorism as ISLAMIC terrorism

07.27.04 (7:49 am)   [edit]
[b]The 9/11 Report's Straight Shooting on Islamist Terror [/b]
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 27, 2004

Finally, an official body of the U.S. government has come out and said what needs to be said: that the enemy is “Islamist terrorism … not just ‘terrorism,’ some generic evil.” The 9/11 commission in its final report even declares that Islamist terrorism is the “catastrophic threat” facing the United States.

As Thomas Donnelly points out in the New York Sun, the commission has called the enemy “by its true name, something that politically correct Americans have trouble facing.”

Why does it matter that the Islamist dimension of terrorism must be specified? Simple. Just as a physician must identify a disease to treat it, so a strategist must name an enemy to defeat it. The great failing in the U.S. war effort since September 2001 has been the reluctance to name the enemy. So long as the anodyne, euphemistic, and inaccurate term “war on terror” remains the official nomenclature, that war will not be won.

Better is to call it a “war on Islamist terrorism.” Better yet would be “war on Islamism,” looking beyond terror to the totalitarian ideology that lies behind it.

Significantly, the same day that the 9/11 report was published, July 22, President George W. Bush for the first time used the term “Islamic militants” in a speech, bringing him closer than ever before to pointing to the Islamist threat.

The report of the “National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States” has other good value. It paints an accurate picture of Islamist views, describing these as a “hostility toward us and our values [that] is limitless.” Equally useful is the description of the Islamist goal being “to rid the world of religious and political pluralism.”

In contrast to those analysts who wishfully dismiss the Islamists as a few fanatics, the 9/11 commission acknowledges their true importance, noting that bin Laden’s message “has attracted active support from thousands of disaffected young Muslims and resonates powerfully with a far larger number who do not actively support his methods.” The Islamist outlook represents not a hijacking of Islam, as is often but wrongly claimed; rather it emerges from a “long tradition of extreme intolerance” within Islam, one going back centuries and in recent times associated with Wahhabism, the Muslim Brethren, and the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb.

The commission then does something almost unheard of in U.S. government circles; it offers a goal for the war now underway, namely the isolation or destruction of Islamism.

And, after nearly three years, how fares the war? The commission carefully distinguishes between the enemy’s twofold nature: “al Qaeda, a stateless network of terrorists” and the “radical ideological movement in the Islamic world.” It correctly finds the first weakened, yet posing “a grave threat.” The second is the greater concern, however, for it is still gathering and “will menace Americans and American interests long after Usama Bin Ladin and his cohorts are killed or captured.” U.S. strategy, therefore, must be to dismantle Al-Qaeda’s network and prevail over “the ideology that gives rise to Islamist terrorism.” In other words, “the United States has to help defeat an ideology, not just a group of people.”

Doing so means nothing less than changing the way Muslims see themselves, something Washington can help with but cannot do on its own: “Tolerance, the rule of law, political and economic openness, the extension of greater opportunities to women—these cures must come from within Muslim societies themselves. The United States must support such developments.”

Of course, such an evolution “will be violently opposed by Islamist terrorist organizations” and this battle is the key one, for the clash underway is not one of civilizations but one “within a civilization,” that civilization being the Islamic one. By definition, Washington is a bystander to this battle. It “can promote moderation, but cannot ensure its ascendancy. Only Muslims can do this.”

Moderate Muslims who seek reform, freedom, democracy, and opportunity, the report goes on, must “reflect upon such basic issues as the concept of jihad, the position of women, and the place of non-Muslim minorities,” then they need to develop new Islamic interpretations of these.

The 9/11 commission has fulfilled its mandate in interpreting the current danger. The Bush administration should now take advantage of its insights and implement them with dispatch.

Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

DNC day 1: an evening of losers (Gore, Carter)

07.27.04 (7:43 am)   [edit]
[b]DNC Day 1: An Evening of Losers [/b]
By Jonathan V. Last
Weekly Standard | July 27, 2004

Boston

JOHN KERRY and John Edwards want to bring you a stronger America. It says so on their signs and the slogan flickers across the thin, ticker-tape video screens that ring the Fleet Center, repeating over and over and over. To that end, they've decided to open their convention with the two biggest losers in the recent history of the Democratic party: Al Gore and Jimmy Carter.

Introduced by Bill Richardson, Al Gore emerges to a warm, if not thunderous ovation. By way of introduction, Richardson notes that Gore was the choice of more Americans in the last election. That seems a little cruel. Imagine if Craig Ehlo spent his entire life being introduced as the man who got beat at the buzzer by Michael Jordan, or Guy Lewis was always introduced as the guy who lost the NCAA championship on Jim Valvano's last second prayer.

Gore is supposedly one of the two "untouchables" this week--speakers who are allowed to say as many mean things about George W. Bush as they want. As such, there's some excitement about his remarks tonight, with many Republicans hoping he'll give a repeat performance of some of his recent, crazed harangues.

These Republicans stand disappointed. Gore's talk is casual and wistful. He makes a number of jokes about his 2000 loss ("You know the old saying: you win some, you lose some. And then there's that little-known third category.") Gore says that he "didn't come here to talk about the past," but that's all he really does.

"In our democracy, every vote has power," he says. "And never forget that power is yours. Don't let anyone take it away from you, or talk you into throwing it away." That's Gore's first reference to Ralph Nader. His second comes a few minutes later when he says, "For those who supported a third-party candidate in 2000, do you still believe that there was no difference between the candidates?"

Gore is so fixated on the past that he doesn't even mention John Kerry's name until nearly nine minutes into his remarks. After a brief, terribly unconvincing testimonial (Kerry's "word is his bond"), Gore says, "To those of you who felt disappointed or angry with the outcome in 2000, I want you to remember all of those feelings. But then I want you to do with them what I have done: focus them fully and completely on putting John Kerry and John Edwards in the White House."

It's a selfless and disciplined performance. Gore has jettisoned his angry, Deaniac persona and presented himself as a cautionary tale. Here is an Al Gore who admits he lost and makes no excuses for it. It's like a '50s health-class film strip on gonorrhea: Look at Al; if you're not careful, you could wind up just like him.

When Gore finishes, Tipper comes onstage. They reenact The Kiss from the 2000 convention, and then exit, stage right. Once upon a time, Al Gore was a Democratic heavy. Defeated, he became a fiery heretic. Defanged, he's now nothing more than a walking parable. Somewhere in a swing state, John Kerry is smiling. Mission accomplished.

A NUMBER OF SMART, important speakers followed--Glenn Close, Barbara Mikulski, a children's choir singing "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land"--but the real excitement is in the box behind me when Michael Moore emerges, clad in a black shirt and blue jeans, with a green baseball cap. It's pandemonium. The nearest delegation is made up of folks representing Democrats Abroad. Their reaction is similar to what you would expect from a pack of 19-year-old boys if Britney Spears wandered, drunk, into their frat house. People vault over railings and push and shove their way up the short stairway to the balcony where Moore is holding court. Ever the gentleman, Moore smiles shyly and shakes hands and signs autographs. Dozens of expatriates can now die happy.

AL GORE'S defeat thus handled, it's time to get the other piece of Democratic detritus out of the way. By way of introduction, Bill Richardson says that President Carter gave us "a strong America." Hmmm. Now I'm just asking, but will John Kerry's "stronger America" be like Jimmy Carter's "strong America," only more so? Don't say you weren't warned.

President Carter gets a heartfelt and sustained ovation and emerges to "Georgia," which is appropriately slow and bittersweet. Unlike Gore, Carter mentions Kerry in his second sentence, before embarking on a prolonged, personal critique of George Bush.

Talking about his time in the Navy, Carter mentions that he served under Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, "both of whom," he notes pointedly, "had faced their active military duties with honor." When John Kerry was called to military service, Carter winks, "He showed up."

It's the former president's biggest applause line, and it represents a theme: Nearly all of his applause lines are attacks on President Bush. Carter rails against the "super rich" (oops!) and frets that the goodwill from September 11 "has been squandered." The current president, Carter says, has "misled" us.

At times, Carter veers into intellectual incoherence. He charges that "the Middle East peace process has come to a screeching halt for the first time since Israel became a nation." This is true, of course. Except that the screeching halt occurred on Bill Clinton's watch, with the dissolution of the Oslo Accords.

Carter also performs a neat bit of revisionist history, explaining that America won the Cold War because of "sustained bipartisan support" for "the defense of our own freedom and the promotion of human rights." Never mind that this sustained support was often not bipartisan and that Carter himself was nearly always on the wrong side of it. No, the stunning thing is that the former president is holding up the duty to promote human rights as an argument against the war in Iraq.

On the subject of Iraq, Carter criticizes the Bush doctrine of "preemptive war," before complaining that president should have gone after North Korea, instead.

Towards the end of his remarks, President Carter asks the delegates to repudiate "extremism" and worried about "extremist doctrines" which are pulling America into dangerous waters. I'm assuming he was talking about Bush, but you never know. After his speech, Jimmy Carter repaired to small box behind my workstation. There, the former president of the United States and his wife, Rosalynn, sat down next to Michael Moore.

How Europe deliberately became Eurabia

07.27.04 (7:32 am)   [edit]
[b]How Europe Became Eurabia[/b]
By Bat Ye’or
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 27, 2004

Last Tuesday, the 25 nations of the European Union (EU) voted unanimously to support a United Nations Resolution condemning Israel’s defensive fence (ignoring that this barrier was constructed to keep jihadist murderers from entering the nation via Judea and Samaria). The EU’s craven, morally bankrupt stance was sadly consistent with Eurabian policies evident now for three decades. In fact, the EU has been completing a slow metamorphasis into the "Christian" arm of the Pan-Arab world, different in religious observation (or lack of same) but united in its views of Israel and America.

The European Community (EC), and later the EU, has been aligned with Arab policy regarding Israel and the United States since its June 1977 declaration. Disruption of the Western alliance by separating Europe from America, and the piecemeal destruction of Israel were the pillars of the Euro-Arab alliance that gave birth to Eurabia. The formation of this tactical alliance can be traced clearly to a document issued 24 years ago. Prompted by fears of Khomeini's Shi’ite theocracy in Iran, international Arab terrorism and the rise of oil prices, the EC adopted the 1980 Venice Declaration. This declaration made clear that the EC, under French leadership, had adopted Pan-Arab conditions regarding Israel without qualification, including: the 1949 armistice as Israel’s legitimate borders; Arab sovereignty over East Jerusalem; an Arab Palestinian state; the recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians, as well as its participation in all negotiations, and the obligation of Israel to negotiate with Arafat, exclusively; and the refusal to recognize a separate peace between Israel and any Arab country, for the resolution of the "Palestinian problem." By adopting all those conditions (which contradicted UN Resolution 242) Europeans could in turn justify their ahistorical designation of Judea and Samaria as occupied Arab land. Ultimately, the entire European effort to delegitimize and vilify Israel hinges upon this inaccurate, disingenuous formulation. In the 1970s and 80s, the Communist bloc and the burgeoning Euro-Arab alliance granted international legitimacy to the denial of Israel’s rights by the PLO. France, and to a lesser extent Germany, directed the entire European Community foreign policy in accord with Arab-Islamic sentiments. A careful reading of the Venice Declaration (1980), the Fez Islamic Conference (1980), the Amman Arab Summit (1980), and the Taif-Mecca Islamic Summit (1981) reveals the similarities between the European and Arab positions in relation to Israel. Europe’s modified wording is just a fig-leaf.



This subterfuge allows the EU to pose as a “neutral” agent between Israel and the Arab world and to retain a role in the peace-for-terrorists-proc ess. At the Durban circus in September 2001, European representatives tried in vain to conceal the anti-American and anti-Semitic animus that permeates Eurabian policies, most visibly through the collusion of Eurabian and Arab NGOs. And again, during the recently completed International Court of Justice proceedings in The Hague, Eurabian judges employed similar tactics but joined their colleagues from the Muslim world in finding Israel’s anti-terrorist barrier “illegal” (and thus denying the Jewish state its legal right to self-defense).



Beyond a fleeting awareness, the overwhelming majority of Europeans and Americans do not understand the new Eurabian entity, which only the first step in a steady progression toward its Arabization and Islamization. Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secula r elements, to a "civilization of dhimmitude," i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing.


This evolution of Europe has been duplicated internally within every EU country. This deliberate, comprehensive process has taken place through several means: the control of Middle Eastern Studies departments at European universities, and the re-writing of historical textbooks; allowing Euro-Arab bodies to screen cultural exchanges and publications relating to Islam and the Arab Muslim world for unwelcome content; taboos imposed on issues related to immigration and Islam; disinformation campaigns demonizing Israel (and America), while fostering a comprehensive and “brotherly” alliance between EU and Arab League countries on the political, economic, cultural, and social levels; and the servile obedience of the EU's mainstream media to all these initiatives.

Most recently, this program of Euro-Arab symbiosis has been codified in a detailed report entitled, “Dialogue between Peoples and Cultures in the Euro-Mediterranean Area.” Released last October, this report (whose contributors included Umberto Eco and Tariq Ramadan) was to establish complete interdependence between Europe and the Arab-Muslim world. Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, established the High-Level Advisory Group which stated the aims, policies, and routine functions of the foundation. The Advisory Group mandated that the foundation have complete financial and administrative independence in managing its budget and in choosing its partners. In support of this remarkable request, the Advisory Group argued that the foundation needed considerable resources to cover its activities that would be extraordinarily expensive, as they will encompass all the countries of the EU. The Advisory Group further justified such conditions by invoking its lofty aim, which “is nothing less than peace itself.” And this “peace” -- accomplished through “brotherly love” and “dialogue” between the North and the South of the Mediterranean -- will be achieved by a total economic, political, and cultural fusion.

This May (2004), the EU followed this report up by accepting the creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures, named after Anna Lindh, the Swedish minister murdered by a deranged man. Lindh was a staunch defender of Arafat and advocated an economic boycott of Israel by the EU, a policy long desired by Eurabian politicians. Not surprisingly, the Anna Lindh Foundation draws inspiration from the spirit of Edward Said, the late dhimmi ideologue bent upon subverting Western culture, and values. The Anna Lindh Foundation endeavors to fight what it dubs “Fortress Europe” on Arab immigration issues, and to establish a totalitarian academic structure which alone will be entitled to teach and publish material on the Euro-Arab Mediterranean. It will also monitor the texbooks and university curricula for all of the EU. Moreover, the Foundation promotes the vision of a unified Euro-Mediterranean world where people are not even defined as being from the North or the South, (terms considered too provocative as they might evoke visions of a once-Christian North and a very Muslim South). The Euro-Arab continent will instead be populated by an amorphous mass called only “Us,” without acknowledged ethnic, national, or religious features. In reality, Europe is creating a gigantic Muslim community, or “umma,” which is also inhabited by an anonymous (and precipitously dying) European dhimmi population.



One can choose to ignore it, but Eurabia is a tangible entity. Eurabia has a discernible historical development, and its functionaries are now well entrenched in each European parliament, and at the head of the European Commission. Often Javier Solana merely parrots the Arab League's Amr Moussa, or the Palestinian Authority's Yasser Arafat. Hence Solana's parrots the pan-Arab refrain that no reforms can be achieved in any Muslim country before the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, reiterating the same fatuous statements made by Amr Moussa. The EU continues to proclaim that all negotiations must be conducted with Arafat alone and that the Middle East conflict is at the center of world politics. Those two assertions were repeated endlessly at the Fez, Amman, and Taif Summits (1980-81). The EU’s unlimited funds finance anti-Israeli and anti-American campaigns, as well as the "dialogue" industry. Regarding Israel in particular, it appears as if the EU has become the obsequious mouthpiece of the Arab League.



This Eurabian ethos operates at all levels of European society. Its countless functionaries, like the Christian janissary slave-soldiers of past Islamic regimes, advance a jihadist world strategy. Eurabia cannot change direction; it can only use deception to mask its emergence, its bias and its inevitable trajectory. Eurabia’s destiny was sealed when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the United States, particularly in terms of its resultant foreign policy realities. Americans should consider the despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly responsible people. Finally, Americans should understand that Eurabia’s contemporary anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are the spiritual heirs of 1930s Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent.

There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore

07.27.04 (12:09 am)   [edit]
From OpinionJournal.com--

[b]When Punchline Trumps Honesty
There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore.[/b]
BY SCOTT SIMON
Tuesday, July 27, 2004 12:01 a.m.

Michael Moore has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and may win an Oscar for the kind of work that got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jack Kelly fired.

Trying to track the unproven innuendoes and conspiracies in a Michael Moore film or book is as futile as trying to count the flatulence jokes in one by Adam Sandler. Some journalists and critics have acted as if his wrenching of facts is no more serious than a movie continuity problem, like showing a 1963 Chevy in 1956 Santa Monica.

A documentary film doesn't have to be fair and balanced, to coin a phrase. But it ought to make an attempt to be accurate. It can certainly be pointed and opinionated. But it should not knowingly misrepresent the truth. Much of Michael Moore's films and books, however entertaining to his fans and enraging to his critics, seems to regard facts as mere nuisances to the story he wants to tell.

Back in 1991 that sharpest of film critics, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, blunted some of the raves for Mr. Moore's "Roger and Me" by pointing out how the film misrepresented many facts about plant closings in Flint, Mich., and caricatured people it purported to feel for. "The film I saw was shallow and facetious," said Kael, "a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing."

His methods remain unrefined in "Fahrenheit 9/11." Mr. Moore ignores or misrepresents the truth, prefers innuendo to fact, edits with poetic license rather than accuracy, and strips existing news footage of its context to make events and real people say what he wants, even if they don't. As Kael observed back then, Mr. Moore's method is no more high-minded than "the work of a slick ad exec."

The main premise of Mr. Moore's recent work is that both Presidents Bush have been what amounts to Manchurian Candidates of the Saudi royal family. Mr. Moore suggests (he depends so much on innuendo that a simple, declarative verb like "says" is usually impossible) the Saudi government, having soured on their pawns for unstated reasons, launched the attacks of Sept. 11.

"What if these weren't wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed onto a suicide mission?" Moore asks in the best-selling "Dude, Where's My Country?" "What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family?" Central to Mr. Moore's indictment of the current President Bush is his charge that the U.S. government secretly assisted the evacuation of bin Laden family members from the U.S. in the hours following the Sept. 11 attacks, when all other flights nationwide were grounded. He supports this with grainy images of indecipherable documents.

But on our show on Saturday, Richard Clarke, the government's former counter-terrorism adviser and no apologist for the Bush administration, told us that he had authorized those flights, but only after air travel had been restored and all the Saudis had been questioned. "I think Moore's making a mountain of a molehill," he said. Moreover, said Mr. Clarke, "He never interviewed me." Instead, Mr. Moore had simply lifted a clip from an ABC interview. Perhaps Mr. Moore just didn't want to get an answer that he didn't want to hear. (See how useful innuendoes can be?)

In what is perhaps the most wrenching scene in the film, an Iraqi woman is shown wailing amid the rubble caused by a bomb that killed members of her family. I do not doubt her account, or her sorrow. I have interviewed Iraqis about U.S. bombs that killed civilians. People who agree to wars should see the human damage bombs can do.

But reporters who were taken around to see the sites of civilian deaths during the bombing of Baghdad also observed that some of those errant bombs were fired by Iraqi anti-aircraft crews. Mr. Moore doesn't let the audience know when and where this bomb was dropped, or otherwise try to identify the culprit of the tragedy.

Mr. Moore tries hard to identify himself with U.S. troops and their concerns. But he spends an awful lot of effort depicting them as dupes and brutes. At one point in "Fahrenheit 9/11," someone off-camera prods a U.S. soldier into singing a favorite hip-hop song with profane lyrics. Mr. Moore then runs the soldier's voice over combat footage, to make it seem as if the soldier were insensitively singing along with the destruction.

In another scene, U.S. soldiers make savage jokes about the awkward effects of rigor mortis on one part of the corpse of an Iraqi soldier. I do not doubt the authenticity of those pictures. But I also have no particular reason to trust it. A few basic details, like where and when the video was shot, are considered traditional reporting techniques (especially after the front-page photos of British soldiers brutalizing Iraqi prisoners turned out to be frauds). A few other basic facts might have informed the audience. Was the Iraqi killed in battle? By a suicide bomb? Moore says the U.S. soldiers are good boys turned coarse in an immoral war. But I have also heard those kind of ugly and anxious jokes about corpses from overstressed emergency room physicians.

In the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote that, "Viewers may come away from Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true," and that he "uses association and innuendo to create false impressions." Try to imagine those phrases on a marquee. But that is his rave review! He lauds "Fahrenheit 9/11" for its "appeal to working-class Americans." Do we really want to believe that only innuendo, untruths, and conspiracy theories can reach working-class Americans?

Governments of both parties have assuaged Saudi interests for more than 50 years. (I wonder if Mr. Moore grasps how much the jobs of auto workers in Flint depended on cheap oil.) Sound questions about the course, costs, and grounds for the war in Iraq have been raised by voices across the political spectrum.

But when 9/11 Commission Chairman Kean has to take a minute at a press conference, as he did last Thursday, to knock down a proven falsehood like the secret flights of the bin Laden family, you wonder if those who urge people to see Moore's film are informing or contaminating the debate. I see more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore. No matter how hot a blowtorch burns, it doesn't shed much light.

Mr. Simon hosts NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday" and is the author of theforthcoming "Pretty Birds," a novel about the siege of Sarajevo, from Random House.

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Let the people see the documents Berger was hiding

07.27.04 (12:03 am)   [edit]
From OpinionJournal.com--

[b]All the President's Memos
Let's all see what Sandy Berger was trying to hide.[/b]
Tuesday, July 27, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

We've all had experience with the office Oscar Madison. Yet notwithstanding Bill Clinton's transparently insincere effort last week to laugh off the docs-in-socks scandal as a testament to Sandy Berger's sloppy ways--that Sandy!--the precision with which the former National Security Adviser zeroed in on one specific document in the National Archives suggests focus, not absentmindedness.

Which raises the obvious question: What was in that document that Mr. Berger so badly wanted to keep under his hat, er, trousers? The only way to answer that question is for the Justice Department to release it.

The 9/11 Commission report offers a tease. [b]It records Mr. Berger's objections to at least four proposed attacks on al Qaeda between 1998 and 2000. A footnote on page 500 puts it this way: "In the margin next to Clarke's suggestion to attack al Qaeda facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote 'no.' "[/b]

The Clarke in that footnote, of course, is Richard Clarke. He is the author of the document Mr. Berger pinched from the archives, an after-action review of the Clinton Administration's response to al Qaeda's 1999 threats against the U.S. In his own testimony to the Commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft--who has the advantage of having read the document--says that in it [b]Mr. Clarke attributes such success as the Clinton Administration had against al Qaeda to luck rather than skill.[/b]

[b]That belies the public line taken by both Mr. Berger and Mr. Clarke, which is no small matter given how critical both have been about the Bush Administration these past few months. Certainly their own credibility is an issue, as is that of Mr. Clinton, who has also claimed that he told Mr. Bush how consumed he was with al Qaeda.[/b]

Still, the main public interest here has nothing to do with fixing blame on either Mr. Berger, Mr. Clarke or the Clinton Administration for what they did or did not do pre-9/11. To the contrary, it has to do with the single largest question of this election: How America ought to respond to the terror threat.

On Sunday, Commission Chairman Tom Kean said that Mr. Berger's padded hosiery did not affect the Commission's final report. [b]Mr. Kean says he believes Commissioners had all the documents. The problem is this: He has no way of knowing for certain what he might not have seen. Remember, it was Mr. Berger who was assigned the task of selecting which documents--and which drafts of which documents with which marginal notations--to send up on behalf of the Clinton Administration.[/b]

Experience tells us that tiny differences in drafts can be critical. After all, the Iran-Contra case exploded when then-Assistant Attorney General Brad Reynolds discovered a paragraph in one draft of an Ollie North memo on diverting funds to the Contras. This was a paragraph that did not appear in other drafts of the same memo. At the very least, given Mr. Berger's role as point man for the Clinton-era documents, Justice needs to assign someone to review his selections and ensure the integrity of a process he so grossly compromised.

While this might mean nothing to Mr. Kean, surely it has some implications for voters in this election. [b]The Bush Administration has been taking knocks for not having made al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden the priority Mr. Berger said it was during the Clinton years. [u]Yet neither Attorney General Ashcroft nor National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice even saw this Clarke report until after the 9/11 terrorists had struck.[/b][/u]

Perhaps if they had, America would have been on a more aggressive footing earlier on. At the least, releasing the Clarke after-action report now would provide better context for weighing such ongoing political accusations as the charge that the Bush Administration's concern about Iraq was simply a fantasy of a "neoconservative" cabal.

Toward that end we can't help but note page 134 of the Commission report, which documents a proposal early in 1999 to send a U-2 mission over Afghanistan to gather intelligence on where bin Laden was hiding out. Mr. Clarke objected on the grounds that Pakistani intelligence would tip bin Laden off that the U.S. was planning a bombing mission. [b][u]"Armed with this knowledge," the Commission quotes Mr. Clarke as saying, "old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad." Is that the same secular Baghdad that we are told would never cooperate with Islamist al Qaeda?[/b][/u]

The entire justification for the highly contentious exercise known as the 9/11 Commission has been to provide Americans with a full accounting of that terrible day, let the chips fall where they may. Now we learn that Mr. Berger wanted to keep some of those chips hidden. [b]Whatever Mr. Berger's legal liabilities, the largest interest here is less what he did than why a sophisticated ex-National Security Adviser would do it. And for that we need to see what he was hiding.[/b]

The New York times and its support of a raised minimum wage

07.26.04 (11:52 pm)   [edit]
[b]The New York Times and the minimum wage[/b]
Bruce Bartlett
July 27, 2004

In academia, when scholars change their minds about something, they admit it publicly and explain why, even if it causes a bit of embarrassment for having erred previously. Thus we recently saw renowned physicist Stephen Hawking say that he was wrong in his theory of "black holes." He knew that it was a necessary, if painful, thing for him to do so that research on these celestial objects can move forward.

I believe that public opinion leaders have the same responsibility to explain themselves when they switch gears. If I were suddenly to endorse a higher minimum wage, after having opposed it for many years, I would owe my readers an explanation. I would have to say that the facts had changed or that new research had caused me to change my mind or whatever. It would irresponsible for me to pretend that my new position was consistent with my old one and just ignore the contradiction.

This is a view that is not held by the New York Times. For decades, that paper had carefully and consistently editorialized against the minimum wage. But five years ago, for no apparent reason, it reversed a policy dating back to 1937 and suddenly endorsed a higher minimum wage. Its latest editorial on this topic appeared on July 24, in which legislators in Albany were urged to agree on a "much-needed increase in the minimum wage" for New York State.

When I first began clipping Times editorials on the minimum wage back in the 1970s, they were unambiguous in their condemnation of it as misdirected, inefficient and having negative consequences for most of those it was supposed to help. For example, an Aug. 17, 1977, editorial stated, "The basic effect of an increase in the minimum wage ... would be to intensify the cruel competition among the poor for scarce jobs." For this reason, it said, "Minimum wage legislation has no place in a strategy to eliminate poverty."

In the 1980s, the Times became even more aggressive in its denunciations of the minimum wage. Rather than simply argue against increases, it actively campaigned for abolition of the minimum wage altogether. Indeed, a remarkable editorial on Jan. 14, 1987, was titled, "The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00."

Everything in that editorial is still true today. "There's a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed," it said. "Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and few will be hired," it correctly observed. In conclusion: "The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable -- and fundamentally flawed. It's time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little."

Even in the 1990s, the Times remained skeptical about the value of raising the minimum wage. An April 5, 1996, editorial conceded that a proposed 90-cent increase in the minimum wage would wipe out 100,000 jobs. It said that Republican critics of the minimum wage as a "crude" antipoverty tool were right.

By 1999, however, the nation's newspaper of record had completely reversed itself. In a Sept. 14 editorial, it endorsed a sharp increase in the minimum wage, arguing that it would have no impact whatsoever on unemployment. "For millions of workers, a higher minimum wage means a better shot at self-sufficiency," it stated.

Gone are all the old arguments that higher minimum wages cost jobs, are mainly promoted by unions to stifle competition, that most of the benefits go to the children of the well-to-do rather than the poor and that legislating higher wage costs would be inflationary. Now the Times accepts the justification for a higher minimum wage as given and doesn't even try to marshal any facts or analyses in favor of its new position. It simply says the minimum wage should be raised, as if its opinion on the matter is all that anyone needs to know.

I think the Times owes its readers some explanation for its about-face. After all, there has been no change in ownership at the paper that caused its editorial policy to change, as was the case at the New York Post and the Daily News. The Times is still owned and run by the same family and has had the same liberal editorial policy since the 1930s. So what gives with the minimum wage? Why was it bad for 60 years and now has suddenly become good? Inquiring minds want to know.

I won't hold my breath waiting for an answer. In the meantime, I recommend the book, "Times Change: The Minimum Wage and The New York Times" by economist Richard McKenzie for those curious about this case of editorial apostasy.

Bruce Bartlett is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Townhall.com member group.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

How, exactly, would Jewish Gaza residents achieve peace?

07.26.04 (7:54 am)   [edit]
I am a fan of Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. Not because I don't think that Gaza is Jewish territory, or because I am anti-Semitic. I am a fan of Ariel Sharon's disengagement fan because it works.

Though there is still violence in the area, Sharon's disengagement plan, in the infant stages with his fence, is already working. It is focusing Palestinian rage in the proper place-- their own government, not Israel. Though Arafat has "stabilized" his government for now, he cannot scapegoat Israel anymore, so he has to produce results. Since Arafat is thoroughly evil, you can expect more Palestinian-on-Palestinia n violence.

When it all boils down, most people want the same thing-- accountable government and peace. The Sharon disengagement plan accomplishes that.

Of course, extremists on both sides do not want this. Palestinian extremists think that the entire region should be rid of Jews. Their war still goes in. Gaza Jewish extremists think that since the entire region at one time is historically Jewish it should be theirs, and damn the consequences.

We know that the Palestinian extremists are wrong, but when I point out that I think Gaza settlers are wrong, some on the right freak out.

But the Jewish far-right does not want a peace with the Palestinians. It does not care if Israel is perpetually at war. It does not seem to care if many more people are killed thanks to Arafat's suicide bombings. It does not have a plan to save Israel-- it just has a zealous drive to selfishly hold onto its own small piece of land.

These words are offensive to some Jews, I'm sure. But Sharon's disengagement plan is a work of offensive strategy, not a retreat. It is meant to beat the Palestinian terror in the only way possible-- by having its leadership wither on the vine.

There are millions and millions of Palestinians in the Middle East. Most of them hate Jews and a sizable minority wants to kill every one of them. The far-right Jewish contingent is just as zealous as this minority, because they care less about the future of the Jewish state and more about their own goals.

Sharon's disengagement plan works, it will save Israel. It is already starting to work. I fail to see how engaging, and legitimizing, the Palestinian "resistance" achieves peace at this point, for as long as Jews are the excuse, there will be no end to the trail of young, mostly brainwashed Palestinians marching off to kill innocent Jews and be killed themselves.

Hubris, thy name is Therealspartacus

07.26.04 (12:47 am)   [edit]
Therealspartacus has spoken:

[i]The whole Bible is crap about how people should either submit or control.[/i]

Of coure, we all submit or control. We submit to our weaknesses, ourselves, etc. If we don't submit to Christ, ,we submit to something worse-- ourselves. Or we think we can control others through our own inflated view of ourselves.

I guess the part in the "whole" Bible that teaches servitude to others, turning the other cheek, not throwing the first stone, etc., I guess the part in the "whole" bible, written by the same Paul so often maligned by the "brights" of the atheist faith, the part that teaches the construct of marriage that has existed for 2,000 years....I guess it's all "crap".

You may disagree with what the Bible says. You may think it is wrong. But in no way is [i]anyone[/i], much less a guy as arrogant as Therealspartacus, qualified to call this book, the basis of western civilization for the last 2,000 or so years, "crap".

On what basis is the reverend of the "Church of Keeping it Real" qualified to dictate that the bible is "crap".

There isn't such a basis. It's called "Hubris", and Therealspartacus has a lot of it.

Ps. If it weren't for the 10 Commandments, by what rubric would the west learn what is right and wrong? Does the reverend know? Doubtful.

Let's talk dishonesty about the US and Christianity! Let's talk Therealspartacus

07.26.04 (12:24 am)   [edit]
I'm in this a bit late, and I hate to read therealspartacus' blogs anymore, because he makes a mockery of himself, but apparently he was recently in a debate with stepdad about Christianity in US government.

In his response to Stepdad, Therealspartacus becomes willfully stupid and uses the Treaty of Tripoli as proof that the US was not founded on Judeo-Christian values. The treaty of Tripoli, in case you haven't heard atheists use it before states in Article 11:

"As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

This is somehow used by the reverend of the Church of Keeping it Real that the US was not founded on Judeo-Christian values. Now, let's assume that the founders of the country were not nominally Christian (which they were). They were raised in a culture of Christianity and all of their laws reflect Judeo-Christian law, going clear back to Mosaic law (which is where we get modern day juris prudence from). They were [i]not[/i]raised in a culture of anything other than Judeo-Christian belief, because if they were, there'd be a treaty signed by the US saying that, for TRADE PURPOSES, they were not offensive to the religion of the country they were trading with.

In short, the US is not founded on a denomination of the Christian religion. This is true. But every one of the founders of this country was influenced by the Christian nature of the culture. The foundation of this country rests on the values learned by the founders-- which are Christian values. Therealspartacus takes a treaty with a Muslim nation, Libya, meant to encourage trade, constructs a false premise and blows it out of the water.

No one ever said this country was founded on the Christian religion-- even the folks that therealspartacus aims to demolish don't say that. This country was founded on the principles of Liberty. But the Treaty of Tripoli was signed to encourage faith between an anti-Christian nation and the US. Did it ever occur to Therealspartacus, in all his wisdom, why the US would have to say that it wasn't founded on the Christian religion in order to trade with a Muslim nation?

I think the answer is self-evident. The US was founded on Jude-Christian values, which is all the so-called "Christian right" is saying.

Back to the drawing board for Therealspartacus.

It takes balls: Kerry uses Vietnam crutch to hide record, even though he hates America, vets

07.25.04 (9:21 pm)   [edit]
[b]John Kerry Didn't Support The Troops In His Post-Vietnam Days[/b]
by John Hawkins
07-21-04

The most underreported and unexplored story of the entire presidential campaign has been John Kerry's time as an anti-war protester. Here's a guy who is selling himself to the American public as Sgt. York reincarnated and yet the same press which spent weeks hyperventilating over the unsupported & insubstantial "George Bush AWOL" story has shown scant interest in digging into Kerry's Post-Vietnam days.

However, there are a plethora of great angles for front-page stories out there. Kerry spoke from the back of the same pick-up truck as hated anti-war protester Jane Fonda, Kerry was present at a VVAW meeting where they "discussed and voted (against) an assassination plot against pro-war U.S. senators", Kerry's first Purple Heart turned out to be an accidentally self-inflicted scratch that was fixed with a band-aid which is particularly significant since his three purple hearts got him out of Vietnam and into the anti-war movement well before his tour of duty should have ended, all of Kerry's former commanding officers think he's unfit to be President, Kerry claimed that he committed atrocities in Vietnam, etc, etc, etc.

[b]If Kerry were a Republican instead of a Democrat -- which would mean that the press would really go after him on this stuff instead of burying it -- all the baggage from his time as a Vietnam War protester would be enough to torpedo his campaign.[/b]

Think I'm exaggerating?

[b]Well, imagine what would happen if Kerry's war record got the scrutiny it deserved. Think about what a month of articles featuring devastating quotes, like the ones compiled by groups like Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, would do to the Kerry campaign if they regularly appeared on the front pages of the "A list" papers like the New York Times, the WAPO, USA Today, & the Chicago Tribune...

"In 1971, when John Kerry spoke out to America, labeling all Vietnam veterans as thugs and murderers, I was shocked and almost brought to my knees, because even though I had served at the same time and same unit, I had never witnessed or participated in any of the events that the Senator had accused us of. I strongly believe that the statements made by the Senator were not only false and inaccurate, but extremely harmful to the United States' efforts in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. Tragically, some veterans, scorned by the antiwar movement and their allies, retreated to a life of despair and suicide. Two of my crewmates were among them. For that there is no forgiveness." -- Richard O'Mara

"I served in Vietnam as a boat officer from June of 1968 to July of 1969. My service was three months in Coastal Division 13 out of Cat Lo, and nine months with Coastal Division 11 based in An Thoi. John Kerry was in An Thoi the same time I was. I'm here today to express the anger I have harbored for over 33 years, about being accused with my fellow shipmates of war atrocities. All I can say is when I leave here today, I'm going down to the Wall to tell my two crew members it's not true, and that they and the other 49 Swiftees who are on the Wall were then and are still now the best." -- Robert Brant

"In a whole year that I spent patrolling, I didn't see anything like a war crime, an atrocity, anything like that. Time and again I saw American fighting men put themselves in graver danger trying to avoid... collateral damage. When John Kerry returned to the country, he was sworn in front of Congress. And then he told my family -- my parents, my sister, my brother, my neighbors -- he told everyone I knew and everyone I'd ever know that I and my comrades had committed unspeakable atrocities." -- David Wallace

"I served with these guys. I went on missions with them, and these men served honorably. Up and down the chain of command there was no acquiescence to atrocities. It was not condoned, it did not happen, and it was not reported to me verbally or in writing by any of these men including Lt.(jg) Kerry. In 1971, '72, for almost 18 months, he stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains -- there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief. It just galls one to think about it." -- Captain George Elliott, USN (retired)

"(Kerry) encouraged our enemies to rebuild and hang on when they were near defeat, as they were after the tet offensive in 1968. Did you know our POWs had John Kerry's words quoted to them by their interrogators?" -- Retired U.S. Navy SEAL captain with service in Vietnam, John Bailey

"John Kerry's recent admissions caused me to realize that I was most likely in Vietnam dodging enemy rockets on the very day he met in Paris with Madame Binh, the representative of the Viet Cong to the Paris Peace Conference. John Kerry returned to the U.S. to become a national spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a radical fringe of the antiwar movement, an organization set upon propagating the myth of war crimes through demonstrably false assertions. Who was the last American POW to die languishing in a North Vietnamese prison forced to listen to the recorded voice of John Kerry disgracing their service by his dishonest testimony before the Senate?" -- John O'Neil in May, 2004[/b]

The fact that John Kerry, a man who trashed the military so badly in his testimony before Congress that the Vietnamese played Kerry's words to our POWs in an effort to break their will, is now portraying himself as a champion of the military who can be trusted to lead America because of his Vietnam war experience, is practically beyond belief. As Mark Steyn once said of Kerry, "He spent the Seventies playing Jane Fonda and he now wants to run as John Wayne."

If Kerry wants to play up his combat time and his medals, I have no complaints. He did put his life in danger, he did win medals, and he deserves credit for that. [b]But, there were a lot of soldiers who fought in the Vietnam war who fit that description and Kerry smeared their good names, trashed their reputations, and stood shoulder to shoulder with anti-war protesters who thought our soldiers were human garbage. As far as I'm concerned that in and of itself makes John Kerry unfit to be the President of the United States.[/b]

© copyright 2001-2004 John Hawkins
Design & Various Scripts by Nicole Baker

So the Left calls anti-terror laws "Orwellian" while their party cages them in Boston?

07.25.04 (9:13 pm)   [edit]
Yup, you wanna talk Orwellian? Try having a party oppose the "tyranny" of GW Bush's anti-terror measures (designed to keep the country safe) yet keep protesters at its convention locked up (so they can protect their own elitist asses).

In case you don't know, the city of Boston (liberal) along with the Democratic party fear that there will be a terror threat at the Democratic National Convention (hardly -- terrorists know an ally when they see one). So they've decided to design a handy place for protestors to exercise their right to assemble: a cage.

From John Hawkins of Right Wing News--

"I guess the people who want to exercise their First Amendment Rights at the convention will have to do it from the inside of a Democratic "freedom cage", huh fellas? [b]I suppose it's "ya can't be too careful" when Democratic elites might be imperiled, but when it comes to protecting the American people from terrorism it's "The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity". -- Erich Fromm"[/b]

Indeed.

Clinton defends Berger by saying that he is typically sloppy with secret documents...

07.24.04 (5:18 am)   [edit]
Seems like a ringing endorsement of his administration, eh? You know, the one that Richard Clarke lied about and said did "all it could" to fight terror? As Jonah Goldberg points out, Berger dealt with classified documents all the time, he was the freaking NSA (who balked numerous times to get OBL, according to the 9/11 Commission), and we should all laugh because "accidentally discarding" classified documents, documents that just happen to look particularly damaging to Clinton, happens all the time!

Clinton is a joke, his entire 8 year term was a joke. And we paid for it-- big time.

[b]Berger's revealing footnotes[/b]
Jonah Goldberg
July 23, 2004

"The innocent explanation is the most likely one, particularly given the facts involved," Bill Clinton said in defense of former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Who, you've probably heard, is in some hot water for getting caught illicitly smuggling very classified documents on more than one occasion from the National Archives.

Now, I don't know for sure what to make of Berger's misdeeds, but it's clear that his best defense against criminality is an offensive to prove how sloppy and careless he was. He says that in the process of illegally sneaking the notes he made while reviewing classified material, he "inadvertently" stole several classified documents. He's since lost some of them. And the documents were far from random. He took all of the politically sensitive drafts of the after-action study on the Clinton Administration's response to the so-called Millennium Terror plot, which went to the heart of the Clinton administrations anti-terror policy.

Unfortunately for Berger, even his A-list spin team - Clinton lawyers Lanny Breuer, Lanny Davis and former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart - are having a hard time proving Berger was as dumb as he's claiming. According to various reports, Berger inadvertently took anywhere from four to five drafts of the same report, plus the final copy, over at least two different visits. Some witnesses claim he shoved documents down his pants, in his jacket and - allegedly according to one witness - in his socks. He says he accidentally carried the drafts and final copy away in a leather portfolio. Still, the drafts were somewhere between 15 and 30 pages each, so it's hard to believe he didn't notice swiping 75 to 180 pages.

It's like a 10-year-old telling his parents he knowingly stole $5 worth of candy but in the process he accidentally shoplifted a basketball. And this guy was the National Security Adviser.

In an interview with the Denver Post, Clinton stuck to the most "innocent explanation," that Berger's just a slob. "We were all laughing about it on the way over here," he told the paper. "People who don't know him might find it hard to believe. But ... all of us who've been in his office have always found him buried beneath papers."

Now, I've chatted with a few people who are very experienced in the rules and procedures governing the handling of classified documents. And many of them think this "innocent" explanation is the most damning. Berger was the head of the NSA, and he was in charge of countless documents like these when he was in the White House. And here Clinton is defending him by saying mistakes like these are just plain funny because they're so typical. Berger steals documents in the lead-up the 9/11 Commission hearings because - according to his lawyer! - he was too distracted stealing notes that he couldn't keep things straight. And Bill Clinton is laughing it off. Why? Because that's so like Sandy! He was always a slob with vital national security documents.

Mr. Berger has been a top advisor to the Kerry campaign. He resigned this week to stem the damage to the Democrats. But why didn't Berger tell Kerry he was being investigated? I guess being investigated by the Justice Department for his chicanery is as laughable - and therefore trivial - a subject as losing "password" class documents and sneaking past armed guards with notes crammed into your pants.

Now, nobody ever gives this administration the benefit of the "most innocent" explanation. George W. Bush is still called a liar every day, and the Kerry campaign still says Bush misled the country, even though two massive investigations - one in Britain and one by the Senate Intelligence Committee - have exonerated Bush of that charge and cast very harsh light on his accusers, like former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

This election - according to every observer and even the campaigns themselves - will be focused on national security and the war on terror. But the Democrats and The New York Times are convinced the real scandal here isn't Berger's antics but the leak which revealed them. I cannot recall such concern about a single leak in the last year which hurt the Bush administration.

The central debate of this election is national security. Democrats charge that Bush has fumbled it. Republicans charge that the Democrats don't take it seriously enough. Fair debate.

But now comes a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign, who helped write the Democratic platform and who set anti-terror policy in the last administration. He's been caught in a scandal in which the most innocent defense they can mount is that he was so careless, so sloppy and so dismissive of the rules that he stole - and lost! - extremely sensitive documents by accident, while illegally smuggling others. And the last Democratic Commander-in-Chief says it's not only typical, it's funny.

That may be the most innocent explanation, but it's also evidence why these guys have their work cut out if they're going to convince voters they're serious about national security.

Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a Townhall.com member group.

©2004 Tribune Media Services

Jesusisangry gets... angry

07.24.04 (4:50 am)   [edit]
I had to respond to Jesusisangry's nutjob comments on my last post. My responses are in bold.

Your country allows you to have the freedom of speech for you say that. But however was'nt it president bush who choked on 9/11. [b]No, he's the President that actually was crafting a terror plan to go after OBL and Al Qaeda-- something Clinton had 8 years to do but didn't, which allowed 9/11 to happen. There wasn't much Bush could have done in 8 months-- and if there was, all the more reason to blame Clinton, who had years after OBL declared war on US.[/b]Was'nt it bush who just sat in his chair at the florida grade school for seven minutes before decideing to get up and leave. [b]As Bush explained, he didn't want to get up and leave real quicly-- something that would surely cause panic, and something assholes like you would criticize for being too hasty. [/b]I can safetly assume that you are a guy.(american guy) Therefore you must watch (american) sports. You know when your star( american ) athletes freeze on the playing field. What does the commenters call that the star athelte froze was'nt able to come through on the play. Bush was frozen for 7 minutes. Then he got up and left. Now talk about a president who claims to run on national security as a strength. but when the time came he froze. Is that the type of preisdent you want someone who freezes in a emergency.[b]First of all, I am going to safely assume your stupid. Secondly, the President did show his national security credentials quite well-- four years, 2 regimes gone, no new terror attacks against the US, Al Qaeda cells in the US being busted, etc. Sounds to me like he's doing fine. By the way, since I can safely assume you're not America, ,what else has the world done to stop terror? What did the rest of the world do to stop Saddam Hussein? The world didn't freeze when terror struck-- it just ignored it. How noble.[/b]

'Bush went into Iraq because Hussein threatened America, accept it or not.' If that is your agruement then there is alot of countries that threatean America, North Korea, Iran, Egypt, Argentina, basically i think most of worlds people hate america now? would'nt you consider those people threats becuase there displaying the hate for america vocally?[b]We can't attack North Korea, thanks to Clinton, because they now have nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein broke a cease-fire in a war against the UN. This breach of the cease-fire threatened America specifically, especially after 9/11 because it was known-- by everyone-- that Hussein had WMD. Every country accecepted that.[/b]Maybe your contires actions has created more terrorist by your action.[b]This could be, as terrorists don't like to be challenged. However, terrorism flourished when we did nothing as well. What is your argument, that we should let ourselves be blown up because that would stop the attacks? Good thinking. I also know that Afghanistan and Iraq are free, to the gratitude of many, especially women, who don't have to live in tyranny anymore. No thanks to most of the nations of the world, either.[/b] Is'nt possibe for the moderates to become extremes. Like how your countries politics try to get the swing votes (are swing voters moderates) But your country leaders due things purposely i belevie to court block of voters?

It is also the Bush administration, and not the EU or the UN, or anyone else, that wants economic sanctions and condemnation brought through the UN Security Council.

Another political move that american think will achive results. big deal the U.S. is going to impose economic sanctions and condemnation. How would economic sanctions hurt country that 1 has very little wealth, 2 a country that is not tied into the world economy. 3 is sudan one of america's freetrade partners.

[b]So what are you saying Jesusisangry? Are you ADVOCATING THE BUSH DOCTRINE OF PREEMPTIVE WAR AGAINST SUDAN? If so, and you were against Iraq and Bush in general, you are a hypocrite. You just caved on your principles.[/b]

Then you say that ameica is going use condemnation of suden. hmmm does that word condemnation sound familar to you. I think i can remember other countries leaders saying something about condemnation on the U.S. for invadeing Iraq. [b]The UN Security Council did not condemn the US for invading Iraq, and that's because they couldn't. Why? Work with me here-- it was the US THAT DID WHAT THE UNSC WAS SUPPOSED TO DO-- ENFORCE THE CEASE-FIRE RESOLUTIONS. [/b]But did the condemnation stop the U.S. from invading Iraq?[b]Did US condemnation stop the Kofi Annan and the rest of the thugs at the UN from committing the biggest scandal in world history, the oil-for-food scandal? Nope.[/b]

[b]The US is far from perfect. But most of the time it does the work the rest of the world is supposed to do, and this is because the rest of the world is lazy and cowardly and pushes it off on us. Iraq was a UN mess. The US had to clean it up. For decades terrorism killed hundreds of thousands, and the UN coddled the terrorists and excused it away (or just blamed Israel). The UN was created to prevent world wars. It is not doing that. You should thank the US-- for without this involuntary "hegemony" in the world that the cowards at the UN let it have, at the cost of billions of dollars of US tax dollars-- the world would be a smoking charcoal briquette.

Do you honestly think Kofi Annan cares if terrorists have nukes or not?

Thanks for your comment.[/b]

No one would know a thing about Sudan if it weren't for the Bush administration

07.23.04 (12:06 pm)   [edit]
DrForBush wonders:

[i]President Bush’s argument to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a bad guy could hold water if he actually applied the same argument around the world. However, today in Sudan we are faced with thousands of people being killed by their own government. Does the Bush administration even say anything about this atrocity? Well, they sent Collin Powell to Sudan so he could dance around a bit, but he did not save any lives. Do they have a plan? Do they even care? Is it because Sudan lacks the natural resources that Iraq had?

There are so many questions and very few answers.[/i]

Bush went into Iraq because Hussein threatened America, accept it or not. As far as Sudan goes, it was the Bush administration, and not the EU or the UN, or anyone else, that has been bringing up the oppression and genocide in Sudan since last year (DrForBush can navigate his mouse to the State Department website to verify if he likes). It is also the Bush administration, and not the EU or the UN, or anyone else, that wants economic sanctions and condemnation brought through the UN Security Council.

The UN wants nothing to do with the Sudan crisis, and only spoke out because of the efforts of the US.

Now, if liberals like DrForBush always claim that we should take things through the UN, what is his bitch? We're doing exactly that. Just like we did-- for 11 years-- with Iraq.

The real question is whether a Liberal president would use military force when diplomacy fails or when it is not an option-- like when dealing with terrorists.

We all know the answer on that.

Kerry's tortured logic on abortion-- the same logic that endorsed slavery 150 years ago

07.23.04 (10:20 am)   [edit]
There are some here at Tblog that justify abortion by claiming that a baby isn't a baby. In the words of one blogger, a baby is "property". Though John Kerry isn't as artless as to say something like that, he still believes a baby in utero isn't a person (and therefore is no differen than being a piece of property). Both viewpoints essentially advocate second-class citizenship, or [b]slavery[/b]--

From the Catholic League-- http://www.catholicleague.org...

July 23, 2004


[b]KERRY’S TORTURED LOGIC ON ABORTION[/b]

Catholic League president William Donohue offered the following remarks today on Senator John Kerry’s interview yesterday with ABC TV anchor Peter Jennings:

“Senator Kerry recently said that he believes life begins at conception. Accordingly, Peter Jennings asked, why isn’t ‘even a first-trimester abortion not murder?’ Kerry replied, ‘No, because it’s not the form of life that takes personhood in the terms that we have judged it to be in the past. It’s the beginning of life.’ Thus did Kerry distinguish between human life and personhood.

“Kerry’s dichotomy was advanced by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 in the Dred Scott decision that legalized slavery. In that ruling, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that members of ‘the negro race’ were ‘not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government.’ Similarly, he concluded that ‘it is too plain for argument, that they have never been regarded as part of the people or citizens of the State.’

“Kerry floated another dichotomy yesterday that is equally troubling. When pressed by Jennings whether he could ever imagine himself campaigning against abortion, Kerry said, ‘Well, I don’t think—let me tell you clearly that being pro-choice is not pro-abortion.’ But why isn’t it? Voters need to know exactly what it is about abortion that Kerry doesn’t like. What’s holding back his enthusiasm? In other words, why isn’t he pro-abortion? And what is it that is being aborted? A human life that is not a person? Does even Kerry believe this to be true?

“Kerry wants the Catholic vote. According to an AP story today, the Massachusetts delegates are mostly Catholic. But they describe themselves as ‘non-practicing, lapsed, recovering and even ‘unhappy’ Catholics.’ These are the kind of Catholics who gravitate to Kerry. They are also the kind who like his tortured logic on abortion. Unfortunately for Kerry, [b]they are not representative of most Catholics. Practicing Catholics know that a baby is a person, and persons have rights, beginning with the right to be born.”[/b]

[i]The Catholic League is the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization. It defends individual Catholics and the institutional Church from defamation and discrimination.[/i]

9/11 Commission vidicates Dr. Rice testiomy that Bush more focused on terror than Clinton

07.23.04 (9:50 am)   [edit]
As reported in PowerLineBlog--

[b]Commission Confirms Condoleezza[/b]

I haven't yet seen any comment in the news on this section of [b]Executive Summary of the 9/11 Commission's report, which describes the transition from the Clinton to the Bush administration[/b]:

"After the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, evidence accumulated that it had been launched by al Qaeda operatives, but without confirmation that Bin Ladin had given the order. The Taliban had earlier been warned that it would be held responsible for another Bin Ladin attack on the United States. The CIA described its findings as a “preliminary judgment”; President Clinton and his chief advisers told us they were waiting for a conclusion before deciding whether to take military action. The military alternatives remained unappealing to them.

"The transition to the new Bush administration in late 2000 and early 2001 took place with the Cole issue still pending. President George W.Bush and his chief advisers accepted that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the Cole, but did not like the options available for a response.

***

"The Bush administration began developing a new strategy with the stated goal of eliminating the al Qaeda threat within three to five years.

***

"While the United States continued disruption efforts around the world, its emerging strategy to eliminate the al Qaeda threat was to include an enlarged covert action program in Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic strategies for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The process culminated during the summer of 2001 in a draft presidential directive and arguments about the Predator aircraft, which was soon to be deployed with a missile of its own, so that it might be used to attempt to kill Bin Ladin or his chief lieutenants. At a September 4 meeting, President Bush’s chief advisers approved the draft directive of the strategy and endorsed the concept of arming the Predator. This directive on the al Qaeda strategy was awaiting President Bush’s signature on September 11, 2001."

This narrative [b]is a succinct summary of what Condoleezza Rice told the Commission, and rejects the testimony of Richard Clarke--which dominated the news for what, two weeks?--that a laser-like focus on bin Laden by the Clinton administration (i.e., Clarke) was lost when the Bush administration came into office and scaled back the anti-terror effort.[/b] Given that Clarke's testimony was given to the Commission, which appears to have rejected it, can we conclude that he was as unreliable a source as Joe Wilson?

UPDATE: John Podhoretz has interesting comments on two credibility issues raised by the Commission's report, and on how we should assess the relative credibility of Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger on the one hand, and President Bush and Condoleezza Rice on the other.

9/11 Commission reveals virtues of the Patriot Act, Bush Doctrine of Preemption

07.23.04 (4:45 am)   [edit]
Editorial from today's Wall Street Journal--

[b]The Pre-emption Commission
The virtues of the Patriot Act, among other surprises.[/b]

Friday, July 23, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

So the doctrine of pre-emption has its uses, after all. In a world of conflicting intelligence, uncertain consequences and potential foreign opposition, it is still sometimes necessary for America to attack an adversary before it attacks us.

That, reduced to its essence, is the main conclusion of yesterday's 567-page report from the 9/11 Commission. The September 11 attacks may have been a shock, it says, but they never should have come as a surprise. Our government--and the entire political class--knew enough to act against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but it did not because of "failures of imagination, policy, capability, and management." Though the bipartisan report can't quite bring itself to use the words, it would seem that the Bush anti-terror doctrine lives.

These columns have been rough on the Commission, especially for the partisanship that has marked its deliberations. But perhaps our pounding helped, because its unanimous final report seems on our first reading to be better than the process that produced it. Its narrative history is especially helpful, filling in much of the record of what the government knew, when it knew it, and what it didn't do about it.

We refer readers specifically to the recitation of non-action that starts on page 11 of the executive summary. Beginning in 1997, the U.S. tried diplomacy to get the Taliban to drop al Qaeda and Pakistan to drop the Taliban, but the efforts failed. We now know that only an ultimatum turned Pakistan, and only military force toppled Mullah Omar.

The report discloses that the CIA failed to infiltrate the terrorist Islamic network with even a single spy. The FBI failed to share crucial information about terrorist suspects. In other words, our security bureaucracies became hidebound and self-protective over the years, and their cultures need a thorough shaking up.

The report is especially damning in its revelations about the law enforcement mindset toward terrorism that prevailed before 9/11. Top CIA analysts--many of whom are now critical of the Bush Administration--thought it was a manageable problem. FBI investigations were "geared toward prosecution," the report notes, and hampered by "perceived legal barriers to sharing information." Part of this was due to the infamous "wall of separation" between intelligence and law enforcement that was reinforced in 1995 by Clinton Deputy Attorney General (and 9/11 Commissioner) Jamie Gorelick. The Patriot Act took down that wall, and the report amounts to a rousing endorsement of that much-maligned legislation.

Notably, the Commission performs a service by defining the threat we now face in refreshing fashion. "The enemy is not just 'terrorism,' " it says. "It is the threat posed specifically by Islamic terrorism." Bush Administration officials say the same thing privately, but they have been reluctant to state this publicly lest they offend the broader body of peaceable Islam. But it is hard to defeat an enemy without defining who it is. And the fact that Islam has a problem with its radical factions is something that Muslims themselves have to face up to.

This failure to speak candidly has ramifications at home, too, specifically in the Transportation Department's continued failure to endorse racial profiling in airport security checks. The policy reduces the government's credibility among ordinary Americans who understand that the policy defies common sense. Commissioner John Lehman noted at one hearing that any airline that set aside more than two Middle Eastern-looking passengers for secondary security clearing at any one time still faces large anti-discrimination fines.

The report also sheds new light on the issue of "state sponsors" of terror, especially Iran and Iraq. The Iran information--including pass-through rights without border stamps for al Qaeda--should give pause to those who think diplomacy alone will mollify the mullahs.

As for Iraq, the final report retreats from its interim judgment that there was no "collaborative relationship." The Commission now says it found no "collaborative operational relationship" to attack the U.S., but it does record extensive and troubling contacts. This includes the news that Richard Clarke, the former NSC aide, himself believed that Iraq had ties to the chemical plant in Sudan that was linked to al Qaeda and bombed by Bill Clinton. The report quotes Mr. Clarke as speculating to a superior about an "Iraq-al Qida [sic] agreement" on the chemical plant. Our readers may recall that Mr. Clarke more recently said there was not a shred of evidence of such ties.

As for the Commission's many proposals, they deserve to be examined, though count us skeptical on the idea of unifying all intelligence agencies under the control of a Cabinet-level intelligence czar. It might change bureaucratic incentives for the better, but it might also create a new and equally dangerous kind of groupthink. At the very least Congress should wait until the intelligence review commission led by former Senator Charles Robb and federal appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman reports next year.

The details, however, should not obscure the Commission's larger message about the dangers of not acting against a looming threat. After a year of recriminations against a President who chose to act against another threat, in Iraq, the report may even do some good.

Iran's growing threat-- and why Bush has been hindered by the Left in the war on terror

07.23.04 (4:36 am)   [edit]
[b]Iran's Growing Threat[/b]
By Rachel Ehrenfeld
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 23, 2004

Recent events have made it clear that the threat posed by Iran should be dealt with sooner rather than later. Today's 9/11 Commission report documents extensive ties between Iran and terrorism, and the mullahs' drive to create a nuclear weapon is well known. In recent days, Iranian officials and clerics have increased the incitement for violence against American and Coalition forces in Iraq. However, ending the real threat this fundamentalist Islamic theocracy poses to the United States and the West may be impossible, thanks to the Left’s and the pro-Islamists non-stop assault on the president's credibility.

The case against Iran should be air-tight. The Bush administration is now armed with:

[1] The 9/11 Commission’s report, documenting the logistical, operational and material support from Iran and Hezbollah (Iran’s international terrorist arm) to al-Qaeda;

[2] Iran’s own admission of its intention to develop nuclear weapons;

[3] Iran’s increasing anti-American rhetoric; and

[4] Iran’s growing support of terrorism in Iraq.

According to the just-released 9/11 Commission Report, Iran’s support of al-Qaeda dates back to 1991, when operatives from both sides met in Sudan and agreed “to cooperate in providing support—even if only training—for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States.”

By 1993, “al-Qaeda received advice and training from Hezbollah” in intelligence, security and explosives, especially in “how to use truck bombs.” The training took place in the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah’s stronghold in Lebanon.

The commission further reports that “at least 8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives traveled into and out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001,” and that Iran facilitated “the travel of al-Qaeda members through Iran on their way to and from Afghanistan.” Yet in an ostrich-like move, the commission refrained from accusing Iran of supporting al-Qaeda.

This is how the commission phrased it: “There is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9-11 hijackers…however, we cannot rule out the possibility of a remarkable coincidence...[and] we found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.”

Indeed, the commission recommends that further investigations should be carried out, but looking at the body of evidence about Iran’s leadership role in worldwide terrorism and the war against the U.S., one can only hope that we can act in time to restrain it.

"Iran is closer to nuclear capability that it was two years ago," said Dr. Ephraim Kam, deputy director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, earlier this week. And U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, R-KS, also added that Iran is clearly developing nuclear weapons. Pakistan, as we found out earlier this year, provided Iran with information on how to build an atomic bomb.

Iran’s admission that they are working on developing nuclear capabilities was made in November 2003 by a member of the Iranian Parliament, Ahmad Shirzad. He made reference to the existence of a then-unknown essential nuclear facility, at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Iranian opposition had identified at least 8 different nuclear facilities in Iran. Despite all the evidence, it is unlikely that the international community will take steps to disarm Iran any time soon – indeed, the IAEA and EU overtures have been disastrous. And undoubtedly, China and Russia will block any real disarmament efforts.

Iran denies that it is developing nuclear weapons; however on July 6, 2004, the Iranian daily, Kayhan’s editorial warned that, "The entire Islamic Middle East is now a volatile and tangled trap, and will be set off by the smallest bit of silliness – and will reap many victims of the sinful adventurers…Indeed, the White House's 80 years of exclusive rule are likely to become 80 seconds of Hell that will burn to ashes everything that has been built.” Earlier, according to reports in the Kuwaiti, Al-Siyassah, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Expediency Council stated, "The present situation in Iraq represents a threat as well as an opportunity... It is a threat because the wounded American beast can take enraged actions, but it is also an opportunity to teach this beast a lesson so it won't attack another country.” He ended his speech calling for "Death to America, Death to Israel.”

Iran’s support of the growing terrorist activities in Iraq and its attempts to destabilize the interim government resulted in warnings issued this week by the Defense and Interior Ministers of Iraq in an interview for the London based Arabic-daily, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. The Defense Minister, Hazem Al-Sha’lan, after accusing Iran of supporting terrorism on Iraqi soil, warned, “We have the capability to move the assault into their country[ies].”

If you think that Iran has its hands full with terrorist activities already, think again. Last month, according to Reuters, the Islamic Republic of Iran – through the proxy known as the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Campaign – launched a new campaign calling for volunteers to carry out suicide attacks against U.S and Coalition forces inside Iraq, as well as missions targeting Israel and author Salman Rushdie. Since the 10,000 volunteers already registered are not enough, they distributed a “Preliminary Registration for Martyrdom Operations” application for the position of “martyr.” Announcing this new campaign, the cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati urged the public that "It is the duty of every Muslim to threaten U.S. and British interests anywhere.”

So, what are we waiting for? The president's impaired credibility, a dividend of the perpetual partisan assaults of the political Left, most elements of the Democratic Party in general, and the pro-Islamists anti-American elements in Europe and elsewhere now poses a grave danger to our security at home and abroad. Since the Democratic Party has embraced its activist core, its politicians have denounced the war in Iraq as unjustified and immoral, each American and Iraq death the intended by-product of President Bush's wilful lies. Ted Kennedy claimed the war was "cooked up in Texas" months or years before it was launched; Al Gore screeches that President Bush "betrayed us!"; and the Left at large has claimed the president massaged intelligence to manipulate the public into attacking the benign despot of Iraq. The 9/11 Commission’s and Lord Butler’s report debunked the Left’s and the pro- Islamists’ allegations, but the damage was already done. Having tarnished the president's veracity specifically on the War on Terror for political advantage, the Democrats hope is to render us impotent to respond to the genuine threat posed by Tehran. If the damage they have caused cannot be reversed, their self-seeking rhetoric may prove to have mortal consequences.

[i]*Rachel Ehrenfeld is the author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It and is the Director of the American Center for Democracy.[/i]

Bush critics who say Iran worse than Iraq would have attacked neither country

07.23.04 (4:27 am)   [edit]
[b]What about Iran?
Charles Krauthammer[/b]
July 23, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Did we invade the wrong country? One of the lessons now being drawn from the 9/11 report is that Iran was the real threat. It had links to al Qaeda, allowed some of the 9/11 hijackers to transit through, and is today harboring al Qaeda leaders. The Iraq War critics have a new line of attack: We should have done Iran instead of Iraq.

Well, of course Iran is a threat and a danger. But how exactly would the critics have ``done'' Iran? Iran is a serious country with a serious army. Compared to Iraq, an invasion of Iran would have been infinitely more costly. Can you imagine these critics, who were shouting ``quagmire'' and ``defeat'' when the low-level guerrilla war in Iraq intensified in April, actually supporting war with Iran?

If not war, what then? We know the central foreign policy principle of Bush critics: multilateralism. Kerry and the Democrats have said it a hundred times: The source of our troubles is Bush's insistence on ``going it alone.'' They promise to ``rejoin the community of nations'' and ``work with our allies.''

Well, that happens to be exactly what we have been doing on Iran. And the policy is an abject failure. The Bush administration, having decided that invading one axis-of-evil country was about as much as either the military or the country can bear, has gone multilateral on Iran, precisely what the Democrats advocate. Washington delegated the issue to a committee of three -- the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany -- that has been meeting with the Iranians to get them to shut down their nuclear program.

The result? They have been led by the nose. Iran is caught red-handed with illegally enriched uranium, and the Tehran Three prevail upon the Bush administration to do nothing while they persuade the mullahs to act nice. Therefore, we do not go to the U.N. Security Council to declare Iran in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty. We do not impose sanctions. We do not begin squeezing Iran to give up its nuclear program.

Instead, we give Iran more time to swoon before the persuasive powers of ``Jack of Tehran'' -- British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw -- until finally, humiliatingly, Iran announces that it will resume enriching uranium and that nothing will prevent it from becoming a member of the ``nuclear club.''

The result has not been harmless. Time is of the essence, and the runaround that the Tehran Three have gotten from the mullahs has meant that we have lost at least nine months in doing anything to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

The fact is that the war critics have nothing to offer on the single most urgent issue of our time -- rogue states in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Iran instead of Iraq? The Iraq critics would have done nothing about either country. There would today be two major Islamic countries sitting on an ocean of oil, supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction -- instead of one.

Two years ago there were five countries supporting terror and pursuing WMDs -- two junior-leaguers, Libya and Syria, and the axis-of-evil varsity: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The Bush administration has just eliminated two: Iraq, by direct military means, and Libya, by example and intimidation.

Syria is weak and deterred by Israel. North Korea, having gone nuclear, is untouchable. That leaves Iran. What to do? There are only two things that will stop the Iranian nuclear program: revolution from below or an attack on its nuclear facilities.

The country should be ripe for revolution. The regime is detested. But the mullahs are very good at police-state tactics. The long-awaited revolution is not happening.

Which makes the question of pre-emptive attack all the more urgent. Iran will go nuclear during the next presidential term. Some Americans wishfully think that the Israelis will do the dirty work for us, as in 1981 when they destroyed Saddam's nuclear reactor. But for Israel, attacking Iran is a far more difficult proposition. It is farther away. Moreover, detection and antiaircraft technology are far more advanced than 20 years ago.

There may be no deus ex machina. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the ``Great Satan'' will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive strike.

Both of which, by the way, are far more likely to succeed with 146,000 American troops and highly sophisticated aircraft standing by just a few miles away -- in Iraq.

©2004 Washington Post Writers Group

Commission finds no link between Saudi government and 9/11-- what will Michael Moore do now?

07.22.04 (10:33 am)   [edit]
Back when President Bush was worrying about the
separation of powers implications of testifying before
the 9/11 Commission, the Left portrayed Bush as
standing in the way of truth. When Commissioner
Richard Ben-Veniste harrassed Dr. Rice for the
public's benefit, or whenever Commissioner Bob Kerrey
went nuts, the Left continously portrayed the 9/11
Commission role as a noble crusade that would present
"what really happened".

I doubt the Left still thinks that way, for among the
conclusions in the 9/11 Commission's report is the one
that finds that Saudi Arabia had no role in the terror
attacks on 9/11. The commission found no evidence
that the Saudi government knew of or supported the
plot to attack America, including the case of 2 Saudi
attackers that lived in San Diego and were linked to
a member of the Saudi Royal family.

Though the Congressional joint inquiry last year
helped elevate the Saudi suspicions (and they are
valid suspicions), it was Michael Moore on his
website, through the mainstream media, and in his
2-hour lie "Farenheit 9/11" who has raised the
Saudi-9/11 link to an article of faith within the
ranks of the rabid Left. Moore claims, and probably
will until the day he dies, that not only was Saudi
Arabia behind 9/11, but it was all at the direction of
the oil-lusting Bush administration.

The spin from the Lefties now will be that the 9/11
Commission itself was a tool of the Bush
administration and that the report seeks to exonerate
Bush (even though it appears that Clinton's NSA Sandy
Berger was the one trying to cover things up).
Predictably, the Left will hold dear to its
faith-based principles: Bush is Hitler, it's all about
oil, Michael Moore is Jesus Christ, and Bush stole the
2000 election.

The Left cannot let go of its hatred for Bush, so my
guess is that it will continue to show disdain for
facts and truth, even while it claims to revere them.

Terrorists scouting airliners for new attacks-- testing the system

07.22.04 (9:07 am)   [edit]
..and it doesn't sound like the system is too good.

[b]Scouting jetliners for new attacks[/b]
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.

At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane.

"No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack," an air marshal said.

Pilots and air marshals who asked to remain anonymous told The Washington Times that surveillance by terrorists is rampant, using different probing methods.
"It's happening, and it's a sad state of affairs," a pilot said.
A June 29 incident aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles is similar to a Feb. 15 incident on American Airlines Flight 1732 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport.
The Northwest flight involved 14 Syrian men and the American Airlines flight involved six men of Middle Eastern descent.
"I've never been in a situation where I have felt that afraid," said Annie Jacobsen, a business and finance feature writer for the online magazine Women's Wall Street who was aboard the Northwest flight.
The men were seated throughout the plane pre
tending to be strangers. Once airborne, they began congregating in groups of two or three, stood nearly the entire flight, and consecutively filed in and out of bathrooms at different intervals, raising concern among passengers and flight attendants, Mrs. Jacobsen said.
One man took a McDonald's bag into the bathroom, then passed it off to another passenger upon returning to his seat. When the pilot announced the plane was cleared for landing and to fasten seat belts, seven men jumped up in unison and went to different bathrooms.
Her account was confirmed by David Adams, spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS), who said officers were on board and checked the bathrooms several times during the flight, but nothing was found.
"The FAMS never broke their cover, but monitored" the activity, Mr. Adams said. "Given the facts, they had no legal basis to take an enforcement action. But there was enough of a suspicious nature for the FAMS, passengers and crew to take notice."
A January FBI memo says suicide terrorists are plotting to hijack trans-Atlantic planes by smuggling "ready-to-build" bomb kits past airport security, and later assembling the explosives in aircraft bathrooms.
On many overseas flights, airlines have issued rules prohibiting loitering near the lavatory.
"After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together and eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre bathroom activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified," Mrs. Jacobsen said.
"One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves ... one of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the men. Not one of the flight attendants asked them to sit down."
In an interview yesterday with The Washington Times, Mrs. Jacobsen said she was surprised to learn afterward that flight attendants are not trained to handle terrorist attacks or the situation that happened on her flight.
"I absolutely empathize with the flight attendants. They are acting with no clear protocol," she said.
Other passengers were distraught and one woman was even crying as the events unfolded.
The plane was met by officials from the FBI, Los Angeles Police Department, Federal Air Marshal Service and Transportation Security Administration. The Syrians, who were traveling on one-way tickets, were taken into custody.
The men, who were not on terrorist watch lists, were released, although their information and fingerprints were added to a database. The group had been hired as musicians to play at a casino, and the booking, hotel accommodations and return flight to New York from Long Beach, Calif., also checked out, Mr. Adams said.
"We don't know if it was a dry run, that's why we are working together with intelligence and investigative agencies to help protect the homeland," he said.
Mrs. Jacobsen, however, is skeptical the 14 passengers were innocent musicians.
"If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?" she asked in the article.
The pilot confirmed Mrs. Jacobsen's experience was "terribly alike" what flight attendants reported on the San Juan flight.
He said there is "widespread knowledge" among crew members these probes are taking place.
A Middle Eastern passenger attempted to videotape out the window as the plane taxied on takeoff and, when told by a flight attendant it was not permitted, "gave her a mean look and stopped taping," said a written report of the San Juan incident by a flight attendant.
The group of six men sat near one another, pretended to be strangers, but after careful observation from flight attendants, it was apparent "all six knew each other," the report said.
"They were very careful when we were in their area to seem separate and pretended to be sleeping, but when we were out of the twilight area, they were watching and communicating," the report said.
The men made several trips to the bathroom and congregated in that area, and were told at least twice by a flight attendant to return to their seats. The suspicious behavior was relayed to airline officials in midflight and additional background checks were conducted.
A second pilot said that, on one of his recent flights, an air marshal forced his way into the lavatory at the front of his plane after a man of Middle Eastern descent locked himself in for a long period.
The marshal found the mirror had been removed and the man was attempting to break through the wall. The cockpit was on the other side.
The second pilot said terrorists are "absolutely" testing security.
"There is a great degree of concern in the airline industry that not only are these dry runs for a terrorist attack, but that there is absolutely no defense capabilities on a vast majority of airlines," the second pilot said.
Dawn Deeks, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, said there is no "central clearinghouse" for them to learn of suspicious incidents, and flight crews are not told how issues are resolved.
She said a flight attendant reported that a passenger was using a telephoto lens to take sequential photos of the cockpit door.
The passenger was stopped, and the incident, which happened two months ago, was reported to officials. But when the attendant checked back last week on the outcome, she was told her report had been lost.
Recent incidents at the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport have also alarmed flight crews. Earlier this month, a passenger from Syria was taken into custody while carrying anti-American materials and a note suggesting he intended to commit a public suicide.
A third pilot reported watching a man of Middle Eastern descent at the same airport using binoculars to get airplane tail numbers and writing the numbers in a notebook to correspond with flight numbers.
"It's a probe. They are probing us," said a second air marshal, who confirmed that Middle Eastern men try to flush out marshals by rushing the cockpit and stopping suddenly.

A tale of Costco as feminist hell has unintended consequences

07.22.04 (8:56 am)   [edit]
From National Review--

July 22, 2004, 8:39 a.m.
[b]Triplet-Tale Trauma
New York Times unwittingly gives the pro-life movement new life.[/b]

So now we know the lowest level of feminist hell, and there, in the white-hot center, stands the Costco.

This was a surprise to everyone who believed Wal-Mart to be the apex of retail evil, but villains are easily replaced and we have a new one in Costco, thanks to the musings of Amy Richards in the New York Times Magazine. Richards, of course, is the freelance writer who unwittingly deflated the "pro-choice" movement Sunday with her cheerful account of how she decided, upon hearing she was pregnant with triplets, to dispose of one or two of them.

Unmarried, and possessed of a "five-story walk-up in East Village," Richards considered the trauma of triplets for, oh, possibly 30 or 40 seconds, before asking her doctor what could be done about the problem at hand. This was, she said, her "immediate reaction."

Unfortunately for two of the babies she was carrying, it was Richards's delayed reaction, as well, and it intensified as she spent a day contemplating a life of "shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise."

Upon reading this line, I immediately e-mailed the essay to a friend who shops at Costco and who can occasionally be prevailed upon to buy me a big bag of teriyaki chicken breasts for only $12. I'd love a Costco membership, but I am fundamentally opposed to stores that make me pay for the privilege of shopping there, and I don't want to spend the money. (That $45 membership fee can buy a lot of under-the-table chicken breasts.) Richards would shudder to learn that there's an even lower level of domestic hell — women who want to shop at Costco but can't afford it. If she'd known of us, she would have aborted all three, I suppose, and immediately gotten back on the pill.

So I send the story to Laura with the note, "Just so you know.... There are people who find our lives repulsive." She's a conservative, a Mormon, and I knew she'd be offended. But as the day wore on, and the essay made its way across the Internet and approached "most e-mailed" status, a curious thing happened: No one I knew, conservative or liberal, came down on Richards's side.

The pro-lifers, of course, turned purple and required emergency-room care. This was to be expected. But the fence-sitters — the squishy middle that see nothing wrong with lifestyle abortions up until 12 weeks or so, but get more uncomfortable the bigger the baby gets — reported feeling "sick" after reading Richards's story. Even strident pro-choicers were uncomfortable with the decision she'd made. A pro-abortion friend who works in the newsroom of a major metropolitan daily sent the piece to a handful of her liberal co-workers and, to a woman, they were "appalled" by it.

The essay reads like a parody published by The Onion or the Christian equivalent, The Door. It's what I would have written in college had someone assigned me an 800-word parody that exposes the shallow and the callow of the thirty-something population today.

"I'd have to give up my life!" Richards exclaims to her boyfriend and father of the triplets, who, to his credit, appeared a bit uneasy about the swiftness and ease of her decision. (Presumably, they never married, even after their son was born; Richards never refers to him as anything other than a boyfriend.) "I'll never leave my house because I have to care for these children!" she laments. "I'm going to have to move to Staten Island!"

Yeah, Amy, and honey? I would have told you — although you have probably figured it out by now — you're also going to have to — horrors! — wake up...unwillingly...during the night! And — brace yourself — you're going to have to remove anything breakable and/or poisonous within a toddler's reach! You will have to install child-safety locks! Put a car seat in the Corvette! Pretend to be interested in water Pokemon! You will be sneezed on, and bled on, and thrown-up on...the indignities know no bounds.

Worst of all, you will occasionally — maybe even frequently — catch a cold or even strep throat from that ungrateful little monster in your care. Children are parasites, really, from the moment they attach to your uterus and suck your nutrients away, and if you're lucky, this will continue for only 18 years and nine months, but usually it's much longer than this.

Some years ago, The New Yorker published a satirical piece entitled "Shiftless Little Loafers," in which the writer complained about how children do nothing but take and contribute nothing to better the world. One wonders if Richards read it and took it seriously.

You read her litany of complaints about How Motherhood Will Ruin My Life, and you want to shake her, and say, "But why? Why? Why are you getting yourself pregnant when it's clear that you are not prepared to make any sacrifices for them?" Richards seems typical of the woman who is determined to Have It All, even when she doesn't really want it all. She wants the Hallmark moments...the "experience" of having a child, which, in this Costco-is-the-enemy worldview, is just one more thing on the Cosmo checklist of things to do before you're 40. (Have a one-night stand with someone you met on an airplane! Buy a canoe! Learn another language! Have a child! But just one! Any more will ruin your figure!)

Richards doesn't say how old her son is, but assuming this account is recent, I'm figuring he's either a newborn, or about a year old. As the sole caregiver for an almost-two-year-old (and her three older siblings), I'd love to think that she's already regretting her decision, but I know the opposite is true. Each night she is awakened by a cry, every interruption in her workday, every dollar drained from her checking account for diapers or formula, she is telling herself, "What if it had been three? I couldn't have done it. I did the right thing."

But she didn't, of course. She did the easy thing. And she can tell herself for the rest of her life, that it was the right decision for her...after all, abortion is all about choice, isn't it? And you know, it probably was the right decision...for her.

But 20 or 30 years from now, when her adult son comes to her and asks — as he surely will one day — why she aborted his siblings, I wish I could be a fly on the wall. Because it may have been her children, her "choice," but in making it, she aborted her son's brothers or sisters. And some day, he, too, may believe in "fetal reduction"; after all, children tend to assume the morality, or lack thereof, of their parents. But, it also could be that, given a choice, he would have preferred to have had a couple of brothers or a sister, than the smallest jar of mayonnaise on the block, purchased at D'Agostino. Even if his mother was stressed.

— Jennifer Nicholson Graham, an NRO contributor, is a writer in Virginia. Here website is www.jennifergraham.com

9/11 report to blame "institutional failings", while Richard Clarke proves he's an idiot

07.22.04 (5:19 am)   [edit]
I don't have the text of the 9/11 report because it comes out at 11:30am, so you can read the news storyabout it here-- http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

Richard Clarke, quoted in the article, says this about the report:

"To get unanimity they didn't talk about a number of things, like what effect is the war in Iraq is having on our battle against terrorism."

I think I can field that one. The 9/11 Commission's purpose was to investigate what led to --- 9/11! It's job was also to recommend ways to prevent future 9/11s! The Commission's job was not to critique Bush's war on terror.

Why can't Richard Clarke just go away? He's obviously an opportunist with no crediblity. Just like Joe Wilson.

More on the 9/11 report later.

Berger's lax attitude toward national security is what you'll get if Democrat Kerry is elected

07.22.04 (5:04 am)   [edit]
Berger, a Kerry adivsor, was Clinton's NSA-- most Democrats are on the same page regarding US national security. We can expect actions like Berger's if Kerry is elected president.

This is a revealing, vital article.

[b]The Bad Old Days[/b]
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 22, 2004

Democratic partisans, notably Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, are howling about the timing of the revelation that Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel “Sandy” Berger is under criminal investigation. They contend the sensational allegation that he was observed by National Archives personnel stuffing highly classified documents into his clothing, and then "accidentally disposing” of some of them, is coming out now for a cynical political reason: In order to divert attention from the criticisms of the Bush Administration expected in the 9/11 Commission report due to be released today.

In fact, far from distracting the public from the factors that contributed to the deadly attacks that cost nearly 3,000 American lives that day in September 2001, the disclosure of Sandy Burger’s misconduct would be the perfect introduction to a theme that surely will be a central theme of its report: The considerable contribution made to the worst attacks on this country in its history by the lax attitude towards national security secrets that pervaded the executive branch during the eight years that preceded the Bush presidency. Surely, that is, if the presence as one of the Commissioners of a top Clinton policy-maker, former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, has not precluded an objective and unstinting analysis of the facts.

Consider a few examples of this insidious and predictably dangerous attitude:

oSandy Berger was not the first senior Clinton official to have been investigated for serious breaches in the classified information. Former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch was forced to resign and ultimately received a presidential pardon after he was found to have exposed very sensitive information to compromise by putting it on a home computer used for accessing notoriously insecure pornographic web sites. Interestingly, Berger and Deutch formed a consulting firm in 2001 called "Stonebridge International." Former Assistant Secretary Tobi Gati, who headed the Clinton State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), was also investigated for a number of security violations.

oDuring John Deutch’s tenure at the CIA, the hiring for its Directorate of Operations – the clandestine operational side of the house – was cut dramatically and morale in the organization plummeted, resulting in a significant number of resignations among “human intelligence” professionals.

oStaff reports prepared for the 9/11 Commission have established serious failures with respect to the timely sharing of relevant information between U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. We now know that this impediment to “connecting the dots” was due, in part, to the insistence of the then-Number 2 person in the Justice Department, none other than Ms. Gorelick, that “the wall” between such agencies be maintained in an even more exacting way than was otherwise required.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence established that a contributor to the problems with America’s understanding of the true state of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs was a similar the failure of various intelligence agencies to share such information as they had.

These institutional problems are all the more remarkable given the insistence that senior members of the Clinton Administration’s national security team – notably, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and his predecessor, Anthony Lake, and UN Ambassador-turned Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her INR chief, Secretary Gati – that highly classified American intelligence be routinely shared with foreign governments and multilateral institutions. This practice continued even in the face of evidence that such sharing was compromising U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

oThe Clinton team’s lax attitude towards sensitive information was also evident in its determination to engage in the wholesale declassification of previous administrations’ documents, with scant concern for – or even careful review of – the continued sensitivity of the information they contained. Nuclear weapons-relevant documents that could still be dangerous in the wrong hands were among those declassified wholesale.

oOn the Clinton team’s watch and with its acquiescence, the job of recruiting human agents in critical target areas and organizations became infinitely more difficult. At the instigation of a close Clinton associate, then-Senator Bob Torricelli, the CIA was barred from using spies who had unsavory records. Since just about anybody who had access to the likes of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il and their secrets would have such a record, the negative impacts of other Clinton policies and practices on human intelligence were greatly exacerbated.

oEven physical security was a nightmare during the Clinton years. In 1999, a Russian spy planted eavesdropping devices in the Albright State Department. We still don’t know who gained access to and stole top secret documents from her office in Foggy Bottom. Nor is the identity yet known of the person who made off in January 2000 with a laptop computer kept in a conference room used by INR – a computer whose hard-drive contained a wealth of top secret intelligence.

oAs with fish, the rot started at the top. President Clinton virtually refused to see his CIA Director and almost never read the Presidential Daily Briefing prepared to ensure he was aware of emerging threats and other priority intelligence developments.

oFor his part, Vice President Gore famously abused intelligence professionals and capabilities. He scrawled “bull....” on a classified assessment that reported his favorite Russian interlocutor, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, was corrupt – a response that had a chilling effect on analysts’ readiness to convey information that would be seen as “politically incorrect” or otherwise inconvenient. Some analysts who failed to self-censor were subjected to retaliation.Isn’t it curious that Mr. Gore has been so ready to take his successor and others in the Bush Administration to task for manipulating or pressuring the Intelligence Community to lie about Iraq?

Vice President Gore also insisted that intelligence assets be diverted to serve his pet environmental interests. Spy satellites and anti-submarine sensors were used to monitor sea-life. Millions of dollars were spent by the CIA on a "DCI environmental center." Intelligence assessments were tasked concerning volcanic eruptions and global warming. The Veep’s environmental preoccupation even resulted in an annual "Earth Day" edition of the PDB being produced for his attention.

oThose who claim the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq was the product of political pressure – despite the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unanimous finding to the contrary – have chosen to forget a truly egregious example of Clinton politicization of intelligence. An NIE was generated and delivered to the Senate in September 1996, just in time to influence a vote on missile defense adamantly opposed by administration ideologues. It arrived at the astounding conclusion that there would be no threat of ballistic missile attack against the United States for at least fifteen years.

To arrive at this preposterous finding, of course, the CIA had to come up with three remarkable assumptions: For the purpose of the analysis, 1) Russian and Chinese missiles didn’t count; 2) no one with long-range ballistic missile technology would help others who didn’t have it yet to get such equipment and know-how; and 3) Alaska and Hawaii wouldn’t be considered part of the United States, since they were likely very shortly to be within striking distance of North Korean medium-range missiles.

o The CIA diverted millions of dollars to a "Balkans Taskforce" which in the 1990s consumed much of agency’s analytic talent and a considerable amount of money. Meanwhile, during this period, the DCI Counterterrorism Center was sorely neglected. Assignment to it was viewed by intelligence professionals as a bad career move.

In short, Sandy Berger’s alleged theft of classified documents from the National Archives is no more a diversion from the 9/11 Commission’s subject than it is an anomaly. Rather, it bespeaks an indifference to, if not actual hostility towards, the fundamentals of sensitive national security policy-related information and tradecraft that should feature prominently in the Commission post-mortem on the September 11th attacks. Assuming, that is, such a focus was not too embarrassing for Jamie Gorelick – or too inconvenient for the Clinton-Kerry team that hopes the American people will not be reminded of the “bad old days,” and invite a reprise by returning that team to high office.

[i]Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. He formerly held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department.[/i]

America still not serious about enforcing its immigration laws-- a dangerous game

07.22.04 (4:55 am)   [edit]
[b]A Dangerous Immigration Game [/b]
By Michelle Malkin
Townhall.com | July 22, 2004

Let me state the obvious for the 9,999th time: America is still not serious about enforcing its immigration laws. The latest addition to my homeland insecurity files comes from New Ipswich, New Hampshire.

Last week, the local police there stopped a speeding van. The driver was on the road with a suspended license. Upon inspecting the vehicle, the cops found 10 people stuffed inside. They sheepishly presented authorities with dubious identification cards. The cops asked the passengers where they were from and where they were headed. "Massachusetts" and "New Hampshire," the answers came back in perfect English.

One of the cops wasn't about to play games. "Are you here illegally?" the officer asked. (I can hear the American Civil Liberties Union members running to file their lawsuits right now). Upon being asked their immigration status, the passengers suddenly lost their command of the English language. "No comprende," they sputtered.

After a Spanish-speaking translator was brought in from a nearby town, the New Ipswich cops learned that the 10 individuals in question had paid a smuggler up to $10,000 each to get into the United States. They apparently originated in Ecuador, traveled to Mexico, crossed the border into California with the high-priced help of coyotes, and then trekked across the country into New Hampshire without a hitch. The vigilant cops of the New Ipswich Police Department, who are constantly urged by the bureaucrats in Washington to be on heightened alert, immediately contacted federal immigration authorities.

The response they received from the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was: So what?

According to New Ipswich police chief Garrett Chamberlain, the feds told his department that they didn't have the resources to take the admitted illegal aliens into custody. Besides, since they were "only" garden-variety illegal aliens and not "previously deported" aliens or violent criminals, there was no reason to hold them. "You gotta be kidding me!" Chamberlain told me in an interview this week. "These people admitted they paid smugglers, admitted they were here illegally, and nobody wants to take them in?" Chamberlain noted that the 10 individuals supplied false birth date information ("one guy said he was 31 and was born in 1963") and gave obviously false names. "We called immigration five times before releasing, and they had no interest in them whatsoever."

As for the federal government's priority of only enforcing the law against "previously deported" aliens, Chamberlain wonders -- at a time when millions of illegal aliens are living, working, studying, voting and lobbying for their "rights" -- how anybody ever gets deported anymore. Chamberlain is furious and decided to go public with the incident, despite a politically correct code of silence among police chiefs about open-borders chaos. "We're asked by our government every day to increase our awareness and try to apprehend" law-breakers, Chamberlain mused, "and then they tell me to kick 'em loose? It's frustrating."

Chief Chamberlain is not alone. As I've reported consistently since the Sept. 11 attacks, immigration enforcement remains a joke. "Catch-and-release" games are par for the course:

In Wenatchee, Wash., last month, a man now charged with the murder of local deputy Saul Gallegos in Chelan was "voluntarily removed" (allowed to leave the country on his own accord) three times in recent years but he always came back. In Del Rio, Texas, 17 illegal aliens from Brazil were arrested by a local sheriff and released by federal authorities. The sheriff's complaints to Rep. Henry Bonilla resulted in immigration enforcement interviews that would otherwise not have happened. Sheriff D'Wayne Jernigan fumed to the local press:

"Are they criminals? Are they terrorists? We don't know who they are. . . . The agency officials at this level here locally, I truly believe, are just as much against these releases as I am. They feel betrayed. They're thinking, 'We work hard to apprehend these people and then the next day someone at the Washington level orders their release. Why are we apprehending them in the first place?'

"It's ridiculous. A war on terrorism? Homeland security? Hah!" Jernigan said.

Indeed. Perhaps it is time for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to simply drop the word "Enforcement" from its title. Spare us the charade.

Leftist press ignores Berger scandal-- THE PUBLIC HAS THE RIGHT TO KNOW WHAT BERGER ATTEMPTED TO HID

07.22.04 (4:31 am)   [edit]
This article makes three points that I think are important:

1)How can the 9/11 commission be sure it has "everything" when Berger is still being investigated?

2)This investigation has been going on since October- this means that this is a serious matter that doesn't involve "accidentally" discarding a thing.

3)THE PUBLIC NEEDS TO KNOW WHAT WAS TRYING TO BE ERASED FROM THE RECORD.

[b]The Gap
Sandy Berger's pilfering of papers from the archive should be big trouble for the Democrats. Why is the press AWOL?[/b]
by Hugh Hewitt
07/22/2004 12:00:00 AM

HERE ARE the two key sentence from yesterdays Washington Post: "[Sandy] Berger returned two of the after-action drafts within days, according to his attorneys. Other drafts of the after-action document, they said, were apparently discarded."

As any lawyer who has ever argued over the contents of a brief knows, the stuff that gets left out can be the most telling material of all--indicative of prejudices and priorities, sensitivities and credibility. Berger's sticky fingers have left a gap in the record of the Clinton administration's response to the growing threat posed by al Qaeda. Unless other files exist with all the same drafts and handwritten notes that Berger destroyed, we will never be able to conclude whether Berger's actions were simply another display of fecklessness and recklessness on an issue of national security, or an attempt to bleach the record of Clinton-era malpractice on matters of terror.

Washington has had to judge gaps in the record before. "[A] few minutes missing from a non-subpoenaed tape hardly seemed worth a second thought," Richard Nixon wrote in his memoir of his reaction on first learning that Rose Mary Woods had deleted a portion of the famous tapes. Nixon would conclude "most people think that my inability to explain the 18 and 1/2-minute gap is the most unbelievable and insulting part of the whole of Watergate." Imaginations ran wild, and Nixon's credibility never recovered.

Now crucial drafts of an important report are missing, and no one has reported if exact duplicates--not "copies"--have been found. Unless and until "red-lined" versions of the previous and following drafts are produced and compared to the "missing" drafts, we will never know what vanished from the record in Berger's pants. Could it have been a reference to Osama's flight from Sudan, or a warning of airplanes as missiles? No one can know unless some other repository existed for all of the drafts, and only if copies of all handwritten notes exist in that same file. The trouble with widely circulated papers is that principals make handwritten notations on all of them, which are then returned to the central record keeper. Every "copy" is an original if a note has been made in the margin.

A COMMISSION STAFFER said with certainty that no gaps exist in the record, but how could they possibly know this if the Department of Justice still has the matter under investigation and if handwritten notes are involved? Further, if handwritten notes appeared on the originals or copies that Berger walked off with, the commission would have to be certain that the "copies" they have been provided were copies of exactly what Berger took away and "lost." Read this laughable, incredible statement from the commission, quoted in the Los Angeles Times: "Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, said the panel had been given access to all copies of drafts that were missing, and thought that the integrity of its work had not been compromised. 'We had access to copies of everything we are reading about,' he said."

Reporters who know what a paragraph or two can do to a story and who have seen what a handwritten note can do to a case, are walking away from this story, calmed by the assurances from Berger's lawyer, his friends, and a desperate-not-to-be-discr edited commission. Was Rose Woods this well treated? If Condoleezza Rice had stuffed her blouse full of various drafts of pre- 9/11 terrorism reports and then admitted to sloppy work that resulted in the loss of these docs, would promises of copies suffice to quiet a crazed White House press room?

Still wondering about the potential significance of a single draft, or small changes between drafts? Recall that on January 11, 2001, the Los Angeles Times deleted a reference to Juanita Broaddrick from a George Will column on the legacy of Bill Clinton. I caught the censorship on air, and the wave of reader outrage that followed forced an admission of guilt and an apology from the paper. The Times's attempt to hide a single phrase from its readers told you volumes about the paper--and about the significance of Broaddrick to the Clinton legacy.

We will probably never know what Berger erased from the record. The idea that he smuggled sensitive documents and then "lost" them is absurd. If there were "damning admissions against interest," as trial lawyers like to say, among the papers, Berger probably could be counted on to arrange the carrying away and return of enough paper as to obscure the trail and cloak the reference. Why has the investigation gone on so long? There is a complex paper trail here, and hopefully the government is attempting to recreate everything that was in the archive before Berger scarred it. That will take a long time, perhaps even requiring the fetching of computers and the recreation of electronic transmissions.

But eventually the public needs to know not what was attempted to be excised from the archive--it may be too sensitive to reveal--but only if there was information unique to the draft(s) that Berger lost. If there was, Berger wasn't being sloppy. He was being precise.

Finally, the Kerry campaign quickly assured everyone that it knew nothing. It is interesting that Nixon tried to persuade the public of the very same point. You don't believe Nixon, do you? "[T]o this day many people are not aware that Rose was exonerated by the Special Prosecutor in regard to the 181/2-minute gap," Nixon noted in his memoir:

[i]Rose Woods testified under oath concerning the 18 and 1/2 minute gap before a court hearing and the grand jury. In the hearing she was subjected to hours of merciless cross-examination on this issue. On July 17, 1974, Leon Jaworski informed Rose's attorney that no case had been developed of any illegal action of any kind by Rose, and that no charges would be made against her. He said that his assistant, Richard Ben-Veniste, agreed.[/i]

Has Berger been before a grand jury yet? Is Ben-Veniste as aggressive on gaps in the record today as he was 30 years ago?

[i]Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends Upon It. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.[/i]

© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Bush can't win-- even if he does!

07.21.04 (8:11 am)   [edit]
July 20, 2004, 9:00 a.m.
[b]W.’s Double Binds
He can’t win — even if he does![/b]
Rich Lowry, NRO

Sometimes a political figure becomes so hated that he can't do anything right in the eyes of his enemies. President Bush has achieved this rare and exalted status. His critics are so blinded by animus that the internal consistency of their attacks on him no longer matters. For them, Bush is the double-bind president.

If he stumbles over his words, he is an embarrassing idiot. If he manages to cut taxes or wage a war against Saddam Hussein with bipartisan support, he is a manipulative genius.

If he hasn't been able to capture Osama bin Laden, he is endangering U.S. security. If he catches bin Laden, it is only a ploy to influence the elections.

If he ignores U.N. resolutions, he is a dangerous unilateralist. If he takes U.N. resolutions on Iraq seriously, he is a dangerous unilateralist. If he doesn't get France to agree to his Iraq policy, he is ignoring important international actors. If he supports multiparty talks on North Korea, he is not doing enough to ignore important international actors.

If he bombed Iraq, he should have bombed Saudi Arabia instead, and if he had bombed Saudi Arabia, he should have bombed Iran, and if he had bombed all three, he shouldn't have bombed anyone at all. If he imposes a U.S. occupation on Iraq, he is fomenting Iraqi resistance by making the United States seem an imperial power. If he ends the U.S. occupation, he is cutting and running.

If he warns of a terror attack, he is playing alarmist politics. If he doesn't warn of a terror attack, he is dangerously asleep at the switch. If he says we're safer, he's lying, and if he doesn't say we're safer, he's implicitly admitting that he has failed in his core duty as commander in chief.

If he adopts a doctrine of preemption, he is unacceptably remaking American national-security policy. If the United States suffers a terror attack on his watch, he should have preempted it. If he signs a far-reaching antiterror law, he is abridging civil liberties. If the United States suffers another terror attack on his watch, he should have had a more vigorous anti-terror law.

Bush's economy hasn't created new jobs. If it has created new jobs, they aren't well-paying jobs. If they are well-paying jobs, there is still income inequality in America.

If Bush opposes a prescription-drug benefit for the elderly, he's miserly. If he supports a prescription-drug benefit for the elderly, he's lining the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. If he restrains government spending, he's heartless. If he supports government spending, he's bankrupting the nation and robbing from future generations.

If he opposes campaign-finance reform, he's a tool of corporate interests. If he signs campaign-finance reform, he's abridging the First Amendment rights of Michael Moore (whose ads for Fahrenheit 9/11 might run afoul of the law).

If he accuses John Kerry of flip-flopping, he is merely highlighting one of the Massachusetts senator's strengths — his nuance and thoughtfulness. If he flip-flops on nation-building or testifying before the 9/11 commission, he proves his own ill-intentions, cluelessness, or both.

If he doesn't admit a mistake, he is bullheaded and detached from reality. If he admits a mistake, he is damning his own governance in shocking fashion.

If he sticks with Dick Cheney, he is saddling himself with an unpopular vice president, giving Democrats who can't wait to run against Cheney a political advantage. If he drops Cheney, he is admitting that the Democratic attacks against his vice president have hit home, thus giving Democrats who have made those charges a political advantage.

If he loses in November, the voice of the American people has spoken a devastating verdict on his presidency. If he wins, he stole the election.

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

Imagine what the uproar would be if Condi Rice "accidentally discarded" classified documents?

07.21.04 (5:14 am)   [edit]
If Dr. Rice, current NSA for Bush, in preparation for her testimony before the 9-11 commission rifled through some classified documents, claimed she accidentally took some home with her, and "accidentally discarded" some of them that dealt with terrorism before bringing them back, she would have resigned already-- and we'd have every snot-nosed leftist in the country (including every one of them on Tblog) calling her a "House Nigger" part of "Bush/Cheney, Inc." in bed with Halliburton (and so forth). They'd all be demanding her head.

It would be insufferable.

But Sandy Berger does this when the 9-11 commission is scrutinizing the Bush and Clinton administrations, and all we can do is excuse the man. All we have are pathetic excuses. We can take [i]Berger[/i] at his word, but not Dr. Rice. Why? Well quite simply-- Rice is a conservative.

Plus, Berger's explanation doesn't hold water. According to Byron York writing in National Review:

[i]Second, although Berger said he reviewed thousands of pages, he apparently homed in on a single document: the so-called "after-action report" on the Clinton administration's handling of the millennium plot of 1999/2000. Berger is said to have taken multiple copies of the same paper. He is also said to have taken those copies on at least two different days. There have been no reports that he took any other documents, which suggests that his choice of papers was quite specific, and not the result of simple carelessness.

Third, it appears that Berger's "inadvertent" actions clearly aroused the suspicion of the professional staff at the Archives. Staff members there are said to have seen Berger concealing the papers; they became so concerned that they set up what was in effect a small sting operation to catch him. And sure enough, Berger took some more. Those witnesses went to their superiors, who ultimately went to the Justice Department. (There was no surveillance camera in the room in which Berger worked with the documents, meaning there is no videotape record of the incidents.)[/i]

This after-action report of the millenium plot was written by Richard Clarke, and it apparently provides scathing criticism of the Clinton administration's handling of terrorism. It would be in Berger's interest to get rid of this report, a report that AG John Ashcroft said before the 9-11 commission reflects a way of fighting terror that not be a model for government.

And, of course, it doesn't matter if Berger committed the crime or not. This time the accusation doesn't matter (it always does for a Republican), it's the timing. In fact, if the DOJ does its job and investigates further, that merely proves to these insane troglodytes that Bush is evil! That's the way it is when you worship yourself-- you're incapable of doing any wrong and incapable of any shame. Don't believe me? Go to Moveon.org, read "The Nation", listen to Air America. Hell, read the moronic Matthew Martin (jimmytherighteous)-- http://jimmytherighteous.tblo... ...These guys are not grounded in reality.

For the Left, the evidence that Bush = "Hitler" is overwhelming. For the Left the idea that Hussein didn't have WMD and "Bush LIED!!!" is an article of faith (and these lefties tell us to grow up). So far-out are these guys that if we finally found WMD it would have been "planted" by Bush/Cheney, inc. The Democratic party has turned into a circus freakshow, and all these morons have is their hate, which they call "intellect", and their arrogance.

So anyway, Trousergate is becoming pretty huge, even though the media is trying to ignore it. There are two articles linked here that basically say two things: 1)What the hell was Berger thinking? and 2)Berger needs to come forward and cooperate with the investigation, for the documents he held have to do with the way the US fights terror.

From NRO-- "Sand Berger's Heavy Lifting" http://nationalreview.com/yor...

Wall Street Journal Editorial-- http://www.opinionjournal.com...

Excerpt:

[i]There's only one way to clear away the political smoke: Release all the drafts of the review Mr. Berger took from the room....

Written by Richard Clarke for the NSC, the key document was called the Millennium After-Action Review because it dealt with al Qaeda attacks timed for the eve of the Millennium celebrations. In his own 9/11 testimony, Mr. Berger described these al Qaeda plans as "the most serious threat spike of our time in government." He went on to say that they provoked "sustained attention and rigorous actions" from the Administration that ended up saving lives.

But Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has the advantage of having read the document in question, had a different take. In his own 9/11 testimony in April, [b]Mr. Ashcroft recommended that the Commission "study carefully" the after-action memo. He described it as laying out vulnerabilities and calling for aggressive remedies of the type he and the Bush Administration have been criticized for. [u]Mr. Ashcroft further noted that when he took office, this "highly classified review" was "not among" the items he was briefed on during the transition.[/b][/u]...

Maybe that is because of the potential for embarrassment at the mentality the memo reveals. [b]Mr. Ashcroft testified that the Justice Department's "surveillance and FISA operations were specifically criticized for their glaring weaknesses."[/b] The most glaring, of course, were the restrictions on the sharing of critical information between intelligence and law enforcement--even within the FBI itself. This was the infamous "wall of separation" that Clinton Deputy AG Jamie Gorelick instructed the FBI director should "go beyond what is legally required."[/i]

Will the truth come out? Don't count on it. Liberals control the mainstream media-- if DOJ pursues charges they'll make Ashcroft the villain, though it appears the illegal behavior is all Berger's.

I thought the Clinton administration (and Richard Clarke, remember) were proud of the way they "fought" Al Qaeda in the 1990s?

Apprently not. Welcome to Trousergate.

On "free" healthcare, or why Cleveland is where Canada goes for hip surgeries

07.21.04 (4:47 am)   [edit]
[b]Free health care[/b]
Walter E. Williams
July 21, 2004

Let's start out by not quibbling with America's socialists' false claim that health-care service is a human right that people should have regardless of whether they can pay for it or not and that it should be free. Before we buy into this socialist agenda, we might check out just what happens when health-care services are "free." Let's look at our neighbor to the north -- Canada.

The Fraser Institute, a Vancouver, B.C.-based think tank, has done yeoman's work keeping track of Canada's socialized health-care system. It has just come out with its 13th annual waiting-list survey. It shows that the average time a patient waited between referral from a general practitioner to treatment rose from 16.5 weeks in 2001-02 to 17.7 weeks in 2003. Saskatchewan had the longest average waiting time of nearly 30 weeks, while Ontario had the shortest, 14 weeks.

Waiting lists also exist for diagnostic procedures such as computer tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. Depending on what province and the particular diagnostic procedure, the waiting times can range from two to 24 weeks.

As reported in a December 2003 story by Kerri Houston for the Frontiers of Freedom Institute titled "Access Denied: Canada's Healthcare System Turns Patients Into Victims," in some instances, patients die on the waiting list because they become too sick to tolerate a procedure. Houston says that hip-replacement patients often end up non-ambulatory while waiting an average of 20 weeks for the procedure, and that's after having waited 13 weeks just to see the specialist. The wait to get diagnostic scans followed by the wait for the radiologist to read them just might explain why Cleveland, Ohio, has become Canada's hip-replacement center.

Adding to Canada's medical problems is the exodus of doctors. According to a March 2003 story in Canada News (www.canoe.ca), about 10,000 doctors left Canada during the 1990s. Compounding the exodus of doctors is the drop in medical school graduates. According to Houston, Ontario has chosen to turn to nurses to replace its bolting doctors. It's "creating" 369 new positions for nurse practitioners to take up the slack for the doctor shortage.

Some patients avoided long waits for medical services by paying for private treatment. In 2003, the government of British Columbia enacted Bill 82, an "Amendment to Strengthen Legislation and Protect Patients." On its face, Bill 82 is to "protect patients from inadvertent billing errors." That's on its face. But according to a January 2004 article written by Nadeem Esmail for the Fraser Institute's Forum and titled "Oh to Be a Prisoner," Bill 82 would disallow anyone from paying the clinical fees for private surgery, where previously only the patients themselves were forbidden from doing so. The bill also gives the government the power to levy fines of up to $20,000 on physicians who accept these fees or allow such a practice to occur. That means it is now against Canadian law to opt out of the Canadian health-care system and pay for your own surgery.

Health care can have a zero price to the user, but that doesn't mean it's free or has a zero cost. The problem with a good or service having a zero price is that demand is going to exceed supply. When price isn't allowed to make demand equal supply, other measures must be taken. One way to distribute the demand over a given supply is through queuing -- making people wait. Another way is to have a medical czar who decides who is eligible, under what conditions, for a particular procedure -- for example, no hip replacement or renal dialysis for people over 70 or no heart transplants for smokers.

I'm wondering just how many Americans would like Canada's long waiting lists, medical czars deciding what treatments we get and an exodus of doctors.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

What info would be on classified documents that would compel Clinton's Berger to STEAL them?

07.20.04 (4:55 pm)   [edit]
A statement from Dennis Hastert, speaker of the House on Sandy Berger's "inadvertent" stealing of CLASSIFIED national security documents:

I am profoundly troubled by allegations that former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger removed highly classified documents from the National Archives regarding the Clinton Administration's handling of terrorist attacks prior to the September 11th attacks.

What could those documents have said that drove Mr. Berger to remove them without authorization from a secure reading room for classified documents?

[b]What information could be so embarrassing that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation's most sensitive secrets?[/b]

(Blogger's note: as I've pointed out earlier, Berger is a trade lawyer and had no national security experience before being appointed as NSA by his crony Bill Clinton-- still, he knows damning info when he sees it)

Did these documents detail simple negligence or did they contain something more sinister? [b]Was this a bungled attempt to rewrite history and keep critical information from the 9/11 Commission and potentially put their report under a cloud?[/b]

It is my understanding that Mr. Berger shoved this classified information into his clothing to smuggle them out of the National Archives. [b]Press reports indicate that Archival staff became concerned when documents began to disappear and specifically marked additional documents to track them. A number of those documents also turned up missing.[/b]

Mr. Berger has a lot of explaining to do. [b][u]He was given access to these documents to assist the 9/11 Commission, not hide information from them. The American people and the 9/11 families don't want cover-ups when it comes to the War on Terror. They want the truth. And so does the U.S. House of Representatives.[/b][/u]

Oh yes, and Berger [b][u]HAS RESIGNED FROM THE KERRY CAMPAIGN[/u][/b], with his lawyer saying, I swear this is so, that "Mr. Berger does not want any issue surrounding the 9/11 commission to be used for partisan purposes."

Hahaha. Nah, not like the commission isn't already a political organ of the Democratic Party.

More Left-wing attempts to rewrite history, but the sad part is that this story, already being underreported, will lose traction-- even if there are criminal charges against Berger and the documents prove to be even more sour on Clinton's bungled presidency.

For the resignation article, click here-- http://www.usatoday.com/news/...

So for Sandy Berger it is the "timing" of the accusation, not the charge, that matters?

07.20.04 (12:07 pm)   [edit]
Of course it is, silly.

The Left has done nothing but accuse the president and his administration of every criminal act imagineable, insisting that each one represents "serious charges" that need to be investigated immediately, etc., but Sandy Berger is accused of taking damnng Clinton-era documents from the national archives before he spoke before the 9-11 Commission, and this time, according to David Gergen and Tom Daschle, the seriousness of the charge doesn't matter, it's the "timing".

Indeed, Berger may have done exactly what he is accused of, but the seriousness doesn't matter. If Berger were a Republican, then you can bet that the timing would be insignificant-- it would be the charge.

And why would Sandy Berger, former Clinton NSA, steal classified info right before his testimony? Why speculate? The Left-wing "rational" folk who insist Bush lied !!! against all evidence and common sense, who with a plain face call Bush "Hitler", insist that a man whose ass is on the line wouldn't try and cover it.

Only Republicans are evil. Repeat and repeat. That's the stance of the Democrats.

Disgusting, really.

Kerry continues to lie about the US economy-- but of course!

07.20.04 (4:38 am)   [edit]
From NRO--

[b]KERRY ECONOMIC AGITPROP 101 [07/19 01:16 PM][/b]

Almost every Kerry press release includes some version of the following economic arguments. No matter how many times the Kerry Spot, the Bush campaign, or the media refutes the untrue claims, Kerry and his team just repeat them over, and over, and over again.

[b]"Under George Bush, America has lost 1.8 million private-sector jobs."[/b]

Kerry ignores the fact that from 2000 to 2003, the economy experienced the dot-com, high-tech, and stock-market bubbles bursting; the terrorist attacks of September 11 and subsequent war on terror including the war in Iraq; and the discovery of corporate accounting scandals, years in the making, that undermined confidence in corporate America.

He also ignores the fact that the number of new people signing up for jobless benefits dropped last week to the lowest level in more than three years.

The Bush campaign cheerfully points out that since last August, more than 1.4 million new jobs have been created. The unemployment rate has fallen from 6.3 to 5.6 percent, below the average of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Job growth is widespread — employment over the last year was up in 44 of the 50 states, and the unemployment rate was down in 46 of the 50 states.

The Financial Times reported on July 12, "At the Harvard Business School between 91 per cent and 92 per cent of the graduating class had offers on graduation, and 83 per cent of them had accepted a job. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology more than 90 per cent of students had offers on graduation, up from 82 per cent last year. At MIT, campus recruiting by companies was up by 15 per cent and job postings — where companies advertise specific jobs on the school website — were between 30 per cent and 40 per cent higher than last year."

[b]"New jobs that are being created are primarily in low-wage industries."[/b]

Balderdash. A new set of numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually shows solid growth in employment in relatively higher-paying occupations including construction workers, health-care professionals, business managers, and teachers, and virtually no growth at all in relatively lower-paying occupations including office clerks and assembly-line workers.

According to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, [b]"Between June 2003 and June 2004, 71.4 percent of the net increase in employment was in three relatively well-paid occupational categories: management, professional and related occupations (23.1 percent); construction and extraction occupations (36.1 percent); and installation, maintenance and repair occupations (12.2) percent."[/b]

Real after-tax incomes are up by 11 percent since December 2000. The Bush campaign attributes the increase to the tax cuts and states that the growth by this measure is substantially better than following the last recession.

[b]"At the same time families are making less, the costs of college tuition, health care and college have all soared."[/b]

Tuition: Wrong. From USA Today, 06/28: "What students pay on average for tuition at public universities has fallen by nearly one-third since 1998, thanks to new federal tax breaks and a massive increase in state and federal grants to most students and their families.

"Contrary to the widespread perception that tuition is soaring out of control, a USA TODAY analysis found that what students actually pay in tuition and fees — rather than the published tuition price — has declined for a vast majority of students attending four-year public universities. [b]The newspaper concluded, "today's students have enjoyed the greatest improvement in college affordability since the GI bill provided benefits for returning World War II veterans."[/b]

Health Care: Conservatives may not love all of Bush's health-care proposals, but [b]one can hardly accuse Bush of ignoring the issue.[/b] He's created the Medicare prescription drug benefit, new health savings accounts, added 600 new community-health centers, and allowed states more flexibility with Medicaid.

Increasing health-care costs may have something to do with advances in technology, research, pharmaceuticals. Apparently Kerry believes he can make the medical community keep making breakthroughs and advances without getting any additional money from patients to pay for them.

President Bush proposes reforming the court system to eliminate frivolous lawsuits, including those accusing medical malpractice. Think you will get serious reform of malpractice law under Vice President John Edwards?

College: You're getting redundant, Senator.

"Focusing on values like opportunity, responsibility and fairness, Kerry said at both events today that a Kerry-Edwards administration will fight for good paying jobs and an economy that lifts up middle-class families.

"'Let me tell you what values mean to me and John Edwards,' Kerry said. "Values mean creating opportunity and fighting for good paying jobs that let American families actually get ahead. It means building an America where the middle class is doing better, not being squeezed."

[b]"Kerry and Edwards have a comprehensive plan to create 10 million new, better paying jobs."[/b]

Their goal of ten million new jobs over four years would slow the current rate of job growth by one third.

[b]Anyone who reads a newspaper consistently — or the Kerry Spot — can see that Kerry hasn't changed his economic outlook, rhetoric, or prescriptions one iota from last year, or 2002.[/b] A challenger needs a bad economy to win, so no matter how well the economy does, Kerry insists it's doing poorly. All of the stock market growth, he contends, is an illusion. The hiring numbers? Lies! Homeownership rates are at record levels? It's a trick! Inflation is low? That's a sign of disaster! Up really means down! Black really means white! Who are you going to believe, Kerry's press releases, or your own lying eyes?

The Lies of the "Bush Lied!!!" crowd

07.20.04 (3:29 am)   [edit]
The money quote,for therealspartacus--

'As the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon -- a frequent Bush critic -- puts it, "It would have taken an overwhelming body of evidence for any reasonable person in 2002 to think that Saddam did not possess stockpiles of chemical and biological agents."'

Unless you're The Smirking Chimp Posse and therealspartacus....

[b]The Lies of the "Bush Lied" Crowd[/b]
By Michael Barone
Townhall.com | July 20, 2004

Official reports issued the last two weeks have conclusively refuted those who have been arguing that "BUSH LIED" about the dangers from Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction programs. The first report was that of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That committee has been rent by partisan divisions over the last year, but the report was unanimous.

One prime conclusion of the report is that American intelligence organizations, like those of every other major country, did indeed believe that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ongoing WMD programs. That intelligence seems to have been mistaken.

But given Saddam Hussein's documented development, possession and use of WMDs, and his refusal to account for their disposal, what intelligence evidence could have convinced a reasonable analyst that he no longer had them?

As the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon -- a frequent Bush critic -- puts it, "It would have taken an overwhelming body of evidence for any reasonable person in 2002 to think that Saddam did not possess stockpiles of chemical and biological agents."

So Bush was justified in relying on the intelligence. And "the committee did not fund any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."

So much for the wild charges that Bush manipulated intelligence and lied about weapons of mass destruction. He simply said what was believed by every informed person -- including leading members of the Clinton administration before 2001 and Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards in their speeches in October 2002 supporting military action in Iraq.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report also refuted completely the charges by former diplomat Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration ignored his conclusion, based on several days in Niger, that Iraq had not sought to buy uranium in that country. Democrats and many in the press claimed that Wilson refuted the 16-word sentence Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, noting that British intelligence reported that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.

But British intelligence stands by that finding, and the committee noted that Wilson confirmed that Iraq had approached Niger, whose main exports are uranium and goats, and intelligence analysts concluded that his report added nothing else to their previous knowledge. And the report flatly denied Wilson's statements that his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with his mission to Niger -- it quotes Plame's memo taking credit for the appointment.

The report issued last week in Britain by former civil servant Lord Butler reaches similar conclusions. It finds that Prime Minister Tony Blair did not pressure intelligence organizations to change their findings and that there was no "deliberate distortion" of intelligence or "culpable negligence." It supported the conclusion of British intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium in Africa.

All this is significant because for the past year most leading Democrats and many in the determinedly anti-Bush media have been harping on the "BUSH LIED" theme. Their aim clearly has been to discredit and defeat Bush. The media continue to fight this battle: contrast the way The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times front-paged the Wilson charges last year with the way they're downplaying the proof that Wilson lied deep inside the paper this year.

Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued that George W. Bush has transformed American foreign policy, in response to the threat of Islamist terrorism, more than any president since Harry Truman transformed our foreign policy in response to the threat of aggressive communism.

But there is one big difference. In the late 1940s, Truman got bipartisan support from Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg and Thomas Dewey, even at a time when there were bitter differences between the parties on domestic policy, and received generally sympathetic treatment in the press. This time, George W. Bush has encountered determined opposition from most Democrats and the old-line media. They have charged that "BUSH LIED" even when he relied on the same intelligence as they did; they have headlined wild and spurious charges by the likes of Joseph Wilson; they have embraced the wild-eyed propaganda of the likes of Michael Moore.

They have done these things with, at best, reckless disregard of the effect their arguments have had on American strength in the world. Are they entitled to be taken seriously?

Michael Barone is Senior Writer for U.S. News & World Report.

OH CANADA-- Jihad-TV comes to Canadian broadcasting

07.20.04 (3:24 am)   [edit]
[b]Jihad TV Comes to Canada[/b]
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 20, 2004

It’s official: just as Al-Jazeera has declared its intention to “present a clear, factual and accurate picture” in its news coverage, it has been approved by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for broadcast in Canada. Putting this approval in perspective is the fact that another “fair and balanced” news outlet, Fox News, is still waiting for approval from the same body. Another example of Canada’s wobbliness in the war on terror? You be the judge. Some of Canada’s newest news outlet’s most notorious deeds include:

• Repeatedly airing the most vile anti-Americanism, including statements made shortly before 9/11 by Abd al-Bari ‘Atwan, editor of the London Arabic publication Al-Quds al-Arabi. On Al-Jazeera, ‘Atwan called the U.S. “a terrorist regime that has killed innocent people since 1945 to this very moment.” Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was for ‘Atwan “a legitimate jihad fighter. Bin Laden has a work plan … to harass the U.S., to harm its presence in the region as much as he can.”[1]

• Trampling upon the Geneva convention by showing footage of American prisoners of war being interrogated in Iraq, as well as of American soldiers killed by Iraqis.[2]

• Featuring the radical Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who made headlines by defending suicide bombing during a recent trip to London (earning him an invitation to return from London Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone), on an Islamic issues program entitled “Sharia and Life.”[3]

• Airing, on several notorious occasions, video and audio communiqués by Osama bin Laden and other leading jihadists, thereby allowing them to spread jihad ideology and hatred of America all over the Arabic-speaking world — and never divulging how it obtained the tapes.[4]

• Highlighting messages from the likes of Osama bin Laden’s spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and other high-profile terrorists.[5]

• Filming footage of a Baghdad suicide attack that indicated that someone in the network knew in advance when and where the bombing was going to take place.[6]

• Lying about attacks by U.S. soldiers against Iraqi civilians — propaganda disguised as reporting that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”[7]

Also, last September of one of its star journalists, Taysir Allouni (who was able to get close enough to Osama to interview him in 2001, and was also the only foreign correspondent allowed into Afghanistan by the Taliban regime), was imprisoned in Spain for involvement with Al-Qaeda, and in particular with the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.[8]

Of course, now the network has instituted a much-balleyhooed new ethics code, not only pledging accurate reporting but also promising to consider “the feelings of victims of crime, war, persecution and disasters, their relatives, viewers and individual privacy” before airing the next jihadist beheading video. However, troubling questions remain. The network has not repudiated its manifest support for the global jihad. And even as the new code of ethics was announced, news editor Ahmed al-Sheikh defended the network’s previous practices: “Some people say we are taking the nightmares into people's houses and we are putting too much blood on the screens…. If we don’t report the ugly face of the war, would that mean we abided by the criteria? ... Would we be embellishing the face of the war?”[9]

Al-Jazeera executives have claimed that the network has been criticized by American officials only because it doesn’t accept the American understanding of the war on terror, and because it portrays the Muslim perspective on the burning issues of the day. No doubt these two considerations made the network’s application far more attractive than Fox’s to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The members of that august body no doubt share the visceral anti-Americanism generally held by the Canadian elite — as well as an anxiousness to accommodate and pacify Canada’s rapidly growing Muslim population.

But the incidents recounted above and others like them suggest that Canada may be getting more than it bargained for. According to a recent report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, “Terrorism of foreign origin continues to be a major concern in regard to the safety of Canadians at home and abroad. … Canada is viewed by some terrorist groups as a place to try to seek refuge, raise funds, procure materials and/or conduct other support activities. ... Virtually all of the most notorious international terrorist organizations are known to maintain a network presence in Canada.” From the looks of its track record, Al-Jazeera will provide these Canadian-based terrorists with a source of news, encouragement, and instruction.

What’s more, it will serve these radical Muslims as a useful recruiting tool. For jihadist recruiters in Canada, Al-Jazeera is likely to be an electronic madrassa beaming, twenty-four hours a day, the teachings and perspective of radical Islam into the living rooms of Canadian Muslims. Nor will this be a problem for Canada alone: what is to prevent those whom Al-Jazeera radicalizes and recruits for the global jihad from slipping across the border into the Great Satan?

Whenever that happens, and whatever they succeed in doing here, you can be sure that it will be carried — and celebrated — on Al-Jazeera.

Notes:

[1] Kenneth R. Timmerman, “Live From Qatar: It’s Jihad Television,” Insight On the News, February 11, 2002.

[2] Walid Phares, “Jihad TV,” National Review Online, March 26, 2003.

[3] Ibid. For Qaradawi’s visit to London, see “Al-Qaradawi full transcript,” BBC News, July 8, 2004.

[4] Cf. “Al-Jazeera Shows New Bin Laden Tape,” Fox News, September 11, 2003.

[5] Timmerman, op cit.

[6] John R. Bradley, “Crunch-time for Al-Jazeera,” The Straits Times, December 1, 2003.

[7] Peter Johnson, “U.S. says Al-Jazeera putting troops at risk,” USA Today, April 18, 2004.

[8] “Espagne: emprisonnement confirmé pour Tayssir Allouni, journaliste vedette d’Al-Jazira,” Latinreporters.com, September 12, 2003.

[9] “Al Jazeera unveils code of ethics,” CNN, July 13, 2004.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).

Palestinians agitating for government reform, but MUST recognize Israel

07.20.04 (3:21 am)   [edit]
[b]Palestinian Anarchy[/b]
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 20, 2004

“There is a crisis. There is a state of chaos.” That’s what Ahmed Qureia said after announcing his resignation from what some call the Palestinian Authority’s prime ministry. “We have an absolute state of chaos,” echoes the mayor of Jenin, a West Bank town. That chaos, growing since Yasir Arafat initiated the Oslo War in September 2000, has prompted the PA to declare a state of emergency; it could signal the end of the PA itself.

According to an April poll of the Gaza-based General Institute for Information, 94 percent of Palestinians believe that a state of lawlessness and chaos prevails in Palestinian Authority territories. As Palestinian security forces have fragmented and dissolved, armed groups of unknown identity have taken their place, using strong-arm tactics against a hapless population. The Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group finds that “weapons possession has become socially legitimized in Palestinian society.”

In gang-dominated Nablus, for example, some deaths have resulted from spiraling criminal activity and reckless accusations of “collaboration” with Israel. But, Reuters explains, most casualties involve mistaken identity or plain bad luck. In two typical stories dating from February 2004, “Amneh Abu Hijleh, 37, entered a pharmacy to buy cough syrup for her infant daughter only to be shot dead in a botched abduction. Firas Aghbar, 13, was killed when he walked into a gang battle on his way to the barber for a birthday trim.”

As explained by the Washington Post, “the Palestinian Authority is broke, politically fractured, riddled with corruption, unable to provide security for its own people and seemingly unwilling to crack down on terrorist attacks against Israel.” One unnamed Fatah member estimates that 90 percent of gang activity is carried out by Palestinian Authority employees.

In February, for example, one Palestinian police officer died and eleven were wounded when rival police factions fought each other within the confines of Gaza’s police headquarters. Things climaxed on July 16, as Al-Fatah terrorists ambushed and seized Gaza's police chief for several hours; and then some recently-sacked Palestinian policemen abducted the director of military co-ordination in the southern part of Gaza.

Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN’s Middle East envoy, has offered choice comments on the spreading anarchy, telling the Security Council that “Clashes and showdowns between branches of Palestinian security forces are now common in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian Authority legal authority is receding fast in the face of the mounting power of arms, money and intimidation.” He also reached the startling conclusion that “Jericho is actually becoming the only Palestinian city with a functioning police.”

This descent into chaos prompts four observations.

* The PA has joined other parts of the Greater Middle East (Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan) in the general trend toward lawlessness.
* Arafat predicted in 1994 that “Either we build a Singapore in our country or fall into the trap of the tragic Somali model.” He thus acknowledges that the PA’s slide to Somali-like anarchy symbolizes his own failure.
* The Islamic proverb, “Better a thousand days of tyranny than one day of anarchy,” has an element of truth, for life in the PA territories has truly become hellish.
* Although Arafat launched the Oslo war nearly four years ago with the intent to destroy Israel, he is, ironically, destroying not Israel but his own proto-government.

The question now facing Palestinians is whether they have learned the right lessons from their bitter experience. That for once they are not blaming Israel for their problems gives some reason for optimism. Cox News Service notes that, “as the disorder spreads, Palestinian intellectuals and politicians are increasingly looking past Israel as the usual scapegoat and admitting they share a part of the blame.” National Public Radio quotes a Palestinian saying that the PA is in trouble “because many people are being killed or kidnapped or robbed. … We are all accusing the government of not doing anything.” A poll by the Gaza-based General Institute for Information finds that just 29 percent of Palestinians hold Israelis responsible for the PA’s failure to enforce law and order.

This is a good start. But to emerge from their political predicament requires Palestinians coming to terms with the existence of the Jewish state of Israel. So long as they resist this change of heart, the Somali model remains their fate.

[i]Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers). [/i]

Presbyterian church defames Christianity by its anti-Semitism

07.20.04 (2:53 am)   [edit]
This is a must-read article discussing the Pesbyterian church's blaming of Israel for Palestinian atrocities and their urging of divestment from Israel.

I disagree with one point in his article, and it comes at the end. Prager says "If Jesus were here, he would probably be at Israeli hospitals comforting fellow Jews who were deliberately blinded, paralyzed and brain-damaged by Jew- and Christian-hating Palestinian terrorists. He would surely not be with the Jews' enemies, among whom are now the leaders of the Presbyterian Church, USA."

Jesus would be wherever innocents were manipulated and oppressed-- in addition to being with his fellow Jews he'd also be with the innocent Palestinians that are as much a victim of the PA machine as Israelis are; and he'd be with all of those who are fed the Big Lie about Israel. He'd be angry at those who know better and still spread evil-- and as an organization the Presbyterian Church, USA would be one of them.

A very good article--

[b]Presbyterian church defames Christianity[/b]
Dennis Prager
July 20, 2004

I have argued in this column that the greatest sin is committing evil in God's name. As bad as the evil committed by secularists, such as communists and Nazis, has ever been, the most grievous evil is that which is committed in the name of God. For not only do religious evils harm their victims, they also do lasting damage to God-based morality, which those of us who believe in God and religion consider the only viable antidote to evil.

That is why Islamic terror is so evil. Not only because it targets the most innocent of people for death and torture, but because it does so in the name of Allah and Islam.

Incredibly, The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) joins the list of religious groups committing evil. In the name of Jesus, it has called for the economic strangulation of Israel. They have equated the Jewish state with South Africa during apartheid and called for a universal divestment from it.

The Presbyterians are the first Christian church to do this, and, ironically, the divestment campaign came the very week that the Roman Catholic Church signed a document equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

It takes a particularly virulent strain of moral idiocy and meanness to single out Israel, not Arafat's Palestinian Authority, or terror-supporting, death-fatwa-issuing Iran, or women-subjugating Saudi Arabia, for condemnation and economic ruin. One of the most decent societies, one of the most liberal democracies in the world, is fighting for its life against Islamic fascists who praise the Holocaust and publicly call for the annihilation of Israel -- and the Presbyterian Church calls for strangling Israel!

Apartheid state? This Goebbels-like Big Lie, concocted by the world's anti-Israel and anti-American Left and by those who want Israel destroyed, is now an official doctrine of the Presbyterian Church. Israel is a nation whose population is one-quarter non-Jewish Arab, with the same rights, including voting and its own political parties, as Jewish citizens; a nation whose second official language is Arabic, the language of those who wish to annihilate the Jewish country; a nation that occupies a tiny sliver of land known as the West Bank only because Jordan, overwhelmingly composed of Palestinians, invaded Israel in 1967 in order to destroy it and thereby lost its ownership of the West Bank.

As an American who fights to preserve Judeo-Christian values as America's primary value system and preserve Christianity as the specific American faith that embodies those values, I can only say this: the God that the 431 leaders of the Presbyterian Church worship is not my God, any more than the Allah of the Islamic fascists that Israel and America fight is my God.

The Bible that these Presbyterians read is not my Bible.

The religious values that these Presbyterians hold are not my religious values.

This is not a difference about immigration policy, affirmative action, taxation, bigger or smaller government, welfare policies, gun control, or a myriad of other moral issues over which decent, God-fearing people can disagree.

This is one of the morality-clarifying issues of our time. To single out Israel for economic strangulation while that good nation fights for its life is an act of such immorality that holding that view precludes one from the title "good" or "God-fearing," for if they are true to God, I am false to Him. If they are good, I who support Israel am bad. If their Bible teaches them to strangle Israel and support Yasser Arafat, I am guided by a different Bible.

They have drawn a line. It is now time for good people, Presbyterians specifically, Christians generally, to distance themselves vigorously and publicly from this morally sick church. And it is time, once again, for Jews to realize that the enemies of the Jews in our day are to be found on the Christian Left while their friends are far more often on the Christian Right.

Many serious Christians ask, "What Would Jesus Do?" If Jesus were here, he would probably be at Israeli hospitals comforting fellow Jews who were deliberately blinded, paralyzed and brain-damaged by Jew- and Christian-hating Palestinian terrorists. He would surely not be with the Jews' enemies, among whom are now the leaders of the Presbyterian Church, USA.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

What is Kerry's position on the war on terror? Even he doesn't know.

07.20.04 (2:44 am)   [edit]
[b]Kerry’s Quandary: Trying to be Both Pro- and Anti-War[/b]
Joel Mowbray
July 20, 2004

Despite the media’s obsession with President Bush’s failures in Iraq and the blame cast on him even for the CIA’s mistakes, John Kerry should be soaring in the polls. But he’s not.

Iraq is easily the dominant issue—although the jury’s out on how many votes it will sway—yet Kerry’s polling has barely budged. After all, not being the unpopular guy often counts for a lot in elections.

But this is Kerry’s quandary: he’s not exactly a supporter of the war, though he voted for it, yet he’s not quite anti-war either.

Fudging positions on intractable issues where clarity can only earn enemies makes sense. But wartime ambiguity for a would-be commander-in-chief does not inspire the necessary confidence among the electorate.

To understand why Kerry cannot—and likely will not—capitalize on Bush’s Iraq troubles, look at the Democrat’s recent comments to the NAACP.

In a friendly forum where little was needed to elicit a standing ovation, the Massachusetts senator made a startling accusation—or at least it seems he did.

“We’ve got a plan to invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and protect our environment, so that no young American in uniform is ever held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East,” he said near the end of his prepared remarks.

Standing alone, it seems entirely possible he was alluding to the Gulf War or to some hypothetical situation in the future where a Saddam-like tyrant attempts similar hijinks.

The very next words Kerry uttered, however, made clear the intended meaning: “Values mean building a strong military and leading strong alliances, so no young American is ever put in harm’s way because we needlessly insisted on going it alone.”

Kerry clearly set the context as the Iraq war with that follow-up statement. Calls to Kerry’s campaign office seeking clarification were not returned, perhaps not unintentionally.

Leveling incredibly serious charges by implication is fast becoming a Kerry trademark. He did so after the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report—which actually exonerated Bush from charges that his administration had cooked up evidence—and kicked off the Kerry-Edwards campaign that way.

Here is what Kerry told the assembled crowd when he announced John Edwards as his veep pick: “And I can pledge you this: John Edwards and I would never think about sending young America’s sons and daughters into harm’s way anywhere in the world without telling the American people the truth.”

But about did Bush lie? Al Qaeda? WMDs? Kerry doesn’t bother explaining. Kerry, in fact, doesn’t even have the guts to say that Bush “lied,” but the implication couldn’t be clearer.

If Kerry’s recent remarks are any indication, a primary Democratic theme this fall will be that Bush has blood on his hands—for waging a war Kerry supported. Immediately after the release of the Senate panel’s report, Kerry told the New York Times, “They were wrong and soldiers lost their lives because they were wrong.”

Who are “they?” Factually, it would have to be the CIA, yet contextually, it appears Kerry was referring to Bush and Cheney. The article seems to back up the latter interpretation.

Four separate calls to the Kerry campaign last week seeking clarification were not returned. A pattern, perhaps?

To be fair, almost every candidate for every office throughout time has muddied the political waters. Try as he might, though, Kerry can’t be both pro- and anti-war.

But boy, has he tried.

After voting to authorize the war in 2002—and using stark rhetoric about the threat posed by Saddam in his accompanying speech—he has intermittently been a peacenik since. He opposed the $87 billion for rebuilding the country, and now he routinely blasts Bush for launching a war he himself supported.

When he’s not busy pandering to the Moveon.org crowd, though, Ted Kennedy’s protégé poses as a hawk. Just Friday, Kerry appeared to back pre-emptive strikes, saying that he would be “prepared as president to go get them before they get us.”

The caveat he sneaked in right afterward, however, is what reveals his true intentions: “if we… have sufficient intelligence.” What exactly would be “sufficient?” The fact that he leaves that issue cloudy probably says it all.

Moments later, he offered an apparent endorsement of unilateral action: “I will never allow any other country to veto what we need to do and I will never allow any other institution to veto what we need to do to protect our nation.” This from the same man who the day earlier who had blasted Bush for “needlessly going it alone”—despite having done everything short of putting France and Germany in a headlock before amassing a “coalition of the willing” comprised of over 35 countries.

Kerry can’t dance this way forever and expect to win. Voters need some sense of his proposed direction. For all the brickbats thrown at Bush, at least folks know where he stands.

The same can’t be said for Kerry. Voters suffer migraines attempting to reconcile his criticisms that Bush should have submitted to the whims of France and Russia with Kerry’s supposed support for unilateral action. Ditto for endorsing preemptive action in between speeches where one of the biggest applause lines is, “In our Administration, we’ll never go to war because we want to; we’ll only go to war because we have to.”

Maybe Kerry won’t deviate much on the War on Terror. Who knows? But that’s the point.

©2004 Joel Mowbray

THE ANTI-CHOMSKY READER: 'AMERICA'S PERIL IS CHOMSKY'S HOPE'

07.19.04 (5:43 am)   [edit]
July 19, 2004, 8:45 a.m.
[B]Chomping Chomsky
Debunking a Left-wing icon.[/B]
By Clara Magram

Give Noam Chomsky credit for consistency. For nearly half a century, he has unfailingly praised the world's most brutal totalitarian regimes, even as he has slandered democracies. In 1970, Chomsky — a leading opponent of the Vietnam War — visited North Vietnam and wrote admiringly of the "high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels." The Hanoi leadership he termed "flexible and intelligent." Later in the 1970s, reports of the Khmer Rouge's bloody atrocities surfaced; the MIT linguistics professor dismissed them as products of "the U.S. propaganda system."

Chomsky has become one of the all-stars of the radical Left because he embodies that distinct vitriolic passion, the paranoia of the self-hating Westerner. He reserves his criticism mainly for America and Israel. The Middle East might achieve peace, he tells us, if not for Israel's commitment to "Jewish dominance throughout the region"; he references the "genocidal texts of the Bible" as sources of this Zionist drive for imperial rule. It's not too surprising that neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers are among his supporters.

His approach to current events is rife with bias and distortion. After 9/11, for example, he asked: "Why did [the terrorists] turn against the United States? Well, that had to do with what they call the U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia.... That's the home of the holiest sites of Islam." Never mind that the Saudis welcomed U.S. aid in defending against Saddam Hussein's 1990 aggression. Chomsky also avoids mentioning the homicidal intent articulated by America's Islamist enemies. His recommendation to America for ending global terrorism: "Stop participating in it."

Chomsky's words fall on receptive ears, particularly on liberal campuses across the nation. His influence is pervasive, and a systematic rebuttal is long overdue. It has now arrived: The Anti-Chomsky Reader http://www.nationalreview.com... is a masterpiece of Chomsky debunking. Editors Peter Collier and David Horowitz have assembled a collection of nine essays (by nine writers) refuting the aging professor's wildest claims.

"Today, as throughout his long career," writes Collier, "America's peril is Chomsky's hope." After terrorists murdered thousands of American civilians on 9/11, Chomsky fretted about a predicted "silent genocide" caused by U.S. retaliation in Afghanistan. He remains "committed to the idea that America had it coming for a history of misdeeds stretching back at least to 1812, the last time foreigners attacked the homeland, but really to 1492, where the nightmare began," according to Collier.

In an essay on the Vietnam War, Steven J. Morris of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins analyzes Chomsky's view of American imperialism. The U.S. effort in Vietnam, Chomsky alleged, was part of a "long-term effort to reduce Eastern Asia and much of the rest of the world to part of the American-dominated economic system"; anti-Communism was merely a convenient device for garnering support for the war. But, as Morris points out, Chomsky's contention was at odds with the facts. Chomsky's willingness to whitewash the Vietnamese Communists as earnest, idealistic peasants — as well as his studied avoidance of the terms "Leninist" and "Stalinist" — demonstrates that he was unwilling to face important truths about the ideological dimension of the Vietnam conflict.

In an essay on "Chomsky's War Against Israel," Paul Bogdanor contrasts Middle East reality with Chomsky's reverence for Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. It is "quite clear," wrote Chomsky in The Fateful Triangle (1999, foreword by Edward Said), that the PLO "has been far more forthcoming than either Israel or the U.S. with regard to an accommodationist settlement." Chomsky ignores the inconvenient truth that the PLO's charter still calls for "the liquidation of the Zionist entity economically, militarily, politically, culturally, and intellectually." Meanwhile, the bloody outbursts of PLO terrorists continue. Chomsky passes over these atrocities and points the finger at Israel, which, he says shares "points of similarity" with the Third Reich.

Since the 1960s, when he parroted Vietcong propaganda and ignored mass executions, Chomsky's star has continued to rise. Supporters of a freedom-based global order must contend with this intellectual spinmeister for hearts and minds around the globe. The Anti-Chomsky Reader performs a service to the whole world, by exposing Chomsky as one of the most damaging charlatans ever to ride the wave of campus adulation.

— Clara Magram is a National Review intern.

Woman with triplets has "pregnancy reduction", i.e. multiple murders

07.18.04 (2:14 pm)   [edit]
What a world we live in. The pro-death camp in America calls their support for baby murder "pro-choice", the act of murder a "procedure" and call the murder of one or more babies out of a multi-baby pregnancy "pregnancy reduction". How this is any different than the callous and detached rhetoric of Hitler and his "Jewish problem" is a mystery to me.

From the New York Times-- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...


[b]When One Is Enough[/b]
By AMY RICHARDS as told to AMY BARRETT

I grew up in a working-class family in Pennsylvania not knowing my father. I have never missed not having him. I firmly believe that, but for much of my life I felt that what I probably would have gained was economic security and with that societal security. Growing up with a single mother, I was always buying into the myth that I was going to be seduced in the back of a pickup truck and become pregnant when I was 16. I had friends when I was in school who were helping to rear nieces and nephews, because their siblings, who were not much older, were having babies. I had friends from all over the class spectrum: I saw the nieces and nephews on the one hand and country-club memberships and station wagons on the other. I felt I was in the middle. I had this fear: What would it take for me to just slip?

Now I'm 34. My [b]boyfriend[/b], Peter, and I have been together three years. I'm old enough to presume that I wasn't going to have an easy time becoming pregnant. I was tired of being on the pill, because it made me moody. Before I went off it, Peter and I talked about what would happen if I became pregnant, and we both agreed that we would have the child.

I found out I was having triplets when I went to my obstetrician. The doctor had just finished telling me I was going to have a low-risk pregnancy. She turned on the sonogram machine. There was a long pause, then she said, ''Are you sure you didn't take fertility drugs?'' I said, ''I'm positive.'' Peter and I were very shocked when she said there were three. ''You know, this changes everything,'' she said. ''You'll have to see a specialist.''

[b]My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets. I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure I could work around that. But it was a matter of, Do I want to? [/b]

(Blogger's note: Message received: [i]I'm so important and selfish that I don't want to take responsibility for my own actions.[/i])

I looked at Peter and asked the doctor: ''Is it possible to [b][u]get rid of one of them? Or two of them[/b][/u]?'' The obstetrician wasn't an expert in selective reduction, but [b]she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more[/b].

(Blogger's note: [b]With a shot of potassium chloride inmates take dirt naps in prison-- but this baby is not a baby, it's 'property'![/b])

Having felt physically fine up to this point, I got on the subway afterward, and all of a sudden, I felt ill. I didn't want to eat anything. What I was going through seemed like a very unnatural experience. On the subway, Peter asked, ''Shouldn't we consider having triplets?'' And I had this adverse reaction: [b]''This is why they say it's the woman's choice, because you think I could just carry triplets. That's easy for you to say,[u] but I'd have to give up my life.''[/b][/u] (Blogger's note: OF COURSE SHE WOULDN'T REALLY GIVE UP HER LIFE-- SHE'D STILL BE ALIVE. HER BABIES WOULDN'T, THOUGH. BUT WHO CARES?) Not only would I have to be on bed rest at 20 weeks, I wouldn't be able to fly after 15. I was already at eight weeks. When I found out about the triplets, I felt like: It's not the back of a pickup at 16, but now I'm going to have to move to Staten Island. I'll never leave my house because I'll have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don't think that deep down I was ever considering it.

(Blogger's note: Oh she'll be a hick if she has three kids, that's giving up her life...)

The specialist called me back at 10 p.m. I had just finished watching a Boston Pops concert at Symphony Hall. As everybody burst into applause, I watched my cellphone vibrating, grabbed it and ran into the lobby. He told me that he does a detailed sonogram before doing a selective reduction to see if one fetus appears to be struggling. [b]The procedure involves a shot of potassium chloride to the heart of the fetus[/b] (Blogger's note: It's just property!). There are a lot more complications when a woman carries multiples. And so, from the doctor's perspective, it's a matter of trying to save the woman this trauma. After I talked to the specialist, I told Peter, ''That's what I'm going to do.'' He replied, ''What we're going to do.'' He respected what I was going through, but at a certain point, he felt that this was a decision we were making. I agreed.

When we saw the specialist, we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone. [b]My doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one[/b]. Before the procedure, I was focused on relaxing. But Peter was staring at the sonogram screen thinking: [b]Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can't believe we're about to make two disappear. The doctor came in, and then Peter was asked to leave. I said, ''Can Peter stay?'' The doctor said no. I know Peter was offended by that. [/b]

Two days after the procedure, smells no longer set me off and I no longer wanted to eat nothing but sour-apple gum. I went on to have a pretty seamless pregnancy. But I had a recurring feeling that this was going to come back and haunt me. Was I going to have a stillbirth or miscarry late in my pregnancy?

I had a boy, and everything is fine. But thinking about becoming pregnant again is terrifying. Am I going to have quintuplets? I would do the same thing if I had triplets again, but if I had twins, I would probably have twins. Then again, I don't know.

***

This woman is a)fundamentally stupid. b)a murderer.

Pro-choice is code for abortion on demand. The largest holocaust in human history is occuring right now in America-- 40 million people dead, thanks to selfishness and moral degredation.

Our public schools: Teachers overpaid, underqualified-- Oppression 101

07.18.04 (1:55 pm)   [edit]
From David Horowitz's blog-- http://www.frontpagemag.com/b...

[b]Those who can teach do, and those who can't teach get paid anyway [/b]

New figures show that California K-12 teachers are the highest paid in the nation. They make $56,000 a year -- for a 10 months year. They are required to be on the job 6 hours a day. They have lifetime jobs. They get raises for sticking around, that is according to the contract and not according to whether good at what they do or not.

[b]And what do they do? There are 700,000 kids in the LA schools and 350,000 are failing, learning nothing, should be held back except for the fact that the school district pursuing a "social promotion" policy, promotes them by age, just the way it gives their teachers -- competent and incompetent alike -- a raise every so many years.[/b] Two-thirds of these kids are Hispanic; most of the others are black. And [b]their parents are all too poor to afford to send their kids to private schools the way every official in the teachers unions and every Democrat and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton do. You want to talk about oppression? Exploitation? Racism? The teachers unions and the Democratic Party, every official collusive in this atrocity along with them -- and every progressive and liberal who tells you that teachers are underpaid and the problem with the schools is money -- are the ones to talk to.[/b]

Guantanamo information helps thwart Athens Olympics terror attack

07.18.04 (1:46 pm)   [edit]
A key passage:

"The Tribune reporter, along with a television reporter from CNN (Cable News Network) was given special access to Camp Delta, where about 600 "enemy combatants" have been held without access to legal representation for months, and in some cases, years.

The report comes as the government prepares to allow some of those detainees to challenge their detention in US courts, following a Supreme Court ruling in their favor last month."

Of course, terrorists are soldiers in a war against the US. Why do they deserve representation IN OUR LEGAL SYSTEM? POWs and enemy combatants have a legal system to go through-- military tribunals. Now that SCOTUS has covered itself in shame with its asinine ruling, we can bet that detainees will not share any info whatsoever-- they'll just call Johnny Cochran.

I guess we should take the victories while we can still achieve them:

[b]Athens Olympics Attack Foiled [/b]
By ChannelNewsAsia.com
ChannelAsiaNews.com | July 16, 2004

[b]Guantanamo Bay detainees have given up intelligence that helped foil attacks planned for the upcoming Athens Olympics and possibly a dozen attacks elsewhere, a US daily said.[/b]

The information was gathered recently from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to the Chicago Tribune newspaper, one of several US media outlets given access to the US navy base there last week.

The daily did not elaborate on US military claims during an on-site "intelligence briefing," but noted that they were impossible to verify independently.

The Tribune reporter, along with a television reporter from CNN (Cable News Network) was given special access to Camp Delta, where about 600 "enemy combatants" have been held without access to legal representation for months, and in some cases, years.

The report comes as the government prepares to allow some of those detainees to challenge their detention in US courts, following a Supreme Court ruling in their favor last month.

Detainees' lawyers contend the government is inflating the value of the intelligence garnered from individuals at Guantanamo in order to buttress their case for denying the detainees due process in US courts.

But military officials told the Tribune that intelligence they have gathered has yielded information about US terror cells within US borders and internationally, as well as the planning and financing of attacks on September 11, 2001.

WinstonSmith, FAS, and 'secrecy'

07.18.04 (11:38 am)   [edit]
Winnie is at it again, your favorite blogger. Now he claims without any justification whatsoever, that the Bush administration is the most secretive ever!

How?

Because the Federation of American Scientists has once again gone beyond their call of duty to compile a misleading list of documents that show the Bush administration is the most secretive ever!

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS THE MOST SECRETIVE EVER!

Let's be clear about a few things. Number one, the reason why there are leaks within the administration is that Bush, in his towering evil, sought to keep Clintonite officials in his administration and in sensitive areas because in a business-like fashion he wanted to preserve continuity. These people, especially those at State, hate him and leak falsehoods about him.

Secondly, and most importantly, most of these documents have to do with the TRANSPARENT, OBVIOUS FACT THAT WE ARE AT WAR. This is something that Winnie and the rest of the Left refuse to acknowledge.

From the Bush executive order that sums it up:

"Nevertheless, throughout our history, the national defense has required that [b]certain information be maintained in confidence in order to protect our citizens, our democratic institutions, our homeland security, and our interaction with foreign nations.[/b] Protecting information critical to our Nation’s security remains a priority..."

Now, let's see. President Bush issues an executive order outlining how he has the right, oops, the [i]Constitutional[/i] right to protect citizens of the US and therefore lays out guidelines in this time of war on how information will be classified and de-classified. Meanwhile, in a time of "peace" (when Al Qaeda was blowing Americans up [i]overseas[/i]), Bill Clinton signed executive order after executive order, including the one that loosened export controls, enabling China to buy state-of-the-art space and nuclear technology from the United States.

Of course there's no double-standard. Of course it is the Bush administration that is supposedly so secretive, even though:

*No US president has ever testified in any fashion before an arm of Congress (Bush and Cheney did before the 9-11 commission).

*No ACTIVE NSA has ever testified in any fashion before an arm of Congress (as Dr. Rice did).

*No President has ever conceded to a Congressional investigation of his administration to examine how we got to the war [i]while fighting the war[/i] (Pearl Harbor, for example, wasn't investigated until after World War II was over).

President Bush has been smeared in the press. He's been smeared on the Senate and House floors. He's been smeared by the European elite. He's been smeared by ridiculously and unjustifiable pompous college-age bloggers. He's been smeared by Left-wing radical groups that merely wish to push their agenda through an anti-war guise. He's been smeared by everyone.

The Left has pushed the extremism to a new high where just by breathing they try to undermine US security. They tried to steal the 2000 election and now they're trying to lie about [i]everything[/i] the Bush administration does-- it is scary to see how in just four years things that everyone knew have been twisted and shaped into something entirely unrecognizable.

*Bush and Ashcroft have protected American citizens, there are protests everywhere, there are f-ing books written about killing the President, and these nutjobs say Bush is suppressing "free speech".

*Bush concedes to a higher scrutiny than almost any other president and all of a sudden he's a dictator.

*Bush justifiably invades Afghanistan after the previous administration balked at it for years and after that administration let 9-11 happen by their political cowardice, and he's "Hitler" (tell that to the Afghanis). Bush justifiably invades Iraq after the previous administration-- and the world-- balked at it for years and allowed him to make a mockery of the international system and Bush gets labelled "Hitler" again (actually by now he's portrayed as something worse than Hitler).

People like Winston Smith have no grounding in reality. And that has to be because we here in America simply have it too good. We're so fucking spoiled on ourselves, our prosperity and our freedom, that we can make a game out of the truth.

Context? Fuck it. History? Fuck it. Logic and reason? Fuck it.

The irony to all of this is that Bush deserves to be criticized, like any president does. This kind of circus that the Left has created does nothing to help the United State-- it only serves to justify their wild imaginations and lust for power.

Bush proven right about Iraq-Niger, why is Kerry still saying Bush lied?

07.18.04 (11:13 am)   [edit]
From a Kerry campaign press-release four days ago that insists Bush didn't read the National Intelligence Report because he didn't read the footnotes-- he read everything else, but not the footnotes. Got that? :

"Rice Didn’t Read CIA Memo Warning of Dubious Intelligence In Bush State of the Union. When asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether she read a memo from the CIA which had debunked the Niger/yellowcake claim, Rice responded, “I don’t remember the memo. It came after it had been taken out of the speech, and so it’s quite possible that I didn’t.” [NBC, “Meet The Press,” 9/28/03]

Bush Was Kept In The Dark About False Niger Claim. “The official said Bush was ‘briefed’ on the NIE’s contents, but ‘I don’t think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it.’ Asked whether Bush was aware the State Department called the Africa-uranium claim ‘highly dubious,’ the official, who coordinated Bush’s State of the Union address, said: ‘He did not know that.’” [Washington Post, 7/19/03] "

What false Niger claim? As the recent Senate Intelligence report confirms, and as the UK government inquiry confirms, the Iraq-Niger claim was entirely [i]true[/i]. The Senate report confirms that Joe Wilson is one of the biggest political fakes in US history, lying about his wife's role in recommending him for the job (apparenlty she did recommend him, so Novak was right-on), and lying about what he actually found there (what he told the public was that the claim had no merit, what he told the CIA actually bolstered the case for the Niger-Iraq link). The UK always stood by their intelligence.

If Kerry is going to accuse Bush of not reading the footnotes on an intelligence [i]estimate[/i] maybe it would do him well to read the primary text of an entire intelligence evaluation, especially if he's going to criticize.

But make no mistake, Kerry knows better. But lefties disdain facts. They like to believe the lie so much that they deny the reality. When a conspiracy of theirs is so spectacularly destroyed by the truth as with the Joe Wilson affair, they keep spinning the falsehood for as long as they can.

And since the Left oversees indoctrination of our youth, you can bet the "False Iraq-Niger claim" will be fed the youth of America for generations.

Vote Bush 2004.

NEA convention watches Farenheit 9/11, slams Bush...and talks about education

07.18.04 (4:56 am)   [edit]
Written by a Democrat in National Review--

July 16, 2004, 8:36 a.m.
[b]A Look to Your Left
Dictators and orthodoxy at the NEA convention.[/b]

By Hans Moleman

At the National Education Association convention last week, the liberal orthodoxy for the most part flowed in carefully directed channels. Resolutions and "new business" items condemning the war on terror and the occupation of Iraq were set aside without debate or votes, in a conscious and commendable effort to minimize anything that could distract from the unified anti-Bush (and incidentally pro-Kerry) event. In other words, the leadership kept the 9,000 delegates "on message" (as we all say nowadays).

The message was: "We hate Bush — for education reasons."

The popularity of the message was reflected in the 86-percent delegate vote to endorse Kerry (though there was no more warmth for Kerry there than anywhere else.)

They did hear from one of the real NEA heartthrobs, Hillary Clinton (the other one was at a book-signing across town and couldn't make it). She knocked them dead, of course, but she too steered away from foreign policy.

The only cracks in this impressive message wall came during two instances when everyone let their hair down and their real feelings out. The first was a special benefit showing of Michael Moore's feature-length campaign commercial Fahrenheit 9/11. This embarrassing embrace of Hollywood's number one Euro-pet anti-American produced a hate rally worthy of Orwell.

Another moment came in nostalgic mode, when Children's Defense Fund founder and liberal icon Marian Wright Edelman was honored with a Friend of Education award. She responded with a gratifying sermon on the old time religion. Channeling the spirit of Sojourner Truth to blast the Bush (-Powell-Rice?) administration, she repeatedly brought the crowd to fever pitch. It was charming.

But one particularly interesting moment came with her bold declaration that Bush was failing the world by "supporting brutal, corrupt dictators." In context, this got a nice slice of the rolling applause wave that continued throughout her remarks.

But I couldn't help but wonder which dictators she had in mind.

The Taliban? No, Bush took them out already.

Saddam Hussein? No, the U.S. got him, too.

The mullahs of Iran? Kim Jong-Il? No, Bush regards them as "evil," and they regard him as their main problem.

Qaddafi? No, he was one of the first to get the message.

Castro? I don't think so.

So who?

Sadly, there was no time for Q&A, so Mrs. Edelman was not given a chance to elucidate.

What does it mean? Did an old 3x5 card left over from the Reagan years get mixed in with her current ones?

Or is it just that the time-tested "Awful America" lament hasn't fully adjusted to the changed reality of the post-9/11 world?

Modern-day isolationists now cluster on the left rather than the right. For the first time, the Left doesn't even bother to fake concern for the victims of fascism. The brutal dictators now fear nothing so much as the reelection of a Republican president.

Democrats haven't fully internalized these new facts. We really don't like to think about such things. That's understandable.

Still, if a polite silence is going to be the tactic for dealing with international fascism, we need some message discipline: Silence means silence.

The party of FDR is long gone. The modern dictator finds nothing to fear in the prospects of Democratic-party victory at the polls.

We Democrats had better get used to it.

— Hans Moleman is an National Education Association employee and lifelong Democrat who prefers to remain anonymous. He has no relation to the Simpsons character by the same name. Any similarities are purely coincidental.

Thanks to Sharon and Bush, the Palestinians finally start pushing for government reform

07.18.04 (4:45 am)   [edit]
The "wall", that is Israel's security fence has stopped the "cycle of death" that is actually Arafat's war against Israel. Terror attacks against Israelis have ground to a halt, and Arafat now doesn't have a way to accuse Israel of "slaughtering" his own kind.

The fence, the Israeli disengagement, appears to be doing exactly what Sharon said it would do-- it is now forcing Palestinians to look at the cause of their own misery-- not Israel, but Arafat.

Angry Palestinians have burned down Arafat's Gaza offices hungry for reform. According to a news article I have linked below, one Palestinian student, Ahmed Jamous, is quoted as saying,

"Arafat now is at a crossroads. Either he makes a revolution inside his authority or the Palestinian people will make a revolution against him...The people want elections and good government, not to be ruled by a group of corrupt thieves."

Said a Gaza leader: "There is a consensus in the Palestinian nation and not just in Gaza that what is happening now can't continue...The new thing is ... that people won't accept what had been accepted until now."

This is a hopeful sign Confined to his Ramallah HQ, Arafat can do little to respond to the backlash against his leadership.

The average Palestinian, like the average Israeli, is tired of war. They are seeing that Israel's disengagement has left them, as predicted, with themselves and the sorry leadership of an Egyptian-born man that claims to care about them. And they are looking at freer, liberated Iraq and Afghanistan and are wanting some of that for themselves.

Clearly, if a freer, more liberal government emerges in the Palestinian territories it will be because of Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, and Bush's push for accountable, free government in the Middle East.

I pray that it happens.

The article-- http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

More on the illegal ICJ ruling against Israel over the "wall"

07.16.04 (5:27 am)   [edit]
[b]The ICJ vs. Israel[/b]
By Charles Krauthammer
Townhall.com | July 16, 2004

[b]Among various principles invoked by the International Court of Justice in its highly publicized decision on Israel's security fence is this one: It is a violation of international law for Jews to be living in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. If this sounds absurd to you -- Jews have been inhabiting the Old City of Jerusalem since it became their capital 3,000 years ago -- it is. And it shows the lengths to which the United Nations and its associate institutions, including this kangaroo court, will go in order to condemn Israel.[/b]

The ICJ's main business was to order Israel to tear down the security fence separating Israelis from Palestinians. The fence is only one-quarter built, and yet it has already resulted in an astonishing reduction in suicide attacks into Israel. In the last four months, two Israelis have died in suicide attacks, compared with 166 killed in the same time frame at the height of the terror.

But what are 164 dead Jews to this court? Israel finally finds a way to stop terrorism, and 14 eminences sitting in The Hague rule it illegal -- in a 64-page opinion in which the word terrorism appears not once (except when citing Israeli claims).

Yes, the fence causes some hardship to Palestinians. Some are separated from their fields, some schoolchildren have to walk much farther to class. This is unfortunate. On any scale of human decency, however, it is far more unfortunate that 1,000 Israelis are dead from Palestinian terrorism, and thousands more horribly maimed, including Israeli schoolchildren with nails and bolts and shrapnel lodged in their brains and spines who will never be walking to school again.

From the safe distance of 2,000 miles, the court declared itself ``not convinced'' that the barrier Israel is building is a security necessity. It based its ruling on the claim that the fence violates Palestinian ``humanitarian" rights such as ``the right to work, to health, to education and to an adequate standard of living as proclaimed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.''

I'm sure these conventions are lovely documents. They are also documents of absolutely no weight -- how many countries would not stand condemned for failure to provide an ``adequate standard of living '' -- except, of course, when it comes to Israel. Then, any document at hand will do.

[b]What makes the travesty complete is that this denial of Israel's right to defend itself because doing so might violate ``humanitarian" rights was read in open court by the chief judge representing [i]China[/i], a government that massacred hundreds of its own citizens demonstrating peacefully in Tiananmen Square. Not since Libya was made chairman of the Commission on Human Rights has the U.N. system put on such a shameless display of hypocrisy.[/b]

Moreover, [b]the ICJ had no jurisdiction to take this case. [/b]It is a court of arbitration, which requires the consent of both parties. [b]The Israelis, knowing the deck was stacked, refused to give it. Not only did the United States declare this issue outside the boundaries of this court, so did the European Union and Russia, hardly Zionist agents.[/b]

The ICJ went ahead nonetheless, betraying its prejudice in its very diction. For example, throughout the opinion it refers to the barrier as a ``wall.'' In fact, [b]over 93 percent of its length consists of fences, troughs and electronic devices to prevent terrorist infiltration. Less than one kilometer out of every 15 is wall, and this is generally in areas that Palestinian gunmen have been using to shoot directly onto Israeli highways and villages. Sensors and troughs cannot stop bullets.

The ICJ's long account of the history of the conflict is equally corrupt. For example: [u]In 1947, the U.N. partitioned Palestine into two states -- one Jewish, one Arab. When the British pulled out and Israel proclaimed its independence, five Arab countries responded immediately by declaring war and invading Israel with the announced intention of destroying the newborn state. How does the ICJ render this event? ``On 14 May 1948, Israel proclaimed its independence. ... Armed conflict then broke out between Israel and a number of Arab states.'' Broke out? [/u]As if three years after the Holocaust and almost entirely without weapons, a tiny country of 600,000 Jews had decided to make war on five Arab states with nearly 30 million people.[/b]

Israel will rightly ignore the ICJ decision. The United States, acting honorably in a world of utter dishonor regarding Israel, will support that position. [b]It must be noted that one of the signatories of this attempt to force Israel to tear down its most effective means of preventing the slaughter of innocent Jews was the judge from Germany. The work continues. [/b]

P.J. O'Rourke replies to Therealspartacus on war, Libertarians

07.16.04 (5:16 am)   [edit]
Yesterday I think spartacus posted a blog basically putting Bush and Kerry in the same pot regarding the war in Iraq (which is not exactly true) and advocating the isolationism of the Libertarian candidate. My point was going to be that we simply can't ignore the world-- it never works. But I shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from college, you see, and everyone's smarter than me, and probably better looking, so I'm going to let someone else make the point.

P.J. O'Rourke is touted on many Libertarian websites. He is an excellent writer, and funny, and he's come to grips with certain realities about the US and war. When asked about reconciling his small government views (something I support) with what's going on in the world O'Rourke, in a promotional interview for his book "Peace Kills", tells interviewer Shawn MacComber:

[b]“When you get into something like an altruistic foreign policy things get complicated,” he explained. “The United States is involuntarily the only superpower in the world, and trying to put our principles into practice while also accepting all the responsibilities that have been thrust upon us by the laziness and cowardice of the rest of the world is a daunting task.”[/b]

O'Rourke says that Americans generally like to be isolationists, but the US is frequently forced into crisis management:

“Americans would like to ignore foreign policy...Our previous attempts at isolationism were successful. Unfortunately, they were successful for Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan…We are perplexed by the subtle tactics and complex strategies of the Great Game. America’s great game is pulling the levers on the slot machines in Las Vegas.”

O'Rourke is a very good writer. I've been reading his books and columns for years. I especially recommend "Parliament of Whores".

The article which references the interview is here-- http://www.frontpagemag.com/A...

Ps. When the US ceases to be the world's only superpower, when its economy is in the crapper, etc., then perhaps people may leave us alone. But I doubt it. Because we are the freest country on earth we are born with the principles of Liberty and that translates into a kind of fairness that when violated we cannot ignore. We are resented for being free.

I find it fascinating that the reasons the Libertarian presidential candidate gives as to why we're hated in the Middle East are the same reasons Osama bin Laden uses-- including US support of Israel. These are guys that think it fine to decapitate women if they are accused of committing adultery. These are guys taught that Hitler should have "finished the job" regarding the Jews. These are guys that call the US the "Great Satan" precisely because we are not Islamic and embrace all different kinds of faiths.

We may try to ignore the world, but it won't ignore us.

Kerry exploits the dead for political gain

07.16.04 (4:56 am)   [edit]
[b]Exploiting America’s Dead for Political Gain[/b]
Joel Mowbray
July 16, 2004

With sleazy hypocrisy practically oozing from his pores, presidential wannabe John Kerry last week sought political gain by exploiting the memories of dead American patriots, saying, “They were wrong and soldiers lost their lives because they were wrong.”

What Kerry apparently didn’t explain during his interview with the New York Times was about what exactly Bush and Cheney were wrong, or what would have happened differently for soldiers not to have “lost their lives.”

Perhaps Kerry was assuming people would know what he meant, since he timed the remarks to the release of the bipartisan Senate committee report that was highly critical of the CIA’s pre-war intelligence gathering.

Conveniently ignored was that the senator based his vote to authorize the war largely on Saddam’s past history and his ties to terrorists—intelligence that, contrary to pack mentality thinking, has not appreciably changed since the war. But even if Kerry had based his position on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, his vote would still be justified today.

Rather than rehashing the decision to go to war with 20/20 hindsight—something that is only possible, in many instances, because we went to war and subsequently obtained new information—we should first review what we knew then.

The WMD case against Saddam, as of early 2003, was so substantial that it’s hard to know where to start. The most revealing piece of evidence may be whatever it was Saddam refused to reveal to the United Nations weapons inspectors on the eve of the war.

If Saddam had nothing to hide, after all, why would he stonewall the very people who had the best shot to win him a new lease on life? Not only was this obvious to any objective observer, but the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay—a man whose credibility no war critic attacks—determined that Saddam’s minions had duped the weapons inspectors.

Also in the final days before the war, there were large, unidentified shipments heading into Syria. Kay, for his part, does not believe that they contained WMDs, but he admits that they easily could have. WMDs don’t need to be physically big in order to be tremendously lethal, and an entire “stockpile” could have been carted into Syria in these shipments.

One reason to suspect the shipments contained WMDs is that Saddam maintained active WMD programs. Kay confirmed that the CIA was right on this count, although Kay’s multitude of interviews with scientists and other key figures led him to believe that, for a variety of reasons, the programs were not successfully developing chemical and biological agents.

The former lead investigator did conclude, however, that Saddam had the know-how and ability to develop certain chemical weapons within a matter of weeks. As he told National Public Radio this January, “But in some areas, for example producing mustard gas, they knew all the answers, they had done it in the past, and it was a relatively simple thing to go from where they were to starting to produce it.”

When dealing with a madman who had attacked two of his neighbors and slaughtered well over half a million of his own people—including with the widespread use of chemical weapons—what is the meaningful distinction between having stockpiles and having the ability to produce WMDs within weeks capable of wiping out tens of thousands?

Even with the value of hindsight, however, the war was not “justified.” It was necessary.

Kay found that Saddam himself believed he had WMDs, though Kay surmised that the tyrant was misled by those lying to him in order to curry favor. But if the dictator running a closed society—the man in the best position to know the truth—believes he has WMDs, how can any outsider know better?

And though the typical news consumer might not know it, WMDs have been found in Iraq. Discovered so far have been roughly a dozen rounds of mustard and sarin gas, the biological precursor botulinum (stashed in a scientist’s house), and 1.8 metric tons of low-enriched uranium. No “stockpiles” hardly means we haven’t found anything.

Media groupthink dictates that the case for war has been completely or at least substantially undermined by post-war revelations. But there is a substantial body of largely uncontested evidence.

To recap: Saddam believed he had WMDs, he had ongoing WMD programs, he had the ability to whip up mustard gas in no time flat, he had used WMDs against Iran and against his own people, he duped UN weapons inspectors who could have saved his tyranny, and there were large numbers of unidentified shipments crossing into Syria on the eve of the war.

That is what we know now, after more than a year of exhaustive investigation. The mitigating evidence we have that casts some doubt on Saddam’s WMD capability significantly owes to having free reign of the country and full access to relevant former Iraqi officials. But until we comb every last inch of Iraq—and Syria—it is entirely possible that the CIA was right about Saddam’s WMD stockpiles.

Nothing learned to date, however, changes the fact that Saddam posed a “grave and gathering threat.” Intelligence is inherently messy and relatively free of absolutes. Assessing threats requires judgment calls, and in a post-9/11 world, common sense leaves only one side on which to err.

In the case of Iraq, the only untenable position would have been inaction.

President Bush said it best in a speech this May: “So I had a choice to make: Either trust the word of a madman, or defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time.”

©2004 Joel Mowbray

Unfunny, Left-wing cartoonist Trudeau slams President Bush in Rolling Stone interview

07.15.04 (8:05 am)   [edit]
Gary Tudeau shares props with Charles Schulz for being the most overrated, unfunny, unentertaining cartoonist of all time. Since he is a famous political cartoonist, however, he's obviously a liberal.

Anyway, in an interview in Rolling Stone, Trudeau "fondly" recalls his days at Yale, which he shared with the President.

From the Sacramento Bee--

[b]'Doonesbury' cartoonist Trudeau recalls Bush in Rolling Stone interview[/b]
The Associated Press

Last Updated 8:44 pm PDT Wednesday, July 14, 2004
NEW YORK (AP) - Cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who has skewered politicians for decades in his comic strip "Doonesbury," tells Rolling Stone magazine [b]he remembers Yale classmate George W. Bush as "just another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries."[/b]

Trudeau attended Yale University with Bush in the late 1960s and served with him on a dormitory social committee.

"Even then he had clearly awesome social skills," Trudeau said. "He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable ... He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation."

Trudeau said he penned his very first cartoon to illustrate an article in the Yale Daily News on Bush and allegations that his fraternity, DKE, had hazed incoming pledges by branding them with an iron.

[b]The article in the campus paper prompted The New York Times to interview Bush, who was a senior that year. Trudeau recalled that Bush told the Times "it was just a coat hanger, and ... it didn't hurt any more than a cigarette burn."

"It does put one in mind of what his views on torture might be today," Trudeau said.[/b]

Having mocked presidents of both parties in the "Doonesbury" strip since 1971, Trudeau said Bush has been, "tragically, the best target" he's worked with yet.

"Bush has created more harm to this country's standing and security than any president in history," Trudeau said. [b]"What a shame the world has to suffer the consequences of Dubya not getting enough approval from Dad."[/b]

Rolling Stone was publishing the interview Friday.

***

How can you attend Yale and not be a preppy, for starters?

Secondly, let's say that Bush excused hazing at his frat with that comment (we don't know for sure, because this is all recollection from Trudeau-- Lefties are good at bending facts). That's regrettable.

But I wonder how it is that Ted Kennedy can drive his car into a lake with a young coed, drunk off his ass, refuse to save her from drowning and that is off-limits, but Bush can haze someone in a frat and that somehow makes Trudeau wonder how that has influenced his views on torture?

[i]Ted Kennedy let a woman die because of his political career.[/i]

The message must be this: A Republican does a ridiculous, terrible thing that millions of other frat brothers have done, and that makes him evil. A Democrat lets another die while out on a drunken evening of adultery, and he's the "sage" of the Senate.

Democrats commit youthful indiscretions, Republicans are born evil.

Let's also remember the fact that if you recall DOJ memos from 2002, it was President Bush who authorized treatment of detainees in accordance with Geneva standards (while not following Geneva because terrorists aren't protected by Geneva).

Bush is also a born-again Christian, but that doesn't matter either. Only Democrats are capable of change.

I wonder how the security of this country is so imperiled-- is it that the Left secretly hopes that as many times as they say it they'll be able to will a terror attack? All evidence shows that Bush has made America safer. At the very least, he's fought the war on terror and Iraq that Bill Clinton, whom Trudeau treated with soft gloves, refused to do (for political reasons, of course).

Bush hatred gets lethal-- what the Left has become

07.15.04 (5:19 am)   [edit]
From National Review Online--

July 15, 2004, 8:18 a.m.
[b]Shoot to Sell
Knopf’s tangos with presidential assassination.[/b]
By Mark W. Davis

When I was eight years old, school was let out early. The teachers were inexplicably upset, several were crying. But we students weren't. We were happy to be suddenly released. I didn't begin to be troubled until I got home and saw that my mother was crying too.

"Honey, I have to tell you something," she said. "The president's been shot."

"Dead?"

She nodded.

An hour later, my father came home, looking terrible. This I did not quite understand. My father loved to laugh at mean things he would read about the president in columns written by someone named Buckley. My father often said that Kennedy was too busy being a "playboy" (whatever that was) to stand up to Khrushchev. Oddly enough, though, my busy father had come home early too, just as upset as my mother.

He fixed himself a Scotch and downed it all just before the phone rang in late afternoon. My mother answered it and told my father who it was, a family friend. I couldn't hear what my father was told, but I witnessed his reaction. He got all red in the face, and starting barking harsh, angry words. He hung up on his friend, slamming the phone down. A long time would go by before he ever talked to that man again.

When I was older, I learned what the family friend had said to my father. The man, a Republican Kennedy-hater, had said, "Well, they finally got the son of a bitch."

Forty-one years later, something terrible has reemerged in the soul of America, something immoral. A major publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, which once published H.L Mencken, D.H. Lawrence, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka — and, most recently, former president Bill Clinton's My Life — has decided that it is now acceptable to sell, as edgy entertainment, Checkpoint, a novella by Nicholson Baker that explores explicit fantasies about killing President George W. Bush. With saws. With boulders. With bullets. A British newspaper reveals that a main character runs through various outrages over Iraq and concludes, "I'm going to kill that bastard."

The author and publisher, no doubt, will argue that they are expressing an emotion, not an intention (which would be illegal). The problem is, intentions emerge out of emotions. A powerful enough emotion, validated and popularized by a prominent book by a seemingly respectable publisher, can be taken as an incitement. Checkpoint, whatever its literary conceits, will be an act of linguistic terrorism. "He is beyond the beyond," the Washington Post reports the main character saying of Bush. "What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It makes me so angry. And it's a new kind of anger, too."

It is, indeed, a new kind of anger. It is one that takes me aback, even though I am no stranger to partisan rancor. Like many conservatives, I have been willing to risk being considered outré for questioning the Clintons' ethics, motives, and how they explain their personal life. I have written unkind things about them, as people often do about their leaders in a democracy. There are times when I see Bill Clinton on TV that I want to throw something at the screen.

But I never would throw anything at him. I'd rather break my TV. Nor would I nod in agreement with lunatics who believe that Hillary murdered Vince Foster and dumped his body in a park. I am frightened of people who hate so much, because hate rests on fanatical certitude — an inability to grasp the idea that they might actually be wrong. I could well be wrong about the Clintons. Maybe there is something great about them that I just cannot see. Millions of Americans do.

There was a time when most partisans had such an internalized reality check, and a larger concern for the well-being of the country. On the day President Reagan was shot, I saw reporters and editors — almost all liberal Democrats — with tears welling up in their eyes. They were crying because they realized that a hole had been shot through our Constitution.

Today's Left has lost its way. The season's most-talked-about film portrays President Bush as willing to send Americans soldiers to their deaths in order, somehow, to enrich himself and his buddies. Entertainment figures turn fundraisers turn into hate rallies. And such events are embraced by the Democratic establishment as acceptable.

Now I have to wonder — God forbid — what the reaction would be if someone called a senior editor at Knopf and said, "Well, they finally got the son of a bitch." Would he hang up?

— [i]Mark W. Davis was a White House speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush.[/i]

If ClearChannel had a contract with anti-war group, that's one thing....

07.15.04 (4:49 am)   [edit]
..but it also depends on what the contract says.

My guess is that ClearChannel is not dumb enough to say to anyone that you can print or say whatever you want on its media. So when a bunch of anti-war folks want to put up an anti-war billboard near the GOP convention that has a bomb on it, my guess is that ClearChannel can deny that image.

The media goliath that all the lefties love to hate has defended its actions, saying it wasn't against an anti-war ad, it was against the picture of a bomb in NYC. It has that discretion. Also, the owner of the Marriott that the billboard will be on also has noted her right to refuse the image.

Why is this math so hard for the Left? Because they like to turn everything into a "free speech" issue. That is not what this is. It is, at most, a breach of contract issue (and it's probably not even that). The bomb was most likely the group's first choice, and ClearCHannel had the right to refuse it. But it would only be a "free speech" issue if the government prevented the billboard from going up.

As with ClearChannel refusing to play Dixie Chicks' music, they have the right to do that. They are a private company, they are not a government organization. Freedom works both ways.

The only trouble ClearChannel could be in is breach of contract, but only if the contract implied or stated that this anti-war group could put up what they wanted, which I highly doubt.

Background article-- http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/...

It's time for the Democrats to apologize to the President

07.15.04 (4:40 am)   [edit]
[b]Time to Apologize to Bush [/b]
By Washington Times
Washington Times | July 15, 2004

Earlier this week, Americans learned from the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC) report that the Bush administration did not lie about or manipulate intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. To reiterate, the report found "no evidence that the [intelligence community's] mischaracterization or exaggeration of [Iraq's] weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of political pressure ... The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

Yesterday, a British inquiry exonerated the Blair government of exactly the same charge. "We should record in particular that we have found no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence [on the part of the Blair administration]. We found no evidence of [Joint Intelligence Committee] assessments and the judgments inside them being pulled in any particular direction to meet the policy concerns of senior officials on the JIC," the report said.

The British report also agreed with the SIC about the nature of Iraq's weapons programs. In short, intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs on both sides of the Atlantic was flawed, but no one "lied" about it. Both President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair acted in good faith given the intelligence provided by their respective agencies. This is the nature of leadership.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2004 elections. Soon after the fall of Baghdad, it started to become clear that Saddam Hussein did not have the weapons programs everyone believed he had. Urged along by one dissembling former ambassador, the Democrats soon lost control and began to accuse the president of the United States of lying to, or at least misleading, the American people.

To name only a few, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), in a television ad, mentioned the "yellowcake" reference in the president's 2003 State of the Union, adding "the administration knew it wasn't true ... It's time to tell the truth." (No, it was true, then as now.) The DNC Web site also informed readers about the administration's "year-long campaign of deception involving a bogus intelligence report on Iraq's nuclear program." DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe huffed, "This may be the first time in recent memory that a president knowingly misled the American people during the State of the Union address." According to John Kerry, Mr. Bush "misled every one of us." Sen. Joseph Biden believed the administration "hyped [the intelligence] ... to create a sense of urgency and a threat." Sen. Carl Levin said, "The statement that Iraq was attempting to acquire African uranium was not an inadvertent mistake. It was negotiated between CIA and National Security Council officials, and it was highly misleading."

We agree with the Wall Street Journal on this matter: Apologies are in order.

Joe Wilson the Kerry advisor lied, kids died!

07.15.04 (4:36 am)   [edit]
[b]Wilson lied, kids died![/b]
Ann Coulter
July 15, 2004

Another high-profile John Kerry supporter was outed as a nutcase this week: Joseph C. Wilson IV, the Walter Mitty of conspiracy theorists. Wilson is the ne'er-do-well WASP embraced by the Democrats last year for calling Bush a liar. Wilson claimed to be shocked, appalled, alarmed when President Bush said during his 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Wilson was shocked because, in 2002, he had been sent on an unpaid make-work job to Niger to "investigate" whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger. Wilson's method of investigating consisted of asking African potentates questions like: Did you commit a horrible crime, which, if so, would ruin your country's relationship with the United States? I have no independent means of corroborating this, so be honest!

On the basis of the answers he got, Wilson concluded that Saddam had not sought uranium ore from Niger. Since "Africa" means "Niger" and "British intelligence" means "Joseph Wilson," Wilson realized in horror that Bush's statement referred to Wilson's very own report! Out of love for his country and an insatiable desire to have someone notice his worthless existence, Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times calling Bush a liar.

The whole story was already nutty enough to be believed by every columnist at The New York Times. But then journalist Robert Novak revealed that Clown Wilson had been sent as an unpaid intern to Niger by his wife, a chair-warmer at the CIA who apparently wanted to get him out of the house. This in turn provoked our own Walter Mitty to accuse Karl Rove of outing his wife as an undercover "spy" in retaliation for his attacks on the Bush administration. (And P. Diddy told me Britney Spears is out to get me! I'm a spy too!)

In response to Wilson's crazy behavior, he was made an adviser to the Kerry campaign. He was also fawned over by Vanity Fair magazine, embraced by Democratic senators like Jon Corzine of New Jersey, hailed as a patriot in The New York Times, awarded The Nation magazine's "Award for Truth-Telling" and given a lucrative book contract.

According to The Washington Post, Wilson began wiling away his once-empty days discussing "who would play (his wife) in the movie" and fantasizing about how his obituary would read. His favorites were: "Joseph C. Wilson IV, the Bush I administration political appointee who did the most damage to the Bush II administration ..." and "Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of the spy the White House outed ..."

I'm not sure we were waiting for any more evidence on whether Wilson was an idiot, but this week we found out he's a liar, too. The Senate report on the CIA's intelligence gathering concluded that, contrary to Wilson's statements about his own report, his findings had bolstered rather than undermined the case that Saddam had sought uranium from Niger.

Most amusingly, despite Wilson's insistence that he had been tapped for the Niger trip based on his nonexistent expertise and zero credentials, the Senate committee produced his wife's memo recommending her husband for the (unpaid) job. This followed Wilson's assertions that his wife "definitely had not proposed that I make the trip" and his astonishment that anyone could imagine his wife was "somehow involved in this," saying that "just defies logic."

When presented with the memo from his wife recommending him for the job, Wilson said only that his wife was not the one who made the decision to send him to Niger. This cleared up the matter for anyone who had been under the impression Wilson was married to George Tenet.

As an aside, I note that the main point of the Senate report was to slam the agency for its Mickey Mouse intelligence gathering on weapons of mass destruction. Guess what Wilson's wife does at the CIA? That's right! She gathers intelligence on weapons of mass destruction! No wonder she claims to be "undercover." Her fantasist husband calls the incompetent CIA paper-pusher "Jane Bond." (I'm an astronaut!)

The implicit deal the government has always had with worthless, rich WASPs is they get trivial, make-work jobs with the Foreign Service so they can go around calling themselves "diplomats"; but the trade-off is, they're not supposed to make fools of themselves or commit treason. It's not that high a hurdle. Unlike the Ivy League WASPs of yesteryear, at least worthless WASPs from the lower-ranked schools like Wilson have, thus far, managed to avoid treason. Merely being an ass shouldn't cause many problems for the country – except that: One political party embraced the ass.

Wilson is an "unpaid foreign affairs adviser" to the Kerry campaign. (In yet another testament to the wisdom of the market, all Wilson's "jobs" seem to be unpaid.) Indeed, Wilson's website, denouncing the perfidy of the Bush administration, was created and paid for by "John Kerry for President." (Why haven't any crack investigative journalists noticed that?)

This may explain why Kerry was boasting about foreign leaders supporting him earlier this year: He was trying to distract voters from the fact that his strongest base of support in the United States consists of lonely fantasists hoping to make some new friends.

Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org, a Townhall.com member group.

©2004 Universal Press Syndicate

Possible terrorist arrested in Minneapolis

07.14.04 (1:39 pm)   [edit]
From KSTP news--

[b]Man arrested with suicide note on flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul International[/b]
Updated: 07/14/2004 07:48:58 AM

MINNEAPOLIS - The war on terrorism is again at Minnesota's front door after federal authorities arrested a man who they suspect has terrorism ties.

Federal sources told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS the man was arrested last Wednesday at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Sources in the Twin Cities and in Washington D.C. said the man arrived on a flight and was taken into federal custody. Along the way, customs agents found disturbing items in his possession.

The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that Ali Mohamed Almosaleh is in federal custody in the Twin Cities. He was being detained on an immigration law violation, but federal sources confirmed there is much more than that to this investigation.

Sources confirm Almosaleh was carrying a suicide when he was arrested. They say that note indicated a specific time and date for carrying out some sort of public suicide. He was also carrying CDs and DVDs, which federal sources say contained anti-American material. A source also confirms Almosaleh had something with him indicating a connection with at least one known terrorist.

"One of the first things that comes to mind is is he actually going to do something that's the first concern," said terrorism expert Bill Michael. "Second, if law enforcement believes he is, and now rightly so they take an overly safe approach and they try and determine what activity he might actually be planning to engage in."

Almosaleh arrived on a KLM flight last week. A source confirmed he began his travels in Syria and stopped in Amsterdam before continuing to the Twin Cities.

A federal source would not say where Almosaleh's final destination was, but that source did indicate it appears Almosaleh had plans to travel beyond the Twin Cities.

One federal official in Washington noted, this is a "very sensitive" investigation.

Pentagon challenges Rockefeller on Feith accusation

07.14.04 (1:36 pm)   [edit]
Let's be clear about Rockefeller and the Dems:

As the November memo points out, it won't matter what the actual Senate report says. The Democrats will push for more investigations regardless of what "the people" discover (which is, to put it plainly, nothing, except that Joe Wilson is a liar, and the CIA has major problems [thanks to the federal government!]).

It's called abuse of power, and it's designed to try and impeach Bush or, if that's not possible, spread enough disinformation and accusations to get the election turned in favor of John Kerry.

It's all clear-- their own memos say it (just like the judiciay memos which detail how to block Senate rules and politicize Bush's nominees).!

From the Washington Times--

[b]Pentagon challenges Rockefeller on Feith hit[/b]
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Pentagon is accusing Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of distorting the intelligence work of its No. 3 civilian official, and calling on the Democrat to prove his charges or retract them.

It is unusual for the Pentagon to formally take on a sitting senator. In this case, the challenge came in a letter to Mr. Rockefeller on Friday from Powell A. Moore, the assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs.

"On behalf of the department, I request that, if you have any evidence supporting the serious charge you floated during your press conference, you provide it to the department," Mr. Moore wrote to Mr. Rockefeller of West Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Senate SelectCommittee on Intelligence,who has emerged as one of the Senate's fiercest critics of President Bush.

"If there is not evidence, then a retraction and apology would be appropriate," said the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

Last year, Mr. Rockefeller was embarrassed when one of his staff's strategy papers leaked to the press. The paper talked of how Democrats would work with Republicans to get a critical report on the Bush administration and pre-Iraq war intelligence, then continue to exploit the issue no matter what the report's conclusions.

Mr. Rockefeller criticized the Pentagon official on Friday, the same day the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the report on prewar intelligence findings on Iraq to which the leaked memo referred.

The unanimous committee report made a brief mention of the intelligence work of the No. 3 official, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. But the report did not criticize Mr. Feith or accuse him of wrongdoing. The bipartisan report, which Mr. Rockefeller approved, said there was no evidence that any policy-maker had pressured CIA analysts to conform intelligence findings to the Pentagon's point of view.

[b] At his post-report press conference, Mr. Rockefeller charged the opposite.[/b]

"We've done a little bit of work on the Number-three guy in the Defense Department, Douglas Feith, part of his alleged efforts to run intelligence past the intelligence community altogether ... and was he running private intelligence failure, which is not lawful?" Mr. Rockefeller said Friday at the joint press conference with committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican.

"The committee's report fails to fully explain the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments," Mr. Rockefeller said.

At issue is a special team Mr. Feith set up after the September 11 attacks to examine any linkage between Saddam Hussein's regime and international terrorists, including Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. Mr. Feith's personnel examined years of intelligence reports on Iraq-al Qaeda contacts, put them into a briefing and delivered it to the CIA, which was compiling a report in 2002 called "Iraqi Support for Terrorism."

Defense officials, who asked not to be named, said yesterday that Mr. Rockefeller's charges against Mr. Feith are not supported by his own bipartisan report.

On this point, the Senate committee report said, "All of the participants in the August 2002 coordination meeting on the September 2002 version of Iraqi Support for Terrorism interviewed by the committee agreed that while some changes were made to the paper as a result of the participation of two office of the under secretary of defense for policy staffers, their presence did not result in changes to their analytical judgments."

In another section on this same issue, the Senate report says, "A number of the individuals interviewed by the committee in conducting its review stated that administration officials questioned analysts repeatedly on the potential for cooperation between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. Though these allegations appeared repeatedly in the press and in other public reporting on the lead-up to the war, no analyst questioned by the committee stated that the questions were unreasonable, or that they were encouraged by the questioning to alter their conclusions regarding Iraq's links to al Qaeda."

The Pentagon's letter of complaint from Mr. Moore to Mr. Rockefeller said, "The department is surprised and disturbed by the assertion during your press conference [Friday] that Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith might be 'running a private intelligence failure (sic), which is not lawful.' "

The letter added, "In the course of a year of investigations into activities of the office of the under secretary of defense for policy, no one on the committee staff, to my knowledge, has charged that anything unlawful had been done."

Mr. Feith's staff "have provided thousands of pages of materials and scores of hours of testimony, including testimony by Secretary Feith before the full committee and committee staff interviews with numerous members of his staff," the letter said. "My understanding is that the information thus far collected by the committee does not support any of the charges of impropriety, much less any unlawful behavior."

Mr. Rockefeller's office issued a statement to The Times yesterday defending his statements.

"When the committee finishes its review of these activities we will be able to determine if, in fact, Under Secretary Feith was running an unauthorized intelligence activity in contravention of this and perhaps other legal requirements," it said in part. "A letter from Assistant Secretary of Defense Powell Moore expresses surprise at my description and asks for an apology. I did not suggest that Mr. Feith has broken a criminal statute. Rather our 'concern' is that some activities of his office may not have been in compliance with the law. The Committee has not reached a conclusion."

The intelligence committee is now completing what is called "phase two" of its investigation and plans to talk more about Mr. Feith's intelligence work.

In November, an internal memo from Mr. Rockefeller's staff leaked to conservative radio host Sean Hannity. It detailed a strategy whereby committee Democrats would cooperate with Republicans to produce a report as critical as possible of the Bush administration. Once the report came out, the strategy paper said, Democrats would then push for more investigations no matter what the first investigation said.

"The fact that the chairman supports our investigations ... is helpful and potentially crucial," the memo said.

Once Democrats have "exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority," the memo says, "we can pull the trigger on an independent investigation of the administration's use of intelligence at any time — but we can only do so once."

"The best time to do so will probably be next year," when Mr. Bush would be campaigning for re-election, the Democratic memo said.

The foundation of Moore's hatred? "Farenheit 9-11's" lies about Florida 2000

07.14.04 (5:05 am)   [edit]
From the NY Post--

[b]MOORE'S MYTHS[/b]
By JOHN R. LOTT, JR. & BRIAN BLASE

July 12, 2004 -- AMONG its many errors, Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is poisoning our political debate with its fictional account of the Florida vote in 2000.

Perhaps his distortions have gone unremarked because they've been repeated so often. (Jesse Jackson, for one, still speaks of Florida as "the scene of the crime" where "[blacks] were disenfranchised. Our birthright stolen.") But still, Moore's "documentary" seems to set a new record for political dishonesty.

Consider a few of the movie's assertions:

[i]The Fox News Channel played a major role in Bush's victory in Florida[/i]: The film shows CBS and CNN calling Florida for Gore, followed by a voiceover uttering, "Then something called the Fox News Channel called the election in favor of the other guy."

[b]First off, Moore leaves out the fact that Fox first called Florida for Gore — and didn't call it back until 2 a.m.[/b]

Indeed, all the networks, Fox included, helped Gore by calling the Florida polls as closed at 7 p.m. Eastern time — and quickly declaring a Democrat the winner of the state's U.S. Senate race, before also saying the state had gone to Gore.

[b]In fact, polls in the 10 heavily Republican counties in the state's western panhandle, located in the Central time zone, were open until 8. But why bother trying to vote when a trusted newsman says the polls are closed and you've already lost?[/b]

After surveying voters, Democratic strategist Bob Beckel claimed that [b]the early call cost Bush a net loss of up to 8,000 votes.[/b] Another survey conducted by John McLaughlin and Associates, a Republican polling company, [b]put Bush's net loss at about 10,000 votes.[/b]

[i]"Under every scenario Gore would have won" the Florida vote if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't stopped the count. [/i]In making this claim, Moore chooses to ignore the most definitive post-election examinations of the ballots.

Two large news consortiums (USA Today and The Miami Herald headed one; the other included The New York Times) conducted massive recounts of Florida's ballots. Both reached very similar conclusions, and neither supported Moore's claim. [b]To quote from the USA Today group's findings (May 11, 2001):

"Who would have won if Al Gore had gotten manual counts he requested in four counties? Answer: George W. Bush."

"Who would have won if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the hand recount of undervotes, which are ballots that registered no machine-readable vote for president? Answer: Bush, under three of four standards."

"Who would have won if all disputed ballots — including those rejected by machines because they had more than one vote for president — had been recounted by hand? Answer: Bush, under the two most widely used standards; Gore, under the two least used."[/b]

Unless all these news organizations are part of Moore's vast rightwing conspiracy, his claim that the U.S. Supreme Court's reversal of the Florida Supreme Court's decision cost Gore the election is based only upon his own wishes, not facts.

[i][b]Florida Gov. Jeb Bush stole the election for his brother by removing African-American voters, who were likely to vote for Gore, from the rolls[/i][/b]. Again, Moore ignores documented fact.

Some background: Florida bans felons from voting (unless they've been granted clemency). Before the 2000 vote, the state hired Database Technologies to purge rolls of felons and dead people. Some non-felons were erroneously removed from the rolls — [b]but the errors didn't "target" minorities.[/b]

[b]The liberal-leaning Palm Beach Post found that "a review of state records, internal e-mails of [Database Technologies] employees and testimony before the civil rights commission and an elections task force showed no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted."[/b]

The law against felon voting does have a racial impact, since African-Americans make up the greatest share of felons (nearly 49 percent felons convicted in Florida). But the application of that law in 2000 skewed somewhat the opposite way — [b]whites were actually the most likely to be erroneously excluded.

The error rate was 9.9 percent for whites, 8.7 percent for Hispanics, and only a 5.1 percent for African-Americans.[/b]

*Michael Moore has been honest in one regard: He freely admits he hopes his film helps defeat President Bush this fall. It's hard to find much else that he's been honest about, however — including calling "Fahrenheit 9/11" a documentary.

[i]John R. Lott Jr. is a resident scholar and Brian Blase a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.[/i]

Did you know that JOHN KERRY SERVED IN VIETNAM?

07.14.04 (4:42 am)   [edit]
Well, [i]you[/i], dear reader, may know. But the Kerry campaign apparently believes that not enough people know that John Kerry served in Vietnam, airing yet another series of ads that puff this band-aid triple Purple Heart earner as some sort of hero.

Of course, Kerry's actual Senate record, which is where his "leadership" was most on display shows an aggressive anti-military, anti-intelligence stance over the last 19 years. Every major weapons system the US has in its arsenal was opposed by Kerry. And given the current failing of our CIA, it is worth noting that this Senator, who by the way served in Vietnam, wanted to gut the CIA and restrict it even more.

On "60 Minutes" Kerry and Edwards seemed proud of the fact that they voted against funding for the Iraq war (even though they voted to send them to Iraq). They are appealing to their extremist base here. But soon they'll be out touting whatever strong defense attributes they have (which apparently means one thing: I SERVED IN VIETNAM!). They really do think people are that stupid, and that is why they are Lefties. Lefties think everyone in America are dumbasses.

As President Bush said of Kerry : "He's entitled to his view...But members of Congress should not vote to send troops into battle and then vote against funding them, and then brag about it.''

Kerry's response? That there were still some "questions" about Bush's Texas Air National Guard service. Talk about deranged. There are no questions about Bush's service, and coming from Kerry there shouldn't be. This is the man that eloquently defended Bill Clinton in a floor speech in 1992 saying that Vietnam service was not a requirement for the presidency.

The irony, of course, is that Bush had more balls than Clinton who didn't even serve in the guard. Clinton worried about invading Iraq and Afghanistan. He didn't respond to terror attacks. This led to 9-11. Bush, in four years, has replaced two evil regimes and decimated Al Qaeda.

And we all know of John Kerry's anti-military stance from VIetnam, making up story after false story about his "band of brothers" that he shamelessly plugs in his campaign ads. He's the one that said in 1971 that as President he'd hand over the US military to the UN. He's got 19 years of anti-military, anti-intelligence speeches and votes on the floor of the Senate.

His service in Vietnam means nothing.

But expect "I served in Vietnam" to be his response to everything now. He stands for nothing, he has no plan for anything. And he's praying like hell for US tragedy so he can look like better than Bush.

I found an old Bush 2000 campaign flyer the other day, and almost every promise he made during his campaign he has kept. That on top of masterfully waging the war on terror (a war the Democrats have no interest in fighting, leading to more 9-11s in the future) tells me that Bush deserves another four years-- he's more of a leader than John Kerry can ever hope to be.

But Kerry served in Vietnam!

Michael Moore fact sheet on Israel and America

07.14.04 (4:17 am)   [edit]
[b]Moore on America[/b]
By Republican Jewish Coalition
Republican Jewish Coalition | July 14, 2004

[b]Michael Moore on Israel[/b] :

- Quotes from Michael Moore’s book, “Dude Where’s My Country?” (Warner Books, 2003) regarding the United States support for Israel:

• Moore dedicated his book, “Dude Where’s My Country?” to Rachel Corrie, an International Solidarity Movement volunteer who was killed March 16 when she climbed in front of a Caterpillar bulldozer that was destroying tunnels used by Palestinian terrorists to illegally smuggle weapons from Egypt into Gaza

• “Of course many Israeli children had died too, at the hands of the Palestinians. You would think that would make every Israeli want to wipe out the Arab world, but the average Israeli does not have that response. Why? Because IN THEIR HEARTS, THEY KNOW THEY ARE WRONG, AND THEY KNOW THEY WOULD BE DOING JUST WHAT THE PALESTINIANS ARE DOING IF THE SANDAL WERE ON THE OTHER FOOT.”

• “Hey, here’s a way to stop suicide bombings – give the Palestinians a bunch of missile-firing Apache helicopters and let them and the Israelis go at each other head to head. Four billion dollars a year to Israel – four billion dollars a year to the Palestinians – they can just blow each other up and leave the rest of us the hell alone.”

• “Now I’m not just talking about your everyday anti-Semites. No, I’m talking about a perceived notion that we Americans are supporting Israel in its oppression of the Palestinian people. Now where did those Arabs come up with an idea like that? Maybe it was when the Palestinian child looked up in the air and saw and American Apache helicopter firing a missile into his baby sister’s bedroom just before she was blown into a hundred bits.”

- In 1987, Moore was honored by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee for his “courageous efforts in journalism.” (ADC Times, January 1990, page 4)

- In 1990, speaking before the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Moore announced that he would refuse to attend a screening of his movie, “Roger and Me,” which was being held in Jerusalem. He was quoted as saying that he would not attend until Israel ceased to occupy the West Bank and Gaza. (Arab American News, 1990)

- Moore attended and spoke at a June 5, 1990 demonstration protesting the continued Israeli occupation at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July, 2001)

- In October 2003, Moore was honored by the Muslim American Public Affairs Council (MPAC) with a media award. (www.mpac.org)

- In his book, “Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation,” Moore proposed that Congress give Israel 30 days to end the bloodshed taking place in its name, and if Israel does not do so, funding to Israel should be cut. He also noted that while individual terrorism is bad, state sponsored terrorism is truly evil. Moore also proposed that the Palestinians be given their statehood and receive twice as much economic assistance from the United States as Israel receives.

- “In Liverpool, [Moore] paused to contemplate the epicenters of evil in the modern world: “It’s all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton.” (David Brooks in the New York Times, June 26. 2004)

- Recently Moore had no comment when questioned about the rumor that members of Hezbollah had been involved in the distribution of Fahrenheit 9/11. (http://www.moorewatch.com)

- Moore tried to prevent Fahrenheit 9/11 from being shown in Israel. (New Yorker Magazine, February 16, 2004)

- Moore stated: “Anyway, the support Bush and the Republicans feign for Israel is because Israel is near our oil. If the oil wasn't there, I bet those same Republicans wouldn't [care] about Israel. " (Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2004)

[b]Michael Moore on America[/b] :

- While promoting his book, “Dude Where’s My Country,” in Germany, Moore gave a speech in which he asserted that, “Americans are possibly the dumbest people on the planet….in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks. We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don’t know about anything that’s happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing.” (The Washington Dispatch, June 26, 2004)

- “I want Bush paraded in handcuffs outside of a police house as a common criminal because I don’t know if there’s a greater crime than taking people to war based on a lie. I’ve never seen anything like Bush and his people. They truly hate our Constitution, our rights and our liberties. They have no shame in fighting for their corporate sponsors.” (Quote from Moore in The Mirror, November 3, 2003)

- In his book, “Dude Where’s My Country,” Moore proposed that the Patriot Act is as un-American as “Mein Kampf.” He wrote, “The Patriot Act is the first step. ‘Mein Kampf’… ‘Mein Kampf’ was written long before Hitler came to power. And if the people of Germany had done something early on to stop these early signs, when the right-wing, when the extremists such as yourself, decide that this is the way to go, if people don’t speak up against this, you end up with something like what they had in Germany. I don’t want to get to that point.”

- In October of 2003, Moore was quoted in the University of Michigan’s student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, as saying “there is no terrorist threat in this country. This is a lie. This is the biggest lie we’ve been told.”

- On his book tour to promote, “Dude Where’s My Country,” Moore stopped off in Cambridge, England, where he lamented before a large audience that, ‘You’re stuck with being connected to this country of mine, which is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe.” (Newsmax.com, June 6, 2004)

- While on his recent book tour, Moore told a crowd in Berlin, “Don’t be like us. You’ve got to stand up, right? You’ve got to be brave.” (David Brooks in the New York Times, June 29, 2004)

- In an open letter to the German people in Die Zeit, Moore asked, “Should such an ignorant people [as the United States] lead the world? Don’t go the American way when it comes to economics, jobs and services for the poor and immigrants. It is the wrong way.” (David Brooks in the New York Times, June 30, 2004)

[i]The Republican Jewish Coalition is the well-respected representative of the Jewish community to Republican elected officials and party leaders and is the pre-eminent Republican organization in the Jewish community. www.rjchq.org [/i]

The Philippines pull a Spain and cave in to terror

07.14.04 (4:09 am)   [edit]
[b]The mollycoddling milksops of Manila[/b]
Michelle Malkin
July 14, 2004

Add the flag of the Philippines to the International Hall of Appeasers. Sign this pitiful nation up for a lifetime membership to the Axis of Weasels. And remind me never again to brag about the proud fighting spirit of my ancestors.

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm deeply, mortifyingly ashamed of my parents' native land. The island nation has gone and pulled a Spain (and a France and a Germany). Philippine president Gloria Macagapal-Arroyo has crumbled like a fried lumpia wrapper under pressure from radical Muslim terrorists.

The Battling Bastards of Bataan have given way to the Mollycoddling Milksops of Manila. And ultimately, we -- not just Filipinos, but all Americans and our allies battling Islamofascism -- will pay a grisly price for this disgraceful capitulation.

Late last week, an Islamic terrorist group in Iraq kidnapped Filipino truck driver Angelo de la Cruz. He was abducted near Fallujah while shipping fuel for an American company from Saudi Arabia to Baghdad. The sword-wielding kidnappers, calling themselves the Khaled Ibn al-Walid Brigade, have threatened to execute de la Cruz unless the Philippines immediately withdraws its 51-member contingent of police officers and soldiers from the multinational force providing security in Iraq (the troops were scheduled to be sent home next month, anyway).

My prayers, of course, are with de la Cruz and his family. He is the father of eight children, an innocent man who was reportedly just trying to earn enough money for an operation to restore the eyesight of a son. It could have easily been a relative of mine in the hands of the heathens. No one can blame his family for their entreaties to President Arroyo to pull out all the stops to save him.

But Arroyo is not merely the protector of one man and one family. She is not only a parochial leader of one people. Arroyo proclaimed herself a front-line warrior in the battle against global terror. Last spring, she came to Washington, embraced President Bush, and heralded her tight relationship with the United States.

"(T)he Philippines is one of the first countries to join this war on terror," Arroyo said. "And the reason why we did it is that we in the Philippines know what it is to suffer from the hands of terrorism. We know the pain of terrorism. And we are with you in your leadership against terrorism, wherever it may be found."

We are with you. Remember those words.

Initially, the Philippines appeared to stand firm against de la Cruz's abductors. The nation followed the courageous lead of Japan, South Korea and Bulgaria, which have all resolutely opposed the terrorists despite the abduction and murder of their countrymen. "Philippines Defiant on Iraq," one headline read. "Philippines Rejects Deadline From Iraq Kidnappers," read another.

But facing pressure from a vocal minority of isolationists, anti-American academics and Catholic church leaders, Filipino government officials buckled within hours of their original decision. On Monday, Philippine deputy foreign minister Rafael Seguis announced on al-Jazeera television that "in response to your request" -- "request," as if the terrorists had extended an invitation to tea -- the Philippines "will withdraw its humanitarian forces as soon as possible."

"I hope the statement that I read will touch the heart of this group," Seguis pleaded further, as if he were addressing Oprah Winfrey's studio audience. He concluded pathetically: "We know that Islam is the religion of peace and mercy." Meanwhile, militant Islamic brigades of merciless cutthroats have menaced the southern Philippine islands, collaborated with murderous al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah operatives, and will now see every overseas Filipino worker as an irresistible tool for geopolitical extortion.

Indeed, there have even been unconfirmed reports from the Philippines that its diplomats may have offered cash to the terrorists using al-Jazeera TV as an intermediary.

Some observers, including our own State Department, have given the Arroyo administration the benefit of the doubt. They believe that the wording of the nation's announcement to withdraw troops from Iraq "as soon as possible" is a deliberate ploy meant to confuse the captors and buy time. Nonsense. The unequivocal message of the Philippines to the terrorists has come across loud and clear: We will surrender. And so has the country's message to America:

We lied.

Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Proposed British ban on "hate speech" toward Muslims will merely fan flames of their extremism

07.13.04 (9:09 am)   [edit]
From the London Telegraph--

[b]Blunkett's ban will fan the flames[/b]
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 13/07/2004)

A couple of years back, I mentioned the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and received a flurry of lively e-mails. It was Valentine's Day 1989, you'll recall, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his extraterritorial summary judgment on a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims were marching through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed.

A reader in Bradford recalled asking a West Yorkshire officer on the street that day why the various "Muslim community leaders" weren't being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they'd been told to "play it cool". The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to "F--- off, or I'll arrest you."

Isn't that pretty much how it's likely to go once David Blunkett's new protection for Islam is in place? If you're the "moderate" Imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, you'll be invited to speak at the "Our Children Our Future" conference sponsored and funded by the Metropolitan Police and the Department for Work and Pensions. But, if you express concern about ol' Mullah Moderate, an Islamic lobby group will file an official complaint about you.

Indeed, after Sir John Stevens, Met commissioner and event co-sponsor, said he didn't want his officers on the same stage as the imam, the Muslim Association of Britain filed an official complaint about his comments. By the time you read this, Sir John might have already called for himself to be investigated by a Royal Commission and found guilty of systemic Islamophobia.

As for "Our Children Our Future", when it comes to children, the imam certainly has the future all mapped out: as he has said, "Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation." Thank heaven for little girls, they blow up in the most delightful way.

If an Anglican Bishop were to commend a career as a suicide bomber to his Sunday school charges, you'd certainly hope to be free to question his judgment on the matter. Not that Anglican bishops ever say such things, of course. They're lost in anguished debate on whether they should just have celibate gay deans in long-term relationships or go for full-blown robustly active gay bishops, and all the thanks they get for their painful efforts to keep up with the times is wholesale public mockery of Christianity up and down the land - i.e. my old friend Alistair Beaton's satirical Iraq-war song, We're Sending You a Cluster Bomb From Jesus.

Meanwhile, Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the Western world, but Blunkett wants us to pretend that it's a wee delicate bloom which has to be sheltered from anything unpleasant. The other week, the governor of one of those Nigerian states that now lives under sharia called for the burning of all Christian churches within his jurisdiction. Every Friday, on state TV and radio throughout the Arab world and in mosques somewhat closer to home, the A-list imams call for the killing of Jews and infidels. Well, good luck to them. But, if they can dish it out so enthusiastically, couldn't they learn to take it just an eensy-teensy-weensy bit?

One of the reasons Arab nations are in the state they're in is because of the inability to discuss Islam honestly. I was in Amman for the Jordanian election last year and one of the things you notice is that, although the city does a reasonable impression of a modern dynamic capital and its press is, by the standards of the region, free-ish, its stunted political culture is subordinate to its religious culture. That's why, for example, Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code - which effectively licenses "honour killings" - always gets renewed when it comes up in parliament.

That's another reason the British Government should not be in the business of helping coercive lobby groups further stifle debate. Islam raises political questions that Judaism or Buddhism don't - the suggestion, for example, that Muslim women should be exempt from the requirement to be photographed on national identity cards. Without Blunkett's law, there'll be the odd crusty type from the shires huffing on BBC phone-ins that if Muslim women think it's insulting to be made to remove their hejab for ID cards, they should bloody well have thought about that before moving to Britain.

With Blunkett's law, we'll discuss such questions, if at all, between tightly imposed government constraints explicitly favouring one party to the dispute. I know which one of those options any self-respecting liberal democracy ought to prefer.

In The River War (1899), Winston Churchill's account of the Sudanese campaign, there's a memorable passage which I reproduce here while I'm still able to:

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science - the science against which it had vainly struggled - the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome."

Is that grossly offensive to Muslims? Almost certainly. Is it also a rather shrewd and pertinent analysis by one of Britain's most eminent leaders? I think so. If Blunkett bans the sentiments in that first sentence, the sentiments of the last will prove even more pertinent.

As therealspartacus slips into absurd parody, I've completed his homework assignment

07.12.04 (11:56 pm)   [edit]
Took me about 2 minutes...

Disregarding his childish cheap shot at me (which means he's pissed that I'm right), therealspartacus sez:

"I don't know how you were allowed to graduate from college. Your homework for tonight- look up the following words in the dictionary (and not the Bill O'Reilly version) and provide a full definition, along with 5 sentences containing examples of the words used correctly:

1) Atheism
2) Religion
3) Liberal
4) Secular Humanism
5) Human Secularism (since I've never heard of that before)
6) Marlon Brandon (I've only heard of Marlon Brando)"

My reply:

6) That's Marlon Brando. So sorry I confused you.

5)Human Secularism-- The term may be redundant, but it essentially means a form of opinion which concerns itself only with questions, the issues of which can be tested by the experience of this life". George Holyoake defined secularism, saying "Secularism is that which seeks the development of the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of man to the highest possible point, as the immediate duty of life — which inculcates the practical sufficiency of natural morality apart from Atheism, Theism or the Bible — which selects as its methods of procedure the promotion of human improvement by material means, and proposes these positive agreements as the common bond of union, to all who would regulate life by reason and ennoble it by service."

This view glorifies the "self".

1)Atheism-- as a doctrine, or theory, or philosophy formally opposed to theism, atheism can only signify the teaching of those schools, whether cosmological or moral, which do not include God either as a principle or as a conclusion of their reasoning.

This ties in quite nicely to secularism. Since there is no one but themselves to reason with, and reason is inescapable from the God "self", atheists always are secularists.

2)Religion-- A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

That explains spartacus pretty well, doesn't it.

3)Liberal-- Morally unrestrained; licentious.

That explains the Left. Since morals come from the God of Abraham, and since secularists and atheists hate the God of Abraham, they are all, by default, liberals.

Their new "morality" is moral equality, but all that is is a license to allow whatever behavior imagineable.

***

All of this is quite silly, as therealspartacus only made his comment because he was upset with me. Instead of debating with me or simply acknowledging he is wrong (as I've had to do), he chose to become more of a liberal and call me names and mock my intelligence. Well rock on. I never said I was the smartest guy in the world. I have a freakin' BA in English, for Christ's sake. But I know enough. And it appears to be more than therealspartacus can handle.

And if I'm wrong about that, all he has to do is stop being a childish prick and be honest with himself.

I'm not betting that is possible.

Jimmytherighteous, that is Matt Martin the loser, can't help but bash me

07.12.04 (11:34 pm)   [edit]
In a blog entry comparing poll results Jimmytherighteous, AKA Matthew Martin, sez:

"Anyhow, when asked about the current poll numbers, the best Coulter could do was say, "I don't care to comment on that." Better yet, when asked about the 50% or more of Americans who do not support Bush and will not vote for him, she answered that those ~55+ million people are "traitors." It's fascinating to see just how deranged the extreme right wing is. No wonder James Yerian masturbates to soiled pictures of Ann Coulter ;-)"

So I print a handful (no pun intended) of Ann Coulter columns a year and Matthew Martin makes a slam about [i]me[/i]. And what is deranged about saying "I don't care to comment on that?"

Ann Coulter would be deranged if she said, "I think John Kerry makes sense" or "You know, Sean, I think Matthew Martin of Athens, Ohio is not a waste of space." Instead she said, basically, "no comment".

I'm sure Matt Martin knows all about masturbation, though. Lots and lots about it.

Rock on.

WinstomSmith the propaganda whore. Spinning the truth.

07.12.04 (9:10 pm)   [edit]
Winston Smith sez this about the Senate intel report--

"For example, the CIA reported to the Administration that Iraq and al-Qaeda did not have "an established formal relationship."3 In fact, the Iraqi government actively sought "to prevent Iraq youth from joining Al Qaeda." Yet, Vice President Dick Cheney continues to tell the American people that Saddam Hussein had "an established relationship with al Qaeda."4

Winnie says this to make the case that Bush-Cheney said their was a formal link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. That never happened. As with the myth spread by the Left about Bush claiming an "imminent" threat, the Left is spinning the Al-Qaeda- Iraq connection case as one denoting a formal relationship. The Bush administration never said it was formal-- and that's because it wasn't.

There is a difference between an established relationship and a formal relationship. If there is any kind of relationship it is established, whether it is formal or not. I want Winston Smith to name me one state that proudly had "formal" relations with a terror organization before or after 9-11.

There is only one, and that was the Taliban. It is gone. Iran has dealings with Hezbollah, but it doesn't have "formal" relations. No state does. Winston knows this.

There is plenty of information to suggest an established relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. And EVEN MORE TO THE POINT, this was never a major case for the US going to war. We know what that was-- the grave and gathering threat of Hussein to America after 9-11 (and through 11 years of broken UN resolutions). But the Left lies about that as well.

What I find truly fascinating is that whatever George Tenet's motives in sending the fax to Dr. Rice about Niger and Iraq, he was wrong. As the Senate intel report and Joseph Wilson (the liar) make clear. The UK government is releasing a government inquiry saying they were right.

So Bush [i]was[/i] right about Niger and Iraq. And he was right about a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda that he never said was "formal".

WinstonSmith is wrong about everything-- he can't keep track of his own lies and his clown logic. He doesn't consider:

The Senate intel committee sees the same information the president does. If Bush twisted what was said, why isn't that in the report? All it takes is a Senator to file impeachment papers. How in the hell does WinstonSmith, political expert and conspiracy spinner, know more than the Senate?

Everything seems conveniently to be Bush's fault. In Winston's dim mind he believes that if Bush loses the election things will "get better". The only problem is that things have always been bad-- the CIA has been failing for decades (largely because of the government itself), and the world has always hated us. But Winston and other left-wing conspiracy spinners like him will scrutinize the President of the US only if he is a Republican while take a Democratic president at face value when he says something as stupid as "Never again will Russian missiles be pointed at your children."

Winston, you've covered yourself in shame. Again. Bang up job. Do you read the daily misleader to get the "truth", or to hone your craft? My guess is that it is the latter.

Edwards and Kerry want to raise taxes, but aren't wild about paying them

07.12.04 (8:48 pm)   [edit]
From OpinionJournal.com--

[b]Liberal Loopholes
Edwards and Kerry want to raise taxes, but aren't wild about paying them.[/b]
Tuesday, July 13, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

In embracing John Edwards, John Kerry has also endorsed his populist "two Americas" rhetoric and has put tax increases at the center of the election campaign. So it's fair to ask the two Democrats: How much of those tax increases will actually hit the super-rich like yourselves, and how much will end up on the backs of upper middle-class wage earners?

For an answer, let's look at what the two Senators have themselves been paying in taxes. It turns out that the Kerrys and Edwards have exploited plenty of tax loopholes over the years. Of course, nobody is obligated to pay more than what the letter of the law requires. But the complex tax code benefits the wealthy, who can afford tax attorneys and complicated schemes to skirt the law. And high marginal rates give them plenty of incentive to do so.

[b]Senator Edwards talks about the need to provide health care for all, but that didn't stop him from using a clever tax dodge to avoid paying $591,000 into the Medicare system. While making his fortune as a trial lawyer in 1995, he formed what is known as a "subchapter S" corporation, with himself as the sole shareholder.[/b]

Instead of taking his $26.9 million in earnings directly in the following four years, he paid himself a salary of $360,000 a year and took the rest as corporate dividends. Since salary is subject to 2.9% Medicare tax but dividends aren't, that meant he shielded more than 90% of his income. That's not necessarily illegal, but dodging such a large chunk of employment tax skates perilously close to the line.

The Internal Revenue Service takes a dim view of such operations and "may collapse the structure entirely and argue the S corporation is not truly a separate entity," in the words of Tax Adviser magazine. Attorney CPA magazine lists it as No. 11 of its "15 best underutilized tax loopholes," but warns that the IRS "has successfully litigated cases against individuals, particularly sole shareholders of personal service S corporations, reclassifying such deemed distributions as wages subject to social security taxes."

[b]As a political matter, the dodge is especially hypocritical because the income limits on which Medicare taxes are paid were lifted by Democrats in 1993 specifically to hit "the rich," as Mr. Edwards likes to call people in his tax bracket.[/b] And the supreme irony? Mr. Edwards has claimed that he set up the subchapter S company to protect himself from legal liability. You know it's time for tort reform when even the trial lawyers say they're afraid of getting sued.

Senator Kerry's personal finances are not so complicated, since most of his income comes from his government salary and a modest inheritance. But he owes his jet-setting lifestyle and indeed some of his political success to the wealth of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Her personal assets have been estimated at up to $3.2 billion, and the couple travel among their five houses scattered around the U.S. on a $35 million Gulfstream V jet. During a tough election for the Senate in 1996, Mr. Kerry sidestepped a gentleman's agreement with opponent William Weld to limit the spending of personal wealth on either side to $500,000 by having his campaign borrow $1.7 million from his wife.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry's finances remain largely a closed book, since she has so far refused to release her tax returns. [b]What we do know so far is that she has prepaid $750,000 in federal taxes on $5.1 million in income for 2003--an effective tax rate of 15%.[/b] That is because a significant portion of the income came from tax-free municipal bonds, which is perfectly legal.

Even so, her net income must be much higher. We know that since the death of her husband John Heinz in 1991, Mrs. Heinz Kerry has invested shrewdly and possibly even doubled her inheritance. Even if one takes a conservative estimate of her net worth, say $1 billion, an income of $5.1 million means a paltry return of just 0.5%. More likely, the majority of her investment income is sheltered within trusts so that tax is deferred until she or her family actually wants to spend it. [b]Again, perfectly legal, but this is a luxury that the average middle-class professional working for a wage does not have. [u]These are the non-rich who will pay the bulk of any Kerry tax increase.[/b][/u]

So when John Kerry and John Edwards say that they want to tax the wealthiest Americans, let's be clear about what they really mean. [b]They want to tax the most productive people at higher marginal rates and close loopholes for corporations, while they themselves dodge taxes by exploiting loopholes they plan to preserve.[/b]

Mr. Edwards is right that there really are two Americas. The people who work for their money and want to keep more of their own paychecks. And wealthy politicians who want to raise taxes on the middle class secure in the knowledge that they won't have to pay.

Congress only has itself to blame for CIA failures

07.12.04 (8:39 pm)   [edit]
Money quote:

[b]"In the matter of Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, Congress had access to the same information given to the White House and Pentagon. It was information credible to many other nations. In typical hand-washing fashion, Congress now wants to avoid taking blame and is passing the buck to others. Senators could have questioned the accuracy of any of the intelligence they received, but the members of this body, who often do not read the bills for which they vote and seem to care more about pork than they do matters pertaining to war and security, refuse to hold themselves even partially accountable."[/b]

[b]Finding fault with intelligence[/b]
Cal Thomas
July 12, 2004

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has found that bad information was provided to the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. Some members of Congress claim that had they known then what they now know they would have not voted to authorize force to topple Saddam Hussein.

That adage about being careful about the finger you point at others because three are pointing back at you applies here. It is Congress, not the executive branch, that fashions our intelligence apparatus, authorizes money and sets parameters beyond which information collection may not legally go. Congress should at least share equal blame with the various intelligence agencies for faulty information. That includes the newly minted Democratic vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, who is a member of the Select Committee, but who apparently was not aware of much in his rapid pursuit of higher goals.

A little history adds to the understanding of the restrictions under which the CIA has been forced to operate. The CIA was created in 1947 to address the Soviet Union's growing espionage activities. In the mid-1970s, Congress and the public began to question the role of the agency following the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal. The media disclosed many abuses by intelligence agencies and new guidelines were recommended by presidential commissions and drafted by congressional committees, including one headed by Sen. Frank Church, D-Ida., restricting the work of the CIA and mandating stronger legislative oversight.

President Jimmy Carter signed the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which restricted the right of Congress to monitor the CIA to the Senate and House Intelligence committees. The law said just eight members of Congress were to receive special information, and even that information was to be released to other members only under extraordinary circumstances.

CIA successes - and there are many - are less well known than its failures for obvious reasons. Failures include the Soviet downing in 1960 of the U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers, embarrassing President Eisenhower who first denied and then was forced to admit the spy mission. The Bay of Pigs disaster under President Kennedy further embarrassed the agency. That was followed by Kennedy's assassination in 1963, and more criticism for the CIA when it was learned that his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had earlier been identified as a dangerous political malcontent, but the CIA had lost track of him.

During the Watergate period, the CIA was revealed to have spied on American citizens, and the agency took heat from the Hollywood and literary left. The Iran-contra "scandal" during the Reagan administration further besmirched the agency, and in 1994, when it was revealed that longtime CIA employee Aldrich Ames - the son of a CIA executive - was a Soviet spy and the highest paid American traitor in history, morale fell to new lows.

In the matter of Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, Congress had access to the same information given to the White House and Pentagon. It was information credible to many other nations. In typical hand-washing fashion, Congress now wants to avoid taking blame and is passing the buck to others. Senators could have questioned the accuracy of any of the intelligence they received, but the members of this body, who often do not read the bills for which they vote and seem to care more about pork than they do matters pertaining to war and security, refuse to hold themselves even partially accountable.

Was it laziness or dereliction of duty on the part of Congress? Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times wrote a year ago: "Fewer than a dozen House members have taken the time to review more than 10,000 pages of intelligence documents backing up the administration claims about Iraq, which were made available more than a month ago." Surely senators also had access to the same material. Where was congressional oversight?

The larger question - is the world better off without Saddam Hussein in power? - cannot be answered any other way but "yes." How much more dangerous would the world be had Saddam not been ousted and the Iraqi people given a chance to taste freedom for themselves? Civilization advances when any tyrant falls.

As Congress attempts to correct mistakes at the CIA, Congress should not ignore its own shortcomings. It might also want to question where the weapons of mass destruction have gone, since they were once in Iraq and used by Saddam Hussein.

©2004 Tribune Media Services

The Senate Intel report-- why it vindicates Bush

07.12.04 (8:34 pm)   [edit]
IN a nutshell, the Senate Intelligence report sez:

1)Joseph Wilson is a liar-- his Niger report to the CIA actually supported the FACT that the Hussein regime sought Niger uranium (500 tons). Wilson lied about this to the press-- and in a book-- solely to undermine the war effort against Iraq and, though he probably didn't care, crumble US credibility and security in the world.

2)Bush did not pressure the CIA to reach its conclusions about WMD and Hussein. The CIA, the supposedly premier spy agency in the world, acknowledge Hussein's long-time deceiving about WMD. The committee interviewed hundreds of CIA officials.

When a president, [i]any[/i] president makes a decision about war, intelligence is a vital part of that decision. President Bush used the same intel that the CIA had been feeding the US and the world since the early 1990s. More than that, the rest of the world's intelligence agencies believed the same thing.

The real issues at play here are still the same, though. We know Hussein had WMD. He lied about destroying them many times, and he never honored his part of the cease-fire. After 9-11 this was intolerable, not because he was an "imminent" threat to the US (which Bush never said) but because of the very real possibility that Hussein would give these WMD or WMD components to terrorists.

The CIA failures stem from knowing more about the WMD and how the information was gathered. Big surprise, considering since the Nixon administration the government had gutted the CIA's clandestine service and prevented it from doing what had to be done on the ground to get the right kind of intel (specifically by dealing with shady characters).

The same government that called the CIA on its failures is the same government that set the CIA up for those failures.

These failures created less than reliable information, which the CIA had used for 15-20 years.

President Bush did what all presidents do-- he weighed the best evidence he had, and he made a decision. It was the right one, even if the CIA was less than stellar in its conduct. It was the right one because Hussein had attacked America before. It was also right because Hussein had broken the UN cease-fire multiple times, and this action specifically threatened the US, especially after 9-11.

Bush didn't lie about WMD. It is high time that the political discourse in this country became less extreme, less influenced by an extreme left-wing hatred of George Bush and America. It's high time that the facts came to light.

Kerry shamelessly dredges up the disproved myths of the 2000 Florida election

07.12.04 (8:21 am)   [edit]
A conspiracy theory for the Democrats never goes away no matter how many times it has been proven wrong. It doesn't even fade away. It's always there, ready to be used by the Left when thinking gets too hard and the facts don't fit their beliefs.

[b]July 12, 2004, 8:24 a.m.
Running on Urban Mythology
Before Kerry plays the race card, he should check the facts in his deck.[/b]
By Peter Kirsanow

Senator John Kerry made a fantastic statement while speaking to a predominantly black audience in Indianapolis last Tuesday. Admonishing the Bush administration for calling "[the Kerry campaign] pessimists for speaking truth to power," he stated: "Don't tell us disenfranchising a million African Americans and stealing their votes is the best we can do. This time, in 2004, not only will every vote count — we're going to make sure that every vote is counted."

Kerry's statement came just a few days after a dozen members of the U.S. House of Representatives, led by the immediate past chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Eddie Bernice Johnson (D., Texas), sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan requesting that the U.N. provide election observers to monitor the 2004 U.S. presidential election. The representatives contend that U.N. involvement is necessary to prevent a repeat of "the nightmare of the 2000 presidential election."

The representatives cite as the basis of their request certain alleged findings of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that countless Floridians were denied the right to vote in 2000 and that "the disenfranchisement of Florida's voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of black voters and in poor counties."

The theme of massive black disenfranchisement and stolen votes has been repeated ad nauseam since 2000, and has become more pronounced and hysterical during the current election cycle. (In December 2000, Rep. Johnson asserted on the floor of the House that there was overwhelming evidence that George W. Bush had lost the Florida popular vote.) John Kerry referred to alleged voter harassment and intimidation while speaking to a Rainbow/PUSH Coalition audience last week.

The allegations that a million African Americans were disenfranchised, harassed, and intimidated from voting, and thus had their votes stolen, are utterly false. The allegation that George W. Bush lost the popular vote in Florida is also completely false.

The six-month investigation of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found absolutely no evidence of systematic disenfranchisement of black voters. The investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice also found no credible evidence that any Floridians were intentionally denied the right to vote in the 2000 election.

Many Florida voters, irrespective of race, spoiled their ballots by mistake. But voter error is not the same thing as "disenfranchisement" and it certainly isn't evidence of a nefarious plot to steal black votes.

In fact, Florida 2000 was not a startling anomaly. Ballot-spoilage rates across the country range between 2-3 percent of total ballots cast. Florida's rate in 2000 was 3 percent. In 1996 it was 2.5 percent.

Glitches occur in every election. Some glitches are massive, others not. This is not to downplay the problem, but to put it into perspective. For example, the number of ruined ballots in Chicago alone was 125,000, compared to 174,000 for the entire state of Florida. Several states experienced voting problems remarkably similar to those in Florida. But the closeness of the 2000 election in Florida, and the attendant electoral implications, placed the state at the fulcrum of a remarkable opportunity for racial demagoguery.

The myth that President Bush lost the popular vote, even though a million black Democrats were supposedly disenfranchised, has also become a verity. This, despite the fact that every single vote count — including those conducted by various media — unequivocally establishes that Bush won. In fact, the Miami Herald election 2000 report notes that had the looser count standards sought by Al Gore been employed, Bush's margin would've increased. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, in counties using punch-card voting, mismarked ballots were more likely to affect Bush than Gore.

The toxic claim that countless blacks were denied the right to vote isn't simply irresponsible, it dangerously undermines public confidence in the integrity of the electoral system. It's compounded by a host of other pernicious urban legends that filter through the black electorate each election cycle, such as the perennial claim that the Voting Rights Act is about to expire, stripping all black Americans of the right to vote.

These cynical efforts may succeed in stirring up the base, but at the expense of inflaming racial resentment and suspicion. Yet those who once obsessed over the incendiary effects of the Willie Horton ad don't seem equally concerned about politicians who traffic in tales of massive disenfranchisement on a third-world scale. At this writing, a quick Nexis scan shows not one challenge to Senator Kerry's outlandish claims.

Kofi Annan, not surprisingly, rejected the congressmen's appeal for election monitors. But if Annan changes his mind, the investigations of both the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Department of Justice reveal where the U.N. may wish to send its observers: Under Florida law, responsibility for the conduct of elections falls upon county supervisors. The Justice Department found that three Florida counties committed violations of the Voting Rights Act during the 2000 presidential election. (The infractions were that some poll workers had been hostile to Hispanic voters and bilingual assistance hadn't been provided to some Haitian and Hispanic voters.) The next time Senator Kerry tells a black audience about massive disenfranchisement, he might also inform them that in none of the offending counties was the county supervisor a Republican — and in 24 of the 25 counties with the highest ballot spoilage — er, disenfranchisement — rates, the county supervisor was a Democrat. (In the remaining county, the supervisor was an independent.) Perhaps then he'll better appreciate the consequences of playing the race card.

— Peter Kirsanow is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The Senate Intel report-- CIA kept Wilson Niger and WMD info away from president

07.12.04 (8:14 am)   [edit]
From NRO--

July 12, 2004, 9:41 a.m.
[b]The Great Intelligence Committee Report
Some mysteries remain unsolved.[/b]
-- Michael Ledeen

Wow, more than 520 pages. As Dan Darling and I worked through it (and don't miss his more detailed analysis at www.windsofchange.net), we were constantly entertained by big blocks of "redacted" pages. Why don't they just put in ellipses instead of all those blacked-out paragraphs? Maybe the Government Printing Office gets paid by the page, and Congress wants the GPO to have more money?

The other great mystery is how the authors expect us to read the report. It's terribly written, and talks breathlessly about "trade craft" when "logic" or "common sense" would do better. It takes multiple sentences to say things that should be reduced to one or two. Are there no editors around?

Whatever the explanation, you should know that the text does not always conform to the talk-about-the-text. The text, for example, is at pains to say that the report does not deal with the "accuracy" of the intelligence. That will come later (barely five minutes later in the case of Senator Jay Rockefeller, who looked as if he'd just leapt out of a sauna and hadn't had time to towel off — I hadn't seen an American politician sweat like that since the glory days of Milhous). This report is said to focus on the intelligence "process" — that is, how information was gathered, analyzed, and provided to policymakers.

What a fine idea. But Rockefeller, at the press conference with Senator Roberts, was not happy about it. You could see that the poor man wanted, oh so desperately, to scream "Bush Lied!!!," but he couldn't go all the way. However, he certainly strained at his leash. Listen to this, for example:

The central issue of how intelligence on Iraq was — in this Senator's opinion, was exaggerated by the Bush administration officials, was relegated to that second phase, as yet unbegun...

But in the very next breath, it turns out that it has begun.

We've done a little bit of work on the number three guy in the Defense Department, Douglas Feith, part of his alleged efforts to run intelligence past the intelligence community altogether... And was he running a private intelligence failure, which is not lawful. (emphasis added)



I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I love that "private intelligence failure" bit, as if only the CIA is entitled to intelligence failure. On the other hand, it's appalling and disgusting to have this senator hint of something "not lawful" on the part of the undersecretary of defense for policy, especially when said senator's own fat report totally exonerates Feith of the nasty rumors that have been circulated by the likes of Seymour Hersh, Joshua Marshall, and other camp followers for many months.

Then Rockefeller went on to lament that the report didn't really explain "the environment of intense pressure in which the intelligence officials were asked to render judgments," implying that administration officials bullied the analysts into saying what the president wanted to hear. Not so. The report explained that there was certainly pressure, but that pressure came from the real situation — from the knowledge that error might lead to the death of many Americans — not from policymakers demanding that intelligence officials get the analysis just right.

In fact, for those few people who actually read the report, there's a pretty big story around page 357, on which we learn that Chairman Roberts got upset at the many anonymous leaks alleging pressure to "cook" the intelligence in the run-up to the war. So he, along with his House counterpart, Porter Goss, "made a public call for officials to come forward and contact the Committee if they had information" about such pressure. Roberts issued that call at least nine different times, but "the Committee was not presented with any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure...or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so..."

So Rockefeller should either put up or shut up. If the report is wrong, he put his signature on a lie. If it's right, he should stop talking as if he lived in an alternate sauna...I mean universe.

It's even worse than that, because the report does talk about pressure, but it's the opposite of what Rockefeller and the Hate Bush crowd was hoping for. It turns out that the CIA pressured some analysts into agreeing with its view of the aluminum tubes — which it said were headed for uranium-enriching centrifuges but could easily have been for rockets. And it wasn't the Pentagon that ran its own private intelligence "failure" but the CIA, which kept the experts at the Department of Energy — who were specialized in such matters — out of that particular loop.

For those who follow the debates over this stuff, I think the plethora of reported contacts between al Qaeda biggies and Iraqi-intelligence officials is sufficient to convince any open-minded person that there was enough to worry about.

The best part of the report is the thorough discrediting of former Ambassador Wilson, who duped just about every self-proclaimed "investigative journalist" in America. Wilson is the husband of a CIA officer who was sent by the CIA to Niger to check on an allegation — based at least in part on some documents given to the American embassy in Rome — that Saddam's minions had approached the Nigeriens with a request for uranium. Wilson had told everyone that the Nigeriens had denied it, and he personally told the Washington Post and others that the documents in question were probably forgeries because names and dates were wrong.

Well, the report says that Wilson had not seen the documents, so he couldn't have had any serious basis for claiming that names and dates were wrong. Worse yet, the Nigeriens told him about an Iraqi delegation that had gone there in '99, and that the Niger's prime minister "believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium." As the Wall Street Journal elegantly put it, Iraq asked to expand trade, and Niger had only two exports: uranium and goats.

The Wilson story gets even better. He had sworn that his CIA wife had had nothing to do with his appointment as special emissary, but the report quotes a memo from his wife recommending him for the post. And Wilson had chewed out the vice president for standing by the claim, famously made by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, that British intelligence had reported Iraqi requests for uranium from Niger. Wilson said, in effect, the veep knew of my report but he just dissed it. Not true. "CIA's briefer did not brief the vice president on the report (that Iraqis had indeed discussed uranium in Niger), despite the vice president's previous question about the issue."

Oh, I see. The vice president of the United States asks for information about the story. The CIA sends this lout to Niger. He hears from the prime minister of the place that the story is true, and reports as much to the CIA (while saying the opposite to the pressies). And the CIA never bothers to tell Cheney. Is this not a scandal? What have I missed? Maybe somebody should tell Senators Rockefeller and Roberts that the CIA is supposed to answer such questions. They often don't, by the way. I can tell you that two senior administration officials asked the CIA, five months ago, about a report that Iraqi officials had arrested two people in the act of transporting a barrel full of uranium from Iraq to Iran. There is still no answer. If we're really interested in the intelligence "process," this sort of silence has to stop.

Anyway, back to Wilson. The whole journalistic universe was in heat over the Niger story, because Wilson had convinced them that it was a hoax, based on forgeries. All kinds of celebrated journalists, from Hersh on up, presented theories about the origin of the forgeries, as if that were the issue. But it wasn't. Throughout it all, the British government continued to say that they had evidence, that they still believed in that evidence, and that they believed the story was true.

The Brits were right: It was true, as Wilson undoubtedly realized. Thanks to a couple of articles in the Financial Times over the past few weeks, we know that several European countries had reason to believe it. The "forgeries" were a total red herring, they had nothing to do with the price of eggs, and thus Seymour Hersh's breathless spasm — in which he theorized that the forgeries were created by a bunch of ex-CIA "old boys" in order to gull Cheney so they could then "expose" him — is idiocy. And Joshua Marshall's narcissistic echo chamber, broadcasting "Bush lied" 24/7, is another. (I am obliged to reveal that I have an intense personal contempt for Mr. Marshall, who slimed me and my wife and my daughter on the basis of lies and suppositions, and has yet to acknowledge it, let alone apologize.)

Before we leave the Wilson story, here's another mystery: Why did the Bush administration apologize for the16 truthful words the president pronounced? Why was poor Steve Hadley sent out to take the fall for...telling the truth? There are two obvious possibilities. One is that, somehow or other, our leaders decided that the CIA had indeed been gulled by a forgery. The other is that politics trumps truth once again, the story was painful to them, and they decided they'd rather run away than tell the painful truth. But it's peculiar, don't you think?

Penultimate observation: The report tells us several times that we had no human sources "collecting against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" (there's that awful language again), and we are told that this was the result of "a broken corporate culture and poor management." And why, pray tell, was the "corporate culture" broken? The committee doesn't probe this very deeply, and they are right to avoid it, because the Congress is the main culprit in this sad story.

No one has seen fit to point out that, thanks to the depredations of President Bill Clinton and Senator Robert Torricelli a few years back, the CIA had been told to avoid working relationships with persons of dubious human-rights records. Well, it would be hard to find a high official in Saddam Hussein's Iraq who didn't have a really rotten human-rights record. So, even if the agency had an olive-skinned case officer, fluent in Iraqi Arabic, capable of penetrating the Baathist state, he would probably have had to deal with some real monsters in order to get real secrets. If you were the CIA, you'd have avoided that one. Remember that Torricelli's scorched-earth campaign was the result of a CIA case officer talking to a Guatemalan paramilitary type who killed people from time to time.

On this one, I hold Congress and Clinton guilty. The CIA didn't have a broken culture — it had a lunatic overseer in the legislature and a cowardly customer in the White House.

Finally, we come to the really big question, and the weird answer of the committee. The big question is this: How could every serious intelligence agency on earth have come to believe there were WMDs in Iraq when (as the current article of faith has it) there were none? Senator Roberts likens it to a global epidemic. The CIA got it wrong and then infected all the others. A worldwide virus, so to speak. The WMD flu, if you will.

I don't buy it. I don't think the French were swayed by the CIA. I don't think the Israelis and the Russians were infected by our views. I think this is like the David Kay theory of WMDs. Remember? He said that Saddam really believed he had some, because all his guys lied to him about it. He didn't actually have WMDs at all, because the Iraqis had failed, and they feared for their lives if Saddam found them out, and so they lied, and he bought the lies.

These are pretty complicated theories, you must admit. What about a simpler approach? Let's say that there were WMDs. Then, in the disgracefully long period between Afghanistan and Iraq, Saddam, knowing he was gonna be overrun, exported some (mostly to Syria and Iran), destroyed some, and hid some.

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it for the time being. I'm sticking with it because I know — as Senator Roberts and the committee staff know, because I told them —[b] that there are very credible reports of WMD sites, but the CIA chooses not to go look at them. Since I told my own story I've learned about others, one of which comes from a very high-ranking former official of the American government. I'm also sticking with it because the Polish government insists that their guys in Iraq found warheads with chemical weapons, even though a CENTCOM press release denies it, and because Zarkawi's killers arrived in Jordan with large quantities of chemical weapons. And because I don't believe the Iraqis would have bought all those funny suits that protect you from chemical and biological weapons unless they had such weapons and expected to use them.[/b]

Enough already.

— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen is Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

John Kerry Exposed

07.12.04 (7:59 am)   [edit]
[b]Kerry Exposed[/b]
By Yahoo News
Yahoo News | July 12, 2004

President Bush has governed in a dishonest fashion, trampling values on every issue except fighting terrorism and leaving voters "clamoring for restoration of credibility and trust in the White House again," John Kerry and John Edwards said in an interview.

"The value of truth is one of the most central values in America, and this administration has violated" it, Kerry said in an interview with The Washington Post aboard the Democrats' campaign plane Friday. "Their values system is distorted and not based on truth."

The Democratic nominee and his running mate said it was that kind of anger toward the president that prompted entertainers at Thursday's Democratic fundraising concert in New York to attack Bush as a "cheap thug" and a killer. "Obviously some performers, in my judgment and John's, stepped over a line neither of us believes appropriate, but we can't control that," Kerry said. "On the other hand, we understand the anger, we understand the frustration."

Edwards said scathing anti-Bush attacks such as the concert and Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11 reflect an "expression by folks with genuine feelings," adding, "Thank goodness in our country they have a right to express those feelings."

In one of a series of interviews since teaming up on Tuesday, Kerry and Edwards predicted they would win the political fight over which party best exemplifies the values and ethics of most Americans, but Kerry said they would wage that battle on their terms and not what he called the Republican Party's "little political, hot-button, cultural, wedge-driven, poll-driven values."

[b]With their ties loosened and shoes kicked off, the Democratic duo also vowed to forgo negative advertising in this presidential campaign -- [u]an assertion that draws scoffs from Republicans who note that independent Democratic groups have pounded the president with millions of dollars in negative ads.[/b][/u]

"We have not stood up and attacked our opponents in personal ways," Kerry said.

[b]This week alone, Kerry has criticized Bush personally in speeches for lying, professional laziness, waiting until right before the election to indict Enron Corp.'s former chief executive, Kenneth L. Lay, lacking values and even having worse hair than the two Democrats. Some advisers are privately counseling Kerry to tone down his attacks on Bush.[/b]

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Kerry is firing "baseless political attacks" and "not offering a positive vision for the country."

Kerry was forceful and freewheeling during the interview, while Edwards, who appeared more drained from the intensity of their maiden voyage, was generally deferential toward the Massachusetts senator, sometimes holding back until Kerry had answered a question. When not speaking, Kerry sometimes gazed out of the window at the mountainous West Virginia landscape below.

Kerry and Edwards said they would return to the Senate to oppose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but only for a final vote. With debate set to begin next week on the amendment proposed by the president, Kerry emphatically reaffirmed the ticket's position that marriage is between a man and a woman.

"Let's be very firm about it. Both John and I believe firmly and absolutely that marriage is between a man and a woman," Kerry said. "But we also believe that you don't play with the Constitution of the United States for political purposes and amend the Bill of Rights when you don't need to when states are adequately addressing this issue."

Kerry, who recently said he agrees with the Roman Catholic Church that life begins at conception, said he disagrees with his church's teaching that homosexuality is a sin. Edwards twice did not respond when asked if he, too, believes life begins at conception.

With Republicans questioning Edwards's fitness to serve as a wartime president, given the fact that he has less than six years of government experience, Kerry defended his vice presidential pick as more qualified for the job than Bush.

"Don't get suckered into the how many years you've been in one job or this job" debate, Kerry said. "You've got people in [Washington] who have been in one job [for] 30 years of what you call experience, and they have done nothing, they don't stand for anything and they don't know how to fight."

The measure of a leader, he said, is a "person's character, a person's values, a person's abilities and political skills and ability to work with other people and bring people to a cause." Kerry called this the "character of toughness."

[b]Yet it was Kerry himself who challenged Edwards's readiness during the Democratic primary elections, saying it's not a time for "on-the-job training." He mocked Edwards's youthfulness -- the vice presidential candidate is 51 -- and later asked aides what made Edwards think he was ready for the presidency.[/b]

"I challenged my level of experience against his, as I will challenge my level of experience against George Bush's and Dick Cheney's," Kerry said. [b]"That was a fair challenge . . . [u]in the context of the primaries[/u]. But that doesn't mean [Edwards] isn't qualified against George Bush."[/b]

[b]Kerry added, "Does [Edwards] have as much experience as me? No. But I am running for president; he's running for vice president."[/b]

(Blogger's note: This is the kind of weighty intellectual verbage we can expect from smart guys like Kerry!)

Edwards, a first-term senator from North Carolina, who has served on the intelligence committee for more than five years but who has rarely been in Washington since launching his presidential bid in 2003, said his work on national security matters and terrorism qualifies him for the role of commander in chief.

"I'm ready today," he said.

During the Democratic primaries, Edwards did not make national security a central focus of his campaign. "I believe I had during that time very creative ideas about what needs to be done to protect America's role in the world," including championing efforts to fight terrorism and thwart weapons proliferation, he said.

Edwards noted, however, that he will do everything he can to reassure people of his capacity to handle the job. "I have an obligation to the American people to work 18 hours a day . . . to make sure that every day I know more than I did the day before," he said. "I feel that responsibility [and] take it very, very seriously."

Edwards's chief focus will be the messages of values and economic disparity. Kerry's advisers said Edwards will be dispatched to towns and rural communities in the Midwest and South, probably starting in Iowa, to target voters Democrats often overlook in presidential campaigns.

Asked whether he will play the traditional role of a vice presidential nominee and lead the Democratic attack on Bush and Cheney, Edwards said, "I will fulfill my responsibility to make sure people know what we will do, how we will govern, and what the differences are between us and this administration."

The two plan to frame the debates over issues from war to welfare as a choice of American values. In their words, it is a stark choice between Bush, who they say favors unilateralism abroad and the rich back home, against a Democratic ticket that believes in working closely with allies overseas and taking tax cuts away from the wealthy to help everyone else.

The new twist in this populist approach is the heavy focus on values for a Democratic ticket. "It's the heart of our campaign," Kerry said. "It's the center of what matters in America, it's why we are running."

Kerry added, "The battles of this administration do not represent the values of America -- with the sole exception, which we all share, of our determination to defeat terrorism and to stand up after 9/11 to that attack."

Edwards suggested Bush's career is not reflective of American values, either.

"George Bush and others can say whatever they want now about what their values are, but what have they spent their life doing? Have they shown in their life experience, not just in the time they've been in politics, but in their life experience, that they have the values that Americans looked up to and respected?" Edwards asked. "It's just difficult for me to imagine anybody in my little home town in rural North Carolina looking up to and respecting someone more than John Kerry."

A NEW LOOK AT BUSH'S '16 WORDS' AND WMD

07.12.04 (7:48 am)   [edit]
"But if intelligence mistakes are inevitable, is it better to worry too much about potential threats or to worry too little? Worrying too much -- if that's what happened -- resulted in the toppling of one of the planet's most murderous tyrants. Worrying too little resulted in 9/11."

[b]A new look at Bush's '16 words'[/b]
Jeff Jacoby
July 12, 2004

Last year at this time, the media were in full scandal mode over 16 words that President Bush had spoken nearly six months earlier.

"The British government has learned," Bush had said in his State of the Union address in January, "that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

A furor erupted over that statement when a CIA consultant and ex-diplomat named Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Niger in 2002 to look into the matter, publicly claimed that the charge wasn't true. The White House agreed that the line shouldn't have been in Bush's speech, but far from quelling the uproar, that admission only intensified it.

Within days, Howard Dean was making comparisons to Watergate, a group of left-leaning former intelligence officers were calling for the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney (who had taken a close interest in the uranium evidence), and the Bush-is-a-liar shrieking reached fever pitch. The Democratic National Committee cut an ad accusing Bush of deliberately deceiving the American people. And the press embarked on a classic feeding frenzy, turning loose a tidal wave of coverage and commentary on what had been, by any sober estimate, only a very small piece of the administration's case against Saddam.

Upshot: Bush's credibility took a blow, support for the war in Iraq was undermined, and the idea that Saddam's regime had tried to acquire refined uranium in Africa for use in nuclear weapons was widely dismissed as false.

But what if it was true?

Late last month, the Financial Times, a respected international newspaper, reported that according to European intelligence agencies, Iraq was one of five countries that had negotiated with smugglers in Niger for the illegal purchase of uranium yellowcake. "These claims support the assertion made in the British government dossier . . . that Iraq sought to buy uranium from an African country," the paper reported in a front-page story on June 27. For some reason, though, the US media showed virtually no interest in following up that revelation. (One exception: columnist William Safire in the New York Times.)

A few days ago, the Financial Times was back with more news: An independent British commission investigating the government's use of intelligence during the runup to the war in Iraq, the paper reported on Wednesday, "is expected to conclude that Britain's spies were correct to say that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium from Niger."

[b]But this, too, has been largely ignored by the American press. Curious, no? Journalists couldn't get enough of this topic when the story line was that Bush and the British had lied. Shouldn't they find it just as riveting when facts point in the other direction?[/b]

Here's another fact, this one from a recent book by a one-time US ambassador: In 1999, Saddam's information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf approached an official of Niger to talk about expanding trade, an approach the official interpreted as a possible attempt to buy uranium. The author of the book? None other than Joseph Wilson -- the man who accused the Bush administration last year of making up an Iraqi interest in uranium from Africa. Now, it seems, he comes close to confirming that interest. Yet except for a single story in the Washington Post, the media have had virtually nothing to say about Wilson's new account.

To be sure, none of this proves that Saddam's agents sought uranium for use in nuclear weapons. [b]What it proves is that reasonable people had good reason to believe that that's what Saddam's agents were doing. Just as reasonable people had good reason to believe that Iraq was armed with biological or chemical weapons. Remember: That was the deeply held consensus of the US intelligence community. [u]It was affirmed by Republicans and Democrats, by Americans and Europeans, by the Bush administration and the Clinton administration, and by a unanimous UN Security Council.[/b][/u]

[b]Only in the wake of Iraq's liberation has it become fashionable to assert not just that there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but that only a liar would have said there were. And only now have the media, in their eagerness to discredit Bush, been reluctant to cover stories that prove otherwise.[/b]

Intelligence failures are not the same thing as lies. And intelligence failures about Iraqi WMD did not begin with the Bush administration. [b]It is worth recalling that the CIA was way off the mark in its estimates of Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs before the first Iraq war, too.[/b] It turned out then that Saddam was a much more dangerous WMD menace than the experts had realized. The experts then underestimated the threat. This time around, they may have overestimated the threat.

[i][b]But if intelligence mistakes are inevitable, is it better to worry too much about potential threats or to worry too little? Worrying too much -- if that's what happened -- resulted in the toppling of one of the planet's most murderous tyrants. Worrying too little resulted in 9/11.[/b][/i]

©2004 Boston Globe

Therealspartacus' schizophrenia on Brando, religion

07.11.04 (10:50 pm)   [edit]
OK, so therealspartacus trumpets being an atheist, he thinks it's great not being tethered to an ideology or, as the lovely DragonBait describes it, being a "servant" to God (only the Judeo-Christian God-- atheists don't really care about the unimportant religions).

But I find it truly fascinating that he writes a blog claiming to be shocked by a drawing of Marlon Brandon in Heaven accepting God (Brandon apparently was an atheist).

Number one, if these atheists, or "brights" as they wish to be called, believe God, heaven, etc. is all a bunch of bullshit, is all comical, why should they be offended? It shouldn't matter, right? It would be more stupidity by a member of a stupid, brainwashed people who "serve" God.

Right? If that is what they truly believe, then the cartoon is no more offensive than a cartoon of Marlon Brando dancing the macarena in a grass skirt. It means nothing.

But it does mean something to them, and here is why. Atheism is a religion, a way of life for people. It's not "bright", it is a systematic glorification of the self-- which is the God of atheism. Bashing Christians (and Jews) is their own little Crusade.

A true atheist would be confident enough in him/herself to laugh at the Brando cartoon because he/she knows "the truth" about things. The fact that they have ganged up on this cartoonist and provoked an apology shows that they are another religion, another belief system organized around a God bigger than themselves-- the self.

Which means they have no ideological, much less moral, position to stand on.

Essentialnews' esssential disinformation about P2OG

07.11.04 (10:37 pm)   [edit]
Essential news publishes a [i]Counterpunch[/i] (left-wing) link that referencecs an [i]LA Times[/i] article in 2002 (that's right, two years ago) that describes how the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group of the Defense Department aims to stimulate a response from terror groups in order to find them.

This is called flushing out the enemy, and is no different than what armies do to each other.

"But refucto," you're saying, "The evil neo-con Bush regime wants to stimulate terror attacks against innocent civilians!". Not exactly. The group aims to stimulate movment, a response, from terrorists by provoking them. That does not in any way man attacks on innocent civilians. Besides, the point of the P2OG is to stimulate them into movement so they can catch them before they commit the act. That's where the [i]preemptive[/i] part of the name comes in.

So let's be clear-- Essentialnews has been dishonest or stupid in his reporting. My guess? It's the latter.

There havent' been any news articles on P2OG since 2002, so either the program isn't up and running or-- more to the left-wing taste-- they are being secret.

CarteBlanche shows why the Left is a dangerous group of fanatics

07.11.04 (9:49 pm)   [edit]
CarteBlanche posted a news article-- http://www.tblog.com/template...
that reports that one-- one-- US company is involved in a black market of nuclear enablers.

And so that naturally leads to this question for a leftist-- is Bush a terrorist?

My God, but these people are stupid. It is because of the Bush administration that this Khan black market was exposed, and it is because of the Bush administration that the IAEA is doing its job-- including reluctantly getting harsh with the Mullahs in Iran.

The Khan (Pakistani) black market has been in operation since the 1970s, and also in the 1990s, which was the decade of CLinton, which was also the decade that India and Pakistan both became nuclear rivals.

No, Bush is not a terrorist. But CarteBlanche is a moron. And the Left wing cannot do anything but spin disconnected, illogical conspiracy theories.

Bonus: in WinstonSmith's tortured world nuclear weapons don't matter, and everyone should have them. So what's the big deal?

John Edwards and his phony "two Americas"

07.11.04 (9:02 pm)   [edit]
From the London Telegraph-- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/op...

[b]The tearjerker[/b]
By Mark Steyn
July 11, 2004
Profile: John Edwards

'We've got better vision. We've got better ideas. We've got real plans. And we've got better hair," said John Kerry, introducing his running mate. The Kerry-Edwards vision, ideas, etc don't look so good in the cold light of day, but John Edwards's hair does.

I can personally vouch for his beautiful layered nape, having spent much of New Hampshire primary season looking at the back of his tanned neck on chilly winter mornings. He likes to campaign in the round, so all winter, in Legion halls and diners, the advance men rearranged the furniture and then the pretty-boy Southerner would come bouncing into the circle to the strains of Small Town (by has-been rocker John Mellencamp).

Radiating all the vigour and enthusiasm Kerry had surgically removed at birth, the honey-toned Edwards found himself adored by the media for his "two Americas" stump speech, a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the tones of a Depression-era sob-sister.

Even if you have never heard it, you know how it goes: there's one America where Dick Cheney's oil buddies are swigging down Martinis and toasting their war profits; but there's another America where "tonight a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm".

You would have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at that line. But Democratic primary voters are not that rude. So they looked thoughtful and engaged, and they nodded and they applauded. And then they went out and voted for somebody else. After you've heard the speech a couple of times, you realise that John Edwards is perhaps the most condescending candidate in America. But the voters condescended right back, smiling politely at the clean-cut charmer, and then going away and forgetting about him.

In New Hampshire, he came a poor fourth. Likewise, New Mexico and North Dakota. In Delaware, he came third, with 11 per cent of the vote. In Oklahoma, he came second, managing to lose to loopy General Wesley Clark. The only place he won was the state of his birth, South Carolina. In Florida, he pulled 10 per cent of the vote; Maine, 8 per cent; Mississippi, Arizona, 7 per cent.

Edwards is a lawyer, and supposedly his great strength is his ability to make an argument and sell it to a jury. But the more the primary jurors heard his argument, the less they were sold on it. "There are two Americas," said Conan O'Brien on CBS. "Unfortunately for Edwards, neither one voted for him."

Who is John Edwards? Well, in a nutshell, he is the metaphorical brother of that non-existent coatless girl. Now 51, but looking a well-preserved 12, he was born in Seneca, South Carolina, and had a soi-disant dirt-poor, hardscrabble childhood in Robbins, North Carolina. His dad worked in the textile mills, and John was the first member of his family ever to go to college.

Where Senator Kerry's biography is full of problematic phrases like "Swiss finishing school", Edwards's is a classic American story - if one overlooks some of the details. According to Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton-stain-mopper-turn ed-Guardian-columnist, "He bears the memory of his father taking the family to a local restaurant after church only to leave when he realised he could not afford anything on the menu."

Really? Robbins was a town of just over 1,000 people, so presumably it was, if not the only restaurant, one of only two or three. In small towns, folks generally know what the local eateries charge. And, while the Edwards family was poor by comparison with John Kerry, dad was in fact the mill's production manager (though the son tends to leave that bit out). So, in a mill town, at a restaurant presumably priced to cater for mill workers, the management of the mill couldn't afford to eat?

Ah, well. There are two Americas, and, as a successful plaintiff's attorney, Edwards spent 20 years exaggerating the gulf between them. "Plaintiff's attorney" is American for the kind of lawyer who specialises in those suits that Britons find so fascinating - you spill the coffee on your lap, so you sue McDonald's for a gazillion dollars, etc.

Edwards worked an ostensibly less ridiculous seam: suing doctors and hospitals when babies were born with brain defects. He made his name with a 1985 cerebral palsy case, where he channelled the words of the unborn child as she waited in the womb, hour after hour.

"She said at 3, 'I'm fine.' She said at 4, 'I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing OK.' Five, she said, 'I'm having problems.' At 5.30, she said, 'I need out'," Edwards told his hushed jury. "She speaks to you through me. And I have to tell you right now - I didn't plan to talk about this - right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me."

The jury came back with a $6.5 million award, and Edwards was the hottest trial lawyer in North Carolina. His line, in that and other cases, was that there would have been no brain damage if the doctor, instead of the breech delivery, had performed a caesarean. Thanks in part to lawyers like Edwards, there are now far more caesarean sections than ever before, yet without any reduction in birth defects.

The correlation between C-sections and birth defects is non-existent. But Edwards sold junk-science to jury after jury, for big bucks. In his "two Americas" routine, he talks about his commitment to "bringing down the cost of healthcare". One reason it costs more than it did is because of Edwards and his fellow ambulance-chasers.

Nonetheless, if the Bush campaign is figuring on tarring Edwards as a fancypants trial lawyer, they should rethink. He spent much of his life defending kids against corporations, and, whatever the fine print, the basic outline of that terrain is not favourable to Republicans.

For another, his own son died in a car accident at the age of 16 - the one stark tragedy in Edwards's effortless career rise and happy home life with his college sweetheart. Today, John and Elizabeth Edwards have three children - a daughter at college, and two youngsters born since the death of their first son. What the Republicans see as a shyster the media will paint as a champion of defenceless children driven by a heart-rending twist of fate.

It is standard on the Left now to insist that Bush's "war" is a fiction cooked up by Dick Cheney to enrich his pals. But Edwards's two Americas are the real fantasy. Take that 10-year old girl, hungry and coatless. In America, poverty doesn't mean hunger, it means fat - it's harassed moms shovelling 99-cent cheeseburgers into their kids because it's cheap and quick. Nor does poverty mean coatlessness.

Edwards's shivering 10-year-old can get a brand-new quilted winter coat for $9.99 at JC Penney, or secondhand for three bucks at my local thrift shop - at least until Edwards and Kerry crack down on the cheap textile imports they've been attacking these past two years. There may be two Americas, but Edwards's America doesn't exist anywhere from Maine to Hawaii. Even as a lurid Victorian melodrama designed to frighten prosperous soccer moms into voting against hard-hearted Republicans, it sounds ridiculous.

In the meantime, Edwards has nothing to say on foreign policy except a pledge to end "war profiteering by Halliburton". Once he discovered that you can't sue al-Qaeda, he seems to have lost interest in the subject, and his shallowness was embarrassing in some of the primary debates. As I wrote here in February, "His basic pitch is that the entire electorate are victims, and his candidacy is the all-time biggest class-action suit on your behalf." John Edwards's approach - the American people are helpless children - is the wrong message for dangerous times.

Back when his maudlin 'twas-Christmas-Day-in-th e-workhouse shtick was still new, I offered to buy a brand new coat for every 10-year-old coatless girl the Edwards campaign could produce if in return he included one substantive passage on foreign policy in his stump speech. I'm still waiting on both counts.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

Putting off the Presidential Election is an astonishingly bad idea

07.11.04 (8:52 pm)   [edit]
Apparently some twit at the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission, DeForest Soaries, has asked the DOJ for preliminary guidelines on how to postpone a federal election if a terror attack happens the day before.

Of course, this has already got the WinstonSmith conspiracy-nuts spinning, but more than that it is just a terrible idea. The election should be held come hell or high water. We're America and we don't cow-tow to terrorists.

This is why DHS and all bloated government agencies are a bad idea.

Link-- http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

"Farenheit 9-11" earns less money in its first 19 days than "Dodgeball"

07.11.04 (8:46 pm)   [edit]
And "Dodgeball" has the noteworthy position of being a much truer-- and better-- film.

Link-- http://www.boxofficemojo.com/...

The case for the Iraq war made easy

07.11.04 (8:40 pm)   [edit]
In light of the Senate Intel Report which blames the CIA (which means not Bush) for "failures" re: Hussein's WMD, I maintain that the case for war was made even if Hussein had no WMD (of course he did have them, that is patently obvious).

I'll let Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, do the talking:

"Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America, now. Saddam has used chemical weapons before, both against Iraq's enemies and his own people. He is working to develop delivery systems like missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles that could bring these deadly weapons against U.S. forces and U.S. facilities in the Middle East...He could make those weapons available to many terrorist groups which have contact with his government, and those groups could bring those weapons into the U.S. and unleash a devastating attack against American citizens....Some argue it would be totally irrational for Saddam Hussein to initiate an attack against the mainland United States, and they believe he would not do it. But if Saddam Hussein thought he could attack America through terrorist proxies and cover the trail back to Baghdad, he might think it not so irrational."

Now, let's give something to the lefties and assume that we don't know whether Hussein had WMD left or not (to claim, as Spartacus does, that he did not have them is unvarnished stupidity). We know that Hussein wasn't going to ever let the world know. That was a violation of a UN cease-fire,and a major threat to the US (which Hussein hated and threatened) after 9-11. Wouldn't war be the only option, especially after more than a decade of useless sanctions and airstrikes?

Yeah, I think so too.

"Mainstream" reporters don't realize how fanatically liberal they are

07.11.04 (8:29 pm)   [edit]
From OpinionJournal--

[b]High Bias
"Mainstream" reporters aren't just liberal--they're fanatical.[/b]
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Monday, July 12, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN, and if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future.

Now, almost a decade later, Fox News Channel has left both CNN and MSNBC in the dust. There's no guarantee that this is permanent, of course. But it certainly has the left in a panic. They hated it that American conservatism had any voice at all, back when it was confined to a few radio talk shows--remember how everybody wanted to blame Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-radio hosts for the Oklahoma City bombing?

Now, though, to have Fox News Channel be the source for the largest portion of America's TV news junkies just sticks in their craw. How could such a thing happen? Scott Collins, author of "Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN," thinks he has the answer.

It's not what Fox claims--that the American news media have a pronounced and painful liberal bias, so that huge numbers of Americans had given up on TV news, only to return in droves when Fox News offered them a balanced, trustworthy source of information. No, it's that a large number of Americans believed that the news was biased. How they got this idea is that they were . . . hmmm . . . idiots? But no matter. Mr. Collins repeatedly states that the perception is what mattered, and by homing in on the audience dumb enough to think the media was biased, Fox News won the ratings race (but not, of course, the race for quality news coverage).

I'm painting Mr. Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately. In fact, you can finish "Crazy Like a Fox" and think you have received a balanced story. Nowhere does Mr. Collins actually say that Fox News viewers are idiots. But Mr. Collins is a product of the liberal American news media, which are deeply offended at any accusation of bias. They don't twist the news--they inform their readers of the truth. And when they see Fox News trumpeting slogans like "we report, you decide" and "fair and balanced," they see red. They take it for granted that those slogans are true of every news outlet except Fox News.

So when Mr. Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News.

But the bias is there. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by--and blame the messenger.

So let's put it to the test. Is there a real leftist bias in the mainstream news?

One recent morning--the Sunday before Memorial Day--I picked up the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times and started looking through national news coverage. You know, the stuff that is filtered through the lens of liberal bias long before it even reaches local papers, which rarely revise what they get off the wire services.

In a story on Donald Rumsfeld's remarks to the graduating class at West Point, here is the lead paragraph: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, making no mention of the prisoner abuse scandal that has led to calls for his ouster, told a cheering crowd of graduating cadets Saturday that they will help win the global fight against terror."

Let's see, how could there be any bias in that? Every word is true, right?

Except for this: The first thing mentioned, the lens through which we are forced to view the rest of the story, is something that did not happen and that only an idiot would expect might happen: Mr. Rumsfeld mentioning the prisoner-abuse scandal at a commencement address at West Point.

The lead, in other words, is not the graduation that is supposedly being reported, but rather Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to resign in the face of events that happened weeks ago. How is Mr. Rumsfeld's not resigning news? It's mentioned in this story only because the reporter does not want to let go of it.

This is bulldog journalism: Once you get hold of a story, you never loosen your grip until your victim dies--at least politically.

Does it happen to everybody? Or just Republicans? Well, try this fictitious opening paragraph: "Senator Hillary Clinton, making no mention of the $100,000 she once made by trading cattle futures with astonishing perfection, told a cheering crowd of activists that President Bush's globalist economic policy is hurting poor people in other countries and costing American jobs."

Nope. You've never seen it, and you never will. Because bulldog journalism only goes one way in our "unbiased" mainstream media.

The only differences between Fox News and all the other news media are (1) they admit that on some issues they take sides, and (2) they allow the conservative side to be heard--without contempt.

Fox News, for instance, made the decision after 9/11 that they would display the American flag. This has caused (and still causes) seething resentment from the rest of the news media. Why?

First, it implies that the rest of the news media aren't patriotic. Well, duh. Come on, prior to 9/11--and even after it--they prided themselves on not being patriotic and spoke of people who were self-consciously patriotic with contempt. They thought of themselves as being above national borders. You can't have it both ways, kids.

Second, it's pandering to the ignorant unwashed masses of Americans who want their news from people who are "on our side." Again, duh. When a nation is at war--which on 9/11 we finally realized that we are--we don't want to hear the news from neutral parties. We want the news to be accurate, yes--and Fox has had its share of painfully accurate scoops that nobody wanted to hear, but which we needed to know. But when a negative story comes out, we want the people telling us the news to say it with regret. And when America wins, we want our news media to tell us with excitement and happiness.

In other words, we want to hear the truth from a friend. From someone who is one of us. And if it took an Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to give us an American national news source, so be it.

But let me go on. A story about terrorists murdering civilians and taking hostages in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, never actually uses the word terrorist. Instead, the killers are "gunmen" (in the headline), "suspected Islamic militants wearing military-style uniforms" and "attackers" (in the body of the story).

Suspected Islamic militant--this pussyfooting appellation even though later in the story we learn that an Islamic group called "Al-Quds" and signing itself "al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula" is claiming credit for the attack. But presumably they are only "suspected" of being Islamic militants because, after all, they might turn out to be long-hidden Nazis or perhaps holdouts from the Irish Republican Army or--who knows?--maybe Timothy McVeigh's buddies from the "red states" in America.

That's what makes some Americans turn away from mainstream sources in disgust. Why in the world is there any need for the news writers to wrap themselves in impartiality when the story makes Islamic militants look bad, but when the story is about our own secretary of defense, he gets slapped around from the first paragraph on?

This "neutral" approach to a terrorist attack on Americans and other westerners working for American companies in Saudi Arabia is one reason why Fox News is triumphing. Fox makes it clear that they're on America's side, that what happens to Americans abroad is happening to "us"--in short, they feel our pain because they are part of us.

Let's go on to the coverage of Bill Cosby's remarks on the self-defeating actions of some segments of the American black community. In the Asheville Citizen-Times, it's hard to find what is newsworthy about the article at all. Mr. Cosby's remarks are reported as taking place "earlier this month," and there is no event since then to justify considering this new article as "news."

In fact, the "story" is a thinly disguised editorial, in which Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela seems to be trying to draw the controversy to a "balanced" conclusion. Mr. Cosby's most heated remarks are quoted, but fairly, and in context, and his credentials are respected. Ms. Hajela is not out to "get" him.

After summarizing Mr. Cosby's weeks-ago remarks, Ms. Hajela then gives one paragraph to Jimi Izrael's criticism of Cosby's remarks, who merely objected to Cosby's tone and privileged position. Then Ms. Hajela quotes the Rev. Conrad Tillard of Roxbury, Mass., at some length. Obviously, it was Mr. Tillard's statement that provided the trigger for this article. It's the reason that Mr. Cosby was "news" again--though Mr. Cosby gets the headline to himself because who would read an article headlined "Rev. Tillard answers Cosby"?

Mr. Tillard is first quoted as saying that "Cosby 'could absolutely have' gone even further," and though slavery and Jim Crow had hurt African-Americans, "at the end of the day, we have got to turn the tide." But then Mr. Tillard is quoted as explaining that the real danger of Mr. Cosby's remarks is that white people (i.e., racists) will "seize upon that and try to castigate the African-American community. The conservatives and liberals are far too quick to seize upon a statement and say to the rest of us, 'See, see, it's not us, it's you.' What they have not wanted to acknowledge is that there are still legacies of slavery."

How is this biased? In this editorial-masquerading-as -news, Ms. Hajela is providing us with a "clincher" that tells us what we are supposed to learn from all this: that it would be a bad thing for Americans to let the racists off the hook by telling blacks that they are causing some of their own problems.

Harmless? Sure. In fact, I agree with Ms. Hajela's editorial. But it was in the news pages, and it was not news, and it was not impartial. It was shaped and designed solely to cause readers to reach a certain opinion.

Nobody was quoted as saying, "Cosby was absolutely right, it's ridiculous to keep complaining about things that are completely under our own control. We can teach our children to learn standard English and get a good education. We can teach our children not to become criminals, and can hold them responsible for their actions when they do commit crimes, instead of blaming racism."

Ultimately, both the "pro" and "con" quotes said the same thing: Mr. Cosby had a point, but he shouldn't say it openly because it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Very PC. Don't we all feel better now?

Then there's the half-page tie-in to the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," with the headline "Could It Really Happen?" The answer, buried deep in the story, is that of course it couldn't. Geochemist Wallace Broecker, who is the most-quoted source, is paraphrased only in the final paragraph as saying "Hollywood's idea of 'abrupt' is much swifter than nature's, however. Climate shifts unfold over years and decades--not in two reels, said Broecker."

This is as vague a way of saying "What this movie actually shows is scientific nonsense" as you could possibly imagine.

The bulk of the article--especially the crucial first paragraphs and the large-type inset, which are all that most people ever read--say quite a different thing. In answer to the question "could the climate really go bonkers, just like that?" the answer in the article was "Maybe. That was the consensus among researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a leading center for climate studies."

The next paragraph includes a quote from the observatory's director, G. Michael Purdy: "This is not fantasy. It's happened before. It's well documented."

Which quote will leave the clearest impression in the readers' minds? The fact is, what Mr. Purdy was saying was "not fantasy" and has "happened before" is Manhattan being covered in ice. That was during the Ice Age. It didn't happen in one big storm. And it wasn't caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions.

Furthermore, any institution calling itself an "earth observatory" has a built-in bias. They want to wrap themselves in the much more fact-based science of astronomy, but this isn't an observatory as most of us understand it, it's a group of scientists who have gathered together specifically because they already are true believers in a certain set of viewpoints about the human impact on the environment.

And the large-type inset absolutely treats global warming as a fact (it is still only a suspicion, by rational standards) and ends with this statement, attributed to no one: "Scientists believe this is probably due to man-made 'greenhouse gases' in the atmosphere." Which scientists? Are there scientists who disagree? These matters are not even addressed.

The whole point of this article is to make sure that the people who read it take "The Day After Tomorrow" far more seriously than the film deserves. Why? Because global warming has become one of the weapons used in the political war to bring down Western civilization, and without necessarily realizing it, the left-biased news media are completely buying into that political agenda.

Keep in mind that there is no way of knowing whether human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing or preventing disaster, mostly because we don't yet understand the causes of the natural cycles that lead to ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. So at this point, there is zero scientific basis for action. There is only the quasireligious premise that any human change to nature is dangerous and bad. Therefore, if human activities produce gases that might cause a disaster, then we can't afford to wait until the connection is actually proven. We must stop emitting those gases right now.

What they don't tell you is that the only way they are proposing to stop emitting those gases is to have such a drastic change in the activities of Western civilization that it might well lead to devastating impoverishment, and probably to famine and a catastrophic drop in the human population.

But the reporters covering science in America today are so wretchedly miseducated that they don't even know what questions to ask when interviewing biased sources. And they are perfectly willing to make ridiculous statements--which would include any sentence beginning with "scientists believe."

This is the postreligious equivalent of a fundamentalist preacher starting a sentence with "The Bible says." It invokes authority without context, without understanding, and without admitting the possibility of error. (Most self-respecting fundamentalist preachers would at least tell you which book in the Bible they were quoting.)

The fact is that Mr. Broecker is an important scientist, and his model of the "conveyor belt" of warm water in the Atlantic provides a plausible explanation for how ice-age climate changes might happen and why they seem to be restricted to the northern hemisphere, at least in the most recent ice-age events.

But the article in the paper was not science or even respectable science reporting. It was designed as propaganda to convince readers that smart people all agree that global warming can cause an ice age like the one depicted in "The Day After Tomorrow," unless we make the radical changes required to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to levels that true believer claim (but cannot prove) would prevent this disaster.

If the evidence of global warming were a report of burglars operating in your neighborhood, there's enough of it to cause you to check that your doors and windows are locked--but the true believers want you to respond by boarding up your house and moving to another state.

In every case of bias I just cited, the writers would almost certainly be outraged at my accusation that they were doing anything other than reporting the facts as clearly and fairly as possible. It doesn't occur to them that they are biased because they live in a box filled with people who share exactly the same bias. But that's how we human beings create our working definition of sanity--someone who shares the same worldview as his neighbors is "sane," and those who don't are crazy.

The left-wing news media live in a tiny village of people who all think (or pretend to think) exactly alike. Therefore, to them any reporter or media outlet that rejects their premises must be insane or dishonest, and instead of seeking to refute them with actual evidence, they merely call them names and accuse them of venal motives.

The fact remains that on Fox News, and only on Fox News, we get television reportage that gives us at least two sides of every important issue. On all the other TV news outlets--and "mainstream" newspapers--we mostly get coverage that is hopelessly biased. The madmen have taken over the asylum and now, dressed in white lab coats, they pronounce the rest of the world insane.

Keep in mind that I found these egregious examples of bias in a single issue of a single newspaper, randomly chosen. I could do the same thing with any national news broadcast or with any paper in America except the occasional paper that still has a toehold on reality.

I wrote this essay for a newspaper that is also biased. The only difference--and it's all the difference in the world--is that the Rhinoceros Times admits that it's a conservative paper and reports events through conservative eyes. Likewise for this Web site.

Fox News Channel, on the other hand, claims to have only one bias--it is definitely pro-American--and it presents all the facts and every viewpoint and leaves the decision up to the viewer. Imagine if these news stories had been written from that perspective. They would be barely recognizable--and some of them would not have been written at all.

What makes the liberal bias in the mainstream media so pernicious is that they deny that they're biased and insist that their twisted version of events is "reality," and anyone who disagrees with them is either mentally or morally suspect. In other words, they're fanatics. And, like all good fanatics, they're utterly convinced that they're in sole possession of virtue and truth.

Mr. Card, a science fiction writer, writes for the Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, N.C., and for ornery.org.

Why should we lean on the UN and the EU?

07.11.04 (8:15 pm)   [edit]
[b]Foreign 'allies'[/b]
Thomas Sowell
July 11, 2004

To those who do not want to face up to hard and brutal choices in a nuclear age, the magic formula is to turn to something called "the international community" -- or, more concretely, the United Nations or "our European allies." As with so many rhetorical solutions to hard problems, the specific realities behind the rhetoric get very little attention.

What is the actual track record of the UN or Europe? Is it something to rely on, in life and death decisions?

The UN stood idly by in Rwanda while mass slaughters went on. The UN passed resolution after resolution on Iraq for years, without taking any action to enforce them. Indeed, the UN was part of the massive corruption in the oil-for-food program, which enabled Saddam Hussein to divert money intended to feed the Iraqi people into buying weapons and palaces for himself.

When the UN seated Libya on its human rights committee, that was a sign of its moral bankruptcy. So was its conference on racism, which featured anti-Semitic propaganda by Arab countries.

What of our European allies, who are automatically assumed to be so much wiser and more sophisticated than American "cowboy" presidents, whether Reagan or Bush?

Europe's track record throughout the 20th century was one unbelievable disaster after another. European countries blundered their way into two world wars -- from which every country involved emerged worse off than before, with a continent devastated and its people hungry amid the rubble. Both times American food fed them.

The two biggest ideological disasters of the 20th century -- Communism and Fascism -- were both created in Europe. Both of these blind fanaticisms led to innocent civilians being killed by the millions, during peacetime as well as in wars.

For more than half a century, Western Europe has not had to defend itself because it has been protected by the American nuclear umbrella. Without that, there was nothing to stop the Soviet army from marching right across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.

American protection enabled Western Europe to neglect its own military defenses, and in some cases use their armed forces as another government featherbedding program. NATO's forces include unionized soldiers who absorb a much higher share of Europe's military spending than do American soldiers in the U.S. That leaves less money for NATO to buy up-to-date equipment.

NATO's troops get generous vacations and light enough schedules that many of them have part-time civilian jobs. The average age of soldiers in Belgium is 40, compared to 28 for American soldiers.

No country could afford to have to fight a war with over-age soldiers and obsolete equipment, unless its military defense was left to someone else. That someone else is the United States.

Like so many people who have been sheltered from the harsh realities of life and not forced to stand on their own two feet, Western Europeans have been able to indulge themselves in illusions. The most unrealistic of these illusions has been that we can just talk our way out of international threats with "negotiations," treaties and UN resolutions.

That approach was tried for two decades after the First World War. That is what led to the Second World War.

France was the worst. In the 1920s, its foreign minister Aristide Briand negotiated much-ballyhooed agreements renouncing war -- agreements that won him the Nobel Prize but did nothing to deter war. In fact, such things lulled peaceful countries into a dangerous complacency that emboldened aggressor nations.

France's record of cowardice and betrayal of its allies during the 1930s, was climaxed by its own surrender to Hitler after just six weeks of fighting in 1940. At the 11th hour, France appealed to the United States, which was not in the war at that point, for military equipment -- that is, for the kind of "unilateral" American intervention at which the French would sneer so often in later years.

Are these the people to whom we should defer on life-and-death questions?
Are our actions to be limited to what is acceptable to the lowest common denominator at the UN or in Europe? Are the lofty rhetoric and condescending airs of foreigners to impress us more than their dismal track records?

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Therealspartacus, Jesus, WMD and growing up

07.11.04 (5:11 am)   [edit]
Therealspartacus is irked because he knows for a fact, which he doesn't document, that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs. This is really a gift for all of us, because some really bright people on the ground for UNMOVIC were pretty convinced he had them; the people of Iraq that had loved ones die in gas and chemical attacks certainly knew he had them. Iranians on the battlefield knew he had them. Only therealspartacus knows [i]for a fact[/i] that Saddam Hussein didn't have them.

How does he knows this? Because we haven't found them! Fascinating stuff, because all throughout the 1990s the UN, et al. were convinced Hussein was hiding them. We're finding documents in Iraq that suggest them (dual-use facilities). But since we can't find them yet, they must not exist.

In our year-long "rush" to war, Hussein could have gotten rid of them. This is more than probable. Or he could have hid them really well-- this is also possible. But the faithful like spartacus take it to heart that since there are no WMDs, Hussein didn't have them at all.

[i]It doesn't do anyone any good to pretend Hussein had WMDs. All it does is make you look silly and stupid. I completely understand trying to spin everything into a positive, but come on, grow up and admit you were wrong. That goes to all of you- from NoGuru and Yerian all the way up to the most powerful man on the planet, Dick Cheney.[/i]

I don't think I look silly and stupid. What [i]is[/i] silly and stupid is for a man who takes obvious pride in his love for facts and logic basing his very own opinion on Hussein's WMD on faith. Precious faith.

So this goes out for you, spartacus: if I have to "grow up" and acknowledge the "facts", you should too. And until you can prove to me that Hussein didn't have WMD, I'll continue to believe he had them. THere's a mountain of evidence that suggested he did.

Hypocrite.

Ps. You should also face the facts and acknowledge that a woman who has an abortion ends up killing a human being, not "property". Biologically, this is a fact. Abortion terminates a life. Who are you to lecture me?

Senate Report says Joe Wilson lied about his Niger report, Washington Post

07.11.04 (4:58 am)   [edit]
This one goes out to DrForBush and the rest of the Lefties. It appears Joe Wilson lied about his Niger report (it actually bolstered the Niger-Iraq uranium case), and he lied about his wife's role. One more Left-wing lie in the crapper. The Bush vindications keep a comin' :

[b]Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Report Disputes Wilson's Claims on Trip, Wife's Role [/b]
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 10, 2004; Page A09

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, [b]was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.[/b]

Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.

[b][u]Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. [/b][/u]

[b][u]The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts.[/b][/u] And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, [b][u]the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. [/b][/u]

Yesterday's report said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched "yellowcake" uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question. Much of the rest of the intelligence suggesting a buildup of weapons of mass destruction was unfounded, the report said.

The report turns a harsh spotlight on what Wilson has said about his role in gathering prewar intelligence, most pointedly by asserting that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, recommended him.

Plame's role could be significant in an ongoing investigation into whether a crime was committed when her name and employment were disclosed to reporters last summer.

Administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak then that Wilson, a partisan critic of Bush's foreign policy, was sent to Niger at the suggestion of Plame, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at CIA. The disclosure of Plame's identity, which was classified, led to an investigation into who leaked her name.

[b]The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction.[/b] To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.

The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.

Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me."

The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. The committee found Wilson had made an earlier trip to Niger in 1999 for the CIA, also at his wife's suggestion.

[b][u]The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." [/b][/u]

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when [b]he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," [/b][/u]the Senate panel said. [b]Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters.[/b]
(Blogger's note: It's never that a lefty lies-- it's that he is 'confused' and misspeaks.)

The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

[b][u]Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said. [/b][/u]

(Blogger's note: These are the reports that Lefties say [i]disprove[/i] the link. WILSON LIED ABOUT HIS OWN REPORTS!)

Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq."

According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.

Still, it was the CIA that bore the brunt of the criticism of the Niger intelligence. The panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.

The agency did not examine forged documents that have been widely cited as a reason to dismiss the purported effort by Iraq until months after it obtained them. The panel said it still has "not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa."


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

The POPE OFFICIALLY LOSES HIS MIND

07.11.04 (4:40 am)   [edit]
Pope John Paul II has lost his mind. Regretting the fact that despite 2 years of lobbying, the new EU Constitution will not contain a reference to its historic Christian roots, PJP II has decided to try and make the "founder of modern Europe", Robert Schuman, a saint.

A [i]saint[/i].

Reading this with my mouth wide open in [i]Our Sunday Visitor[/i] ("After constitution snub, will pope give E.U. a saint?", no link available for now), I tried to find a justification for this man's sainthood.

Miracles?

Selfless giving to the poor, the diseased, the weak?

Martyrdom?

Schuman has none of these expected requirements to become a saint. But he did consider becoming a monk once! And not only that, but he showed up for "every" parliament meeting. As French Foreign minister he created the "Schuman Plan" that created the European Coal and Steel Community, which is today the E.U..

This is more the controversial, it almost seems like a reckless use of papal power. I understand that the pope may be desperate to put a Christian veneer on a hopelessly secular Europe, but this is not the way it is done.

The pope has some wacky positions -- like the fact that it is ok for him to overlook the UN's multitude of sins and failings because it is a "good idea"-- but those used to be mainly political. Now he has started to cheapen what it is to be a saint.

What next, dogma?

Why should Bush attend the NAACP conference?

07.11.04 (4:21 am)   [edit]
A relationship is a two-way street. President Bush campaigned on the promise of enhancing the rocky relationship between the NAACP and the GOP. Bush has a very ethnically diverse cabinet (more diverse than any other, I might add), with African Americans Colin Powell and Condi Rice filling in prominent roles ( a major accomplishment for African Americans, I might also add).

But the NAACP never saw it that way. THey have called the President horrible names, accused him of stealing the 2000 election. The most telling comments came from NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, who said recently that Bush and Republicans in general appeal to a racist "dark underside of American culture.''

``They preach racial equality but practice racial division,'' Bond said. ``[b]Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side.''[/b]

Bond is talking about the Republican party. You know, the party of Abe Lincoln. The party entirely responsible for their liberation from slavery in America.

You're welcome, Mr. Bond.

For Mr. Bond economic dependence on the government is "freedom". For Mr. Bond victimization is "freedom". Republicans preach a work ethic, they preach economic independence, they preach moral values. They believe the best way for a person to have money is for him or her to earn it and save it and invest it and make more of it in a society geared for it. They believe a handout is unproductive.

Indeed, such racists Republicans are! Clarence Thomas becomes a Supreme Court justice and these NAACP folk call him an "Uncle Tom" (remember, again, that we're talking about a Justice nominated by a [i]Republican[/i] president. Ditto that for Colin Powell, a man more qualified, in my opinion, than Kerry or Bush to be president. Condi Rice is called a "House Nigger". And so on and so on.

We have Michael Moore slurring black people by stereotyping them. Lefties can't get enough of doing that-- it's how they see the world.

A good conservative Republican sees a person based on his morals and the virtue of his common sense. They see potential. They don't see a victim, they see in that person the opportunity to change his or her life.

As the Democrats crumble away into complete insanity, it looks like the NAACP is determined to take the black race with them. This is a suicidal move.

I don't blame Bush for refusing to attend such a hate-filled institution that, like the labor union, is filled with a lot of false promises and hot air and little benefit.

Sharon points the finger at World Court after Bus Attack in Tel Aviv

07.11.04 (4:04 am)   [edit]
This is what the World Court ignores when it has the arrogance to levy a ruling at Israel re: the Palestinians:

"The state of Israel totally rejects the opinion of the world court...The ruling totally ignores the reason behind the construction of the security barrier which is Palestinian terrorism." -- Ariel Sharon

Kofi Annan says that Israel as an occupying power must "respect" the Palestinians in its operations--- and the "wall" (it is a fence) hurts the Palestinians. Of course this "occupation" (it is really Israeli land) exists for one reason-- Palestinian terror aimed at Israel since it was re-born.

The UN ignores the fact that the Palestinians don't want their own state, it ignores the fact that the Palestinians and their other Arab counterparts have been waging war against innocent Israelis for 60 years. And this, after the Holocaust. How many Jews have to die?

The Palestinians were offered their own state alongside Israel (in historic Israeli land, no less). They refused. To say this is a "cycle of violence" is absurd-- that kind of thinking equates both sides. It doesn't get to the bottom of it all, which is -- the Palestinians and their terror.

The UN isn't a world government and the ICJ isn't a world court (much as it likes to think so). Why should Israel accede to the wishes of an organization that doesn't even recognize what is going on in the Middle East?

[b]Sharon points finger at world court after deadly bus bomb in Tel Aviv[/b]

TEL AVIV (AFP) - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) pointed the finger at a world court ruling against his government's West Bank barrier after Palestinian militants carried out their first deadly attack inside Israel in months.

Police and medical services said Sunday that one woman was killed and 20 people wounded when a bomb placed next to a bus stop in the commerical capital exploded at the start of the morning rush hour on the first day of the working week.

"One woman was killed and we have around 20 people injured," a spokesman for Tel Aviv police told AFP. The fatality was declared dead on arrival at hospital.

Tel Aviv police chief Yossi Setbon said that a device had been concealed in shrubbery.

"It was caused by a charge which had been placed close to a bus stop, in the middle of bushes," he told reporters at the scene of the explosion. "A bus and nearby buildings were damaged."

The windows of a bus near the stop were blown in by the force of the blast.

Police and firefighters, using sniffer dogs, were searching the area for any other bombs and methodically gathering bolts and screws which had been packed into the device.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, a militant group linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites)'s mainstream Fatah (news - web sites) movement, swiftly claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to AFP.

A spokesman who declined to give his name said it was carried out to avenge crimes committed by Israeli forces in the West Bank town of Nablus and in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites), where troops recently carried out deadly raids.

The attack came just two days after the International Court of Justice dealt a stunning blow to Israel by declaring its West Bank separation barrier illegal, and ruling that the parts of the structure built on Palestinian territory must be torn down.

Sharon's government has argued that the recent fall in attacks by Palestinians in Israel is a direct result of the barrier, about a third of which has been built so far.

The last attack on Israeli soil came back on March 14, when 10 Israelis as well as two suicide bombers were killed in the southern port of Ashdod.

Sharon made clear at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem that his government would ignore the ruling, which he linked to Sunday's attack.

"The murderous act that was carried out this morning was the first to occur under the patronage of the world court's decision," Sharon said.

"The state of Israel totally rejects the opinion of the world court," he added in his first public reaction to the advisory judgement.

"The ruling totally ignores the reason behind the construction of the security barrier which is Palestinian terrorism."

The Palestinian leadership was to hold an emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss how to pursue its campaign against the barrier at the United Nations (news - web sites) in the light of the court's decision.

The Palestinians are expected to push for a UN Security Council resolution against the barrier and the imposition of sanctions if Israel does not comply with the court's ruling although such a move would likely be vetoed by the United States.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (news - web sites), who is currently attending an AIDS (news - web sites) conference in the Thai capital Bangkok, urged Israel to comply with the ruling.

"I think the decision of the court is clear," he told reporters Sunday.

"Whilst we all accept the government of Israel has a responsibility -- and indeed the duty -- to protect its citizens, any action it takes has to be in conformity with international law and has to respect the interest of the Palestinians.

"And Israel, as an occupying power, is responsible for the welfare of the Palestinian people."

At Hollywood fundraiser, Kerry/Edwards show off their 'conservative' values

07.10.04 (5:09 am)   [edit]
[b]Got Conservative Values?[/b]

“I actually represent the conservative values that they feel.” John Kerry, last week in Minnesota, on rural voters
(Source: Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)

[b]Words are Cheap. Priorities Show John Kerry’s True Values.[/b]

[b]John Kerry’s Priorities…
Kerry Says He Didn’t Have Time To Be Briefed on Terrorist Threats, Yet He Made Time to Attend a Hollywood Celebrity Bush-Bashing.[/b]

When asked about al Qaeda plans of large-scale attack on the U.S., Kerry responded: "Well, I haven't been briefed yet, Larry. They have offered to brief me. I just haven't had time." ("Larry King Live," CNN, 7/8/04)

That same night Kerry and Edwards attended "a star-studded salute to Senators John Kerry and John Edwards Thursday night at Radio City Music Hall” which “slid into an unsparing skewering of the Bush administration, with actors and comedians denouncing the president as a liar, making offcolor jokes about his name, and accusing him of risking soldiers' lives for political gain." (The New York Times, 7/9/04)

[b]Just Who Is The Real America?
Kerry Says Hollywood Is The “Heart And Soul” Of America… [/b]

The Real Heart and Soul of America Know Kerry’s Singing A Drastically Different Tune From Last Week… “Kerry said every performer conveyed the ‘heart and soul’ of America.” (The Washington Post, 7/9/04)

[b]*John Mellencamp: The President Is “Another Cheap Thug [u]Who Sacrifices Our Young[/u].” (The Washington Post, 7/9/04)[/b]

[b]*Whoopi Goldberg: “Waving A Bottle of Wine… Fired Off A Stream Of Vulgar Sexual Wordplays” On The President’s Name. (The New York Post, 7/9/04)[/b]

[b]*Meryl Streep: “I Wondered Which Of The Megaton Bombs Jesus, Our President’s Personal Savior, Would Have Personally Dropped On The Sleeping Families Of
Baghdad.” (The New York Times, 7/9/04)[/b]

[b]*Jessica Lange: The Bush Administration Is “A Self Serving-Regime Of Deceit, Hypocrisy And Belligerence.” (Los Angeles Times, 7/9/04)[/b]

[b]*Chevy Chase: Accused The President of Leading Operation Iraqi Freedom “Just So He Could Be Called A Wartime Pres